Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Comments on: CIA Enters ‘Scale Phase’ of AI Adoption.

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Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

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Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

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French Catholic philosopher Chantal Delsol, a member of France’s prestigious Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, is known for her searing accounts of totalitarian ideology and her penetrating works on modern European politics and culture that richly reward any reader who gives them close attention. Over the years, many of her books have been translated into English, including Icarus Fallen: Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity. Her latest work to be translated into English, Prosperity and Torment in France , is an analysis of the current state of affairs in French politics, economics, and cultural life that reveals key lessons for modern democracies around the world.

In particular, Delsol examines the seeming paradox of a wealthy France, whose people are unsatisfied with the current state of affairs despite the almost unrivaled free social services provided to its citizens. On one level, the book is a grim account of a nation that has become historically defined by various ideologies, turning even good ideas and political forms like republicanism into rigid concepts closed to further political development. In a style reminiscent of Tocqueville, Delsol considers how the French people are caught between the tremendous benefits provided by the government and their devotion to ideological abstractions like egalitarianism, individualism, and secularism.

“France,” Delsol declares, “is a country that is particularly smitten with ideologies. It prefers ideas to reality.” She remarks that “Marxism was so entrenched that it was necessary to wait until the fall of the Berlin Wall for it to fade away: only universal ridicule could put an end to it, but certainly not the lucidity of our brilliant brains.” Delsol describes how in a widespread appeal to a “farcical Marxism,” French domestic politics was dominated from 1972 into the early 1980s by the “Programme commun” or “Common Program,” signed into law by the French Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Radical Party of the Left.

France’s national motto, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” originated during the Revolution of 1789. In this book, Delsol describes in withering detail how these ideological formulae have become closed and seemingly incapable of answering the severe challenges that confront France in the twenty-first century. France cannot afford to stand still or act as if these new controversies can be dismissed with the stand-pat answers that it has developed for decades, if not centuries.

The author also notes that “it is so good to live in France.” French citizens are “pampered by a welfare state the likes of which exists nowhere else.” Its citizens “do not pay for health care, or schooling.” France has some of the highest levels of welfare spending in the world, but also an economy with a high GDP and a significant level of economic redistribution. She observes that “French grief is incomprehensible in the face of the ‘fortune’ and the abundance that can be objectively verified. However, if a self-governing people orients itself politically by modern ideologies of egalitarianism or humanitarianism, it will be perpetually disappointed. [She concludes that] … this grief comes from a propensity to expect perfection here below—the habit of an ideologue.” The author anticipates that many will find her analysis “pessimistic.” Though she shares her belief that a nation with France’s history and longevity can reform itself, it cannot do so without “lucid diagnostics.”

French citizens now freely indulge in a technologically driven individualism, making it almost impossible to envisage the civic fraternity needed to make the republican ideal possible.

Delsol observes that France’s decline from being part of the leading cohort of nations to a mid-tier power has been difficult to endure. She also remarks that other values specific to “eternal” France are also fading. Delsol notes that the weight of its celebrated national education system now burdens the nation with its abundant mediocrity and declining performance. Delsol concludes that the suboptimal results are because of top-down control, and a purported ability to deliver free education at all levels with minimal cost consciousness guarantees. Yet, to critique it or to openly suggest that the stringent limits placed on private education should be lifted is to risk public censure. The social justice good that public schools supposedly serve endures in the national psyche, despite years of poor results. This, despite the angling and maneuvering by those with means to get into the best government schools or pull strings and gain admission to one of the few private school slots.

Likewise, the vaunted nature of the republican ideal in France also seems stilted, ideological even, in a country of tremendous individualism. France is starting to resemble other Western countries, and this has produced the impression that their national substance is being stolen from them. Less republican, egalitarian, and exceptional, what then will be left of France?

Delsol argues that republicanism requires generous actions, not ideological control over people. If citizens do not freely choose to place the country first, then forcing such actions smacks of authoritarianism. Yet French citizens now freely indulge in a technologically driven individualism, making it almost impossible to envisage the civic fraternity needed to make the republican ideal possible. No one, though, will admit to a reduced identification with republicanism. Delsol wonders why the former trappings of republicanism no longer captivate French hearts. She answers that republicanism as a government ideal has become ideologically corrupted.

Republicanism in France replaced the socialist ideal with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Until that moment, the national imagination was socialist, Delsol informs. Republicanism became something of a substitute for Marxism for leading intellectuals. This can be seen in how republicanism, which is always tied to a concrete place, a country, and for a specific people and their virtues, was reconceived as a humanitarian universalist program. Republicanism was for the world; thus, the spectacle of French youth, Delsol reports, rushing to various ports of entry to protest on behalf of migrants entering France. The French Republic must automatically accept them. But from socialist histrionics to republican humanitarianism are the “moments of great hope and moments of great bitterness.” France loves “the union of hearts in comparison with people’s freedom.” True, it seems, but the French nation in Delsol’s analysis suffers from a profound deficit of encountering reality on its truthful terms, choosing instead to attempt to fill reality with an exaggerated political longing.

Delsol argues that, in a period of individualism, the republican form must incorporate a “high degree of democracy.” The ideology of French republicanism is failing because it lauds an abstract sense of social justice and the common good at the expense of concrete local, religious, and even racial commitments; Delsol suggests that the solution is to extend citizens a greater freedom of choice than that currently offered by the French state. Only in this manner can the union of republicanism be open to a citizenry that no longer wants to ask the state for permission to engage in various commercial, educational, and consumer pursuits. However, another paradox emerges with this argument for greater individual liberty, and that is the French citizenry’s love for equality, which is necessarily threatened by perhaps allowing more options and choices in healthcare, schooling, work, and commerce. Can the French publicly admit that more substantial options are needed other than those provided by the government? The remedy itself is a threat to still cherished but hardly flourishing social settlements.

Delsol notes that France is a disciple of the sixteenth-century thinker Jean Bodin, who emphasized centralized sovereignty of the state as opposed to that of Bodin’s contemporary, German thinker, Johannes Althusius, of the same period, who articulated a federalism and subsidiarity thesis of actions by people in intermediate groups and associations. The French rationalistic conception of state control leads to remarkably different outcomes from the subsidiarity model, Delsol concludes. One of those outcomes is an isolating individualism that results from the existence of only two densities: man and the state. “Centralization increasingly produces the need for the state.”

The individual becomes less, losing agency and direction, requiring increasing assistance from the state. Such is the direction of French politics, Delsol articulates, which evolved dramatically in the age of the twentieth-century welfare state, whose existence continues unabated into the present day. The result is maternalistic government. Delsol argues that this path can be tied directly to the French Revolution, which consisted of a regicide and then a coalescence “around the symbol of Marianne, the mother of the republic.” The arts of association were never possible in post-revolutionary France, as associations and corporations were abolished, leaving individuals solitary and reduced to their own capacities. Delsol pointedly asks, “What else can the individual do, without the right to associate when acting?” Consequently, the citizens are reduced to the welfare state and begging a maternalistic government to meet every need. The citizens have an “infantile attitude” constantly demanding more resources from a state that is always giving and promising. The state as mother and the citizen as infant need one another.

Delsol states that such servility to the government undergirds the French preference for “equality to liberty: they prefer everyone to be dealt with in the same manner.” The republican ideal in France requires one standard for everyone to maintain a proper political union. In the face of declining quality of public services and mounting debt, most French citizens still want the state “to decide for everyone about minimum wages, working hours, school curricula, retirement age, and so on.” The French would prefer the unemployed to be equally cared for by the state on a large level rather than be thrust into competitive employment situations and risk inequality, or work in “little jobs.” Delsol’s damning observation entails that freedom and responsibility for one’s life are removed from any conception of citizenship.

Delsol notes that Macron isn’t engaging in democratic politics, which makes way for alternatives, but in a style that leads to “a war against all.”

Such egalitarianism extends even to philanthropy, where it is done quietly for fear of offending people with displays of financial inequality. State subsidies are the first-order method for helping various causes. This even extended to donations to repair Notre-Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire, where the public turned against anyone “chasing after glory” by making significant donations. Again, state grants for such repairs were foremost in their minds. The Pinault family (owner of luxury goods, fashion houses, Christie’s auction house, travel companies, and vineyards, among many others) announced that it would not seek a tax deduction for its considerable gift to the repair of the Cathedral. One of the wealthiest families in France wanted to announce its equal status with everyone else.

Yet considerable threats continue to mount to the French political model. The left-right divide now faces both communist and reactionary populist elements that capitalize on the deep mistrust that exists in French society for the justice system, unions, corporations, Parliament, and the rich. A system built on corporatism at the expense of the human person’s freedom is now seen as corrupt and governing at the cost of the public. The left-populist elements offer more government services and programs, more statism. But the right-populist element proposes to make the French nation the center of its rule. One struggles to see either populist movement engaging in the economic, education, and welfare state reforms described by Delsol to raise the quality of services, increase choice, and spark growth.

The secularism of French life faces a challenge posed by the millions of Muslims who have been given entrance to the country and who report in polling data and behavior great loyalty to the Koran and a much lower level of belief in the French constitution. In a less emphatic vein, rising numbers of young French citizens, despite the pressures placed on them to abdicate their Catholic faith or at least keep it private, remain loyal to the church. While Catholicism is undoubtedly weak in French life, and this by dint of political atheism dominating the country for over a century, perhaps the laity are rebounding in their faith as they watch former national promises made come apart at the seams.

But the most dramatic pressure comes from the challenge to French humanitarian values that undergird the European Union project. The populist right counteroffer is home, a concrete place called France, which can’t be rearranged by migratory flows, climate change regulation, and a flattening of human life without any sense of history, loyalty, and love. French President Emmanuel Macron surely senses this when he refers to the National Rally party, formerly the National Front party, as the “enemy.” Delsol notes that Macron isn’t engaging in democratic politics, which makes way for alternatives, but in a style that leads to “a war against all.” But if the French economic and social model is under duress, if not on the brink of collapse, and its defenders refuse to change, then the next metamorphic change in political leadership in France will likely have to be won decisively.

The only question is if the populists have a program that can restore common sense by giving voice to French citizens who want their country’s sovereignty enforced and expanding freedom and virtue in a manner suitable to the restoration of the nation. The French nation, so heavily defined by an interwoven collection of ideologies, will have to become less. A nation of independent citizens, creatures, family members, and workers will have to become more.

In 2002, the US Census Bureau published a report showing that college graduates earned nearly $1 million more over a lifetime than high school graduates—a gap approaching $2 million in 2025 dollars. The widely cited report reframed inequality as a credentials gap. If more people earned degrees, the logic went, wage gaps would close.

But correlation isn’t causation. The data didn’t prove that degrees caused higher earnings—only that degree holders tended to earn more. Still, the message stuck: underserved groups held fewer degrees, so policymakers assumed the solution was to remove barriers to college.

The harder path—improving K–12 academic preparation—would have required sustained investment in curriculum, teacher quality, and school accountability. Instead, leaders chose the shortcut: eliminate placement tests, ban remedial courses, and expand access by mandate. It was easier to legislate and more politically attractive. But it didn’t build capability. It just lowered the bar.

What this logic missed was how college creates value in the first place. Institutions don’t conjure skills out of thin air—they select for readiness and refine it through competition and academic rigor. Admissions standards exist to match students with programs they’re prepared to complete. Remove those filters, and the meaning of the credential collapses.

In 2009, President Barack Obama declared that “every American will need to get more than a high school diploma … by 2020.” College completion became a civic obligation and a macroeconomic strategy. If credentials alone created prosperity, we could solve inequality with a printing press. But degrees don’t create skills—they signal them. And when standards collapse, the signal fades. So does public trust. 

Removing placement tests didn’t eliminate academic screening—it just delayed it. Students hit barriers in coursework instead of admissions. Those aiming for high-value degrees were quietly diverted when they couldn’t keep up.

In fields like business, engineering, and health sciences, the first required math course often assumes years of preparation. At San José State University, for example, business majors must complete Business Calculus, which requires precalculus, which requires college algebra. For a student who hasn’t mastered Algebra II in high school, that’s a three-course ladder they can’t climb.

Engineering is even more demanding. Calculus I is the entry point—and it defeats many students who passed AP Calculus in high school. Success in these courses isn’t about cramming. It’s about a decade of structured math—long nights at the kitchen table, mastering foundations from elementary school onward.

Students who can’t keep pace in high-demand majors aren’t dismissed. They’re redirected into fields with lower expectations and weaker economic returns. Engineering becomes business. Business becomes psychology, communications, or justice studies. Institutions call it “flexibility.” But the outcome is the same: students land in programs with minimal quantitative demand and limited economic payoff.

Telling every student they can be whatever they want, regardless of academic record, isn’t guidance. It’s false hope disguised as empowerment.

Research confirms this shift disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic students: after California Assembly Bill 705 effectively eliminated remedial courses, they were more likely to be routed into SLAM (statistics and quantitative reasoning) rather than BSTEM (algebra and calculus) pathways—regardless of academic preparation—suggesting a new form of racialized tracking under the banner of equity.

One of the most influential studies driving this trend—Jo Boaler’s “Railside” project—claimed that de-tracked, collaborative math instruction improved outcomes for low-income students. It was widely cited and helped justify the elimination of eighth-grade Algebra I in California. But when independent researchers identified the school and examined public data, the reported gains vanished. Standardized test scores and college readiness outcomes didn’t improve. The lesson is stark: when feel-good pedagogy replaces real preparation, students are told they’re succeeding—right up until they hit the wall. 

We see the pattern in degree production. Between 2001 and 2022, annual bachelor’s degree awards rose by roughly 770,000—representing a nearly 40% increase relative to the US population. Low-return majors surged: psychology degrees rose 76%, criminal justice 126%, and interdisciplinary studies 194%. These fields are easy to scale, light on math, and often disconnected from clear career pathways. This surge wasn’t driven by student choice—it was institutional triage. Faced with waves of underprepared students, colleges expanded programs unlikely to screen them out.

The belief that every American should earn a bachelor’s degree was a costly mistake. Four years of college is expensive—not just in tuition, but in lost wages and delayed entry into productive work. And most jobs in the economy don’t require it.

The bachelor’s degree was designed for pursuits that demand sustained intellectual training—law, medicine, engineering, and education, for example. It rewards abstract reasoning, structured inquiry, and disciplinary depth. That model has real value—but only when such cognitive demands are central to the task. Not every domain of human activity calls for this kind of formal abstraction, just as not every person is built to lift their body weight in the heat or crawl through a 36-inch coal seam. Recognizing differences in skills and abilities contributes to specialization—something Adam Smith, in 1776, identified as essential to the wealth of nations.

So why try to universalize it? Not because the labor market demanded it, but because the politics of inequality did. As credentialed professionals pulled ahead and working-class wages stagnated, policymakers embraced a seductive narrative: if degrees equal earnings, then more degrees must mean more mobility.

Rather than address structural inequality directly, they offered a workaround: “learn to code.” At a 2014 White House event, President Obama urged students, “Don’t just play on your phone—program it.” It sounded empowering. But it blurred the line between cultural aspiration and practical workforce preparation.

The Hour of Code didn’t rebuild the trades or close wage gaps. It dressed inequality in borrowed tuition and vague tech dreams. Most jobs in America still rely on applied skill, not theory. Training, not abstraction. There’s nothing wrong with saying college isn’t for everyone. What’s wrong is pretending it is—and calling that equity. 

We didn’t just lower the bar—we raised expectations and sold students a story. Young people are the unwitting pawns in a larger political script. They’re told the “good people” have secured their seat at the table—and if they pull up a chair, economic mobility awaits. Just work hard.

But what they aren’t told is that the system doesn’t bend to support them—it bends to preserve itself. When students fall short in high-demand majors, they aren’t expelled. They’re taught a lesson in bait and switch. Colleges steer them into programs with lower academic demands and weaker labor market alignment. The institution meets its enrollment targets. If students refuse to switch majors, they drop out—no degree, plenty of debt—only to realize too late they weren’t prepared. Either way, the result is the same: a system that avoids accountability while the student shoulders all the risk.

At San José State University, roughly 27% of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in these low-math, low-ROI fields. These aren’t pipelines to professional careers. They’re pressure valves—used to keep students enrolled after hitting academic obstacles.

Most students don’t choose these majors out of passion. They choose them because they were redirected—and no one told them the economic tradeoffs. The tuition is the same. The time is the same. But the return is radically lower. This is not guidance. It’s enrollment management. And it’s funded by students who believed they were preparing for their futures.

Survey after survey confirms that students attend college for economic mobility. Steering them into debt-financed credentials with limited value isn’t equity—it’s a betrayal of the public trust. Higher education has a solemn mission. It should elevate students, not quietly reroute them to protect enrollment targets.

Real equity doesn’t require lowering expectations. It requires telling the truth. Even Mad Magazine understood the problem back in 1975.

The great philosopher Tom Koch wrote of guidance counselors:

Most counselors take pride in their Vocational Guidance techniques, which consist of signing you up for all the courses you’ll ever need to launch a career that you don’t want and they don’t understand. But even after you’ve taken every course and graduated with every honor, a Guidance Counselor is seldom ever able to find you a job as a New York Disc Jockey or a Hollywood Talent Scout or a Boston Symphony Conductor. More likely, his Placement Service will offer you work as a Super Market Box Boy or a Steel Mill Furnace Stoker or a Shepherd (Mad Magazine #175, June 1975).

That was satire from my old comic book collection, but for many students today, it’s reality.

Students deserve honest, structured, and data-grounded guidance. This isn’t ancillary—it’s a core function of public education. Programs must disclose entrance requirements, academic demands, graduation rates, and labor market outcomes. But real equity requires more than transparency—it requires honesty. Students need a clear-eyed assessment of where, how, and whether they fit before investing years and debt. That might mean being told college isn’t the right path for them—or it might reveal where they’re a great match. There’s no shortage of meaningful work in this country. What’s missing is the guidance to help students find their place in it.

Advising should be anchored in objective data: curriculum catalogs, NCES and Scorecard outcomes, and Department of Labor wage statistics. Placement must reflect demonstrated readiness—not race, zip code, or inflated transcripts. Passion matters, but it must be matched with preparation. Telling every student they can be whatever they want, regardless of academic record, isn’t guidance. It’s false hope disguised as empowerment.

Technology makes bias-resistant, transparent guidance possible. All that’s missing is the leadership to make it real. Pretending all majors are equally accessible and equally valuable isn’t guidance—it’s misdirection. 

Higher education was never designed to prepare students for every job in the economy. Its value lies in preparing students for fields that genuinely require deep academic preparation—and in being honest when that preparation is lacking. Turning college into a universal credentialing system is a fool’s errand: it dilutes purpose and erodes credibility.

Rather than making college the goal, our education system’s mission should be to prepare students for a rewarding adult life. That might mean technical training, on-the-job experience, or, for some, bachelor’s degrees.

A just system doesn’t sort by race, wealth, or prestige. It aligns knowledge, skills, and abilities with opportunity—and respects every path that leads to productive work. But in the name of equity, we lowered standards to raise degree totals. The result wasn’t mobility—it was misdirection. Unprepared students were steered into college full of hope, only to land in majors with low academic demands and limited value.

Preparation and selectivity weren’t obstacles to justice—they were its foundation. Real equity doesn’t mean rerouting ambition into academic dead ends. It means telling students the truth, honoring all forms of work, and making sure that when a degree is awarded, it actually means something.

While routinely invoked by Protestant Reformers during the Reformation, natural law ethics did not have a good twentieth century among Protestant theologians, particularly those in the Reformed (or “Calvinistic”) tradition. Karl Barth famously blasted natural law ethics. Cornelius Van Til blasted both Karl Barth and natural law ethics. More recently, albeit more irenically, Calvin College philosophy Professor James K. A. Smith detailed “What’s Wrong with Natural Law?”

Despite the criticism, or perhaps because of it, the pendulum started swinging back earlier this century. Interest in natural law ethics revived not only among distinctly Reformed and Lutheran scholars, but among Evangelical scholars more generally. This May, Zondervan Academic published Natural Law: Five Views. The book seeks to introduce today’s Protestants to the renewed attention to natural law. To do so, it includes contributions by Catholic as well as Reformed and Lutheran commentators on natural law. It also includes a chapter by one “anti-natural law” theologian.

For the most part, the book’s editors and the four “pro” natural law authors each provide a helpful précis for their particular tradition’s view of natural law. These views are the classical view, the Lutheran view, the Reformed view, and the “new natural law” (a la Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and others).

Each chapter, and the back-and-forth discussion between the contributors that follows each chapter, accomplishes the editors’ and authors’ goal: each contributor provides a brief, chapter-length summary of their tradition’s distinctive emphases and provides sources and citations for the interested reader to follow up.

All that is useful enough. Yet a thought kept nagging me while reading the short volume: The editors and the contributors (except for the “anti-natural law” contributor, of course) seem distinctly interested in promoting “natural law” as a distinctive label or brand name. Pressing the brand name, however, risks muddying waters that the editors and authors aspire to clarify, and losing at least two distinct groups that natural lawyers presumably would count as allies or cobelligerents.

On the one hand, there is a set of scholars and commentators who, like natural lawyers, are moral realists yet who reject or find inadequate some elements of natural law systems. Moral realists hold that moral requirements are objectively true, as opposed to moral requirements being subjective or relative. In the main, all natural lawyers are moral realists, but not all moral realists are natural lawyers.

On the other hand, there are scholars and commentators who actually, if implicitly, apply or draw on forms of natural law methodologies in their arguments, but who want to reject the natural law brand name for one reason or another.

We’ll start with this second set first.

Natural Law in Name vs. Natural Law in Substance

C. S. Lewis, whom the editors and several of the contributors cite with approval, exemplifies brand-name ecumenism in his book, The Abolition of Man.

The thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. … The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory.

What is critical in Lewis’s view is not whether one applies the “natural law” label to one’s view, but the substantive commitment to moral realism, whatever one terms it.

Lewis, for example, would welcome Ronald Dworkin’s echo of the “reductio” Lewis asserts in The Abolition of Man regarding the self-refuting nature of moral skepticism. In his book Law’s Empire, Dworkin writes that if a person “really believes, in an internally skeptical way, that no moral judgment is really better than any other, he cannot then add that in his opinion slavery is unjust.” This is a form of the “reductio” that Lewis employs, even if the affirmative content of the objective morality each asserts ultimately differs at signal points.

Yet while Dworkin devoted much of his career to arguing that morality cannot be separated from law, he nonetheless resisted the claim that his theory reflected some version of natural law theory. He did so not because it wasn’t true, but rather because he didn’t deem it “a very important objection.” He observed that labeling his theory a natural law theory merely “suggests a different way of reporting” what his theory is about.

Or consider Michigan Law Professor Scott Hershovitz, who argues a different version of Dworkin’s thesis in his recent book, Law Is a Moral Practice. Hershovitz, too, does not deny that he engages in natural-law reasoning. Rather, he rejects the label as just not “helpful” in identifying the nature of his argument, given the wide variation in theories that go under the label.

Whether they are moral realists who reject the natural law label or moral realists who accept the natural law label, it seems that in this day and age the wedge issue is moral realism versus the rejection of moral realism.

To be sure, natural law jurisprudence should not be identified with natural law ethics, but the two sets of literature do intersect. Both Dworkin and Hershovitz advance a form of moral realism in their arguments, although neither thought it necessary to anchor their moral realism in a deeper metaphysical system. (Dworkin, for instance, did not believe in God.)

On the other hand, the “anti-natural law” contributor to the “Five Views” volume, Peter Leithart (with whom I co-edited a book), argues that “natural law” does not apply to his thought because he believes it necessary to posit a deeper metaphysical system of thought to account for knowledge of law, and this requires divine rather than natural revelation. (More on this point below.) Despite rejecting the natural law label in application to his view, the volume’s editors wonder whether Leithart is “truly ‘Anti-Natural Law.’”

It seems to me that many who reject the natural law label nonetheless either apply a natural law methodology or assert a form of moral realism that rejects moral relativism, an outcome the editors of the Five Views book suggest is realized uniquely by natural law theories.

Natural Law Methodologies vs. the Natural Law Brand Name

The irony is that many scholars and commentators who ignore or reject the natural law label nonetheless employ one or another form of natural law methodology. The question then is whether it is worth the effort to persuade these scholars to apply the brand name to their product. This, as opposed to the possibility that self-identified natural law aficionados can, like C. S. Lewis, simply declare victory and focus on the substantive debate over the content of natural law principles.

To make this argument, we first need to identify what are “natural law” methodologies. Here, the heterogeneity of natural law theories can be a problem. I suspect that some scholars reject the natural law label because they think it requires a commitment to a methodology they do not employ or to which they object. Without any claim to exhaustiveness, and with the proviso that methodologies can overlap, I would generally follow Russell Kirk, with some differences by way of emphasis, and count at least four basic types of natural law methodologies:

• Connaturalism and/or an intuitive commitment to some form of moral realism as self-evident (cf., Aquinas, ST I-II. q. 91, a3).
• Principles and actions that promote achieving the human teleology, that is, achieving the human end or “nature” in the Aristotelian sense (see, for example, Aristotle’s Politics I.2, 1252b30-34 or Nichomachean Ethics I.7, 1097b24-29).
• Rejection of self-refuting propositions. (See, for example, John Finnis; Aquinas, ST I-II. q. 94, a2).
• Empirically observed universal, or near-universal human beliefs and/or behavior. (See, for example, Edward O. Wilson’s empirical/biological argument, or Aquinas, ST I-II. q. 94, a3, ad.2, or Lewis’s argument in The Abolition of Man.)

As I mentioned, these types can overlap. For example, Finnis’s argument in Natural Law and Natural Rights asserts both that the “basic goods” he identifies are “self-evident” and asserts the claim that to reject any of the basic goods he identifies is self-refuting.

The larger point of the exercise, however, is that any number of commentators who reject the label “natural law” nonetheless implicitly employ natural law methodologies. Dworkin and Hershovitz, for example, seem to employ a form of moral intuitionism.

The question is how much energy natural law advocates want or need to invest in persuading these folk expressly to apply a natural law nomenclature to their work versus the alternative that C. S. Lewis modeled, of simply recognizing that those who are not against us are for us, and focus attention and resources on substantive questions.

Anyone who reasons from a human telos, an image of human flourishing, implicitly engages in a natural law methodology even though the content or conclusions of their theory may diverge.

Consider the difference between Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s teleologies. Both Aristotle and Aquinas conceive of a human nature through what it means for a human to be wholly mature or fully flourishing. But Aristotle identifies flourishing with “an activity of the soul in accord with virtue,” while Aquinas identifies it with realizing the beatific vision. To be sure, there can be overlap between these two views, perhaps substantial overlap. But they are not necessarily the same thing.

The point of observing this is to note that anyone who reasons from a human telos, an image of human flourishing, implicitly engages in this sort of natural law methodology, even though the content or conclusions of their natural law theory will diverge depending on the distinctive telos they reason from.

Whether the image of human flourishing is that of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the freedom of the Jeffersonian yeoman, or overcoming Karl Marx’s alienation, all posit a telos that can be understood to identify a human “nature” to which the Aristotelian methodology can apply.

I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that it doesn’t matter what we posit as the human telos or our view of human flourishing. It matters critically; analysts will argue over which image of human flourishing is correct or appropriate.

The point is that deriving moral or political implications from a concept of human flourishing—any concept of human flourishing—is a natural law methodology, whether one calls it that or not. That Aristotle and Aquinas (or others) disagree about the ultimate nature of the human telos does not mean that one or the other is therefore not engaging in natural law reasoning. Nonetheless, the promiscuity of natural law theory here is one reason scholars such as Hershovitz don’t think it’s helpful to be identified with natural law.

So, too, for example, Dworkin and other secular scholars. Despite not believing in God, Dworkin nonetheless embraced a form of moral intuitionism that required him to posit a form of moral realism. Pertinent to the Five Views book, this moral realism—the belief that moral principles were objective and could be known and applied—would seem to be consistent with the minimal threshold that the Apostle Paul identifies for non-believers reflecting the requirements of the law “by nature” in his letter to the Romans, a canonical text for natural law (Romans 2:14-15).

Even the likes of nineteenth-century legal positivist scholar John Austin, who expressly warred against the notion of “natural law” in jurisprudence (calling it “stark nonsense”), was nonetheless a moral realist. Austin assented “without hesitation” to the view that “all human laws ought to conform to the Divine laws.” He agreed that “if human commands conflict with the Divine law,” then the human law should be “disobey[ed]” in favor of the Divine law. While insisting that “law” can be identified by positive attributes alone—he insisted that “the existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another”—Austin was nonetheless a moral realist.

Sin and the Problem of Gaps in Apprehension of Natural Law

The Protestant theologians who criticize natural law are moral realists as well. In the main, they object to the notion that natural law is accessible to reason on account that sin impacts humans so dramatically that it can limit natural knowledge of morality in significant ways. This creates a very practical problem for an argument commonly deployed to argue for natural law. The argument is that “natural law” is moral knowledge shared generically by humanity across culture and across time. In response, some Protestant theologians have argued that if sin so dramatically affects moral knowledge that there are gaps in the human conscience at particular times and cultures, then natural law cannot or does not provide a universally accessible moral system.

Many who reject the natural law label nonetheless either apply a natural law methodology or assert a form of moral realism that rejects moral relativism.

The issue revolves around whether sin affects the moral conscience so significantly that natural law fails to meet the threshold for robust versions of moral responsibility.

While Aquinas is often forwarded as a paradigmatic natural lawyer, it seems to me that he goes further down this anti-natural law road than is often conceded. Divine law, which is biblically revealed law for Aquinas, is needed not only for matters beyond what is accessible to reason (Aquinas includes the Gospel in this category), but also for matters that are accessible to reason but to which access has been “impeded” by sin. Aquinas writes:

It was fitting that the Divine law should come to man’s assistance not only in those things for which reason is insufficient, but also in those things in which human reason may happen to be impeded. … Through being habituated to sin, [human reason] became obscured in the point of things to be done in detail. … The reason of many men went astray to the extent to judging to be lawful things that are evil in themselves. Hence there was need for the authority of the Divine law to rescue man from both of these defects (ST I-II. Q. 99, A.2).

The issue here pertains to the robustness of natural law, that is, the problem of gaps in apprehension of natural law.

Note first that, for Aquinas, this is not a minor problem for humanity. Aquinas observes that being “habituated to sin” is the “reason … many men went astray” in approving evil things.

Secondly, in referring to moral sense being “obscured … in detail,” Aquinas means that the natural law becomes obscured on specific moral points, but these can be significant moral points. One example of impeded human reason that Aquinas discusses is German barbarians for whom “theft, although it is expressly contrary to the natural law, was not considered wrong” (ST I-II. Q.94, A.4). So, too,

the natural law can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just as in speculative matters errors occur in respect of necessary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states (Rom. 1), were not esteemed sinful. (ST I-II. Q.94, A.6).

Let’s take Aquinas’s example of theft and consider how this would create a very practical problem for the deployment of natural law in concrete situations. Let’s say that the moral conscience is working just fine for nine of the Ten Commandments. But the consciences of “many men” in our society have gone astray on the natural law behind one commandment, the commandment against theft. The practical problem is that it is specifically when there’s a failure to follow the law that we would want to appeal to conscience to persuade people to stop stealing. But it’s precisely on the point of theft (in my hypothetical) that the appeal to conscience wouldn’t work because reasoning has been impeded regarding this principle.

The natural lawyers’ habitually appeal to Romans 2:14, when Paul discusses that “Gentiles who do not have doing by nature the things of Law,” doesn’t help at this point. This canonical text for Christian natural lawyers contains an opening conditional (a condition that is often elided over). Paul writes, “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do by nature the things of the Law.” Paul’s argument here does not require that Gentiles by nature recognize all the things stipulated in the Law. His argument is only that “when” they do, their conscience bears witness to the Law.

Paul’s argument is consistent with the possibility of gaps in apprehension of natural law. Take the Ten Commandments again, and Aquinas’s example of ancient German barbarians thinking that theft is morally permissible. As long as their conscience “accuses” them regarding one of the other nine commandments, then Paul’s argument is satisfied. Their consciences “accuse them” on one or more of these other grounds, and, therefore, they know they have sinned (which is the bigger point that Paul is making in the passage).

The problem that “gaps” create for natural law systems is that natural law cannot be offered as a theory that accounts for a universal morality accessible to all people … except when it doesn’t.

Whether they are moral realists who reject the natural law label or moral realists who accept the natural law label, it seems that in this day and age, the wedge issue is moral realism versus the rejection of moral realism. As C. S. Lewis suggests, it doesn’t matter all that much what label we apply to the view as long as it’s some form of moral realism. I’m not suggesting that advocates of one view or the other shouldn’t burn any of their free time arguing over whether Coke is better than Pepsi or vice versa. At the same time, we don’t want to get caught up in a form of natural-law sectarianism akin to what Emo Philps lampooned with his telling “die heretic” joke.

Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Congressman James Madison, Republicans of Virginia, took a lengthy trip through northern climes together in the spring of 1791. Contemporaries surmised that the two of them had in mind to invigorate the Republican proto-party of which they were understood to be the leaders. Louis P. Masur’s exquisite little book A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship shows that they did far more than that.

Masur refers to the Virginians’ northern sojourn as “a gambol through upstate New York and parts of New England” and what we would nowadays call an opportunity for them to recharge their batteries. Their ongoing conflict with Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist party had somewhat dampened their spirits, and a bit of sightseeing would perhaps reinvigorate these prominent political contestants—even if it is somewhat difficult to imagine James Madison in so light-hearted a mood as to be gamboling. Masur’s other description of the journey as an “excursion, maybe an adventure” is more apt. They did do some work along the way, the author avers, as their sightseeing at Revolutionary battlefields and meetings with local eminences perforce had political implications.

In his prologue, Masur shows that Jefferson, at least, had in mind traveling with a companion from an early age. For example, he asked John Page—a young friend and future Virginia governor—whether he had in mind to travel: “If you have,” Jefferson told him years before the Revolution, “I shall be glad of your company.” As Page would not join him, Jefferson had to wait until he was posted several years later to represent the Confederation Congress in Europe to take in the sights in much of England and France. Of rural France, he wrote, “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine. What more can man ask of heaven?” He counseled a younger kinsman that traveling “makes men wiser, but less happy.” As he was likely to learn to value his homeland less if he traveled abroad, Jefferson opined that the younger man should just take in American sights: “There is no place where your pursuit of knowledge will be so little obstructed by foreign objects as in your own country, nor any wherein the virtues of the heart will be less exposed to be weakened.”

One suspects that spending time together was what the two rising statesmen enjoyed most about their voyage.

James Madison was loath to undertake significant travel. He first rejected an invitation from Jefferson to spend much of 1784 in France and then the following year turned down James Monroe’s invitation to accompany him to the Ohio territory. Monroe’s suggestions of Montreal and Quebec sojourns drew no more positive a response. In 1784, however, Madison did accompany the Marquis de Lafayette to New York and up the Hudson River (which he had visited before). He told Jefferson in the wake of this journey that he would like to see “the eastern states,” i.e., New England, on the first convenient occasion.

Masur provides a kind of précis of Jefferson’s life prior to the trip with Madison, capturing all of the main points in a slight space and giving a good impression of the older man’s personality along the way. A substantial deepening of the two men’s friendship followed the death of Jefferson’s wife, particularly as the two shared time together in Philadelphia between that lamentable event and Jefferson’s departure for diplomatic duty in France. In 1784, not for the last time, Jefferson tried to persuade Madison to establish an abode close to Monticello.

Their political relationship is also succinctly presented. Like most Federalists of the 1780s, Madison was aghast at Shays’ Rebellion; Jefferson, away in France, found something very un-French to admire in Berkshires Massachusetts men’s tax resistance. A similar impulse left Jefferson quite skeptical of the proposed United States Constitution, which his friend had played the lead role in writing. To placate Orange County Baptists, Jefferson, Governor Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and George Nicholas, Madison took up Jefferson’s dear cause of constitutional amendments. Masur’s account of these matters, familiar to students of the men and the period, is brief and clear. So too that of the Jefferson/Madison-led Republican Party’s opposition to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s program.

Some of the material Masur includes is of interest to students of Jefferson, Madison, and the United States in this period, though not likely to people solely interested in the Northern Sojourn of 1791. For example, the story of the slave James Hemings’ service to Jefferson in Virginia and France, besides his eventual emancipation in America and ultimate suicide, has little to do with the events of 1791. So too the imbroglio over publication of Jefferson’s comment on a copy of Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man” that it would counteract certain “political heresies which have sprung up among us.” The “heresies” he had in mind had been endorsed by Vice President John Adams, whom Jefferson certainly did not intend to contradict in so direct a manner before the public—yet here it was. Masur seems to include these marginally relevant tales just because he finds them interesting. (The Paine tale ends with an observation that Timothy Pickering was due to have a distinguished career, which is one way to describe it.)

We are told after this that Madison and Jefferson fell into “the very party system that they dreaded,” and by the end of the same paragraph, Madison says that party disputation “could not be prevented,”—which anyone familiar with his famous Federalist #10 would find totally unsurprising. Jefferson stooped to secret partisan machinations and lied to President Washington about being involved, as the President surely must have known. That the two Republican chieftains dined with prominent administration critics before their departure to the north cannot have allayed anyone’s suspicions.

“No question,” Masur says, “politics was on everyone’s mind” as our heroes began their journey. “Jefferson and Madison’s tour through Federalist New England undoubtedly reinforced for them the necessity of taking a firm public stand against what they saw as the heresies of the day. Yet, in the end, politics was not their main purpose.” “Health, recreation, and curiosity,” said Madison, prompted their trip. What else might we expect him to have said?

From then on, each chapter of the book about the journey itself is titled to refer to one of the main matters of interest to Jefferson and Madison as they made their way. Jefferson famously was a man of encyclopedic interests, and Madison, too, could be prompted to take up matters of fascination. While we are prone to think of them now as among the premier politicians in the country’s history, both of them were first substantial farmers, of course, and one of the purposes of their journey was to investigate the problems posed to American agriculture by the Hessian fly.

Masur provides information about the new pest’s appearance in Europe, about Jefferson’s role in spurring the American Philosophical Society to investigate the Hessian fly, about the questions regarding the fly—when it first appeared, whether it grew from egg or worm, the type(s) of wheat it attacked, how it had been successfully fought—to ask people along their route. “Jefferson’s most extensive writing” on the trip, we learn, “was his notes on the Hessian fly.” “They are never in the grain or chaff,” he jotted, likely irked by the British government’s measures to exclude American wheat imports. Though an amateur scientist, Jefferson was a notable one. In his leisure time, he did significant mental work, and Madison was right along with him. Much of their recreation on the trip had practical application.

Masur also describes Jefferson’s relationships with one of his daughters and a slave, as shown on this trip. Rather than a single narrative account, the book presents a timeline with several points of interest along it, at which the author delves into related, sometimes distantly related, matters. The “forging of a friendship” in the book’s title does not exactly capture the book’s content. For example, there are sections on Jefferson’s relationship with his younger daughter and on the slave man he took with him to France, neither of which is related to the older man’s relationship with James Madison.

A substantial section on Madison and slavery, though interesting, is not much about the men’s friendship either. Like Jefferson, he thought seriously about slavery, and Masur considers his record in this regard. Like many other Upper South liberals of his day, Madison believed that the sole practicable solution to the slavery problem was to find someplace to which American slaves could be sent. While Masur’s account of this matter will hold the interested reader’s attention, it is not obviously related to the book’s supposed theme.

In sum, A Journey North ably tells the story, with substantial digressions, of the northern trip James Madison and Thomas Jefferson took in 1791. Perhaps the most memorable aspect of this well-written little book is the story of Jefferson’s leaving his walking stick to Madison “as a token of the cordial and affectionate friendship which for nearly now an [sic] half century, has united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have deemed for the greatest good of our country.” Masur illustrates it with a photo of the stick, which Madison returned to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s favorite grandchild, thus accounting for its presence at Monticello today. One suspects that spending time together was what the two rising statesmen enjoyed most about their voyage.

Next year, the Supreme Court is expected to clarify the scope of birthright citizenship. In other words, the Court will determine who may, and who may not, claim to be American citizens by virtue of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Citizenship Clause reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Thus, to qualify as a birthright citizen, a person must have been both (1) born or naturalized in the United States and (2) born “subject to the jurisdiction of” the United States. Disputes about the scope of the clause center on the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction of.”

Problems with the Fourteenth Amendment

Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, and state legislative ratification was declared complete on July 9, 1868. The amendment was designed primarily to protect newly freed slaves from hostile state governments. It has also been the basis for some of the Supreme Court’s most memorable, fair, and popular decisions. Some even hail it, along with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, as the basis for a “Second Founding” (a characterization I consider overdrawn).

The value of the Fourteenth Amendment has made writers reluctant to criticize the measure’s text or its drafters. Candor compels, however, the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment is very poorly written.

Much evidence of poor drafting is in the results: Section 2, dealing with congressional apportionment, has proved unworkable. Section 3, the Disqualification Clause, is filled with uncertainties that fueled extensive litigation during the months leading to the 2024 presidential elections. Scholars are still debating the Privileges or Immunities Clause—not merely its specific applications but even its basic purpose. Scholars and jurists continue to debate the amendment’s Due Process Clause as well.

Thus, it is unsurprising that the scope of birthright citizenship also remains unsettled.

One reason for the difficulties in construing the Fourteenth Amendment is that, while the 1866 Civil Rights Act is often cited as an interpretive source for the amendment, the language of the amendment differs appreciably from that of its predecessor statute. One cannot dismiss the legal effect of those changes, as some have, simply because a senator or two thought (inaccurately) that they meant the same thing.

Another source of difficulty is that, unlike the framers of the original Constitution, the amendment’s drafters rarely relied on words and phrases with recoverable historical and legal meanings. Instead, they coined their own phrases (such as “equal protection of the laws”) or—as in the case of the amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause—referred to idiosyncratic definitions rather than established ones.

The most important source for the original meaning of a constitutional provision is usually the ratification record. And yet the Fourteenth Amendment’s state ratification records, to the extent that they are published at all, often are unhelpful—although the late James E. Bond has used them to show that ratification evidence contradicts the incorporation doctrine.

Because of the poor drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment, the conflicting statements among those who proposed it, and the lack of useful ratification history, there can be no perfect interpretation of the Citizenship Clause.

If you try to interpret the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction,” you encounter all these obstacles. This language differs from the corresponding phrase in the Civil Rights Act (“not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed”). The traditional legal meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction” (that is, “within the territory governed by”) would render that phrase redundant, and the Senate debates confirm that a new, unprecedented definition was intended. But those debates are very unclear on what that new definition was.

The Senate Debates

Commentators on several sides of the birthright citizenship issue quote from the Senate debates to support their positions. They can do this, because the debates support several sides. Sometimes, even the same Senator is found supporting several sides.

To illustrate the point, let’s consider some comments not from opponents—who would be expected to issue conflicting interpretations—but exclusively from the amendment’s supporters:

• Jacob Howard (R.-Mich), the principal sponsor, stated in his introductory speech that “subject to the jurisdiction” excluded the children of foreigners born in the United States.
• But John Conness (R.-Cal.)—another supporter—expected the amendment to grant citizenship to the children of resident Chinese nationals. Timothy Howe (R.-Wis.) claimed the Fourteenth Amendment would admit to citizenship “all men … who are born and reared upon American soil”—thereby adding a requirement of being reared and deleting any exclusion of foreigners.
• Lyman Trumbull (R.-Ill.) contended that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof: “not subject to some foreign Power”… owing “allegiance solely to the United States.” Thus, he agreed with Senator Howard that the amendment would exclude the children of all foreigners. But on another occasion, he said it meant, “birth within the territory of the United States, born of parents who at the time were subject to the authority of the United States.” The latter statement seems to include the children of foreigners subject to US authority.
• In his initial speech, Senator Howard made no suggestion that tribal Indians in the territories were excluded by the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction”—even though they had been excluded by the Civil Rights Act. When challenged on the point, however, Howard claimed they were excluded. This reader gets the impression that he manufactured the exclusion for the moment.
• Senator Howard also averred that the language—which, he said, excluded children of all foreigners—was merely “declaratory of … the law of the land already.” But, as explained below, it was not.

These incidents only begin to describe the confusion that characterizes the debates over the Citizenship Clause.

Deducing Principles

Unfortunately for Supreme Court justices, the jumbled state of the historical records does not excuse them from interpreting the Constitution as best they can. In this case, specific drafter expectations differed. But we may be able to deduce some common principles, and if so, those principles will have to trump divergent expectations. And the drafting history does disclose principles accepted by most, if not all, of the participants.

First: Both the presumption against redundancy and the Senate debates tell us that “subject to the jurisdiction” imposes a requirement additional to being born within the country. A 2011 Time Magazine cover story opined, “The 14th Amendment … holds that if you’re physically born in the US or a US territory, you’re a citizen. Full stop.” We can be confident this assessment is wrong.

Second: Several senators, including the principal sponsor, acknowledged that “subject to the jurisdiction” excluded the children of all or some foreigners.

Third: Several senators said, without contradiction, that the amendment restored the law as it had existed prior to the Dred Scott decision.

Fourth: Several suggested, without specific contradiction, that “subject to the jurisdiction” was tied to the Anglo-American concept of allegiance. For example, Edgar Cowan (R.-Pa.) said, “It is perfectly clear that the mere fact that a man is born in the country has not heretofore entitled him to the right to exercise political power.” He affirmed the prerogative of states to evict people “who acknowledge no allegiance, either to the State or the General Government.” Similarly, Senator Trumbell declared that tribal Indians “are not subject to our jurisdiction in the sense of owing allegiance solely to the United States.”

Supreme Court Precedent

Supreme Court precedent is broadly consistent with these principles. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1872) included dicta stating that “the phrase ‘subject to its jurisdiction’ was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” Elk v. Wilkins (1882) adopted the allegiance rationale to endorse Senator Howard’s view that tribal Indians were not “subject to the jurisdiction”:

The main object of the opening sentence of the fourteenth amendment was to … put it beyond doubt that all persons … owing no allegiance to any alien power, should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. … The evident meaning of these last words is … not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance.

Although that language seems to exclude the children of all foreigners, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) corrected course by ruling that legal foreign domiciliaries as well as citizens can pass citizenship to their children. In addition, the court imported wholesale the traditional principles of allegiance:

[The Constitution] must be interpreted in the light of the common law, the principles and history of which were familiarly known to the framers of the constitution.

The fundamental principle of the common law with regard to English nationality was birth within the allegiance. … The principle embraced all persons born within the king’s allegiance, and subject to his protection. Such allegiance and protection were mutual … and were not restricted to natural-born subjects and naturalized subjects, or to those who had taken an oath of allegiance; but were predicable of aliens in amity, so long as they were within the kingdom. Children, born in England, of such aliens, were therefore natural-born subjects. But the children, born within the realm, of foreign ambassadors, or the children of alien enemies, born during and within their hostile occupation of part of the king’s dominions, were not natural-born subjects, because not born within the allegiance, the obedience, or the power, or, as would be said at this day, within the jurisdiction, of the king.

The Law of Allegiance

In an earlier essay for Law & Liberty and, along with co-author Andrew Hyman, in an article for the British Journal of American Legal Studies, I outlined the traditional rules defining when a person was in or out of allegiance. The rules were as follows:

Citizens were in allegiance. A foreign diplomat was in allegiance only to his own nation and not to the host country. Otherwise, a foreigner from a friendly nation (an “alien friend”) was in “local allegiance” to the host country, in addition to the superseding allegiance he owed his sovereign. A foreigner from a hostile nation could be in local allegiance to a host country if the host country granted a special dispensation. One who seriously broke the obligations of allegiance was guilty of treason.

A person without a dispensation and from a hostile nation was an “alien enemy” and not in allegiance to the host country. The host country might prosecute an alien enemy for other crimes, but not for treason. Any person who entered the host country illegally or otherwise rejected allegiance and was likewise an alien enemy. Despite the court’s suggestion in Wong Kim Ark, a foreigner need not be in enemy-occupied territory to qualify as an alien enemy.

Observe that nothing in the law of allegiance limited it to those foreigners who were permanent residents. Foreign merchants temporarily in England were routinely considered in local allegiance to the Crown.

Observe further that allegiance was a concept applicable to free people. It did not apply to slaves, who, like other “property,” were always “subject to the jurisdiction” of the prevailing government. In Somerset v. Stewart (1762)—the case in which Lord Mansfield ruled that there was no slavery in England—the former slave James Somerset was able to establish allegiance because under English law, he was free.

Because of the poor drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment, the conflicting statements among those who proposed it, and the lack of useful ratification history, there can be no perfect interpretation of the Citizenship Clause. But there is a best one: A child is born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States when his or her parents are in allegiance to the United States. That means they are either US citizens or non-diplomat foreigners from friendly countries—temporarily or permanently, but legally—in the United States.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the war over war powers demonstrated a healthy, albeit messy, constitutional system. In both branches, there were battles about when and where the US should use its military and how large that military should be. These questions would shape deliberations between the executive and legislative branches for decades, with men in both branches attempting to assert their preferences, and they would claim those who disagreed did not have a proper understanding of the founding principles. Arguably, those who favored a larger military capable of helping the US become a great power tended to win out, even in the early years. Only a few decades after independence, they doubled the size of the US with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, followed by the acquisition of the Floridas in 1819, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the acquisition of the Oregon territory in 1846, and finally seizing half of Mexico’s territory by the end of the war in 1848. Those who hoped for a larger military could point to the expansive territory and the two oceans as a justification for increasing the size of the military.

The desire to move across North America did not come exclusively from the executive branch. Voices in both branches wanted continental dominance, and they won out over those whose preference was for a small republic. Even in the nineteenth century, when the United States was considered isolationist, these acquisitions and the Mexican-American War showed a clear victory for those with grand ambitions for the United States and its place in the world.

During this time, we do not see presidential unilateralism. If a president wished to initiate a military operation, he would ask Congress for permission to purchase territory or start a war—in Jefferson’s case, he asked for forgiveness after a fait accompli. Congress, in turn, would engage in a meaningful debate about the merits of the action, and provide him with permission or deny it. Subsequently, if a war effort proved questionable or problematic, they would again debate the merits of the prosecution of the war and hold the executive accountable. During an operation, spending would increase, and a president would have more power. At the conclusion of the operation, the military would draw down, and Congress would return to its coequal status.

This changed with the Spanish-American War. President William McKinley assumed a great deal of power—at the expense of Congress—and military spending started ratcheting up. The healthy push and pull over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the branches began eroding then continued to do so through WWI. The healthy balance never returned after WWII. The Cold War and the War on Terror then exacerbated an already problematic relationship. Congress did not have the incentives to reassert its coequal status. This is certainly problematic for the separation of powers and the health of the constitutional system; there is a bigger problem. Congress facilitated unilateral presidential decision-making when it comes to the military without much oversight from the people, the courts, or Congress. This lack of deliberation and accountability has led to the operationalization of bad policy. This policy creates new security threats rather than diminishing them, and we have seen decades without a coherent grand strategy. Despite mountains of evidence proving the need for a more assertive Congress, presidents continue to make the same kind of mistakes in military engagements, large and small.

World War I

World War I was a flash point in the balance of power between the branches, with Congress standing firm against a president encroaching on legislative powers. In the early days of the war, Congress and President Woodrow Wilson agreed that the US should stay neutral. The sinking of the passenger ship, Lusitania, in 1915 changed their thinking. At this point, Wilson felt compelled to bring the United States into the fight due to the immorality of the Germans. He followed the steps outlined in the Constitution and solidified by nineteenth-century norms: He produced a war message for Congress explaining that he had exhausted every diplomatic avenue available. He emphasized the inhumanity of the Germans and requested a declaration of war, which Congress then provided. In the declaration, it claimed that the Imperial German Government (not the people) was at war with the American Government and that the German government was the aggressor. As a consequence, “the President … is hereby, authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial German Government; and to bring the conflict to a successful term.”

After WWII, the United States and its industries remained intact, making it the sole liberal democracy capable of defending that form of government.

Congress told the president what he was authorized to do, what he could do to accomplish it, and the expected conclusion of the conflict. Until that conclusion, Congress accepted its responsibility to use its power of the purse to ensure a successful conclusion. We see in Wilson’s application to Congress and its declaration, coequal branches with different but interlocking responsibilities to each other and the people of the country.

As the American constitutional system allowed, during wartime, Wilson enjoyed more discretion and a greater ability to command. At the end of the war, a healthy rebalancing occurred. Wilson came to the Senate with the League of Nations Treaty and commanded them to pass it without revisions. Quite legitimately, the Senators claimed that if they signed the treaty, they would lose some of their Article I powers. Wilson attempted to go over their heads to the people, but this did not sway the Senators. They rejected it a second time.

World War II

The American response to WWII echoed their view of WWI. They wanted to remain out of another European war. Reflecting their will, Congress passed several neutrality acts. They did not see what President Franklin Roosevelt saw: the battle for a metanarrative. For him, the fascist governments would continue to expand unless liberal democracies fought back. He attempted to work around the will of the people as expressed through these laws.

As I noted in my book on the theory and history of US war powers, “it is shocking to see how far FDR and his lawyers pushed the concept of executive power in what should have been a balanced system, with the political branches working in tandem.” One such example was the “destroyers-for-bases” agreement, in which FDR provided warships to Britain in exchange for basing rights, all by executive agreement. At the time, eminent legal scholar Edward Corwin said that Attorney General Robert Jackson’s opinion justifying the action threatened all congressional authority and constituted a step toward “totalitarian” rule. Despite his efforts, members of Congress did not check him or take steps to either support or undo the destroyers for bases agreement.

The following year, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Hawaii and the Philippines. This was a proverbial breaking point for Congress. Roosevelt asked for a declaration and, like Wilson, explained that they had to resort to war. In turn, Congress produced a declaration using the same language used in WWI, which authorized and commanded the president to act. It told him what resources he had at his disposal, who he was fighting (the governments of the Axis powers), and what happened at the conclusion.

Cold War

After WWII, the United States entered a new era with the largest economy, one of the largest militaries, and a victor’s sense of righteousness. Unlike their allies in Europe, their nation and industries remained intact, making it the sole liberal democracy capable of defending that form of government. They accepted this role as an international police force. Perhaps curiously, Congress would increasingly recede into the background as more and more power accumulated into the hands of presidents. It is almost breathtaking to see how members of the Senate reacted to the United Nations treaty and the NATO treaty. In both instances, they did not stand up for their control over the declaration of war and other Article I powers—as Senators did after WWI. The emerging imbalance in wartime decision-making came very quickly. In 1950, the UN Security Council (UNSC) created a resolution calling for a police action in Korea. Truman circumvented Congress and justified sending 6.8 million American men and women to fight using the UNSC resolution as his legal justification. Congress did not stop him.

What explains this dramatic change? There are several major factors. First, there was a broad consensus on both sides of the Atlantic that the Europeans needed to demilitarize. It was a feature of NATO. As the first NATO Secretary General Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay quipped, it would “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Second, the Americans had created nuclear weapons. The Soviets were not far behind, successfully testing their own nuclear weapon in 1950. The destructive power of this new weapon led to questions about who would control it. There was a broad consensus that the president alone should wield it to ensure flexibility and nimbleness (there are still no restraints on presidential control). The third reason is closely related to the second. Once the Soviets also had nuclear weapons, Americans worried they would use them. The Soviets wanted communism to win out over liberal democracy, and they were ruthlessly spreading it. As Russians increased their weaponry, the Americans responded in kind. Both engaged in an arms race and maintained large militaries.

While all of these contributed to the increase in presidential unilateralism, the large standing military caused the most damage to the powers of the legislative branch. In essence, they had already given tacit permission to the president to exercise his discretion by passing a large military budget, year after year. With a standing military, the president did not have to explain his decisions to Congress. He could send the military anywhere in the world, for any reason, without any significant check on his discretion.

One of the worst examples of this power is the war in Vietnam. US involvement dates back to President Dwight Eisenhower, but the escalation of the war occurred under President Lyndon Johnson. During his administration, Johnson attempted to keep the war away from the public, quietly escalating month after month. Members of his administration convinced him that if they just sent more troops, they could overcome the threat from the Viet Cong. Instead, the United States was pulled into a war it could never win and used tactics that caused a great deal of suffering. Congress only authorized force long after US involvement began, and when it did, it gave the president broad authority to escalate the conflict and use his own discretion to determine what would constitute a successful conclusion. When the legislative branch became more aware of the circumstances and realized the impossibility of achieving a victory, they used the power of the purse to draw down troops. In 1973, during the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Act to try to constrain presidential unilateralism. While there has been some controversy about the act and about how presidents address it, there are rare examples of presidents ignoring it or failing to abide by it.

The War on Terror

The tragedy of 9/11 facilitated a great deal more presidential unilateralism and congressional abdication. Due to the shocking nature of the attack and the immense pain it caused, Americans and many around the world were psychologically primed to bring the fight to this stateless enemy. Problematically, unlike the Germans or the Japanese, with a stateless enemy, there is no return address. Terrorists existed in a variety of countries around the world.

In contrast to the WWI and WWII declarations, the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) is remarkably vague. It says the president is:

authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.

The broad grant of power arguably shows congressional support. One could also argue, however, that this is Congress ceding its coequal status and allowing the president carte blanche to make decisions—putting even more power into presidential hands. Bush had complete control over how and when to use military force to carry out an ambiguous mission without a sunset clause or an objective that would indicate when the war concluded. Even the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—which was hardly a good example of Congress ensuring accountability—had a sunset clause. When compared with earlier declarations of war, it is clear that Congress has turned towards ambiguity and away from clarity.

Armed with such sweeping authorization, Bush’s 2002 State of the Union announced that he could and would search for terrorists in any nation. If you were not with the US, you were against it, he claimed, leading many allies to feel bullied. He labeled North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, the “Axis of Evil,” giving many the impression that the US would intervene militarily in at least one, if not all three.

By the summer of 2002, the Bush administration started beating the drum for war in Iraq. By the fall, Bush asked Congress for an authorization. Once again, we see that Congress failed to perform its duty. After listing the problems caused by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the attempts by the UNSC to stop him, Congress authorized the president to:

Use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to 1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and 2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

The ambiguity and the grant of power are staggering. Congress allowed the president to decide what was necessary and appropriate when it comes to the use of force. Furthermore, the president is defending “national security.” What is within the scope of national security? With another carte blanche, Bush and members of his administration convinced themselves the American military could overwhelm Hussein’s forces quickly—as they arguably had in 1991—and they would be “greeted as liberators.” He launched the invasion in March of 2003.

The rest of the decade would see a civil war in Iraq, followed by a surge authorized, this time, by an opposition Congress, Democrats having gained the majority in the legislature in 2006, partly due to their campaign promise to end the unpopular and disastrous war. These decisions created an appetite among the American people for a dramatic change. Tapping into this unique moment, Senator Barack Obama entered the race promising hope and change. Domestically, he had many accomplishments that pleased Democrats. In the realm of foreign policy, however, he essentially continued Bush-era policy, albeit on a smaller scale and with more circumspect rhetoric.

In this very complicated world, the decisions about when and where the US military will engage in operations large and small rest in the hands of one man.

In his campaign, Obama labeled the war in Afghanistan the “good war” and Iraq the “dumb war.” Feeling pressure from the military and the public to show strength, he was pressured into a troop surge in Afghanistan. He claimed the military would achieve success if he had these additional troops. Success, however, was ambiguous. Did it just involve degrading al Qaeda, or did it involve degrading the Taliban as well? He suggested both in a speech at Westpoint in 2009, announcing the surge. Congress did not scrutinize any of these issues. They simply provided him with the funding without reviewing whether 30,000 more troops would produce the desired result (let alone what the desired result was). This war would quietly continue until 2021. At this point, Biden planned to withdraw completely. They had accomplished what they came to do—degrade al Qaeda—and it was time to leave. Americans would leave by the end of August 2021. Due to the weakness and corruption of the Afghan government, the Taliban swept across the country and took control of Kabul on August 15.

The Arab Spring

In the spring of 2011, after decades of corrupt and brutal leaders, citizens of the Middle East and North Africa rose up and demanded change. There were crackdowns in many countries, but the two most salient ones for US foreign policy were in Libya and Syria. In Libya, Muamar Qaddafi openly expressed his violent intentions, leading the Arab League and the African League to abandon him, and they implored NATO to take action. Within a month of the violence, Obama ordered the American military to carry out air strikes in Libya as he explained in a letter addressed to Congress. Without even suggesting that he has to obtain permission from Congress, he explained the “regional and international threat” posed by Qaddafi’s actions. They had to avoid “wider instability in the Middle East” and the civil war in Libya was a threat to “the national security interests of the United States.” This level of unilateralism would shock the Founders and presidents well into the twentieth century.

Simultaneously, the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, cracked down on his people. Unlike Muamar Qaddafi, however, he had close allies in Iran and Russia. NATO decided not to act, allowing a civil war to draw out for years and a refugee crisis to destabilize countries near and far. Besides these horrible consequences, the anarchy allowed for the rise of the Islamic State. Starting in 2013, this group inflicted brutal violence. In the summer of 2014, they took the dam outside of Mosul after the Iraqi military (that the US had trained) fled. Without asking permission from Congress, Obama immediately deployed US military forces to Iraq to address the very real threat.

Once again, Congress shirked its responsibility, and the president acted unilaterally to address an issue. In an attempt to find legal justification for his action, Obama reached back to the 2001 AUMF to claim that his actions against ISIS are legally sanctioned by that document and he does not need any new legislation. Congress made some attempts to revise the 2001 AUMF or create a sunset clause, but they failed. While these operations succeeded in driving ISIS off the land they claimed, the region remains unstable.

The Contemporary Landscape

Unlike his two predecessors, President Donald Trump did not start any new military operations in his first term that required a congressional response. He continued the war in Afghanistan on a low simmer, but he generally left military affairs to the generals, and they did not find any “monsters to destroy.” That doesn’t necessarily mark a turn away from presidential unilateralism, however.

On January 3, 2020, without even alerting any members of Congress, Trump ordered a lethal drone strike against the Commander of the Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani. This decision sent shock waves around the world and could have easily caused war between the US and Iran. Yet in a precedent-setting move, unlike previous presidents of both parties, he only asked executive branch lawyers to produce a justification well after the fact. The strike clearly violated international and domestic law, to say nothing of norms. Yet Congress did not rise to the occasion to restrain presidential unilateralism.

Today, in the second Trump term, the war in Ukraine persists and shows little sign of ending. There is concern that the Chinese may invade Taiwan, especially if Russia succeeds in Ukraine. War still rages between Hamas and Israel, and there is a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Iranian nuclear program likely continues in some capacity despite the US strike in June, undertaken without congressional approval or input. Relations between the United States and its closest allies remain tense. In other eras, there were serious deliberations between the branches and within the branches about the direction of US foreign policy. There were still mistakes and lapses in judgment, to be sure, but all was not exclusively determined by one individual. Over the last 20 years, Congress has made only limited and unsuccessful attempts to create laws that would restrict presidential unilateralism or restrain the use of military force. The Islamic State and Obama’s use of the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs to justify his actions caused many to worry that Congress had sanctioned a forever war. In this very complicated world, the decisions about when and where the US military will engage in operations large and small rest in the hands of one man.

When looking at the Constitution and the debate in the Constitutional Convention, it is clear that the power of the legislative branch concerned the Founders. Comparatively, the executive seemed weak and required ways to ensure the administration could defend itself against legislative encroachment. Over time, the executive branch has managed to draw power into its branch at the expense of legislative power. We do not see “ambition … made to counteract ambition.” Instead, we see a constantly encroaching executive and a supine Congress. As a consequence, the president essentially has the authority to initiate any military operation, anywhere in the world, for any reason. The lack of oversight leads to questionable decisions, from the war in Iraq to the operation in Libya to the lethal drone strike against Qassem Soleimani. Without scrutiny and accountability, presidents are going to follow their own impulses and interests when making decisions that have consequences for the United States and the world. Without a healthy constitutional system where another branch checks the worst impulses of the executive, the US will continue to see questionable decision-making from an unchecked executive branch.

What is the United States’ greatest achievement? Winning World War II? Landing a man on the moon? Hollywood’s global reach? For Dartmouth College historian and Episcopal priest Randall Balmer, all these accomplishments pale in comparison to a less celebrated but more enduring breakthrough: the separation of church and state. Few ideas, he argues, have done more to preserve both religious vitality and civic peace. In America’s Best Idea, Balmer offers a spirited defense of this foundational principle, contending that the First Amendment’s twin guarantees—no establishment of religion and free exercise thereof—have made the United States a uniquely fertile ground for religious pluralism and, in turn, a more virtuous and democratic citizenry. 

He is alarmed, however, by what he views as a growing desire in some quarters to return to an older model in which church and state walked much closer together. His book is at once a historical account of how this achievement was won and a warning (at times a touch hyperbolic) about the threats now arrayed against it.

For Balmer, this arrangement is not only good for the country, but good for the faith itself. It protects religion from state corruption and safeguards government from sectarian dominance. From Roger Williams’s exile in Rhode Island to William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania, Balmer traces how a long line of dissenters, reformers, and visionaries helped craft a constitutional order rooted in freedom of conscience rather than religious coercion.

And in our own unsettled moment, when some Americans fear the rise of Christian nationalism, others lament Christianity’s retreat from the public square, and religious liberty lawsuits surround everything from Ten Commandments displays to Satanic Temple nativity scenes, Balmer contends that the American model remains both radical and essential. In a nation where Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, and secular candidates now routinely seek office, and where the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow as a cultural force, his argument feels all the more urgent. 

A mixture of history, polemic, and pastoral plea, America’s Best Idea is Balmer’s attempt to remind Americans why the First Amendment was worth creating and why it is still worth defending. His sense of urgency stems from what he sees as a growing and deeply troubling threat: the rise of Christian nationalism. For Balmer, recent efforts to conflate Christian identity with American citizenship (whether through Ten Commandments mandates in schools, public funding for religious education, or political campaigns wrapped in religious rhetoric) represent a betrayal of the founders’ vision and a danger to both church and republic. But given the flood of recent books attacking Christian nationalism, Balmer’s critique adds little that hasn’t already been said. His concerns and arguments closely mirror those found in works like Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers and Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Myth, both of which portray Christian nationalism as little more than a cynical power grab built on a willfully distorted reading of America’s founding. Like them, Balmer treats Christian nationalism as a manifestly bad-faith movement—historically dubious, theologically misguided, and politically corrosive. But while those critiques may carry some merit, Balmer’s tone often lacks nuance. He shows little interest in understanding the appeal or growth of Christian nationalism and is often more interested in denunciation than diagnosis.

The notion that the United States is on the brink of becoming a theocratic nation-state owes more to Twitter threads and fringe podcasts than to any measurable political reality.

Nevertheless, what distinguishes America’s Best Idea from many other recent critiques of Christian nationalism is that Balmer is not merely issuing cultural warnings—he is casting a historically grounded, theologically informed vision for the American experiment in religious liberty. As both a historian and an Episcopal priest, Balmer defends the separation of church and state not as a secularist imposition, but as a theological and civic gift that has allowed religion in America not only to survive, but to flourish. He situates the First Amendment as a radical break from the European model of established churches, tracing its lineage to figures like Roger Williams and the Baptists, whose commitment to religious voluntarism was rooted in the gospel’s refusal to coerce. Balmer sees this system not as a safeguard against religion, but as a safeguard for religion, protecting it from factional capture and state corruption. 

His account celebrates this pluralistic religious economy as central to both the vibrancy of American faith and the health of its democracy. 

Along the way, Balmer reminds readers that evangelicals were once at the forefront of social reform movements, from abolition to temperance to women’s education. In that spirit, he calls today’s believers to recover that legacy of public witness, not by grasping for political power, but by preaching from the margins. Rather than lamenting the decline of cultural privilege, America’s Best Idea urges both religious and secular Americans to preserve the delicate architecture of the First Amendment, a system that, in Balmer’s view, has conserved both faith and freedom better than any official religion ever could.

By the end of America’s Best Idea, readers will likely come away with a renewed appreciation for the remarkable achievements of the First Amendment. Balmer’s historical sweep makes clear just how dangerous (and often deadly) state-established religion has been. Beginning with the sectarian conflicts that plagued Europe for centuries, Balmer shows that religious establishment has more often led to coercion and violence than to piety or peace. Against this grim backdrop, the American model of religious disestablishment appears not just prudent but inspired. Balmer underscores that it is precisely under this framework of constitutional neutrality that once outlawed or marginalized faiths have flourished. Baptists were once jailed in Virginia, Mormons driven west by mob violence, Catholics viewed with suspicion, and Jews barred from elite institutions. But all of these, along with newer movements like Pentecostalism, Islam, and Hinduism, have found space to grow, organize, and even shape public life in America. While the experience of religious liberty in the United States has certainly not been a straight line, when set against the alternatives found in both past and present, Balmer’s case for the First Amendment’s enduring genius is inspiring. 

While one can appreciate Balmer’s passion for the First Amendment, aspects of his framing are historically problematic. He rightly celebrates early champions of religious liberty such as Roger Williams and William Penn, yet he often portrays the American experiment in religious freedom as if it arose chiefly in opposition to traditional Christianity, rather than emerging from within it. The very Baptists he praises (figures like Isaac Backus and John Leland) were not theological progressives or pure Lockean liberals; their arguments for liberty of conscience were rooted explicitly in biblical exegesis and evangelical convictions. Furthermore, Balmer’s repeated appeals to a “wall of separation” between church and state rely on a modern and legally contested interpretation of the First Amendment. One shaped more by mid-twentieth-century jurisprudence than by the text, context, or original intent of the founding generation. Jefferson’s metaphor, which was lifted not from a legal text or constitutional debate, but from a private letter to a Baptist association, has come to bear far more constitutional weight than the framers ever intended or could have imagined. 

In emphasizing rigid separation, Balmer overlooks the fact that early American states routinely supported religion without establishing it, tied public morality to religious belief, and defended the right of religious citizens to contribute meaningfully to public life. Massachusetts, for instance, maintained religious tests for public office well into the 1830s. Connecticut’s 1818 constitution explicitly affirmed “the duty of all men to worship the Supreme Being,” and several states, including Maryland and North Carolina, required public officials to profess belief in God or in divine judgment. Far from being anomalies, such measures reflected a broad consensus that religion, particularly Christianity, was essential to civic virtue and republican self-government, even if no single denomination should be elevated above others. Much of what Balmer presents as a timeless constitutional principle is, in fact, a projection of modern jurisprudence and liberal Protestant values onto a founding generation that held a far more complex and variegated view of church and state. 

One is left to wonder why Christian moral witness is celebrated in one era but viewed as suspect in another.

Balmer’s narrative tends to flatten this complexity into a simplistic binary, either establishment or total separation, when the historical record reveals a spectrum of arrangements across the states, many of which retained close church-state ties well after 1791. By reading back a post-Jeffersonian, mid-twentieth-century model of “separation” as the founders’ original intent, Balmer risks turning a rich and pluralistic founding landscape into a legal abstraction better suited to modern polemic than historical accuracy.

Then there are the words of warning against Christian nationalism. Like many books in this genre, America’s Best Idea offers warnings that feel hyperbolic and out of proportion to the actual threat. Balmer largely overlooks Christian nationalism’s limited real-world influence, its lack of theological or organizational coherence, and its marginal growth beyond chronically online circles. As Mark David Hall and Miles Smith IV have persuasively argued, the notion that the United States is on the brink of becoming a theocratic nation-state owes more to Twitter threads and fringe podcasts than to any measurable political reality. In fact, and somewhat ironically given Balmer’s earlier work on the rise of the Religious Right, the more significant transformation in recent years has been the emergence of a non-religious right. In contrast to Christian nationalism, this is a tangible and measurable shift: according to the Public Religion Research Institute, the share of religiously unaffiliated Republicans has tripled, from about 4 percent in 2006 to roughly 12 percent in 2022, and Gallup reports that nearly one-quarter of nonreligious Americans now lean Republican. Ironically, this growing secular bloc on the right (which is probably far more aligned with Balmer’s pluralist ideals) gets far less attention than the overhyped specter of Christian nationalism, despite representing a deeper and more lasting shift in American life.

Which brings me to a perplexing tension in Balmer’s account. He lauds evangelical involvement in nineteenth-century reform movements (particularly abolition, temperance, and women’s education) as exemplars of Christian public witness. These efforts, in his view, demonstrated faith speaking truth to power and working for the common good. Balmer also praises historical figures like William Jennings Bryan for his economic populism and Martin Luther King Jr. for his prophetic civil rights leadership, holding up such examples of progressive, justice-oriented engagement as faithful expressions of Christianity in the public square. More broadly, he voices admiration for faith-based activism that advances values like social justice, equality, and inclusion.

Conversely, Balmer is consistently critical of recent evangelical political engagement, especially when it aligns with the Republican Party or centers on issues such as abortion, gay rights, or religious symbolism in public life. He often portrays such activism not as prophetic witness but as a bid to reclaim lost cultural privilege or enforce sectarian morality through legislation. One is left to wonder why Christian moral witness is celebrated in one era but viewed as suspect in another. Of course, Balmer is entitled to his political and theological commitments, but the criteria by which he distinguishes faithful from inappropriate activism often seem ad hoc and selectively applied. The result is a framework in which Christian political engagement is endorsed when it advances progressive goals but dismissed when it reflects more traditional convictions.

In short, Balmer seems comfortable rendering unto Caesar when Caesar shares his views, yet eager to proclaim “Jesus is Lord” when Caesar does not.

Despite its limitations, America’s Best Idea stands as a compelling progressive tribute to the Madisonian tradition and its vision of religious liberty. Balmer’s greatest strength lies in his passionate and historically informed defense of the First Amendment as a civic and theological breakthrough, one that has allowed an astonishing diversity of religious communities not merely to survive, but to flourish. In an era when “religious pluralism” can often sound like a platitude, Balmer roots the phrase in real historical struggle, making clear just how hard-won (and how uniquely American) this achievement truly is. His narrative reminds readers that the separation of church and state was not designed to diminish faith, but to preserve its integrity and safeguard public life from religious domination. While reasonable people may disagree over how this principle has been interpreted or applied over time, Balmer makes a compelling case that our church-state separation truly is one of America’s best ideas.

Congress is down, but how close is it to being out? What is the ultimate source of its vitality, and how might it return to that wellspring in our deeply cynical political moment?

The three excellent responses to my initial essay, “Choosing Congressional Irrelevance,” helpfully probe these questions and bring to light some useful disagreements. Yuval Levin, Joseph Postell, Shep Melnick, and I look at Congress from different enough angles that we each perceive different possibilities for further marginalization or, perhaps, revival. In this response to their perspectives, I start by probing what I take to be the fundamental question: what animates Congress? I then consider just how gloomy we ought to be about Congress’s prospects and briefly take up a few solutions.

Do We Believe in Representation?

As is so frustratingly often the case, Yuval Levin lays out many of my central ideas with greater clarity and force than I mustered. Although Congress is our lawmaking body, Levin insists we remember that “Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation.” Rather, “It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines.” To the extent we think of Congress as a tool for efficient action, we will naturally come to think that “members are the problem and leaders are the solution.” If we want a congressional renaissance, we will need members to take their own role in producing a legitimate political order more seriously.

Postell takes nearly the opposite tack. He says that giving members more opportunities for influence is likely to be a recipe for institutional stagnation. In his reading of the historical record, “decentralized structures and procedures such as open amendment processes, leadership shorn of committee assignment and agenda control powers, and powerful committees, have tended to fragment Congress and render its collective action more difficult.” Were we to move away from the centralized, omnibus-heavy procedures behind most of the contemporary Congress’s enactments, our legislature would quickly find itself even more stymied by internal dissent and even more irrelevant than it is today.

Postell is surely correct to say that, at present, congressional policymaking depends on this path—but, with Levin, I take very different lessons from the historical record. Members have sought efficiency, but their energies have dissipated. As Levin puts it, the ironic result of prioritizing programmatic, ideological coordination has been to devalue their own representative function.

What does that mean, exactly?

What makes representation potent is the sense that there is something real in each congressional district that needs to be made present in national deliberations. This is something different than the political beliefs held by the majority of a district’s voters. I’m happy to go with Postell in identifying the relevant distinction as being between (national partisan) ideology and (locally rooted) interest. I share Edmund Burke’s belief in the solidity of interests, separate from opinion, as a sturdy basis for politics. We want to grapple with realities, not fantasies, even when they are somewhat grubby. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington was, for decades, known as the Senator from Boeing. This was meant as an insult, but it seems healthy for a corporation at the heart of America’s military-industrial complex, which employed many tens of thousands of Washingtonians, to have had its say. (Jackson, in turn, forcefully brought the public’s concerns into the corporation.)

Narrow-minded “parochialism” is generally contrasted with high-minded universalism, but I hold with Willmoore Kendall in believing that the two values need to be in constant conversation with each other, and that Congress is the appropriate venue for the rooted interests to contend with each other and temper the grand schemes that often emanate from the White House.

Especially because of the rise of artificial intelligence, we are heading into a time of massive social upheaval, and we need a functioning politics to help us find our collective way through.

For that vision to make sense, we must believe in the connection between the organic community and its representative, who has a distinctive way of knowing about his or her community and its needs. There are three components of that: 1) believing that the organic community itself is real and distinctive; 2) believing that the elected representative has a special relationship to it; and 3) believing that, in carrying out the activity of representation, the representative will hold faith with the community, rather than betraying its interests. If all those hold, then, as Levin says, Congress takes on the emergent “capacity [of facilitating] broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains,” which is of immense value to our constitutional republic. (This is what I argued makes Congress “indispensable.”)

Each of these three necessary beliefs is strained today. Our belief in the integrity of geographic communities has waned as people forge more of their connections in life through the Internet, and more people work for firms far away from their homes. We are justifiably more skeptical of the idea that our representatives orient themselves toward their districts, given how much more nationalized our politics has become. If the “D” or “R” appearing next to a candidate’s name vastly outweighs everything else about them, how special of a relationship can that person really have with the district? And, finally, as Melnick points out, we live in a time when we are generally dubious of fidelity in all forms. This certainly holds regarding the public’s views of their legislators. Recent research indicates that Fenno’s paradox, in which citizens hold their own member of Congress in high esteem even as they mistrust the institution, has lost steam in recent years. Many voters clearly feel that their members of Congress care little about them, rather than their place in the news cycle. With representativeness itself under strain, Congress’s institutional self-confidence sags.

Melnick calls our attention to an even deeper concern: Counterintuitively, the juggernaut of democracy itself may be working against representation in a development that spans centuries rather than decades. Citing Tocqueville’s apprehensions of the individualistic, leveling tendencies of the democratic spirit, he notes that the purest little-d democrats may be naturally “allergic to forms and formalities. They want their favorite policies, and they want them now.” Citizens who think in these terms are likely to be skeptical of the complicated give-and-take of congressional bargaining and attracted to the presidency’s promises of instant gratification, even if they are dimly aware that the president is offering sugar highs rather than real sustenance. I, too, worry that the democratic logic triumphant in our time promotes distrust of intermediaries of all kinds. Why should representatives have any greater voice than you or I? This impulse flares up constantly in the public’s relationship with Congress.

How Bleak Is It, Really?

Then again, that point surely rang true at much earlier points in our nation’s history, and Congress has time and again shown its resiliency. We have to be careful of taking any sort of historical logic to its endpoint, or presuming we live there.

Attending to our own specific moment, we should consider: Is anything so bad about Congress in the present moment? Postell reminds us of the ongoing importance of “Secret” (“low-salience” Congress, which can achieve a good deal with little fanfare. And he (with me) notes that members of Congress did play a large role in shaping the reconciliation law that is the centerpiece of Trump’s busy 2025. He also asks whether overall productivity might be holding up just fine, notwithstanding consistently negative media coverage of Congress. Maybe legislators have changed how they work, without losing influence.

I hope these suggestions (which, to be clear, Postell offers as helpful provocations) turn out to be right, and that Congress is poised to unleash a gusher of productive legislation. But I doubt it. I tried to make clear in my original piece that Congress still does a great deal, and that it would be a mistake to simply write it off. But my sense is that the institution is genuinely on a downward trajectory. Based on previous research, I can say with some confidence that the 118th Congress (2023–24) was historically unproductive. It is too early to judge the 119th, but I’m willing to bet on low output (coupled with continued historically high reliance on omnibuses). We have lost a great deal, without reaching a nadir. We can lose much more.

Supposing that is correct, how difficult would it be to turn things around? In a different vein of his response, Postell brings out an inevitability argument: “Reducing partisan loyalty and incentivizing cross-cutting policies may simply be out of touch with the mood of the people, and perhaps no amount of institutional reform within Congress can change that.” Our Congress is what it is because we are what we are, and no amount of reformist messing around can change that. Melnick also strikes a pessimistic note, saying Americans’ dislike of open conflict will make it difficult for Congress to ever regain people’s trust.

I (try to) maintain more hope for Congress because I feel that the American people really are more complex (and interesting) than our current Manichaean style of politics, which repulses enough people to make burnout and reinvention a live possibility. Especially because of the rise of artificial intelligence, we are heading into a time of massive social upheaval, and we need a functioning politics to help us find our collective way through. Trust generated by shared experience of place may be harder to come by, but it is still a real force, which makes geography-rooted representative government the best solution. That’s especially clear given how obvious it’s become that the public fora of social media can never function as an acceptable “universal town square.” The deficiencies of mass plebiscitary democracy, unmediated (or poorly mediated) by a powerful representative legislature, are clearer every day.

How to Make It Better

Of course, articulating the good that a more self-assured Congress could bring is no recipe for actually delivering one. So let me conclude with a brief run-through of some of the suggestions laid out by my interlocutors. Postell recommends:

• Expanding the House such that, instead of representing some 750,000 constituents, each member would represent only 250,000, thereby strengthening the connection between citizens and their representatives. The principle is good, but I worry that a House of 1,300 members would be too large to support any genuine deliberation. Madison warned in Federalist #55 that an assembly’s number must be low enough “to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude.” That concern makes me more receptive to the recommendation to expand to 585 members made by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences report on the subject, which Yuval Levin coauthored.
• Cancelling direct congressional primaries. Yes, but how could this possibly gain political momentum? Likewise with the cause of devolving policymaking powers back to state and local governments.
• Reforming campaign finance so that a district’s constituents are privileged. I’ve been persuaded by Michael Malbin’s work on this subject, though devising a workable scheme that doesn’t run afoul of the First Amendment is difficult.
• Limiting the presidential veto and reviving the legislative veto. I’m sold on both, but trying to practice constitutional politics outside of our current partisan divide seems very difficult, and so all Article V amendments seem like longshots. We should build bipartisan support for constitutionally valid mechanisms that approximate the legislative veto.

Rather than seek a reformist groundswell, my inclination (shared by Levin) is to urge members of Congress to reorient their chambers toward committee work, especially in the House. That this sounds dull as bricks to outsiders is an advantage; it is a program that can be pursued underneath the din of national politics. Members who care about policy and plan to spend years in Congress need to see how institutional reconfiguration can serve their own ambitions. Hard work needs to be rewarded with agenda control. Back benchers have nothing to lose but their leashes.

Another academic year will bring a lot of debate about the nature of debate on college campuses. It is tempting to say that if the First Amendment is the gold standard of public debate, why not import it wholesale into the university, even if the institution is private and beyond the Amendment’s formal reach? In fact, enthusiasm for applying the modern First Amendment in full to the campus is the position of much of the classical liberal right, because they see it as the way to protect conservative dissenters from left-wing university bureaucrats. Yet the fit between the modern First Amendment and the university as originally conceived by classical liberals is far from perfect. A university is an institution for finding truth by reason. But modern First Amendment doctrine is a charter for expression, protecting speech and even conduct with little, if any, rational content.

Moreover, the First Amendment protects not only speech but also assembly. That guarantee is aimed less at truth-seeking than at collective action. It empowers citizens peacefully to organize and press their government to change policy. The ideal university, by contrast, should resist any pressure unrelated to truth. An idea does not become truer because many people gather to demand its adoption. Moreover, given their role as facilitators of reasoned discourse, universities should not be adopting political or cultural positions as institutions.

Thus, even if public universities are bound by modern First Amendment case law, private universities should not sign on. Of course, they should model an epistemic openness in which all reasoned arguments are welcome and encouraged. They may also need to impose institutional constraints on themselves to make sure that the unsettling ideas are heard, mandating neutral and unbiased tribunals to protect speech and inquiry. Judicial review thus is a legal idea that may have some lessons even outside the public university context. Building on that old idea rather than on the modern First Amendment may be the better way to protect dissenters while still upholding the classical ideal of the university.

The focus of the university on discovering truth through reason links the institution from its growth as a medieval foundation for disciplined disputation to the modern research center of today. At Bologna and Paris, the first universities, theses were stated, critiqued, and then defended by reasons. The Enlightenment sometimes redirected that method toward empirical inquiry but preserved the same architecture of truth-seeking. Conclusions were based on evidence and could be disputed based on better evidence. Modern research institutions continued this tradition and added new safeguards such as academic freedom and tenure that are designed to secure independence from faction and fashion.

The university ideal thus has remained that of a social technology for the discovery of knowledge. Sadly, the ideal is not always honored. Ideological monocultures can dull reason’s blade. But when challenged politically, at least, universities never tire of aligning themselves with their proud tradition of preserving epistemic openness bound by reason. It remains their best argument for independence from the threats of politics.

The free speech regime at the time of the Framing likely better comports with that university ideal because speech had to be an exercise in reasoned persuasion to gain protection. The point appears beneath the surface of state charters: Pennsylvania in 1790 guaranteed “the free communication of thoughts and opinions” and allowed citizens to “freely speak, write and print on any subject,” while making them “responsible for the abuse of that liberty.” That text both ties speech to the exchange of reasons and appears to draw a line at non-communicative abuse. Johnson’s influential eighteenth-century dictionary defined “speech” as “the power of expressing thoughts by vocal words,” thus framing it as an instrument of rational expression. Jefferson stated in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that citizens are “free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion”—again, the vocabulary of argument and persuasion rather than brute verbal force. Consistent with this view, states maintained and enacted laws punishing profane cursing, blasphemy, and kindred offenses in the 1790s and early republic—Massachusetts’s “Act to Prevent Profane Cursing and Swearing” in 1798 is one example. Thus, at the time of the Framing speech was prized, but as an instrument in the service of reason. When speech departed from reasoned persuasion, it lost its protection.

Universities would have spared themselves a great deal of grief with a simple rule against political assemblies and demonstrations so long as it was rigorously enforced against everyone.

Modern doctrine, however, has entirely pivoted from “reasoned persuasion” to a broader ideal of expressive autonomy. One inflection point was Justice John Marshall Harlan’s opinion in Cohen v. California. Paul Cohen had been convicted for wearing a jacket reading “F__- the Draft” in a courthouse corridor. But Harlan refused to let the state regulate speech on the basis of its vulgarity. He emphasized that expression carries both a “cognitive” and an “emotive” message and that the Constitution protects the latter as part of how citizens communicate meaning. Because Cohen’s expletive was not obscene, not directed at a particular person, and not likely to provoke a fight, the state’s interest in decorum yielded to a principle of tolerating offense in the name of free expression. In short, Cohen decoupled protection from the provision of reasons and anchored it instead in a robust commitment to expressive freedom, even when the mode of expression may even retard rational argument.

After Cohen, the Court moved further from reason as the touchstone of free speech. First, “fighting words” category shrank. Second, incitement was narrowed to advocacy intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action. Third, offense to sensibilities, however profound, did not suffice to suppress speech (Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, Snyder v. Phelps). The Court also protected symbolic acts like flag burning (Texas v. Johnson). The governing tests for free speech now turn on such matters as content and viewpoint neutrality and imminence of violence, not on whether speech is connected to public reason. That shift has yielded a First Amendment regime that is capacious, but indifferent to a speech’s rational quality. It gives the widest berth to expression, including that made solely for shock value, but at the cost of abandoning the requirement that the speech display even a modicum of reason.

Public universities are thus probably stuck with having to accept expressive self-fulfillment as the mandate they need to follow. Even public universities, however, can use time, place and manner regulations to make sure that this kind of expression does not obstruct their core business, whether conducted by their own teachers or outside speakers. But private universities need not accept the modern view. They should instead use the older First Amendment paradigm because it better roots the right to speech in the right to reason to gain the truth. Thus, universities should provide protection for any speech that attempts to reason under a broad definition of what reason is. Reasoned persuasion can take the form of dissent against the vast weight of opinion and authority. But reasoned persuasion does not consist in insults, fighting words, and personal invective. 

To be sure, as in any free speech regime, there may be reason to distrust the administration in making ideologically neutral decisions about what speech is protected under the rules employed. But this is an institutional problem, not a conceptual one. Universities should create tribunals on the model of judicial review to resolve disputes about the boundaries of their rules that are composed of neutral arbiters. Distinguished alumni, particularly lawyers, of diverse viewpoints might be appointed arbiters. And here one should be relatively sanguine about their decisions. For instance, whatever one thinks of the current Supreme Court’s First Amendment doctrine, its application to parties of widely varying ideologies seems eminently fair.

Universities, unlike the government, also possess an obligation to facilitate debate and conversations between different reasoned positions. The First Amendment protects negative rights, preventing the government from interfering with speech, but not requiring it to aid in building knowledge. But the truth-seeking function of the university requires it to facilitate and encourage debate aimed at discovering reality. Sadly, because of their ideological monoculture many universities fail to do so. My own law school even took money from a well-meaning donor who wanted the expression of the diversity of views but created forums that lacked them.

Providing students a fundamental right to assemble or demonstrate, by contrast, discourages the kind of reasoned speech essential to free inquiry. The right of assembly in our Constitution was not about reasoned persuasion but instead protected the right of the people to peacefully assemble to press for the redress of their grievances. Founding-era texts treat assembly as the people’s right to gather in order to act politically—to consult, instruct representatives, and petition. Massachusetts’s 1780 constitution provides an example: citizens may “assemble to consult upon the common good; give instructions to their representatives; and … request … redress” by address, petition, or remonstrance. Pennsylvania’s 1776 declaration uses the same similar terms such as “assemble,” “consult,” “instruct,” and “apply,” making clear that the right protects coordinated political pressure in a lawful, orderly form.

The university, however, is not a political institution, and neither its students nor its faculty are its citizens. Both have freely chosen any particular university in a market of higher education and, if unhappy, can go elsewhere to one of its many competitors. Reason, not pressure, should govern the relations of all members of the university, whether the issue is a political or moral one outside the university or one of governance within.

Thus, universities should not permit demonstrations for or against speakers or causes on university campuses. They should certainly not allow, as my university did, the erection of structures to make some political point. Building improvised structures may be a useful skill but it is unrelated to the university’s business and may obstruct it. Universities would have spared themselves a great deal of grief with a simple rule against political assemblies and demonstrations so long as it was rigorously enforced against everyone.

The university secures its authority not by importing the First Amendment’s modern, autonomy-maximizing sweep, but by reclaiming the older freedom that privileges reasoned persuasion. Its charter is to find truth through reason, not protect expression as a means of personal fulfilment. Its objective requires safeguards for any good-faith attempt at reasoning but excludes individual insults and mob pressure. Protect reasons, not rage. The university can then enjoy the freedom calibrated to its mission.

The guilty secret among students of American politics is that many of them—perhaps most—have not read The Federalist in its entirety. They may have been introduced to “Publius,” the nom de plume of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, early in their studies, as undergraduates or even in high school. But the demands on the time and attention of both teachers and students to “cover” many things typically meant that only the “greatest hits” of the eighty-five essays were assigned and discussed. Sometimes the authors of introductory textbooks on American government will include pivotal essays such as No. 10 and No. 51 in an appendix, and editors of anthologies of primary sources may include as many as eight or ten numbers of The Federalist. The work is sampled more often than read as a coherent unity.

Even the editors of complete editions recognize that many of the essays will go unread. Clinton Rossiter, the editor of an inexpensive and popular 1961 edition under the inaccurate (but evidently unkillable) title The Federalist Papers—an edition refreshed, reissued, and (annoyingly) repaginated under the editorship of Charles Kesler a quarter century ago—had this to say in a “Note on Text”:

Those readers who do not have the energy and fixed purpose to make their way through the whole of The Federalist may wish to know that, by common consent of learned opinion, the following numbers are the cream of the eighty-five papers: 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 23, 37, 39, 47, 48, 49, 51, 62, 63, 70, 78, 84, 85 (ten by Hamilton, ten by Madison, one by Jay).

Those twenty-one essays, with perhaps a half dozen more besides, constituted my own introduction to Publius as a freshman in the 1970s. And when I began to teach American politics in the 1980s, this “cream” of The Federalist made up the essays I assigned—fewer in introductory courses, these and more in upper-level American political thought. In advanced courses also on Congress, the presidency, or the courts, I might home in on just a handful of essays, adding several more to the relevant few on Rossiter’s list.

True confession: I had been teaching for more than twenty-five years before I assigned The Federalist in its entirety to any class I taught—and it was only then that I finally read each and every one of them myself! That was in spring 2007, and concurrently with my class at Radford University, I blogged my way through all the essays for National Review’s Bench Memos page, with a short entry on each one. A decade later, at Princeton University, I teamed up with a visiting fellow to lead a noncredit weekly reading group through all the essays over the whole 2017–18 academic year.

Everyone who assigns even selections from The Federalist should have this book, and using it will be a spur to teach the work in its entirety, which would be all to the good.

I strongly recommend making the time to do this, and I wish I’d done it years earlier. For teacher and student alike, nothing beats reading the whole of The Federalist. In descending into its granular detail, one begins to see why these essays, written on the fly from October 1787 to May 1788 to urge first New Yorkers but ultimately Americans everywhere to ratify the new Constitution, have had unique staying power among all the contributions to the ratification debate. And with the work involved in grasping the nuances of Publius’s supple arguments, one also begins to ascend again to a bird’s-eye view of the whole series. Close study of this kind will lead you to see why Thomas Jefferson told his son-in-law in 1790, “Descending from theory to practice there is no better book than the Federalist.” 

And now has come into my hands a little book I wish I’d had many years ago, one that should quickly find a place in the library of all those who teach and study The Federalist. It is The Framework of the Federalist: Visualizing the Structure of the Argumentation, just out from St. Augustine’s Press. The author, Harvey Flaumenhaft, has been teaching for more than fifty years at St. John’s College, Annapolis, where The Federalist is part of the “great books” curriculum. Whether one calls his book a guide, a synopsis, or an analysis—each description would be accurate—The Framework of the Federalist is plainly the fruit of long and close study of all the essays. Eschewing the formal divisions of an outline into numbered and lettered parts and levels, Flaumenhaft moves back and forth from a high-level overview of the series and its major headings to finely detailed breakdowns of the structures of individual essays. The cycle of ascents and descents is not at all disorienting. Quite the opposite: frequent recurrence from detail to overview and back again keeps the reader oriented, as one would turn from compass and nearby visual landmark to a map one carries to be sure of one’s progress over a whole journey.

Instead of formal outline divisions, Flaumenhaft employs the visual technique of indenting successive levels of the argument, making sure as well that each page of the book is a self-contained unit of The Federalist as a whole. This requires him frequently to interject a signpost that “expanded detail on” some feature of the present page will be found on the next, with that descent followed by a renewed ascent after the detailed analysis has been unpacked. But Flaumenhaft’s strategy of making each page of his book a coherent unit has a remarkable synoptic effect. It provides, as his subtitle puts it, a visualization of the argument’s structure, and it is hard to convey its effectiveness without a visible sample. Here, for example, is how Flaumenhaft begins to break down Federalist #45, answering the concern that the new Constitution grants such a great mass of power that the sovereignty of states is in jeopardy:

And so on. Although Publius’s elegant prose is stripped away, and with it the full rhetorical richness of The Federalist’s case for the Constitution, it is fair to say that the entire argument of the series is present here in skeletal form, in a mere fifty pages. (Two appendices, a page tabulating the authorship of The Federalist and fourteen pages analytically formatting the Articles of Confederation, conclude the book. I should like to have seen a similar formatting of the unamended Constitution as well, and wonder why the author did not provide it.)

The publisher’s website tells us that this book is eighty pages in length, and measures eight and a half inches by eleven. That size may have been originally intended, but Flaumenhaft’s unique approach to visualizing the text’s structure required the enlargement of the pages and a consequent reduction of their number. The work’s 66 pages measure a full twelve inches a side in order to achieve the author’s intent. And still, in order to pack into each page every structural feature that belongs to it as a unit of the whole, the printers were obliged to employ 8-point type, which is a bit taxing for aging eyes like mine. The desired effect has been accomplished, however: Flaumenhaft has both distilled the essence of Publius’s argument and presented it in a series of text-images that can be grasped by the mind.

One perhaps unintended effect of this book is that it may give some readers the impression that Alexander Hamilton and his co-authors—but chiefly Hamilton, who conceived the series and wrote the majority—gave The Federalist an exact and predetermined design, in structure and in substance, that was carried out with precision and polish. But these eighty-five newspaper essays are not a Platonic dialogue, a treatise in analytical philosophy, or a leisurely legal commentary. They were furiously written exercises in advocacy in a newly independent country going through a political crisis. It is well known that Hamilton sketched, in the first essay, a six-part outline of the coming series; then, when he wrote the concluding essay some seven months later, he noted that only the first four parts had been systematically finished—but begged the reader to recognize that the final two parts had been miscellaneously accounted for along the way! All that being noted, however, Flaumenhaft’s analysis brings to light the care taken by Hamilton, Madison, and (yes, even) Jay to fashion rigorous arguments with moving parts that incline the reader strongly toward embracing the Constitution.

Aside from judicial precedents, nothing is more often cited than The Federalist in opinions of the Supreme Court, not to mention the lower federal courts. Unfortunately, the isolated sentences and phrases of Publius that wind up in judicial opinions are usually so abstracted from their context that the point-scoring achieved by them cannot always be trusted. Copies of The Framework of the Federalist should be on the shelves in every justice’s chambers to help guard against this failing. It is not only judges who forage for authority in The Federalist, of course; scholars frequently offer a specious reliance on Publius for their own agendas, sometimes quite innocently, thanks to their unfamiliarity with the whole.

But the primary beneficiaries of Flaumenhaft’s painstaking work will be teachers. Everyone who assigns even selections from The Federalist should have this book, and using it will be a spur to teach the work in its entirety, which would be all to the good. Teachers should want their students to have The Framework as well, though I can imagine some of them holding it close as their pedagogical secret weapon. 

As I turned Flaumenhaft’s meticulously crafted pages, one more thought occurred and recurred to me: that at a time when we hear much about the power of “artificial intelligence” to do analytical work for us, and even to write for us, here is a book that only a human intelligence could have produced. Only, that is, a real mind, dwelling with a work like The Federalist over a period of years, talking it over with students, and determined to learn not just about it but from it, could possibly have made such a thing as this. Students of our country’s Constitution, and the thought of its makers, are in Harvey Flaumenhaft’s debt.

During my brief stint as a Senate staffer decades ago, I would sometimes walk from the Senate office building into the Capitol itself. Virtually everyone—be they former anti-war and civil rights protesters, unreconstructed defenders of racial segregation, or purveyors of bizarre conspiracy theories—treated the place with reverence, dressing appropriately, speaking quietly, and obeying the many rules of decorum (such as no reading in the staff gallery). This, after all, was the cathedral of our civil religion. Years later, it continues to fill me with awe.

When hooligans ransacked the building in early 2021, I expected all members of Congress to be horrified by this assault on our nation’s sacred place. After all, this was a direct and violent attack on their institution. High time to defend that institution from angry mobs and the demagogues who urge them on. Time to reclaim some of the constitutional powers ceded to presidents, Republican and Democratic, in decades past. Yet this extraordinary moment quickly passed, leaving almost no institutional imprint.

We could not expect a party dominated by Donald Trump to favor limits on presidential power, at least as long as he might hold office. But what about the Democrats? They had majorities in both houses in the 117th Congress and managed to pass several important pieces of legislation. But none imposed significant restraints on presidents.

In late 2020, Bob Bauer, President Obama’s White House Counsel, and Jack Goldsmith, an eminent Harvard Law professor who had served as George W. Bush’s second head of the Office of Legal Counsel, published After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. They noted that during his first term, Trump had

operated the presidency in ways that defied widely held assumptions about how a president might use and abuse the powers of the office. … His words and actions exposed the presidency’s vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability. Trump was not the first president to raise these dangers, obviously, but he did so unlike any of his predecessors.

Bauer and Goldsmith offered over fifty proposals to constrain such abuse of authority, ranging from ethics rules to control over the Justice Department, from vacancies and civil service protection to pardons and delegation of emergency power. With but one exception, the Democrats who controlled Congress for two years ignored them. The 123 statutes that allow a president to exercise “emergency” powers—including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 that Trump used to impose steep tariffs on friends and foes alike—remain in place. Warned of the dangers of a rogue president, Democrats in Congress devoted their efforts to enacting the program of a president from their own party.

One might have expected conservatives to show more respect for tradition, for restraints on executive power, and more disdain for overwrought rhetoric.

As Philip Wallach has shown, the current Congress has been even less willing to protect its institutional prerogatives than those in the past. The Trump administration has refused to enforce laws recently enacted by Congress. It has usurped Congress’s authority to tax and spend. Congress has routinely confirmed nominees who obviously lack the expertise, integrity, and credibility required of the office they seek to fill. It has ceded oversight of agencies’ performance to an ill-defined collection of young tech bros with little understanding of how government bureaucracies differ from those in the private realm. The fact that the official name of the only significant legislative accomplishment of the current Congress is “One Big Beautiful Bill” indicates how undignified and unserious the institution has become.

Wallach explores the question of whether Congress can recover from this “decrepitude” and become, if not the “first branch of government,” then at least a powerful counterweight to the presidency. He notes that during previous periods of presidential ascendancy, Congress did mount substantial comebacks. The presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were followed by nearly two decades of congressional institutionalization and assertion. If Franklin Roosevelt dominated Congress during his first term in office, that was no longer true by his second (or third or fourth). The “imperial presidencies” of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were the catalyst for congressional reforms that produced a surge of legislative activism. The cyclical nature of congressional organization and activity was captured by the title of James Sundquist’s masterful book, The Decline and Resurgence of Congress.

Our Constitution, after all, does not count on altruism or virtue to protect separation of powers, but rather expects “ambition to counteract ambition”: “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” There is no denying that most members of the House and Senate are ambitious. So in the long run, won’t they find it in their interest to protect the rights, powers, and responsibilities of their institutions? Perhaps, but we know what happens to all of us in the long run.

One could argue that Congress’s current dysfunction is the product of two unusual and possibly temporary features of American politics: partisan polarization coupled with the narrow and short-lived majorities each party has held in the House and Senate. Bipartisan majorities on major issues are hard to come by, so each party rushes to jam through its program in unwieldy omnibus bills before it loses the next election. Each hopes that this will finally be the year and these will finally be the issues that produce a partisan realignment and a permanent majority. Until that day comes, party loyalty will remain paramount, even among members who have serious doubts about the institutional and policy damage it does. As Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes put it, “separation of parties” has replaced separation of powers.

Compounding this political problem is the federal government’s fiscal plight. In a time of peace and prosperity, we are running up huge, unsustainable debt. Since addressing this problem will require both raising taxes and cutting spending, neither party is willing even to admit the extent of the rapidly looming threat. Budgeting—the central task of Congress—becomes an endless game of evasion and obfuscation.

Perhaps Congress can revert to “regular order”—passing appropriations bills before the beginning of the fiscal year, reauthorizing programs on schedule, conducting serious oversight hearings, taking a hard look at the qualifications of nominees, applying pressure to presidents who ignore their laws, and allowing major legislation to go through the committee process and floor debate rather than being stuffed into gargantuan reconciliation bills—once one of the parties attains a comfortable and stable level of public support. Then again, maybe not. For there are other, equally substantial obstacles Congress must overcome in order to avoid “decrepitude.”

A central feature of a legislative body not dominated by parties is the gap between individual and collective responsibility. In the US, legislatures at both the state and national levels must put together diverse majorities in each of two houses—and even super-majorities in the US Senate. For such legislation, those in the majority can take credit once they return to their constituencies. But often it is more attractive to take credit for refusing to join a majority that endorses items unpopular among one’s general election or primary constituency. As Richard Fenno put it many years ago, members of Congress often run for Congress by running against Congress: “Reelect me so I can protect you from the 534 crooks up there.” Especially since the 1970s, running as an “outsider” has been a popular strategy, even among congressional veterans.

Social media did not create this dynamic, but it certainly exacerbated it. Today, media mavens such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene can attract far more public attention than the old “whales” of the Senate or “committee barons” of the House ever could—or wanted to. For this growing breed, negotiating and producing legislation is not just a distraction, but a threat to their image. Once the iron grip of partisan necessity begins to relax, the hazards of policy individualism will loom large, as they did in the late 1970s. 

Only now that centripetal force will be even stronger, due not just to social media, but to a phenomenon explored by Yuval Levin and Hugh Heclo: the broader cultural decline of institutional loyalty. Strong, resilient institutions, Heclo explains, establish not just a set of rules, but an ethos. They are, as Levin emphasizes, formative. They inculcate a strong sense of how one is expected to behave within this institution. In vibrant institutions, veterans pass this ethos along to novices—and impose sanctions on those who fail to conform.

Having seldom encountered them, our students have a hard time envisioning such institutions. Levin notes that these days “we don’t think of our institutions as formative but as performative,” most evident “when the presidency and Congress are just stages for political performance art.” But we need only to look back a few decades to discover a Congress that not only followed its own rules, but imposed a powerful ethos on members from different regions, parties, temperaments, interests, and political views.

The more visible political conflict within an institution, the less the public trusts it. And Congress is the most transparent branch of government.

Descriptions of the House and Senate from the late 1930s through the early 1970s by Donald Matthews, Ralph Huitt, Richard Fenno, Nelson Polsby, and others provide a wonderful picture of the informal norms that were passed from generation to generation: seniority, apprenticeship, specialization, reciprocity, civility, restrained partisanship, and institutional pride. “Be a work horse, not a show horse.” Liberals chafed under these norms more than conservatives, and often for good reason, especially on civil rights matters. Eventually, the liberal Democratic Study Group came to dominate the Democratic caucuses at a time when Democrats dominated Congress. The norms and constraints weakened as Baby Boomers and Watergate Babies took over.

Just as important (and more surprising) is the extent to which conservative Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, went even further in denigrating Congress, its members, its norms, and its guiding ethos. One might have expected conservatives to show more respect for tradition, for restraints on executive power and policy individualism, and more disdain for overwrought rhetoric. But no—just the opposite.

As Wallach has explained in a 2020 paper, Republicans emerged from the political wilderness in 1994 with a deep antipathy toward Congress. They “took an almost punitive attitude toward the First Branch that they now found themselves controlling. They were determined to root out petty corruption, but more fundamentally their agenda was about cutting Congress down to size.” Thus began their love affair with presidentialism, which grew ever-stronger once the party remade itself as the instrument of angry populism. Democrats were once the party of insurgencies, iconoclasts, and norm-breakers. Now the GOP is the preeminent anti-institutional party.

The biggest question before us today is whether the anti-institutional forces we see operating in Congress are the result of a concatenation of temporary forces or the inevitable working out of American democracy and individualism. Little-d democrats, Tocqueville explained, are allergic to forms and formalities. They want their favorite policies, and they want them now. For better or for worse, they distrust career politicians. They mistakenly believe that politics and policy are simple, and that disagreement is a sign of corruption. They are, to use Jonathan Rauch’s clever term, “politiphobes.” The more visible political conflict within an institution, the less the public trusts it. And Congress is the most transparent branch of government.

As unpopular as it may be to admit, Congress performed best when it managed to remain, to some degree, removed from public observation and current opinion. Closed committee mark-ups and quiet negotiations among party and committee leaders can provide the degree of insulation that Madison considered essential for wise legislation. Except in a few corners of congressional activity—most notably its intelligence committees—modern communications have eviscerated that insulation. 

Can Wallach and other thoughtful people help Congress escape from “decrepitude”? I certainly hope so and have learned never to bet against American revivals. But I am old enough to doubt that I will live to see yet another resurgence of Congress. For the foreseeable future, the political and cultural deck is stacked against it.

Even decades after her premiership, and despite vicious criticisms from both the left and right of the political spectrum, Lady Margaret Thatcher remains a dominant figure in Britain’s political imagination. The centenary of her birth has been marked by a festival, an academic symposium, and numerous new books. The two that have particularly stood out to me, so far, are Terrence Casey’s Forging the Iron Lady (which I have previously reviewed for this online magazine), focused on Lady Thatcher’s years before she became prime minister, and now Peter Just’s, Margaret Thatcher: Life After Downing Street, focused on Thacher’s years after her time as prime minister. Together, these studies mark the bookends of Thatcher’s political career.

Just’s book is on, as is stated in the subtitle, Thatcher’s life after Downing Street; that is, from 1990 to her death in 2013. It is the first full-length examination of this period of her life, which, as Just writes, is “under-researched and largely misunderstood, if not actively misrepresented.” Just has achieved a true reassessment through thorough research—the book is erudite and full of fascinating quotes from people who worked with Thatcher, met her, and wrote about her. These provide a kind of insider’s view, and readers of the book receive a glimpse of what it would have been like to be on the receiving end of a Thatcher talk, grilling, or a handbagging. 

One prominent misrepresentation of Lady Thatcher in her post-premiership years is that she was permanently unhappy. Just makes a strong case that this is not true and that Lady Thatcher’s premier emerita years ought to be viewed more positively. Certainly, as Just notes, Thatcher found it difficult to transition from being prime minister to a backbench Member of Parliament. Thatcher recalled, “I remember hearing when the tanks had gone into Vilnius. I kind of leapt up and dialled the telephone. Then I realised it was no longer me anymore.”

Thatcher’s entire career illustrates that substance is important, but how you argue for your beliefs and how you present them is paramount.

Just provides us with some tools to study Lady Thatcher after her time in 10 Downing Street, as well as frameworks and categories to enable our evaluation. He frames the book around Thatcher’s private life, public life, political life, her work, philosophy, party, policy, performance, and her legacy. In addition, he provides us with categories for this period of her life. From 1990 until 2002, he refers to these as Lady Thatcher’s “siren” years. From 2002 to 2013, the year of her death, he calls these Thatcher’s “symbol” years. In her “siren” years, Thatcher was active in the political world on topics such as the “European Union, the former Yugoslavia, General Pinochet, and Hong Kong and China.” Moreover, the “symbol” years were when her presence or support could be just as powerful as when she was delivering commanding speeches across the world. Just recounts the time when Thacher attended President Reagan’s 80th birthday party, where she “received two standing ovations,” and as Just remarks, “one of those standing ovations was the longest of the night,” as she was the party’s “superstar.”

Another useful categorization that is utilized in the book is “between Margaret Thatcher the person and Margaret Thatcher the persona.” Just was quick to note that “when Lady Thatcher was playing the character that was Margaret Thatcher, she was true to herself.” He also added that “her performance was authentic and was played with conviction. The character that was Margaret Thatcher was simply the dramatic persona that gave voice to Margaret Thatcher’s beliefs and illuminated her character.” I would highlight here the word dramatic. Just claims that “the character that was Margaret Thatcher, and the way Lady Thatcher played her after Downing Street, was crucial to her legacy.” Why is this, according to Just? He argues that “it helps to explain why, in her centenary year, she persists in British political consciousness, arguably as potent now as an idea as she was as a person between 1979 and 1990” and we must “recognise that, as important as what Lady Thatcher did after No. 10 was the way she did it.” This is because “there’s as much showbusiness as ideology in her performance.” Indeed, this is quite true; substance is important, but how you argue for your beliefs and how you present them is paramount.

Lady Thatcher is fascinating as a political figure in her own right, but her career also teaches us broader lessons about the nature of statesmanship. To name just one example, Just’s treatment of her time after Number 10 raises the question of what other British prime ministers ought to do after leaving office. The same question applies to American presidents or any politician who has reached the top of the “greasy pole,” as Benjamin Disraeli said on becoming prime minister himself. What should one do when one has to slide back down the greasy pole?

There are multiple and overlapping options for a post-greasy pole politician. Should they heed the Roman general, Cincinnatus, and go back to the plow, or return to Mount Vernon, like George Washington? Should one engage in philanthropy or establish a center or foundation, like Jimmy Carter? Should one stay politically active like John Quincy Adams did in the House of Representatives? Should one take up a hobby such as painting, like George W. Bush and Sir Winston Churchill? Or go and earn a significant amount of income from speaking engagements like Bill Clinton and Sir Tony Blair?

This question of what a post-term politician should do and what they do, in the case of Lady Thatcher, was one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Nevertheless, Just could have made the lessons that we can draw from Lady Thatcher’s emerita years more explicit.

What, then, did Lady Thatcher do? We can garner from Just’s books that Thatcher did most of these things, except the painting. She set up the Margaret Thatcher Foundation and wrote two volumes of memoirs: The Downing Street Years, which was published in 1993, and The Path to Power two years later. The latter was much more Burkean in the sense that Thatcher did not just look backwards, but also expressed her views on the current policy situation. Most definitely, throughout the remainder of her emerita years, she remained active in the political world, giving speeches around the world and expressing her views back at home.

Just notes that “Lady Thatcher evangelised on Thatcherism’s behalf.” As he writes, it was a “symbol in the UK and also around the world,” and that “Lady Thatcher frequently spoke about her ‘ism’ on her visits abroad, as well as in the UK.” Just asks the question, “But what was Thatcherism?” Answering this question was going to be an immense task, as whole books can be and have been written trying to provide answers to this very question. Unfortunately, this was one of the areas of the work that was quite slim; of course, the book is not on political theory, yet this section could have been thickened up. Just writes about Thatcher and her “ism” that “sometimes she seemed to suggest it was a leadership type or personal style,” and at “other times, Lady Thatcher spoke of it as if it were a philosophy.” Just added that “she did not need to use the word to emphasise its continuing significance.”

All of this got me intrigued, but Just did not try to unpack this. All the same, he does go on to demonstrate the influence of Thatcherism and Lady Thatcher, as President George H. W. Bush put it in 1991, as a “prophet and crusader.” It would have been interesting for Just to tackle Thatcherism’s continuing significance and relate it to the debate within the conservative movement, both within the United Kingdom and the United States. Despite these minor shortcomings, Margaret Thatcher: Life After Downing Street is a stimulating book, and readers will learn a great deal from it about Lady Thatcher’s character, her policies, and her political priorities and interests in her post-premiership years. We can learn what the path to post-power can be like for a statesman of Lady Thatcher’s eminence.

If bloated, ineffectual, unconstitutional government is your bête noire, the start of the second Trump administration was a heady time. You were promised $2 trillion in spending cuts, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seemed to be running rampant with its chainsaw. One of the administration’s prime targets was the US Department of Education, which over its 45-year existence has been a poster child for ineffectiveness, incompetence, and unconstitutionality. The administration eliminated nearly half of its workforce through voluntary separation deals and layoffs, and Trump issued an executive order for the Secretary of Education “to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Crucially, though, this was to be done “while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits.”

Unfortunately, those high-energy days have seemingly ended, at least when it comes to cuts. Musk is gone from DOGE, which by its own reckoning has achieved savings of only around $200 billion, a tenth of the original goal. For the Education Department, while the US Supreme Court preserved its firings, momentum for deeper cuts appears to have waned. That might be because some cuts, such as for research contracts, are caught in litigation. The administration might also believe it has hit the constitutional limit on what it can ax unilaterally. Finally, it seems to a significant degree that Trump wants to control schools from Washington.

The prospects for eliminating the department, at least in the next few years, are poor, and that is largely because we are past what Trump can, or at least will, do himself. The president arguably can refuse to do things he believes are unconstitutional, even if passed by Congress, signed by previous presidents, and upheld by courts, but Trump has not made that case for ending the department that the Constitution gives no authority to exist. Trump likely believes that Congress created it and the programs it runs, and Congress must end them. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has said that explicitly. Consistent with that, the administration has cut staff and contracts, but not outright ended major programs and offices.

So the ball is in Congress’s court. Unfortunately, there has not been much energy there for ending the department. This could just reflect the fact that Congress’s overwhelming focus, since Trump’s inauguration, has been on the One Big Beautiful Bill. Perhaps efforts to eliminate the department will rev up now that that is in the books.

There are currently several bills in the House and Senate aimed at ending the department, but so far none have gotten a groundswell of support. Two are just messaging: Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie (R) and Sen. Rand Paul (R) have introduced legislation simply saying, “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2026.” Alas, ending the department is not that simple. Over the years, Congress has tasked the department with running numerous programs, from Pell Grants to 21st Century Community Learning Centers, and given it such responsibilities as investigating allegations of civil rights violations by schools receiving federal funds. Those jobs would not just disappear were the department to end. Congress would either have to terminate them or send them elsewhere.

The other pieces of legislation would do those things. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) produced a bill, the Returning Education to Our States Act, soon after Trump’s election. It would reassign education jobs to other federal departments and agencies, for instance, moving Office for Civil Rights responsibilities to the Department of Justice, while Federal Student Aid would be sent to the Treasury. It would also block-grant some monies. It has two cosponsors. 

The goal to eliminate the department will not be reached until the public understands a basic reality: that something sounds good—more education!—does not mean it is good.

In the House, there are a handful of bills, including the States’ Education Reclamation Act of 2025 from Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC) and a bill with no title from Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL). Like Rounds’s bill, these pieces of legislation are typically a mix of block-granting and moving responsibilities to other agencies. So far, Rouzer’s bill has the most cosponsors with 12.

Unfortunately, though many Republicans talk a good game about getting Washington out of education, they rarely act. That status quo remains unchanged. Even while Trump, the party’s undisputed leader, has spoken repeatedly about ending the department, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 26 to 3 at the end of July to give the department $79 billion in discretionary funds for FY 2026, more than $12 billion higher than what Trump proposed. The committee also voted to keep programs Trump would have eliminated, such as TRIO and English Language Learner initiatives.

The root disincentive to act is likely that Americans are still inclined to think of education as a near-unqualified good. Members of Congress might know that the department is unconstitutional and incompetent, and the programs are ineffective, but when people hear that money is being cut for education, or an entire education department is targeted, they are aghast. They think education is good, so of course we should not cut it. Driving home all the negative impacts of federal “help”—stultifying rules, higher college costs, dangerous centralization—is harder to do than scaring people with the prospect of loss.

That said, the dangers of federal power were more clear in the recent past. What likely drove Trump’s emphasis on ending the department was anger among his supporters over prolonged school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, and masking and vaxxing requirements when they reopened. Many believed that the country’s behemoth teacher unions—the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers—had far too much influence in Washington keeping schools closed. Add this to a broader rejection of “expert” authority as Covid guidance whipsawed and the pandemic lingered, and the Education Department made for an attractive target. 

Had the crusade to end the department commenced in 2021, as Covid loomed over everything, public anger might have been sufficient to drive serious congressional action. But when the epidemic petered out, widespread frustration with unresponsive public schools and agencies also abated. 

The best opportunity to eliminate the department may have come even earlier. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) gave Washington major power over public schooling. It mandated state standards in math, reading, and science; state standardized tests; and all students making “adequate yearly progress” to full proficiency on state tests by 2014. Schools that failed to make sufficient progress faced a cascade of interventions and punishments. Over time, this generated widespread aggravation over rigid rules and the reduction of education to standardized test scores. 

Resentment of federal intervention rose to a fever pitch after the 2009 Great Recession “stimulus” bill gave the Secretary of Education authority over $4.35 billion, which the Obama Administration used to create the Race to the Top initiative. States competed for shares of the money, including by adopting a specific set of national curricular standards and tests: the Common Core State Standards and attendant, federally selected tests. 

When districts started implementing the Core, which, among many problems, featured infamously convoluted ways to solve basic math problems, a national outcry ensued. Amidst this, the Obama Administration declared that states could get waivers out of NCLB’s 2014 full proficiency deadline, which no state was close to meeting. In exchange, states would, among other things, have to assess teachers using their students’ standardized test scores. This created a rare political confluence: teacher unions joined libertarians and small-government conservatives in opposing hyper-intensive federal micromanagement. The result was that in 2015 Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which ended the adequate yearly progress “accountability” lynchpin and forbade Washington from mandating adoption of the Common Core. 

The federal government had actually relinquished significant power. It was a rare and wonderful thing, but it also significantly reduced aggravation about federal education intrusion.

Perhaps Trump is trying to engineer such widespread anger again, by using federal funding to pressure schools and colleges to adopt his favored polices, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, participation of transgender female athletes in girls’ sports, and more. It seems unlikely, however, that Trump is being heavy-handed to poison people against the department. That would be some serious three-dimensional chess, and Trump seems to take pleasure in jawboning elite colleges like Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA, as well as blue states and school districts. This is another reason to think that at least the near-term prospects for ending the department are poor: Trump appears to like federal influence.

The Trump administration has catalyzed a national discussion about eliminating the US Department of Education, and that alone is progress. But the goal will not be reached until the public understands a basic reality: that something sounds good—more education!—does not mean it is good. Maybe Trump’s own, heavy-handed actions will help drive that message home, but not quickly enough to end the department in the next few years.

Banking is probably the most highly regulated industry in America, especially after the 2008 “financial crisis.” Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta have produced the first comprehensive account of how our system came to be. This may be the best book ever written about bank regulation. For those inclined to say “That’s like being the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas,” the absence of competition is significant. Banking has been conspicuously missing from scholarship on the administrative state. The founders of the field (James Landis, Leonard White) and its reformers (the Brownlow and other commissions) all but ignored it. Banking has also been virtually exempt from the antitrust laws. Conti-Brown teaches finance and economics at the Wharton School and is a fellow at the Brookings Institution; Vanatta teaches financial history at the University of Glasgow. In this deeply researched and admirably written work, they aim to put banking back into the picture.

The narrative stream is a repeated history of vacillations between the private-profit and the public-welfare (as in “safe and sound” banking practices) sides of banking, which have made the industry a quasi-public utility. The authors properly accentuate the danger of “internalized benefits and externalized costs” in finance. Everyone became familiar with this kind of “heads the bankers win, tails the public loses” problem in the 2008 bailouts, and more recently in the Silicon Valley Bank rescue. American history displays a long train of political clashes over banking: Jefferson v. Hamilton, Jackson v. Marshall, Salmon P. Chase v. himself, Bryan v. McKinley, Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis v. “the money trust,” and the Roosevelts v. the “malefactors of great wealth.” Today, we have Elizabeth Warren v. “the big banks” and Trump v. Powell. Each conflict tends to augment the regulatory superstructure, which the authors call “institutional layering.” 

It may be hard not to laugh at the authors’ ingenuous conclusion, that “bank supervision is not some sleek, efficient machine ordained by farsighted legislators.” Bank regulation is “not simply a teleological march toward ever-greater perfection.” Indeed. Our regulatory structure looks more like a Rube Goldberg design or the Ptolemaic solar system before the Scientific Revolution than Hegel’s “divine idea as it exists on earth.” One can only wonder why it took these experienced scholars so long to arrive at their “theoretical conceit that history is contingent and unpredictable.”

The Civil War national bank system did more than just provide a national currency. Its most important function was to monetize the enormous federal debt that accompanied the Civil War.

The origins of America’s exceptional banking system lie in our constitutional history, principally in the confusion of “money” and “banking.” The Constitution gives Congress the power “to coin money, regulate the value thereof,” and some other money-related powers like taxing and borrowing. It forbids the states to “coin money; emit bills of credit; make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” It says nothing about banking. This, of course, was the basis of the first great interpretive controversy in American constitutional history, between Jefferson and Hamilton over the First Bank of the United States (BUS). This bank, and its successor, were supposed to provide a uniform and stable national currency, which everyone agreed was a legitimate congressional function. (Nobody but hard-core libertarians seems to have said that Congress could or should not exercise its money power—to leave it dormant, like the bankruptcy power or much of the commerce power.) The banks’ involvement with private business—with banking—is what raised hackles. Opponents complained that Congress had delegated its monetary power to the Bank, with virtually no strings attached. The constitutional debate was a close one. Washington sided with Hamilton against Jefferson and Madison, and the latter two came to accept the Bank. John Marshall endorsed it, but Jackson reopened the controversy and killed the Second BUS. If Congress had created a Third BUS, as Henry Clay and the Whigs wanted, it is likely that the Taney Court would have reversed McCulloch v. Maryland and struck it down.

Instead, after Jackson killed the Second BUS, the country entered the “free banking era.” States liberally permitted bank incorporation (via “free banking” laws) and began to experiment with regulatory devices like examination and note insurance. Despite the constitutional prohibition, states did make banknotes legal tender. In the inaugural term of the Taney Court, Briscoe v. Bank of Kentucky (1837) reversed a Marshall Court precedent and effectively allowed the states to usurp the national monetary power. This period is often depicted as the chaotic era of “wildcat banking,” but historians like Richard Timberlake have defended it. The authors point out that banks in this period were primarily “regulated” by market competition (30). The US did not go all the way to the radically libertarian Locofoco ideal of “the separation of bank and state,” but we’ve never been closer.

The Civil War ended the state-centered bank era. Congress enacted several “National Currency Acts” during the war. They did not create a third national bank, but extended the state free-banking model nationwide, and made the notes of national banks the national currency. The lack of a uniform currency offended the nationalism of the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. He hoped that all the state banks would join the national system, but they did not. Congress had to impose a prohibitive tax to drive state banknotes out of circulation. The Court upheld this unusual use of the taxing power, which was really a corrective to the antebellum usurpation of the money power by the states, permitted in Briscoe. By this time, the larger issue of the constitutionality of a national bank seemed to be settled; a predominantly Republican federal bench was not likely to dispute it. No longer able to issue notes, the state banks adopted a demand-deposit or checking account system, and by the end of the century, the number of state banks had increased twentyfold and outnumbered national banks three to one. The US has maintained a uniquely bifurcated or “dual” banking system ever since, with a large number of both state and national banks. 

The Civil War national bank system did more than just provide a national currency, though. Its most important function was to monetize the enormous federal debt that accompanied the Civil War. National banks had to purchase federal bonds to back the notes they issued. The National Currency Acts also created the first “independent regulatory commission,” the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Congress gave the OCC the mandate to examine the national banks, made its funding independent of annual appropriations, and for the first time imposed a restraint on the president’s power to remove an officer.

Conti-Brown and Vanatta try to make the case that the OCC is part of the “missing century of administrative law” depicted by Jerry Mashaw and the “revisionists,” featuring permissive legislative delegation, robust administrative discretion, and judicial deference. (The Steamboat Inspection Service is the poster child of this allegedly lost world.) This is hard to sustain. The OCC kept within its statutory lane, and hardly anyone complained that it went beyond ensuring compliance with the law to telling bankers how to conduct their business. Comptroller James McCulloch’s Instructions and Suggestions is hardly akin to the Department of Education’s “Dear Colleagues” letters on school gender-affirmation policy, as the authors suggest. It looks more like the OCC became less active in the late nineteenth century, in keeping with the abatement of most of the Civil War-era statist expansions. This is why almost nobody today outside of the banking industry has ever heard of the OCC, and why the Interstate Commerce Commission is considered the first IRC. As Leonard White observed, in his monumental history of the origins of federal administration, “An old timer in Washington looking backward from the vantage point of the late 1890s would have found the government establishment bigger but not much different from its essential nature in 1870.”

The OCC hardly affected the money supply at all. (Curiously, the authors do not address the forays of the Gilded Age Treasury Department into de facto central banking.) Congress retained the monetary power, which was often at the center of national political debate—the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and its repeal, the Legal Tender Act and the Greenback parties, the 1896 “battle of the standards.” The shortcomings of the national banking system—the period panics due to the “inelastic” bank note system (note issue was limited by the amount of federal debt the banks held)—led to the creation of the Fed in 1913. The new central more than overcompensated in providing elasticity. Where the US saw deflation of about 40 percent from the Founding until 1913, we have had an inflation of 3,200 percent since then.

This was the beginning of the wholesale delegation of the monetary power to the bureaucrats. The Fed also failed to impose a coherent national banking system and failed to manage the economic crises of 1921 and 1929. But Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress only gave the Fed more power. This is the hallmark of bureaucratic expansion: attributing regulatory failure to market failure and using it as the grounds for more regulation. The New Dealers also put into place the last twentieth-century piece of national bank regulation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The 1935 Banking Act marks the real debut of bank regulation in the modern administrative state. The OCC continued, though overshadowed by the Fed and FDIC. The authors liken it to the “panda’s thumb,” a vestigial, redundant curiosity.

The authors note that each institutional addition became a power unto itself, “rendering efforts to remove this authority or abolish them as fruitless as they are regular. This is not due merely to the exercise of bureaucratic power, nor is it evidence of the (contested) idea that Congress creates but never abolishes federal bureaus.” Actually, it is. The bank regulation story confirms Publius’ warning in Federalist #44 that “one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding.” Often this is because one round of regulation produces harmful economic effects that lead entrepreneurs to devise ways around the existing system (“shadow banking” institutions, which Hugh Rockoff has shown to be on the scene of almost all of our financial crises), or for political entrepreneurs to call for deregulation or reregulation.

We see regulatory pathology in the generation after the New Deal banking reforms. The mid-twentieth-century US came very close to a nationalized banking system. Jesse Jones, the head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation ([RFC] the bailout ladle for banks, railroads, and municipalities “too big to fail,” a First World War and Hoover administration holdover that did expire, though not until 1957), warned the American Bankers Association in 1933 to get behind the New Deal or be nationalized. By 1935, the RFC owned stock in half of American banks, and one-third of all bank capital. By World War II, federal bonds constituted 57 percent of all bank assets; another 19 percent were guaranteed loans to government contractors. The “animal spirits” of the financial world were torpid. Postwar banking was all but risk-free. This was the era of so-called “3-6-3 banking”—borrow at 3 percent, lend at 6, and be on the golf course by 3. As the authors observe, “the banking industry’s corporatist system of public and private risk management had perhaps succeeded too well in dampening excitement and entrepreneurial risk.” This surely had dampening economic consequences. The postwar years were not an “era of unprecedented growth,” but rather lackluster compared with the late nineteenth or late twentieth centuries.

We see regulatory pathology in the generation after the New Deal banking reforms. The mid-twentieth century US came very close to a nationalized banking system.

The modest deregulation movement of the 1970s came late to the banking industry. Conti-Brown and Vanatta tell the engaging story of James Saxon, JFK’s Comptroller’s and his fruitless effort to “get the country moving again.” In 1970, Treasury official Roy Englert (who just passed away at the age of 102) lamented that Congress was moving in the other direction, adding “one restraint after another,” especially for consumer protection and civil rights. Many took the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s as a cautionary tale against deregulation, but it rather reinforces the story of self-generating government interventions. The Fed fed rampant inflation at the turn of the ’80s and devastated the S&L industry; inept congressional and regulatory responses compounded the demise. Real reform came with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which became the scapegoat for the 2008 “financial crisis,” begetting the next round of re-regulation, with the Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency within the independent Fed.

It’s said that the Fed’s job is to take away the punchbowl when the party starts to get too lively. (Nobody accuses the OCC of being such a killjoy—it’s never invited to the monetary party.) Conti-Brown and Vanatta might be said to do the same, with the post-1960s story relegated to a brief chapter on “Expansion of Residual Risk: Bank Supervision for Antidiscrimination, Consumer Protection, and Community Reinvestment.” One would like to hear the story of how the “new social regulation” came to banking, and the role of “woke banking” on the subprime mortgage implosion in the last financial crisis. It would be good, as well, to hear of the contribution of “government-sponsored entities” like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and SEC-anointed accreditors, and of the “regulatory capture” by bank lobbyists and their congressional confederates. But that is more than enough material for another volume, particularly when technological change has produced so many “shadow banking” alternatives (how many of the iGen and now Gen-Alphas have ever darkened the foyer of an actual brick-and-mortar bank?) and even money alternatives (do we need an Office of the Comptroller of the Cryptocurrency?). In the meantime, we have this helpful account of how the financial industry fits into what Gary Lawson calls “the rise and rise of the administrative state.”

The political scene is filled with those who question the liberal foundations of society today. One such current is the self-styled “Dark Enlightenment,” which calls upon its followers to question modernity and the liberal establishment that sustains it. Among its luminaries is Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin is a curious postmodern figure who deliberately defies classification. The fifty-one-year-old author is a software developer who engages in political commentary, and his Substack musings were relatively unknown until recently.

Much of his work is contained in his now-discontinued blog, Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He has since written a 2024 book titled Gray Mirror—Fascicle I: Disturbance, in which he tries to explain his illiberal position and vision of the future. The problem is that because he does not recognize more traditional ways of presenting his perspective and goals coherently, the best one can do is to try to untangle his thoughts that seem to thrive on disruption. 

Entrance into Notoriety

With the right’s victory in the November elections, Yarvin gained a sizable following. He counts among his readers and admirers Vice President J. D. Vance as well as venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Interviews with establishment media such as The New York Times have given him some notoriety outside the fringe from which he emerged. His thought fits into the rising populist wave found everywhere.

The shaggy commentator has everything to make him popular among the illiberal right. He is brash, sarcastic, skeptical, and cynical. His style is irreverent and vulgar. He cares little for rules and formality. His anti-establishment invectives leave nothing standing. Every certainty must be doubted, every institution distrusted.

In Gray Mirror, Yarvin openly advocates for a regime change in which a single figure guides society like a CEO. While he likens this figure to a monarch, he clearly does not want to be restricted to the traditional customs and limitations associated with a king. His figure would be endowed with all the powers of a monarch/CEO to get things done, but without the trappings or limitations.

He believes that a regime change would put in check the decay of the liberal woke establishment (which he calls the Cathedral) and pave the way for a new world more responsive to society’s needs.

Unreviewable and Nearly Unreadable

Thinkers usually lay out their thoughts in books. Thus, to understand this curious writer, Gray Mirror would be a logical place to start. However, Yarvin’s work fails to deliver. Any reader who expects clarity comes away disappointed. Anyone who wants to review the book is likewise frustrated. It is indeed Dark Enlightenment.

Gray Mirror is unreviewable and nearly unreadable. It is a collection of rambling commentary—part blog, part social media, part Facebook banter—and the worst thing is that it seems intentionally so. A standard review of the book is an exercise of futility since it violently resists such attempts. The author would reject fitting the book into any classical framework.

Moreover, Yarvin provides no path to solutions in this first fascicle but only sows seeds of doubt about the establishment. As a good marketer, he abruptly ends the book, promising an unwritten fourth fascicle called Process that is touted to be a handbook outlining the processes for collective action, regime change, and CEO rule. This first fascicle purposely presents no clue as to what these processes might be.

The subtitle, Disturbance, is the stated aim of the book, and so perhaps the best way to discuss it is to declare it disturbing. Indeed, the book is unnerving not because its content is important. It isn’t. It is unsettling because it represents a chaotic way of dealing with problems, and that bodes ill for the nation. He engages in disruption before discussing processes, which opens the doors for just about anything.

Three disturbances might be noted. The first is its lack of certainty.

As an illiberal figure, Yarvin questions the whole liberal narrative dating back to the Enlightenment. This includes notions of democracy, progress, and historical perspectives. He further criticizes the woke world that has turned everything upside down.

He claims all these things are broken, as evidenced by the crisis inside society. Thus, they must all be doubted. There is also no way to ascertain certainty inside the dark web of the book’s quasi-narrative. The author questions everything. He claims traditional explanations are partial and deceitful. No one is to be trusted—perhaps not even himself.

This distrust is built into the text. The author promises the reader that, after reading the book, “you may not have many answers, but you should have many more questions.” The book’s goal is “to disrupt the sense of where we are. Our historical, political, philosophical narratives are not infallible.”

One cannot rely on past narratives, canons, and religious beliefs, not because they are wrong, but because they are just “not infallible.” They cannot be interpreted in the dark light of the present regime of “unwisdom.”

Some conservative thinkers are like the Pablo Picassos of the philosophical world, where everyone pretends to find meaning in confused canvases that have none. 

“We cannot use tradition to guide us into the future,” Yarvin affirms. “It is because we have a fake past. Any real, useful past must be constructed from first principles.” He invites readers to “write it out ourselves.”

Readers are deliberately left drifting and unanchored, with their past certainties shaken. In this disturbed state, Yarvin invites them to grab onto the idea of an undefined regime change, which he presents as at least desirable.

The second disturbance contradicts the first. Upon a platform of doubt, Yarvin constructs a framework of semi-certainties. The same person who calls everything into question then asks the reader to seriously consider the radical ideas he throws about, and which he admits may or may not work.

Thus, the author pontificates about his musings, affirming them strongly, without development or deep reflection. However, this strong affirmation takes on airs of authority, as if claiming to know what is going on.

In his jocular style, he insinuates he knows the game of the ruling oligarchy now in power. He exposes its Matrix-like dominion over society. He will write the manual for regime change from scratch to make the world a better place. 

Disturbance becomes the formula for regime change. Without it, nothing will move forward.

The final disturbance involves the book’s prism of cold, hard power. Yarvin’s politics are those of a Caesar-like strong man, who resolves everything efficiently by exercising his power and technique. The author reduces everything to power without considering the vast world of moral, cultural, and other considerations that make the act of governing both human and messy.

There are no references to charity or traditional notions of morality or virtue. There exist no high ideals or social community. As an atheist, Yarvin omits any reference to a loving God Who governs the world through His Providence. 

In a pseudo-monarchical regime that functions like a corporation, everything becomes an exercise of power dynamics. The undefined aim is to make the world a better place to live. However, it is not clear what that means or how it is to be done.

His system does not address the grave moral issues that divide the nation; it suppresses them. The Culture War is a fake war that will be simply declared over with no side allowed victory. He does not propose a moral alternative. It seems that abortion, same-sex marriage, and other permissive lifestyles that so polarize America will be left in place. 

Meanwhile, the deep questions of purpose, meaning, and morals remain untouched at a time when these issues are crying out for solutions.

Pablo Picasso of the Philosophical World

What makes Gray Mirror so disturbing is that such ideas are gaining traction among some conservatives.

In times of political unrest and moral uncertainty, authors who attract shallow souls often emerge. They create some sensation because they affirm their ideas strongly. It becomes trendy to cite them as profound thinkers, if not prophets, who read the signs of the times.

About Gray Mirror, one is reminded of what Encyclopedia Britannica wrote about Martin Heidegger’s 1927 book, Being and Time: “Although almost unreadable, it was immediately felt to be of prime importance.”

Such works are unintelligible to the general public. Few can understand what is meant by Yarvin’s chapter, “The Etiology of Political Toxicity.” However, no one wants to admit that the emperor’s “new clothes” don’t exist. These thinkers are like the Pablo Picassos of the philosophical world, where everyone pretends to find meaning in confused canvases that have none.

Times of Radical Mediocrity

Catholic thinker Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira once commented that convoluted philosophies are the products of mediocre minds. They lack the crystalline logic and élan that should characterize good philosophy. Such thinkers fail to take their ideas to their final consequences.

Instead, they clog their thought with created jargon and complicated reasoning. They become attached and obsessed with their creations and easily become narcissistic. Like Gray Mirror, their works become difficult to read. They are disturbances, not solutions.

Such an evaluation may seem harsh and even uncharitable. However, this is not a personal attack. Works like Gray Mirror reflect much more the present culture than any individual.

Society suffers from radical mediocrity, in which no one wants to address causes or accept the consequences of their actions. Everything must be without effect; no one takes responsibility. By questioning everything, people see themselves as victims of those seeking to deceive them.

Perhaps this questioning is what makes Yarvin’s view attractive to some conservatives. He provides an easy way out: Just walk away from complex problems by claiming they are fake narratives and that everything can be written anew.

He also provides an outlet for those who are tired of disorder and want action without weighing all the consequences. A strong executive power can clean up messy situations. Such “solutions” do not necessarily require individuals to change their own disordered lives and practice virtue.

The radical mediocrity of Curtis Yarvin and those like him consists of an unwillingness to enter into the existential questions that clamor for resolution. This results in the dangerous and paradoxical times of Dark Enlightenment, which are better understood as Rejecting Wisdom.

In The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis traces the modern idea of “the West” as a socio-political—rather than geographic—concept, and as the name for a political association based on cultural commonality. From 395 AD, “the West” could refer to the Western Roman Empire and later to the Catholic Church as opposed to the Eastern Orthodox Church. But the way we use “the West” today must be traced to the first half of the nineteenth century, argues Varouxakis in his learned book.

Varouxakis is an author with skin in the game. His preface places the book in an autobiographical context. Best known as a scholar of the thought of John Stuart Mill, Varouxakis was born on the island of Crete in Greece. He was seven years old when Turkey invaded Cyprus in July 1974, and his father was mobilized. While agreeing with the Greek prime minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, that Greece belonged to the West, Varouxakis’s grandfather had been born prior to Crete joining Greece in 1913, before which the island was an autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, his grandfather referred to himself as “Roman,” which is what the Greeks within the Ottoman Empire called themselves, as they regarded themselves as the descendants of the Eastern Roman Empire with its capital in Constantinople (now Istanbul). While Varouxakis’s education was thoroughly Greek, the culture of his native Crete contained a mixture of Eastern and Western influences.

The question of whether Greece was Eastern or Western was critical to the story about the beginning of the meaning of “the West,” which Varouxakis traces to the early nineteenth century. In the process, he challenges a number of orthodoxies, and most importantly, the notion that the idea of “the West” emerged in the late nineteenth century in defense of European imperialism. On the contrary, he shows that the idea was first conceived as part of an anti-imperial program. Nor was the appearance of the concept related to the more explicit racial discourse of the period between 1890 and 1930. Instead, “the West” emerged and gained meaning in opposition to the rising threat from Russia in the east.

The Russian Threat

As Varouxakis demonstrates, “the West” was historically by no means identical to “Europe” or “Christendom,” and indeed emerged as an alternative when Russia appeared as a major European (and Christian) power under Peter the Great. Until the eighteenth century, the crucial distinction in Europe was between north and south, but the rise of Russia challenged this categorization, especially in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, with Russia being frequently described as an “Eastern” power. The need for a “Western” alliance against Russia became viewed as paramount.

Among eighteenth-century anticipations, Voltaire used the term Occident (West) rather than Europe to refer to what we would call Western civilization. But he did not conceptualize a West that excluded Russia, but rather understood Russia as a northern European power, as was common at the time. Indeed, Voltaire wrote a sympathetic history of Peter the Great and celebrated Russia’s advances.

“The West” was historically by no means identical to “Europe” or “Christendom,” and indeed emerged as an alternative when Russia appeared as a major power.

In the early nineteenth century, Germaine de Staël promoted German culture in her De l’Allemagne (On Germany) in 1810, eventually inspiring Harvard graduates and other Americans to pursue doctoral studies at Berlin, Halle, Heidelberg, and Göttingen. In this work and elsewhere, Staël began to supplant the eighteenth-century North-South division with an East-West one. She was clear that Russians were in spirit Eastern, even if their courtiers might have acquired Western habits.

The East-West division was further promoted by Staël’s collaborator and lover Benjamin Constant. During the Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire (1821–29), Constant argued in a pamphlet that the Greeks were Christians fighting against their Muslim conquerors. The struggle between East and West, for Constant, was one between civilization and semi-savagery. This meant that the Greek cause was the cause of the West (“La cause des Grecs est la nôtre”). But Constant and others remained convinced that the enfeebled Ottoman Empire was not the long-term Eastern challenge for the West. In this context, the abbé de Pradt suggested that Western Europe had to erect a federative system to be able to stand up to the might of Russia.

Auguste Comte

The French philosopher Auguste Comte is a crucial figure in Varouxakis’s history. Comte and his fellow Positivists wanted to form a “Western republic” that would abolish empire and conquest. Because of Russia, Comte found “Europe” to be too confusing for what he was describing (and prescribing). Varouxakis argues that Comte was the first political thinker to elaborate an explicit sociopolitical project based on the idea of “the West.” His project was based on the idea of abolishing empires and replacing them with a republic led by the five great Western nations: the French, Italian, Spanish, British, and German. His membership list was based on pre-Reformation, or Charlemagne’s Europe, and thus excluded Russia.

Comte is rarely read today, but he was a dominant intellectual figure in the nineteenth century. His motto was “order and progress,” which he viewed as two mutually supportive principles in opposition to revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. His many disciples were spread all over the world in the nineteenth century, and his motto can be found on the Brazilian flag (Ordem e Progresso), as the Brazilian republic was founded by Comtists in 1889.

The first systematic attempt to substitute “the West” for “Europe” in Britain was made by Comte’s British followers and their leader Richard Congreve, beginning with the volume on International Policy (1866). Congreve regarded Ottoman Turkey as more Western than Russia. Unlike Comte, who merely viewed the US as an offshoot of England, Congreve gave a great deal of attention to America. But he was convinced that it was the mass rather than the ideas of the US that made it weigh heavily in international affairs. In due course, however, America and Americans would play key roles in most narratives about “the West.”

America and the World Wars

For many Americans in the nineteenth century and beyond, “the West” meant the frontier, both geographically and, as Frederick Jackson Turner put it, “a phase of social organization.” The Anglo-American Encyclopædia Britannica had no entry for “the West” until 1929, and even then, it focused on the concept in its intra-American sense. But “Western civilization” had appeared nearly a century earlier, in Francis Lieber’s Encyclopædia, under an entry for “Woman.” Lieber, who was first known as Franz, as he spent the first decades of his life in Germany, also referred to “the West” in a lecture in Boston in 1829. But this was not his preferred terminology. Lieber went on to defend transatlantic Western unity and shared civilization under the heading of a term of his own coinage: Cis-Caucasian (all Caucasians did not belong to the West). Unsurprisingly, this term did not catch on.

Before, during, and after the First World War, German academics looked increasingly to the East. Meanwhile, the Great War played a key role in eventually bringing America into the Western alliance.

One of the first Americans to write widely about “the West” and “Western civilization” was the philosophically trained journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann, before “Western civ” courses became a staple at US elite universities. And Lippmann spoke of a “Western alliance” before the US had entered the Great War. In The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915), Lippmann contended that the appearance of a joint enemy tended to unite nations, enlarging the circle of fellow-feeling. More specifically, to meet the challenge of Japan, American isolationism was insufficient. Central to his scheme was that the “liberal powers of the West” must control sea power.

A heavily debated question in the wake of the First World War, which had wreaked havoc at the heart of Europe, was whether it had heralded the end of Western civilization. It was in this context that Oswald Sprengler published The Decline of the West (1918–22), in which he predicted that the dominance of Western culture was likely to be succeeded by Slavic. As Varouxakis shows, while Sprengler’s book met with a negative reception from academics, its wider impact was immense.

Strauss was particularly concerned that historicist relativism had come to dominate the social sciences in “the West.”

Unsurprisingly, World War II stimulated plenty of discussion about Western civilization, especially after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and shattered the straightforward East-West dichotomy supported by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Lippmann interpreted the Second World War as a civil war within the Western world. In a famous lecture delivered in December 1940, he argued that the West had lost its democratic ethos because of educational decline in the last half-century and especially the neglect of Western culture. This was the culture which the Romans had inherited from the Greeks and passed on to the Church Fathers, and which had steadily expanded from the beginning of the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. It was the culture in which the Founding Fathers had been steeped. But modern education, Lippmann contended in 1940, was based on a denial of the religious and classical ideals of the Western world. The religious tradition of the West was particularly frowned upon, with disastrous consequences. Instead of seeing reason as the master of man’s appetite, it had been reduced to its servant. Moreover, Lippmann posited that a society could only be progressive if it conserved its tradition. “In developing knowledge men must collaborate with their ancestors,” he wrote in a Burkean fashion.

The Cold War

Though Russia was briefly incorporated into “the West” during World War II and its immediate aftermath, the Cold War changed that trajectory. W. E. B. Du Bois maintained in 1946 that it was “the Russian people and their army which saved Western civilization in the Second World War.” But many Westerners came to regard the Soviet Union as the greatest challenge to “the West.” The UK’s socialist foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, over dinner with the American secretary of state, George C. Marshall, spoke of the need for a “spiritual federation of the West.” As the Iron Curtain hardened, Bevin sought to strengthen the UK’s relationship with the “young, vigorous, democratic people” of the US.

In the early 1950s, the young Henry Kissinger, then a PhD candidate at Harvard, co-founded the “Harvard International Seminar,” whose mission he described as “create[ing] a nucle[us] of understanding of the true values of a democracy and of spiritual resistance to communism.” The people who attended the program included future presidents and world leaders.

Kissinger had written his undergraduate thesis on Arnold J. Toynbee (and Kant and Sprengler). Toynbee, professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, became highly fashionable in the US in the late 1940s, as an abridged version of the first six volumes of his A Study of History was published in 1947. After Truman asked Congress to approve funding to support Greece and Turkey against communist threats, Time magazine put a portrait of Toynbee on its cover along with a comment piece titled, “Our civilization is not doomed.” In the magazine, the former communist Whittaker Chambers implored the US to step up to the plate and fill the vacuum left by the decline of the British Empire. Ironically, however, Toynbee did not think highly of the US, and he believed that the Soviet Union had a powerful “spiritual” weapon in communism, as he argued in his 1952 Reith Lectures. This and other views made Toynbee a highly controversial figure in Britain.

A host of German-born thinkers wrote about Western civilization in Cold-War America, including Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Strauss was particularly concerned that historicist relativism had come to dominate the social sciences in “the West” and especially in the US. His student Allan Bloom targeted cultural relativism and nihilism in his best-selling Closing of the American Mind (1987).

Meanwhile, the Frenchman Raymond Aron offered a powerful liberal defense of “the West” in his seminal critique of the “leftist intellectual,” The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955): “The true Communist is the man who accepts the whole of the Soviet system in the terms dictated by the Party. The true ‘Westerner’ is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty it allows him to criticize it and the chance it offers him to improve it.” In a similar vein, though ostensibly writing from a more conservative position, Allan Bloom argued that only Western nations, influenced by Greek philosophy, had the ability to be self-critical, whereas all other dominant cultures were ethno-centric, “think[ing] their way is the best way, and all others inferior.”

The book shows “the West” to have been a flexible and changing concept, and an immensely useful one in political and cultural debate.

Bloom wrote against the backdrop of the self-criticism that had swept the young people of the Western world since the 1960s. But as liberal capitalism triumphed and communism faltered and ultimately failed, the key question thinkers increasingly asked was whether the West offered “a universalizable model for the whole world, or was it a distinct, unique, culture, that should look after itself and abandon universalist pretensions.” Samuel Huntington and his student Francis Fukuyama offered widely different answers. Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis made him famous, but it was controversial from the start and was challenged by Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” For example, while Fukuyama had argued, in 1989, that Chinese expansionism had disappeared, Huntington retorted, also in 1989, that it had yet to appear. For Huntington, instead of exporting its values, “the West” had to learn to live alongside other, competing civilizations. Eight civilizations stood out for Huntington: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African. Most of these civilizations had little time for Western values such as democracy, constitutionalism, human rights, free markets, and separation between church and state. Rather than conflict, Huntington promoted co-existence and understanding of civilizational differences.

The West and Us

In the final chapters, Varouxakis considers how definitions and memberships of “the West” have once again been reconsidered in light of NATO’s expansion and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Here he demonstrates that some of the defining political questions of the present day, of the part of the West in the world, and particularly the role of the United States abroad, have a very long history indeed. It reflects the fact that this is not an antiquarian book but a must-read for anyone with an interest in current and world affairs.

The almost inevitable conclusion of a study as vast and wide-ranging as this one is that “the West” has meant different things to different people at different times. It is, as we like to say, an essentially contested concept. The book shows “the West” to have been a flexible and changing concept, and an immensely useful one in political and cultural debate. Yet, Varouxakis remains clear as to why “the West” has been so successful and resilient. As he points out, Comte chose the term “‘Occident’ [West] because of the historical, cultural, religious, and emotional baggage and associations that it carried.” It was bound to be more effective than Lieber’s “Cis-Caucasian.” And because of the missing deep-seated history, Varouxakis doubts that a new Chinese-led politico-cultural alliance has any prospect of being as successful, even with the Belt and Road Initiative.

Notwithstanding the elasticity of “the West” as a concept, Varouxakis further disagrees with those who claim that there is no such thing as Western culture:

Studying these things historically shows that most of the models, institutions or principles in question evolved out of the history of a particular culture of society for particular combinations of reasons. The outcomes were not inevitable or ‘providentially’ determined, but they are equally far from being completely accidental … at each of the phases of their history there are factors that reliably differentiate the civilizations or cultures of transnational societies such as ‘the West’ from those outside them.

Varouxakis concludes the book by taking issue with those who, since the Cold War, have almost habitually blamed the West for all the ills of the world. Instead, he offers a thoughtful defense of liberal, commonly known as Western, values. He is particularly critical of attempts to “decolonize” the so-called Western canon, as it would be mistaken to view thinkers such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Cicero as belonging to any specific cultural, “racial,” geographical, or even linguistic group. Though from the Mediterranean, “they belong to the world,” writes Varouxakis.

The West is a monumental achievement of scholarship. Its chief contribution is its decentering of imperial and racial paradigms, which have become politicized and turned into stale orthodoxies that have led to distortions in historical understanding. Notions that “the West” was invented to justify empire, racial hierarchy, and religion have led to a great deal of confusion, especially among the bien-pensants, as when Peter Beinart in the Atlantic asserted, in response to a 2017 speech by Donald Trump in Poland, that “the West is a racial and religious term.” It is Varouxakis’s great accomplishment to have shown that its origins were much more complicated, and more interesting. And more relevant, because “the West” is not going anywhere soon.

Disney’s Snow White (2025) is among the company’s recent missteps, receiving an IMDB equivalent of poisoned apples—a rating of 2.1—and earning $205.5 million globally despite a budget of $269.4 million. The computer-generated dwarfs didn’t help, nor did the lead actress’s propensity to insult Disney’s original 1937 film. Yet this movie is significant in reflecting current debates about elitism and the development of our youth. It is particularly instructive to compare it to its source material. 

Disney’s groundbreaking 1937 film traces a young woman’s development as she makes sense of her attempted murder, negotiates for shelter in exchange for work, wins the love of strangers, and marries. But in screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson’s hands, the twenty-first-century Snow White’s growth is political. She lectures her subjects on fairness, gives voice to the silenced, and leads a rebellion against the Wicked Queen. Snow White then restores the kingdom to the monarcho-socialist system of her father. 

Disney’s Snow White (2025) suggests that, given enough power, a young ruler from the intellectual elite can overthrow the greedy to create a paradise of “fairness.” The film’s low rating reflects public resistance to such fallacies along with disgust at the hubris of the filmmakers: the elitist of them all.

“A Beautiful Abundance We Share” 

The film’s opening scene depicts a utopia under the rule of Snow White’s father. Everyone in the kingdom dances in colorful garb, happily gathering the harvest while singing about the “beautiful abundance” of the land and the mines. “Everyone” includes the royal family. As the protagonist grew, “the king and queen taught Snow White that the bounty of the land belonged to all who tended it.” Moreover, “they taught her how to rule with love.” 

This world reflects the ideals of writers such as John Last, whose “A King for the People” insists that “the dream of radical redistribution under hereditary rule has never been more important than in an age of rampant capitalism and dysfunctional populism.” The opening of Snow White depicts shared work, not the supposed evils of trade. It shows the rulers helping to spread the wealth, or at least the apples. 

Yet this idyllic scene raises questions. First, is it really a good use of the king’s time to pick apples rather than manage the kingdom? Has the king never heard of the division of labor? Second, does the entire economy really consist of people farming and mining? Where are the bankers, sewage workers, and doctors? The latter might have been helpful when the queen fell ill and died. Her death rendered the king vulnerable to the seductions of a new beauty, whom he made his second queen.

A Tale of Two Elites 

While both “fair” in the sense of being beautiful, the two queens are not equally “fair” in their willingness to distribute resources equitably. They exemplify the two types of elites that Joel Stein defines in his book In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. The first queen was what Stein terms the “intellectual elite,” who know how things work and how to plan: she was beautiful and spread the wealth around. The second wicked queen is among those Stein terms the “boat elite”: rich people who focus on acquiring stuff. She hoards gems, which she wears with all the finesse of a six-year-old given a cache of costume jewelry. 

Conversely, the younger Snow White represents the “intellectual elite”: she knows the right thing to do, which is to restore “fairness.” In fact, after seeing the bandit Jonathan steal potatoes from the castle, she immediately goes to the iconic well, where Disney’s 1937 heroine wished that the one she loves would find her. Our modern heroine’s request, however, is not romance or a free market but getting the queen to “share.” 

The controversy over Disney’s Snow White offers a mirror for the “Intellectual Elite.” We see their contempt for the general population, who they believe need them literally to help us put our houses in order.

While Snow White rightly objects to starving the kingdom’s subjects, she also reveals delusions in imagining that equality can be achieved through central planning. Like her father, she represents a positive vision of Adam Smith’s Man of System, who falsely believes he can move the kingdom’s subjects like pieces on a chessboard (TMS VI.ii.2.17). As Smith observes, however, often those chess pieces assume a life of their own, and then the game goes awry. 

It is a point denied by Intellectual Elitists like Stein, who dismisses F. A. Hayek’s critique of the “fatal conceit” of central planning. Instead, Stein believes that the “Intellectual Elite” should run everything because they are educated, a point he supports by inventing what he terms the “Meterological Fallacy.” The “experts,” he says, occasionally have a bad forecast, but mostly they are right. 

In this context, the battle between the Evil Queen and Snow White is not simply over the kingdom but between two caricatures of rulers (greedy tyrants/boat elites vs. idyllic socialist kings/intellectual elites). Having gestured toward these competing visions, the film retreats from substantive arguments, and the focus becomes the conflict between the two women. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Dopey

The wicked queen, of course, sends the huntsman to kill her rival. He lets Snow White go, and she heads to the dwarfs’ cottage. Disney’s original heroine (1937) acts with grace and kindness when the animals guide her to the dwarfs’ cottage, which she assumes is the home of seven “untidy little children.” When a doe confirms that the children “have no mother,” she leaps into action: “I know. We’ll clean the house and surprise them. Then maybe they’ll let me stay.” She believes she should offer something to her hosts, not demand their hospitality. She launches into the song “Whistle While You Work,” cleans with the animals, and finally falls asleep in the dwarfs’ beds. When the dwarfs arrive home, she bargains with them to let her stay by promising to clean and bake gooseberry pie. 

The Snow White of 2025 shows no such consideration. The animals guide her to the dwarf’s house, and she goes upstairs to sleep in the dwarf’s beds. The next morning, she rises and does eventually sing “Whistle While You Work,” but she wields her broom mainly as a prop. Her focus is on directing the dwarfs in cleaning up their own house and lecturing them on mistreating Dopey, who has been silenced for centuries.

This shift is described by the screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson, who decided that “Whistle While You Work” “had to have a purpose—to get Dopey and his friends to stop being disorganized and stop hating one another and to get them in a peaceful place where they learn to clean up and fall in love with each other again—and fall in love with Snow White.” To make this point work, Wilson reimagines the dwarfs as violent and cruel, particularly to Dopey. In fact, she sees Dopey as “disenfranchised the same way Snow White is,” so she makes their “relationship core to the story.” 

Given Wilson’s agenda, we should not be surprised to see Snow White exhibit what I dub the Intellectual Elitist Mindset at “work”: I know best and will come into your home and tell you how to put it in order. And you will not only thank me but follow me. 

“We Will Inherit What Was Meant for All of Us”

Snow White next seeks another group—bandits—to help her find her father, who never returned from the war. (If you are confused about why there are bandits, you are not alone.) Doc explains that the bandits (former actors) are “only there because of the queen’s greedy economic policies, which forced them into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define.” This comical line not only justifies the bandits but also evokes the rhetoric about riots and even looting pushed by Intellectual Elitists. 

Certainly, the first person Snow White encounters, Jonathan (of the stolen potatoes), is self-righteous and critical of her “princess problems.” The actor playing the role of Jonathan, Andrew Burnap, observes, “Jonathan finds himself quite disillusioned with the power structures of the world he lives in and is part of a certain resistance to those power structures.” He wants hope.

When a soldier hits Jonathan with an arrow, Snow White guides the bandits to the dwarf’s house. Doc hesitates to heal him, but she rallies the groups against their common enemy: 

This is exactly how the queen would want us to behave. Fighting with each other, distrusting each other. This is how she wins. She’s poisoned everyone into believing that it’s everyone for themselves. But if we can give up our meager scraps, we will inherit what was meant for all of us. 

Disney’s new Snow White provides a sense of purpose in uniting disparate groups. Her development into an activist replaces the earlier plot of Snow White’s progression through traditional stages of life. In so doing, it narrows the film’s lesson to activism against the rich. 

Again, this is a driving agenda for people such as John Last, who observes that the ideal of monarcho-socialism is all the more important in an age where the tyranny of fascism has been replaced by the unlimited power of international capital. “One of the great things about having a hereditary system is that you can’t buy it,” Elliot Ritzema said. “And actually, in a world where we have lots of Bezoses and Thiels, I think having some things that can’t be bought under any circumstances is probably a precondition to having a functioning democracy.” 

Snow White’s task is to claim her inheritance as socialist queen.

Mirror, Mirror

Snow White is gullible enough to fall for the Queen’s eat-the-apple trick, but she is awakened by a kiss from Jonathan. Yet rather than riding into the sunset on a white horse, Snow White tells Jonathan and the dwarfs that “it’s time” for her to take back her kingdom: it’s her “destiny.” This speech not only rallies the dwarfs but inspires the previously silenced Dopey to speak—”Let her”—thereby affirming her role as the people’s champion. 

Moreover, Snow White restores her subjects to themselves when she returns to the castle. She persuades soldiers to resist the queen’s order to kill her by sharing memories of them: one was a farmer who used to share his cherries; another was a baker who gave bread to the penniless. Under Snow White’s rule, these lucky men can once again give away their food. 

At the end of the movie, the mirror tells the queen that her beauty “goes no further than the skin. For Snow White, beauty comes from deep within.” As a result, Snow White “will always be more fair than thee.” It would have been handy if the mirror had developed this moral standard sooner. Nevertheless, the queen’s response—shrieking “You lie!” and smashing the mirror—leads to her death when shards fly. Snow White, now queen, accepts her subjects’ bows and, in the final scene, dances with everyone in the suddenly prosperous society. 

The controversy over Disney’s Snow White offers a mirror for the “Intellectual Elite.” Here we see their contempt for the general population, who they believe need them literally to help us put our houses in order, and their loathing of the “Boat Elite,” depicted as the Wicked Queen with bad taste. The Intellectual Elite—those willing to look—will discover that the public sees neither them nor their socialistic ideals as “the fairest.” In fact, all we see are the delusions of the Elitist of them All. 

The Diabelli Variations by Beethoven are “a wretchedly difficult work,” remarks Lawrence Perelman. That’s how he starts his book, and there will be more such details.

Recounting a friendship based on music, American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Elements of American Character is too specialized to deliver much on its grand subtitle. Yet it’s a gem, richly insightful on two of Buckley’s deepest qualities—his love of classical music and generosity as a mentor.

Admirers will be delighted to see how brightly these burned even in his fading last decade. Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published long biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, notes these qualities, but not emphatically or in much depth. Perelman does them full justice by thoroughly describing his years of warm contact with Buckley.

The son of 1970s-era Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union, Perelman felt a visceral loathing of communism, so he had that special reason for admiring him: “Everything he had done … as a great Cold Warrior.” He was also inspired by Buckley’s recent short book In Search of Anti-Semitism. Serious reasons indeed. The importance of anti-communism in sparking and defining Buckley’s long career as the American right’s great articulator cannot easily be exaggerated.

The author began earning his friendship in the mid-1990s by offering, out of the blue, to perform something on the piano for him. Excited and nervous, the college-age Manhattan School of Music student, who aimed at a career as a concert pianist, brought two pints of freshly squeezed orange juice—and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “I was taking a Russian literature class at Columbia … and wanted to emphasize my intellectual side.”

The piano at the elegant, “magisterial” maisonette was a huge old high-quality Boesendorfer, but not in tune. Firmly instructed even on this point by his tough music teacher—whose family “survived the Siege of Leningrad by boiling the flour off wallpaper”—young Perelman believed in not complaining about a piano. He played a selection from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier and finished with Liszt’s “hyper-virtuosic … Transcendental Etude, which ends like an intense blizzard fading to black.” Buckley and a young guest applauded after each piece; discussions of the music and the composer followed. After it all “sped by,” Perelman “walked out of that Narnian door” onto East 73rd Street and immediately “asked myself, ‘How do I get back in?’”

Their relationship grew with more such performances, then with Buckley’s offer to provide him with much-needed grant money to research the significance of students’ exposure to classical music—and especially the longstanding lack thereof—in the New York City schools. He wished to know what people missed in their adult lives by having learned nothing about it, by never hearing it. In a letter, Perelman had “declared boldly” that he wished to do for classical music what Buckley did for conservatism, and here was a possible start on that. (He eventually became founder and CEO of Semantix Creative Group, a strategic advisory firm specializing in business strategy, management, and communications “for a wide range of artists, institutions, and companies in the performing arts.”)

He found it difficult to reach definite conclusions about the amorphous question, also stated as: “What does the lack of art cost you?” But that didn’t matter greatly to Buckley, who graciously accepted the lack of solid results. More important was that someone who knew classical music had tried, that a worthy young man had the opportunity to research the point. It’s equally significant that Buckley wanted very much to know about this: what people in general, not just potential musicians, miss from having no musical education. 

Perelman also played repeatedly for National Review people, plus family members and social friends of Buckley’s, at the maisonette. The richly appointed palatial room, the outsider as star of the evening making exquisite music after so much practice, all suggest Western civilization at its finest. Perelman’s palpable delight in this setting, his refreshingly open enthusiasm for it, continued many years later. 

Buckley’s zeal for classical music is especially remarkable because it was originally imposed on him by a formidable parent. “My father enjoyed the kind of music he heard as a young man living in Mexico” in his years as an oil prospector. “He knew nothing about serious music except that it was serious. … His instructions to our teachers were to expose us to: serious music.”

Buckley’s ability to respond to all those letters, his commitment to playing and hearing classical music in his busy schedule, and indeed his whole adult life, demanded a striking efficiency in his use of time.

They learned on the five pianos at Great Elm, the Buckley estate. Weekly private lessons, practice 45 minutes daily, “listening sessions of great works of music curated by Penelope Oyen, one of the children’s tutors.” As Buckley later wrote: “Miss Oyen … would weep when listening … not for every composer; but almost always for J. S. Bach.” These sessions were four times a week for an hour, using a giant, advanced phonograph player. “The absolutely decisive feature of Miss Oyen’s system was very simple: Darkness … Too much light, and we’d have managed to read … anything to avoid just … sitting there.” There was “no escaping” the music. 

Perelman conveys the elder Buckley’s great success in this respect:

“For Bill and his nine siblings the sound of music … was ingrained early on, leading most of them to become classical music enthusiasts.” Bill and his sister Trish were “the most serious” in this, actually contemplating careers as musicians. “Bill even devised a new notation system … published in 1994 titled Getting Back to the Piano: Of Course You Can Play! … This quirky volume—now out of print—shows just how passionate he was about the instrument and encouraging people to learn it at any age.” He also loved playing the harpsichord.

More than half a century later, Buckley’s interest in classical music still thrived, even as his engagements with politics waned. For this reason, he let the unknown Larry Perelman into his busy life. Perelman frankly admits to dwelling, in the book, on the mere fact that Buckley made the effort to answer his letter and later ones. He dwells on it because he deems it a profound reflection of Buckley’s character:

“His first letter … in 1994 gave me so much belief in myself, in him, and in humanity. It was only an invitation to play piano … but it reverberated … [and] gave me an incredible amount of confidence.” The experience “also represented something very American.”

With sharp regret, Perelman notes that this practice, treating a would-be correspondent as something like an equal, now seems to be dying: “Today … one mostly writes into an abyss expecting no response and being shocked or heartened by a response. If there is a lesson to learn from Bill and the virtue of communication, it is to respect the time that someone took to write you. … I believe Bill felt a responsibility to answer any letter he received. That is a virtue which today is lacking in the American character … leaving the person on the other end questioning why there’s no reply. That emptiness and void, silence and selfishness, is something that begins to define a nation and its people.”

Buckley’s ability to respond to all those letters, his commitment to playing and hearing classical music in his busy schedule, and indeed his whole adult life, so quantitatively productive, demanded a striking efficiency in his use of time—a habit that easily could have spoiled his generous, aristocratically relaxed demeanor but didn’t. “Bill’s discipline was … known to all his friends and colleagues. He was up at 5 a.m. … How else could he have accomplished everything … without the gift of discipline? … He never could have built the movement and the following he had.” Buckley also retired at an earlyish hour, and a “conversation with him at a party was like a flash of lightning.”

Plausibly, Perelman speculates: “From where did this discipline spring? I believe that a major element was rooted in Bill’s quest to become as accomplished a musician as possible.” Even good amateur playing, as he shows when discussing his own extensive practice for the Buckley recitals, is hard work like the efforts of an accomplished athlete.

The Great Elm drill may also have enhanced Buckley’s “ability to speak and write melodiously, as a musician plays, sings, or composes. … Bill’s prose was musical. … Colleagues have commented on how words flowed from his fingers on a keyboard or typewriter much like musical notation flowed from Mozart’s mind, … already complete and edited into a score.”

Buckley thought classical music was among “the major achievements of our civilization,” Perelman writes, so he used his iconic television interview program to share its “importance to him and humanity”—taking “any excuse to bring up Bach, most notably with the Firing Line ‘jingle’ for many seasons … the opening of the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.”

“It is not necessary,” Buckley wrote in a column on the composer’s 300th anniversary in 1985, quoted by Perelman, “to believe in God in order to revel in Bach … though there is a need for such human modesty as Einstein expressed when he said that the universe was not explicable except by the acknowledgement of an unmoved mover.” Bach’s music “disturbs human complacency because one can’t readily understand finiteness in its presence.” The book shares a key observation by Perelman’s mother Celia after one performance: “how Bill sat behind me and reacted with amazement at each challenging bar of music. He was always the most involved member of the audience.”

Perelman notes, too, the centrality of classical music to Buckley’s social life. The fortnightly dinners at his city residence featured standard invitations to the National Review editors and included friends of Bill and his wife Pat, a pre-eminent socialite, with “guests of honor ranging from writers to politicians, musicians, and clergy.” Often they would hear classical pianists and harpsichordists. Through these performances that preceded dinner and its political discussions, “Bill aimed to convert those who weren’t musically attuned.” In the early 2000s, Perelman played there about once every six to eight months, later playing occasionally at Buckley’s home on Long Island Sound in Stamford, Connecticut.

It was here that Buckley died, after battles with emphysema and other ailments, on the morning of February 27, 2008, at work in his adjoining study—just hours before another scheduled performance. Perelman had asked to stay overnight so he could “get some good practice in” the next day. ”I woke up from a deep sleep,” Perelman recalls. “Ugh. 6:30 a.m. Footsteps in the hallway? It must be Bill going downstairs.” As he remained briefly awake, Perelman thought of “the glass as half-full. … As difficult as it was to watch him struggle to walk and breathe every few feet, it was still our Bill who was with us.”

He means at least partly this: “In Bill’s final two years … our interactions became more frequent and his requests for performances multiplied. In a particularly … unvarnished interview with Charlie Rose in 2005 … Bill conveyed … that he was ready to die … [and] seemed dejected,” yet that Buckley was “very different from the one I saw during musical encounters. There was something about music that gave him life, or the willingness to live.”

For this reason and more, a book with so much on his engagement with music provides a valuable part of the Buckley story. The American Impresario title, however, refers to far more than Buckley’s extensive contact with the music world. It’s about his strong, lasting instinct to build relationships among people who interested him or provoked his admiration—and to assist them.

“The goal of these pages,” Perelman explains, is “to shine a light on the importance of Bill the impresario. … That role was actually where we as a society can still learn from him.” Buckley was “the great connector always bringing people together and letting the sparks take on a life of their own”—always seeking “the opportunity to create opportunities for others.”

“As we wander in this age of uncertainty,” his friend and protégé urges, “we should look to Bill as an example of what to emulate.”

On December 26 (O.S. December 14), 1825, a group of idealistic, young army officers, commanding about 3,000 soldiers, staged a coup in St. Petersburg with the aim of forcing the Senate to adopt a liberal constitution for the Russian Empire. Badly led and organized, it was easily crushed by the new Tsar, Nicholas I. An uprising by an allied group, operating in what is today Ukraine, met a similar fate days later.

These young officers, members of a number of different secret societies, subsequently came to be known collectively as the Decembrists, and their abortive coup as the Decembrist Revolt. Although it failed and its leaders were severely punished, the revolt was enormously important to the subsequent socio-political evolution of Russia. Following the revolt, Nicholas instituted an authoritarian regime that stifled any sort of free thought or intellectual inquiry that might remotely challenge his absolute power.

In her excellent book, The First Russian Revolution, fortuitously released in time for the revolt’s bicentennial, Susanna Rabow-Edling, a professor of political science at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, presents a detailed picture of the Decembrists themselves, their fellow-travelers, and their wives and girlfriends. Her focus is quasi-biographical; she asks why so many young noblemen, army officers with promising careers ahead of them, risked everything to build a liberal social and political order in their country. After introducing us to them, she recounts their actions in their short-lived attempt at revolution and their subsequent arrests, interrogations, and punishments. Finally, she acquaints us in great detail with their lives in Siberian exile, where most of them were joined by their wives. What emerges from the book is thus a work of political and intellectual history, enhanced by often extremely moving portrayals of human bravery, devotion, and love.

So who were these so-called “Decembrists?” As Rabow-Edling describes them, they were a small group (around 200 at any given time), though their ranks fluctuated and they always had large numbers of supporters who were not officially members of any of their societies or clubs. Almost all of them were young junior military officers drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy. Besides these professional and demographic characteristics, they shared two other extremely important traits: they had all received decent educations, including training in foreign languages, and almost all of them had taken part, to one extent or another, in the wars against Napoleon.

The ramifications of these last two aspects of their biographies are stressed by the author, who sees them as the foundation of the entire Decembrist saga. Armed with their knowledge of French (and usually German as well), and an intellectual curiosity whetted by their educational backgrounds, these young officers found the unaccustomed intellectual atmosphere in post-Napoleonic Europe to be exhilarating and immersed themselves in it to every extent possible. Often, this also meant joining the Freemasons, through which they imbibed additional Enlightenment ideas, besides providing a model for their subsequent establishment of their own secret societies in Russia. According to Rabow-Edling, the entire experience left them deeply impressed and committed to the central ideas of classical liberalism as it was emerging in post-Napoleonic Europe. Among others, these included republicanism (especially its insistence on constitutional government), the rule of law, equality, and patriotism.

An important related point, which Rabow-Edling mentions a number of times, is that the Decembrists had the courage of their convictions to advocate policies, especially the abolition of serfdom and the institution of representative government, which would have been detrimental to the material and political dominance of their socio-economic class.

Rabow-Edling goes into the intellectual background and interests of the Decembrists in great detail, providing lists of authors who influenced them, including the usual suspects of classical liberal thought. For example, one list she provides consists of such luminaries as “Smith, Bentham, Say, Rousseau, Nicholas de Condorcet, Cesare Beccaria, Louis de Bignon, Benjamin Constant, Jean-Louis de Lolme, Benjamin Franklin, Germaine de Stael, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Gaetano Filangieri, Niccolo Machiavelli, Voltaire, and Montesquieu.”

Ideas, especially great, eternal ideas like freedom, justice, and equality, have no nationality. They are available to people everywhere. The Decembrist leaders recognized this.

This is a very diverse group, and unfortunately, Rabow-Edling does not go into detail about which authors were particularly important to the Decembrists and for what reasons. In general, in her extensive discussion of Decembrist ideology (such as it was), she stresses their advocacy of liberal political economy (especially private property rights and free trade), constitutionalism (occasionally expressed as republicanism), and the rule of law (particularly equality before the law).

Despite mentioning these authors frequently in general terms, Rabow-Edling only mentions one specific case where one of the Decembrists’ key leaders, Pavel Pestel, was “particularly inspired” by a liberal philosopher, in this case Destutt de Tracy. His famous book on Montesquieu (A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s “Spirit of Laws”) was apparently the major influence in Pestel’s draft of a constitution for a (republican) Russia. Rabow-Edling’s list of intellectual influences on the Decembrists is also interesting because of the complete absence of German names, whereas intellectual histories of Russia at the time usually highlight the importance of German philosophers, especially Friedrich Schelling and Hegel, at Russian schools and universities.

A main point in reviewing the Decembrists’ intellectual pedigree is that all of their major influences were Western Europeans. This becomes very important after their revolt, as their enemies sought to portray them as “alien” and anti-Russian. While Rabow-Edling freely admits, and even relates in great detail, the European influences on the Decembrists, she emphasizes that “these young Russian officers saw themselves as Europeans and Russia as part of Europe,” but also “they were committed patriots. They wanted what was best for Russia and for the Russian people, which in their mind was freedom, representative government, and the rule of law.”

Significantly, the Decembrists also went to great lengths to argue that their modern, “European,” ideas were, in fact, rooted in Russian history. They pointed to the medieval city republics of Novgorod and Pskov, with their popular representative institutions, as alternatives to the narrative of traditional Russian autocracy. Kondrati Ryleyev and Alexander Odoevskii, two prominent Decembrists, wrote poems and stories glorifying the republican histories of these cities, and in the draft constitutions they drew up for their future Russia, they named their parliament the Narodnoe Veche, after the assemblies of Novgorod and Pskov. 

It is important to understand that these young officers were hardly operating in a vacuum. Liberal ideas were clearly in the air and seemed to be advocated by none other than the Tsar himself, the young(ish) Alexander I, known after 1815 as the “Liberator of Europe.” He was genuinely interested in liberal ideas and eagerly accepted his role, established at the Congress of Vienna, as king of a constitutional kingdom of Poland (known as the Congress Kingdom). He hinted frequently that he saw the Polish experiment as a forerunner to a future constitutional monarchy for Russia itself. He oversaw the abolition of serfdom in the Baltic provinces, instituted a number of reforms in the structure of the imperial government, and began work on a constitution. For the future Decembrists, this was all exciting stuff indeed, and Tsar Alexander, besides being their commander-in-chief, was their intellectual and political hero. They looked to him as a leader in their (admittedly somewhat vague) project for the liberalization of the Russian Empire.

Alas, this was not to be. Liberal revolutions in Spain and Naples rattled the conservative Concert of Europe established by the Congress of Vienna, and Klemens von Metternich, its architect and guardian, stoked Alexander’s growing fears of liberal agitation. A mutiny of disgruntled soldiers in 1820 apparently shook Alexander badly, as did increasingly vociferous grumblings from the Polish parliament (the Sejm). By 1821, Alexander had retreated from most of his erstwhile liberalism and reasserted himself as an autocratic absolute ruler.

Undeterred, the young officers now decided that the only hope for Russia was a revolution. But, as Rabow-Edling describes in great detail, their planning was complicated by intellectual divisions and disagreements about strategy. By 1825, the various secret societies and clubs to which they had belonged coalesced into two allied branches called simply the Northern Society, based in St. Petersburg, and the Southern Society, in the garrison town of Tulchyn (now in Ukraine). Besides the challenges posed by this geographic division, there were intellectual differences between the two societies, with the more radical Southerners, for example, hankering for a republic as soon as possible, while the Northerners were more open to a constitutional monarchy.

As the officers drew closer and closer to formulating their plans for an uprising, they were faced with an unexpected and unwelcome challenge: Tsar Alexander died unexpectedly on December 1 (O.S., November 19), 1825. He was only 47 years old. To make matters even more turbulent, he died childless, and the heir apparent, his brother Constantine, had, without any publicity, sometime earlier had renounced his claim to the throne, leaving their younger brother, Nicholas, as the heir. Unlike his more liberal minded brother Alexander, Nicholas had never made any secret of his autocratic conservative tendencies and he was broadly unpopular not just with the future Decembrists but, importantly, with large numbers of the common soldiery as well, who saw him (rightly) as a supporter of their frequently cruel commanding officers (not including, of course, our young Decembrists!).

The leaders of the Northern and Southern Societies realized that this was a revolutionary moment and, though hardly ready for action, they realized that if they did not seize it, and Nicholas were able to come to power, their cause would be lost. Since Constantine had renounced his claim to the throne while also not making this public, the situation in the capital was extremely unclear. The Decembrists decided to take advantage of the confusion by convincing as many troops as possible to swear their allegiance to the new Tsar Constantine, portraying Nicholas as a usurper. They would then occupy the Senate building and call for a Russian constitution. By the time the dust had settled, they hoped, Nicholas would be confronted with a fait accompli and would have either to abdicate or agree to rule as a constitutional monarch.

The actual events of December 26, 1825, proved to be just as chaotic and, ultimately, disastrous for the Decembrists as the above description of their plans hints, and Rabow-Edling recounts the events of that day in minute detail. Despite being plagued by weak leadership, poor planning, and bad luck, she suggests that the Decembrists might just have been able to pull off their coup. As things turned out, however, by nightfall, Nicholas and his loyal troops dispersed the Decembrists’ forces with great loss of life and crushed the revolt.

The Decembrists also went to great lengths to argue that their modern, “European,” ideas were, in fact, rooted in Russian history.

Rabow-Edling spends the rest of her book, almost half, recounting the sad aftermath of the failed revolt. The Decembrists were all tracked down within a few days, arrested, and imprisoned under differing conditions, in the (in)famous Peter Paul Fortress. Nicholas, by now fully ensconced in power and recognized as the new Tsar, oversaw the investigation into the attempted coup personally. The many pages of testimony collected by the investigating officials show the continued defiance, courage, and idealism of the imprisoned Decembrists. While clearly prepared for severe punishments, many of them nevertheless seemed to have hoped for clemency; they were from good, aristocratic families, after all. As a result, the severity of the sentences came as a huge shock to most of them.

The majority were sentenced to some combination of imprisonment with hard labor followed by exile in Siberia. But five were sentenced to death, originally by quartering, but reduced to hanging, ostensibly by order of Nicholas himself to spare the young aristocrats such a gruesome execution. The death sentences stunned not only the unfortunate Decembrists but much of Russian high society. Capital punishment had not been used in Russia since the end of the Pugachev Rebellion in 1775, and its return, used against people from noble families no less, created an atmosphere of fear and dread. Tsar Nicholas, eventually dubbed “the Policeman of Europe,” of course, knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted to make sure that everyone, especially any uppity nobles, would think very carefully about making any sort of trouble in the future.

In fact, Nicholas very quickly instituted a regime that actively discouraged any sort of philosophizing at all. Although Rabow-Edling does not go into this in any great detail, any sort of organized or academic intellectual life, to say nothing of overt political activity or even philosophizing, in Russia came to a halt until after Nicholas died in 1855. Philosophical and intellectual discussions and writing, such as they were, continued to be carried out more or less as hobbies by various gentlemen or exiles (or both), especially people like Alexander Herzen, who as a teenager witnessed the Decembrists’ revolt and was profoundly moved by it and its aftermath.

The effects on Russian intellectual history were immense. As Rabow-Edling explains, Nicholas introduced in 1832 what became known as “Official Nationalism.” She describes how in this new doctrine, “The new conception of the nation as a unique people was employed as a substitute for the radical idea of the nation as a sovereign people advocated by the Decembrists. It allowed the regime to create a narrative in which the Russian autocracy was tied organically to the Russian nation, intrinsic to Russian nationality, and rooted in Russian traditions.” In part this was achieved, she argues, by the regime’s portrayal of the Decembrists’ ideals as “alien” and “an infection imported from the West.”

Despite the obvious parallels, Rabow-Edling is very careful not to draw too many explicit comparisons between the days of the Decembrists and current events in the Russian Federation. One exception is her reference to a 2019 movie on the Decembrist Revolution, sponsored by the Russian state, which “presents the Decembrist leaders as fanatical, power-hungry egoists or foolish romantics, who aspire to introduce ideas alien to Russia … and who threaten to undermine the unity between the tsar and the people.” Observers of the latest pronouncements coming from the Kremlin might be forgiven for seeing some parallels with Nicolas’ “Official Nationalism.”

Yet, the tragic tale of the Decembrists, while a crucial episode in Russian history, also suggests an important observation about intellectual history in general. Ideas, especially great, eternal ideas like freedom, justice, and equality, have no nationality. They are available to people everywhere. The Decembrist leaders recognized this, as did the thousands of soldiers who followed them, and the great number of civilian bystanders who came out in their support in Senate Square on that cold December day. Perhaps this is the real legacy of the Decembrists and their revolt.

Writing in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas never used the term “textualism” in his discussions of law in the Summa Theologica. He did, however, basically discuss the issue in two different treatises in the Summa and commends a pretty straightforward textualist approach to reading “written law.”

In his “Treatise on Prudence and Justice” in the Summa, Aquinas discusses the question “Whether we should always judge according to the written law?” (ST II-II, Q. 60, a. 5). In his “Treatise on Law,” Aquinas discusses the question “Whether he who is under a law may act beside the letter of the law?” (ST I-II, Q. 96, a. 6). While overlapping, the two questions address different people in different roles. In the former question, Aquinas addresses judges as they interpret law in their official capacity. In the latter question, Aquinas addresses common folk who are “under a law” regarding their personal obligation to obey that law.

Whether anachronistic or not, why might we care what anyone opined about textualism over 750 years ago? As an initial matter, due to Aquinas’s continued visibility, commentators and scholars arguing about textualism often invoke Aquinas to support their views. Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cites Aquinas in his recent book for the claim that judges have asked “purpose-oriented questions” when interpreting laws “for hundreds if not thousands of years.” So, too, Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule invokes Aquinas in his book Common Good Constitutionalism, distinguishing a classical version of textualism, which he identifies with Aquinas, from what he styles as the modern textualism of Justice Scalia and textualist justices currently on the Supreme Court.

More generally, it is because Aquinas discussed textualism 750 years ago that his arguments might be helpful to survey today. Whatever his private motivations might have been for discussing the issue in the thirteenth century, he couldn’t have been carrying water for one side or another in today’s legal debates; his view of interpreting legal texts couldn’t be a proxy for a set of substantive legal positions in twenty-first-century America.

Aquinas and the Sine Qua Non of Textualism

Aquinas orients his discussion in the Summa’s “Treatise on Prudence and Justice” to judges and others who have “authority” (ST II-II, Q. 60, a. 1, ad. 4). Here Aquinas affirms the sine qua non of textualism:

Since judgment should be pronounced according to the written law[,] … he that pronounces judgments, interprets, in a way, the letter of the law, by applying it to some particular case. … Just as a law cannot be made save by public authority, so neither can a judgment be pronounced except by public authority, which extends over those who are subject to the community. (ST II-II, Q. 60, a. 6)

We can draw on Aquinas even here to underscore a fundamental point about textualism that often gets lost in the debate: textualism, properly speaking, is not a theory of interpretation; it is a theory about what gets interpreted.

The first move of textualism is what Ronald Dworkin terms a “preinterpretive” move. That is, it is a stage at which a legal text is “identified and distinguished” from other texts. This may seem so obvious that it does not really merit notice, let alone comment. After all, the thought goes, “of course everyone agrees what it is that is being interpreted.”

But I’m not sure as a practical matter that everyone agrees on what texts are being interpreted. Even at an ostensibly preinterpretive stage, there can be some slipperiness in what in fact it is that is being interpreted.

It is because Aquinas discussed textualism 750 years ago that his arguments might be helpful to survey today.

In Cooper v. Aaron, for example, the Supreme Court includes its own decisions interpreting the Constitution and federal statutes along with these latter two texts as “the supreme law of the land.” The Court seemingly lists its decisions as a part of “the Constitution” that it interprets. Because of the significance of the issue at stake, and the Court’s (understandable) exasperation at southern states attempting to delay implementing its Brown decision, the Court slips around just what texts are the supreme law of the land. Equating its own decisions as the supreme law of the land means that the written text of the Constitution (as amended) is not a privileged textual dimension in the interpretive process; the text is not identified at a distinct “preinterpretive stage” and then is interpreted by subsequent decisions.

Rather, in the decision, “the Constitution” is part of a textual stew that not only includes the original text but also includes the text of subsequent decisions that interpreted the written text.

So, too, in his book, Reading the Constitution, former Justice Stephen Breyer treats the written text of the Constitution as just one ingredient of a constitutional stew:

The language of the Constitution will sometimes help [with interpreting the Constitution], say by setting boundaries for the interpreter. So will history and practice. Precedent may prove useful[,] … values (or purposes) matter; and so do consequences[,] … which of the relevant matters—e.g., text, values, consequences—the judge should emphasize will vary depending on the circumstances.

Listing a legal text as one of a set of equally “relevant matters” obscures identifying text as a distinct stage that precedes interpretation. Consider whether we would apply Breyer’s methodological approach in another interpretive context. Think, for example, of an English class studying a Shakespeare play. It is difficult to think the teacher would talk about “the language of the play will sometimes help.” To be sure, there may be numerous additional sources that students might draw on to help interpret the play, but it is the text of the play that these other sources are drawn on to interpret. The text is the material for interpretation; it is not one of a set of sources that might be helpful to interpretation. Like the lexicographic ordering of a dictionary, the text is an initial, privileged dimension that cannot be interpretively traded off against ways subsequently to interpret the text.

The problem doesn’t pertain only to critics of textualism. In moving too quickly to identify textualism with “original public meaning” (or some other interpretive approach), textualists can also invite conflating what is being interpreted with how one approaches the text to interpret it. To be sure, how one interprets the text is critically important. But rushing to that step can gloss over the distinct preinterpretive move of identifying exactly what text it is that we are interpreting. In Aquinas’s approach, he commends that we first identify “the letter of the law,” then move to a subsequent stage of providing a reasonable reading of that text.

Textualism and Equitable Interpretation

Justice Breyer cites Aquinas for the proposition that courts have applied “purpose-oriented” interpretation for “hundreds, if not thousands of years.” Aquinas, he writes, “understood the letter of the law to yield to ‘natural right’ and ‘equity’ where an overly wooden interpretation would frustrate the aims of the law.”

Breyer’s reading of Aquinas, however, has Aquinas’s exception swallowing Aquinas’s rule. Aquinas’s main proposition, after all, is that “it is necessary to judge according to the written law.” Breyer skips over Aquinas’s discussion of this main thesis and instead cites Aquinas’s reply to an objection as though it were his main point. In fact, Aquinas’s reply to this objection is accommodated in the modern era by judicial doctrines such as rationality review and “necessity,” doctrines that even textualists accept and apply.

Before getting to Aquinas’s reply to the objections he articulates, we should note Aquinas’s main thesis. In his reply to the question “whether we should always judge according to the written law” (ST II-II, Q. 60, a. 6), Aquinas first quotes Augustine:

In these earthly laws, though men judge about them when they are making them, when once they are established and passed, the judges may judge no longer of them, but according to them.

The quotation from Augustine draws on the distinction between an official acting in a legislative capacity and an official acting in a judicial capacity. While not a separation-of-power argument, it is certainly a separation-of-role argument.

Next, moving beyond the quotation from Augustine, Aquinas sets out his own view, observing first that there is both natural right and positive right, and that “laws are written for the purpose of manifesting both these rights.” Written law “manifests” these rights “in different ways,” given that written law “contains” natural right but does not establish its authority—nature does—while a written law both contains and establishes the authority of positive law. (The authority of positive law is established by human agreement or custom rather than by nature.)

From these starting points, Aquinas concludes, “Hence it is necessary to judge according to the written law, else judgment would fall short either of the natural or of the positive right” (emphasis added). Significantly, for Aquinas, natural law implies that textualism is a requirement for judges.

Aquinas’s approach to interpretation would reject both Breyer’s purposivism and older forms of “original intentions originalism” (this as opposed to textualist originalism).

Aquinas then discusses two cases in which judges should not apply laws as written. Importantly, when we translate these cases into modern jurisprudential categories, the two cases Aquinas discusses are not exceptional. Today’s textualist judges typically read texts consistent with Aquinas’s provisos.

The first case Aquinas discusses is when the law itself is unjust. The second case is when a particular application of the written law produces an unjust and harsh outcome.

Breyer cites Aquinas’s discussion in the second of these cases as supporting his view of purpose-oriented interpretation.

Aquinas quotes Justinian on this point: “By no reason of law, or favor of equity, is it allowable for us to interpret harshly, and render burdensome, those useful measures which have been enacted for the welfare of man.”

We can glimpse what Aquinas means here by looking at his related discussion in the Summa’s “Treatise on Law.”

A word of caution, however, before proceeding. Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” is often treated as though it were an abstract discussion of law. It is not.

Unlike his discussion of judgment, which Aquinas aims primarily at officeholders, Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” speaks primarily to those “under law.” Within the broad intellectual agenda of the Summa, Aquinas intends the “Treatise on Law” to speak to law as an “extrinsic principle” by which God instructs humans for good (and God then enables humans to do that good by grace).

While the first quarter of Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” receives the most attention in discussions of jurisprudence (Questions 90 through 97), that section only develops the framework for the major work Aquinas does in the treatise, which is his discussion in Questions 98-108 of Old and New Testament laws. The bulk of Aquinas’s discussion in the treatise is focused on providing an answer to a pertinent Biblical question Christians face: identifying what aspects of the Old Testament law continue to oblige Christians and what aspects do not.

With that cautionary word, let’s consider Aquinas’s discussion of written law in his “Treatise on Law.” In Question 96, Aquinas provides an example of interpreting a law in the “harsh” and “burdensome” manner that Justinian discusses:

For instance, suppose that in a besieged city it be an established law that the gates of the city are to be kept closed, this is good for public welfare as a general rule: but, if it were to happen that the enemy are in pursuit of certain citizens, who are defenders of the city, it would be a great loss to the city, if the gates were not opened to them: and so in that case the gates ought to be opened, contrary to the letter of the law, in order to maintain the common weal, which the lawgiver had in view. (ST I-II, Q. 96, a. 6, co.)

Aquinas’s specific application in this Treatise is that law does not oblige obedience in this situation. We can apply Aquinas’s discussion to a judge overseeing a trial of a person accused of breaking this law in the situation Aquinas describes. Aquinas would presumably have the judge allow the accused to assert a defense of necessity, as presumably a modern American judge would as well. To be sure, today we would not call a defense an interpretation of the statute, but that’s not a problem regarding the point Aquinas makes.

Or in the alternative, a judge today might conclude that the prosecution’s construction of the statute is an “absurd result.” This is an interpretive doctrine admitted by the late textualist Justice Scalia.

So, too, Aquinas provides that if there be any doubt regarding the effect of a law, a person must resolve the doubt to “act according to the letter of the law, or consult those in power.”

Again, Aquinas’s immediate point concerns the person “under” the law, which a judge is not (at least not in the same way). Nonetheless, Aquinas’s insight that the law should be applied as written if there is any “doubt” whether the law would result in harm maps onto the minimal rationality test that modern US judges apply to laws. That is, that a law must be sustained if it can plausibly be understood to be rationally related to a legitimate governmental objective.

Aquinas’s approach to interpreting legal text would seem to side with Scalia’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States when it wrote, “It is a familiar rule, that a thing may be within the letter of the statute and yet not within the statute, because not within its spirit, nor within the intention of its makers.” Aquinas’s approach to interpretation would reject both Breyer’s purposivism and older forms of “original intentions originalism” (this as opposed to textualist originalism).

The point is that modern-day textualist judges apply approaches similar to Aquinas’s as a matter of course. But that’s not really a surprise. Aquinas defined law as “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated” (ST I-II, Q. 90, a. 4, co.). In reading and applying a legal text, this approach would seem to invite the judge to apply Scalia’s essential textualist approach: “A text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means.”

Philip Wallach’s lead essay extends his analysis in other notable writings on Congress, especially his wonderful book Why Congress and his National Affairs article “Congress Indispensable.” His analysis is characteristic of his other essays on Congress: both ambitious and nuanced, historically informed, and relevant to the critical problem our republic currently faces. 

After briefly summarizing what is novel and important about Wallach’s argument about Congress, my response poses a few questions about Wallach’s framework for analyzing the branch. First, I ponder how extensive the so-called “Secret Congress” is, and whether its existence complicates the standard account of congressional irrelevance. I then question whether Wallach’s goal of weakening partisan loyalty and enabling cross-cutting policymaking would actually revive Congress. Finally, taking Wallach’s side on those questions in spite of my hesitations, I suggest some specific (albeit radical) reforms that might advance the kind of Congress Wallach seems to envision. 

Why Congress Is Indispensable

One of Wallach’s key insights and arguments over the years, also advanced in his lead essay, is that Congress is the only institution in our system that reflects the diversity of our extended republic and allows our different interests and opinions to confront each other, deliberate, bargain, and compromise towards durable solutions to the nation’s major challenges. As he puts it, he wants Congress to engage in “the kind of broad coalition-building needed if policy investments are to endure for generations.” Those durable policy investments tend to produce greater peace and trust among citizens who disagree with each other, because they tend to settle big questions on a relatively permanent basis—think the Civil War Amendments, the New Deal, the Great Society, and Civil Rights legislation.

The key problem he confronts in his essay is Congress’s passivity and irrelevance, a problem that leads to narrow coalition-building and winner-take-all presidential elections. That style of politics fails to generate durable policy investments and tends to result in policymaking by executive orders—orders which are frequently reversed in four or eight years by a new president with a similarly narrow majority. 

Congress is creeping towards the decrepitude that Wallach foresaw as a possibility in his latest book. In part, it is on this path because it is a clunky, inefficient body with many different voices, operating in an age that demands managerial efficiency. But as Wallach has argued, Congress’s “inefficiencies” are actually the very virtues that our republic most needs. Its plurality and inefficiency promote compromise, trust, and accountability, if it serves the role our Framers intended for it. 

The Extent of “Secret Congress”?

One big question Wallach hints at, but does not fully address, is just how far Congress has actually gone down the path of decrepitude. The overall tone of his essay suggests that Congress has become irrelevant. But periodically, he acknowledges that Congress still matters, more so than people today think it does. He writes, for example, that Congress’s “irrelevance is now probably overestimated by most casual observers of American politics.” He notes that Congress’s factions did play a significant role in crafting various provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Even in foreign policy, where the president has traditionally been more of a forceful actor, members on relevant congressional committees are able to “steer presidential conduct” to a degree. 

These statements depict a Congress that still determines policy outcomes, where committees still matter, and where bipartisanship still exists on lower-salience issues. They resemble the writing on the so-called “Secret Congress.” In my experience, teaching various undergraduate and graduate students with experience on Capitol Hill, this version of Congress is more prevalent than people think. Vitriol and drama are good for media consumption, but still, much of the real work of legislating is happening in committees, across the aisle, on low-salience issues. It just goes largely unnoticed. 

Case in point: the GENIUS Act, the first major legislation on cryptocurrency in the United States, recently passed with over 300 votes in the House and 68 votes in the Senate. While President Trump was generally supportive of the bill, most of it was hashed out by legislators and their staff. In short, I think our picture of Congress’s irrelevance would be clarified significantly if we could get a handle on how much of this kind of activity still happens in Congress today, and how much it actually matters in comparison to the soap-opera performances that tend to get the most media attention.

Cross-Cutting Policies vs. Partisan Loyalty

But set that question aside for the sake of the argument and assume that Congress is perilously far down the road to decrepitude or irrelevance, which I take to be Wallach’s central point. Wallach writes that it would take “some shock to the system, big enough to make members prioritize politically cross-cutting policies rather than partisan loyalty.” 

My interpretation of this statement is that Wallach wants members to follow local constituencies, which tend to be rooted in interest, more than they follow national partisan identities, which tend to be more ideologically rooted. Historically, the tension between these two views of representation has driven congressional development. If members were to be freed up from their parties, it seems that they would necessarily have to become more closely tied to local constituents who re-elect them. Similar to the bipartisan and decentralized Congress of the mid-twentieth century, members would be defined not by their party brand but by their locality.

My main concern is that this would exacerbate Congress’s weakness rather than alleviate it. Historically, decentralized structures and procedures such as open amendment processes, leadership shorn of committee assignment and agenda control powers, and powerful committees, have tended to fragment Congress and render its collective action more difficult. As James Curry and Frances Lee have recently explained, today’s centralized procedures are the means by which Congress has remained active, given the nature of the political environment, rather than contributing to its irrelevance. 

I’m interested to know why Wallach would expect this time to be different. In other words, even if we freed members from their national parties and enabled them to prioritize cross-cutting policies, would bipartisanship flourish again? Would that, in turn, lead to a more assertive and relevant Congress? I’m not so sure.

The expansion of national authority over the past century has made our political contests more acrimonious because more is at stake.

Wallach acknowledges that the external environment, rather than its internal structure, plays a critical causal role in Congress’s irrelevance. He speculates, “perhaps [decrepitude] is inevitable in a historical moment when more Americans see their political adversaries as actual enemies unworthy of being political bedfellows on any cause. Why should one seek to persuade and accommodate people who wish to destroy one’s whole way of life? If we do not believe in reasoning together, there is no need for Congress to make a comeback as an institution.” In other words, Wallach seems to understand that Congress’s current polarization and centralization are symptoms, not causes. They are effects of the way the American people think about engaging in politics with each other. Reducing partisan loyalty and incentivizing cross-cutting policies may simply be out of touch with the mood of the people, and perhaps no amount of institutional reform within Congress can change that. 

Reforms to Unleash Cross-Cutting Coalitions

One response to my skepticism might be that Americans seem to be more divided today than they actually are, because of distortions in the way public opinion is shaped and understood by members of Congress and others inside the beltway. The loudest voices tend to be the most amplified on social media, and those tend to be on the extremes. Those who furnish contributions to campaigns also tend to come from the extremes, and they tend to have the ears of the members. Wallach’s proposal for weakening partisan loyalty and unleashing cross-cutting policy coalitions, it might be argued, would put members more in touch with the more numerous and more moderate (if quieter) constituents that they should be representing.

I’m sympathetic to this view. But this leads to the question: how to get members to better represent them? What kinds of institutional reforms would help to strengthen members’ attachments to their constituents on the ground, and advocate for their interests as opposed to following orders from congressional leaders—thus leading to the more bipartisan and more assertive Congress for which Wallach hopes? 

I think the necessary reforms would be quite radical, and I would be interested in whether Wallach shares this view. These radical reforms for conserving Congress should be openly avowed and defended. Here are some possibilities that might support Wallach’s project:

• Dramatic expansion of the House of Representatives: Members today represent around 750,000 constituents. If that number were reduced to a ratio of 1:250,000, members would be closer to their constituents, and presumably more able to buck party leadership and still win reelection in their home districts.
• Abolish the direct primary: The direct primary was originally justified as a means of ensuring that candidates would be accountable to local communities. Paradoxically, primaries are today a chief means of nationalizing candidate behavior. One of the key ways in which presidents have dominated their parties in the past century, from FDR’s purge campaign in 1938 to Trump’s threat to oust Republican Thomas Massie, is the intervention in primary elections. Presidential interventions tend to nationalize campaigns. Moreover, in today’s era of partisan sorting into deep-red and deep-blue districts, primaries also incentivize members to avoid compromise and moderation. 
• Overhaul campaign finance: House and Senate races are often nationalized because so much of the money spent on advertising comes from outside the districts. These advertisements highlight national issues over local issues and arguably give people outside of congressional districts a greater voice than the voters within them. Party leadership PACs give congressional leaders leverage over rank-and-file members who are reliant on those dollars for reelection. 
• Abolish the presidential veto on policy matters: In an era of tight majorities, mustering a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress is extremely heavy lifting. It was once a key plank of the Whig Party platform that their presidents would not use the veto to advance a policy agenda. Instead, the veto would be limited to measures that violated the Constitution. Presidents today, paradoxically, sign legislation that they object to on constitutional grounds, and veto (or threaten to veto) legislation on policy grounds. If Congress could legislate without the threat of a presidential veto, it could be much more assertive than it is today. 
• Revive the legislative veto: Until the Court’s monumental decision in INS v. Chadha, Congress delegated power but retained the ability to reverse administrative decisions without requiring the president’s signature. The Court did away with hundreds of these legislative veto provisions in Chadha, and this has certainly correlated with Congress’s decline and the emergence of presidentialism. I think that Chadha was wrongly decided and should be reversed, but whether Wallach agrees with me or not, I wonder whether he would support a constitutional amendment to revive the legislative veto. 

The Challenge of Political Nationalization

One additional reform to our political system as a whole might be more effective than any of these in restoring a functional and effective Congress. Our system was not designed to solve all policy problems at the national level, one-size-fits-all. Our ability to compromise and to live peaceably with each other was probably a result, at least partially, of the fact that the stakes of national policy were lower throughout most of American history. The expansion of national authority over the past century has made our political contests more acrimonious because more is at stake. 

It may be too late, and perhaps inadvisable, to return to the balance of state and federal authority that existed for most of American history. But either way, we should acknowledge that the centralization of power has put strain on the political system’s ability to manage conflict and generate durable coalitions, and that Congress has been the institution most dramatically affected by the consolidation of power in the hands of the national government. None other than James Madison himself understood this problem—as early as 1791.

This doesn’t mean we should stop looking for solutions to the problem of congressional irrelevance. To the contrary: conserving and reviving Congress is the most critical challenge of twenty-first-century American politics. But it should clarify the scope of the challenges Congress faces and encourage us to advance reforms that are sufficient to meet those challenges. Wallach has laid the groundwork for these reforms in his lead essay, and I hope he takes the next step and sketches a path to conserve or return to congressional relevance.

In the past, Walter Lippmann was virtually a household name. Today, it is the rare household that knows him. Some people may associate him with the phrase “American century.” But it was Henry Luce, the media magnate, who said that the twentieth century would be “the American century.” (That was in 1941.) So why the association with Lippmann? In 1980, Ronald Steel published his biography Walter Lippmann and the American Century.

What Lippmann is responsible for is the common understanding of the word “stereotype.” He took the term from the printing trade. (The word “cliché” also comes from that trade.) Also, Lippmann popularized the term “cold war” to describe the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II. In 1947, he published his book The Cold War.

Steel’s biography won every award under the sun, with the exception of the Pulitzer. It won the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, etc. In a new biography of his own, Tom Arnold-Forster calls Steel’s book “classic” and says that it is “still indispensable.” So why the new biography? In his subtitle, Arnold-Forster identifies his book as “an intellectual biography.” He will concentrate on Lippmann’s writing and ideas, not his life per se—although Lippmann’s life was certainly consumed by writing and ideas.

Walter Lippmann was a New Yorker, born in 1889. His family was German-Jewish and well-off. Lippmann entered Harvard at 16 and graduated in three years. He stayed on for a fourth, to assist Professor George Santayana. Arnold-Forster quotes a freshman essay titled “Who I Am and Why I Came to Harvard.” Young Lippmann wrote, “I have always taken a deep interest in the great issues of the day.” He always would.

It is interesting to know that this young man—whose name would become a byword for journalism, of the most exalted kind—failed to land a spot on the undergraduate newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. It could not have helped to be Jewish, as Ronald Steel notes in his book.

In the first sentence of his own book, Arnold-Forster says, “Few writers had more influence on American politics in the twentieth century than Walter Lippmann.” That is a normal sentence—hedging, cautious, unobjectionable—that any of us might have written. But consider: Did any writer have more influence on the politics of the previous century? H. L. Mencken? William F. Buckley Jr.? Who? An equally safe sentence, I think, would be, “Few writers had as much influence on American politics …”

When Lippmann died in 1974, the Crimson’s obituary said that he was widely regarded as “the dean of 20th-century American journalism.” He had a career “that saw him attain almost the status of an oracle in the course of publishing over 4,000 columns.”

In a somewhat mystical but apt sentence, Arnold-Forster says that Lippmann “has an omnipresence but is hard to place.” He goes on to say that Lippmann “appears in so many contexts and moments that he can seem chronically peripatetic and inconsistent, always changing his mind, moving on elsewhere and everywhere.”

Several years ago, I heard Richard Brookhiser, the journalist and historian, make a point: The word “day” is embedded in “journalism” (jour). In a sense, “daily journalism” is a redundancy. (So is “daily diary,” in light of día.) You take note of what seems most important or truest on that day. As the times shift, you may well too, while retaining a general outlook.

“For all of his networked globetrotting,” writes Arnold-Forster, “Lippmann spent most of his days sitting at his desk, reading a book or writing a column.” I think of what George F. Will, the veteran columnist, told me in a podcast last year: “If someone said, ‘What do you do, Mr. Will?,’ I’d say, ‘I’m a writer,’ but actually I’m a reader. I have to read four or five hours a day—journalism, books, etc.—to get the material.”

Walter Lippmann worked “at the intersection of daily news and democratic theory,” says Arnold-Forster. “He was not a system-building philosopher, nor an ur-liberal archetype, but a political writer engaged in controversies with his contemporaries.” This makes me think of Bill Buckley’s habitual title for a speech. He was often booked far in advance. The title of his speech was “Reflections on Current Contentions,” allowing him to talk about whatever was in the air.

Arnold-Forster says that Lippmann’s career was “a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics.” So was Buckley’s; so has Will’s been. You can find inconsistencies in the writings of all of these men, and certainly different emphases, depending on the day, or the era. This is only natural.

Walter Lippmann believed that good journalism was essential to liberal democracy. Bad journalism went hand in hand with bad politics and bad government.

Lippmann had a huge audience, with his syndicated newspaper column, and various articles in Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, Reader’s Digest, etc. His books were available through the Book-of-the-Month Club. This landscape was described, and scorned, as “middlebrow.” Where I sit, however, that landscape seems to me of a higher brow: serious, decent. Enviably so.

I got a kick out of a tidbit in Arnold-Forster’s book, and you may, too. In the 1960s, Lippmann began appearing on CBS television for annual interviews. He had a proviso, though: no ads for dog food or deodorant. Such ads, apparently, were gauche. (In her 1997 autobiography, Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, would write that Lippmann was “very intelligent” but also “a prima donna.”)

What was Lippmann, politically? Arnold-Forster writes that his subject “took the well-trodden path from young liberal socialist to old conservative liberal.” Arnold-Forster’s final chapter is titled “American Conservative Liberal.” Nehru, speaking in his country’s parliament, called Lippmann “an American conservative liberal.” (It says something about Lippmann’s importance that the prime minister of India was engaging with him.)

In a 1955 book—The Public Philosophy—Lippmann “suggested that liberalism had lost touch with ‘man’s fallen nature.’” (I have quoted Arnold-Forster, quoting Lippmann.) That is, of course, a common conservative critique of a liberalism of a certain kind.

When it came to foreign affairs, Lippmann was—depending on the day, depending on the emphasis—an “internationalist,” a “realist,” an “interventionist,” a “non-interventionist.” In other words, he was not a dope. Nor was he a dogmatist. By and large, he dealt with the world as it was, and the world was messy, as usual.

It was communism and fascism, writes Arnold-Forster, that pushed Lippmann into constitutionalism—that landed him on constitutionalism as the guardian of liberty. Here is a healthy passage from the new biography:

He argued in 1934 that, both in Russia and in Germany, the rulers of the state were “subject to no law. There are no customs, contracts, constitutions, or ancient usages which limit them.” He claimed in contrast that law ruled in America, where the Constitution was “undoubtedly the greatest attempt ever made consciously by men to render popular rule safe for the nation as a whole, the local community, and the individual.” Celebrations of the American Constitution became routine aspects of Lippmann’s political writing in the 1930s. What he wanted to construct were clear divisions between rule-of-law liberalism and lawless totalitarianism.

Some of this biography seems ripped from today’s headlines, as issues perdue. What is the interest of the United States in the security of Europe? How to contain, or counter, the expansionists in the Kremlin? On the domestic front, what are the limits of free speech, if there are any? Are there “real Americans” and a “real America,” as opposed to false ones?

Arnold-Forster writes that, after the 1960 presidential election, in which Kennedy beat Nixon by a hair, “Lippmann stressed that democratic life depended on accepting election results.” In 1968, that overheated year, Lippmann himself wrote, “We are suffering not from communism and radicalism but from nihilism.” In 1971, Lippmann worried about extreme polarization: “a party system in which the two parties were diametrically opposed.” You could even get a “civil war.”

If you will indulge a self-reference, I wrote, some years ago, a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the pleasures of writing this history is that it allowed you, or me, to survey the twentieth century. A biography of Lippmann allows you to do the same (to a large degree). Tom Arnold-Forster has done very well with his.

I have complaints, of course. He paints Bill Buckley as a McCarthyite, a racist, and an illiberal. (Let me disclose that WFB was a beloved friend of mine.) Left and Right like to do this: freeze Bill in the early stages of his career, not allowing for the last 40 years of his busy, evolving, magnificent life. At the same time, Arnold-Forster quotes Noam Chomsky uncritically. Of the many questions one could ask, here’s one: Who was wiser about the Khmer Rouge? Buckley or Chomsky?

Nevertheless, this new biography is a pleasure for anyone interested in—well, just about anything, where politics and history are concerned.

Walter Lippmann believed that good journalism—sound journalism, honest journalism—was essential to liberal democracy. Bad journalism went hand in hand with bad politics and bad government. Talking about journalists, Lippmann said, “We do what every sovereign citizen is supposed to do but has not the time or the interest to do.” And “that is no mean calling.”

What is the future of DEI? Does it have at least some laudable goals, and are there better ways to achieve them? What do the American people really want when it comes to tolerance, inclusion, and discrimination law? The Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen discusses all these questions and more with host James Patterson in this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Related Links

“Fight Bias and Legalize Meritocracy,” by Robert VerBruggen

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. Our guest today is Mr. Robert VerBruggen. He is a fellow at Manhattan Institute, where he provides policy research, writes for City Journal, and contributes to special projects and initiatives in the president’s office. And he has served as a deputy managing editor at National Review, managing editor at the American Conservative, and editor at RealClear Policy. And finally, as an assistant book editor at the Washington Times, he publishes on a number of issues and was the 2005 winner of the Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Award. That’s great. And today we’ll be talking about his study at Manhattan Institute titled, “Fight Bias and Legalized Meritocracy, A Unifying Vision for Anti-Discrimination Law.” Mr. VerBruggen, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Robert VerBruggen (01:38):

Great to be here.

James Patterson (01:39):

Let me give you two accounts of DEI and you tell me where they go wrong and maybe what half-truths they get. So the first is that DEI, which for those six or seven people listening to this podcast who don’t know, stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, is mandatory for all hiring practices because of the permanently structured white supremacy in American institutions. And without it, we would experience the same levels of discrimination found, say in Jim Crow America. That’s the first version of the story, usually understood to be on the left. And the second version of the story is that DEI policies are a form of counter-discrimination designed to elevate minorities, otherwise incapable of achieving excellence in a competitive environment, and thereby exposing people to all kinds of forms of incompetence. These are the two extremes. It’s more of the right-wing extreme, and your study seems to say, look, let’s take this much more seriously and look at the evidence. What does the evidence tell us about these two positions?

Robert VerBruggen (02:54):

Well, sure, I think the beautiful and ugly thing about the term DEI is that it’s very vague. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think some people really do mean it just to refer to the concept of being open to people, being inclusive, being willing to hire and consider candidates from all different walks of life, and making efforts to make sure that you’re not overlooking people because of where they come from or who they are. And that’s, of course, entirely laudable, but I think it’s also a euphemism for, as you might say, counter-discrimination, reverse discrimination, whatever you want to call that, discrimination against sort of overrepresented groups or higher performing groups in an effort to hit the correct numbers that you think that a company or a student body should have. And I think that that’s where it runs into problems legally. I think there’s been a lot that’s been going on under the banner of DEI that has always been illegal, and I think that there’s a lot of gray area as well that as what the Trump administration is doing plays out. And as courts hear more of these cases, I think we’re going to have to resolve a lot of that gray area in terms of what exactly is allowed and what is not allowed in these sorts of areas.

James Patterson (04:06):

So where does the term DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, come from? Does it have the same provenance as something like affirmative action? Does it grow out of affirmative action, or is it its own thing?

Robert VerBruggen (04:19):

I mean, I think it’s largely used in the same context as affirmative action. We talk about DEI and wokeness. These are sort of new terms or they’re new debates that we’re having, but in a lot of ways, they really just echo the debates about racial preferences and affirmative action that we’ve been having for 50 years or more. So I think in a lot of ways, they refer to ways of trying to diversify a company or a student body typically by taking race into account. And that’s also a problem that we have with the term affirmative action. The original use of it is just take affirmative action to make sure that you’re being fair and not discriminating by race. And it ends up being a euphemism for discriminating by race to get the numbers that you’re trying to get. And I think it’s a similar sort of thing with DEI where it’s just vague enough that a lot of people hear it and think, oh, that sounds nice, but it also turns out to be sort of a cover for some discriminatory and often illegal behavior.

James Patterson (05:07):

So the policy of DEI, at least as I understand it, is kind of a strange thing to emerge, given that as you put in your study, it actually has its origins originally in an attempt to establish a colorblind law. So how is it that we go from the colorblind objectives of, say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into at least as it’s been abused, a DEI that creates preferences almost to the point of quotas?

Robert VerBruggen (05:45):

Yeah. What the original civil rights laws reflected was sort of a consensus in America at that time that things had gone very, very badly under Jim Crow and it was not fair for African Americans to be treated the way they’re being treated and to basically ban discrimination by race. And these were written in very colorblind terms, and it was not only discrimination against certain groups was illegal, and it was okay to discriminate against other groups. It was just colorblind language that said, you’re not allowed to discriminate. But there’s always been a vocal minority in the US, and this is a debate that plenty of other countries have, as well, something Thomas Sowell has written a lot about, there’s always the vocal minority that says, no, we should be making more affirmative efforts. We should be discriminating in favor of the population that’s been discriminated against in the past. And that has very rarely actually been written into the law. It’s been very rare that Congress has put colorblind language into the statute books, but what’s been more common to happen is that courts and executive agencies blur the lines of the law and open the door that you see that with affirmative action in higher education. You see that with affirmative action plans in hiring where essentially courts and executive agencies blessed behavior that was pretty clearly not supposed to be happening under the Civil Rights Act.

James Patterson (07:01):

So let’s look at some of those laws, or at least what we might consider the sort of the big moments in anti-discrimination. What are they, and maybe how did judicial rulings or bureaucratic enforcement change?

Robert VerBruggen (07:20):

One of the bigger examples is affirmative action in higher education. The text of the Civil Rights Act says basically you’re not allowed to be denied participation in something that’s funded by the government, which is pretty much all colleges, public and private, on the basis of race. A couple decades or a decade and a half or so later, the Bakke decision comes along and says, well, you can consider race as one factor among many to get the educational benefits of diversity despite the very clear language of the statute that’s on the books. And also the constitutional issue of, especially for public colleges, denying equal protection under the law. It basically says it’s okay to do that. In employment law, you have a few different developments. One is the Griggs decision, which says that the original law had basically said you’re not allowed to intentionally make a test to give to your employees that’s designed to discriminate to weed out certain racial groups.

(08:15):

But you’re protected if you want to use tests to find the best employees. And the Griggs decision comes along and says, actually, if the test has a disparate impact, we’re going to hold you to a higher standard. We’re going to make you basically presumptively liable for discrimination for using that test unless you can defend it in court with pretty stringent rules and also with affirmative action. In private employment, you have the Weber and Johnson decisions which say, okay, if you’re a private company and you think you have a traditionally segregated job line, you can take race into account. If you have an affirmative action plan documenting what you’re doing, you can have an affirmative action plan to take race into account to some limited extent. And these are all things that are just not in the statutes. These are things that courts later kind of allowed out of the sympathy, frankly, with that vocal minority that wanted to do something that hadn’t been enacted in law.

James Patterson (09:11):

Yeah, there was a kind of optimism during the 1960s that with correct legislation and maybe with some kind of federal assistance, there would be a rapid evening out of outcomes. And when these don’t surface, there’s increasingly a justification for interventions that come from the courts. The one that seems to be most important, at least in beginning the process, is the Griggs decision in disparate impact. What does that mean?

Robert VerBruggen (09:46):

Basically, disparate impact means that in the case of an employment test (which is just kind of the textbook example of disparate impact, though the ruling applies to other selection mechanisms too) if you give people a test for the job and one racial group passes it at a significantly higher rate than another racial group that is presumed to be discriminatory, and the employer then has the burden of defending the test, showing that it’s adequately job related, showing that it’s validated. And there’s a whole very technical process that tends to play out in those kinds of cases called a Battle of the Experts, where each side hires testing experts to defend and criticize the test at a very technical level. So it basically says that if you’re going to use tests that have any kind of disparity, they have to be very rigorously vetted, and if you get challenged on them, the judge has to agree with you that they’re appropriate for the job.

James Patterson (10:37):

And the report on the area of employment, it says by the end of the 1970s, the Supreme Court had thrown out a requirement that Alabama prison guards be at least 5’2″ and 120 pounds, and yet allowed women to be outright excluded from certain roles in maximum security prisons owing to sexual assault fears. In the same decade an appeals court threw out a company’s categorical policy of refusing to hire those with criminal records. But the Supreme Court allowed New York’s transit system to refuse to hire addicts on methadone treatment without making case-by-case distinctions among applicants and job roles. The evaluation of written tests came to involve fact-intensive nitpicking of exactly what skills a test measured. I don’t know about you, if I were five one and 115 pounds, I would definitely not apply for a job as a prison guard, but what explains this battle of the experts? There’s a real aversion to being hauled into court and suddenly having to hire a firm or keep on staff a certain amount of legal expertise.

Robert VerBruggen (11:46):

Exactly. It’s not just, you can’t just say, okay, look, I’m using this test in good faith. There’s no evidence that I chose it to a certain racial impact. If you look at the test, I can explain to you why the questions on the test relate to things that I want my employees to know. It’s this really intensive process that stems from the EEOC putting out, they’re called the uniform guidelines. It’s a really long document on testing procedures that does not have the force of law, but that courts have really looked to over the years, and it’s just sort of an additional layer of requirement on employers that want to use tests. So when you use a test, you’re taking the risk of being held into court, and even if it’s a good test, you’re going to have to defend it. You’re going to have to go through the expense of defending it, and you’re going to have to hope that the legal process ultimately agrees with you that the test is a good one. So it’s basically an additional layer of risk that people take on when they try to screen their employees.

James Patterson (12:40):

We have a pretty lengthy history in the United States of what’s called redlining, which were efforts of cities or planners somehow to create housing arrangements in cities that would keep African-Americans out of certain neighborhoods. Do we find DEI as a policy impacting this sort of thing and has it been successful?

Robert VerBruggen (13:04):

Yeah, I mean, I went into the history of housing discrimination a little bit in the report. That’s an area where there’s been, I think, a lot of progress in a lot of different ways. One exception is that real estate agents do in more recent papers, still seem to just steer people to kind of like neighborhoods. And it not clear the extent to which that is because they’re trying to preserve discrimination, which I think is probably not a major motive these days, or if they’ve come to realize that if you have a majority white neighborhood, a majority black neighborhood, people of that race are going to be more likely to rent there. But that is illegal. You’re not allowed to steer people. So yeah, I think that’s an ongoing concern that there has been discrimination in real estate. There are laws to prevent that I think are good laws. And I think there are still, I think the audit studies do show that there are certain ways that those are still being violated, but there’s also been immense progress. There’s been a pretty big drop in a lot of kinds of bad behavior, like telling people that homes or apartments aren’t available when they are, that sort of thing.

James Patterson (14:01):

Earlier you mentioned the Bakke decision and its impact on higher education. Bakke comes down in 1978. What is this case and to what extent is it still controlling on issues of admissions to higher educational institutions?

Robert VerBruggen (14:19):

Sure. Yeah. I guess I forgot to finish my thought. It was the beginning of a very wishy-washy period in jurisprudence over the affirmative action issue. So it was basically, well, you can kind of do it, but you can’t have a quota. You can consider it to increase diversity, but you can’t do it, for example, in the name of social justice. It has to be that you’re trying to get the educational benefits of diversity. And then of course, as the Supreme Court turned back to the right, over the past few years we’ve had the SFFA decision that essentially overruled it without quite coming out and saying that it was overruling. It said that, no, you don’t get this extra sort of broad discretion to discriminate by race just because you’re a college.

James Patterson (15:03):

Great. And an area that, I guess, doesn’t occur to me that often because I’m not in this world, but there’s a fair amount of discrimination or history of discrimination in government contracting. And so maybe explain to an audience that may not know much about this, why this matters and what happened with it.

Robert VerBruggen (15:27):

Sure. Yeah. I mean, over the past 50 years or so, there’s been a number of developments under Nixon going back to Nixon and the Philadelphia plan and a little bit even before that where basically you had an executive order urging sort of diversity in government contracting and especially trying to ensure that African-Americans have equal access to those jobs. But it bled over into basically pretty intensive pressure on government contractors to balance their workforce in that way. And in one of the big developments of the Trump administration is that he rescinded the executive order from the Johnson administration that undergirds a lot of that. So we will see kind of going forward how well that works and how much that kind of trickles down to other layers of government because it’s not just the federal government that does this with government contracting.

James Patterson (16:17):

Yeah, and each of these stories has, I mean, there’s little distinctions and differences in them but they each seem to have the same sort of narrative, which is in the beginning there’s just reprehensible amounts of racial discrimination, especially targeted at black Americans. And then there are interventions in the law attempting to establish colorblindness. There is not the same degree of evening out that everyone had anticipated, and there’s still, less and less so, but there remains entrenched opposition to the law, that justifies greater interventions that haven’t really been repealed except maybe in the case of higher education in the SFFA case you mentioned earlier. But all the same remain sort of around and justifying increasing interventions despite the fact that the motivation of discrimination isn’t really around anymore. And this gets us to a section of the report called “Bigotry Falls, Disparities Persist.” So what are these disparities persisting, and what significance should we attribute then to failures of policy?

Robert VerBruggen (17:29):

Sure. I mean, one of the things I show is that if you look at surveys of whites asking things like, would you object if a relative of yours married someone from a different race? Do you think that people have a right to segregated neighborhoods? Would you vote for a black president if your party nominated one? When those sorts of questions that get at basically, are you a racist? You see a very steep drop off going back to the 1970s. So you’ve had, at least in terms of people being openly willing to admit to a survey taker that they’re racist, you’ve had a pretty drastic change in white attitudes essentially. And you have also seen some other things like audit studies showing that discrimination in places like the labor market may have fallen off as well, but you still see very deep inequalities in terms of things like school outcomes and things like wages, especially the male wage gap is very significant as I talk about in the report.

(18:28):

And that’s been just extremely frustrating. I think for everybody that was hoping for these things to improve and for America to take steps forward from its past that we haven’t seen these concrete outcomes equalize nearly as much as we wanted to. And I think what you see when you dig into the data, which I do a bit in that section and into the studies that have been done on it, is that the effect of intentional discrimination may not be gone, but it’s lessened over the past since the 1950s, 1960s. But instead, you still have these academic gaps and you also have, for example, in the labor market, you have the labor market putting a lot more value on education and skills where those gaps are still quite severe. So I think that there’s a really important discussion to be had around yes, continuing to fight the discrimination that still exists. And I have a section on audit studies in the report that goes into that. I do think that there is some level of discrimination that still happens in places like the labor market and the housing market, but I think we also need to work on things like human capital, making sure that education is sound from the early years and also that people have access to opportunity to apply the skills that they’re able to develop.

James Patterson (19:41):

Yeah, this section of the report really gets into some pretty technical data that you do a very good job of explaining for people that maybe aren’t as fluent in “statisticalese.” That’s not something some of us have to do in our daily jobs. What are some of the limitations of these studies? I see here, for example, formally studying the links among race cognitive skills, educational attainment and income has proved surprisingly difficult owing to certain patterns in the data and technical limitations. Maybe say more about what the problem is there.

Robert VerBruggen (20:22):

Sure. I mean, well, one interesting thing is that there’ve been some studies where you want to statistically control for things like test scores, you want to statistically control for educational attainment. And one of the weirder things is that because there’s such a big test score gap, African-Americans with a given test score actually get more education than whites with that same test score. So basically the test score gap is bigger than the educational gap in that sense. So you get very different results depending on whether you control for one or both. And there’s been a lot of debate in the literature about that. And one of the odder things is that in some analyses, you actually reduce the wage gap more if you just control for test scores as opposed to controlling for test scores and education level. So it’s a sort of conundrum of, okay, what is this actually telling us? How are we supposed to interpret this?

James Patterson (21:10):

And in some of these studies, I’m saying this almost as though I know this for certain, but maybe I should pose it as a question, but in some cases you’re dealing with sample sizes that are sufficiently small that where you control for population, you might end up with pretty few cases making it hard to make inferences. Is that a problem?

Robert VerBruggen (21:28):

It depends what dataset you’re using. If you’re using census data, those data tend to be really big. There are also some longitudinal studies like the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that’s much smaller. You’re going to have sample sizes in a few thousand depending on how you strain out the cases you don’t want to analyze or which variables you’re looking at. But yeah, sample size can be an issue in some of these studies more than others.

James Patterson (21:52):

Well, that’s good to know that a lot of it’s done by census. This isn’t an area where I do any kind of empirical work, so I need to defer to the expert here. One of the things that emerges as a prominent study in this section is one where Patrick Klein and two authors send out 83,000 fake applications to jobs across the country offered by 108 major employers and check to see which received responses. This is a pretty incredible amount of work. Tell me about the results of the surveys and what bearing they have on the sort of broader discussion of DEI today.

Robert VerBruggen (22:33):

Sure. I mean, one thing I’ve been writing about for a while and pressuring people on the left to think more about is this sort of study, it’s called an audit study. The idea is that you send out otherwise similar applicants to do things like apply for jobs. What they did in this study is they sent out, you said 83,000 fake applications, and basically looked to see if the application had a stereotypically white or black name, did that affect whether you got a call back? And I’ve got the numbers here, about 25 percent of the white applicants were contacted within 30 days versus 23 percent of black applicants. So you have, it’s sort of an interesting disparity because on the one hand, it doesn’t sound that big, 23 versus 25. Basically, if you send out a hundred applications, it’s only a difference of two applications getting a response, but that’s basically a 10 percent gap for every 10 successful applications, you’re only getting nine if you’re from the disfavored racial group.

(23:31):

And of course, because this is just one aspect of the hiring process, it raises the question of, okay, if they’re discriminating at this level, what else is going on elsewhere in that process? And I think it’s important to note that when I say that I’m skeptical of DEI, I’m skeptical of reverse discrimination, that doesn’t mean we should lose sight of the fact that regular old discrimination is still a factor and it still matters and it’s still something that we do need to enforce and think about.

James Patterson (24:03):

Yeah, that’s right. There is this sort of persistence in this study to refuse to go to one of these chief narratives, but to stick with the data. That’s what makes it so valuable. I skipped over something I meant to ask you about, which is that there’s been this, especially on the right, some amount of discussion about the impact of family formation on success rates, especially for black men. What if any kind of impact could policy have on those kinds of outcomes?

Robert VerBruggen (24:36):

Yeah, that is kind of the million-dollar question. I’ve been thinking about family policy for a long time. I think there are certain things on the margins that matter. There are, for example, safety net programs that discourage marriage by taking benefits away when somebody gets married, things like that. I think that’s really important. That’s something we should be thinking about. But when you have a gap as big as the gap that we see in family formation in married parenthood, is any realistic government policy going to close that gap completely? I don’t know that it can. And of course, we’ve seen over the past 50 years, what started out with the Moynihan report is a crisis that was focused among black Americans. Instead of closing the gap and fixing it, it’s gotten worse over the years until fairly recently. And also, white illegitimacy rates have gone up, too. So that doesn’t seem to be something that we’re actually making too much progress on.

James Patterson (25:30):

So I wanted to ask you about this one last issue before moving on to the legal landscape, and I’m very curious about this because it’s one that I’ve heard people complain about when describing discrimination, which is the issue of stereotypically black names. Is this still in the Kline study?

Robert VerBruggen (25:52):

Sure, yeah. Yeah. That’s something that they address. They find that the particular name didn’t seem to make too much of a difference beyond the race of it. But there is a lot of research, and I do discuss this a bit in the report, suggesting that different names have different class connotations in addition to having different racial connotations. So there is that question about how much are you measuring class versus measuring race? One of the interesting things I found when I started to dig into this and that I mentioned in the report is a study finding that when there was a survey study about these class connotations and a fair number of people who had stereotyped a black name as being poor, when asked why they did that, they said, well, I know that there’s this income cap and it’s a black name, so I assume they were poor for that reason. So it’s not as clear cut as I think some of the critics resorting to that argument would like it to be. And also, I’m just not sure how good we should feel about it if employers discriminate against blacks but also discriminate against poor white people. It’s certainly worth teasing out the extent to which that’s what’s going on, but I’m not really sure that that’s anything good if that is what’s going on.

James Patterson (27:00):

Right, right. It’s one of these factors that–and I’m going to have a baby soon–it’s one of these things where you don’t realize that the name might actually affect trajectory, but apparently that is an issue now that I have to consider. So when we get to the changing legal landscape, you make a very important distinction between constitutional and statutory precedents, which are more important for DEI issues today.

Robert VerBruggen (27:32):

I think they’re equally important because I think we have an equal protection clause in the Constitution that’s been hugely important in a lot of these issues. The SFFA decision and the Bakke decision relied on equal protection despite the fact that the statute actually has much clearer language. The Bakke decision basically just assumed that the statute was meant to put into effect the equal protection clause despite the fact that it used completely different language. And the SFFA decision said, well, okay then, I guess we’ll decide this one on the equal protection clause. But the reason that I think that distinction is so important is that several of the originalist, or right-leaning, or however you want to put it, judges on the court are extremely reluctant to mess with statutory precedent. They have this sort of assumption or theory where if the Supreme Court screws up a statute, Congress can just pass it and fix it.

(28:24):

Whereas if the Supreme Court messes up the Constitution, it’s much, much harder to pass a constitutional amendment. That’s true as far as it goes, but I’m not really a fan of that way of thinking. I don’t think that the justices adhering to that are going to listen to this podcast and change their mind because of me, but I’m doing what I can on that. I think the problem is that passing a law through Congress requires both houses of Congress and the President all to agree to the same thing. And in the Senate, you might even need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. So if Congress comes to a specific compromise and then the Supreme Court misinterprets that and says it means something else, they might not have the votes to turn that back to what the original compromise was. If any one of those decision makers either doesn’t think it’s worth the effort to put into changing the law or actually prefers that one because this was a compromise, if one part of that compromise actually prefers what the Supreme Court says to what they actually agreed to, they have no incentive to change that back.

(29:20):

So I think this sort of super deference to statutory precedents is a problem, but it’s just sort of a reality of the court that when you’re trying to overcome bad statutory precedents made in the past over issues like employment, affirmative action, you’re going to face a little more of an uphill climb than you do with something like SFFA where you can make your case to the originalist judges and they’re going to take the issue on and come to the conclusion they think is right without being excessively deferential to what was said incorrectly in the past.

James Patterson (29:53):

And I hope the listeners will forgive my academic bias here, but I have to ask just for my own sake. You have here some language here, it says, early signs indicate mixed compliance with the SFFA decision. The first class was admitted after the ruling revealed the kind of substantial demographic changes that one might’ve expected at others, there was virtually no change. Do you think we’re going to have to see more judicial interventions in the future?

Robert VerBruggen (30:28):

Yeah, I think it is actually very difficult to understand what’s going on in a lot of these schools. Basically, the Supreme Court said that you can’t use race as a factor. It didn’t say that you have to remove race from your admissions process and leave everything else exactly the same. Obviously if you were using race heavily before and you stopped using it, you’re going to see a big demographic change. But the more you change other things, the more you might be able to mitigate that demographic change. And the courts seem inclined to let people do that sort of thing, even if they are doing it for the specific purpose of preserving some kind of diversity. Even some of the briefs in the SFFA case from the plaintiffs were basically arguing that schools could preserve their diversity by moving to things like class-based affirmative action and things like that.

(31:11):

So I think it’s going to be very difficult to figure out which ones of these are doing things that are permissible and which one of these are basically still considering race even though told not to. And also where the courts are going to draw the line between what’s permissible and what’s not, because I think there’s a big gray area of policies that colleges may adopt specifically for the racial effects that probably would not be allowed in other contexts. For example, if you were trying to discriminate against black people or Hispanics, I don’t think that kind of thing would be allowed, to deliberately design your process to minimize their presence. But I think that the courts do seem pretty deferential to saying, hey, colleges, you can do things like class-based affirmative action. You can tweak those preferences with diversity in mind a bit. You just can’t use race directly. And I think finding out where to draw that line is going to be an interesting battle in the years to come.

James Patterson (32:06):

Yeah, that is, and I’m sure it’s going to be difficult to make everyone happy with any kind of result. There are some smaller programs you mentioned here and you highlight a COVID-era program targeting debt relief to black farmers and how it was replaced by a sort of thinly veiled, maybe more constitutionally compliant version. Is this a regular event in legislation where there are these handouts based around identity

Robert VerBruggen (32:40):

That has been much more unusual. As I lay out kind of earlier in the report, to me, the main thrust of the history is that Congress passes colorblind laws, and then the courts go back on it. Here, you had something that was kind of interestingly the reverse. You had big democratic majorities, and you had this sort of racial justice moment where people were very inclined to accept that sort of thing, so that Congress actually passed it and the Supreme Court rejected it, and then Congress tweaked it up a bit more. So I feel like that was part of the DEI fervor that we saw circa 2020, whether that’s over for good or whether we’ll see it again is an open question.

James Patterson (33:19):

Yeah. I have to wonder how many people were actually able to benefit from that. It’s a strange program, but I guess you never know what’s going to be in the law until you pass it. As a famous former speaker…

Robert VerBruggen (33:31):

You’ve got to pass it to know what’s in it.

James Patterson (33:36):

One of the worst things ever uttered about Congress. Also true, unfortunately, in many cases. In the midst of all of this, you reach a pretty poignant passage here. You say, “a backlash against double standards is a natural reaction, and racial favoritism raises additional issues as the nation diversifies and the horrors of the past decades recede. It’s one thing to grant preferences or special protections to black workers who attended segregated schools as children. It’s another to grant preferences to Hispanics over Asians for the foreseeable future, merely because the latter tend to perform better academically and economically. So while an identitarian equity-seeking approach has certainly shown itself to be a political possibility, it has proved neither popular nor desirable as an actual solution to the country’s racial problems.” Is this sort of where you land, or do you think this is where you think America’s landed?

Robert VerBruggen (34:38):

I think it’s both. I think any realistic solution going forward has to take public opinion into account. Even if I were to disagree with public opinion, I just think, you’re going to have all these people of different races living together and competing with each other for jobs and slots and colleges. You’re going to need a regime that has popular support, I think. So I think policy views need to be informed by public opinion to some extent in that regard. And I think the reality is that Americans never really made their peace with race-conscious policies. Even in some of the surveys, there does tend to be a racial gap, but even black support for a lot of these policies falls below 50 percent. So it’s a matter of, I think Americans generally want fair processes and equal opportunity and a fair chance to compete. They don’t want a thumb on the scale in terms of race. And I think public policy is going to have to sort of confront that reality and readjust, especially as we become more diverse. And as I said in that passage, as the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow fade into the past as we continue forward as a nation.

James Patterson (35:48):

Yeah, and in some ways there has to be some amount of time passing. We have a black justice on the Supreme Court who endured that life. He’s now 80, Justice Thomas. I’m reminded in that passage of something. I taught for a year as a visiting professor at Hampden-Sydney College. It’s a small men’s college in Central Virginia, and there was a generation of some white, some black men who were more or less illiterate because of massive resistance, in which they shut down the schools. They had illiterate parents, and so they were at that formative age when they would’ve learned to read at school, but never did.

Robert VerBruggen (36:32):

Yeah. It is a thing where each generation that passes, hopefully, those things go further into the past and are replaced by the better times that we’ve had more recently in that regard. So yeah, it’s one thing in 1970. It’s another thing in 1995. It’s another thing today, and it’ll be another thing 25 years from now, and my hope is that we will learn to find ways of focusing on concrete disadvantage and making sure that everybody has opportunity and everybody has a good education, and then letting people compete from there.

James Patterson (37:03):

So we’ve covered the courts a lot, but there’s a section on the future of DEI both in how the executive and the judicial branches will approach it. So maybe say a few things about what those predictions are.

Robert VerBruggen (37:19):

Sure. Well, essentially, what we’ve been seeing even since this report came out is obviously a huge push from the Trump administration. There’s obviously a very big Democratic Republican divide over this that we’ve seen in previous administrations, including the previous Trump administration. But this seems to me to be at an entirely different level. I mentioned that he rescinded the affirmative action and government contracting executive order. He’s reoriented the civil rights enforcement agencies so that they’re not relying on disparate impact theories anymore. He has started to take seriously reverse discrimination. It’s never actually been legal to put a job posting up that says you don’t want any white people to apply for it. But we’ve seen that, especially in colleges, that sort of thing. There’s a lot of things that have just been flagrantly illegal that they’re finally going after. And my hope is that this is going to be an even-handed enforcement effort.

(38:12):

If you look at the EEOC’s press releases on the cases that they’re talking about, there is still a mix of traditional civil rights enforcement, where you might have a case where black or Hispanic workers are being mistreated or being harassed at work, and they’re pursuing that still. I think that’s fantastic and it’s good, and also enforcing it even handedly, and obviously getting a lot more news coverage for going after DEI practices. So the executive branches have just seen this enormous reversal. I don’t know how much of that will last over the long run. Certainly, if a Democratic president is elected next, that’s all going to go out the window. I don’t know if that is going to create a precedent, kind of a standard for future Republicans to live up to or not.

James Patterson (38:56):

So in an area where you talk about the possibility of a grand bargain in Congress, which is interesting. I am happy to hear people still take Congress seriously as a source for changes. That was probably my favorite part of this was oh, Congress. But yeah, they can actually pass laws, not just make hits on cable news. So you say that the compromise could be, and there’s more to it than this, but the central nature of the compromise is effectively jettisoning disparate impact as a way of solving the problems created by the left, and in order to ameliorate the jettisoning of it, the government funding studies that would actually attempt to measure real discriminatory practices. And then throwing the book at those firms. Who are the buyers for this? Who are the people who might want this kind of law?

Robert VerBruggen (39:59):

Well, I mean, I think most people want an even-handed enforcement of anti-discrimination law. I think most people would think it’s unfair to say, you gave people a test and some people failed it more than others, so therefore we’re going to drag you into court and make you miserable. I think a lot of people would also think it’s unfair for there to be genuine discrimination where people are being rejected because of their race. I think that people who genuinely believe in colorblindness, I would say, are the buyers of that policy. And I would hope that it would be a little bit of a left-right compromise where the left gives up kind of this DEI approach to the issue that I think they’re paying some prices for in terms of public opinion anyhow, but the right admits, oh hey, there is still some discrimination out there. Why don’t we make more of an effort to address that? Why don’t we try to study it in a rigorous way and work with firms or sue firms as needed if they’re rejecting applicants because of their race?

James Patterson (40:53):

You’ve run into a problem, not you specifically, I’m sorry, Americans run into a problem where the two parties have to negotiate within their coalitions in their extremes. And on the right, you have people who are still racialists, right? And they’re self-discrediting in some degree, but still they manage to be a problem for people who want to take this on. And if you’re like me, and unfortunately, too online, you see a lot of their nonsense. But the left has more of an issue here because their more radical fringe, or their more radical advocates, are people who are, in some cases, actually employed as people in DEI organizations or activist groups. And so their checks are cashed on the basis of implementing these policies, whether it be for private firms that have brought in DEI executives or work as consultants. So this is essentially a hard sell for them, right?

Robert VerBruggen (41:57):

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the idea I put forth in the report is the centers of the two parties come together and pass a bipartisan bill, whereas increasingly what we’ve been seeing is that you have some fringe elements in both parties and increasing polarization among the electorate at large. So instead of passing a bipartisan bill, you wait until you have a trifecta and do what you can then. And I don’t think that’s a healthy way of making policy. And I think you’re obviously right if you look at that and say, that’s never going to happen because of this polarization and this refusal to deal with the center, I think. But yeah, I mean, I felt like it was helpful to at least outline in the report what it would look like if Congress did something that was consistent with public opinion, in my opinion, a fair policy.

James Patterson (42:44):

Oh, I didn’t mean to criticize you. I was, like I said, I was happy about it. I was just worried that it’s hard enough to make radical fringes of whatever side you’re on compliant, but when they’re paid not to be compliant, it’s even harder. So just as a final question here, how hard is it to make this very data-driven, complicated argument to people that are accustomed to dealing with DEI as either a term meant to imply an elevated racial consciousness or a form of racial favoritism?

Robert VerBruggen (43:25):

Yeah, I think one of the things I did in the report is try not to get too wrapped up in the term DEI. I mean, I certainly use it in the report. I don’t think you can talk about these issues without doing it. But honestly, after I work at the Manhattan Institute, we do a lot of work on DEI. And nonetheless, I still have trouble telling you exactly what it means, because as I said before, it means different things to different people. What I tried to do in this report is kind of connect the current DEI discussion, wokeness discussion, to all of these policy developments and all of these debates we’ve been having since the 1960s to some extent even before. And to talk about how anti-discrimination laws evolved and how it might move forward in a way that’s productive and that could gain the consent of the American people.

James Patterson (44:12):

So again, this study, “Fight Bias and Legalize Meritocracy: A Unifying Vision for Antidiscrimination Law.” Its author is our guest today, Robert VerBruggen of the Manhattan Institute. I hope everyone moves over there to take a look. We barely scratched the surface in terms of the material he covers, really, in 20 pages. I don’t think I could have done it. So thank you so much for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Robert VerBruggen:

Thank you for having me.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.

Zohran Mamdani, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist, set off a flurry of commentary after upsetting Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral race. He may be the beginning of a wave of radical socialist sentiment. While a certain amount of political physics seems to be at work, with the Trump-MAGA vibe-shift setting off an opposite reaction, we should look deeper at why there seems to be so much energy behind collectivism on both sides of the political aisle. Collectivism is a kind of “political junk food” that people crave in periods when they are particularly hungry for community and solidarity.

Collectivism means socializing things through force, rather than through voluntary community. Collectivism demands forced redistribution of wealth and uses this or that version of the “common” interest to undermine individual ownership, choice, and rights. In housing policy, collectivism takes the form of subsidizing home ownership through the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It also looks like NIMBYism preventing housing and land development for the sake of the “community.” 

It can give rise to specific policies; with Mamdani, for instance, it means explicit rent control. The public school system, especially its school lunch and after-school programs, forces everyone to contribute financially to feed and teach some people’s (the “community’s”) kids. And our national entitlement programs—Social Security and Medicare—require everyone to participate and, supposedly, benefit everyone.

The legacy of entitlement programs from FDR to LBJ has been largely framed in terms of charity, solidarity, and community. Many people on the left, and even some on the right, laud these programs for creating a social safety net and for contributing to the fabric of society. Some have hailed these collectivist programs for reducing poverty. 

But collectivism is not charity. Nor does it generate true solidarity. Nor does it constitute civil society. It pretends to be and to do all these things. Collectivism wears the mask of charity and camaraderie. Though collectivism always brings tragedy, pointing out past failures doesn’t fully unmask it. It continues to capture people’s imaginations because it feeds their desire to belong and to participate in community. Like a pastry or a box of french fries, it seems particularly appealing when citizens are ravenously hungry, though those may really be the moments when solid sustenance is most sorely needed.

Aristotle argued that human beings are political animals. We are social creatures that must live in communities. And as rational creatures, we must engage in governance and participation in those communities. Tocqueville noted how the genius of the United States was its unleashing of voluntary associations for any and every problem and goal. Robert Nisbet famously argued in Quest for Community that Americans’ ability to form new voluntary associations as old ones became obsolete has been severely hampered by the rapid growth in the size and scope of government.

Collectivism is junk food for the body politic and for civil society. It superficially and temporarily addresses issues of belonging and participation. In collectivism, we have an unhealthy civic diet. Instead of the leafy greens, lean proteins, and healthy fats of civic associations, under collectivism, the body politic feeds on the hydrogenated oils and sugary starches of forced socialization. We’ve replaced a largely (classical) Mediterranean diet with the modern American diet. 

Collectivism also masquerades as the means to living justly and generously. After all, are we not a noble and generous society because we spend billions of dollars to care for poor children with school lunches and the SNAP programs, to care for poor adults through welfare, to care for the sick through Medicaid, and to care for the elderly through social security and Medicare? Are we not “just” when we ensure every kid gets an education, or when we create government programs to “right” past racial or socioeconomic discrimination? 

The people campaigning and voting for Zohran Mamdani certainly believed they were advancing justice and generosity by backing a candidate who promised greater collectivism. For them, participation in political action to advance government social programs fulfills their obligation and desire to do something good for others and to belong to a “community.” Yet the collectivist policies proposed by Mamdani are deeply coercive and will undermine the health of civil society.

Getting rid of collectivist junk food is a start, but we also must reintroduce healthy food to the body politick again.

Consider again the young college graduates who drove Mamdani’s radical candidacy to electoral success. They engaged, for a time, in political advocacy. But what do they do after the sugar rush fades? Do they return to building their families? Most are not married, and those who are likely don’t have children. Do they return to building up their churches, synagogues, or mosques? Most are not part of these institutions. We can be forgiven for wondering whether they engage in real civic associations at all.

Collectivism also seems to answer many people’s cultural insecurities. On the political left, many wealthy, educated people feel deeply uneasy about their success and blessings, which they label “privilege.” And others, who have not done so well economically and are saddled with five, sometimes six, figure debt from their college years, resent the hand they were dealt and how they have played it. Collective government programs of welfare, redistribution, and rent control look like appealing solutions.

The political right has different cultural insecurities. Many worry about declining labor force participation among working-age men, about the opioid crisis, about falling birth rates and falling family formation, about declining manufacturing employment, and about reduced national defense capabilities. They suggest a naïve free trade, free market, and limited government philosophy allowed corporations to wipe out communities and their corresponding civic institutions, especially in middle America.

Collectivist policies seem to soothe these anxieties: restrictions on international trade, promotion of labor unions, large government spending programs, modifications to the tax code to engineer social results—all have been advocated by Republican officials over the last few years. Collectivist “solutions” also exist to address more general anxieties about corporate “bigness” and “foreign” competition.

Finally, collectivism is difficult to combat and to reverse because it builds a self-reinforcing cronyism around itself. As ever greater sums of tax dollars are used to fund collectivist endeavors, more people, companies, and industries stand to lose from reform and reduction of government spending. The outcry over DOGE when federal funds were frozen revealed just how extensively federal dollars reach into society—seemingly everywhere. 

Special interest lobbyists and everyday Americans are not likely to let their taxpayer-funded livelihood disappear without a fight. So what can advocates of freedom and civil society do to combat collectivism?

We can work to build private institutions that promote belonging, participation, and meaning. Religion remains the essential bulwark of civil society. Voluntarily associating with others to worship God and to do His will has animated many of the greatest and most widespread acts of charity and civilization-building. There are many hopeful signs on the religious front from rising church attendance among young men to a leveling off of the growth in “Nones.”

There has also been a sea change in the legal landscape for the free exercise of religion. People of faith can increasingly bring their religious beliefs and commitments into the public square. What’s more, the explosion of school choice programs across the country has broken the collectivist government school monopoly, thereby creating more space for educational innovation and decentralized voluntary institution-building.

We should relearn and reinvigorate the American penchant for forming voluntary associations. Conservatives ought to direct more of their attention to local politics rather than national politics. People have to choose to go to city council, school board, and county commissioner meetings. They have to be willing to join commissions and committees. This requires effort, thought, and deliberation. It can’t be done while binge-watching Netflix or taking long vacations. 

And, of course, combating collectivism involves kindly but firmly calling out collectivists’ misappropriation of justice, charity, and solidarity. Language matters, and we should not cede words to be redefined or allow people to throw inaccurate labels on things. We should make the case that collectivism replaces healthy voluntary association with unhealthy coercive socialization.

Finally, we can all practice cultivating wisdom and self-governance in our lives. Rightly ordered souls contribute to rightly ordered families, which contribute to rightly ordered societies. Getting rid of collectivist junk food is a start, but we also must reintroduce healthy food to the body politick again. And we need to train ourselves and others to find such food appetizing. 

That is the surest way to keep collectivism at bay.

The meaning of American conservatism is perhaps more hotly contested today than at any other point in the movement’s history. In his book, Religious Liberty: A Conservative Primer, John Wilsey argues on behalf of what he calls “aspirational conservatism”—an approach that stresses an allegiance to the permanent things over and against populist rage and postliberal ideology. For this symposium, Wilsey presents his case for aspirational conservatism in a new essay, and two Law & Liberty contributors review his book.

Why would anyone, of any age, want to be a conservative? When I was a younger man, my thoughts were mostly preoccupied with the future. I was a cash-poor Christian school teacher right out of college, and I thought about how my career would advance. I was a single man when I graduated from college, and I looked forward to meeting a girl who would become my wife. I thought about fatherhood, what it would be like to own a home, and all the sorts of things people think about when they first get started in life. Why would young people be attracted to conservatism?

Now that I am in my fifties, I think more about the past. Since I likely have more days behind me in this life than ahead of me, what is the use of aiming for lofty goals in my family or in my career? My children are wonderful, and they are on the cusp of leaving home and starting their own families and careers. I have reached all of my career goals, and have no further professional ambitions, other than to finish my teaching and writing career with dignity. If statistics have any reliability as a guide, I have maybe thirty more years of life left. When I am gone, the vicissitudes of life will no longer be my problem. Why care about conservatism?

Maybe I’d want to be a conservative because I want to see my political party in power. Or maybe I want to win arguments on social media, and my conservative politics can help me own the libs. Or perhaps I can only be happy when I’m miserable, particularly when things change. Apparently the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel is making some changes to their restaurant ambiance, decluttering and brightening up the dining rooms with white paint. Horrors!

What is the point of conservatism? Is conservatism only relevant for politics and partisanship? Is it only the neighborhood crank, the peevish uncle, or the lunatic on Facebook that has an interest in being a conservative? Or is being a conservative like being a traditionalist, resisting change for no better reason than, “we’ve always done it this way”?

In other words, can we think of any good reason to be a conservative other than politics, culture wars, or traditionalism?

Of course we can! When conservatism is only about tradition for tradition’s sake, maintaining the status quo, or fleeting partisan power mongering, it is repellent, not attractive; it is boorish, not classy; and it is misanthropic, not humanistic. In my recent book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, I attempt to lay out an alternative vision.

American conservatism is as old as the Republic, and that conservatism has always been far upstream of politics. Politics is important to conservatives, but cultivating the permanent things—the good, the true, and the beautiful—is of primary importance. Conservatism is a temperament, a disposition, an attitude that looks to conserve those things in humanity that make life worth living.

I also think of conservatism as aspirational. Conservatives do not value the permanent things like Aesop’s dog in the manger, or as a miser who stuffs a hoard of cash in the mattress. We seek the conservation of the permanent things for the sake of the freedom and flourishing of individuals, societies, and the nation. Aspirational conservatism aims for an ever-higher destiny for persons, guided by the best of American tradition, while always acknowledging human limitations, the inevitability of change, and the ubiquity of imperfection. In this way, conservatism was made for man, not man for conservatism.

Aspirational conservatism is a standpoint looking up to the eternal, behind to the past, around about in the present, and ahead to the future.

The best way to explain aspirational conservatism is to point to concrete examples, rather than rely on the theoretical or the abstract. The best man, the greatest man, I have ever known in my life is my grandfather. Jasper N. Dorsey (1913–90) was a husband, father, and grandfather, an Army officer in World War II, and a loyal citizen of his home state of Georgia. His career began in 1936 after graduation from the University of Georgia: he climbed telephone poles for the phone company, earning twenty-two dollars a week. He retired from AT&T in 1978 as CEO of all operations in Georgia. He spent his last years, 1978 to 1990, as a syndicated columnist for forty newspapers across Georgia. We called him “Papa.”

Papa was a devoted Christian, a conservative of the William F. Buckley school, and an indefatigable optimist. His optimism was not of the overbearing or annoying sort, nor was it based in naiveté. Papa came of age in the depression. He worked his way through college by finding employment at a rock quarry, loading rocks on wagons. His hands were so rough, he said, he could strike a match on his palm to light a cigarette. As a college senior in 1935, he came close to death from malaria; he and my grandmother lost their firstborn baby days after his birth; and they lost their twenty-one-year-old son, who died in a car accident driving home in a rainstorm.

Nevertheless, Papa was full of joie de vivre. He loved animals—dogs, cats, pigs, and mules. He loved food. He relished feasting on tomatoes, cucumbers, collard greens, turnip greens, okra, radishes, sweet potatoes, and all kinds of vegetables. He loved the thrill of bird hunting, loved the Georgia Bulldogs, loved Coca-Cola, loved his native town of Marietta. He loved his wife of fifty-one years, his daughter (my mother), and my brother and me. He read history, literature, and political philosophy, and especially enjoyed the ancient Greeks and Romans. His columns sparkled with his wit and eloquence on all these subjects, including politics and economics.

In his weekly columns, Papa overflowed with gratitude for people he loved and admired, places he’d had the opportunity to visit, and the inestimable pleasures of reading good books. “The best memories,” he wrote in 1985, “are often the simple things that are beyond price; a letter of encouragement, a book earned as a reward, a note of thanks for a small kindness, praise for an early achievement, or an award of recognition which required self-denial and hard effort.”

He loved books like no one person I have ever known. I have many of Papa’s books, and the notations in his old books are a lasting and living connection I have with him, even though he is gone. “With the marvelous world of books,” he wrote, “we own the magic carpet. We can visit all the ancient, exotic seas and shores. And everyone can go—rich and poor alike. As a child I was greatly blessed by my initiation into the world of books. With them, there is no boredom or monotony. The world is before you.”

Papa loved animals, and wrote about them in his columns. He wrote about the dog they owned when they bought their first house in 1947. He was a German Shepherd named Booger, who quickly “took possession of us and the neighborhood.” Booger was a fine guard dog against magazine salesmen and mailmen, and was always accompanied by a big Doberman, whom Papa called Booger’s “assistant dog.” “These two dogs loved children and neighbors but terrified deliverymen and peddlers.” He also wrote about a cat they named Mama. After acquiring Mama in 1968, she delivered thirty-four kittens by 1971! They brought a Schnauzer dog named Jackson into the home to keep Mama company, and she “raised him like a kitten.” Mama disappeared for over two weeks at one point, and we all thought she was dead. She limped back home having been run over by a car, but the vet fixed her up, and she lived till the ripe old age of fifteen, “doing all the cat work on a large lot, and without any help at all, except from her dog.” Papa closed that column with these memorable words: “If people ask for divine guidance, work real hard and are lucky, they can be as good as dogs and cats.”

To close the year 1986, Papa wrote his audience a benediction as they looked forward to a new year. His words summed up his whole personality and his love of life. He wrote,

I wish you old friends and new, to share your pleasures, to rejoice with you in your triumphs and to stand with you when life knocks you down. Friends to lift the ache of loneliness and dull the edge of grief; friends who’ll listen to your stories with a smile and laugh at your jokes, even when they aren’t funny.

I wish you a mind unafraid of mental adventure, a mind tickled by curiosity and awed by the wonder of small things; a heart that trusts beyond reason, even when faith is assailed by overwhelming odds.

I wish you work to do that has meaning and value both to you and others, work that challenges and inspires and offers the unique human thrill of accomplishment beyond expectation.

I wish you an abiding sense of humor, the power to see the ridiculous in life and in oneself, to be entertained rather than shamed by it. And the mysterious, wonderful ability to make others laugh.

I wish you a consuming desire for justice tempered by mercy, a sense of responsibility leavened by lightheartedness, the grace to forgive without rancor and the humility to be forgiven without resentment.

I wish you the capacity to see beauty not only in grandeur in great mountains, in great symphonies, but in small things in unexpected places, to hear music in common sounds, to see art in common sights and to retain forever a zesty appetite for the hors d’oeuvres of life; the stranger’s smile, the meaningful touch, the lingering sound, the scent of nostalgia, the piquant flavors of the stew of existence.

I wish you a new year filled with accomplishment, good health, and the warm relationships that so often come to those who embrace life instead of rejecting it.

Auntie Mame said it: Life is a banquet, and some poor fools insist on starving to death. God bless you and keep you in the hollow of His hand.

Papa was a great humanist, but his humanism was tempered by his strong belief in the reality of human sin and fallenness. He was a critic of anti-human ideologies and practices, such as abortion, the sexual revolution, corruption in government, disarmament in the face of the Soviet threat, and the trivialization of education. He could mock shady politicians with an acid wit, like when he wrote of the liberal Georgia senator Wyche Fowler that “he has all the qualities of a dog, except loyalty.” He was committed to the American tradition of self-government and individual liberty, to religious freedom and freedom of religious expression in the public square, and was a great defender of the unborn.

What is the point of being a conservative? Being a conservative means that, like Papa, you aspire to a greater destiny as a human person. Aspirational conservatism is looking to the best of American tradition in the interest of improvement as individuals, as families, as societies, and as a nation. Aspirational conservatism is not utopian, because it is realistic about human limitations. But limitations are not constraining, they are liberating. Freedom, for instance, is made true by the constraints provided by just law and order. Limitation of resources teaches us the value of patience, thrift, and stewardship for the benefit of ourselves and of those who would come after us. And limitation of mortality helps us remember that we will not live forever, so we must make the most of the opportunities we have before us in the present. We can then do what we love, but also come to love the things we have to do. Therein is the key to contentment in a life of limitations.

Americans have always been a people of aspiration. Christians are also people of aspiration. Christ commanded us to be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). We all know what it means to strive for improvement in our physical, moral, and spiritual lives. To be an aspirational conservative is to heed the call of Jewel the Unicorn in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle: “Come farther up, come farther in!”

My grandfather was the best and greatest man I have ever had the pleasure and privilege of knowing. If I could be half the man he was, I would consider my life a success. For my whole life, his life legacy has been goals for me to strive to attain, like a high peak on the horizon to navigate to, to scale and climb, and perhaps one day, to reach the summit. Though dead, he still speaks to me, and I aspire to model him, to steward his legacy, and to hand his legacy down to my children. They never knew him, and yet, I hope their lives are animated by his voice and example so that they may benefit from his generous, wise, and hopeful spirit.

Aspirational conservatism is a standpoint looking up to the eternal, behind to the past, around about in the present, and ahead to the future. Such a standpoint is not merely to enjoy the scenery, although the scenery is breathtaking. We are informed by such a standpoint as we seek for, find, and cultivate the good and the freedom of the human person.

The American Right seems intent on proving John Stuart Mill’s infamous remark that “conservatives are the stupid party.” Not only is the populist movement in Washington foundering because of infighting and general boorishness, its intellectual equivalent in the so-called “postliberal” movement also seems to be descending into anger and what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures.” Neither force seems to be the engine of cultural renewal that they promised to be.

John Wilsey’s new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, offers a beautiful alternative: a vision to which conservatives might genuinely aspire. At the very outset of the short treatise, he turns to the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville. And rightly so—with the possible exceptions of Publius and Abraham Lincoln, no other political thinker has more fully understood the deepest meaning of America. Wilsey highlights especially his contention that our civilization is the result of a productive tension between two spirits: the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.

At present, both of these spirits are at great risk of vanishing altogether. Religion has been in decline for quite some time, and what Robert Nisbet called the “omnicompetent state” continues to grow unabated. Wilsey’s book, however, is useful precisely because it can help us understand the civilizational resources we still possess. In this slim volume, he teaches us that we cannot conserve Permanent Things such as religion or liberty by seizing power or imposing our will on either our friends or our enemies—rather, their preservation depends above all on love.

Wilsey’s treatment of Tocqueville’s “two spirits” put me in mind of something similar that the Frenchman’s great mentor, Edmund Burke, once wrote. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Irishman too claimed that “all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.” To his conservative mind, it was the gentleman who could defend liberty by embodying everything that was best about his society.

For Burke, the gentleman enjoys a kind of “exalted freedom” through the cultivation of the moral imagination. The Western literary and philosophic tradition furnishes his mind and heart with certain chivalric concepts, perhaps most poetically described as the “unbought grace of life,” according to which he can govern himself. The French Revolution was dangerous insofar as it sought to banish this chivalry from public life and extinguish the glory of Europe. Burke hoped instead that the rule of the best men could be united with an elevation of sentiment which could prevent abuses of power.

Although to American ears this defense of the gentleman may sound hopelessly aristocratic, there was in fact something deeply democratic about Burke’s vision. “Without force, or opposition,” Burke wrote, the spirit of chivalry “subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.” The generous aristocracy Burke and his followers prized was founded, as a matter of fact, on the Christian doctrine of universal equality before God.

Wilsey’s own term for this way of life is “aspirational conservatism.” He holds—rightly—that this kind of vision can “defend the best of the American character” because it can help us see the fundamental harmony between religion and liberty. But it is unfortunately manifest that there is very little aspirational about the entity we call the “conservative movement” today. Despite their leaders’ endless claims that we are on the precipice of a “new golden age,” the dominant factions have proved time and time again that they are incapable of conserving anything at all. As Wilsey puts it, “The rightism of contemporary times is populist, obsessed with politics, and fueled by social-media-inspired outrage in a similar style as their leftist counterparts.” Reactionary rage is no substitute for genuine cultural renewal.

Secular ideologues have sought to degrade our perception of the divine, but the structure of American freedom itself revolts against their efforts.

Wilsey’s finest explication of this problem with contemporary rightism is his critique of Stephen Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism. Although he concedes Wolfe and other Christian nationalists are right to perceive growing forces of tyranny and immortality, he also explains that their attempt to construct an ideology to fight it is misguided at best. Whereas aspirational conservatives seek to preserve and enjoy the Western heritage, Christian nationalists and other right-wing ideologues instrumentalize and weaponize it.

At one point, Wilsey quotes Wolfe’s precise definition of Christian nationalism: “a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.” These kinds of hyper-logical systems emerging right-wing ideologues construct tend to reduce religion into a mere weapon to beat back modernity. Theirs is a deeply rationalistic approach to politics, which undermines sentiments at the heart of the institutions they claim to be defending.

And that is precisely why Wilsey criticizes it. Rather than upholding the aspirational conservatism at the heart of American civilization, Wolfe and others attempting to create a rightist ideology embrace the same kind of totalitarian impulses that our country stood against in the twentieth century. They may profess to love “the nation” as an abstract category, but they are hardly patriots who love our republic’s particular history or principles—that kind of love is too complicated to withstand their totalizing vision. Christian nationalists have far more in common with philodoxers and ideologues such as Hegel and Marx than statesmen and philosophers such as Lincoln or Plato. As Wilsey writes, “There is not much daylight between Wolfe’s counterrevolutionary method of statecraft and leftist revolutionary models.”

The errors of ideology also explain why the contemporary right has become so vulgar and ungentlemanly. Content to play in the realm of what Richard Weaver called “god-terms and devil-terms,” they utterly lack the virtue of humility Burke saw as essential to civilized life. Their demagoguery may, on occasion, secure them a little temporary power in elections—but it does not inspire the genuine conversion of the heart needed to turn enemies into friends for the sake of the common good. Hyper-rationalized moralism cannot maintain what Lincoln described as “our bonds of affection” or restore “the better angels of our nature” he spoke about so eloquently—nor revive a sense of our common nationhood. Look no further than the faction’s behavior on social media; rather than persuading anyone of the goodness of their vision, they spend their time typing away at insults and ephemeral arguments no one can win. In short, the ideologues of the right have destined themselves to play the role of not-so-beautiful losers in American politics.

What is most necessary in this hour of decline, then, is a conservatism that can help citizens aspire to be gentlemen again. At its best, the twentieth-century movement achieved this. William F. Buckley Jr.’s courtly social graces on Firing Line captivated audiences and inspired imitators. Russell Kirk’s romanticism cast a spell over the minds and hearts across Middle America—including Ronald Reagan’s. The genuine renewal these figures promoted is possible again, and it is to Wilsey’s great credit that his book draws our attention back to this prospect.

In good Burkean fashion, imagination is the heart of Wilsey’s conservative project. Citing the example of George Washington—America’s finest gentleman-statesman—he argues that we need to find better ways of “catechizing” citizens and statesmen alike. The General was able to achieve all he did because he was “formed by books” of the Western canon that taught him something about “the relationship of the eternal to the temporal.” He came to inwardly possess a series of images that informed the sense of the Good Life that guided his political action. Aspirational conservatism seeks to remind the people of these “internal philosophical foundations,” rather than promote “an external pragmatism” which values power above all else.

Throughout the book, Wilsey looks to the oft-neglected Peter Viereck as an exemplar of this aspirational conservatism. Unlike the activists who would largely determine the direction of the postwar Republican party, Viereck was a historian and poet—a man of letters first and foremost. He wrote to move his readers’ hearts. Aspiring to be a gentleman in the Burkean sense of the term, Viereck understood his own conservatism not as a tool to win elections but rather as a way of life. In this sense, we might encourage young people to look to thinkers like Viereck as models to imitate.

Viereck was also, admittedly, an eccentric. He rarely showed up to teach his classes on time, wore a scarf year-round, and could be prickly in ways that made him difficult to work with. But Wilsey sees this strangeness as an important aspect of aspirational conservatism:

[Viereck’s] eccentricities, bizarre as they were, reflected the emphasis he placed on the individual personality over mindless conformity, which is deeply important to the conservative disposition. In our own culture, which is too often obsessed with mindless conformity, a professor like Viereck probably would just be fired, and that would be that. Our times are blander and our skies greyer in the absence of such eccentric geniuses, people of personality. Alas we are the poorer.

Aspirational conservatism, then, aims at redeeming personality from the prevailing culture of dehumanization. Its goals are bigger than politics, even a politics of freedom. In Reflections, for example, Burke acknowledged that “liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind,” but he also warned that he could not judge it a good if it were “stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” We must, therefore, place the first emphasis on preserving a culture of elevation.

That is not to say, however, that Viereck entirely avoided politics in his own day, or that aspirational conservatives should avoid it altogether now. Wilsey explains that his political engagement was largely a “fight for a private life.” He wanted to contend against the choking consumerism of a godless culture and the despotism of the total state, to create a space in which human beings had the liberty to flourish according to their created purpose. For the aspirational conservative, politics is not merely a contest for power but rather a contest for dignity.

Religious Freedom is a serious work of scholarship from a true gentleman—something our movement sorely needs in such desiccated times.

The Southern agrarian M. E. Bradford once articulated this well in an essay of his own on the Duke of Wellington as “The Last Great Englishman.” Like Washington, the Anglo-Irish soldier consciously shaped his life according to a gentleman’s perception of the Permanent Things. “Indeed, because he was an antique Englishman, because Napoleon and imperialism hidden under rhetoric offended his inmost self,” Bradford wrote, “Wellington was able to recognize his campaigns as ‘war to the knife’ and therefore, with grace and quietude, to communicate his own inflexible view of their desperate significance to the men who marched beneath his banner.” When freedom is at stake and dignity is on the line, the gentleman is willing to fight.

This is perhaps why conservatives have seen the most success in recent years fighting for religious liberty. Secular liberalism poses genuine threats to our natural right to worship freely—the most overt recent example, of course, being the government-mandated shutdown of churches during the coronavirus pandemic. The good news, of course, is that the foundations of the American political tradition are strong enough to resist those threats. As Wilsey puts it, “We support the separation of church and state, not because we want to empower the state against the church or redefine religious liberty as a tame and lifeless ‘freedom of worship,’ but for the sake of free religious exercise resulting in the security of liberty for all.” In recent years, at least, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld Americans’ First Amendment rights against the most aggressive abuses, and public opinion generally opposes them as well. Even the pandemic-era restrictions were widely opposed and eventually rolled back. Whatever extremisms lurk in the background of American politics, the foundational principle of religious liberty remains strong.

To put it another way, recent victories on these issues prove that aspirational conservatism just works. Unlike the brittle electoral wins and media bluster of populism, these are concrete successes conservatives can fully celebrate. This realistic politics of freedom—not the rationalistic politics of authoritarianism that too many on the right now embrace—provides the space aspirational conservatives need to go about the business of cultural renewal. It enables us to reform institutions that are straying from their missions or build new ones altogether.

But in a larger sense, as I believe Wilsey would acknowledge, conservative victories against secularism in these religious liberty issues have a metaphysical import. As he puts it towards the end of the book, “the consciousness of God is vital to human nature.” Secular ideologues have sought to degrade our perception of the divine, but the structure of American freedom itself revolts against their efforts. “In a democracy where equality of conditions is the norm, religion is necessary to liberty because it reminds citizens that they are not laws unto themselves,” Wilsey writes, summarizing the central insight of Democracy in America. “Put simply, Tocqueville found that the consciousness of God and the recognition of human fallibility and limitations contributed to ordered liberty by restraining political passions.”

As conservatives continue the fight for religious liberty, and for the life of the republic, we would do well to look to John Wilsey and Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer as a model. This is a serious work of scholarship from a true gentleman—something our movement sorely needs in such desiccated times.

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at a panel on the book during the 2025 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters.

In Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor John Wilsey calls for harmony between religion and (political) liberty in America. “Harmony” implies the possibility of dissonance, a clashing relationship he assigns to religious postliberalism. If we are to infer a connection in Wilsey’s subtitle, however, what then is the relationship of religious liberty to conservatism? Since freedom for freedom’s sake is not the aim of conservatism, what is being conserved, and to what end? If, as Wilsey asserts, “Protestantism was essential to the ideas of the Founding” then must Protestantism in America be conserved? What else must be conserved?

Wilsey’s introduction has its own religious quality. It is a stirring jeremiad about “Americanness” illustrated by intentional and optimistic purpose in the character of Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, and Clare Boothe Luce, for example. Wilsey defends what he calls “evolutionary, dispositional, humanistic, and aspirational conservatism” against identity politics, right or left, and hyperindividualism. Wilsey summons us to save young people filled with anxiety and despair by revitalizing American values and inoculating them against the pessimism of postliberalism. We can, he says, use conservatism to preserve classical liberalism.

Wilsey then moves to his main argument with a short and sometimes playful introduction of conservatism. His argument centers on his experience beginning in the 1960s, when conservatism was a respectable intellectual and political movement. For Wilsey, conservatism is Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan. For his students, it is “conspiracy theories, defeatism, MAGA, the MyPillow guy, covfefe, Jerry Fallwell Jr., or kitschy Christian nationalism[,] … trivial, doleful, desperate, weak, and lacking intellectual rigor, imaginative clarity, or depth of character.” Conservativism should be “inspiring, animating, and life-giving.” What is needed, he argues, is a new conservative ethos inspiring us to “reach far beyond our own temporal existence.” This new conservatism is what he calls “aspirational conservatism,” a pre-political temperament, attitude, and way of life. It aims at a higher moral destiny guided by permanent things, tradition, and just order while reckoning with a sinful human condition. The first exemplar of Wilsey’s aspirational postwar conservatism is Russell Kirk.

While Kirk is likely familiar to most readers, Wilsey’s second exemplar is probably not: Peter Viereck, a poet and historian who taught at Mt. Holyoke College. Wilsey laments that Viereck “has largely been forgotten by many conservative scholars.” Viereck abandoned them first, however. He identified as a conservative in the 1950s but soon disassociated from the movement.

Unfortunately, Wilsey’s summary of Viereck’s dissatisfaction with other conservatives—Kirk, Frank Meyer, or William F. Buckley, for example—is too simple. For example, to say that Viereck’s “negative review” of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale “won him exactly zero points with Buckley” or that Meyer valued “dogmatic purity,” provides no real insight. Given that Wilsey’s project includes criticizing contemporary conservatism, what can we learn from Viereck’s critique of his own contemporaries?

Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence.

Though Wilsey doesn’t mention it, Viereck accused his contemporaries of playing favorites. One of those favorites, Viereck lamented, was Manchester liberalism (i.e., free trade), so one wonders if he would approve of Wilsey’s defense of classical liberalism or a marketplace of religions. Viereck is certainly a safer fit for Wilsey insofar as Viereck opposed nationalism, but Wilsey does not marshal Viereck’s arguments against it so much as his opposition to “Ottantotts,” which Viereck characterized as reactionary utopians relying on obscurantist nostalgia. Ottantottism, Wilsey believes, now characterizes much of contemporary conservative thought and action.

Wilsey’s third exemplar isn’t a person but what he calls the “Black conservative tradition,” exemplified by Thomas Sowell, Robert Woodson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Star Parker, for example. Though white and black conservatism “grew from different fields and soils,” Wilsey argues, “and should be considered distinct one from another,” there remains essential agreement and compatibility between them. What distinguishes black conservatism is that it was born resisting the unjust political status of blacks and therefore had to focus on reclaiming lost freedoms and directing individual achievement away from government redress. Central to this effort, Wilsey says, is the black church encouraging educational and economic community and opportunity. This discussion of black conservatism is worthy, albeit missing a nod to Shelby and Eli Steele. One wonders, however, whether in the spirit of religious liberty, Wilsey considers the Nation of Islam equally capable as the black church to empower.

Successive chapters on aspirational conservatism’s use of imagination, nationality, ordered liberty, history, and religious liberty are a combination of polemic, admonishment, encouragement, and biography. Wilsey argues that conservatism has traded both the “interior life” and pure religion for power politics. To counter this, Wilsey calls the reader to solutions including Great Books, stories of great Americans, and knowledge of transcendence. He argues that imagination and history are necessary not only for a correct conscience but also for both nationality and ordered liberty.

Imagination and history join to create nationality, which he says must be “re-created” every generation through ritual, symbolic practices, and civil religion rather than relying on presumed “facts” of nationality—the worst case being appeals to blood and soil. The latter refers to the worst impulses of postliberals. Fine enough, but what to do with (for example) Kirk’s argument that without British culture (including laws, faith, and institutions) America would have no culture at all? Kirk didn’t consider that culture a re-creation but a patrimony. It would be silly to assert, as some postliberals might, that only British people (whatever that means) may preserve British culture. But neither can it be re-created at will. Two centuries of British colonial rule in India barely eked out an establishment of British cultural institutions there. The Anglo-Afghan wars and our own War on Terror did nothing to create nationality. Culture includes abstractions and organic particulars. It can’t be bred into perpetuity, as postliberals would have it, but neither is it simply re-created. Both solutions are too simple.

Wilsey’s discussion of religion is likewise too simple. For example, he argues that one need not be a Christian to be an aspirational conservative—but it helps. Imagination is, as Wilsey defines it, not the creation of fictions but the perception of truth. God, he argues, is the compass for such a pursuit. But his argument suggests that this is so because God enables a transcendent consciousness not unlike being out in nature. So long as we acknowledge transcendent truth, then, do we even need existing religious traditions? After all, Wilsey says, “None of us can escape the consciousness of God—even atheists.” Why not then passively possess it as an atheist might, so long as one acknowledges a world beyond our senses?

Wilsey certainly encourages religion as a route to the natural (and moral) law. He also prefers that religion not be distracted by politics. These are not easily disentangled, however. In America, which Wilsey says had its identity and purpose shaped by Protestantism, was the deeply religious character of the struggle for American independence, abolition, or the civil rights and pro-life movements, then the co-opting of purer religion? Or were they a reflection of religion’s moral law, rightly working itself out in politics? As popular movements, did they appeal to consciences formed by a specific religious tradition? Or by walks in the woods? Was the reference to God in these appeals simply a foundation for transcendent truth, or did the mention of God summon hearers to personal moral accountability to a Divine Person who will judge them for moral lapses?

Wilsey also argues that religious liberty promotes religiosity through competition, but did the longstanding Christian America that Wilsey compliments as helpful for national identity and purpose exist because it simply beat out all competitors on its merits? Or is it more correct to say that it encultured millions of Americans because it enjoyed a monopoly on public institutions that were anything but secular, neutral, or remotely “competitive” until relatively recently? To argue that (Protestant) Christianity succeeded in America for centuries thanks to a truly free marketplace of religious ideas is akin to claiming that Americans chose cars, especially with combustion engines, because they are so obviously superior to bikes, public transit, or electric cars—ignoring the advantage gained from infrastructure and geography.

What may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful?

A few other blind spots and ambiguities are evident in Wilsey’s discussion of religious liberty. Like many others, his picture of America’s religiosity (because of its religious freedom) is juxtaposed against a relatively irreligious Europe. The argument here is not unlike juxtaposing bright capitalist South Korea alongside dark communist North Korea. There must be an explanation for these otherwise similar places being so dissimilar, right? Wilsey, like others, asserts that it is religious liberty. However, while it is true that Europe does have a few taxpayer-funded religious establishments, these establishments are almost entirely superficial and exist alongside extensive religious freedom, not unlike America’s. In short, neither religious freedom nor religious establishment is a believable explanatory variable.

Furthermore, how irreligious is Europe in fact? If religiosity is defined by belief in a higher being (the essential aid to truth, Wilsey argues) or identification with a religious tradition, Europe is surprisingly pious. Finally, if religious liberty is so important for deep religiosity, why is it that religiosity in America has decreased while religious freedom has increased over the last half-century? Why isn’t this more extensive religious freedom bolstering religiosity? Can it be instead that the relatively high religiosity of recent memory, the experience of Silents, Boomers, or Gen X, is owed not so much to religious freedom but to a more pronounced and discernible generational public piety fading ever since SCOTUS encouraged greater neutrality and secularity? See, for example, Aaron Renn’s thesis about a growing “negative world” for Christianity in America.

Finally, Wilsey’s arguments are tidier if one stays in a Western context. India and Lebanon have no established religion. Both are more pluralistic and religious than America, but they are also more syncretistic and given to religious violence. Why? Indonesia has a state religion, which should make them irreligious according to Wilsey’s reasoning, but its people are deeply religious. Furthermore, would all the faiths practiced in these countries sustain the ethos and institutions Wilsey appreciates in America? In the American case, Wilsey is presuming upon a particular kind of religious freedom, birthed under particular cultural (and theological) circumstances, in a certain organic and historical context—a context much richer than simply having God in one’s consciousness.

Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence. Wilsey is concerned with America’s declining role in the world, the rise of populism, a loss of support for American ideals and institutions, the decline of popular media, and the rise of social media. His students would identify problems like economic disruption, a widening wealth gap, and the perceived failure of American ideals and institutions. They would praise the variety of popular and social media.

Wilsey says that he does not intend the book to be a “Get off my lawn” moment, but are the younger generation’s concerns owed simply to an impoverished inner life and populist inclinations? Can conservatism adapt to these more emotional and alienated times? Is it as rational as Wilsey suggests? Or can it be more dispositional, as Michael Oakeshott suggested? For example, Wilsey dismisses epic poetry to make sense of the past because it is not “verifiable through evidence.” But his examples of the earliest historical research, Herodotus and Thucydides, did not presume to provide just evidence. They reflected sentiment. Even our contemporary Great Books movement, including classical education, assigns Homer next to Herodotus without hesitation because both reveal permanent things.

And even more to the point, what may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful? John Adams, for example, had a rich inner life, but his vision was enabled by men and women who were arguably populists in their time. If conservatism aspires to be more than a vision, especially in a marketplace of visions, these challenges must be taken seriously.

The following is based on a keynote address delivered by the author to the biennial meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association on March 27, 2025.

It is not a coincidence that the emptiness and aridity of so much of our era’s cultural and intellectual life comes at a moment when the arts and practices of conversation have become all but extinct. To be sure, people have not stopped talking to one another, even if they now often mistake an exchange of text messages, sent and received hunched over a tiny screen, as “talking,” and seem to prefer restaurants in which attempts at conversation end up like the discourse of platoon sergeants, shouted over the dining room’s racket. But a copious volume of words being exchanged does not translate into that thing called conversation. Particularly in an era in which openness and candor, even between friends, can prove to be dangerous in the long run.

A great deal has been said and written of late about free speech: whether it is even possible, whether it has intrinsic limits, whether it is inherently biased for or against certain groups, or whether it might be more injurious than beneficial to the well-being of a community. These questions all deserve airing. But I think most of us would agree that a greater degree of commitment to freedom of speech on our campuses and in our public life would be a salutary improvement over the walking-on-eggshells environment that we’ve had to endure for far too many years.

But what would be far better is a commitment to the kind of mutuality and breadth that the term “free conversation” implies. Particularly if Michael Oakeshott is right that conversation, as opposed to mere utterance, is such an important feature of our very humanity.

Oakeshott’s Conversation

So much of what Oakeshott valued is prefigured and modeled by that uniquely human activity, which he perhaps most famously referred to as “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” It is in conversation that “thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another,” without a “symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials.” And perhaps most remarkably, even audaciously, he contended that “it is the ability to participate in conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.”

What might we learn from him today, to help us in the work of restoring and reorienting ourselves?

Well, first of all, we can learn that what he called “the conversation of mankind” in his great essay on the voice of poetry is not merely a transitional state to which we have to accommodate ourselves temporarily, until a fuller consensus about all things, presumably grounded in science, can be arrived at. No, it is the human condition, at least the condition of civilized men and women. Our participation in that conversation is an end in itself, not the means to some other end, and not an activity incidental to our human nature, let alone as a reluctant and provisional accommodation to an imperfect world.

There is a paradox here. Our participation in a common life is what makes it possible for us to converse, while our differences are what make our conversations worth having. And it is by its nature something that requires a certain freedom and spontaneity to thrive. (Hence the term “free conversation” is a redundancy.) It is, as Oakeshott says in the “Voice” essay, and in other places as well, “not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit.”

The concept of “conversation” and its central place in the life of civilized human beings suggest to me some practical considerations that can be drawn from Oakeshott for the betterment of American life. And that is the way that conversation implies the central importance of proper scale in healthy human associations. A fully reciprocal conversation implies a certain propinquity and stability, and containment, rather like the hortus conclusus, the garden enclosed, of medieval lore. It fits well with Oakeshott’s emphasis on the local, which would be those kinds of communities whose scale can accommodate the possibility of conversation, and whose stability with reference to “place” makes those conversations rooted and distinctive. (The very etymology of the word, conversation, goes back to the Latin conversari, “to live with, and keep company with.”) In other words, the voice of Oakeshott ought to pull us back toward a renewed emphasis upon Burkean themes of local patriotism, as opposed to national and universalistic sources of identity, and toward the preservation of smaller-scale and local forms of association.

So that is one possible gift of Oakeshott’s emphasis upon the centrality of conversation. Let me mention another, which follows logically, and is, I think absolutely central to Oakeshott. And that is a release from the burden of purposefulness, from “the rage to reform,” as Oakeshott calls it, the burden that the predominance of the rationalist disposition, and of the enterprise associations through which it is expressed, including the regulatory state, imposes upon us. This release would be akin to the idea of the “usefulness of uselessness” or to the interesting parallel that has been drawn between Oakeshott’s insights and Johan Huizinga’s portrait of homo ludens, of man’s capacity for play as one of the necessary conditions for the development of human culture.

Oakestott warned, “a university will have ceased to exist” when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.”

I would put it even more strongly, that there is something barbarous and inhuman about a mode of existence in which one never allows oneself to repose in satisfaction and gratitude for what one has, or for the things one has been given by and in and through the conditions of one’s mere existence, but must ceaselessly seek to innovate, to grade it, evaluate it, improve it, reform it, remake it, perfect it. A philosophy that fails to resist that relentlessly instrumentalizing tendency is all too likely to succumb to it in one way or another, perhaps by emphasizing the degree to which the person is or can be self-made, thereby allowing the supposed primacy of the will to tyrannize over all other aspects of existence. Think of William Ernest Henley’s triumphant proclamation: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” The greatest of Rationalism’s illusions is precisely this illusion of mastery, an illusion whose rabid and single-minded pursuit is unable to produce either success or happiness. How much more humane is Oakeshott’s untriumphant but sweet description of poetry’s power to release us, and enchant us, with “a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.” A release from the burden of purposefulness.

Speech, Expression, and Conversation

What about a renewed commitment to free speech, in our culture and in our colleges? There I would be a bit more equivocal in my judgment, seeing such freedom as necessary but not sufficient. Necessary, because free speech is one of the chief ways that we test for the truth of our assertions. The most important defenses of free speech have never been the ones that assert that the truth is relative or unknowable or personal or tribal. Instead, they are the ones, such as John Milton’s great Areopagitica, that praise the refining fire of contrary opinions as the best way to complete the incompleteness of our knowledge. If the COVID years taught us anything, they taught us that we cannot allow ourselves to become mindlessly deferential to the putatively superior wisdom of censors and anointed experts to determine the truth for us.

But the restoration of free speech, and of the ethos that supports its flourishing, is not the full cure to what ails undergraduate education in America. Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it is also something more than that. It is a community of shared knowledge and memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present, as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built. Without the prior existence of that accumulated body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. That is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, and forms the basis of a rich and enduring common life.

Oakeshott’s vision of the university as “a place of learning” presumes such commonality as the necessary basis for the proliferation of a multitude of conversations—and the richer the commonality, the deeper and more varied and adventurous the conversations can be. But on the other hand, he warned, “a university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research,” when teaching has become “mere instruction,” and when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.” Is that not where we are now, for the most part … and that only on a good day?

It is here that I must regretfully express a significant disagreement with the Chicago Principles, so named because they were propounded at and promulgated by the University of Chicago, under the courageous leadership of its then-president, the late Robert Zimmer. I honor Dr. Zimmer’s memory and achievement, and I think he did a great deal of good in providing a text that over a hundred institutions have been able to rally around, to reassert the university’s fundamental commitment to free inquiry.

And yet the Chicago Principles leave an important problem unaddressed, and they compound that problem precisely by their failure to address it.

You may recall that the document is called the “Report of the Committee on Free Expression” … not of “Free Speech” (or not, for that matter, of “Freedom of Inquiry” or “Freedom of Conscience”). This is not an unimportant difference, although the text of the report also employs “speech” instead of “expression” in multiple instances, as if there were absolutely no difference between them.

Let me add that the Chicago Principles are not unique in emphasizing “expression” rather than “speech.” The Woodward Report, published in December 1974 by a committee at Yale headed by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward and still one of the best such guides to the virtues of academic freedom, also uses the same language. Its official title is the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale.”

In neither of these two influential documents is attention given to any difference of meaning between “speech” and “expression.”

There are consequences to such semantic slippage, particularly if it is conscious and deliberate. The ultimate justification for free speech is inseparable from the fact that it is speech that we are allowing to be free.

By saying it this way, I mean that speech, discursive language—what the ancient Greeks called logos—has a special dignity. It is the human gift par excellence. It is the medium through which we engage in rational deliberation, the way that we work things out together, solve problems, state and apply moral principles, or principles of action. We use it to map the battle plans that we will employ in the conduct of our lives. It is the means by which we are able to be “political animals” in the way that Aristotle describes us—not just animals that live together, but animals that have the capacity to deliberate together on questions of the common good.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—staged screaming, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, flag-burning, taking a knee—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech.

Animals share with us a capacity for expression of pain and pleasure, but not a capacity for speaking with analytical cogency about those things, holding them out at arm’s length, so to speak; describing them with the requisite precision, making judgments of value among them, and incorporating those judgments into the life of a human community. In fact, Aristotle is saying that it is our capacity for “partnership in these things” that makes a community possible. We might add that it is what makes conversation possible too.

Speech occupies a middle ground between thought and action, a sort of buffer zone in which we can consider, together, with abstract detachment, different courses of action, prior to acting upon one of them. The whole idea of allowing speech to be free depends upon its being securely situated in and mostly confined to this middle transitional zone. (Speech that represents a “clear and present danger” is proscribed precisely because it violates this fundamental understanding.)

We engage in this sort of provisional thinking all the time, as when we deliberate together in considering competing scenarios, whether Plan A is better than Plan B, which plan will have what consequences, and which simulation or imaginative projection is likely to provide us with a more accurate reading of future events, and thus a more effective plan of action. In a truly deliberative environment, individuals collaborate with one another in thinking through their plans, both in constructing them and then in evaluating them, implementing them, and considering together their moral implications. It is the singular virtue of speech that it makes possible such activity in the middle zone between thought and action.

This understanding of speech as a refuge for provisionality and reflection runs in remarkably close parallel to Oakeshott’s beautiful description of the university as a place offering “the gift of an interval,” as he put it in his 1949 essay on “The Universities”: a place in which one could “put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place.” University could be “an interval” in which “a man might refuse to commit himself,” in which he might “taste the mystery” of life “without the necessity of at once seeking a solution” for it. It provides us an opportunity to “practice that suspended judgment of which the ‘neutrality’ of liberalism is so pale a shadow.” And all of this, he concludes, happens not in a vacuum, but “surrounded by all the inherited learning and literature and experience of our civilization.”

Expression, the Opposite of Speech

Expression, however, is something distinct from speech. It is a more or less romantic term, an emotion-laden term, referring to forms of communication that may or may not be verbal, and may or may not be part of a deliberative process. Its romantic quality is reflected in the word’s etymology, deriving from the Latin exprimere, “to press out.”

Expressive liberty tends to be a one-way thing, a monologue, a cry of the heart, like the Sammy Davis Jr. song “I Gotta Be Me,” not a contribution to collective deliberation about truth. We sit back and listen to the monologue, like moviegoers in a darkened theater. We are spectators. The experience can be enthralling, moving, powerful, passionate. Shocking, even. If it is a great work of art we are confronted with, we might be uplifted, or feel our spirit crushed, by what we see. Perhaps our thinking about some social issue or historical personage has changed. If it is inferior art, perhaps not.

But either way, there is no room for us to answer it, to engage it, or to offer an alternative view in counterpoint. Expression qua expression is all about “my voice,” “my truth,” “my narrative”—and it must be heard! And in some sense, it must be deferred to or ignored.

One could write an interesting history of how this blurring of concepts came about in our general culture, how two things that were so clearly distinct a mere century ago have become so conjoined in our thinking as to be indistinguishable. But that is where we are now. “Words are violence!” shouted the student protesters at Middlebury College in 2017, borrowing the words of the novelist Toni Morrison to shout down their campus visitor, the sociologist Charles Murray, and threaten him and his host with violence. As if violence could also be an expressive act, a form of language. Such actions collapse all meaningful distinctions, and undermine the possibility of a college in which speech can serve its highest good, and provide its students with that gift of an interval, in which the high art of conversation can be enjoyed and cultivated.

But often the point of using an expressive gesture or image rather than a verbal declaration is precisely the imprecision that expressive symbolism permits. Words can generally be answered and contested and clarified and amended, in dialogue and conversation and debate with others using words. But the gesture has a powerful finality about it, an unanswerable quality—or it can only be answered by another unanswerable gesture: you insult me, and I insult you back; you block me, and I block you. This is the kind of gestural misanthropy in which our era increasingly specializes. It is not a good model for democratic deliberation, let alone conversation.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—taped-up mouths, armies of Atwood-inspired handmaids, staged screaming, audiences that wheel around and turn their backs on invited speakers or drown them out with chants, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, morons who glue themselves to valuable objects, flag-burning, taking a knee, kick-boxing Congresswomen as performance art—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech. The courts, including the US Supreme Court, have been indulgent in furthering this trend. I could multiply examples or emphasize that this is a practice of all political parties and persuasions, but the point is that we have come to accept passively the notion that these expressive acts are functionally equivalent to more conventional forms of speech.

Learning suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence.

But they are not. In fact, these examples represent the opposite of speech. Rightly understood, speech, logos, always entails the possibility of an answer, of interlocution, of dialogue, of engagement, of argument—in short, of talking back. Or, to put it more optimistically, of conversation. Instead of offering the opportunity for further exchange, such examples seek to foreclose the possibility with utter finality.

When we equate speech with expression, we deny or diminish the unique property of speech: as the medium of deliberation, of the interval, as that middle ground between thought and action, and as the instrument by which we are given an interim space, to seek and test the truth.

A Wild Flower Among the Wheat

Conversation is a term that defines the essential character of our complex and unique civilization, the civilization of the West. I believe it was Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the University of Chicago’s most influential presidents, who popularized the idea that the Western intellectual tradition was best understood as a “great conversation.” It is a way of talking about the West that may sound a bit hackneyed by now. But also may be, like Wagner’s music, better than it sounds.

For one thing, it pays attention to the fact that the thinkers of the past and their accomplishments do not die, but linger on in the present: as exemplars to be emulated, as foils to do battle against, or simply as sources of ideas and metaphors and models, but above all as thinkers who need to be responded to, and can be responded to. In that sense, Plato’s work is as alive today as it has ever been, as much a part of the activity of philosophy, and you can substitute a dozen other names for his, and the statement would be just as true.

But there is a more fundamental way in which the West can be thought of as a long conversation. Its two most important constituent elements are called by the names Athens and Jerusalem, as expressed by the Church father Tertullian, and they were and are rivals. Athens stands for the spirit of free rational inquiry undertaken in a fully intelligible world whose contours and dimensions are fully commensurable with our powers of understanding. Jerusalem stands for the spirit of piety, which concedes the weakness of human understanding and the inadequacy of unaided human nature, and insists that we are utterly reliant for guidance upon the few ways in which God has revealed Himself and His will to us, and that such reliance constitutes a wisdom superior to any ratiocination, since God’s ways are not ours. It is by our faith that we are saved and not by our knowledge; and there is “nothing better than the fear of the Lord … nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord.” 

How to reconcile the two? We haven’t. (Aquinas has perhaps come the closest.) But the conversation between them is in some sense the essential core of Western intellectual history, and the secret of the West’s vitality—a life lived “between two codes.” We would no longer be ourselves, should we become all one or all the other.

I’ve called the relationship a conversation. Some have preferred to call it an antagonism, a great debate, or a warfare between science and religion, or something even more combative or martial. But the proper study of the Western past is more fittingly described by the notion of conversation, as Oakeshott understood conversation: as something that forswears the desire for victory by one side or another, or any similar form of closure, but instead exists for its own sake, recognizing and respecting all the elements in play.

“The pursuit of learning,” he says, is not a race in which the competitors jockey for best place, it is not even an argument or a symposium … we do not ask what it is ‘for’ and we do not judge its excellent by its conclusion” because in fact “it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day.” It thus suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time—an interval—from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence. Call it a foretaste of heaven, or a wild flower planted among the wheat. Or a rose in the cross of the present.

We can only hope that the cultural changes that lie ahead of us may not destroy what is left of this aspect of life in the university and more broadly in the republic of letters. I wish I could be more optimistic about that. But one does what one can, and leaves the odds-making to others.

Why are there so few men in the restaurants, bars, and coffee shops where the women like to recreate? This is the question posed by Rachel Drucker, 54, in the recent New York Times “Modern Love” column, Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. Drucker is a veteran of the 1990s sex positivity who worked for Playboy and its “affiliated hardcore properties,” and has plenty of experiences and exes to her name. She implores men to re-engage women like her as friends and lovers. 

Perhaps the saddest, most evocative lines of her lament are these: “There was a time, not so long ago, when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast. When the act of staying the night didn’t announce a relationship, just a willingness to be human for a few more hours.” 

If we think of sexual mores like a Goldilocks story, Drucker feels that she and her contemporaries came of age when everything was “just right.” The implied interpretation of events goes something like this: In the olden times, a relationship (or, in very olden times, an engagement or even a marriage) was a prerequisite for sharing a bed overnight. Today, with easy access to pornography and male resentment of women’s empowerment, people have lost interest in “be[ing] human.” It’s apparently too much even to ask a man to show up to dinner before asking to come upstairs. 

Where, a bewildered Drucker wonders, did the happy medium of her own experiences go? What happened to the casual sex that nevertheless entailed an intimate decency, which to some extent belied and delimited its “casual” moniker? 

That “happy medium,” however, never existed as such. It was a composite, transitional reality: the lingering fumes of the old rules and mores alongside the lived insistence on no rules or mores at all. So long as traditionalist sexual morality was widely accepted as legitimate, even if not widely practiced, those that flouted its dictates still did so with at least the plausible claim of covert discretion. But when the last fumes of traditionalism died out, the precarious norms Drucker remembers with such fondness disappeared as well. 

Today, in relation to phenomena ranging from sex and dating, to marriage and family formation, to sociality itself, there is an erosion of what so recently felt like unimpeachable standards. Perhaps, it turns out, those fumes of the old ways were responsible for the continuance of our baseline humanity, both personal and societal. Perhaps a post-patriarchal, post-religious, post-institutional world turns out to be a post-human world as well.

Mommy Wars No More

In the season six Sex and the City episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), perpetually single protagonist Carrie Bradshaw is dismayed that someone absconded from a party with her $485 stilettos. She is even more frustrated when the party host, a married mother of three, not only fails to reimburse her for the loss but also “shames” her, calling it “crazy” to spend $485 on designer shoes—ones that, in fact, she used to wear herself before she had what she calls “a real life,” intimating that Carrie’s unmarried, childless existence is less worthy of respect and deference than her own. 

Carrie, fuming, recounts indignantly to her friend Charlotte that she has bought this very friend an engagement gift, a wedding gift, and three baby gifts, not to mention traveling for her wedding. She has spent, in total, “over $2300 celebrating her choices.” Charlotte tries to offer context: “But those were gifts … if you got married, or had a child, she would spend the same on you.” Carrie responds: “And if I don’t ever get married or have a child, then, what, I get Bubkis? … If you are single, after graduation, there isn’t one occasion where people celebrate you. … I’m thrilled to give you gifts, to celebrate your life; I just think it stinks that single people are left out of it.” 

What Carrie fails to recognize is that we give such gifts not to celebrate these individuals’ morally neutral “life choices,” but rather to honor marriage and childbirth as laudable and societally desirable. If they are no longer seen that way, it is only a matter of time before not just the norms of dating (which emerged as a prequel to marriage and family) but also the broader norms of treating other people with reciprocal dignity erode as well. After all, the very notion of giving gifts to celebrate milestones like marriage and childbirth is, at bottom, a statement about our shared investment in the institutions to which we all, whether married or not, owe our societal stability. To personalize this reality in a resentful, individual way, as Carrie does, is to grossly underestimate the fragility of society itself. 

Like Carrie, Drucker wanted to be able to break all the old rules—and facilitate others doing so. What she, like many of us, does not understand is this: Discarded norms do not remain forever in their diminished place so that we can continue to break them, secure in the certainty that there will always be something, however remote, to push back upon. On the contrary, mores are difficult to form—but quite easy to break. 

Both the precipitous decline in fertility rates that everyone across the political spectrum now acknowledges as an impending crisis, and the melancholy of straight women who find men receding en masse from shared social and sexual life with actual, living women, can be understood as the unsurprising productions of a society that does not celebrate marriage and family as uniquely important institutions. 

Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

When adulthood was still considered, socially and professionally, to some degree inextricable from romantic partnership—that is, when perpetual singleness still raised eyebrows if not wagged tongues—we had more dates, leading to more marriages and more children. The erstwhile ability of 50-something single women to engage men as dinner companions cannot be separated from that broad social ecology. 

Yes, these one-time norms involved trade-offs. In an era that all but mandated matrimony, single women tended not to have the kinds of stable, well-established lives that today make tying the knot seem, to many, a next-generation Carrie Bradshaw, like a raw deal. Women in earlier eras also, more often than many conservatives want to admit, settled for terrible marriages. No one wants to go back to that. 

Many people, however, like Drucker, harbor great nostalgia for a time when we treated each other with basic decency. What they fail to recognize is that reciprocal decorum is not natural, but socially constructed. The old norms, for all their admitted limitations, institutionalized treating each other better than we default to treating each other without any norms at all. In Drucker’s youth, people largely flouted those old norms de jure while retaining their spirit de facto. While they may have conceived of themselves as rebels who discarded all the old mores, the truth is that they owed everything to the fumes of the very scripts that they saw themselves as having discarded. 

Today, by contrast, we have in fact adopted the nonchalant, “you do you” premise of Carrie’s screed—even while we still purchase (a diminishing number of) wedding presents. One predictable result of this total eradication of erstwhile norms is the dearth of men in the spaces where Drucker and her friends recreate. Another sad consequence is the devolution of our social decency more broadly. 

It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if No One Comes

In a recent essay titled “Go Where You’re Invited,” speaker and author Katherine Martinko highlights a viral video from therapist and author Esther Perel, in which Perel responds with insight to the now near-ubiquitous phenomenon of invitees to a social event canceling at the last minute. Mulling over the endless echoes in the comments on Perel’s video, along with her own experiences being cancelled on, Martinko offers: “It appears we’re living in a time when people don’t hesitate to bail on their friends for reasons that range from justifiable to absurd. This reveals an appalling lack of etiquette that gives zero consideration to what it takes to host an event of any kind.” Indeed, we are; and indeed, it does. 

Socially responsible millennials find it difficult to count on friends showing up to a planned gathering for the same broad reason that our single or divorced aunt can’t get a guy to invite her to dinner: The rules, judgments, and premises that produced the norm—in this case, showing up where you say you will—are long gone. 

Yes, technology has facilitated this decline in erstwhile etiquette. Just like the pill made commitment-free sex a lot less risky at baseline, texting made sending an invitation to a bunch of people much easier. Thus, as Perel points out, the people on the receiving end of an invitation often think they aren’t particularly important or central to the gathering. So, they don’t bother to respond, or they respond but feel no shame about cancelling at the last minute. Additionally, the ubiquity, ease, and breadth of at-home leisure—delivered food, streamed television and movies, and so on—means that going out is no longer necessary for entertainment. 

Nevertheless, the moral, ideological, and psychological aspects of this seismic social shift from a default of conscientiousness to a default of casualness cannot be discounted. 

Not so long ago, we had expectations of friends that reflected a bygone era of formalized, reciprocal sociality. Yes, the calling cards described in Jane Austen novels have been a remnant of the distant past for some time, as have the dance cards that persisted into the early twentieth century. But the commitment, courtesy, and reciprocity that those measures institutionalized persisted until quite recently, even in their absence. 

Of course, there have always been flakes, freeloaders, and idiosyncratic types who do not reliably follow mutually understood social expectations. But when those norms are nonetheless followed by enough people to remain expectations—and when those who don’t follow them as norms therefore pay some price—there remains a shared recognition that others’ time and attention have implicit and agreed-upon value. 

But today, the de facto adherence to the spirit of those old rules around social etiquette has disappeared, just like the rules themselves did a century-plus ago. So, everyone is free to accept the invitation but bail if something better comes along or if she “needs a break.” No one, however, wants to be on the other end of this new normal. 

As our growing crisis of loneliness shows, it simply does not work like that. Wanting to avoid social accountability but have access to social community is the equivalent of working in the porn industry and wondering where all the thoughtful dinner conversationalists went. 

Civilization, and its attendant civilized treatment of one another, it seems, takes a long time to build and no time at all to destroy. 

Many of us mourn the absence of niceties like acknowledging receipt of a gift and thanking the giver, feeling obligated to invite someone to one’s home after being invited to hers, or responding to invitations and then showing up when and where you say you will. But in order to understand the depth and breadth of what’s really going on here—rather than narrowly saying “the individual friend who didn’t thank me is rude” or “the individual guys who aren’t texting me back are jerks”—we have to recognize that these shared expectations of politeness and dignity were never inborn settings, but products of first de jure and then de facto socialization. 

Which is now gone—and by our own hand.

The ubiquitous self-care industry is chock full of reassurance that “it’s okay to say no,” and cautions against reflexively saying yes, and admonitions to “put yourself first.” Now, full disclosure: I would benefit greatly from a modest mindset shift in this direction, and so would many of the other highly attentive, responsible women in my friend set. Yes, many of us, myself included, are eldest daughters, and it shows. And yes, if we did not surge quite so reflexively to familial and communal responsibility, many of us would be healthier and probably also happier. 

Yet most of us operate the way we do because we are aware on some level that we live in a world that has defenestrated the collective institutions, mores, and social graces that once held people together. Those of us who understand this can throw our hands up at the absence of the institutions, mores, and graces that once existed to facilitate and institutionalize treating one another with warmth and dignity—or we can attempt to preserve, revitalize, and embody them. 

We who make the latter choice tend to find one another. And we tend to evince public respect for (even if we don’t privately follow) the rules and norms that undergird those institutions, mores, and graces to which we owe our own and myriad others’ lack of loneliness. 

My advice to Drucker and her friends, if I may be so bold: Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

My hope—and my hunch—is that some dinner invitations from men worth a “yes” won’t be far behind. 

The rise of artificial intelligence is the single most important trend of our time. The changes it will wreak on human life eclipse not only all other contemporary technological developments, but also any since the Industrial Revolution. The new pope recognizes its salience, choosing as his regnal name “Leo XIV,” because just as Leo XIII was confronted with the social change from the Industrial Revolution, he seeks to confront the even more dramatic change from AI.

Breakthroughs happen monthly now. OpenAI’s o3 model recently scored higher than 99.8 percent of competitive programmers—while the same lab’s Sora engine, launched in February and now being integrated into ChatGPT, can already generate minute-long, high-definition video from text. In July, frontier models from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI sat the International Mathematical Olympiad under the same four-and-a-half-hour rules given to the world’s brightest teens, solved five of the six problems, and earned gold medals. In April, a University at Buffalo team unveiled Semantic Clinical AI (SCAI), an architecture that grafts formal medical knowledge onto a large language model. SCAI scored as high as 95 percent on Step 3 of the US Medical Licensing Examination—better than most practicing physicians and ahead of every previous AI benchmark—showing that well-structured retrieval can turn AI into a skilled general diagnostician.

AI’s new methodological phase is the emergence of AI agents, systems that autonomously execute sequences of tasks in pursuit of a goal. This phase is called agentic AI, which builds on Large Language Models (LLMs) that have dominated AI in the last few years. Those LLMs are neural networks that understand the relation of words in text and can use that understanding to generate competent, even expert, answers on every subject.

Agentic AI marries the predictive eloquence of LLM to an institutional framework of memory, goal-seeking, and tool use. No longer confined to completing sentences, the system can now formulate a purpose, decompose it into ordered tasks, engage external software, monitor its own performance, and revise its course when it makes mistakes. In short, where the LLM offers fluent speech, the agentic overlay supplies the infrastructure necessary for transforming mere words into coordinated action. One way of measuring progress in agentic AI is the uninterrupted duration of its competent autonomy at human tasks.

A year ago: a few minutes spent sorting e-mail, drafting a paragraph of code, or a short speech.

Now: twenty to thirty minutes in which Deep Search on ChatGPT and other similar services produces memos on any subject. As Tyler Cowen observes, the answers “wipes [sic] the floor against any humans, pretty much across the board.”

By 2026–27: several hours, during which an agent can redesign a software module, or plan a fortnight of coordination for a business.

As the decade closes: days or even weeks, in which an agent may conceive a research project, run simulations, draft the article, and submit it for peer review.

Because of its current and future power, progress in AI has become a central national concern. For example, AI may offer a solution to the intractable fiscal situation in which the United States finds itself. The United States’ national debt stands at approximately 120 percent of gross domestic product. And it is rising since we are also running an annual deficit of about 6 percent a year. Neither party offers any solution to the problem. The Republican Party just renewed the tax cuts of Trump’s first term and added more without compensating cuts to the budget. When the Democrats were last in power, they added programs and government spending that also added to the budget deficit. Neither party provides plausible reforms to the middle-class entitlements that drive future deficits in an aging population. Both are committed not to raise taxes on any but the top two percent, which is completely insufficient to curb deficits and debt. The result is a sea of red ink as far as an economist can project.

Given the fiscal plight and political constraints, the only solution is sharply increased economic growth. AI provides the most plausible engine for that growth. As a general-purpose technology, like electricity, it can make almost every human enterprise more efficient. In business enterprises, AI can match output to demand in real time and trim the staffing once required to execute routine tasks. In medicine, it can help deliver correct diagnoses faster with fewer people. In my own field of law, it can draft contracts and briefs with human lawyers just doing the work of tweaking and revising.

In geopolitics as well, AI offers both opportunity and danger. If the West wins the AI race, it will be in a better economic and military position, particularly given that the battle will now be fought with AI technology—both to surveil the enemy and to launch attacks and create defensive shields. But if China gains mastery before the United States, it could replace it as the global superpower.

These three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models.

As a result of AI’s centrality, the Trump administration has created “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” encompassing three companion executive orders issued on July 23. Together, they erect a federal legal architecture for artificial intelligence that seeks to secure US primacy by accelerating innovation, expanding infrastructure, and projecting American standards abroad. The plan sets out more than ninety actions, from specific regulatory sandboxes encouraging innovation at the FDA and SEC to a more general revision of federal rules that “unduly burden AI innovation,” all premised on the proposition that prosperity and power in the twenty-first century will flow to the nation that commands the AI frontier.

The plan recognizes that AI will succeed in rapidly increasing economic growth only if it is not stymied by bottlenecks. It has substantial demands for computational infrastructure and the energy needed to power that infrastructure. Indeed, one way to think of AI is that it converts electricity into intelligence without the biological constraints on such conversion in humans. But electricity generation faces regulatory constraints.

As such, the first executive order in Trump’s bundle, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” attacks the bottleneck of the computational power needed for AI. It aims to shave years off construction times for the facilities needed for frontier model training by creating exclusions to environmental regulations for AI infrastructure. Cheaper and faster computing is the indispensable fuel of the AI age. Thus, unclogging permits promises to liberate AI progress.

This executive order aids AI development more by deregulation than subsidization. The promise of AI is so powerful that the efficient capital market ecosystem is sufficient to supply funds. The roadblock is government regulation. Thus, the focus of the executive order is to ease the regulations that may block its smooth development.

The second executive order, “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack,” turns US economic strength outward. A new American AI Exports Program authorizes the Commerce and State Departments to finance and shepherd “full-stack” AI packages, including chips, models, software, and cyber safeguards, to trusted allies. Wiring friendly nations with American technology locks in governance norms, buoyant markets, deepens supply-chain reliance on US firms, and denies strategic rent to adversaries.

Thus, the second order is designed to deploy AI to strengthen our international alliances. For all the talk of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, this executive order at least indicates the administration recognizes the importance of bringing allied nations within the ambit of America’s growing AI technology network. In the Cold War, the United States strengthened and integrated the West in two principal ways. First, it placed much of the West under a US security umbrella through NATO, additional multilateral pacts, and a web of bilateral alliances. Second, it was a principal mover in international trade agreements, like the GATT, which encompassed most Western nations and sought to tie them together economically. But today, the rise of AI makes our AI technological network the essential mechanism of integration and strength. And it is not Russia that is the principal challenger, but China.

As Dario Amodei (creator of the Claude Model) puts it in a memo that preceded the executive order:

a coalition [of liberal democracies integrated thought AI] would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.

The third order safeguards viewpoint neutrality. “Preventing Woke AI” bars federal agencies from procuring language models that embed ideological filters, mandating “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” as procurement conditions.

The aim is to make sure that AI does not compromise epistemic understanding by skewing answers to questions ideologically. There have been instances in which AI models seem to provide politically correct or biased answers. For instance, when asked to show a set of Founding Fathers, Gemini initially assembled a multiracial group of images in an obvious gesture to political correctness. Just as the Data Infrastructure executive order avoids subsidies to AI, this order avoids actual legal orders to the AI companies to be ideologically neutral—a matter fraught with First Amendment concerns. But the order does direct the government not to contract with companies that engage in distortions. The government has a substantial, indeed compelling interest, not to have its work distorted by ideological bias.

Taken together, the three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models the government pays for. If the bet pays off, long after the daily controversies of the Trump administration are forgotten, this set of actions may be remembered as the most important set of executive orders in the history of the American government’s relation with science.

When I was in middle school, I remember gathering wood each spring with my friends. The task grew into a passion or even a competition, as we raced to collect more. Did someone you know have a crate they were ready to part with for a good cause? What about a broken dining room chair? Why not clean out the loose sticks from the park on the other side of town? 

No, we were not Dickensian orphans desperate to heat our homes. Our quest was more pyromaniac in nature: We were stocking up for a special bonfire—Lag Ba’Omer, celebrated in May. The holiday’s origins are obscure, and there are several different stories connected with it. In modern Israel, where I spent my late elementary and middle school years, however, it has a special significance, as a celebration of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Wait, you might say, this is awkward. Bar Kokhba, the enigmatic messianic figure, did lead a revolt against the Roman Empire in AD 132–136, but it failed. He and his men were defeated utterly, with devastating consequences for the Jews. In addition to the high cost in human life, the Roman Emperor Hadrian punished the Jews by wiping off the map the very name of their land, changing Judea to Syria Palaestina, and paving the way to the modern name of “Palestine.” Hardly cause for celebration, right?

And yet, in his new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, military historian Barry Strauss does find things to admire. His researched yet highly readable account covers the three major revolts of the Jews against Rome, but also explains the long-term significance of these revolts (and the Jews’ military losses) for the present. At a basic level, “This is a tale of empire and resistance. It is also a story of resilience, an intangible but essential factor. Resilience refers to the strength of a society’s sense of its national identity and values. A resilient society has the will to withstand defeat and to recover from it. That, in turn, requires a certain culture, leadership, and institutions. … Ancient Jewry is one of history’s great examples of how a people can lose on the battlefield and yet prevail.” 

The modern Israeli celebration of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, the final one in Strauss’s narrative, makes a lot more sense in this larger context. Sometimes a military loss leads to long-term victory through forging a stronger sense of national identity.

Ironically, the Romans knew this as well. Resilience, after all, was their theme song too. In 280–275 BC, for instance, the Romans fought King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who joined forces with Greek city-states in southern Italy to challenge Rome. Pyrrhus won two major battles, but at such extreme cost as to give rise to the expression “Pyrrhic victory.” As the biographer Plutarch reports, Pyrrhus remarked that another victory of that sort would finish him off. Why? Because the Romans’ losses had no effect on their willingness to keep going. Time and again in early Roman history, we hear of devastating losses like these. And every time, the Romans simply raised a new army and kept fighting—eventually winning the war. But with the Jews, more than any other people under Roman control, the Romans seem to have met their match—at least, when it comes to resilience.

Strauss structures the book around the story of three major revolts of the Jews against Rome: the Great Revolt that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70; the Diaspora Revolt in AD 116–117; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in AD 132–136. While the focus is on the Jews and the Romans, the third wheel accompanying this awkward “date” is Parthia, the major empire to the east, which has been a thorn in Rome’s side since at least the defeat of Crassus and his army at Carrhae in 53 BC. Parthia was just as interested in expanding westwards as Rome was in expanding eastward. It also had a significant Jewish population and was practically next door to Judea. “Empires do not have friends; they have interests,” Strauss observes. This applies to both Parthia’s and Rome’s interest in Judea. Had Parthia taken over Judea, this could have become a base for taking over other portions of the Roman Empire.

Strauss opens his narrative with some important background on the history of Judea under Rome. This matters because “Judea had been in Rome’s orbit for 225 years when it rebelled in 66. Rome couldn’t tolerate humiliation in an established part of the empire like Judea.” This leads to the key question: why would “an established part of the empire” rebel? 

When it comes to the Great Revolt, historians have, in a way, struck gold. Of particular significance is the Jewish historian Josephus. A Jewish leader in the revolt early on, he then defected to Rome and ingratiated himself into Roman citizenship and the patronage of the Flavian dynasty, although still retaining his Jewish faith. Following the precept of “write what you know,” Josephus proceeded to spend the rest of his life writing about Jewish history. And in his history of the revolt, The Jewish War, he argued that the vast majority of the Jews had no desire to revolt from Rome. The war—and the devastation that followed because of it—was all the fault of a few radicals. 

But, Strauss notes, Josephus had goals of his own in blaming just a few individuals for the war. Other sources suggest, rather, that Judea was a powder keg waiting to blow up for a while. Indeed, there were several close calls earlier—murmurs of revolts nearly averted. There were many reasons for this tension—for instance, no one likes living under occupation. But the most important reason has to do with the Jews’ religious differences from other residents of the empire. Because the monotheistic Jews considered God their king, no other authority could supersede him. Yet the Romans required emperor worship as part of their polytheistic state religion. Most of the time, the Jews got exemptions, but occasional crackdowns threatened their ability to practice their religion faithfully. In such an environment, all that was needed for a full-blown war was the right conditions. And so, “the outbreak of war in 66, disastrous for Judea and destabilizing for Rome, demonstrates the absence on both sides of what is essential for peace: statesmanship. Hope, fear, and wishful thinking, all replaced realism.” 

Josephus’ view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, with the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance. 

Nero, the emperor when the war broke out, was known for many things. Statesmanship is not one of them. But Nero inadvertently paved the way for the establishment of the next imperial dynasty, the Flavians, by appointing the elderly statesman and seasoned general, Vespasian, to subdue this revolt. Nero’s reasoning? Vespasian was of too low a birth to be a candidate for power. Therefore, he could be trusted to not take advantage of access to multiple legions during this war to do something bigger, like make an imperial bid. 

The history of the tail end of the decade proves Nero wrong. The revolt of Vindex in Germany in AD 68 was just the first in a series of revolts across the empire and indirectly precipitated Nero’s suicide. (Vindex has also yielded top-notch modern Roman historian jokes about “windexing” Nero out of power.) In the empire-wide chaos that was AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian rightly decided that he could make a successful bid after all. Leaving his son Titus to manage the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian departed Judea for Italy. Just three years after Nero appointed him to lead the Roman forces in suppressing the Jewish Revolt, Vespasian was emperor. Having a military commander for a son proved to be key for his ability to subdue a rebellious province and defeat another imperial contender all at the same time.

Throughout this revolt, the best documented of the three in this book, Strauss provides the play-by-play reports of military action that armchair military historians love. But I appreciated even more his interest in humanizing the various actors through trying to understand their motives. Who was Josephus? Who was Vespasian? Who was Titus? How and why did they do what they did? We get to know them at least a little bit in the process. 

Adding further depth to the story Strauss tells, reminding us of the complexities of history, lesser-known figures come out of the historical shadows—like Helena, a queen from Adiabene on the edge of Parthia, who converted to Judaism a generation before the revolt, and whose descendants supported the Jews in the war. And then there is another Jew in Roman service, in addition to Josephus—one Tiberius Julius Alexander, who was Titus’s chief of staff during the war. What must it have felt like for him to serve the Roman commander in defeating his own people? He was, in fact, not the only one.

Then there were the ordinary residents of Jerusalem, who were sold into slavery afterwards. Strauss brings up the story of one young woman, whose tombstone yields details about her life: Claudia Aster (perhaps her Jewish name was Esther) was enslaved in Jerusalem and taken to Italy. The man who bought her freed her and married her. It is he who set up the tomb, mourning the death of his wife, aged just 25. Was she captured as a child, or was the capture close to her time of death? We don’t know. But we see how some of the captives, at least, were incorporated into Roman society. Such was the Roman way. 

But this was not the end of the revolt—or its mystique. The siege of the Jewish rebels’ final stronghold at Masada, once Herod’s luxury refuge castle-cum-palace, did not conclude until AD 74, another four years after the fall of Jerusalem. Yet again, we have every reason to question Josephus’s account: was this operation quite so spectacular and heroic as he recounts? In this case, it’s not the winners who tell history, but the losers: “Josephus makes Masada into a parable. He pits Jewish love of freedom—romantic, foolish, doomed, but noble—versus Roman power—brutal, relentless, irresistible, and yet ungrudging in its admiration of courage, even on the part of its enemies.” This view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance—national resilience against all odds. 

Strauss devotes nine chapters to the Great Revolt, supplying the context and then detailing the war. The other two revolts receive only a single chapter each. The reason is familiar to historians of ancient history—it has to do with the nature of evidence available. We simply do not know nearly as much about either the Diaspora Revolt or the revolt of Bar Kokhba. Neither had a Josephus to document it. We are, as a result, at the mercy of archaeology and occasional references from other writers—although in the case of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, a few letters from the man himself have survived. 

Still, the mere existence of these two revolts after Rome’s crushing defeat of the Jews in the first one says something in and of itself. “The Diaspora Revolt (AD 115–116) demonstrates the enduring military traditions of the Jewish people, even without a state of their own.” So does the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which also shows the Jews’ mastery of guerrilla warfare—the one type of warfare the Roman legions had a difficult time countering. The legions were just too well-trained and used to fighting in formation. 

Nevertheless, the Romans eventually prevailed, and following the crushing defeats in three successive revolts, the Jews finally learned the lesson: “war was not the proper means to ensure national survival.” Instead, the answer was spiritual. In this way, Strauss notes, the revolts and their consequences inspired the rise of Rabbinic Judaism, a Judaism that did not rely on the Temple for spiritual access to God. This period of successive Jewish revolts also saw the solidification of the split between Judaism and Christianity. Military events, after all, have ramifications beyond simply geopolitical. 

Nearly two millennia later, we see the continued resilience of the Jewish people—and continued testing of that resilience by Israel’s modern neighbors. True, Strauss notes, we should not underestimate the horrors of antisemitism, both historical and more recent. And yet, the same resilience is now on display in the nation of Israel, into whose stories of patriotism the revolts against Rome have been woven—cue my middle school Lag Ba’Omer celebrations. 

And yet, there’s a warning here as well. Patriotism’s relationship to history is bound to be complicated. Good historians take what seems simple and straightforward and make those straight paths crooked—and, as a result, more factually accurate. Strauss is a skilled guide to these crooked paths in all their complexities. 

It is an honor to respond to my colleague Philip Wallach’s comprehensive and depressingly persuasive overview of the self-inflicted irrelevance of Congress. As any reader of his essential 2023 book Why Congress will attest, Wallach is among the nation’s leading scholars of the legislative branch. My own perceptions of the institution’s contemporary strengths and weaknesses have been so thoroughly shaped by his analyses that I am inclined to simply nod in agreement as I read his essay.

Rather than quibble, then, I would propose a friendly amendment to his assessment, offered in an effort to understand the causes and motives behind the peculiar self-effacement he describes. It is, after all, a phenomenon in need of several layers of explanation. Why would ambitious politicians undermine their own power?

Part of the answer surely lies in the evolution of our political culture in the direction of rhetorical performance art rather than substantive legislative action. A more performative politics almost necessarily advantages the president, who, as a lone figure, is simply better able to carefully stage his actions and manage his brand, and better positioned to draw the attention of the nation. Legislators thus increasingly come to understand themselves as supporting actors in a fundamentally presidential drama, and to behave accordingly.

But another crucial part of the story, as Wallach suggests, has to do with the excessive centralization of power within Congress. That dynamic has left most members with too little legislative work to do, and put most of the agenda-setting authority in the hands of a few party leaders who tend to be closely aligned with presidents of their own party or implacably opposed to presidents of the other party. This has focused Congress’s attention on the presidency and has created less room for interesting differences to emerge within both parties. That in turn makes it difficult for strange-bedfellow coalitions to form in ways that might facilitate legislative negotiation both within and across party lines.

That such centralization has happened is beyond dispute. But that it should have led to a weakening of Congress in the inter-branch struggle for power is actually profoundly ironic, since the centralization of power in the hands of congressional leaders has generally been pursued with the intent of strengthening Congress and its members, not weakening them. A better grasp of why a more consolidated Congress has become a weaker Congress could teach us a lot about this constitutional moment.

The modern push for centralization began in earnest in the House of Representatives in the mid-1970s. It was driven in large part by a perception among younger and more progressive Democrats that their policy agendas were routinely thwarted by the power of committee chairmen—who were generally older and more conservative Southern Democrats. Congressional politics meant intra-Democratic Party politics back then, about halfway through what would ultimately be a four-decade stretch of Democratic dominance of the institution. The majority party in Congress felt itself stymied (and therefore also weakened in its struggle against a Republican president) by its own internal diversity.

In an effort to better distribute power in the institution and empower the increasingly dominant progressive wing of their party, congressional Democrats pushed to reduce the power of committee leaders in favor of party leaders in Congress. And this centralization of power (along with the consolidation of the budget process, which the same Democratic majority pursued at the same time) was also viewed as a way to concentrate and increase Congress’s power in relation to the executive.

That trend toward centralization, pursued with both of those aims in mind, advanced gradually over the subsequent two decades but was then supercharged by the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. In an effort to strengthen the position of a Republican Congress against a Democratic president, the Gingrich Republicans sought to empower the Speaker of the House to more effectively wield their coalition at will and so command a power center that could compete with the president’s control of the executive branch. For this purpose, committees were further weakened, and party leaders came to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over the legislative process and the policy agenda of Congress. As had happened two decades earlier under Democratic control, these changes began in the House and then the Senate embraced them too, if a little more modestly.

The same dynamic was pressed even further in congresses under the control of both parties over the past 25 years. By now, members have come to think of the sheer managerial dominance of party leaders in Congress as a natural feature of the institution. But in historical perspective, it is actually quite unusual. And it has badly deformed Congress’s understanding of its own role.

That deformation has led to what now looks like an intentional weakening of the institution by its members. But that is as much an effect as a cause of Congress’s modern travails. The centralization and consolidation of the institution were intended to strengthen it, and even to give the average member more power (since party leaders are accountable to their broader memberships, while committee chairs are focused on narrower interests). But it has done the opposite, because it was rooted in an error about the fundamental purpose of our national legislature.

That error is a function of a progressive conception of Congress, which argues that Congress’s core purpose is ultimately to advance major legislation in pursuit of a coherent policy agenda on behalf of the majority party. This is not a crazy notion, but it reflects an incomplete understanding of the goals of our system of government.

Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary.

If Congress’s purpose were merely to advance major legislation, it would be reasonable to attribute its problems to its radical inefficiency. Bills move too slowly, too many of them never reach the finish line, and the process of legislation is just too chaotic and unfocused. If that were the source of Congress’s weakness, then centralizing the institution might be a reasonable solution. By giving party leaders more power, reformers could improve the efficiency of the institution and get more done. Such a view would see the reforms of the past half-century as justified, and call for more moves in the same direction—perhaps eliminating the filibuster, or further consolidating the budget process in the hands of party leaders.

But the fact that changes in this direction have only made Congress weaker should cause reformers to reconsider their premises. And that fact is hard to dispute. Centralizing power in the hands of party leaders has left most members with little to do (sending them in search of cameras and social-media followers), and has driven Congress to view itself as structurally ancillary to the presidency. In other words, it has had exactly the opposite effect that the reformers sought when this trend toward centralization began.

The same is true of the modern budget process. The mechanisms intended to allow Congress to consolidate its strength in opposition to the president are now routinely used to render Congress a mere facilitator of the president’s agenda. This is particularly evident in the uses of budget-reconciliation bills, which have come to be understood as a way for a president to achieve key goals when his party has only narrow majorities in Congress—a repurposing that would have seemed utterly bizarre to the authors of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Why have reforms of Congress achieved the opposite of their intended aims for decades? Because Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation. It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines. This is what the institution exists to do, and it is why the legislative branch is meant to be the focal point of political action in a system intended to sustain the political life of a vast, immensely diverse democracy.

Congress is intentionally inefficient so that getting anything done will require relatively broad majorities, which can only be achieved through negotiation across factional divisions. The system is intended to restrain narrow majorities, to maximize the legitimacy of legislative outcomes. But reformers who value efficiency above legitimacy have undermined the institution’s capacity to achieve its core purpose—they have tried to make bargaining less necessary, and in the process, they have led members to think of themselves as less necessary.

The failure to facilitate negotiation and bargaining is a key reason why Congress so rarely passes major legislation now. But that is one symptom of the underlying problem; it is not the heart of the matter. The weakening of rank-and-file members of Congress is another symptom of the same failure to facilitate negotiated accommodations. And so is the weakening of Congress in its struggles for power with presidents.

Properly understood, Congress’s strength, and the strength of each of its members, is a function of the institution’s plurality and internal diversity, and of its capacity to facilitate broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains. By losing sight of that source of its power and pursuing mere efficiency instead, Congress has lost the bulk of that power (without actually gaining much efficiency). And by continuing to misdiagnose its shortcomings, Congress now actively surrenders its power on purpose, and increasingly falls into what Wallach aptly describes as “an overwhelming sense of passivity.”

An unintentional loss of congressional power thus preceded the willful surrender of congressional power that we now see. In essence, reforms of Congress over the past half-century have operated on the premise that members are the problem and leaders are the solution. This has led members to recoil from power, and since congressional leaders are actually answerable to members and their priorities, that has, in turn, led Congress as a whole to recoil from power. Addressing this problem would require re-empowering the middle layers of Congress, and especially the committees. Reformers would have to recreate the possibility of members wielding power in order to reawaken the desire for it.

This suggests that any revival of the legislative branch would require members to become reacquainted with the sources of Congress’s strength, and therefore with the core purpose of the institution. Congress is a venue for negotiated legislative accommodations. Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making such accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary. Fifty years of reforms have fallen on the wrong side of that line.

The sorry state of the legislative branch, which Wallach so ably describes, is therefore intentional only in part. Ironically, Congress became weaker partly through reforms aimed at making it stronger. Those efforts backfired so badly because they were rooted in a misunderstanding of the fundamental purpose of the institution. Recovering a proper understanding of that purpose is key to Congress’s future.

A confident, hegemonic republic somehow begins to careen into chaos and civil strife. Its ruling class has been steadily concentrating the republic’s immense wealth in its own hands, ignoring the growing precarity of the less well-off. As instability rises, this class, which had also largely monopolized political offices, begins to lose credibility in the eyes of the rest of the populace. Demagogues, arising out of the ruling class but exploiting the popular hatred against it, flourish. At the same time, political corruption runs rampant, and political trials become frequent. Yet they often prove to be more a vehicle for entertainment or vindictive score-settling than a forum for justice. Transitions of power become fraught, irregular, and marked by violence. The dangerous logic of one-upmanship means that violations of laws and norms by one side all but guarantee worse violations by opponents when the political tides inevitably turn.

This is how Josiah Osgood depicts the last decades of the Roman Republic, clearly suggesting many worrying parallels between it and the contemporary American one. In his Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, he uses the rhetorical career of Rome’s greatest orator and philosopher-statesman, Cicero, to illustrate Rome’s collapse into civil war and tyranny. Rising from obscure birth to the consulship on the strength of his rhetorical skills and political acumen, Cicero also witnessed the final fall of republican liberty and fell himself in the rampant extrajudicial killings that marked it. His severed head, displayed on the rostra from which he had so often held crowds spellbound with his speeches, was a fitting signal that in Rome the era of rule by law and persuasion had been replaced by the rule of force.

Though much of the book is focused on illuminating the way late republican trials worked and the art by which speakers like Cicero could move audiences, Osgood also attempts to diagnose the causes of the republican order’s collapse. As the subtitle of the book subtly implies, he correlates Cicero’s ascent with Rome’s descent. Osgood is not heavy-handed about this: he does not assign Cicero a great deal of personal blame for Rome’s fall, and he even depicts the statesman in a semi-sympathetic light. But he does suggest that Cicero resisted the reforms that were needed to address Rome’s economic divide. Worse still from Osgood’s point of view is that, despite Cicero’s general principle of opposing political violence, he appears to have endorsed extrajudicial killings when the outcome suited his desires. To Osgood, this makes Cicero complicit in—and emblematic of—the blindness and hypocrisy of Roman elites.

Written in an accessible manner of a good storyteller, the book is an easy and engaging read. Bearing the marks of its origin as a set of true-crime stories of ancient Rome, almost every chapter of the book focuses on a different trial in which Cicero was involved. Osgood relates the salacious details that emerge in these trials—affairs, poisonings, bribery, treachery—with evident gusto. But he also uses these elements as jumping-off points to inform the reader about Roman history, institutions, and famous personalities. For anyone wishing for an easy but also informative and engaging introduction to the world of the late Roman Republic, this book would be excellent.

It appears less aimed at scholars, who would learn less from Osgood’s accessible presentation, and into whose controversies he rarely wades. Osgood’s diagnoses of the causes of Rome’s fall, summarized in the first paragraph of this review, largely tread well-worn ground. A partial exception to this is his focus on the wild nature of Roman trials and the Roman court system more generally. His narrative illustrates compellingly the ways in which Roman trials violate what we would today consider basic legal principles: flagrant appeals to emotion, nasty character attacks, outrageous counter-accusations to deflect blame—all often without the slightest shred of what a modern court would consider reasonable evidence. Lawless Republic shows how Cicero himself was a master of many of these tactics.

Expanding beyond biography, though, Osgood often points to these trials as both indicators and indirect causes of Rome’s decline, painting a picture of institutions fraying and collapsing. He also frequently calls attention to the more structural injustice inherent in them: the privileging of elite testimony over that of commoners and Romans generally over foreigners, the treatment of women and slaves, and how these trials often exonerated those obviously guilty of great cruelty and corruption.

Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior.

Osgood certainly has a point. Rome’s trial norms would never pass modern muster, and Rome’s treatment of those outside the circle of elite male citizens is morally unjustifiable. But he also somewhat downplays how, from a world-historical perspective, the Roman trial system was a tremendous achievement for justice and liberty. After all, the principles of a fair criminal trial are not self-evident, and the Romans made great strides in developing what we would today call due process. For instance, the Romans held sacrosanct the idea that no Roman citizen should be put to death without a jury trial and an appeal to the people (provocatio). Roman trials had (admittedly flawed) rules of evidence and procedure. And although Rome’s oppression of those subjugated to it is appalling, one looks in vain for another ancient empire that established a court specifically to try those of its own ruling class who had mistreated its subject peoples. Indeed, one would find few modern examples of such consideration of foreigners’ interests, either. But that is exactly what the Roman extortion court—flawed as it was—did. Cicero’s successful prosecution of Verres in that court showed that at least sometimes, Rome would do justice by her subjects.

This is no small thing. Rome is perhaps the first great polity in world history to systematically attempt to restrain its own abuse of power—both of its elites against its ordinary people, and of the political community as a whole over others. The attempts at self-restraint were clumsy, inconsistent, hypocritical, and ultimately failed. But that Rome even tried distinguishes it from most historical analogues. Cicero himself would contribute to this project of self-restraint, articulating a theory of just warfare to limit the use of force, refusing the numerous opportunities to unjustly enrich himself when governing Rome’s provinces, and condemning unconstitutional concentrations of power at peril of his life.

The spirit of self-restraint, however imperfect in the Roman case, would be a good model for emulation in a modern hegemonic republic. This is especially so if Cicero’s own diagnosis of Rome’s decline is to carry any weight with us today. According to him, Romans began to lose their freedom as soon as Rome stopped upholding the principles of freedom and justice with others. In On Duties, Cicero contrasted the contemporary period of corruption and self-interested rapacity with a time when Rome functioned as “protectorate of the world,” when “the Roman people maintained itself by acts of service, and wars were waged for the sake of allies or for the safety of our realm[,] … the ends of which were marked by clemency.” To Cicero, it was no accident that the Roman toleration of injustice toward others ultimately culminated in injustice at home—no band of robbers can help but eventually start robbing each other.

Osgood shows how the waning Roman Republic was also marked by what some today decry as “lawfare”—the use of courts and criminal trials to attack political opponents. He seems somewhat to disapprove of Cicero’s participation in this culture of lawfare, yet he also shows compellingly that Rome was experiencing profound political corruption very recognizable to modern eyes: bribery, extortion, cover-ups, attempts to interfere with elections, violent resistance to transfers of political power, and more. Osgood also decries Cicero’s other, less frequent reaction to this: reluctant endorsement of political violence ostensibly to halt other political violence or to overthrow a tyrant. But as he himself notes, increasing violence brings one ever closer to a Hobbesian state of nature. So, what is one to do when peaceful political processes give way to armed mobs roaming the streets? Without trials or violence, one’s only recourse would seem to be surrender.

In fact, we might say that Osgood’s narrative and the history of the late Roman Republic illustrate that, as long as republican politics is going to produce conflict that extends beyond the ballot box and senatorial debate, it is far better that it be lawfare than actual warfare. What seems to have eroded the stability of Rome’s institutions is not so much that its elites were subject to politically motivated trials, but that they so frequently evaded justice nonetheless. Consuls could sell Rome’s foreign policy to bribe-bearing potentates from abroad, candidates for office could stir up mobs to obstruct election results, and tribunes could exercise their vetoes to protect obvious wrongdoers. The immunity to prosecution afforded by holding public office made gaining office a near-necessity for crooked elites, for which they might kill. And this security could in turn be compounded by using that office, once won, to enrich friends, rig juries, and otherwise ensure that even when a term of office expires, their corruption and malfeasance could go unpunished.

Osgood’s book is timely and very persuasively illustrates the way violations of political norms and principles of justice form a vicious cycle. When one candidate disburses a few bribes to win office, it justifies and incentivizes the next to offer bigger ones. When one candidate resorts to political violence and retribution against enemies, it only ensures that when his opponents gain power, they will do the same and worse. The book stands as a warning against that kind of tit-for-tat politics, and the tu quoque reasoning that so often justifies it.

Moreover, Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior. The power of rhetoric and demagoguery in any popular republic should give us reason to doubt that elections will serve as a sufficient check on elite misbehavior. We should count ourselves lucky to have a more developed and thick set of judicial norms and procedures than did Rome. We should zealously and scrupulously protect and revere these rules. They have a chance to save us from Rome’s fate.

A broad respect for the rule of law means that it is less likely (though not impossible) for an innocent politician to be convicted in a proper trial. And for this reason, we should perhaps be less squeamish about the idea of subjecting our political leaders to them when evidence of corruption or political misbehavior arises. To try a popular leader for political crimes may be dangerously destabilizing. But as the example of Rome shows, to allow popular leaders to get away with political crimes is in the long run far more dangerous.

Thomas More was a “failure,” but one worthy of emulation—even or perhaps especially today, five centuries later. So declares Joanne Paul, in a preface to her engaging and exquisitely researched biography, Thomas More: A Life.

But a failure how? More rose from modest origins to become Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. In Samuel Johnson’s judgment, he was “the person of greatest virtue these [British] isles ever produced.” He would posthumously become a Catholic saint, not to mention the hero of a play and a movie (A Man for All Seasons) that won the Oscar for Best Picture. How then was he a “failure”?

More lived through a fulcrum period in Western history when the Christendom of the previous thousand years was disintegrating and the modern secular state was beginning to emerge. This was a transformation that More anticipated with dread, and he dedicated his enormous talents and the best years of his life—indeed his life itself, which he eventually sacrificed on a scaffold—to resisting it.

But his resistance would “come to nothing,” Paul explains. “It is difficult to point to any event or moment in Tudor history and claim that it would have been vastly different without his intervention.”

Even so, Paul sees in More’s failure something admirable and ominously timely. “Tyrants, it will not surprise you to learn, still exist. Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will—a will driven by self-interest, pride and desperate paranoia—rule today as they did 500 years ago.” And More’s “willingness to stand firm and speak truth to an overwhelming power is as relevant in today’s world as it was to that of Henry VIII.”

Not everyone has admired More, of course. He has been depicted (in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, for instance, or in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels) as a shriveled-up, mean-spirited inquisitor. Paul herself does not overtly take sides in these interpretive contests. She mostly follows the literary strategy of “show, don’t tell,” rarely offering her own speculations or judgments about More’s decisions and deeds (except in the preface and the epilogue, where she briefly steps outside her scholarly persona).

Her descriptions themselves are superbly textured. Much of the book reads almost as if Paul had followed More around with a video camera, deftly recording (with all the sights, sounds, even smells) the events, discussions, and disputes through which his life unfolded. How were the chambers decorated? Who was there, and how were they dressed? Who spoke first, who responded, what exactly did they say? The detail is remarkable—I often found myself wondering, “How does she know all this stuff?”—and it helps bring More’s world to life.

It was an earthy world, but also a sacramental world, with constant connections to transcendence. Paul thus tells us about the numerous religious festivals, processions, feasts, and ceremonies in their splendid particularities: the candles, the vestments, the liturgies, the music, the bells. These things constituted the consecrated world that More attempted desperately but unsuccessfully to preserve.

But of course, that world was not all candles and festivals; it was a scene of pervasive violence and political peril as well. As an infant, More was nurtured within a morning’s walk of the murderous doings by which Richard III seized power. As an adult, More lived through a series of foreign wars and, even more ominously, internal political developments whereby Henry VIII consolidated despotic power while dispatching into exile or to execution those who stood in his way. “These matters be King’s games,” More observed, “as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds.”

But More was not a mere spectator of these “stage plays”; he was a central player. This role was the result of a portentous choice—a choice that in one form or another many confront again today. In a political world fraught with danger, corruption, and outright wickedness, should a person attempt to retain his purity by remaining politically detached? Or should he immerse himself in the world, perhaps even compromising himself, in an effort to guide political matters in a satisfactory direction?

More’s friend Erasmus, the renowned humanist scholar, implored him to stay clear of kings’ affairs, to continue in the scholarly and literary work reflected in More’s classic Utopia. But More made a different choice, guided by St. John Chrysostom’s counsel to pursue a life “busy among cities.” And thus he rose from lawyer and local lecturer on St. Augustine to undersheriff of London, thence to foreign diplomat, to member and later speaker of the House of Commons, to close friend and counselor to the king, to Lord Chancellor.

It was in his last years, however, that More’s character—both his admirable qualities and what at least from a contemporary perspective may seem his more censurable tendencies—manifested themselves most starkly. Two developments dominated these last years: the effort in England to suppress the spread of Protestantism, and the tumultuous and transformative doings that surrounded Henry’s campaign to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to consummate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More participated vigorously in the first of these developments. He tried desperately to avoid involvement in the second. And in each instance, he failed.

As king’s councilor and especially as Lord Chancellor, More energetically opposed the introduction of Lutheranism into England. He wrote treatises denouncing Luther and his ideas. He vigorously enforced laws prohibiting the importation or possession of Lutheran writings. He imprisoned and interrogated suspected Protestants, sometimes at his own home. And when the suspects persisted in their heresies (as he believed), More sometimes had them burned at the stake.

More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Such actions provoked both defenses and fierce criticisms at the time, and of course, they are even more disturbing to contemporary liberal sensibilities. Critical biographer Richard Marius discerned in More’s actions a deep anger and almost depravity of character. Hilary Mantel described him as a “blood-soaked hypocrite.” Defenders have argued, conversely, that More was only enforcing the laws; that the number of Protestants condemned to death under his administration was small compared to the number of Catholics who would be executed under Thomas Cromwell, More’s successor as Henry’s right-hand man; and that More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Paul describes the measures More took, and she reports More’s own explanations. Severe measures were necessary, he argued, to protect innocent believers and indeed the kingdom from a deadly theological contagion that would undermine civilization itself. Such discipline was also often the best remedy, he said, for the wayward heretics themselves (for whose welfare More always professed concern).

Were these defenses sincere, and did they justify More’s actions? As usual, Paul tells us what More did and said but offers no “innocent or guilty” verdict of her own.

As for “the king’s Great Matter”—namely, his desire to separate from Catherine and to marry Anne—it was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s failure to achieve papal approval for the annulment that led to his downfall and to More’s appointment to replace him as Lord Chancellor. In accepting the appointment, More obtained Henry’s permission to follow his conscience. But as the controversy escalated and as Henry’s obsession intensified, it became impossible to remain detached. More seems to have cooperated as much as he could. At one point, he appeared before both Houses of Parliament and made the king’s case in lawyer-like fashion, presenting the supporting arguments and evidence without purporting to give his personal views.

And when this was not enough, More resigned the office, hoping to live out his life in private with his family and his books. But it was too late for that.

As it became clear that the pope would not grant the annulment, Henry concluded that the only way to end his marriage was to separate from the Roman Church. To that end, the king and his men employed various barely or not quite legal means to intimidate the English clergy into submission. They revived and expanded an old legal theory of “praemunire,” which forbade appeals to Rome, in order to indict the entire clergy for illegality and disloyalty. When the prelates failed to act on a proposal to make Henry head of the church, the king’s men invoked an old legal maxim treating silence as equivalent to assent. Parliament was induced to amend the definition of treason so that any criticism of the king would now qualify as treasonous if done “maliciously” (a term that, as More anticipated, turned out to mean pretty much whatever the king and the judges wanted it to mean). The law was being cynically used—and abused—to achieve whatever those in power wanted.

And then new laws were passed requiring all English subjects to take an oath affirming the validity of the annulment, the succession of Anne as queen, and, by clear implication, the elevation of the king to be head of the church. More’s refusal to take this oath led to his imprisonment in the Tower of London for fifteen months and, eventually, his trial and execution. Both the king’s men and More’s friends and family pleaded with him to take the oath, as nearly everyone in the kingdom (including his family) had done. He was repeatedly assured, even on the day of his trial, that if he would simply affirm the words of the oath, he would be restored to his freedom and his family. Yet he refused, saying simply that he could not act against his conscience.

Whether he was justified in this refusal was and is debatable, but his courage through the whole affair is unmistakable. Paul relates all of the pertinent developments in riveting detail: the legal maneuvering, the confrontations with Cromwell and others, the earnest conversations with and letters to More’s family. She does so again with little commentary, but it is impossible not to discern the integrity and depth of More’s character through these excruciating events.

Paul reports More’s famous declaration at the scaffold that he was the king’s good servant but God’s first: “As he went to his death, however, More could comfort himself with the assurance that he had lived his life—and given his life—in service of those things he held most dear.”

So, yes, he had lived and given his life in service of those precious things, but he had not managed to preserve them. In an epilogue, Paul portrays the transformed, disenchanted world that was to follow, employing her principle of “show, don’t tell.” Chapter one of the book relates how More was born just after the celebration of Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and it describes the “thousands of small flickering lights” as the “people of London—young and old, male and female, rich and poor—processed through the winding streets” of the city. A century later, the epilogue reports, “no candles were carried by Londoners through their city” for Candlemas. The Tudor revolution had banished the celebration.

More’s efforts had failed. But Paul suggests that they nonetheless had their value, and that they are relevant still:

Those, like Thomas More, who stand up to these men [of power] and remind them of higher principles, deeper truths, greater duties, must be remembered for their efforts, even when they come to nothing. … They are the figures who inspire us when a great booming voice from above tells us we must obey, must submit, and a voice deep within us responds, no matter how quietly, “No.”

I rejoiced when I heard that my children’s school had canceled their weekly library hour. I’m sorry. I know how that sounds. Truly, I am a bibliophile; my kids have been surrounded by piles of books, quite literally from conception. I’ve devoted countless hours to reading to them. But for years, I ground my teeth at any mention of the school library.

On one level, my angst stemmed from niggling practical problems. I hated the mad hunts on library day for random books I had never heard of until we were about to be late for school. I scowled at the new entries on our school bill when we couldn’t find them. It just felt like a massive headache we didn’t need. One could argue, with some justice, that I should lament my own organizational failures instead of resenting hapless librarians. Here’s the harsh truth, though. No book the kids brought home ever became a family favorite. And shared libraries (both public and school) are becoming obsolete. 

It’s not just libraries. In the shadow of advancing technology, many things that have contributed enormously to our civilization are passing away. I’m not exactly celebrating here; in many ways, it’s quite terrifying. But as a parent, it feels self-indulgent to marinate in nostalgia. My kids are going to live in this world regardless of how I feel about it. I’d rather help them figure it out than just close my eyes and pray.

As a conservative, I have a natural suspicion of techno-optimists. Large language models are the big newcomer, and they do raise many new concerns. Everyone appreciates this in the abstract, but talking with fellow conservatives (both older and younger), I don’t always find it easy to make common cause. Many seem inclined to shun AI and other new technologies, to “just say no” or at least encourage everyone to use them as little as possible. I understand, but to me that feels like dereliction, a refusal to face up to the task at hand.

I suspect the difference in perspective stems partly from the age and interests of my kids. Four of my five sons are now in the tween-and-teen range, with a wide range of interests that can obviously be advanced through the use of technology. Older adults can default to a “personally I’d rather not” stance, while parents of young kids often warm to the “Tech Exit” strategy, reasonably believing that young children don’t need screen-based entertainment and are better off in the sandbox. That’s fine, but with older kids, the conundrums get harder. If my children just wanted to rot their brains with first-person shooters, that would be an easy call, but if you have raised your kids to be curious and inventive, they’re likely to want to use technological tools to advance healthy and meaningful pursuits. Parents still have the authority to ban the bots, but the bar on adequate justifications rises considerably. 

It’s chilling indeed to imagine a dystopian future in which people cocoon themselves in a virtual world of pleasantly pliant AIs, like a softly lit hall of mirrors.

The problem calls for careful consideration. Let us return for a blissful moment to the library. Libraries were always my happy place in childhood, and as a university student, I loved studying in the stacks. Some years ago, though, I had an eye-opening experience when I tried to make An Event out of a public library trip in early summer, helping my kids choose summer reading books. I wanted to show them how much fun it could be to browse the stacks and explore their interests and hobbies. But as we ran searches and scoured shelves, I realized I was inadvertently teaching them something else. It didn’t make a lick of sense to explore their interests at the library. Classics are cheap to buy, and for specific interests or hobbies, the library’s offerings were dated and limited in scope. We could have spent the whole afternoon hunting, and come away with far less useful material than my phone would furnish in 45 seconds. That was before large language models existed. 

On hearing this story, some people reflexively start looking “laterally” for adequate reasons to keep the libraries even though they are (by today’s new standards) both inefficient and comparatively ineffective at fulfilling the library’s original defining purpose. Perhaps we should value libraries for the human element: librarians, other patrons, public story hours. We might cherish the experience of walking through book-lined stacks, basking in the delightful smell of old pages. Perhaps the inefficiency itself should be seen as a positive good, since knowledge is more treasured when we have to work for it. 

I am not entirely unmoved by these arguments, especially because I do think that indexes, card catalogs, reading rooms, due dates, and the stacks themselves did much to enrich my own young life. But realistically, people rarely keep doing things in antiquated ways for the sake of the lateral goods. Sometimes it’s positively irrational to do that. Practical reason moves us to prioritize our actual goals over diffuse fringe benefits.

Libraries are just the start, of course. The range of things that you or your kids might want to learn from AI or other new technologies is simply enormous, and in many cases, newfangled methods will offer clear and commanding advantages over more traditional methods. 

As it happens, my sons moved into adolescence at just the moment when large language models were descending upon the world, which honestly felt like a bait-and-switch. I had spent years bracing myself for fraught discussions about social media, data theft, pornography, online gambling, scrolling addiction, video game addiction, cancel culture, and online predators. Those conversations happened, but they weren’t particularly hard. My kids (the older ones at least) already know quite a lot about those issues, but they haven’t asked for social media accounts or personal devices; they don’t even seem to want them. It helps, no doubt, that they attend a K12 parochial school where few kids have those things. It helps that they stepped into adolescence a few years after the “anxious generation” went into a tailspin, giving them (and their parents) the chance to learn from past mistakes. But whatever the reasons, they know that the virtual world can be dangerous and bruising, and show little enthusiasm for flinging themselves into that fray.

Here’s what they do want. They want AI to analyze their last chess game, so they can understand why the opening they just used didn’t work. They want it to generate a map of the travels of T. E. Lawrence, to facilitate their ongoing debate about his strategy as presented in Lawrence of Arabia. They want to know what Jane Austen means when she says that Mr. Darcy has “considerable patronage in the church” not enjoyed by his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. They want an explanation of SpaceX’s latest projects, and its relationship to the US Space Force. They want to know which hard baits are most effective for going after walleye in southern Minnesota in high summer. They want to create a board game that models market growth in the early industrial era more accurately than Brass Birmingham. Once AI has helped them to develop some rules, they can be found drawing up plans for 3-D printed pieces to help them play test their game. That’s just a small sample from the past couple of weeks. It’s a bit exhausting, honestly. Hey kids, how about a nice video game?

There’s a sense of being flanked. Not only did we (my husband and I) not prepare for this sort of campaign, we actively paved the way to it by encouraging our kids to be intellectually curious, creative, and resourceful in pursuing personal interests. All my lessons in reading and understanding a text now bolster their case for using AI to look up literary references. All my lectures about mindless scrolling and “snackable” feeds come back to haunt me when they rightly observe that they won’t need to bump around the Internet gleaning snippets of information if I just permit Gemini to give them a quick response. Large language models can be wrong sometimes, and they know that. But if one only wants fishing tips, or fodder for casual dinner-table debates, aren’t they reliable enough? 

It feels obtuse to spurn such a valuable tool. High-handed lectures on alienation just sound silly when you’re standing in a Walmart aisle trying to select appropriate fishing equipment. Why not just take out your phone and get the needed information? But it’s all quite discombobulating: even as I smile and my children’s enthusiasms, taking a genuine maternal pride in that relentless curiosity, there’s that voice in the other ear whispering, “So, you signed your family up to be guinea pigs for the next technological revolution. What could go wrong?”

Some of the risks are obvious. I know all about student cheating, of course, and the nightmare it’s causing for universities. I fully agree that students must read, write, and articulate ideas if they are to develop their rational faculties. But those aren’t the problems that top my list, because the young people that most concern me are not particularly averse to reading, writing, or articulating ideas. 

Syntheses can be transformative, in a good way. But when is synthesis enhancing our capacity to think, and when is it undermining it?

On a very different front, I am deeply concerned by the things I read about chatbots being used for a simulacrum of love and friendship. Already there are tragic stories about ChatGPT ushering mentally fragile people further along the path to insanity, but as sad as those cases are, I’m even more concerned about the ways in which pseudo-intimacy with machines could erode people’s ability to navigate real human relationships. Truthfully, flesh-and-blood humans can be a real pain sometimes, and when they are, you’re not allowed to switch them off and go about your life. On the other hand, real people can love you, as an algorithm cannot. It’s chilling indeed to imagine a dystopian future in which people cocoon themselves in a virtual world of pleasantly pliant AIs, like a softly lit hall of mirrors. When it comes to chatbot intimacy, “just say no” certainly is my best advice, to my children or anyone else.

But when LLMs are used as tutors and sources of information, the questions get much harder. Here too, there are painful losses on the horizon. The decaying libraries may be the harbinger of worse things to come: crumbling universities, soulless novels, faltering minds, and imaginations. A host of questions arises here about how models should be trained, and by whom. But none of that changes the fact that AI tools, right here and now, can do much to enhance our knowledge. As a great thinker once noted, all men by nature desire to know. Can we “just say no” to the desire to know?

It’s something of a cliche by now that it’s bad to “let AI think for you.” I don’t per se disagree, but the relationship between AI and “thinking” is not straightforward, however. The transformative power of the large language model lies in its tremendous capacity for synthesis. Synthesis can be a very important exercise of human rationality, which the LLM can potentially short-circuit, and yet there’s clearly nothing new about relying on outside sources for synthesis. The OED, in its day, represented a new and powerful synthesis. Atlases are a kind of synthesis. The periodic table of elements is a synthesis of another sort. Syntheses can be transformative, in a good way, and in an unimaginably complex world, we clearly need them. But when is synthesis enhancing our capacity to think, and when is it undermining it? Unclear.

Further, it’s a familiar truth that distraction has been one of the most problematic side effects of social media, smartphones, and other recent technological advances, in part because they placed an enormous amount of data at our fingertips but forced us to do some work to marshal different tidbits and synthesize them. Large language models can do much to remedy that problem, renewing our capacity to focus. What if AI could actually lessen people’s absorption in the virtual world? It’s a possibility we should at least consider. 

Honest skeptics need to acknowledge this much at least: if we refuse to use LLMs, or prohibit them for our kids, genuinely valuable opportunities will be lost. Ancient Greek tutors exist in this world, but not many, and not at a price I could afford. Chess grand masters could provide the high-level analysis young chess nerds want, but they’re unlikely to return our phone call. Answers may vary, but it’s simply a fact that AI is forcing us to confront “how should we live now” questions in a new way. In my mind’s eye, I’m suddenly back in that public library, struggling to explain why we should check out a fraying, dated book on a subject that a new YouTube video could cover in a fraction of the time. Again, I’m floundering.

In the end though, there is this. The questions of this moment are difficult. It’s not right to leave the young and inexperienced to wrestle with them alone. The world has changed, with unclear implications, but at least if we live it out with our kids, we have some opportunity to offer guidance.

As I worked on this column, I could hear my husband and boys downstairs, working on a project of their own. They’re renovating our home library. The old shelves were overflowing, so my husband is surrounding the room with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves. We still love books, you see. Some beautiful things may survive this moment of transition, but if we truly want to save them, we’ll need to be both prudent and circumspect. No one ever saved civilization by suppressing the desire to learn.

Ten years ago on this site, I documented the rise of America’s most prominent socialist, Bernie Sanders, from his surprising victory in a mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont, to becoming a member of the House of Representatives, then the US Senate, and now a leading national left-wing politician. I called his version of socialism “genteel” and asked if it really had any relationship with the hard-edged revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America who wanted to confront the owners of capital, take control of industries, and fight for unions and working people.

Whether they are consciously copying Sanders’ footsteps to becoming the leading advocate for overthrowing America’s “oppressive” capitalist system or not, we now have three individuals who either call or align themselves with socialism serving as mayor or in a very strong position to become mayor of large American cities. Like Sanders, these individuals espouse some very left-wing policies. But can someone serving as a mayor, even the mayor of America’s largest city, really pursue “socialism”? Can local politics ever be socialist?

Chicago’s Brandon Johnson won the general election just two years ago, and now in New York City, Zohran Mamdani is the winner of the Democratic primary, which will likely give him the keys to Gracie Mansion. Then just last week in a very surprising outcome in Minneapolis, another socialist, Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic party at a convention, rejecting the incumbent Jacob Frey because he failed to support a resolution calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas conflict last year and not supporting policies such as carbon taxes and rent control. Arguing, correctly, that they don’t work.

Socialism has been growing in popularity and favorability among the two groups that carried Mamdani to victory in New York—Democrats in general and young people in particular. The day after his stunning victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that it was an army of young volunteers who helped organize his campaign and push him over the finish line, convincingly defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Socialism has steadily become more popular among young people and the left in recent years. A Pew poll from 2022 showed 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable impression of socialism, and that a majority of Americans aged 18–29 preferred socialism to capitalism. Drilling further into the data, the poll found that young Democrats in particular were predisposed towards socialism because it would redistribute wealth and use state power to provide a plethora of various services and other “freebies.”

Mamdani’s bread and butter policies were chosen to appeal to younger left-leaning voters in New York, specifically rent control, subsidized public transportation, government grocery stores, and other superficially appealing (and ultimately disastrous) proposals. Fateh has a similar vision for Minneapolis.

Part of the problem is that for a long time, there was at least one party that staked out a fairly consistent position in favor of less government and more markets, in its rhetoric. That was the Republican Party, coming out of the roots of the Goldwater Revolution through the Reagan presidency up through the end of George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House. The party of the “right” was fairly consistent in at least talking about capitalism and limited government positively. But the GOP now supports tariffs, economic planning, and huge domestic spending programs, alongside strengthening the military. That shift allows Democrats to move further left on a wide range of issues, and the election of these two individuals offers a glimpse of one potential future of American national politics.

Leaving aside national politics, an interesting question remains: Why are we seeing socialism become popular at the local level, particularly in these three cities? First, in the case of New York and Minneapolis, these candidates were successful through unconventional electoral processes—ranked-order voting in Mamdani’s case and a nomination by a local party in Fateh’s. Second, all three of these candidates have won in very blue cities in which socialism is more favorably viewed, but none with the support of blue-collar voters. In Chicago, Johnson was the former head of the teachers’ union, which is one of the most politically powerful organizations in the state. In New York, Mamdani won with support from the “a little rich” boroughs of Brooklyn and other areas filled with highly educated elite voters who believe they are the underpaid relative to their fellow elites on Wall Street and in tech. Resentment by them fueled his victory while working-class voters in the Bronx and Staten Island rejected his calls for government grocery stores, housing the homeless in subway stations, and rent control. Fateh won the support of hard-left party delegates in a city that was the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

There is one more key reason why socialism is becoming more popular among heavily blue cities, and Fateh mentions it prominently on his campaign page when he begins his “Vision” by noting that the White House is occupied by Donald Trump. Of course, this is in conjunction with Trump’s policies. He says he wants to create a Minneapolis that is “the last line of defense” against President Trump and what he calls his “posse of unelected billionaires” in a nod to Elon Musk. I would wager that Mamdani enjoys a similar tailwind in this election. It’s also worth noting that Sanders was elected mayor in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was to begin his first term in office. Coincidence?

Expecting the mayors of their cities to lead the resistance, though, is naive. It’s like signing a punter to solve a football team’s passing game. Mayors have limited powers to take on the national government and a responsibility to handle local policy challenges, not to issue proclamations in support of Middle Eastern policies.

Will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.”

Any thoughtful citizen needs to see what this posse of soon-to-be-elected, self-proclaimed socialists is selling. They have little managerial experience; they are rehashing failed policies that will simply lead to a larger public sector that none of these cities can afford. What’s more, increasing public sector spending in many of the areas they are suggesting has never been effective at addressing the problems these individuals are claiming to solve. That is why blue cities have been losing population and Democrats are bleeding blue-collar support in metropolitan areas.

So, will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.” Historically, socialists have advocated for the abolition of privately held property that would be replaced by collective ownership and central control of the distribution of goods through central planning rather than markets. This has led to decreases in inequality, basically by making everyone tremendously poorer, for example, in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Modern advocates for socialism promote it as a much milder version of the Soviet communist model, but the principles share a lot of similarities. Consider Mamdani’s calls for the abolition of privately owned housing and government provision of retail food. Those are steps towards intervention in two critical areas of daily life. Of course, he lacks the power to confiscate people’s homes and build large public housing projects on 5th Avenue. So can a mayor really be a socialist?

The founders of the Bloomington School of political economy, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent, were always reluctant to describe local politics using sharp divisions between “markets” and “government.” They correctly recognized that the market is an institution that needs some third party to maintain property rights and enforce contracts. Governments need some form of wealth creation to pay for services. They argued that neither can exist in a vacuum without the other.

Rather, cities and localities offer different bundles of services, with individuals exercising choice to decide how those services are provided. Take something simple like trash collection. A city can hire a bunch of full-time employees and equipment, then build its own landfills to handle trash removal and waste disposal fully publicly. Or they could work with private sector providers to pick up trash, contract out with private landfills, and deposit the garbage with them. Most city services can now be provided by private companies, and most cities use some mix of public and private. Here in Indianapolis, the parking meters are run by a private company. Education is moving towards a mix of public and private.

And as the Ostroms correctly noted, it is mayors and city councils who decide how those services are provided. All three of the socialist-ish mayoral candidates seem to be in agreement with the broad principle that more public provision of things is good. For example, Johnson in Chicago is fighting to curtail school choice and protect public teachers’ pensions and salaries, which may be a principled belief, but it also satisfies his strongest group of supporters. Mamdani’s goals of rent control and “free” public transit, along with curtailing police power, might also be principled but satisfy his core supporters. But none of those are necessarily “socialist”. In fact, it looks quite a bit more like a lot of urban governance during the 1960s and ’70s—a period of notoriously poor performance by most major American cities.

That period of failed governance included what became known as “white flight,” when large numbers of city dwellers fled to the suburbs when faced with unsatisfactory governance. Exit is always an option for citizens when it comes to localities. To pay for these “socialist” policies, taxes will increase on “the rich,” who will undoubtedly flee the city to avoid those higher tax rates. At this moment, both Chicago and New York are in tenuous fiscal positions because of unfunded pension funds for government employees. While Minneapolis is in a somewhat better position, it also has approximately $100 million in debt from such pension commitments to government workers.

While the music of the 1960s and 70s is something to enjoy, its urban governance, bankrupt cities, crime-ridden streets, and poor public services are not. And no matter what label you put on them, they will not bring the workers’ paradise socialism promises.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

The ongoing clash of the titans, President Trump and Elon Musk, is bringing into high relief the question of whether even the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth can stand up to vast private wealth allied to the power of advanced technology. Can mere political power—the checks and balances of constitutional government—ever hope to control the apparently limitless ability of technology billionaires to alter everyone’s lives? Will Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, having created entirely new digital societies, succeed in making themselves the gatekeepers of those societies? Will the new subjects of the new generation of tech builders get a democratic veto on the future being planned for us? Or will we wake up one day to be notified that installation of a brain-machine interface (BMI) is a “required update,” without which we will be unable to make a phone call or access our investment account? Will space travel soon require no government authorization, and colonies on the Moon or Mars be founded, not by NASA, but by the wealthy few who dominate aerospace technology?

We live in revolutionary times because technology is transforming every aspect of our lives—including not only how we work, but also how we connect with each other and find a sense of meaning. Tech founders and venture capitalists—the creators of artificial intelligence, space technologies, social media, cloud, and data platforms—are becoming global power players, whose tools are not just products, but networks that influence how societies function, how people think, how wars are fought, and how peace is made.

As in the socialist revolutions of the last century, the common people have yet to be consulted about these drastic alterations to our way of life, these new directions being set for our future. Socialists justified the lack of democratic accountability by claiming that the proletariat clung to the past owing to “false consciousness.” They could not be expected to discern the Shining Path that lay ahead, so they would have to be driven along it by force. Similarly, the tech titans of today assume that the vast multitude of tech users, many wedded to outmoded ways of life, will resist but will ultimately accept a future in which tech will give them unimaginable wealth and freedom. For now, they will have to be subject to tyrannous updates. Only Elon Musk, with over 222 million followers on his X account, seems concerned about legitimizing this tech future by founding an “America Party.” How successful his latest venture will be remains to be seen.

For now, the gap between Silicon Valley’s mindset and the rest of humanity is widening. The venture capitalists who invest in the most disruptive technologies tend to be techno-optimists like Marc Andreesen or transhumanists like Peter Thiel. All our personal and social problems, such men believe, are now capable of technological solutions. Human beings no longer have to be satisfied with the traditional limits of human nature or the vagaries of democratic politics.

Many tech entrepreneurs, understandably, are done with waiting for government to solve our problems. Elon Musk believed DOGE could save us from catastrophic levels of public debt, but the politicians wrecked his beautiful dream. Why waste any more time in Washington, DC, when the real solutions will be found through disruptive tech such as generative AI or new space technologies? Why rely on faulty human intelligence when we can create a superintelligent and invisible god in the cloud that can govern us, perhaps via BMI implants, far better than we govern ourselves?

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the rest of us could do with a little less disruption as we struggle to come to grips with the tech revolution. We are having breakdowns from all these breakthroughs. We worry that the tech billionaires are more interested in their own success, measured in dollars, than in our welfare. We are alarmed when the logic of finance drives venture capitalists to prefer dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military applications. Military tech cries out to be used, which means war. As Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon’s chief diplomat, once remarked, the only thing you can’t do with bayonets is to sit on them.

What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin.

Private adventurers getting out in front of public authorities are, to be sure, nothing new in Western history. The Dutch and British empires were launched by entrepreneurs who left the political constraints of their home countries to make fortunes in foreign lands. In time, their governments found it necessary to deploy ever more military power to protect their new overseas interests. Presently, they found themselves with empires. As the historian John Robert Seeley wrote of the British Empire in 1883, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” In North America, the restless expansion of British and French colonists ended up triggering the French and Indian Wars, an extension of the European Seven Years’ War that neither the British nor the French governments welcomed. Unplanned imperial overstretch nearly bankrupted both colonial powers, creating the preconditions for two revolutions, the American and the French.

The ambition to transcend the limits of human nature is also nothing new. In the 1660s, shortly after the formation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Robert Boyle jotted down what many scholars have seen as the Society’s to-do list. This was inspired by his mentor Francis Bacon, who wanted to reorient the sciences to more practical aims, principally “the relief of man’s estate.” More than a few items in this list sound strangely familiar:

• The Prolongation of Life.
• The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
• The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed.
• The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
• Potent Drugs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.

Some items would be described today as dual-use technologies:

• The making Armor light and extremely hard.
• A Ship to saile with All Winds, and A Ship not to be Sunk.

It wasn’t called the Royal Society for nothing. Kings and princes had been sponsoring new technologies since Prince Henry the Navigator developed a new naval vessel, the caravel, to explore commercial opportunities on the coasts of Africa. Scientific advances in Renaissance Europe from the beginning were linked with military competition between rival powers.

Entrepreneurs seeking to escape the constraints of government, then, are nothing new. Inventors have been trying to transcend the limits of human nature for centuries. Dual-use technologies are as old as warfare itself. What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin. Never before have the masters of technology had such power at a time when the public has so little trust in traditional institutions. Will the tech titans soon become the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, as Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said of poets? And if so, what can we do about it?

There have been other times in history when ruling institutions were weak and distrusted, and powerful individuals, lacking political legitimacy, have stepped into their place. Another great poet, Francesco Petrarch, spotted the problem in the fourteenth century, following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the discrediting of the Papacy’s moral authority—the two great universal institutions of the Middle Ages. He came up with a solution that sparked the Italian Renaissance, among the most glorious periods of cultural achievement in the Western tradition. For Petrarch, the problems of his day could be solved by a revival of ancient virtue, meaning the lost moral, intellectual, and spiritual excellence of the ancient world. Educating the new leaders of Europe in the classics, he believed, would bring about a general reformation of society and political life. Could a similar strategy be used today?

A decade or so back, tech entrepreneurs started organizing themselves to promote what they called “Peace Tech.” The idea was not to ease consciences by investing in progressive causes, like ESG investing. Rather, venture capitalists would incubate startups that would create “dual use” innovations of a different kind. These technologies, sometimes called “triple use”, included peace as a third pillar. They aimed to build a movement of tech entrepreneurs, coders, developers, and investors committed to using technology to save lives, predict conflict, mitigate violence, mediate tensions, and support post-conflict recovery.

There are all too many reasons to fear political capture of initiatives like Peace Tech, but perhaps a similar model could be used to launch a Petrarchan reform among the new generation of tech entrepreneurs. The Renaissance revival of ancient virtue succeeded by convincing the most prestigious leaders of Renaissance Italy that they could only bring order to the chaos of the times by creating a new class of men and women. This new elite would dedicate itself to moral and intellectual excellence. The governments of that time suffered from a deficit of legitimacy, but virtue—supreme competence, wisdom, and firm moral grounding—could build a legitimacy of its own. The peoples under their rule would willingly accept effective leaders who showed care for people of all classes as well as loving custodianship of sound Western traditions inherited from the past.

A true aristocracy of virtue in tech, or even a few individuals with humanistic leadership skills of an exceptional order, could alter the worldview of the new technocracy, and place technological advance in the service of humanity and the common good—rather than the other way around. In the Renaissance, some powerful but illegitimate rulers like Lorenzo de’Medici sought the good of their peoples without sharing power with them. By contrast, the Founding Fathers, many of them virtuous men trained in the classics, took the European tradition of aristocratic republics and made it more responsive to the will of the people. As is written in the Book of Wisdom, “A multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world.”

Despite being written 180 years ago, Richard Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser, speaks to contested aspects of freedom in modern-day life. It reflects the earlier conception of freedom that historian Sophia Rosenfeld documents in her new book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Heinrich Tannhäuser moves from license to liberty in the opera. The opera illustrates Rosenfeld’s argument that freedom traditionally meant freedom from bondage to disordered desire; it distinguished between liberty and licentiousness. This, in contrast to the dramatic twentieth-century inversion, in which moral license, rather than being an antonym of freedom, becomes a synonym for freedom.

Contrary to the way the opera’s drama is typically framed today, as revolving around Tannhäuser’s choice between profane and sacred love, the first words Henrich utters—even the first notes of the overture—make clear that Tannhäuser seeks the freedom of beatitude. In Act 1, Heinrich, enslaved by his sexual passion to the goddess Venus—today we would call Heinrich a sex addict—describes the opera’s dramatic trajectory (translation by Burton Fisher),

If I remain with you, I can only be a slave.
It is freedom that I long for: freedom, freedom, for which I thirst;
I will struggle and fight,
even if destruction and death await me:
therefore I must flee your kingdom.
Oh queen, goddess, let me go!

The drama in Tannhäuser does not revolve around a never-ending dialectical struggle between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, tempting though it may be to frame the drama as a choice for Heinrich between Venus (Dionysiac) and the chaste Elisabeth (Apolline).

From beginning to end, albeit with fits and starts, the opera revolves around Heinrich’s pilgrimage to free himself from his bondage, his addiction, as he seeks to attain the beatific vision. Ultimately, however, only death can free him from his bondage. It is not the death of romantic extinction, however, it is a death unto life. The dramatic movement arises from how those around him, his ostensible friends and allies, hinder and divert him from his pilgrimage, and from how others help him to free himself, even at great cost to themselves.

The opera challenges modern conceptions of what freedom is and provides a dramatic, and moving, display of what it takes to be freed from bondage to sin.

To be sure, I accept that Wagner’s opera embodies and reflects Romantic-era themes. Yet modern commentary often draws too sharp a line between Romanticism and Christianity. Thematic currents certainly existed in Romantic art that reflected heterodox, immanentistic religious sentiments. But there also existed currents in the movement more congenial to Christianity.

One does not stretch to recognize a Christian theme in an opera in which the libretto provides “To Thee do I journey, Lord Jesus Christ, for Thou art the pilgrims’ hope.” And more diffusely, the common German Romantic trope of the redemptive female, I suggest, draws on the Biblical currents of traditional Christendom in which the Church holds a distinctively feminine identity as the bride of Christ.

That said, the opera shouldn’t be baptized; Wagner himself prevents that. Nonetheless, I think we can interrogate the opera for Christian themes, although interrogate it for themes that challenge today’s all-too comfortable Christianity as much as interrogate it for themes that challenge today’s antinomian conception of freedom.

The Chiastic Structure of Tannhäuser

The opera offers a basic chiastic structure.

The chiastic structure highlights three points about the opera. First, the opera is all about Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage toward beatific vision; it is not about a choice between profane and sacred love. This is clear musically as well as textually. The very first notes of the overture are those from the Pilgrims’ Chorus. The very last notes of the opera are those of Pilgrim’s Chorus. (Some versions end with a trebled “hallelujah,” but those are no more than sung exclamation marks.)

There is a musical shift, however, that emphasizes the concluding words of the libretto reporting Tannhäuser’s redemption: In both the overture and when the Chorus is sung by the pilgrims returning from Rome without Tannhäuser, the meter for the Pilgrim’s Chorus is 3/4. In the opera’s concluding use of the Chorus, it is in the measured and emphatic 3/2 meter.

The pilgrims’ leitmotif frames both the start and conclusion of the opera. Doing so musically links Heinrich’s fate with that of the pilgrims returning from Rome when they sing the Chorus at length in Act 3, “I lay my pilgrim’s staff to rest, because, faithful to God, I completed my pilgrimage!”

The music articulates the same outcome for Heinrich, the change in the meter underscoring the dramatic concluding words of the libretto, sung with emphasis by pilgrims and others on stage, “The salvation of grace is the penitents reward, now he [Tannhäuser] attains the peace of the blessed!” This is the end toward which the opera moves from literally the first notes of the overture.

Secondly, when Tannhäuser departs Venusberg, his pilgrimage not only takes him away from Venusberg, it also takes him away from Wartburg, and Elisabeth, as well. This is why the opera does not circle around Heinrich’s choice between Venus and Elisabeth: Heinrich does not leave Venusberg in order to return to Elisabeth and Wartburg. His diversion to Wartburg and Elisabeth represents a relapse; this diversion threatens his soul.

Finally, Elisabeth’s intercession for Heinrich is the pivot around which the chiasm inverts. The pivot, however, reflects a point of discontinuity for Elisabeth, a significant moment of change. Elisabeth was basically a besotted schoolgirl before growing up spiritually in answer to Tannhäuser’s crisis.

At the pivot, Elisabeth recognizes that in returning to Wartburg, Tannhäuser has placed his soul at risk. Contrary to the view that Elisabeth does little more than fulfill the Romantic-era trope of the sacrificial virgin, Elisabeth matures more than any other character during the course of the opera (including Tannhäuser). After the chiastic pivot, she reflects the deep love of Christ for his people, “Greater love has no one than that he lay down his life for his friends.”

The Dramatic Movement in the Opera

Act 1 opens with Tannhäuser, a medieval German minnesinger (akin to a troubadour) in intimate repose with the goddess Venus in her grotto in Venusberg. Satyrs, fauns, naiads, sirens, nymphs, and others cavort around the couple. (Some versions of the opera open with a longer orgiastic ballet.)

Tannhäuser is jarred awake by the “joyous peals” of church bells he hears in a dream. Moved by the beatific call, Tannhäuser presses Venus to release him from his bondage to her. Initially diplomatic in how he frames his request, Tannhäuser praises the goddess before repeatedly asking to be set free. Venus pushes back, declining his request. The disagreement escalates, musically as well as textually.

Tannhäuser comes clean with his change of heart, “Goddess of pleasure and delight, no! Oh, I shall not find peace and repose in your embrace! My salvation lies in Mary!” (Mary is a synecdoche for heaven and God’s presence.)

Venus and Venusberg disappear immediately; Tannhäuser finds himself in front of a shrine to Mary outside of Wartburg.

Before Tannhäuser is able to continue his pilgrimage, however, he meets a group of minnesingers from Wartburg whom he used to know. While acknowledging them, he begs them to allow him to continue his pilgrimage away from Wartburg. Not recognizing the desperate nature of Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage, they press him repeatedly to join them again and return to the castle. Tannhäuser resists each request until Wolfram, a previously close friend, entices Tannhäuser with the prospect of renewing his association with Elisabeth. The temptation proves too much; Tannhäuser capitulates. Now diverted from his pilgrimage, he returns with them to the castle, and to Elisabeth.

In Act 2, the community gathers with the minnesingers to witness their competition over who can improvise the best song. The Landgrave (the aristocratic lord) provides the topic of the competition: the minnesingers must improvise a song describing “the true essence of love.”

The first two minnesingers improvise insipid songs of drippy platitudes; Tannhäuser scorns their songs (as they deserve). But when it comes to Tannhäuser, that his return to Wartburg represents a relapse into bondage becomes clear: he sings a tribute to Venus and profane love.

His song scandalizes the assembly. The other minnesingers, outraged, advocate Tannhäuser’s exile, even death. While Elisabeth is shocked as well, she alone recognizes that Tannhäuser has returned to Wartburg morally wounded and disordered. Elisabeth intercedes for Tannhäuser, saving him from the mob.

This is the pivot in the chiasm.

Elisabeth’s intercession allows Tannhäuser finally to proceed with his pilgrimage, heading to Rome with other pilgrims to receive absolution from the pope.

In the final act, Elisabeth waits for Tannhäuser’s return from Rome. When the other pilgrims return, Tannhäuser is not with them. She recognizes that Tannhäuser is again spiritually lost. In response, Elisabeth fulfills the terms of prayer she made at the chiastic pivot, giving her life that she might draw even nearer to the heavenly altar to continue praying for Tannhäuser. She departs to die.

Tannhäuser subsequently arrives back in Wartburg. He is lost: The pope rejected his plea for forgiveness, telling him that because he had “sojourned in the Venusberg, from now henceforth, you are eternally damned.” The pope tells Tannhäuser that, as his (the pope’s) wooden staff no longer blossoms, “deliverance can never blossom for you.”

Without hope of redemption now, Tannhäuser braces himself to return to Venus. “I have lost my salvation, now let the pleasures of hell be mine.” Venus appears before him to receive him back, “Now be forever mine!” This return is its own judgment for Heinrich.

Before Tannhäuser departs, however, the minnesingers arrive carrying Elisabeth’s corpse. Wolfram tells Tannhäuser, “Your angel prays for you at God’s throne. She has been heard, Heinrich, you are saved!” Tannhäuser collapses before Elisabeth’s body and cries out, “Holy Elisabeth, pray for me!” And dies.

Another set of pilgrims arrives, returning from Rome. They return, however, with news of a miracle: the pope’s staff has blossomed. Heaven has overruled the pope; the miracle shows that redemption has “blossomed afresh” for Tannhäuser, and he has “attained the peace of the blessed.”

Elisabeth’s Maturation in the Opera

Commentary typically portrays Elisabeth as a unidimensional, “saintly” Elisabeth. The Romantic trope of the redemptive woman. Elisabeth does become saintly. But she’s an earthly-minded girl at the start of Act 2.

Elisabeth fell hard for Tannhäuser before he spurned her for Venus. In response to the hurt and embarrassment, Elisabeth petulantly withdrew from the activities at Wartburg. On hearing of Tannhäuser’s return, her heart flutters, “How strongly my heart jumps.” She sings, “I have been awakened to new life.”

When Tannhäuser subsequently sings paeans to Venus at the music competition, Elisabeth is as shocked as the others, perhaps even more so. Critically, however, she recognizes, as the others do not, that Tannhäuser is struggling to break free of spiritual bondage. Helping Tannhäuser break free of this slavery requires her intercession, an intercession requiring not only that she give up her own hopes for happiness with Tannhäuser as a couple, but that she sacrifice her earthly life for his eternal life.

At the chiastic pivot, Elisabeth recognizes that Tannhäuser’s diversion to Wartburg—and to her—meant a spiritual relapse for Tannhäuser, that he is once again in the demon’s thrall. Elisabeth recognizes this, and makes a fateful commitment to exchange her earthly life to secure Tannhäuser’s eternal life:

May the spirit of belief be granted him, just as the Savior once suffered. … Let him journey to Thee, Thou God of clemency and grace. … Forgive him, who has fallen, forgive the guilt of his sin. I will pray for him. May my life be prayer; grant that he may see Thy light, before he is lost in darkness. In joyful fright, let a sacrifice be dedicated to Thee. Take, oh, take my life: I no longer call it mine.

Elisabeth offering her life as a sacrifice likely strikes the ears of most modern American Christians as heterodox. Jesus, after all, is the sacrifice for the sins of people.

But Elisabeth’s offer is not quite as heterodox as it may initially appear. First, Elisabeth herself frames her request in the context of Jesus’s sacrifice, “just as the Savior once suffered.” And recall that Jesus enjoins his followers to “take up their cross,” the instrument of crucifixion, to follow him. Similarly, Peter writes that Jesus’s suffering provides Christians “an example, so that you may follow in his steps.” Paul refers to his suffering “completing what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of the body which is the church.” The Apostle even suggests he would be willing to be accursed so that he might save others.

From beginning to end, albeit with fits and starts, the opera revolves around Heinrich’s pilgrimage to free himself from his bondage, his addiction, as he seeks to attain the beatific vision.

None of this impugns the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Rather, traditional Christian theology makes a distinction between Christ’s unique propitiatory sacrifice and his followers’ “eucharistic sacrifices”—sacrifices of thanksgiving—for God and each other.

As with Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac, sacrifice is a means by which the faithful can turn cheap talk into credible talk. Elisabeth offers her life to God to underscore the earnest authenticity of her prayer for his eternal good.

So, too, Elisabeth’s sacrifice of her life for Tannhäuser is not as alien to traditional Christian beliefs as it may seem at first. Elisabeth’s offer in this opera is not a Romantic gesture to non-being. While not emphasized much today, Christian baptism provides a proleptic death (and resurrection), a death that kills off the sin nature, freeing the person into life. This death liberates from sin.

Elisabeth and Tannhäuser do not look to death as extinction, but as release into the freedom of divine beatitude. Here, too, they reflect a deep Biblical longing. Paul, for example, longs for the beatitude that results from death, for “to depart and be with Christ is very much better.” This is ultimately the hope of liberation for Tannhäuser, why he sings of his death as part of his liberation from Venus.

This liberation is the opera’s story, from the first notes of the overture to the last notes the pilgrims sing. It is the move from licentiousness to the freedom of beatitude. Without suggesting that Wagner intended it to communicate a Christian message, or that it does not have its share of heterodox Romantic moments, the opera challenges modern conceptions of what freedom is, challenges easy-going assumptions among Christians of what it means to love one another, and provides a dramatic, and moving, display of what it takes to be freed from bondage to sin.

The sheer horror and bleakness of trench warfare is unrivalled. The humanitarian toll of the First World War, which began in August 111 years ago, is staggering, with 10 million military deaths, close to 7 million civilian deaths, and 21 million military personnel wounded. On July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme saw the deadliest day in British military history to date, with 57,000 casualties, including 19,240 dead. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission files reveal that 526,816 British and Commonwealth soldiers of WWI have no known resting place. Tragically, 338,955 have never been buried, and 187,861 have unidentified graves. It is hard to fathom the scale of devastation and brutality that could render half a million families bereaved without even a tangible location in which to mourn their dearly departed. How did half a million men die in service of their country, with no known final resting place? What spurred the idea of a single tomb to commemorate these men? 

These are the questions John Nichol endeavors to answer in his new book The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance. The bestselling author weaves archival research, diaries, and interviews with descendants and military experts to present a moving historical account that both haunts and edifies. A veteran who served in the Royal Air Force for fifteen years, Nichol is all too familiar with the complexities and camaraderie of war. He was taken prisoner in the Gulf War, and his highly publicized captivity became one of the most enduring images of the conflict. In this new book, Nichol quantum leaps between the past and the present to commemorate the fallen. 

At High Wood

If one single moment was emblematic of the loss of the Great War, it was surely there on the first day at the Somme, “when thousands of young men leapt gamely from their trenches, only to discover that woolen uniforms offer precious little protection against machine-gun bullets.” It was a cruel day in which one man was killed every 4.4 seconds. Two weeks later, a combined British-Indian force armed with lances charged into the jaws of a heavily armed, fortified German position equipped with machine guns. The writer explains that early in the Somme, the Allies had developed a strategy referred to as “creeping barrage.” A wall of exploding shells which moved slowly over enemy positions as infantry followed closely behind, with the hope being that any remaining enemy combatants would be forced to stay under cover as Allied soldiers advanced upon them. 

Nichol offers glimpses of the lives of some of the fallen. Bert Bradley with his pipe, young Alec Reader awaiting his release papers, and Sidney Wheater, the hockey player from Scarborough, all died at High Wood. A few hours later, Raymond Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, was shot while leading his men in an attack. In Ginchy, Harry Farlam from Derbyshire, who was so proud to be a Corporal, was killed the next day. Nichol cites the Duke of Wellington’s 1815 remark after Waterloo, “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” At High Wood today, it is estimated that 8,000 nameless soldiers from both sides still lie under the soil. “Many of the dead, never recovered and offered a permanent place to rest, still lie in the earth beneath my feet. So many Unknown Warriors. So many ghosts.”

Chaplain David Railton carried his personal Union Jack on the battlefield in France, taking great care of it. “The flag was a stirring symbol of home, of ‘Dear Old England’, as he put it. It brought a flash of colour to the muted greys and khakis of their dun-coloured surroundings. And it was a Christian symbol, too: a blood-red cross which offered, perhaps, the possibility of resurrection for those upon whom it was softly laid.” When a fresh corpse was deposited, the Padre would cover it with his flag and say a few prayers. He would do his best to identify the body and make a note of the burial location. By November 1916, the combined casualties of the British Empire, the French, and the Germans were in excess of one million, and many families had no closure. 

Fabian Ware, a newspaper editor and educator, thought deeply about the fate of the unidentified dead and their resting places in France. With colleagues, he started an operation comprising sixteen ambulances, a field hospital, touring cars, well-crafted crosses with inscriptions, and tarred bases to prevent rotting. Called the “Graves Registration Commission” (GRC), they were officially recognized by the War Office. Ware worked to establish general principles for burying and memorializing the dead after the war, and what followed was the establishment of the Imperial War Graves Commission, with the Prince of Wales as its president. Writer Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his eighteen-year-old son John in the Battle of Loos in 1915, was appointed literary advisor. It was Kipling who coined the majority of the phrases carved in cemeteries and gardens, and the phrase that is on the white headstones of all the Unknown Warriors: “A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.” Famed architect Sir Edwin Lutyens would design a majority of war memorials, including the Cenotaph. 

The Chosen One 

Railton understood the nation needed closure, healing, and a symbol to represent the devastating loss. Only 32 out of 16,000 British villages had all their men return alive from the war. He proposed that an unknown warrior be interred at Westminster Abbey, and wrote to its dean, the Right Reverend Bishop Ryle. The dean had the ear of both the King and the Prime Minister, and if anyone could get this sanctioned, it was he. Ryle replied three days later: “The suggestion of commemorating the Unknown Dead has indeed been made in different quarters. But your suggestion strikes me as the best I have received. If I could obtain the War Office permission, I think I could carry out the rest of the proposal—the interment, etc. And the idea occurs to me that it would be appropriate as a wonderful way of commemorating the Armistice.” 

Grieving mothers needed to believe the Unknown Warrior could be their precious son; widows had to hope he could be their beloved husband; and children had to be given faith that he could be their dear father. Thus, it was essential that the identity of the chosen Warrior remain unknown. All involved were sworn to secrecy and given specific instructions for the selection process. Four bodies were to be chosen. The whereabouts of the three “unused” bodies were to be sacrosanct. The body had to be a British soldier chosen from each of the big battle areas: Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. The bodies were to be brought to the headquarters at St Pol and placed in the Chapel on November 8, 1920. The parties bringing the bodies were to swiftly return to their areas. The final chosen Warrior would lie in a sixteenth-century-inspired English oak casket.

The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword.

The final chosen Warrior was transported by ambulance to Boulogne on the coast under military escort, along with six barrels of French soil. Soldiers, both British and French, and a plethora of photographers lined the roads approaching the port, eager to see the Unknown Warrior’s cortège. Nichol explains, “A bearer party of British and dominion soldiers was waiting to carry the Union Jack-wrapped coffin up to the Château’s library. The men had been carefully selected to represent all branches of the army: the Royal Army Service Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Garrison Artillery, the Australian Light Horse, the Canadian Infantry, the 21st London Regiment, the Machine Gun Corps and the Royal Army Medical Corps.”

That night would be the only time in which the Warrior was not under the protection of British troops. The “poilus” from the French 8th Regiment were chosen to guard him, in recognition of their valor in battle and as recent recipients of the Légion d’Honneur en masse. “At 10:30AM, all the bells of Boulogne began to toll, and after a blazing salute from the trumpets of the French cavalry, the great bass drums of the massed band began to thump out the sombre rhythm of Chopin’s marche funèbre (funeral march).” France had lost 1.3 million men in the war, and Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, well understood the intense human suffering. He unexpectedly travelled to the procession on his own volition and marched alongside General Macdonogh behind the Unknown Warrior. The Warrior set sail on the HMS Verdun, finally on his way home. He arrived on British soil to the chords of “Land of Hope and Glory,” then travelled by train to London Victoria’s station and onwards to his final resting place at Westminster. The French Unknown Warrior would begin his journey to Paris, where he was honored the following day as his brother-in-arms was being interred. 

A Place of Remembrance 

The Unknown Warrior’s parade began at Victoria Station, passed Constitution Hill and The Mall, stopped at the unveiling of the Cenotaph, and moved onwards to the abbey, where 20,000 applications had been received for around 1,600 places. Newspapers had come across the plea of a young boy who ended his letter with, “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.” A sentiment shared by many. Thanks to Queen Mary, wife of King George V, some places had been reserved for widows who joined dignitaries from across the Empire, including many Victoria Cross recipients, bestowing a very different honor as the Warrior’s peers. The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword. A writer for the Yorkshire Post captured the nation’s mood, “But never have I known any feeling comparable to that of today as I gazed on the flag-covered coffin that enshrined the sublime anonymity of a fallen soldier, from that to the simple but all-moving symbolism of the Cenotaph, and from both to the living, palpitating, pathetic multitude of mothers and wives stricken by the fell blow of war in these recent years. ” 

In the present, Nichol admires the ornate Unknown Warrior’s American Congressional Medal of Honor, affixed to a pillar near the Warrior’s tomb. It is embossed with the single word “VALOR.” More than 60 countries now have their own tomb for their own valiant unknown. Nichol shares that he and fellow Gulf War POWs gather every year on the anniversary of their release. They observe a moment’s silence before dinner and toast to absent friends who did not come home. 

Nichol speaks of the similarities between Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s final journey and that of the Unknown Warrior. The nation mourned for both, with a deep and profound sorrow permeating all quarters. Pride was also thematic in both, “Pride in Her Majesty’s life and her legacy; pride in our Armed Forces and the role they played; pride, above all, in the feeling of what it is to be British.” After laying flowers at Buckingham Palace, I too was a proud Brit who undertook the arduous lying-in-state pilgrimage to pay respects to our Late Queen. It was the mother of all British queues, thirteen hours of walking through the bitter London cold beside the River Thames. We diligently journeyed past iconic landmarks, eventually reaching the Palace of Westminster at 2am. 

Yet as Nichol states, differences exist, too. “Instead of the crown, orb and sceptre lay the workaday steel helmet, webbing and bayonet of a soldier.” Her Majesty was by no means anonymous. With the Warrior, he was everyone, yet no one, yet someone. As written in a personal narrative after the Warrior’s funeral, “The most terrible words in all writing used to be There they crucified Him. But there is a sadder sentence now—I know not where they have laid Him. Surely ‘missing’ is the cruelest word in the language.” The Unknown Warrior was someone’s missing—and there were hundreds of thousands like him. 

I have worn a poppy to remember the fallen and their sacrifices every November since primary school. Blazer or Cashmere coat, made of paper or enamel, ‘tis there on my lapel. It is a reminder to myself and others of what John McCrae so poignantly wrote in the first stanza of his poem, which inspired the symbol: 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

There are rows upon rows of those who loved and were loved. Who, like us, indeed felt dawn and beheld a sunset glow. The century has turned, man’s propensity for conflict has not abated, and peace still comes at a cost. As the passage of time takes us further away from the Great War, Nichol reminds us of our duty to remember—lest we forget.

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) loom large in conservative thinking about poverty and related ills. It’s widely believed that we could restore social health by reining in big government and expanding private religious programs. George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism laid out the standard expansion plan. It called for giving religious nonprofits a better shot at government contracts. That framework has also been endorsed by Donald Trump. In a February 2025 executive order, Trump stated, “The executive branch wants faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship, to the fullest extent permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, programs, and other Federal funding opportunities.” In other words, the plan is to slot FBOs into the NGO state. This merits rethinking.

America’s welfare state relies on a vast network of private nonprofit contractors to enact social policy. From one perspective, that model seems conducive to building a larger FBO sector. From another, it seems designed to tempt FBOs into overlooking how reliance on public financing makes it harder for a program to keep the faith. Temptation is a concept to which one would expect FBO champions, of all people, to appreciate. Ill-advised expansions threaten FBOs’ integrity as religious organizations offering a meaningful alternative to the social services status quo.

Setting FBOs up for success means creating programs that outperform government in boosting school performance, sobriety and employment, and/or that which promote values to which government programs are indifferent or hostile. Without a strong sense of FBOs’ distinctive virtues and the distinctive pressures they face in a secularized culture, policymakers who encourage expansion are setting faith-based leaders up for failure.

Even the most casual reader of Scripture will find his attention constantly drawn to the poorest of the poor, the miserable, the chronically ill and disabled, convicts, and others living openly sinful lives. Out of such stones cast away (Acts 4:8-12), the church will be built. Scripture shows not only Jesus’ sympathy for the wretched of the earth but his extensive personal contact with them. That example instructs that, as Pope Benedict XVI once explained to Peter Seewald, “Giving can never mean primarily giving money … you must give of yourselves.” This notion of giving of yourself is distinctive to modern faith-based organizations, which stretch thin resources through marshalling volunteer labor.

Those without any personal contact with the poor are susceptible to panaceas and utilitarian theories, such as “effective altruism,” that fetishize efficiency. Mother Teresa took constant heat from critics for failing to operate on sound business principles. Straightforward redistribution with minimal overhead will often appear as the most efficient anti-poverty policy. But redistribution will never enact the kind of behavioral change so obviously necessary to anyone who has witnessed firsthand low-income dysfunction. Giving of yourself is also less individualistic than giving of your resources. Paying taxes that go towards Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc., is part of a social contract—a deal made between the free, rights-bearing individual and the government. A redistribution-centered policy promotes a sterile, transactional conception of social work that will always seem unsatisfying to those most moved to heal society.

More than secular programs, FBOs tend to care about behavioral transformation. Aiming for behavioral transformation can yield high failure rates, but that may be defensible. Graduation from a treatment program that everyone graduates from sends a weaker message than graduation from one that most people fail out of. Conservatives sometimes argue that FBOs’ excellence consists in their ability to outperform the secular welfare state. But it may be more accurate to say that their performance can’t be compared, as they often embrace standards of success that are both different from, and higher than, secular programs’ standards.

Those concerned about anti-Christian bias often frame the FBO question as a religious liberty matter. That framing only clarifies whether religious groups can contract with government. It’s less helpful in determining whether they should. In general, an organization spiritually motivated to serve the poor may take public money to do so, as long as it doesn’t discriminate based on sect and doesn’t use taxpayer dollars to evangelize. But evangelism is precisely how FBOs reach some people failed by secular programs. Take addicts. People in recovery often fail to stick the landing because they lack something or someone to recover for. Family and friends can serve that purpose, but addicts often lack healthy social ties. Indeed, one of the standard best practices of recovery is to avoid the “people, places, and things” associated with one’s old, using ways. Building new relationships—a new life, really—takes time, leaving the typical man in recovery feeling that the only person he has to recover for is himself, which is a lonely state of affairs. But religion is always there—to provide structure, guidance, and cause for persisting in one’s sobriety. If recovery is like conversion, maybe it should be conversion.

Evangelistic work is tough sledding with poor people leading complex lives. All at the same time, they’re trying to get their kids out of foster care, obtain their high school equivalency and some form of professional certification, maintain sobriety, and secure reliable transportation and stable housing. Amidst such chaos, it’s tempting to conclude that evangelization needs to wait. On the other hand, that waiting can wind up taking forever. A crisis can present special evangelical potential. People in recovery often testify that they became sober the same day that they became a Christian and that, moreover, they’d never have made it without their faith. Reflecting on testimonies like that will naturally lead to further reflections on whether similarly situated individuals are positively harmed when social programs eschew evangelizing.

Trust can’t take root amidst fears that the next presidential administration will renege on the deal. As the old saying has it, “with government shekels come government shackles.”

The orthodox tend to bristle when religion is pitched as a life hack for staying sober. But the argument is more dialectical than utilitarian. A recovering addict will be a better Christian if he’s sober. Further, good works have a strong evangelistic upside. In The Rise of Christianity (1996), sociologist Rodney Stark credits first-century health and human service ministries with the early church’s survival. He quotes Tertullian: “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’” Performing good works obviously holds evangelistic potential for the performers, too. Chuck Colson, Watergate con and founder of Prison Fellowship, once wrote: “The richest spiritual experiences I have known have not been in vaulted cathedrals surrounded by stained-glass windows but in the filthiest prison cells. Christians will miss the greatest blessings if they isolate themselves from the reality of the world in which God lives.”

Secularizing pressures, in the world of twenty-first-century social services, are unrelenting. One pressure point is staff. Should an organization desire to integrate Christian teaching throughout its work, success will depend on what kind of personnel they can hire in an age of diminished church attendance. In 2023, the bishop of Toronto gave an interview to The Pillar in which he lamented the impracticality of finding 40,000 teachers who are “fervently Catholic” to staff the parochial education system he oversees. Should religious charter schools get off the ground, they would in short order face a similarly impossible dilemma. The big organizations (Catholic Charities; Lutheran Services in America) are those most functionally indistinguishable from the secular welfare state. That may be due not only to compromised leadership but staffing exigencies.

Downstream of personnel concerns are those of leadership transition. Many FBOs are now led by a founder or CEO who took charge two to three decades ago and is now personally out of step with the twenty-first century’s more casually secular standards. What happens when that person dies or steps down? At bare minimum, a faith-based leader should be a churchgoer. Diminished church attendance, societywide, means that the pool of potential faith-based leaders is smaller than it was thirty years ago. In principle, leadership transition creates the opportunity for revival. And yet, in my years of experience interviewing and meeting with faith-based groups, mainly homeless service providers, I have found revival to be rare. Many new leaders come in promising continuity with their predecessors in terms of religious intensity. Many come in promising fiscal discipline, a sharper focus on “outcomes,” an expanded donor base, and enticing capital improvements. It doesn’t happen very much that a new leader comes in promising spiritual renewal and pretty much just that.

The compassionate conservative theory of FBOs was premised on pluralism, in both the social services and American religious life. Earlier in the twentieth century, it had been maintained that, without strict church-state separation, the Protestant majority would exercise unjust dominion. Religious pluralism dissipated those fears. Parallel to that, as a legacy of the Great Society’s insistence on “community action,” America adopted a highly decentralized, “nonprofit industrial complex” style approach to fighting poverty. President Bush was impressed by sociological studies directed by Catholic political scientist John Dilulio that had documented that low-income neighborhoods were dense with scrappy Christian groups doing vital work in youth mentoring, child welfare, crime prevention, and addiction. These groups were seen as being discriminated against by government funding norms, forcing them to, as Bush put it in a July 1999 campaign speech, “make bricks without straw.”

Compassionate conservatism lost support after 9/11, when Bush’s attention shifted towards foreign policy. But not everyone was sad to see it fade. Author Marvin Olasky said that “compassionate conservatism mutated into a program to help local groups apply for money in Washington and learn how to work the bureaucracy.” There is indeed an essential grubbiness associated with the scramble for government contracts that carries great reputational risks for the faith-based sector. But the deeper problem is that pushing more FBOs into a reliance on government funding will give government leverage over them. Risks associated with that leverage have intensified in the era of “pen and phone” policymaking, which President Obama developed and his successors have continued. Any faith-based leader interested in contracting with government must be able to trust that he will not thereby sacrifice his organization’s integrity. That trust can’t take root amidst fears that the next presidential administration will renege on the deal. As the old saying has it, “with government shekels come government shackles.”

The steelman case for taking public money stems from need. It seems to be the case that private resources available to an FBO don’t grow at the same rate as the need in its host community grows. Many charitable organizations are philanthropically tapped out in their community; others could raise more private resources, but only via conforming to big philanthropy’s dubious whims. What faith-based social services guru Robert Lupton calls “toxic charity” possesses no moral superiority over mediocre government programs. Staying small is a recipe for barebones service offerings, which some FBOs might be content with, but many won’t. The hardest cases’ complex needs (“comorbidity”) necessitate an equally complex array of services. A modest-sized FBO may not be in a position to hire its own master’s level social worker, psychiatrist, clinical psychologists, nurse practitioners, job training and educational specialists. If you lead a good social program (who would want to lead a bad one?), it’s natural to want to help more people, or at least do a better job helping those to whom you’re already committed.

The best approach to expansion uses partnerships with government agencies as opposed to direct funding. Partnerships can facilitate access to more specialized services. In the best kind of partnership, government effectively makes an in-kind donation to an FBO. A shelter for single men hosts onsite detox services from an outside healthcare provider. The best partnerships are settled on the faith-based provider’s terms, not the government’s. A useful model is the San Antonio-based Haven for Hope, which boasts dozens of partnerships with government and other outside service providers. The federal government could play a role by urging more states and counties to, in exchange for funding, articulate how they’re actively exploring partnering with faith-based providers.

But proceed with caution. In rightwing circles, “O’Sullivan’s Law” stipulates that institutions that are not identifiably conservative become liberal over time. Consult, for example, the sad history of Catholic colleges (at least one of which currently offers a certificate in “Cannabis Studies”). Sullivan’s law most certainly applies to faith-based social service providers. Government funding can easily catalyze organizational drift from offering a distinct choice against the secular welfare state into serving as an echo of it.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, has received extraordinary attention in recent weeks, and for good reason. It is meticulously researched, tells an important story, and contains vignettes that will shock even the most cynical readers. It is also adroitly written. Although all readers know how the story ends, the authors created a genuine page turner. 

The book has a narrow focus, providing details about Joe Biden’s inner circle, as well as information about other top Democratic politicians and donors. It rarely expands outward to provide greater political or historical context. It nonetheless raises important questions that I hope all Americans with an interest in well-ordered politics and policymaking will ponder in the years ahead. Our increasingly dysfunctional Executive Branch suggests something has gone wrong with our constitutional order, requiring prudent reforms.

Original Sin is a rare work of political non-fiction that people across the partisan divide can enjoy, though for different reasons. Despondent progressives, looking for someone to blame for President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, can now point to some key figures who ensured that the Democratic Party would be in disarray in the months leading up to Election Day. Republican readers can relive the Schadenfreude of watching their opponents flame out. Even Biden loyalists should appreciate the sympathy the authors show the president, both for his sad decline and the heartbreaking personal losses he suffered over the previous decade, especially the death of one son and the legal and personal troubles of another. President Biden is presented as a tragic figure, not a villain.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, the Biden Administration’s “original sin” was the choice to run for a second term, despite clear signs of the president’s decline. Conservative pundits had been noting this for years, yet the president’s allies and, less forgivably, much of the mainstream media, denied that there was a problem. In a different era, other Democrats might have been more persistent in their efforts to determine whether Biden remained fit for the job, but because of their concern that another Trump presidency would end democracy in America, any criticism of the president was considered unseemly or even dangerous. Biden, after all, had defeated Trump once before. Could they be sure that another Democrat would have similar success?

Biden had previously declared that he intended to be a bridge to the Democratic Party’s future. When running in 2020, he telegraphed that he intended to defeat Trump, serve one term, and turn over the party’s reins to a younger standard-bearer. However, there was no mechanism in place to make him keep his word. His performance during his first years in office was, to most Democratic voters, acceptable. The Democratic Party’s presidential primary elections were perfunctory, at best. Insiders who witnessed Biden’s decline firsthand had few incentives to go public with their concerns. They feared being labelled as traitors, giving aid to Trump. Thus, most remained silent until Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024 made his growing challenges undeniable.

Biden’s eventual withdrawal from the race scarcely improved the Democrats’ chances. There was no time at that point to hold a competitive primary election. Furthermore, failing to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris risked alienating key demographic groups in the party, even if she was an uninspiring candidate. Despite being nominated without much of a fight, she was in a difficult situation. She had spent months insisting the president was in perfect health. In accepting his departure and taking his place at the top of the ticket, was she acknowledging her own dishonesty about Biden’s cognitive decline? She wanted to present herself as an agent of change, but she had difficulty articulating how, if at all, her priorities would differ from Biden’s. She had little choice but to run as a quasi-incumbent, stuck with the baggage of her predecessor, with an unclear vision.

The book drives home that the problems of the modern presidency cannot be entirely blamed on Trump and his allies. Depending on one’s political allegiances, it is either vindicating or alarming that we saw many of the same pathologies during both administrations. To support their president, but perhaps more importantly to defeat his opponent, Democrats were willing to lie, to bite their tongues, to abandon principles, and ultimately act in ways that proved counterproductive to their own cause. Biden himself engaged in some of the same practices for which he and other Democrats had justifiably criticized Trump, most notably a penchant for nepotism and the baffling decision to keep classified documents unsecured in his personal residence.

The authors make a strong case that, at least when it came to foreign policy, Biden proved up to the task. Whatever one thinks about his approach to NATO and Ukraine, he was intensely focused and pursued his agenda with skill—at least for the first few years of his presidency, before his decline became more noticeable. With a limited amount of energy to spend, however, he gave less attention to many domestic affairs. The authors suggest, for instance, that Biden was largely asleep at the wheel when it came to immigration policy, letting more progressive young staffers make unpopular policy decisions that Biden himself would have likely opposed if he were paying more attention. His perceived weakness on the border proved to be a political gift to his Republican opponents.

I have previously warned conservatives that the right’s declining human capital, as measured by voting patterns among the highly educated, will create inevitable problems. It was thus interesting to learn that the Biden White House, despite having a large talent pool to draw from, was not exactly brimming with great minds. For instance, we learn that certain Biden aides did not know the difference between astronomy and astrology. The Biden Administration was also circled by its share of grifting consultants, demanding extraordinary sums far outweighing any value they might provide.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency.

As a conservative critic of the Republican Party’s populist turn, convinced it has resulted in great mischief and damage to our political institutions, it was a strange relief to see that many of the problems I see in the contemporary GOP are also found among their opponents. This is not based on a desire to engage in “whataboutism”—the effort to deflect criticism by pointing out the other side’s failings. Rather, seeing similar issues emerge across the partisan divide indicates we suffer from systematic problems, and this knowledge will assist us as we seek to diagnose their causes and consider potential solutions.

The authors offer few suggestions about how we can avoid similar issues in the future. They suggest that presidents need to be more forthcoming about the state of their health, including their mental capacity. It would be straightforward to legally require presidents to take regular physical and mental exams, with the results provided to the public. This strikes me as reasonable, though I doubt we will see such a development during the current administration. 

I am insufficiently naïve to believe that as a nation we can reach a bipartisan consensus on many major issues at the present time. I nonetheless hope that more people across the political spectrum will conclude that the role of the presidency in American politics has changed for the worse, becoming a hindrance to functional politics. All of politics now revolves around presidential elections. Members of the president’s party in Congress now fall in line behind the president’s agenda, becoming mere auxiliaries of the White House. Members of the opposing party seek to block that agenda, and they look for any reason (justified or not) to hinder presidents with a deluge of investigations and impeachment threats. Those members who would follow their own judgment and principles, rather than toe the party line, determined by the president, are viewed as turncoats. Members no longer seem interested in safeguarding their own institution’s prerogatives, unless it is to score ephemeral partisan points.

The presidency will always remain the ultimate prize in American politics. This was the case even when the office was considerably less powerful. It should not be the only office that interests us, however. Not so long ago, conservatives argued that Congress, not the presidency, should be the most powerful and important branch of the federal government. It may be time to revisit their arguments. The late conservative scholars James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall, reasonably considered two of the conservative movement’s sharpest minds, argued persuasively that Congress was intended to be the most important branch of the federal government, and its diminishing influence represented a major problem.

Burnham argued in his 1959 book, Congress and the American Tradition, that maintaining freedom requires strong checks and balances, but also a strong legislative branch. This would keep power sufficiently diffuse and keep tyrannical impulses at bay. However, as the ideology he called “democratism” has increased in strength, it has resulted in the nation’s greater insistence that policy reflect a mythical general will. This ideology loathes intermediary institutions that can block the people’s desires. A presidential election, according to this thinking, represents a national mandate for the winner, and pushback from other branches or levels of government is viewed as a betrayal of democracy. The result is popular support for an accumulation of presidential power. Perhaps ironically, in the name of perfecting democracy, the public is clamoring for a Caesar.

For Burnham, the transition toward executive supremacy was an existential danger to liberty. It is notable that, as an uncompromising Cold Warrior, Burnham understood the importance of a strong executive, but he also recognized its dangers. Unfortunately, much of the right today seems to wholeheartedly embrace executive power as the only solution to the problems they perceive with American governance. Burnham has received renewed attention from the intellectual right in recent years, largely because of his realistic approach to political power, both at home and abroad. I hope that more of his contemporary admirers will revisit his arguments on this question.

Kendall, for his part, also believed in the importance of a strong legislative branch, and warned against allowing other branches to usurp its powers. He argued that there are always two majorities in America: the presidential majority and the congressional majority. The presidential majority, being national in its scope, is perceived to represent the popular will of the nation. It prefers fast action, it is dismissive of deliberation, and it is inclined to demagoguery. The congressional majority, in contrast, better represents the nation’s diverse interests, makes decisions after lengthy debate, and ultimately provides a more accurate reflection of the people’s will. Kendall’s thought, I should note, has also received renewed interest from conservatives, in part because, of all the major post-war conservative intellectuals, Kendall is one of the very few who could be plausibly described as a populist. Unlike other conservatives of his day, he never exhibited anti-majoritarian views. He sincerely believed in majority rule, but he argued that the legislative branch was the best institution for discerning and implementing the majority’s will.

I am not suggesting that a rebalancing of power that weakens the executive branch will prove to be a panacea to the kinds of problems presented in Original Sin. Congress, of course, has its own gerontocracy problem, especially the Senate. However, Congress will never be so completely dominated by one person, and it would not long allow a senile member to maintain one of the more important positions of leadership. We could furthermore also start demanding that members of Congress also submit to annual health exams and publish the results. If this proves insufficient to drive out incompetent members, changes to the current seniority system that benefit long-term incumbents may be worth considering. In any case, it is time for members of Congress to claw back much of the authority they have given to the presidency, which alone would lower the stakes of presidential elections. A more independent legislative branch, less fixated on helping or hurting the president, would also be less apt to reward politicians according to their talents as sycophants or thoughtless obstructionists.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency. Partisan vitriol and polarization are not going away anytime soon, but I hope good-faith observers of American politics will recognize that neither side of the divide has a monopoly on shameful behavior, and the rot is deeper than a few vain political leaders. The cult of the presidency has become a hindrance to responsible government, regardless of which party occupies the Oval Office.

AI didn’t break higher ed. It revealed the cracks: falling standards, eroded norms, and a growing disconnect between degrees and the job market. These problems predate ChatGPT. Colleges had already begun relaxing expectations around attendance, participation, and performance, especially through online and hybrid formats designed for convenience, not rigor. But the shift wasn’t merely structural. In chasing enrollment and cutting instructional costs, many institutions de-emphasized disciplines with deep traditions of structure and rigor, expanding instead into programs that are easier to scale online—but often less grounded in formal methods or measurable outcomes.

Online and hybrid courses haven’t just changed how students learn; they’ve reshaped what many now expect from faculty, coursework, and from college itself. Even in-person classes now often mimic online ones: asynchronous lectures, automated grading, and minimal oversight. Access may have expanded, but rigor declined. Worse, the system created perverse incentives for both sides. Students can drift through with minimal effort, while colleges collect tuition without paying for proctors, classrooms, or meaningful engagement. By Fall 2023, over half of all undergraduates were enrolled in at least one online course, down from a pandemic peak of 61 percent in 2021—but still far higher than the 37 percent pre-pandemic baseline (NCES).

Courses are filled with countless deadlines for assignments submitted through LMS—on time, flawless, and perfectly formatted. But unless you watch a student produce the work, it’s often safer to assume they didn’t. The occasional flawed submission is almost a relief—it signals genuine academic effort. But when the norm looks artificially perfect, we pile on more busywork to preserve the illusion of difficulty.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1984, when I took financial accounting at the University of Missouri, the grade came from a proctored midterm and final. We had two lectures each week of frenzied note-taking, plus a one-hour lab where the TA demonstrated problems. Homework wasn’t graded—no points, no deadlines. Just a simple question: do you want to learn or not? That structure built discipline, self-efficacy, and the understanding that not all effort is rewarded equally. Today, students in my financial accounting sections complete roughly 75 graded tasks, and the reality is that students are often rewarded for meeting deadlines more than mastering material.

Max Weber described the rise of the industrial economy as rooted in a cultural shift: work became not just survival, but a moral calling. The “protestant ethic,” he argued, prized discipline, method, and accountability—values that once shaped serious education. Students were expected to struggle, persist, and improve under structures that demanded real effort.

Today, we’ve traded that ethic for a customer-service model. The burden of failure has shifted from student to institution, and colleges have responded by softening deadlines, removing requirements, and lowering standards—all in the name of “access.” According to the 2023 Faculty Attitudes on Technology survey by Bay View Analytics and College Pulse, nearly half of tenured faculty say academic standards are falling, and over a third admit to lowering rigor to avoid failing students.

Lowering standards doesn’t help students—it undercuts them. Young people don’t thrive on indulgence. They grow when they’re expected to stretch, struggle, and improve. Easy grades and endless accommodations don’t build confidence, but instead erode it, leaving behind resentment and a quiet contempt for a system that demands so little.

The collapse of expectations has less to do with student effort than with the erosion of program structure. Disciplines like accounting endure because they are built on formal logic, practiced with precision and verified through accountability. In 1494, Luca Pacioli laid out the method of double-entry bookkeeping and insisted it be taught “diligently and with great care,” under a master who explained both the mechanics and the reasoning. That philosophy of disciplined learning became the foundation of global commerce—and it still works.

The university has long served multiple aims: cultivating moral character, transmitting culture, building intellectual capacity, and preparing students for economic life. These goals are not mutually exclusive—but in today’s debt-driven landscape, it’s understandable that students and families focus on financial returns. When institutions mislead on that front, they erode trust not only in their economic promises, but in their civic, moral, and intellectual mission as well.

That ideal of a rigorous education that forms both intellect and skill has quietly been abandoned. In place of structured, skill-based instruction in fields like accounting, nursing, and engineering, many programs now emphasize interpretive, feelings-driven coursework that rewards compliance over competence. The result? Business graduates fluent in “behavioral science” who can’t read a financial report—but can recite ethical frameworks developed by faculty later discredited for research fraud.

Higher education has failed in two ways: by misrepresenting what degrees are worth, and by eroding the standards that give education meaning. AI didn’t cause these failures; it has simply revealed them.

The problem goes beyond pedagogy—it’s economic. Too many degree programs are misaligned with labor markets, yet they’ve become central to the business model of higher education. Students select these programs believing they’re acquiring valuable skills, but often graduate into careers that don’t require a degree at all.

Just as Max Weber observed that prosperity was fueled by a new ethic of disciplined work, the age of artificial intelligence will demand thinkers trained in structure, logic, and rigor.

Take the University of New Mexico’s psychology program, its second-largest undergraduate major. It advertises pathways into clinical work, management, and executive leadership. But the data tells a more constrained story. According to the College Scorecard, median earnings for UNM psychology graduates five years out hover around $45,000—roughly equivalent to the wage for Social and Human Service Assistants, the most likely outcome, though likely not the career students imagined when they enrolled. Students enrolled with the promise of upward mobility. What they got was debt and disappointment.

This is bigger than one program at one school. Psychology is the fifth most commonly awarded bachelor’s degree nationwide, with 129,600 degrees conferred in 2021–22 (NCES, Table 322.10). But it also ranks among the majors with the highest underemployment and lowest median earnings (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2024). That misalignment between promise and outcome is at the heart of higher ed’s trust problem.

Psychology isn’t inherently unserious. But in too many institutions, it’s taught more as a vibe than a discipline, an appealing blend of activism, pop science, therapeutic language, and minimal math demands. For students uncertain about their future, it feels relevant and affirming. For universities chasing enrollment, it’s low-cost to deliver and easy to market. The result is a major that often substitutes engagement for rigor, offering students neither the intellectual structure of the sciences nor the labor-market traction of the professions. This isn’t merely misrepresentation—it’s institutional negligence.

And it raises the central question in education: who are we teaching, and what are we teaching them? For centuries, the “who” was narrow, often restricted by class, gender, and race. Expanding that access is one of higher education’s great achievements. But access alone is not justice. If we broaden the “who” without safeguarding the rigor of the “what,” we give students seats in the classroom but deprive them of meaningful outcomes. A degree means nothing if it represents nothing. It may carry symbolic weight, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Students may not always see the gap at first, especially if grades are high and expectations low. But over time, outcomes speak louder than intentions. And when those outcomes disappoint, trust in the system collapses.

That failure doesn’t just appear in earnings data; it shows up in the classroom. A system willing to exaggerate economic outcomes cannot be trusted to assess learning outcomes. Students learn quickly what’s real and what isn’t. They see a university that rewards the appearance of effort more than the substance of learning. Work is submitted that wasn’t written by the student, and instructors pretend not to notice. Assignments are polished, but understanding is shallow. The rituals of college persist, but the substance has withered—and under scrutiny, the system unravels. Not because of AI, but because of poor leadership.

That’s why AI feels so dangerous to modern universities. It doesn’t just threaten pedagogy—it exposes the illusion. When anyone can generate passable work with a prompt, the weakness of our assessment systems becomes obvious. The answer isn’t to ban AI. It’s to raise standards. Design assignments that demand original thought and reinforce structure, effort, and accountability.

If we want students to thrive in a world of intelligent machines, we must demand more of them—not less. That means restoring rigor in the classroom and holding students accountable for their own learning. Real learning pushes them beyond comfort and into competence. There is no shortcut. We already know what works: proctored exams, high expectations, and treating learning as the student’s responsibility, not the institution’s. These reforms may shrink enrollment, but they will restore higher education’s integrity and purpose, and create the conditions for sustainable growth.

We are entering an era of economic expansion that will dwarf the Industrial Revolution. Just as Max Weber observed that prosperity was fueled by a new ethic of disciplined work, the age of artificial intelligence will demand thinkers trained in structure, logic, and rigor—on a scale we’ve never seen.

But higher education is not preparing them. Instead of deep, demanding scholarship, many colleges now offer convenience, illusion, and credential inflation. As Jefferson warned more than two centuries ago, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

At its best, higher education is both a cornerstone of civil society and a driver of economic mobility. The public recognizes this and supports it through generous subsidies. But like any large, publicly funded system, higher education suffers from inefficiencies and abuse. Chief among them is the erosion of rigor: colleges have replaced the hard work of instruction with rubrics, deadlines, and automated tasks. Students submit work they didn’t write. Faculty assign work they don’t read. What passes for engagement is often simulation. And at the program level, degrees are frequently misaligned with labor markets—sold as pathways to opportunity but producing few measurable returns.

Defenders of the system point out, rightly, that not all value can be measured in dollars. Intellectual growth, civic understanding, and moral development matter, and higher education has long been a home for those goods. Greek and Latin, subjects without discernible economic return, carry enduring civic value. However, while these goods are real, they’re often pitched as byproducts of programs marketed as career gateways. When students take on debt expecting increased earnings, those promises become a public concern. We have no macro-level tools for measuring intellectual development, but we can measure debt, wages, and employment. And by those metrics, many programs fall short. Degrees marketed as career pathways often produce earnings no higher than a high school diploma.

Federal law now reflects this distinction: under Section 84001 of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, programs that fail to improve earnings over a high school baseline lose loan eligibility. Colleges are free to offer philosophical enrichment or spiritual exploration. But once they take public funding and market themselves as engines of economic opportunity, they incur an obligation to deliver. As the line goes: Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. The moment you take Caesar’s coin, you accept Caesar’s accounting.

Every right is a liability. A pension, a healthcare benefit, a tax deduction—even the right to private property—derives its validity from being legally enshrined in one form or another. Yet beneath this legal articulation lies a fiscal reality. Protecting and enforcing each of these rights requires a financial commitment that the state must honor through lawful public means: transparent and lawful taxation, properly allocated budgets, and reliably managed currency.

Trouble begins when the state reaches the limits of its financial capacity. At that point, it can no longer fulfill its fiscal commitments within the boundaries of law. Instead, it begins to meet them at the margins of legality—through improvisation, manipulation, and disguised extraction. The result is not just economic degradation. It is the erosion of the rule of law.

This raises the question of what, exactly, the rule of law demands. Legal theorists have offered a range of answers, often speaking of it in idealized terms. Some define it procedurally: the rule of law requires general, prospective, stable, and publicly known laws. Others adopt more substantive definitions, encompassing rights to property, equality before the law, or access to justice. Some go further still, suggesting that the rule of law must include expansive claims to social and economic justice—redistribution, affirmative rights to housing and employment, environmental equity, and so on.

But these accounts share a common limitation: they treat the rule of law as a purely ideal concept. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it creates a risk—we focus so much on what the law should be that we overlook what it needs to function. The result is a vision of legality disconnected from the practical realities that sustain it.

This means that the rule of law is not simply an independent variable in the architecture of the modern state; it is also a dependent one. Lawyers—inveterate normativists that we are—tend to fixate on what the law ought to be, losing sight of the material and institutional conditions it requires to function. But the rule of law does not arise from legal principles or political will alone. It relies on underlying material and institutional conditions—especially the state’s ability to remain fiscally solvent.

When that solvency erodes, the machinery of legality begins to stall. Rights go unenforced, procedures become empty rituals, and the state operates increasingly by discretion rather than by law. When the state nears the outer limits of its fiscal capacity, the consequences are stark. The state then turns to functional substitutes for taxation: methods of financing public obligations without formal tax increases or budgetary debates. Chief among them is inflation.

History is full of episodes where state insolvency did not merely erode legal order—it obliterated it.

Inflation is a tax by other means. It transfers wealth from savers to the state, from the private sector to the public ledger, without a single vote being cast. It erodes the real value of nominal public liabilities—such as pensions, social benefits, and government debt—diluting what the state owes its citizens. It also distorts private obligations, quietly rewriting contracts and undermining expectations. But that is a separate concern. What matters here is that inflation operates as a form of unlegislated taxation, bypassing the formal procedures and public accountability that define democratic legality.

Inflation is only one such tactic. Depending on the seriousness of the fiscal shortfall—and on the government’s ability or willingness to reduce spending—insolvent states may also freeze bank accounts, convert savings into low-yield bonds, impose retroactive taxes, or use regulatory takings to confiscate private assets. They may declare emergencies to bypass legislative procedures, defer payments, or devalue the currency overnight.

These are not routine exercises of administrative discretion within a stable legal framework; they are extraordinary responses to fiscal breakdown. I witnessed some of these measures firsthand growing up in Brazil during a period of fiscal distress and hyperinflation (which at one point reached 6,000% annually), when emergency decrees, account freezes, payment moratoria, and index manipulation became part of everyday life. While such actions were typically carried out under color of law, they blurred the line between legality and expediency. What unites them is the substitution of legal rule with administrative discretion—a shift that tends to gradually undermine the rule of law.

History is full of episodes where state insolvency did not merely erode legal order—it obliterated it. Ancient Rome offers a distant, but instructive, illustration. While the Roman Empire lacked a modern legal order, it depended on legal and monetary institutions to maintain stability. In the third century, mounting military expenditures, administrative burdens, and declining revenues led emperors to reduce the precious metal content of coins. But debasement meant to stretch limited fiscal resources unleashed high inflation. Faced with growing instability, Emperor Diocletian issued the 301 AD Edict on Maximum Prices. The law fixed prices under penalty of death; yet it proved unenforceable, drove commerce underground, and contributed to a broader erosion of confidence in imperial institutions, paving the way for the mounting civil strife that followed.

Many centuries later, Weimar Germany offered a modern counterpart: a constitutional state undone in no small part by fiscal collapse. Hyperinflation in the early 1920s wiped out savings, shattered public trust, and made a mockery of legal and contractual commitments. In response, German jurists developed the theory of Wegfall der Geschäftsgrundlage—the disappearance of the basis of the transaction—as a way for courts to adjust debts and obligations no longer tenable in nominal terms. In the chaos that followed, the door was opened to the demise of democratic institutions and the rise of political forces we now recall with unease and revulsion.

Argentina offers a more recent example. In the early 2000s, confronted with a collapse in public finances and an inability to meet its obligations, the government faced a deep fiscal and financial crisis. It responded by freezing bank accounts and soon after forcibly converting dollar-denominated deposits into devalued pesos—an emergency measure that wiped out household savings and shattered financial expectations. In the years that followed, the state manipulated inflation statistics, seized pension funds, rewrote private contracts by decree, and expropriated private assets, all under the banner of expediency. These were not merely improvised policy responses; they marked a deeper unraveling of legal certainty. As the state’s solvency eroded, so too did the rule of law.

Brazil tells a parallel story. There, fiscal fragility has repeatedly corroded the reliability of legal protections. In the 1980s, facing acute budgetary strain and hyperinflation, the government relied on monetary restatement mechanisms, wage and price controls, and complex indexation formulas to reallocate resources outside the formal budget process. These tools not only altered private contracts but also allowed the state to quietly redefine its own obligations—delaying, diluting, or reshaping payments it was otherwise bound to make. The pattern continued into the early 1990s, when President Collor—the first democratically elected leader in decades—abruptly froze personal checking accounts of individuals and companies in a desperate attempt to reduce liquidity and contain inflation. The move upended financial expectations and triggered a wave of litigation that dragged on for more than twenty years. Although the severity of these interventions has diminished, the underlying dynamic of fiscal weakness compromising legal certainty remains visible in Brazil to this day.

Law continues to be cited, but no longer constrains. Its forms persist, but its substance erodes.

Even the United States is not immune. In 1933, amid collapsing revenues and rising debt burdens, President Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard, nullified gold clauses in public and private contracts, and required citizens to exchange their gold holdings with the Treasury under threat of severe criminal penalties, including prison. These extraordinary measures sharply reduced the real value of federal obligations and triggered a constitutional showdown. In the 1935 Gold Clause Cases, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld Roosevelt’s actions, even as it acknowledged the threat they posed to the sanctity of contractual commitments. A generation later, in 1971, President Nixon, facing mounting balance-of-payments pressures and eroding confidence among foreign central banks, suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, severing the last external check on US monetary expansion. From that moment on, fiscal and monetary restraint would rely almost entirely on domestic institutions: rules, norms, and political self-restraint.

But as expenditures grew and deficits deepened, those internal constraints began to erode. Over the past two decades, the Federal Reserve has purchased trillions in Treasury securities—especially in response to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic—effectively financing deficits without direct legislative approval. These measures, while technically legal, bypass the deliberative rigors of the budget process. Informal workarounds like these have increasingly displaced formal fiscal governance. The result is a slow but significant institutional drift, and one that blurs the line between emergency response and permanent exception—a quiet slide toward rule without accountability.

This pattern is not merely a matter of economic policy. It reveals something deeper: the contingent nature of legality itself. The monetary constitution—the framework of rules and norms that governs how money is created, valued, and managed—serves as a backbone of the broader legal order. When fiscal pressures grow too great and those rules give way, legality begins to unravel. Law continues to be cited, but no longer constrains. Its forms persist, but its substance erodes. What remains is a hollowed-out shell: the rule of law in appearance, but not in effect.

To preserve the rule of law, we must stop treating it as an autonomous force, detached from material realities. Legal constraints depend on solvency. No constitutional text or institutional reform can substitute for the fiscal capacity that makes law enforceable. The rule of law may restrain the state—but only if the state can afford to be restrained.

Ever since President Trump launched his protectionist tariff agenda at the outset of his administration, economists have offered a common plea to other countries: do not retaliate. This wisdom must often contest with the impulsive political pressures of trade wars, and yet it is the soundest economic path. Politicians often believe that retaliatory tariffs place a burden on the foreign country that picked the fight. Retaliatory tariffs tax your own population by burdening them with higher prices and fewer consumer choices. The actual result, however, is akin to imposing a blockade on your own ports to spite an adversary who chose to do the same to their ports. This strategy seldom ends the trade war though, because the bulk of the resulting economic pain is self-inflicted.

Trump’s early targets largely ignored the counsel of economists to forego retaliation. Canada, then in the midst of an election campaign, imposed countervailing duties on American goods as its Liberal government sought to project an image of strength in the face of international bullying. Trump responded by doubling down. The situation with China rapidly devolved into a retaliatory standoff with threatened US rates on Chinese imports reaching 145 percent, and China’s countermeasures increasing to 125 percent. Both sides de-escalated from this brink in May, but only partially. The US now imposes a 30 percent tariff on most Chinese imports, whereas China now taxes American goods at 10 percent—substantial hikes over the single-digit rates that prevailed in the 2010s.

Until last week, it appeared that the 27-member European Union was about to join the retaliatory trade war. With Trump threatening a 30 percent tariff on European goods, EU leaders floated the idea of invoking their “Anti-Coercion Instrument” (ACI)—an aggressive suite of retaliatory tariffs, export and import controls on the US, intellectual property restrictions, and limitations on American investors in Europe. Suddenly, on July 28, Trump appeared to pull a rabbit out of his hat by announcing a sweeping trade deal. According to the White House announcement, the EU would accept a 15 percent US tariff on European goods, or half the threatened rate, but also significantly higher than the average 1.47 percent duty that existed before Trump started his trade war. Pre-Trump EU rates on American goods were even lower, sitting at about 1.35 percent before Trump’s term, but the White House now claims that Europe will further reduce these mostly vestigial levies on a small number of products.

The US-EU announcement sent shockwaves around the political press. Trump declared “victory” over the Europeans. French officials raged at the outcome, calling on Brussels to reverse course and deploy the retaliatory ACI. Other European leaders seemed resigned to the fate of accepting higher American taxes on their exports, calling it the least-bad outcome. On the American side of the debate, some tariff-skeptics reacted with surprise, even suggesting that Trump’s tactics had upended conventional wisdom about trade wars. Oren Cass, the protectionist lawyer who runs the “New Right” think tank American Compass, appeared to be confused by the development even as he celebrated. Cass declared on a podcast that the EU’s unexpected turn away from retaliation somehow disproved all of the economists who had been pleading with the EU to resist retaliation.

Surprisingly few commentators have paused to examine the underlying strategy that led to the US-EU tariff de-escalation. Almost all sides of the debate have accordingly missed a subtler lesson, one related to legal and institutional dynamics at play.

Before digging deeper, it warrants mention that the EU “trade deal,” like the others that Trump has announced to date, is not a conventional trade agreement between nations. Neither Congress nor its European counterpart has voted on the specific terms, which may not even exist beyond the verbal pledges that Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made in a meeting on the day of the announcement. There are no publicly available documents containing the text of this “deal” or any other that Trump claims to have secured. Trump and his counterparts have not even formally signed anything that would legally bind them to their terms. The EU deal is at best a framework of loose commitments that may or may not be formalized at some future date.

And therein lies the key to understanding why some nations have opted against a retaliatory strategy. The tariff agenda sits on an extremely shaky legal and political foundation. Tariffs remain unpopular in the United States, with recent polling showing that American voters oppose them at a margin of almost 2-to-1. The EU and other countries might accordingly believe that their best strategy is to wait Trump out until a future election outcome reverses his trade war.

More importantly, Trump has eschewed even conventional US tariff statutes when implementing his current measures. Up until this spring, most US tariffs followed the procedures laid out in obscure federal statutes: the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the Trade Act of 1974, and a handful of other measures. These laws contain clauses that allow the president to impose temporary tariffs on specific goods or countries if certain stipulations are met, such as a national security need, or evidence that another country has been “dumping” goods into the United States or trying to injure its industries. 

The rationales behind these clauses are often politicized, but they nonetheless contain specific statutory requirements to invoke. Usually, that means the White House must formally investigate whether the conditions have been met and submit its findings to a regulatory review process. Congress also has formal oversight powers to review any tariffs enacted under these clauses, and may vote to reverse the president’s decision. Most presidents have made periodic use of these clauses to impose limited tariff measures, including Trump’s tariffs on China from his first term. But all of these measures have taken place under relatively strict statutory processes and review requirements.

Not so with Trump’s current round of tariffs, which are far more expansive than anything he attempted in his first term. Instead of using the aforementioned trade statutes, Trump has claimed the power to impose tariffs by unilateral executive order under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. By using IEEPA, Trump believes he can enact new tariffs for almost any reason he wants. He has accordingly set new tariff rates by posting letters to foreign leaders on Truth Social, or by announcing the terms of an “deal” that he made in an informal conversation with a foreign head of state.

The biggest risk to Trump right now is that the appellate and Supreme Courts both strike down his IEEPA tariff orders, and with them every “deal” he has secured to date.

There’s a huge constitutional problem with Trump’s use of IEEPA, though. This statute does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. It does not even contain the word “tariff” or any of its common synonyms. Trump has merely inferred that he has this power through a tendentious interpretation of IEEPA’s “emergency” provisions.

Trump’s use of IEEPA now faces a serious challenge in the federal court system. Earlier this year, the US Court of International Trade ruled that Trump misused IEEPA. The ruling is under a procedural pause as the case makes its way through the federal appellate system, but the clock is ticking. A federal appellate court will likely rule on the case in August, which in turn will probably fast-track it to the Supreme Court in its next term. If the courts continue to rule against Trump, his entire tariff agenda—including every single “deal” made under his IEEPA orders—could be voided in an instant.

Although Trump is fighting to have the trade court’s ruling overturned, the underlying legal issues present a tough sell for the White House’s lawyers. In addition to Trump’s strained interpretation of the IEEPA statute, he faces a constitutional obstacle. Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide tariffs and tariff rates under its tax and commerce powers. 

Previous court rulings have upheld laws wherein Congress authorized the president to modify tariff rates under certain conditions, such as the aforementioned Trade Acts of 1962 and 1974. But they’ve never authorized the president to simply set the rates himself for any reason he wants. The long-established “nondelegation doctrine” requires Congress to set an “intelligible principle” for the executive branch to exercise a delegated power, and the parallel “major questions doctrine” bars executive branch agencies from deciding policy questions of great economic and political significance on their own without express congressional authorization. The Court of International Trade cited both doctrines in its determination that Trump abused IEEPA to impose tariffs. A majority of justices on the current US Supreme Court have also ruled against the executive branch in cases involving similar questions, such as West Virginia v. EPA in 2022 and in their rulings against President Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive federal student loans without congressional authorization (a detailed explanation of these legal arguments may be found in the amicus briefs filed in relation to the case).

Returning to the international arena, Trump may be playing with fewer cards than he realizes when he attempts to negotiate tariff deals. The EU and other governments know that time is on their side with both the tariff lawsuits and the US political climate. And that recognition changes the dynamics of their strategies by shifting them away from retaliation. Consider the possible scenarios.

The biggest risk to Trump right now is that the appellate and Supreme Courts both strike down his IEEPA tariff orders, and with them every “deal” he has secured to date. Courtroom outcomes are never guaranteed, and they tend to operate on the judges’ own schedules, but this outcome could conceivably occur in a matter of months. If that’s the case, then the EU has every incentive to take the 15 percent tariff “deal” and just wait it out until the courts make their determination.

Suppose that the Supreme Court punts on the case for procedural reasons, or finds a rationale for upholding the tariff policies. Even in this scenario, waiting may still be the more prudent strategy for the EU and other trading partners abroad. They may be banking on Trump losing one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms, as often happens to the incumbent president’s party. If the Democrats regain the majority, they will almost certainly remove a procedural rule that Republican Speaker Mike Johnson imposed back in April to prevent floor challenges to Trump’s IEEPA tariffs (Johnson adopted this rule because he currently lacks the votes to defeat a direct challenge if a handful of free-trade Republicans break ranks and vote with the Democrats). An opposition Congress would make it more difficult for Trump to enact tariffs by executive decree, thereby limiting his ability to use them as leverage for his “deals.”

A third scenario could play out in the 2028 election, where both political parties will be nominating new candidates due to Trump’s term limits. On the unlikely chance that the current IEEPA tariffs are still in place in 2028, their survival into the next administration would come down to a simple pen stroke. Since Trump enacted his tariffs by unilateral executive order, they could also be rescinded by any future president at will. Here, the absence of any codification of Trump’s tariff orders and “deals” into law becomes their main future vulnerability. If tariffs remain politically unpopular, Trump’s successor will face growing pressure to rescind them, no matter the party that wins.

From the EU’s perspective, these scenarios amount to a surprisingly short timeframe. Trump’s tariffs could be stricken down in court in a matter of months, or they could collide with mounting political opposition in 1.5 to 3.5 years.

Under these conditions, the advantage goes to the side with greater patience. Risky strategies such as the EU’s retaliatory ACI, or retaliatory tariffs in general, become less appealing if you know there’s a good chance that Trump will be stripped of his claimed tariff powers in the near future. It may mean enduring a little short-term pain from accepting the higher tariffs of a Trump “deal,” but in the long run, all of Trump’s negotiating cards have an expiration date. 

America is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic that broke out in 2020. Not only was it one of the most deadly health incidents in our history, but the strategies imposed by central planners to contain its spread also inflicted countless costs on everything from the economy and education to social life itself. Stephen Macedo, an author of a recent book evaluating the pandemic’s aftermath, joins Law & Liberty contributing editor G. Patrick Lynch to discuss the price of the pandemic on this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Related Links

In Covid’s Wake by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
Liberalism vs. Scientism, a book review by Mary Carmen Mead
The Pandemic in Hindsight by Law & Liberty‘s Editors (March forum)

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

G. Patrick Lynch (00:39):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m G. Patrick Lynch, a senior fellow at Liberty Fund and a contributing editor to Law & Liberty. And for this episode, I’m filling in for James Patterson. Today we are joined by Stephen Macedo, who is the Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality. We will be discussing his latest book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, co-authored with his Princeton colleague Frances Lee. Macedo and Lee have appeared in many major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and The Hill, to discuss the book, which has been lauded for its critical review of the political and policy responses to the pandemic. Steve, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Stephen Macedo (01:36):

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

G. Patrick Lynch (01:37):

Well, it’s great to have you here. As I mentioned to you before we got started, I think this is a tremendous book and I congratulate you and your co-author, Professor Lee, on it. I want to begin by saying, I know for many of us, looking back on the pandemic is personally difficult because of the challenges we all faced, particularly those of us who lost loved ones. And yet in my view, this book is immensely important because it serves as a sort of a truth commission almost on the Covid response by the government, and it reveals a lot of unpleasant truths about how poorly the public sector performed. The title of your book suggests that the government failed the test of Covid. As a professor, would you have given the government an F for its response on Covid?

Stephen Macedo (02:18):

Well, thank you for the introduction first of all. I haven’t really sat down to think about that. And I think I would say that actually the scope of the focus of the book is a bit wider than just the government, though public health officials and others obviously played a very important role in a way, the focus of the book is on what we call the” truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy,” journalism, science, public health included in that of course, and universities more broadly. And while it’s true that public officials did, I think in many cases pass the buck and say “follow the science” in a way to avoid taking responsibility for hard decisions themselves, it’s also the case that these other institutions did not ask hard questions and didn’t play their role as well as they should have under the influence, I think, of the polarized environment in which we live, a kind of epistemic tribalism that so deeply affects our politics.

(03:20):

So we do look back on the record and try to be as accurate as we can. It’s really only the beginning of a reckoning because there’s so much we don’t understand still. I think about what happened and what the results of the policies may have been, but it’s our best shot at doing a first take, fair mindedly, on what happened. And we do emphasize the shortcomings. Part of it is that there were a bunch of pre-Covid pandemic planning documents, which looked at these non-pharmaceutical measures going back to 2005, 2006, and they were skeptical, let’s put it that way. They emphasized the weak evidentiary basis for a lot of those measures that were imposed. And they emphasized the importance of being frank with the public about the weak evidentiary basis and the certainty of costs, considerable costs from imposing these measures.

G. Patrick Lynch (04:18):

I’m glad you raised that because I think that was one of the most eye-opening parts of the book. I think if you asked the average citizen, if they knew that, in fact, all the pre-pandemic planning had shown that there was skepticism about many of the measures that were pursued, they would be surprised. And I certainly was surprised. Can you explain to our listeners exactly why policy officials in most of these major health organizations in the public health field generally advocated for abandoning most of this planning? What happened? What shifted in their thinking?

Stephen Macedo (04:47):

Well, let me say a word about those things first. It is remarkable that the planning documents went back early to 2005, 2006. George W. Bush read John Barry’s book on the great influenza of 1918, and he initiated these planning processes. There was always a national security component as well, having to do with bioweapons, but he was concerned about another pandemic. There were mathematical modelers who were optimistic about the effectiveness of these measures, very optimistic. And they wound up playing a leading role as it turned out in shaping some of the discourse. But going back to that era, scientific officials who looked at this, including the Institute of Medicine, as it was called back then, which has issued a report on these measures and said that they found the evidence unconvincing and that there was a lot of uncertainty around these measures. And anyway, in 2019, Johns Hopkins did one of these surveys on all of these non-pharmaceutical measures, social distancing, mask-wearing, school closures, border closures, and so on.

(05:49):

And emphasized just as you said, the weak basis. And the World Health Organization did one that came out in November 2019. And among the things that said there, again emphasizing uncertainty, weak evidence, was that there were certain measures that were not recommended under any circumstances, including border closures, quarantine of individuals who had been exposed, and contact tracing, and those were not recommended under any circumstances according to the WHO. And those were all implemented in short order during Covid. I think what happened and what shifted the discourse was partly that the World Health Organization sent a team to China in late January 2020 to survey their response. And that team came back after spending about seven or eight days in China in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and proclaimed that the Chinese had solved the problem, that they had defeated the virus, and that every government in the world should follow the Chinese strategy of suppressing the virus, locking down–something that’s never really been attempted in human history before.

(06:55):

And when you read that report from the World Health Organization, a joint mission that included half Chinese participants, half non-Chinese participants, only a couple of Americans were involved in that, it reads like an award citation, as we say in the book, it’s just uncritically endorses the strategy. So that played a major role. And then there were a couple of other things too. A bombshell report came out of Imperial College London on March 16, which had very impressive graphs. The lead there was Neil M. Ferguson, who’s another mathematical modeler who had been involved in the original 2005, 2006 projections. He said that if we didn’t impose this whole suite of measures, this “Report Nine” from Imperial College said that if we didn’t impose this whole suite of measures by the end of August 2020, we’d have 2.2 million dead Americans. So that report, which was finalized and published on March 16, the Trump administration had gotten an advanced copy of it, that was shown to Donald Trump on March 16.

(07:58):

And later that day, he had a news conference where it was recommended that places with infections spreading should close bars and close other places and impose lockdowns. By that time, schools had already closed across substantial parts of the country. But so those two things were important, and there were other projections that were made. 3.4 percent death rate was projected by the head of the World Health Organization in, I think it was February, or maybe it was early March. So there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of uncertainty of course, and the original lockdowns were very widespread across the country and across Europe. But I think what’s in a way most important is that the European–well, some countries never closed their schools at all. I don’t think Iceland ever closed at schools. Sweden never closed them for kids under 16. And the Western European countries in general, France and Germany and other places in Europe, reopened their schools at the end of April and May.

(09:03):

And it was clear, by the middle of May certainly, that schools were not spreaders of Covid and that teachers were not at great risk. And the European health ministers met education ministers, excuse me, met I think it was around May 10 or something, and issued a statement of the education ministers from around Europe saying that it was safe to reopen schools. So there was a lack of learning, especially in Democratic states, which closed down faster and stayed closed much longer than Republican states. It was a partisan pandemic, as we say in one of our chapters, that there was a striking partisan divide on the stringency of all of these measures with democratic states imposing school closures much longer. Republican states were generally reopening their schools in the fall of 2020. Many Democratic school districts were closed through almost the entire 2021 school year. California closed right through March. So the discourse, the narrative, became very rigid and intolerant of dissent. So I would say that a big part of the book focuses on the shortcomings of public deliberation and kind of intolerance of dissent, forgetting the fundamental principles of science and, in a way, classical liberalism: To be open to dissent, to allow criticism, to welcome criticism, and to not close off disagreement prematurely.

(10:37):

I think one thing that happened, we found is that, about April 2020, once the lockdown strategy had been adopted in, of course, many parts of the country, but there’s the sense of a war mentality that arose. We see this in a report that came out of the Safra Center at Harvard that was endorsed by the Rockefeller Foundation and other foundations including the Niskanen Center, and indeed the American Enterprise Institute put out a Covid planning document or policy statement around that time, April, May 2020, which also endorsed the lockdown strategies to some considerable degree descent, became that this is our chosen strategy and dissent was unwelcome, that we were on a war footing and we needed the equivalent of national unity in the face of a war, in this case, a war on Covid. So as in previous wars, we cracked down on dissent, and that was the big problem. Mistakes get made, but we should have been more open to dissent and disagreement and more ready, prepared to learn over the course of 2020, especially over the summer.

G. Patrick Lynch (11:52):

So this is one of the questions I wanted to ask you, because I think the emphasis on deliberation, discourse, and exchange of ideas is one of the strengths of the book. You mentioned, for example, the Great Barrington Declaration in the book and talk about it in a way that I think is probably the fairest and most honest assessment of it that I’ve seen because it was such a polarizing document when it first came out. And you also mentioned the example of Sweden. Before we get into the sort of who was right question, can we talk a little bit about the importance of deliberation during these times of crises? I guess I was struck by, on the one hand, the hopefulness that y’all place in the importance of having that deliberation discourse during a crisis, during this war language. But is that too much to ask of democracy? Is it too difficult to believe that during a crisis we can tolerate and have that kind of discourse and exchange? And I think this is obviously critical, looking back on Covid, and potentially even more important for looking forward to whatever the next problem’s going to be.

Stephen Macedo (12:53):

Yeah, well, it is a very reasonable question, and I don’t have a particularly good answer for it. One thing I would say is that other democracies did a better job. There was more open debate, I think, in the UK, there’s a very good book by Mark Woolhouse called The Year the World Went Mad. He’s obviously very critical of the lockdown strategies, as you can tell from the title of the book, though he supported the first lockdown, though in retrospect, he doesn’t think it did much good because these lockdowns tend to be imposed after the viruses, the horses out of the barn. So the lockdowns tend to get imposed, late viruses tend to come in waves. So oftentimes the rates of infection will drop at some point after, and people assume that’s because of the interventions, but it just turns out there’s not a lot of great evidence for that.

(13:39):

But they did learn more over the summer in the UK. There was more open debate there. And in Germany and France, I think. So the US is especially polarized by Western standards, and this is a dispiriting picture, a window into the state of our highly polarized political discourse. So I wouldn’t hazard guesses about how well we’ll do in the future, but we do need to think about this. And part of what happened, I think, is, as you’ll recall, 2020 was an election year. Donald Trump was on the ballot. He was associated with the “Let’s reopen the economy as fast as we can” sort of approach. He also, of course, referred to the virus as the “China virus” and so on, kind of unhelpfully actually. But suggesting that the virus might have leaked from the lab was always a plausible hypothesis, which again, should have been entertained and was not particularly, and still not being properly entertained, I think, in the US more so than in Europe.

(14:37):

So I think that was part of it. And of course finally there is some reckoning going on on other issues on this too, that if Donald Trump said it, that must be the opposite of the truth. And that was one thing to say we should not take him particularly seriously on these particular matters, but it’s another thing to assume that the truth is the opposite of what he says. That was a silly approach as well. But deliberation is important. It proceeded better in other places. We should have paid more attention to the pre-Covid pandemic planning documents. And there were voices. I mean, it’s not as though no one pointed these things out. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown, wrote some very good pieces pointing out the cost of school closures and the safety of reopening them. Graham Allison, who is scholar in crisis decision making, going back to the Kennedy administration, he’s a very senior scholar at Harvard.

(15:35):

He put out a statement right around the time that Harvard Saffer Center put out its statement, and this is I think in April, maybe late April 2020. And Alison said, look, we need a wider conversation and wider deliberation here. We need a Team B, we need devil’s advocates. We’re doubling down on the strategy and we’re not sure that it’s the right strategy. It’s going to be costly, he pointed out, and we need to reexamine our assumptions and widen the discussion beyond epidemiologists and public health experts, and have a wider conversation. And he was exactly right, surely on that score, but from what I can tell, his statement was completely ignored. So there were people calling for wider dissent, and there were others. Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair wrote some good pieces as well. So there were a few voices out there, but these issues were not discussed adequately for sure.

(16:35):

And then the Great Barrington Declaration–well, let me just say one other thing. When the lockdowns were imposed in March, there were dissenters. Michael Osterholm, who’s one of the leading epidemiologists scientists in the world at the Mayo Clinic University of Minnesota. He warned in mid-March 2020 that these lockdown measures were unlikely to succeed, that they would be extremely costly, that the best strategy was probably protecting the vulnerable from Covid and allowing most people to go about their business, and recognizing that there was a huge age gradient in vulnerability here. Young people were relatively at low risk. They could acquire herd immunity from getting infected and recovering. He pointed all this out in March. David Katz from Yale did. Tom Frieden, former CDC director, again, pointed out the cost of schools back in March 2020. And then those voices tended to become silent. And when we got to October and the Great Barrington Declaration was published, they were saying essentially the same things–Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, they were essentially saying essentially the same things that were said back in March by Michael Osterholm and Tom Frieden and David Katz at Yale and Justin Leslie from Johns Hopkins. But they were greeted, as people know, with great intolerance. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH then, called them “fringe epidemiologists, dangerous, they’re going to kill people.” By that time, schools had reopened in Europe and reopened for months. Schools had been open for Republican states since August. So I think when it comes to school closures, I think people are starting to recognize that that was kind of egregious, the extent to which we didn’t learn from other places about the relative safety of reopening schools. And so I do think that while the Great Barrington people were wrong about some things for sure, they speculated about the virus having traversed society in a much more widespread way over the summer.

(18:37):

And in the fall, there were some projections about the virus being already on its way out over the summer. I think it was what Sunetra Gupta said, and Bhattacharya has gotten a lot of flack for a Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote with, I think it was Eran Bendavid, in I think it was April 2020, March or April 2020, suggesting that Covid might lead to as few as 20 to 40, 60,000 deaths. That was the low range of his speculation at that point. The main point of that op-ed and of his work in the spring of 2020 was trying to do studies of the population to see how many people had antibodies or other evidence of having had Covid infections. We knew how many people were getting seriously ill from Covid, but we didn’t know how many people had contracted the virus and not gotten seriously ill because the symptoms are much the same as the flu or cold or other symptoms.

(19:35):

And many people had mild symptoms. So he was really in that op-ed emphasizing the importance of doing these seroprevalence studies in the community to try to figure out the actual mortality rate, which was not as low as he speculated. But there have been viruses in the past that have more or less just disappeared: Swine flu in 1976, we had a mass vaccination program for that, and it never materialized. So he wasn’t completely off base when it comes to the evidence of previous flus. But in any case, his main point was that we needed to do these seroprevalence studies, and he tried to do them in California on a shoe string, but the CDC should have been doing them and wasn’t doing them at the time. So I think the Great Barrington folks were hardly infallible. And Bhattacharya has admitted himself that he made mistakes, everyone did. But I think they were calling for a wider discussion of the cost of these measures. And certainly in retrospect, they were correct about a number of things, including the need for a wider discussion. And going forward, we should at least take seriously respectable dissenters as they certainly were.

G. Patrick Lynch (20:51):

So you mentioned Emily Oster and Graham Allison. It’s interesting. Those were two people I wanted to sort introduce in the conversation because Emily Oster’s work was to try to figure out, she was trying to collect data on schools and just take a look at the trade-offs, and to raise that trade-off question. One of the interesting things for me, reading this boo,k was learning about what worked and what didn’t. You’ve got an entire chapter dedicated to taking a look at the US through the lens of federalism to try to see if a lot of these NPIs were effective. And can you walk our listeners through sort of a general overview of those results so that you can at least share with them what y’all’s view is on the effectiveness of the NPIs compared to vaccines, compared to some of the other measures that were

Stephen Macedo (21:35):

Pursued? Yeah, yeah. My coauthor, Frances Lee, who’s an excellent empirical scholar, very broad intellect, but she really knows her empirics as well. She did a 50-state study of the United States based on CDC data from across the 50 states, looking at Covid mortality from the period from the beginning of the pandemic through the availability of vaccines. And it’s not the best data in the world, it’s state by state, but it’s the best we can do. Other scholars have done this work. Thomas Bollyky also did a state-by-state study using somewhat different data. He came to the same results. But what it shows is that the states divided very sharply in terms of the stringency of these Covid interventions, school closures, masking, social distancing, business closures, restrictions on social gatherings, and so on, with Democratic states imposing much lengthier stay-at-home orders compared to Republican states.

(22:33):

It’s really a very strong partisan relationship, very strikingly so. And there was also a partisan relationship on vaccine uptake with Democratic states people getting vaccinated at a much greater rate than in Republican states. And what the data that we have shows on mortality in the 50 states is that there was no relationship between the imposition of these non-pharmaceutical interventions, the school closures, the masking, the social distancing requirements, stay-at-home orders, and so on. And Oxford has this index of nine of these measures, and they’ve rated governments around the world on the stringency of their interventions, and we have our own data on school closures and so on. No relationship between the stringency or length of these restrictions and Covid mortality. The partisan divergence on mortality begins after vaccines are available. So the evidence shows that the evidence that we have provides evidence for the effectiveness of vaccinations at curbing mortality, the rate of death correcting for age and percentage, uninsured and percentage urban, correcting for a whole bunch of other confounding variables.

(23:46):

The evidence shows that the rate of mortality did go up in Republican states by about a third higher than Democratic states after vaccination, but not before. So we simply have an absence of evidence for the effectiveness of the NPIs on mortality. There is some evidence that they reduce transmission, but not enough or in the right places to affect mortality. We just had a piece published in the Boston Review Forum, and there were four critics there, three of whom focus on this issue, expressing doubt about our findings, but they all emphasized transmission reductions. None of them present any evidence suggesting that there was mortality reduction. And it’s just not clear that these costly measures were worth it if we didn’t reduce mortality and serious illness. Now, there’s another study in Europe, 29 states of Europe by Pizzato et al from the University of Milan, came out in 2024.

(24:43):

It’s excess mortality data across all the states of Europe with a 10 year prior to Covid baseline. So what they did is they looked at the mortality rates across Europe and the 10 years prior to Covid, they adjust for demographic changes over that course of that time and under Covid and look at the excess mortality post-Covid just to see that that’s considered the best measure because when it comes to recording Covid deaths, countries have done it very differently. In Norway, for example, in order to be recorded as a Covid death, it had to be certified by the medical examiner. In Sweden, if you died with Covid, it was counted as a Covid death. So countries had different methodologies for counting their Covid deaths, but if you focus on excess mortality, that’s considered the better study. And what this study by Pizzato et al show, is that Sweden had the best outcomes across the pandemic in the entire 29 states of Europe.

(25:36):

They did have a bit higher earlier on in the first few months. There may have been various reasons for that. They had had a mild flu season the year before, maybe even the two years before as compared with Norway and some other countries which had harder flu seasons. So there were more people alive who were very vulnerable to respiratory infections. But by the spring of 2020, they were doing better than their Nordic neighbors and other European countries. And over the three years of the pandemic, they had the best outcome in Europe according to Pizatto et al. And again, they find no relationship, and they expressed surprise about this and the article, no relationship between the more stringent NPIs and lower mortality across Europe. So the evidence is fairly considerable, and it just means, as my co-author says, and in the language of social science, we cannot reject the null hypothesis, which is we just can’t reject the proposition. The evidence does not allow us to reject the proposition that these non-pharmaceutical interventions, costly as they were not just economically, but in terms of our lives, socially, family relations and so on, social relations. We just can’t show that they had any significant effect. So that’s what the data shows.

G. Patrick Lynch (26:49):

Steve, where did discussions about trade-offs go exactly? Because you guys have a great citation about a survey of economists who were asked whether or not they supported the lockdowns despite all the costs. And something like, I believe the site was something like 80 percent of them said, no, the lockdowns are worth it. And these are economists who were supposed to be talking about trade-offs. And y’all point out throughout the book that there was no consideration or at least very little consideration, except for some dissenting voices to the notion that the costs here were significant, there were things that had to be included in the policy discussion. What happened to alternative voices? What happened to these kinds of discussions? And can you talk a little bit about some of the suppression stories that you tell in this book about the government and certainly leaders in public health and leaders in social media and their inability to maintain the kind of liberal values that you think are very important?

Stephen Macedo (27:40):

Yes. Well, I think the discussion of cost was simply in a way bypassed. There was a lot of rhetoric about, oh, the kids will recover. The kids are fine, the kids will be resilient. We do think there was a class bias issue here. The policies were being made by, and of course, the educated elites who staff elite journalism and universities and science, our members, in effect of what we could call the laptop class. We were able to work at home on our computers, being better off. Our kids were relatively well-positioned to be able to study. I mean, it was hard on them, of course. And I don’t think enough attention was paid to the fact that one third of American workers had to keep working right through the pandemic to keep our electricity on and the internet running and the lights on and the fire department and the police department and food service, food preparation and so on and so forth.

(28:34):

So a third of workers had to keep going to work, their kids had to be taken care of, somehow had to do online schooling, and so on, under much more adverse conditions. So there was definitely a class component to this, I think. So that was part of it for sure. Somehow, the cost issue got bypassed. Fear gripped people, the fear of death, dying a suffocating death from Covid. And it was a bad pandemic. We shouldn’t discount that. It was the worst pandemic in a century. But we do find that among journalists and public officials who–take Andrew Cuomo for example, we quote him in the book, he had those news conferences every day, and he won a special Emmy Award for his news conferences. He was seen as the “Un-Trump” during 2020 under Covid. And he constantly said, “I’ll do everything we can to reduce the spread of the virus, and if everything we do saves just one life, it will be worth it” without giving any attention to the other side of the ledger.

(29:36):

So it was like doing cost-benefit analysis with no attention to the costs at all. And there’s actually have a quote from him in the book saying something like having to stay home and keeping your kids out of school very bad, but not death, domestic violence on the increase, very bad, not death. And he goes through this whole series of things. The only thing that they focused on was reducing deaths from this disease. Francis Collins has said subsequently in a really quite amazing online discussion he had in July, 2023, that the way he put it there was that the public health mindset is to focus only on reducing deaths from disease and not to focus on anything else, including keeping kids out of school for so long that there’ll be lifelong detriments that they never will recover from. And of course, bad health outcomes associated with postponing hospital visits, doctor visits, bankruptcies can have very bad psychological and health impacts for those involved owning their own businesses and so on.

(30:40):

So there were going to be deaths on the other side, but no attention was paid to them. And the news media also played a role. They constantly asked why more wasn’t being done. We have quotations from journalists questioning governors and so on saying, and the President, “Is any attention being given to a national lockdown such as being imposed in the state of New York?” and so on. So there was an attention to this. I would recommend one other book by the way, which came out a bit after ours called An Abundance of Caution by David Zweig, which focuses on school issues. And it has many parallels to our book. It’s a terrific book. We think very highly of it. And Frances and I, and it’s well researched, and he really also shows how biased the media was that the percentage of negative coverage of news concerning Covid was overwhelming in the United States as compared with Europe.

(31:32):

So, for instance, he talks about a specific CDC report that came out in April, I think it was April 8, 2020, a month and a half into the pandemic. And it contained various pieces of information, including that children were at very low risk from Covid, but that African Americans and men were at greater risk than women and non-African Americans. The media reported widely on the negative information about men and African Americans being at greater risk, but they didn’t report the positive information about kids being at very low risk, the bad news predominated. And there was a narrative that took hold. It was a partisan narrative. It had to do with partisanship in part, and people weren’t willing to question the narrative. And we moralized the disagreement, questioning what was considered to be the science, not “following the science” was considered morally reprehensible. Masks, of course, became a very visible symbol of this.

(32:34):

The evidence around masking was extremely weak, and people shifted their positions this promiscuously, as did Dr. Fauci. I mean, he was asked in 2019, a few months before the pandemic with no sign of the Covid on the horizon by an interview, what should I do in the event of another pandemic? Should I wear a mask? Dr. Fauci immediately interrupts the interviewer and says, “No, no, no, avoid the paranoid stuff. Just keep yourself healthy, get a good night’s sleep, don’t drink too much, get some exercise, and so on.” And a few weeks later, he’s for not recommending masks, then recommending masks, and so on. And he still says now that they work, but now he says that it had to be an N95, which was not, of course, what was required at the time. And then there were warring op-eds in The New York Times by my colleague, Zeynep Tufekci,

(33:19):

“The science is clear that masks work.” And Bret Stephens, “No, the science is not clear. Well, I think Bret Stephens was closer to the truth there, and the evidence is still lacking for the effectiveness of masks against aerosolized viruses, such as this was. And I think we knew that quite early on. So yeah, the narrative took hold and it still exists, I think, around some of these measures. We’re having some more open discussion, the school closures, the cost of the school closures for kids, I think that’s just too dramatic to ignore. But the origins of the virus issue remains kind of a mystery. Nature magazine, the public-facing magazine of Nature, the science journal, a very prestigious journal, published an article in February 2025 saying, “There’s more and more evidence to support the natural origins theory of Covid in a Pangolin or a raccoon dog from the market.”

(34:15):

I just don’t think that’s the case. There is, it remains debated among scientists, but there’s not growing evidence for that. Only a month later, the French Academy of Science, or maybe it’s the French Academy of Medicine, voted 97 percent to 3 percent in favor of the proposition that the virus likely emerged from the lab. And there is quite a lot of evidence. I think it’s more likely than not that it emerged from the lab, but we’re not having a serious discussion of that. And it’s not just a matter of historical reckoning. Did the worst virus in a century, was it manipulated through research funded in part, funded adjacently, at least by the US government in a lab that involved collaboration between American scientists and Chinese scientists? I mean, my God, we’re not investigating that. But the most important part of it perhaps, is that the research still goes on, that we’re still doing this gain of function of research on coronaviruses and other viruses, and it remains dangerous.

(35:14):

So that I just find shocking as well that we’ve not had more public engagement on that issue. Where’s 60 Minutes when you need them looking into these matters? So there is a question, what mistakes did we make? What should we have done? We don’t really try to answer that question. We’re not epidemiologists. But what was the discussion like as you asked? Did science function the way it should function? Did research function the way it should function? Did journalism function the way it should function? Were skeptical questions asked to authorities? And unfortunately, we find that these institutions did not function as well as they should have. And the skepticism that is normal on the part of these institutions towards public institutions, public measures, public policies, where social scientists routinely question whether any policy actually works. That was sorely lacking around this one.

(36:16):

And we still are surprised. So you asked about restrictions on speech and so on. It did become clear. The evidence presented in the Missouri v. Biden case which became Murthy v. Missouri on appeal, that the Biden administration was suppressing social media posts against US policy during Covid, ample evidence of that, threatening the social media companies with the loss of Section 230 protections against liability, which would’ve bankrupt the companies and put them out of business. And intense pressure was brought to bear because we have the emails now, it was subpoenaed through the records. And this was all being done in secret, suppressing arguments and evidence against government policy and boosting government messaging. And we don’t know actually of a single law school conference on those issues. I don’t think the ACLU filed a brief in that case. So it’s kind of amazing that these matters are not being adequately looked into even now.

(37:18):

And there is concern about misinformation and disinformation on the internet for sure. We’ve always had misinformation and disinformation. Maybe it’s worse now than it used to be, legitimate reason for discussion. But I don’t find myself feeling highly confident about trusting the government to become the censor here. So that record as well is quite important and quite impressive. We talked to a scholar who also edits an education journal, and he wrote a piece in March or April 2020, pointing out the cost of school closures, drawing out evidence from previous teacher strikes and blizzards where schools were closed even for just a couple of weeks or a few weeks, and pointing out based on that evidence, how much learning loss would take place and so on. And he was saying to us that as far as he could know, that that was immediately suppressed. And his journal more or less disappeared from the internet once he published that article. So that’s anecdotal, but we have ample evidence that that sort of thing was happening partly on the initiative of the social media companies themselves, but then certainly with administration involvement under President Biden, which they renounced it. And so when it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court didn’t consider merits because the policy had been revoked, but it certainly is a matter of concern. Free speech was one of the casualties of Covid it seems, or at least unbiased representation of different points of view on the internet.

G. Patrick Lynch (38:52):

So two quick questions to finish up. Number one, you talked about the chapter in which you all summarized the cost. Can you briefly walk our listeners through some of the costs of the pandemic as you all measure it?

Stephen Macedo (39:02):

Yeah, this will be brief. We have a whole chapter on that. And again, my colleague took the lead on that and did a wonderful job. Well, there are the fiscal costs for one thing, the 2020 Covid relief effort was as much as a percentage of GDP corrected historically as the entire New Deal and the 2009 financial rescue package put together. So 2020 was a huge fiscal cost. We have graphs there showing that. And then in 2021, we did essentially the whole New Deal over again as a percentage of GDP, as the equivalent of percentage of GDP. So the fiscal cost and the debt burden that we passed on to future generations is itself quite significant. And it also means that the country is in a weaker position when it comes to trying to respond in a fiscal way to a future recession.

(39:54):

Learning losses have been profound. I believe it’s the case that chronic absenteeism is up one-third from before the pandemic. Losses of learning test scores and so on have been very considerable and have been especially bad among poorer kids, low-income kids, and minority kids, just as predicted. So the learning losses and the lifelong detriments to education are profound. Associated with the loss of jobs and schooling, the crime rate went up in many cities, the biggest year-on-year increase in crime in recorded history, I believe. At first, that was associated with the George Floyd protests. But recent research now shows that they pre-date that the crime surge is associated with the Covid lockdown measures and business closures, not the George Floyd protest. They may have contributed a bit later on. Again, business losses and healthcare losses in terms of postponed doctor’s visits, medical interventions, cancer screenings, and so on, depression, higher rates of depression, drug abuse, and so on, including the populations, not themselves significantly affected by Covid. And greater isolation. Church attendance has, I believe, never returned to pre-Covid levels, business closures in many cities.

(41:20):

If you go to Washington, DC, the city is still never fully recovered from Covid, nor is San Francisco. So there have been many losses of businesses in inner city areas that have permanently, or at least over the long term, reshaped many cities, and the feelings of depression and isolation and loss of social connection, and so on. So the cost themselves have been quite considerable, and we’re still trying to figure them out. I think our chapter is a kind of first take survey on that, but there’s no question that the costs are very considerable, and for many people will be lifelong. And just as the pre-Covid pandemic plan said, they seem to have hit poor and minority families and children, and people more severely than the better off.

G. Patrick Lynch (42:10):

I want to finish with one final question. One of the big takeaways for me of this book was that humility is something that we could use a lot more of, certainly in public life, but also in politics. Because I was stunned at how policymakers and politicians were either afraid to say or didn’t feel comfortable saying, We don’t know. We don’t know exactly what the trade-offs are. We don’t know exactly what works and what doesn’t work. We’re going to try things. We’re going to try to move forward with them. And I guess I wonder a little bit, a big part of the project that you all are pursuing is this focus on democratic institutions and elites and other policymakers and folks in academia and media, their inability to accept humility. Is an ability to accept humility one of the goals of this book? Is it something you guys thought about and talked about as you were composing it? Because it seems to me my big takeaway is we need to be a lot more humble the next time we face something like this to understand what we don’t know before we start acting on the things that we think we know.

Stephen Macedo (43:13):

I think that’s exactly right. I think you’ve captured it exactly. There’s no question that those pre-Covid pandemic plans that I mentioned, which are quite remarkable to go back and read, and we survey them in our chapter…

G. Patrick Lynch (43:24):

That was an eye-opening way to start the book.

Stephen Macedo (43:26):

It’s just astonishing. I was sort of amazed when I came across them and even this Institute of Medicine letter from 2005 warning that public officials will be apt to exaggerate the certainty of these measures working and to implement them to show that they were in charge to show that they had things under control for political reasons, in other words, not because of the sound science behind them. So I think you’re exactly right. And I think part of this is a public health thing that the messaging from public health officials and public officials associated with pandemic planning probably had to do with behavioral change, trying to get people to change their behavior. Francis Collins says this, we quote this in the book that we were trying to get people to change their behavior, in case what we were recommending was right, but they weren’t sure it was right.

(44:16):

And he admits again in the July 2023 message he gave, that we should have been more frank about that. And we lost a lot of trust because we were not frank, that we weren’t sure about the things that we were recommending. So I think that’s a big part of it, is that public health officials need to realize that they are responsible for telling the public the truth. They have not been authorized to not share the truth with us. And the way that Paul Offit, who’s a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, puts it, is they need to commit themselves to truth-telling with nuance. If there’s uncertainty communicated, if there is some evidence of adverse incidents associated with a vaccine, even if they’re quite minor, don’t cover it up, allow it, and recognize the limits of the evidence. And that’s going to be the only way to restore trust is to be frank with the public, because the public has access to many sources of information and many dissenting voices.

(45:08):

And I think honesty and humility are two virtues that need to be rediscovered in the wake of Covid. We just need to be honest about the limits of the evidence. People figure these things out. They were told about the vaccination. So if you get vaccinated, you’ll be a dead end to the virus. You will not transmit the virus to others was what was being suggested. We did not have evidence of that. Transmissibility was not an endpoint in the vaccine trials, so that should not have been claimed. And once people found that, well, even if they got vaccinated, they could still get Covid, get milder, somewhat severe disease, but not life-threatening disease nearly at the same rates. Nevertheless, they felt they had been misled. So I think you’re exactly right. We need to be much clearer about the limits of our knowledge. It’s not a comfortable thing to hear in a pandemic that we don’t know exactly what to do.

(45:58):

We’re not sure, or maybe this is worth trying even though it’s going to be costly and there’s some evidence for it. But I think that that’s absolutely necessary: frankness and truth-telling. And those are supposed to be, again, the fundamental virtues of science and universities, university researchers, and journalism. So I agree. I think that that’s exactly right. And that’s something we found throughout, that there was an inadequate commitment to frankness, humility, and also being willing to say things that might seem to be critical of your own side in a partisan way, things that might be at odds with the narrative that’s favored by your side and the partisan struggle. I think people need to rise above. Scientists, journalists, academics need to do more to realize the importance of rising above partisanship.

G. Patrick Lynch (46:55):

And on that hopefully positive note, we will conclude. Steve, I’d like to thank you very much for being on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Stephen Macedo (47:01):

Today. Thank you very much. I enjoyed the conversation.

James Patterson (47:05):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.

Freedom of speech is in a bad place. The modern, young identitarian left appears to have given up on it, regarding it as a dinosaur, of value only to bigots, billionaires, and kleptocrats. Elements of the political right regard it as little more than a political football, to be kicked about in the culture wars as a weapon in the war on woke. The former are more interested in cancelling speakers who offend them than in engaging them in debate and seeking to defeat them in argument. The latter take an extremist approach to free speech (as long as it is speech they agree with), holding that anything goes in an unlicensed, unregulated marketplace of ideas.

Both are profoundly wrong and are doing immense damage to the once-cherished ideal of free speech. To help rescue free speech from the cesspit of the culture wars, there are two places we can look: to the past and to the world elsewhere. If free speech is in the deepest trouble in the United States, is it quite as bad elsewhere in the Anglosphere and is it in a better place beyond the English-speaking world? And if free speech is in trouble now, how did we get here? Was it always thus, or was a wrong turn taken at some point on the West’s journey from the eras of heresy and treason, sedition and blasphemy (all of which were crimes capable of being committed by words alone)? These are among the questions Fara Dabhoiwala asks in his new book, What is Free Speech? A historian now at Princeton who has formerly worked in Oxford and elsewhere, Dabhoiwala is well placed to address them.

What Dabhoiwala gets right is his framing: the way he sets up the problem is excellent, and the book’s introduction and opening two chapters are its strongest sections. He is right that free speech “has always been a weaponized mantra,” that understanding free speech “is also, always, about uncovering the unequal distribution of power,” that free speech has often been regarded as dangerous not only for its power to “unsettle orthodoxy” but also by reason of its being “perpetually manipulated by the powerful.” He is right that “wherever one looks, liberty of speech was never a stable concept.” He is right that, in the history of human development, it is a recent idea and that for most of recorded history it was simply “unthinkable”—not even “intelligible” as a concept. He is also right that, in the English-speaking world, Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1721–23) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) did more than any other works to articulate, celebrate, and popularize notions of free speech.

Or, at least, he is very nearly right about that. To these twin canonical texts, I would add a third, John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), the importance of which Dabhoiwala downplays. Milton’s great essay, for all its partisanship and other flaws, remains the most powerful tract in our language against pre-publication censorship. It is curious that Dabhoiwala should undervalue it, for Milton’s argument actually accords with the conclusion in What is Free Speech?, where the interests of the audience are privileged as much as the interests of the speaker. Milton was fundamentally opposed to censorship, not because it diminishes the rights of the author (or printer or publisher), but because it infantilizes the rights of all of us as readers to choose for ourselves what we should read. Dabhoiwala would agree with that, and his argument in the closing section of his book would have been all the stronger had he harnessed Milton in its support.

Cato’s Letters and On Liberty are far from perfect accounts of free speech. There is a marked naivete about Trenchard and Gordon’s blithe assumption that the truth will always and inevitably emerge if only “all opinions are equally indulged and all parties equally allowed to speak their minds.” And there is a notorious silence—or gap—in Mill’s “harm principle” owing to his refusal to define what a harm is when it comes to what he called “the liberty of thought and discussion.” Is hate speech harmful? Is offensiveness a harm that can justify the curtailment of speech? Is misinformation? Mill answers none of these questions. Dabhoiwala devotes much of his book to challenging Cato’s and Mill’s arguments for free speech.

Free speech does not empower us all equally, but its absence empowers only the censors, whatever garb they clothe themselves in.

Neither Cato’s Letters nor On Liberty should be regarded as sacred texts. Neither is above criticism. Some of Dabhoiwala’s critique is astutely judged, particularly of Trenchard and Gordon’s failure to see how cut-throat competition amongst newspapers and problems of media partisanship undermine several of their arguments for a free press. But Dabhoiwala sets out not to rescue Cato and Mill from their mistakes and oversights, but instead to trash them. That approach is as baffling as it is bizarre.

Trenchard and Gordon were writing in the 1720s avowedly about political speech. In that era, the polis was composed entirely of men. Cato has nothing to say about women’s right to free speech. Does that undermine any aspect of Trenchard and Gordon’s arguments against the official abuse of laws of sedition and libel? Mill worked for the East India Company. His focus in On Liberty is on the liberty of thought and discussion in England, not in India. Does that undermine any aspect of its argument? Dabhoiwala seems to think so. Yet, in whose interests is it to draw our attention to Mill’s early work as a civil servant in the East India Company but not to his pioneering campaign later in life as a Member of Parliament in striving to bring Eyre to justice for the racist atrocities he committed as Governor in Jamaica? All his life, Mill campaigned for women’s rights. Why fail to mention this when so much scorn has been poured on Trenchard and Gordon’s failure to accommodate women’s free speech in their account? We all know what gesture politics is. There is such a thing as gesture history, too. Much of Dabhoiwala’s account reads more as a history against free speech than as a history of free speech.

Speech and Truth

The reason for this is that Dabhoiwala appears to crave not free speech as much as true speech. Throughout his accounts of Cato and Mill, he is captivated above all by their assertions about truth. He is right that what they have to say about truth can be unpersuasive. Free speech has not acted as a guarantor of truth, and Cato was wrong to suggest that it would. Mill, however, did not repeat that mistake. His argument was that free speech was needed in order to enable us to seek the truth, not that free speech would necessarily ensure that the true would drown out the false. (In this regard, Mill’s position was closer to Milton’s than it was to Cato’s.) Mill did not regard any argument from truth as his most important contention for free speech. At the core of his vision for liberty of thought and discussion lay his notion of individual human flourishing. We can grow and develop, and our judgement can be valued, Mill argued, only when we are exposed to that which we do not already know—to new facts, to divergent opinions, and to novel interpretations. That is not only a much stronger argument for free speech than any that relies on truth, but it is also an argument for genuinely free speech and not an argument only for true speech.

The best argument for free speech, however, is to imagine a world without it. We do not have to imagine very hard. Radicals and revolutionaries of many stripes have been so convinced that they are right and everyone else wrong that they have readily grabbed and grasped at the levers of control over discussion. Robespierre did it. So too did Lenin. Neither was very concerned with freedom. Both were very concerned with what they thought was true. And, as Dabhoiwala observes, we know how that story ends. The privileging of true speech over free speech has been tried. It was tried by the medieval church in the age of heresy. It was tried by pre-Enlightenment governments in the age of sedition. It was tried by the totalitarian regime of the socialist Soviet Union. It has been tried and, repeatedly, it has failed.

One of the greatest strengths of Dabhoiwala’s book is his insistence that free speech regimes distribute power unequally. Media moguls, press barons, and the owners of social media platforms wield immense power over their viewers, readers, and users. But when we imagine (or recall) a world without free speech, we conjure a world where the church, the state, or the vigilante goons who wish only to cancel and destroy that with which they disagree run riot. Free speech does not empower us all equally, but its absence empowers only the censors, whatever garb they clothe themselves in, whether they be priests, inquisitors, ministers, or culture warriors.

Free speech needs to be rescued from the culture wars, not condemned, its pioneers pilloried for having failed to prevent them.

What then must we do? If America is drowning in lies, if social media is awash with torrents of misinformation, how might we work our way out of the abyss without giving up on the great liberal values of freedom and autonomy in thought and discussion? There is an answer. In a word, it is balance. Free speech is of immense value. But it is only one value in a pantheon of principles. Dignity is also of value, as are accuracy, honesty, impartiality, decency, personal privacy, and a whole constellation of matters which may sometimes clash and come into conflict with freedom of speech. Social life, political life, and the pursuit of happiness depend on the liberty of speech being balanced with other public goods such as these. Everywhere this is understood, even in the United States.

American Exceptionalism

It is often claimed, including by Dabhoiwala, that American exceptionalism privileges free speech as an absolute, as a card that trumps all competing values and principles. Yet this is not quite so. It is true that in the modern United States, aspects of free speech are more heavily protected than is the case in Canada, Britain, or Europe. But this is not true for all speech and even in the US, there are some forms of speech that are not legally protected at all, such as obscenity, child pornography, defamatory speech, and fighting words. Moreover, the over-protection of speech is a recent development in American jurisprudence—it dates only from the 1960s. Many plausible interpretations of the First Amendment are available, which are far less militant—far more balanced—than the one which is usually preferred by a majority of today’s Supreme Court justices. Care should be taken, though, not to exaggerate the extent of the differences between American and (say) British or European jurisprudence on free speech. For sure, there are legislative restrictions on speech which are nowadays ruled unconstitutional in the US, which would be lawful in Britain or Europe—restrictions on campaign expenditure or on hate speech, for example. But there are also many more cases where a balance is struck between speech and some countervailing interest, such as security (think of the recent TikTok case) or dignity (think of Virginia v. Black, upholding the criminalization of cross-burning). Free speech is a powerful right in US constitutional law, and there are instances, particularly in the last twenty or so years, of it being militantly enforced, but even in America, even today, it is very far from being an absolute.

Once we accept that free speech is a value which must be balanced against others (as Dabhoiwala does and as I would agree), we have to start thinking hard about who should undertake the balancing exercise and how they might achieve it. This is precisely the difficult, often laboriously detailed work that Dabhoiwala acknowledges needs to be undertaken. Yet he disdains from doing it himself. Others, thankfully, are working on it. European human rights law, for example, has developed over more than fifty years a sophisticated account of how freedom of expression must be balanced in a proportionate manner against other competing rights and interests. It is a pity Dabhoiwala has nothing to say about this.

Or take another example. Britain’s Online Safety Act, passed by the UK Parliament in 2023, is one of the world’s leading legislative attempts to bring a degree of regulation to the Internet—particularly to search engines and to social media platforms—with a view to making it a safer space, especially for children. The legislation runs to hundreds of pages. It took over four and a half years to enact. It will be enforced by a statutory regulator, Ofcom, which has already published thousands of pages of guidance and consultation documentation on the Act’s implementation. It is an enormous enterprise. It makes an avowed attempt to balance freedom of online expression against the harms that speech can cause, particularly speech with the speed and reach of which social media boasts. It is both vital and painstaking work. Yet it merits a mere seven and a half lines in Dabhoiwala’s more than 400-page book. In the European Union, a Digital Services Act is doing similar work to the UK’s Online Safety Act. Dabhoiwala gives that legislation a bare paragraph.

These are striking omissions, not least because the ways in which European human rights law and British and European online safety legislation seek to balance free speech against other values are deeply contested and highly controversial. My point is not that they necessarily get the balance right, but that they are, at the least, well-meaning attempts to achieve in practice what Dabhoiwala rightly says needs to be striven for, which is why it is so mystifying that he seems so uninterested in them.

If you want to get serious about how free speech is going to operate in the online ecosystem, if you want to understand how this once beautiful but apparently now merely “dangerous idea” can help to guide us through the myriad difficulties and challenges of Internet regulation, if you are worried about how we should respond to the bilge of misinformation online, you are asking the right questions about free speech. But if you seek insights into what the answers might be, What is Free Speech? is not going to help you. Free speech needs to be rescued from the culture wars, not condemned, its pioneers pilloried for having failed to prevent them.

On February 7, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado offered the following advice on X: “Dear Speaker Johnson, Simply pass every executive order President Trump has signed, and you will go down as the greatest Speaker in American history.” Consider also the words of a more senior legislator, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Tom Cole, in response to being asked whether it is up to Congress to decide whether the foreign aid agency, USAID, ought to be shut down. “Well, yeah,” Cole answered, “but Congress doesn’t always do its job. When Congress doesn’t do its job, I’m not going to be mad at an executive [branch] that’s trying to save money.”

Legislators have responded to the whirlwind of activity in the first half-year of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration with an overwhelming sense of passivity. Trump’s Democratic opponents, who find themselves narrowly in the minority in both the House of Representatives and Senate, have done little to slow things down, even if they’ve offered record-long speeches in both chambers. Republicans, meanwhile, have made supporting the president their top priority, acquiescing to his initiatives even when they seem to directly impinge on the legislature’s constitutional prerogatives.

Americans can be forgiven for thinking Congress has become about as useful as a human appendix—prone to inflammation and perhaps best removed entirely.

Because Congress’s marginalization has proceeded so relentlessly in the twenty-first century, its irrelevance is now probably overestimated by most casual observers of American politics. We should avoid getting carried away. We have not become an autocracy. Legislators retain influence that often expresses itself informally; the president is not free to disregard their priorities. The text of the US Code still matters—very much—and so the people who have the power to rewrite it remain potent and sometimes necessary. The saga of “Trump’s” big, beautiful bill—H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation omnibus signed into law by the president on July 4—is one of factional strife and accommodation that played out almost entirely in the legislature, although Trump’s whipping was certainly crucial to securing final passage.

We should dispassionately take stock of Congress’s current position on foreign and domestic policy, on taxing and spending, and on the deeper question of what role our elected representatives play in our Constitutional system. We will see our lawmakers choosing acquiescence repeatedly, because it is a winning strategy for them in the context of a thoroughly nationalized, thoroughly apocalypticized political environment. If we are careful, we will discern limits to their passivity, though the precise boundaries remain quite murky, as much to the participants as to outside observers. What we will not see is any obvious reason to expect this dynamic to reverse itself in the immediate future. If there are heroes of a legislative revival already on the scene, they have concealed themselves quite masterfully. Congress may well transform itself—its current leader-dominant structure is a historical anomaly—but it will take some kind of shock (bigger than Trump himself) to begin that process.

Second Fiddle on Foreign Affairs

The world stage has been unusually eventful during this first stretch of the second Trump administration, such that the president has been forced to deal with one exigency after another. He has done so on his own terms, with very little pressure from his copartisans who control Congress. Plenty of Republican legislators view NATO and the Russia-Ukraine War quite differently from the chief executive, and they have taken part in ongoing debates, both intramural and public, about America’s proper stance. But formally, Congress has simply steered clear of the issue, in stark contrast to a bipartisan coalition’s funding of Ukraine in 2024.

Meanwhile, Trump initiated two significant offensives. Responding to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, he ordered an air campaign in Yemen, only to end it with a negotiated ceasefire six weeks later. The next month, after Israel unexpectedly bombed Iran to disable its nuclear weapons program, Trump committed American air power to that cause, dropping enormous bunker-buster bombs on three sites in a single hour. The administration essentially ignored Congress as it made these decisions and troubled itself very little as to legal justifications; in both cases, it asserted that the president’s commander-in-chief and foreign relations powers under Article II of the Constitution were sufficient. Trump’s Democratic critics in Congress expressed outrage; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, declared that “the President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers,” endangering the nation and warranting impeachment. Although Trump disavowed any desire to continue hostilities with Iran and indeed helped broker a ceasefire between the Islamic Republic and Israel, Senate Democrats nevertheless pushed forward with a resolution demanding a termination of hostilities (which Republicans successfully bottled up).

Legislators have also been bystanders when the administration’s legal basis for action is dubious—and even when Congress’s own core constitutional powers seem to be in jeopardy.

There is something perfunctory and even farcical about Democrats’ insistence that these sorts of decisions ought to go through Congress in the first instance. Although Trump’s second administration is admittedly unusual in the extent of its willingness to act without even informally consulting Congress, also-ran status for legislators has become the default on foreign affairs over the last several presidential administrations, including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Congress has not passed (or repealed) an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) since 2002; it has not formally declared war since 1942. Legislators have frequently carped about executive bellicosity, and sometimes one chamber or the other has even expressed its official disapproval or tried to cut off funds, but mostly they have underlined their impotence. (Even when bipartisan majorities voted to disapprove any further hostilities with Iran after Trump’s targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, it was unclear this would have any effect; in any case, Trump vetoed the resolution.)

Given how badly things went when Obama sought an AUMF related to Syria in 2013, and how relatively smoothly Trump’s limited engagements have gone, presidential predominance in foreign affairs may be fairly regarded as a comfortable and sensible habit.

Nor does this predominance equate to limitless discretion. If a president were to undertake a protracted “boots on the ground” military engagement, he would be extremely unwise to exclude Congress from his planning efforts. Congress has a great deal to say about the shape and size of the armed forces that the president has at his disposal; those legislators who build their careers around the respected Armed Services committees, many of whom are military veterans, are anything but passive on questions of weapons programs, military bases, and overall fiscal commitment. Moreover, when there is a strong bipartisan consensus in Congress, lawmakers show more ability to steer presidential conduct. Trump has indicated his desire to exit NATO, an alliance he sees as outdated and dysfunctional. Congress has taken steps to make that much more difficult, passing a funding limitation in their FY2020 NDAA and an explicit requirement for congressional approval in the FY2024 NDAA. Those actions might not be foolproof, but they do change the costs for the president in ways likely to matter.

Overall, Congress is decidedly a second-tier actor in foreign affairs today. But that is not a terrible embarrassment to the institution; indeed, it is a familiar situation throughout American history.

Ceding Domestic Policy Predominance

By contrast, legislators have historically been the premier deciders of “major questions” in the domestic sphere for most of American history. They have always existed in a complicated relationship with the “legislator-in-chief” as well as the organs of policy implementation. Roughly speaking, presidential leadership must usually tee up an issue for major legislation, but it is lawmakers who must, in driving it through to passage, decide the major contours of the law with due consideration to all the interests involved. They can manage this balancing, which is messy work, far better than any of the various experts retained in the executive agencies. (That’s politics, in a non-pejorative sense.) By contrast, the experts and permanent civil servants are better suited to settle the administrative details of policies in action. Legislators leave them plenty of questions to answer, sometimes intentionally and sometimes because of limited foresight.

This process has looked rather different in the 2020s, and especially in 2025. Most often, the script is now: the president sets the agenda, often with reference to a campaign promise. Allied partisan legislators loudly announce: We would love to deliver with legislation, but unfortunately our awful opponents make it impossible, and so we will root for the president to figure it out. Then the president rolls out an elaborate new policy, based on whatever old statute is handy, complete with a signing ceremony for the associated executive order, standing in where a new landmark law might once have been. Then, agency officials try to implement the policy while it is litigated, often all the way up to the Supreme Court. A non-exhaustive list of policies that have developed this way in the previous three presidencies: Obama’s DACA, net neutrality, aggressive expansion of Title IX, and Clean Power Plan; Trump 45’s regulatory rollback, off-budget border wall construction, steel tariffs, and overhaul of asylum policy; Biden’s COVID eviction moratorium, COVID vaccine mandate, and student loan relief.

As I explain in a recent article in National Affairs, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tried to push back against the bad-faith legal interpretations that power this Congress-circumventing path. But Republican legislators, for all their celebration of the repeal of Chevron deference, seem inclined to take their turn on the ride. Because nearly all their legislative efforts were devoted to a single reconciliation bill (about which, more below) and because they have eschewed nearly all bipartisan coalition-building in 2025, they have most often been content to root for executive action. Sometimes this makes perfect sense: when Trump reverses Democratic executive actions, new statutes are often unnecessary, as in the administration’s vigorous reorientation of Title IX and equal protection laws.

But legislators have also been bystanders when the administration’s legal basis for action is dubious—and even when Congress’s own core constitutional powers seem to be in jeopardy. This was most immediately apparent with the efforts of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body conjured into existence without the slightest hint of legislative involvement and claiming powers to close departments and terminate programs that Congress has not given even to the president since the 1980s. Far from questioning the parameters of this strange creation, Republican members of Congress fell all over themselves to join a DOGE Caucus which pledged itself to efficiency and promised to legislate in tandem with Musk’s efforts. Nothing of the sort ever happened. Instead, even as they hailed Musk’s declarations that some federal spending programs were utterly corrupt and devoid of value, they renewed the previous fiscal year’s appropriations without alteration, including handing a new year of funding over to USAID even as they cheered its apparent demise.

There are, remarkably, two even more striking illustrations of congressional acquiescence to presidential dominance. The first involves a law that Congress passed, with strong bipartisan support, in April 2024, requiring the social media app TikTok to either separate itself entirely from Chinese ownership or be banned from popular app stores (most importantly, Apple’s and Google’s). Legislators showed some surprising dexterity in getting that law passed, and the Supreme Court upheld its validity in January 2025. But TikTok had a secret weapon: over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump became convinced that it was a political asset for him, and so as president, he has simply declined to enforce the law. On the first day of his second term, he announced a delay in enforcement because the statute allowed for a single 90-day postponement of enforcement if a divestment deal was in the process of being consummated; one could argue (rather weakly) that this was lawful, notwithstanding the nonexistence of any imminent deal. Trump then announced a second delay in April and a third in June. His attorney general told Apple and Google that national security considerations would guarantee nonenforcement. In other words, the law was not really the law. GOP members of Congress who championed the TikTok law have offered barely a peep of protest, let alone an effective strategy to stop the president’s infidelity.

Broad presidential claims of national security are also central to a far more consequential set of policies: historically high tariffs on goods from countries all around the world, which Trump justifies with reference to the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), a statute that has never previously been invoked to justify tariffs. What is the emergency Trump is responding to? A persistent trade deficit. And what sort of rates does this allow the president to set? Any he sees fit, with unlimited changes at his discretion. (Recently, he announced a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, a country with which the United States has a persistent trade surplus.) This interpretation would seem to imply that, when it passed IEEPA in 1977, Congress gave away the first of its constitutionally enumerated powers, “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” A few Republican members have publicly chastised these actions; many more who disapprove (both on legal and policy grounds) have held their tongues, hoping that courts will invalidate Trump’s actions and thus make an open confrontation with the White House unnecessary.

Congress’s ceding of authority could go quite a lot further yet. There are some indications that the Trump administration will withhold appropriated funds from many programs, probably avoiding a straightforward impoundment fight by leaning on the technique of “pocket rescissions.” Some members of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) are encouraging this strategy, seeing it as a way of securing some fiscal discipline. If this strategy works (and it may well meet resistance), it would imply a presidential power of the purse fundamentally stronger than Congress’s. It would become possible—and perhaps politically convenient—to rely on autopilot spending laws from Congress while executive branch officials make the real funding decisions. As Chairman Cole’s quote above suggests, Republican legislators aren’t going to complain too much if all that’s at stake is saving a bit of money. But once the principle is established, it’s easy to imagine Congress losing its relevance entirely.

Partisan Lawmaking as Compensation

If Republican lawmakers are not particularly enthusiastic about many of the second Trump administration’s actions, what is their compensation for all this conflict-avoidance? By downplaying disagreements on most issues, they kept the team together to pass one big bill—which they called, unbelievably, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This is a serious accomplishment, not to be shrugged off lightly. It makes historically unprecedented investments (totaling $170 billion!) in border security; rewrites the tax code; puts some limitations on Medicaid and food stamp eligibility; turns American energy policy in conservative directions; and makes significant investments in military defense ($150 billion).

Getting the law across the finish line without a single Democratic vote was not easy work. Republicans’ majorities in both chambers are slim and members disagree about plenty. Several GOP factions credibly threatened to derail the law, including New York and California members seeking higher deductibility for state and local taxes; those concerned that Medicaid cuts might alienate their working-class supporters; and fiscal conservatives who wished for larger spending cuts. Republican leaders in both chambers figured out how to placate just enough members from each of these groups to secure passage, getting a crucial assist in the last stages from President Trump, who made it clear to potential holdouts that they would incur his wrath.

The OBBBA will undoubtedly live on in the public’s consciousness as Trump’s law, but scores of Republican members can justly take credit for shaping this legislation. As a budget reconciliation law, the OBBBA was crafted by many committees, and its final shape was the result of a complicated process of factional accommodation. Passing this law was a major partisan victory, as were the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Affordable Care Act of 2010, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. One-party legislation, most often possible through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process, has become the main event of twenty-first-century legislating.

We are short on members with the courage (foolhardiness?) to risk their careers and partisan good standing to force the institution to operate differently.

That is bad news for the country, because it promotes zero-sum thinking and cuts out the kind of broad coalition-building needed if policy investments are to endure for generations. The giveaways necessary to get partisan allies to hold their nose and vote yes are often appallingly corrupt. There is little room for public reasoning in a process that will terminate in the question of: “Are you with us or against us?” We get negotiations but not much serious deliberation; there are lots of people keeping track of whose ox is being gored, but not so many worrying about writing good law. These laws reverse each other as each side tries to serve its core constituents, enshrine all manner of pandering policies, and (not coincidentally) blow up America’s budget deficit.

Members know how this process will play out, and plenty of them don’t like it, but they nevertheless play along. (Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the only dissidents in action as well as word, offers Massie’s Law: “Where N = number of Republicans required to stop a bad bill, number of Republicans voting Nay = N-1.”) Members of the HFC, in particular, understood (as early as December) that even a two-bill strategy would create more room for maneuver, while a one-bill strategy would preclude their taking a stand. Though they threatened and grumbled to no end, they nevertheless gave their votes at every procedural crossroads, including final passage of a Senate-reworked bill they claimed was a degradation of the House’s version.

Do Legislators Want More?

The HFC members get a great deal of (well-deserved) grief for their hypocrisy, but their ultimate willingness to play along does not distinguish them from their colleagues in the slightest. Members see themselves as loyal team players; they don’t fundamentally object to an institution set up to facilitate politics as a partisan contact sport; and most of them don’t acutely feel the loss of any more searching deliberation, which has been receding into historical memory for some time now.

In the concluding chapters of my 2023 book, Why Congress, I envisioned three scenarios for Congress’s future: decrepitude, rubber stamp, and revival. Republicans’ unwillingness to pick fights with Trump leads many people to the conclusion that legislators are choosing the second option: a rubber stamp. The truth is, however, Congress hasn’t done the work to make itself fit that role. A rubber stamp isn’t supposed to make itself scarce; it’s supposed to make itself available for the decision-maker’s use, without complication. It’s possible that, if either party won huge congressional majorities and the White House, Congress would move decisively in that direction. But that scenario itself seems remote, since both of America’s political parties seem unwilling to transform themselves into big-tent governing parties. In the deferential treatment of Trump’s cabinet appointments and the (bipartisan) willingness to turn budget reconciliation into an ever-expanding loophole to evade the Senate filibuster, one can certainly make out some signs of this inclination. (Attempts to limit the powers of federal district court judges to block executive actions would also fit the mold, but they seem not to have traction in the Senate.)

But congressional Republicans have not come anywhere close to heeding Rep. Boebert’s above-quoted exhortation to take all of Trump’s executive orders and write them into the statute-books. Perhaps because those votes would be too close for comfort, they mostly absent themselves as a body and use their platforms as individual members to broadcast their support for the administration. For many members, this media-oriented role is no kind of disappointment. It lets them build personal brands that may retain value after leaving office. And if they get on the right television shows, they may well catch the president’s attention and find direct influence through him. Other members who dislike this dynamic and wish to engage in more constructive policymaking often simply leave Congress.

Decrepitude, then, remains the path of least resistance for the institution that is supposed to be the beating heart of American self-government. Perhaps that is inevitable in a historical moment when more Americans see their political adversaries as actual enemies unworthy of being political bedfellows on any cause. Why should one seek to persuade and accommodate people who wish to destroy one’s whole way of life? If we do not believe in reasoning together, there is no need for Congress to mount a comeback as an institution.

Taking this course comes with very serious downsides, to put it mildly. As bad as some observers may have felt that Congress’s public deliberation was, policymaking-by-social-media is much, much worse. Having to hash out major decisions publicly has an unmistakable disciplining effect. A Congress intent on enacting industrial policy would never simply leave us with tariff rates that can bounce around at the president’s whim. A Congress determined to relieve some Americans’ student loan burdens would never have given so much to high earners free of economic distress. Relatively functional bipartisan processes have continued to prevail both for annual appropriations and national defense authorizations in recent years. If we imagine each of the thousands of decisions in those packages turned into a chance for presidential grandstanding, much mischief and bungling will result. In other words, if you think congressional decision-making is bad, wait until you get a load of post-congressional decision-making. It won’t be any technocratic paradise.

What would it take to push Congress toward revival? Some shock to the system, big enough to make members prioritize politically cross-cutting policies rather than partisan loyalty. Trump’s emergence turned out not to be big enough, nor was COVID-19. Maybe a shooting war with Russia or China? Perhaps if artificial intelligence transforms the economy so rapidly as to spike unemployment? Maybe a presidential term could go so badly as to make a political break inevitable, thereby opening a window for institutional reform? Who knows, maybe Elon Musk’s America Party will somehow change everything?

The challenge in imagining plausible scenarios is that, over the last decade, members of Congress have shown themselves quite able to redefine their own commitments to fit their team’s political needs. Our contemporary party system has, so far, bent rather than breaking a la 1910. Even the unprecedented un-gaveling of a Speaker of the House in October 2023 seems to have left little impression. Trump’s exit from the scene might scramble existing battle lines, but my guess is that something more than the turning of political pages is needed. We have no shortage of prescriptions for congressional revitalization. What we are short on is members with the courage (foolhardiness?) to risk their careers and partisan good standing to force the institution to operate differently—together with the perspicacity to understand how such a change would play out and why it would matter. “Once one dismisses the best of all possible worlds, one finds that this is the best of all possible worlds.” Q.E.D.

With a nod to Maimonides, Harvard Law’s Benjamin Eidelson and University of Virginia’s Deborah Hellman have published a draft article offering a “Guide to the Perplexed” regarding “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Title VI.” That law is the Civil Rights Act provision authorizing private litigants and the federal government to sue universities for discrimination. Whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism—always, never, theoretically but not practically, or some other relationship—dominates the discourse about campus demonstrations because it is generally thought that the latter but not the former implicates Title VI. Mere anti-Zionism is allegedly acceptable political discourse while antisemitism is bigotry. Accordingly, anti-Zionist campus demonstrations are sacrosanct free speech unless they “cross the line” into prohibited discriminatory harassment based on national origin.

The authors aim to show that it’s far more complicated. Antisemitism litigation against universities “face[s] formidable hurdles” first and foremost because civil rights law—at least on its face—only prohibits certain forms of antisemitism. It’s perplexing indeed.

Perplexing but moot, that is. Discrimination against Israeli nationals is prohibited under Title VI. No one disputes that, and that is all the government would have to show in order to strip a university of federal support. The hoopla over Eidelson’s and Hellman’s article, though, is about its analysis of contemporary anti-Zionism, and whether it fits into the narrow categories of antisemitism prohibited under civil rights law.

It is shocking that it is not obvious to the authors (and presumably their editors and readers) that contemporary anti-Zionism fits to a tee their description of what would qualify as prohibited national-origin discrimination. Yet it does not occur to them to make the argument that beneath the surface of anti-Zionist rhetoric is a movement with a philosophy predicated on certain discriminatory ideas about the nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. If two highly educated and thoughtful professors suffer from such a blind spot, the error is not really theirs.

Culturally, we have clearly focused on parsing phrases like “globalize the Intifada” at the expense of actually understanding the logic of contemporary anti-Zionist fervor. Forget particular chants and theoretical rhetoric, though: What are anti-Israel activists conveying to an objective listener at an irreducible level? What do they want, and why?

Destroying Israel is nothing short of an obsession among a cohort of young progressives. Yet it’s not always clear why students destroy their own library while disrupting exam prep in service of the anti-Israel cause and no other. Graduates don’t lie to administrators about the content of their valedictory addresses for the looming climate catastrophe. Nobody pours cement down Columbia’s toilets in protest of welfare cuts. Nor is it always clear why anyone off campus ought to care about what appears to be a he-said-they-said of offense-taking. Maybe these are just college kids taking offense at their subjective interpretations of arguably hurtful words, with “discriminatory harassment” serving as an anti-speech cudgel. But the anti-Israel movement has a philosophy whose substantive content doesn’t just put to rest Eidelson’s and Hellman’s challenge; it helps answer all those questions.

Eidelson’s and Hellman’s main contribution to the discourse is arguing that it is not clear that Title VI applies to all forms of antisemitism. Rather, “Title VI recognizes Jewishness only as a racial or ancestral category.” In other words, antisemitism with a religious inflection (“Christ-killer!”), that which taps into derogatory stereotypes (“cheap Jew!”), or devoid of content aside from hostility (“shut up, Jew”) may not count. But holding an event closed to “Ashkenazim,” Jews of European descent, would be a Title VI violation.

The authors think that whether garden-variety campus anti-Zionism implicates ancestral Jewishness is a difficult question. They identify some narrow circumstances in which anti-Zionism could manifest in racial or ancestral terms:

The most we can usefully say is that anti-Zionist acts of exclusion or “shunning” on campus could add up to a racially hostile environment if, but only if, they amount to severe and pervasive harassment even once the set of relevant instances is restricted to those in which (a) an intent to exclude students of Jewish ancestry motivates the exclusion, or (b) it is a student’s perceived Jewish ancestry that grounds an inference about their views regarding Israel. Exclusion of Zionists per se would not suffice.

There is a (c) that can be hard to see, but not because it is well-hidden; only because (and this is the scandal) we are not used to talking about what anti-Zionism is. Contemporary anti-Zionism, the view that the Jewish state of Israel should one way or another cease to exist, in all but the rarest of circumstances takes a form that denigrates Jews on the basis of their shared heritage. More specifically, it necessarily entails telling Jews that their shared heritage is a lie propagated for nefarious purposes but belied by the color of their skin. Today’s anti-Zionism relies on a perception about a Jew’s ancestry—that it is fraudulently concocted—combined with an observation about Jewish racial characteristics.

How such discrimination manifests, and its glaring ancestral-racial qualities, is clear, objective, and inescapable. My own experience as a “visible Jew” illustrates just how.

Students at Columbia, Harvard, and other elite schools set up encampments in violation of school rules, break into buildings, and deploy any number of other unpopular tactics because they are not trying to persuade.

When I was a law student living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I would take the subway to NYU Law’s downtown campus every weekday. Dozens of times over those three years, vagrant straphangers who saw my yarmulke would stand over me and preach—rant is the better word—to the rest of the car about who I really was and the perfidies my people had committed against theirs. These representatives of Black Hebrew Israelites or similar groups announced that white-looking Jews like me are not the real Jews. Rather, Ashkenazi Jews are white usurpers, enslavers, interlopers who lie about their heritage to garner sympathy and extract land and resources from indigenous peoples. We pretend to be heirs to the ancient Israelites, when the real inheritors of the land, tradition, and honor of that people are people of color who pretend-Jews like me oppress to complete our Big Lie. My ancestors apparently did this to black people worldwide. And Jews like me were still fraudsters and poseurs today.

This is easily recognizable as a kind of discrimination based on my ethnic heritage, real and perceived. It directly implicates my lineage as an Ashkenazi Jew by denying that I am descended from Levantine Israelites, singling me out for derision on that basis. It denies Jews the right to self-define as an ethno-religious group. My harassers preferred a conspiracy theory that underscores the Jews’ profound evil. They tell me that I am a fraud and a phony for claiming to be Jewish (real ancestry) while being white (perceived ancestry).

Yet, as I have quipped ever since, I would get off the subway, arrive at NYU Law, and promptly hear the same accusations, only leveled in more sophisticated language. Campus anti-Israel activism is now overwhelmingly “decolonial,” reliant on the claim that Jews are not the rightful sovereigns over Palestine because they are not indigenous. It is therefore eliminationist; the proper outcome is for the colonizers to get out, like the French in Algeria.

My classmates who claim that Israel, alone among the nations of the world, should be dismantled and replaced with a sovereign representing a different ethnic group constitute one kind of singling out. But there was quite another beneath the surface. Israel had to be eliminated, not reformed or compromised with, because it displaced a native population with an exclusive claim to the land. My fellow Jews were aghast. How can educated people say that Jews have no claim to that territory? Education is little defense against just-so conspiracy theories: Sure, ancient Jews lived there before Christian and Muslim Arabs did; but today’s Jews are not the same group, which we know because Jews are white. The position that distinguishes the anti-Zionists from the mere Israel-critics is thus predicated on a profound act of ethnic prejudice: claiming that the Jews who are currently sovereign in Israel are not who they claim to be. In other words, that Ashkenazi Jews (who make up a minority of Israel’s population and only part of its governing coalition) have manipulated, faked, or otherwise fabricated their ethnic heritage in order to steal land from Arabs. It’s subway-rant stuff.

Every time Israel is referred to as “settler-colonial,” the logic of the subway rant is baked in. It simply does not compute without the premise that today’s Jews are not who they claim. When student activists claim that a Jewish state in the Levant is unacceptable because it displaces the true indigenous people with white Europeans—precisely, if not explicitly, the most common form of anti-Zionism today—Jews are being told that they are not who they claim they are. It is per se discriminatory, against Israelis and Jews, on the basis of their real and perceived ethnic heritage, a conspiracy theory like nearly every form of antisemitism.

Seeing that does not require searching for ill motives or intent. It just requires thinking about the ideas being expressed rather than just the words. In other words, we should apply civil rights law to objective discrimination rather than merely explicit discrimination. Our legal standards should take anti-Zionism seriously on its own terms. If civil rights law cannot account for objective but thinly hidden forms of precisely the discriminatory harassment it exists to prevent due to a euphemism loophole that allows favored causes to avoid consequences for advancing a discriminatory movement, then it is not clear what benefit there is to a massive civil-rights enforcement apparatus and expensive campus compliance regimes. 

Once we focus on its objective and unavoidable positions, some apparent mysteries about the campus anti-Israel movement seem much less perplexing. Those who take it on do not think they are participating in a garden-variety political dispute. They are not trying to persuade their fellow students, or anyone else, of the rightness of their position. Nor could they, though they often recur to defensible arguments about Israel’s war conduct, treatment of Palestinians, or other governance issues. Those arguments are not the point, and the tenor of the “debate” over the Middle East would be entirely different if it were; the point is for someone other than Jews to be sovereign over the land that now constitutes Israel. And that is not the kind of position ripe to be advanced through reasoned argument. It can only be accomplished by intimidation, coercion, and misdirection.

Students at Columbia, Harvard, and other elite schools set up encampments in violation of school rules, break into buildings, and deploy any number of other unpopular tactics because they are not trying to persuade. Ask any radical campus group and they will tell you: they are following the lead of the “resistance,” Iran and its terrorist proxies, to make support for Israel anathema among the next generation of Americans. Apparently, Hamas made a habit of telling Israeli hostages the same.

Campus militants make little effort to hide the discriminatory logic of their cause. They count on academics and judges not seeing it for what it really is: A vile antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jews faking their heritage in order to steal from oppressed indigenous people. That is not just a flagrant Title VI violation. It’s an embarrassment to our institutions of higher learning, which have refused even to understand what the demonstrators stand for, and to our nation.

What makes a great superhero film?

It’s the billion-dollar question that largely keeps Hollywood afloat. While big budgets, A-list casts, and over-the-top CGI explosions land butts in seats, that still doesn’t answer the question—because the precondition to any worthwhile superhero film is crafting a hero who is himself great.

Simply put, the greatest heroes know who they are. They know their strengths, as well as their weaknesses; they have principles they believe in, and evils they reject. These take concrete forms beyond vague feelings and emotions. And heroes have the courage of conviction to stand by their choices without equivocation or today’s all-too-common irony. For nearly a century, Superman has been the quintessential hero in this mold, but the latest installment in the franchise, simply Superman, devolves so far from the ideal that our hero, like the country he’s meant to serve, seems to have forgotten his legacy entirely.

There’s little need for a thorough plot summary; you already know it well enough. Superman, played by a fresh-faced but ultimately bland David Corenswet, navigates his dual identity as a Kryptonian and human while working as a reporter for the Daily Planet. He faces public backlash after intervening to stop a war, which his perennial nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) capitalizes on to take him out for good. With the help of Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and a clown car of other “metahumans,” Superman battles to restore his image, defeat Luthor, and save Metropolis.

There’s nothing wrong with the story, per se; it’s a classic Superman arc. And yet, every aspect of it seems designed to fit on a Prius bumper sticker: be kind, end war, diversity is our strength. It’s all there, and it’s almost entirely meaningless.

Luthor is a cut-out for the progressive establishment’s greatest foes: he colludes with the fictional “Boravia,” a composite country clearly based on a mix of Russia and Israel. Its leader could be Ben-Gurion’s twin, who lives in a presidential palace a la Putin, and invades the neighboring country of ambiguously ethnic desert tribes in a war of aggression.

In the media, we have a Daily Planet that’s filled with good people who are nevertheless constrained by rigid institutional objectivity. Lois is frustrated because she knows Boravia is bad, but she can’t prove it, so she can’t print it—the progressive refrain endlessly leveled against more centrist fellow travellers. It doesn’t help that, with wavy black hair and a boho-chic aesthetic, she’s styled after former WaPo princess, Taylor Lorez.

Yet it’s Superman himself who faces the real injustice.

When the world first met Superman as America struggled against the Nazis, his belief in “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” actually meant something, a credo of universal appeal that nevertheless belonged to a particular time and place. Over the decades, the “American Way” evolved to a “Better Tomorrow” and then “Peace for all Mankind,” before settling into its final form, “the Human Way,” in the latest installment. With each step away from a concrete tradition, Superman has fallen further into the vague do-gooderism that drives our politics and culture today.

Corenswet’s Superman wants to be human, to assimilate into and be accepted by Earth’s culture, but has no concept of what that means beyond being a generally nice guy. He wants to have “faith in humanity,” but cannot articulate what’s good about humanity beyond people generally being nice back. But if being kind doesn’t even set him apart, what’s really Super about him at all? He wants earnestly to “do good”—no one can question that, even in this installment—but his actions are driven by knee-jerk emotions without any regard for second-order impact. Is single-handedly stopping a war in a far-off land necessarily “good”? Real geopolitical decisions aren’t that straightforward, and nearly always come with collateral damage—despite the film’s attempt at wishing them away. It’s not ultimately an effort to deconstruct Superman, as many on the cultural right feared it would be, but an exercise in bland delusion.

The film frames this faux-humanitarianism as a rebellious posture against a cynical world. Superman and Lois repeatedly discuss their shared love of punk rock in what becomes a ham-fisted metaphor for being the outcast, underdog, and rebel.“ Maybe that’s the real punk rock,” Superman responds, when Lois questions his boundless love for humanity.

Although this is certainly not an outcast view, it becomes impossible not to see oneself as such when the only solution to the evils of the world is all-encompassing human empathy. It’s a zero-sum game, after all; kindness to one can, and often does, harm another, as Superman learns the hard way. But like the progressive bureaucrat who whines about the raw might of right-wing populism or the six-figure DEI officer who still sees endless oppression, Superman will always feel trounced by his unachievable goal. And that makes him the cynic.

More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), Superman represents America coming into its own.

So the characters fall into another characteristic of the leftist yuppie class, a ubiquitous irony, snark, and pathological unwillingness to take anything or anyone seriously. “Do you think this is going well?” Lois asks Superman as she repeatedly presses him in an interview about his actions in Boravia—obviously implying it’s not. “Well, I think I’m doing a good job,” he retorts with an inflection right out of vaudeville. The interview devolves into pure marital bickering, a tiresome beat of snarky one-liners each rebuked by the next as soon as it lands, until Superman explodes. “People were going to die!” he screams, but even his moral outrage feels contrived, like a politician grandstanding for the camera. The viewer senses an implicit wink and a nod. It’s all a performance.

This comes part and parcel with a lack of real belief; scroll through any social media feed, where validation is fleeting and judgment severe, and you’ll see this rudderless cynicism on full display. There is a palpable fear of being proven wrong, regarded as foolish, or both, if you ever take yourself seriously enough to care about something in an age when nothing is sacred. Yet “doing good” requires sticking to something, a mix of guiding interests and principles. Superman has none, so it’s no surprise that everything in his world is one big joke. The biggest problem with Superman, which often makes it hard to watch, is that not a single one of them lands.

As we reach the climax, and Lois rushes off to rescue Superman with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the filmmakers still couldn’t resist deflating the stakes with a painful joke about a garage door opening too slowly. Even Redditors didn’t like it, precisely the cringe-humor demographic seemingly targeted. 

It’s this incoherent mix of earnest but ineffective altruism, along with a defensive irony, that drives the film, and indeed American culture today. This is a modern phenomenon insofar as it pervades American life, a shallow sensibility certainly detached from the historic “American way.” However, it’s exactly what director James Gunn wants you to believe “the American story” is.

“People did value kindness in the past. That was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn’t necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn’t about anything other than that,” Gunn explained in an interview.

Gunn is categorically wrong: while kindness can be, and often is, an American value, it takes anchored values to understand what “kindness” even is in the first place. Letting in infinite migrants might be kind in the abstract, but is it kind to those who are exploited in the journey north, the local communities and economies they disrupt, or the legacy of generations of Americans who fought and died for the legal right to call themselves American citizens? Beyond the quickest hit of moral satisfaction, there’s no way to truly judge without a basis in core principles. Yet Corenswet’s Superman would simply let them all in, bypassing both tradition and any deeper concept of kindness with the common modern snark: How does this affect you, bigot?

Historically, Superman has been a stand-in for America itself at a time when Americans had a firm belief that their nation stood for something noble and worth preserving. More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), he represents America coming into its own, a mature nation’s confidence in its strength and goodness, and a measured assessment of what responsibility that entailed. “Truth” and “justice” were built around a common culture, one we felt worth defending. No one could understand, let alone anticipate, these concepts being sneeringly reframed as a cover for power politics, as the mainstream leftist understanding goes today. “The American Way” was a distinct way of life—the continuance of Anglo traditions in legal order, personal liberty, and limited government. The average American may not have been able to articulate this, but he nevertheless understood it intuitively, especially in contrast to the arbitrary totalitarianism dually embodied in fascism and communism. And he knew his personal fate and legacy depended on fighting for it. Did America fight the Nazis out of kindness? No, the kind route would always lead to pacifism; we did it instead out of a noble mix of interest and principle, with an achievable, self-serious goal in mind. When filtered through core principles, America rejected unanchored kindness, and instead pursued something much greater.

The story of American heroism is one of unwavering belief in our own particular power for good, and the decline in heroes today is less a rejection of heroism than it is an erosion of belief altogether. Like Superman, we still want to think of ourselves as the good guy. We just no longer have any idea what that means.

The contemporary Marvel malaise is not so much driven by politics or the left’s conscious effort to subvert culture and history, as the right-wing criticism typically goes. Rather, it comes from a cynical fog drawing culture to the path of least resistance, culminating in an art form that no longer serves as art, even politicized art, but simply as a mass commodity. Heroes fight for nothing, represent nothing, they’re merely a replaceable widget; any “good guy” will do.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth, an author unique in American letters for the attraction she exerts. Her life was cut short by disease, and she wrote only two novels and two collections of short stories—yet she has a reputation among American writers of the twentieth century. Further, she was Southern, and her stories tend to be about the South, but she is nevertheless beloved in both the North and the West. Stranger still, she is a Catholic with a reputation among the new, post-Protestant Americans.

O’Connor is so widely beloved because there is something about storytelling that makes us think she may know us better than we know ourselves. Her context is the American context—the great transformations of the continental democracy in the post-war era. Despite the vastness of those themes, she looks at major social movements from a certain distance which, paradoxically, encourages her readers to enter into the intimacy of her characters—to search their hearts, in a way that’s only possible in times of great changes, when our hopes and fears become unsettled.

The questions O’Connor’s approach makes her readers ask may even help lead us to self-knowledge. Of the Catholic readers, one would have to ask: Why do they like O’Connor’s black comedy so much? Of the Northern readers, one would ask: Why do they like the social observation of the very stratified class society of the South so much? More broadly, of the post-Protestant audience, one has to ask: Why do they wish to see the conjunction of violence and grace that marks her storytelling?

Two of her stories help us begin to answer that question. The title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge, O’Connor’s second collection of short stories published in 1965, the year after her death, is one example of her distinctive style. Julian, our protagonist, is a restive college graduate of no particular ability—and an aspiring writer who does not write—living somewhere in the South with his mother. He resents everything about her, partly because she’s frivolous, partly because he owes her so much and believes he will never be able to repay her, and partly because of her apparent racism.

Julian is what his mother wanted him to be: handsome, college educated, a young man with a future. He believes himself to be her martyr, nonetheless, and believes he made something of himself despite her. The irony, of course, is that he is unable to truly do anything in the world. Julian may be considered an apostate—he despises the genteel world in which he was raised and desperately wants to have success as a liberal in the form of intellectual applause and the moral approval of black people, of whom he really knows nothing. Despite these revolutionary visions, there is something strangely innocent about Julian.

One night, taking his mother to her exercise class, he decides to humiliate her on the bus, for her condescending, grandmotherly behavior to a small black boy who wants her attention. He gets his wish. In the midst of their funny and annoying little family drama, there is a moment where their disagreement turns theoretical and raises the question: What does it mean to be human? Julian believes mind is what matters, his mother believes it’s the heart. He’s a liberal—mind could possibly bring us all together, overcome race differences, for example, in the way math can overcome any political difference—mind can make us one. She’s all about class, since heart or character is determined by upbringing.

The story suggests that there’s much to each argument and also that each is, in a specific way, wrong. Your upbringing can’t be who you are, or else there would never be misunderstandings between parents and children who are brought up well, much less the drama of Julian and his mom. She must mean she wishes people had more heart. But also, mind, which separates the smart and the stupid, cannot be the answer as to why Julian ostentatiously prefers black strangers to his mother. Moreover, he can’t quite see that his insistence on mind should lead him either to self-knowledge or to theoretical science—either way, it wouldn’t sustain his self-pity or moralism. But instead of distancing himself from his own passions, he’s just trying to break his mother’s heart. Since Julian’s family is falling apart and America is changing, these questions that seem to threaten to pull the human being apart cannot be avoided. The things we used to take for granted are now painful rather than reassuring.

I take the title “Everything that Rises Must Converge” to be an ironic reference to a phrase by the heretical Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In the story, people converge in their fallenness—Julian, his nameless mother, etc.—and the idealism of rising above the human condition is a matter of cruelty rather than wisdom, since it does not involve rising above oneself but rising above others, who must be lowered. Even rising to achieve equality—a black lady with the same hat as a white lady, or sitting in the same seats—involves too much anger.

O’Connor wrote stories about guilt and grace, whose protagonists are losers busy politicizing their pathologies. That’s also the story of youth revolutionary movements since the ’60s.

O’Connor’s story reveals the fundamental tension at the core of civil rights. The ‘60s may have seemed to the world a period of moral triumph, in both iconic protests and landmark legislation, but the heady atmosphere of the time also led to a kind of moral collapse through division, fear, and hatreds, which ultimately produced race riots. If civil rights are strictly a matter of law concerning public things, they must involve the privatization of opinion. In Julian’s liberal utopia, people have to stop noticing things which, if said aloud, would lead to conflict. Accommodation would be difficult, unsatisfying to everyone, and there’d be no special virtue in being in favor of civil rights. To achieve that special importance, to embody a moral ideal, one would have to think of civil rights as a judgment of private opinions and private associations, too, done in full view of the public, with the instruments of the state, since it would require proving who is of pure heart and who is a racist and then acting on that proof in order to prove that moral superiority makes a difference in ordinary life. Everyone would end up looking racist, as in the story.

In their small way, O’Connor’s characters show us the American drama. In a middle-class society, parents want a better life for their children, but that requires social reform as well as educational reform. For kids to rise above their parents is also for the young to end up judging, and perhaps even damning the old. College kids are almost inevitably revolutionaries. Progress makes ingrates. The black family in the story is no exception. The mother may wish to proudly separate herself from whites whom she suspects, but her kid, precisely because America is a free country, just wants to attract the old white lady’s attention. That boy, precisely because the old white lady likes him, is breaking his own mother’s heart.

Whereas social revolution through a transformation of racial attitudes is the problem in “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in “The Enduring Chill,” from the same volume, religion is the problem. The protagonist is again a fatherless college boy, Asbury, who returns to the South from New York to his mother, whom he also loathes because she has sacrificed to make something of him. He is deluded about being an artist, but he has failed to write a play he started. Asbury is too weak, too soft to be a revolutionary; although softness has given him sufficient cruelty. Instead, he wishes to have a religious revelation and to die a meaningful death of a mysterious disease—and part of the meaning would be punishment for his mother.

Asbury destroys his writings in advance of his anticipated death and writes his mother a deathbed letter, blaming her for his lack of talent—she treated him like a slave, he went to New York to liberate himself, only to find himself useless. Asbury’s ingratitude is the cornerstone of his liberation. To defy his mother, who likes books like Gone with the Wind, Asbury persuades the black workers in her dairy to join him in revolutionary solidarity by, for example, smoking over the milk or drinking it raw. They do not like him, but they accept a cigarette.

Instead of putting any trust in the local country doctor, Asbury prefers to talk to a priest, a Jesuit preferably—an intellectual. He would like to rival Christ as a “dying god.” It would also give him pleasure because it would humiliate his Protestant mother’s prejudices. The scene, however, turns comic: the no-nonsense priest tells him to pray and tries to catechize him while scolding him for his ignorance, laziness, and carelessness of his near and dear. For once, we see something of a man. Asbury is a momma’s boy who despises his successful late father as a stupid Southerner. Asbury was not brought up by a demanding authority and therefore has no strength of character.

The oddity of the story is that in his foolishness, in playing with death, in turning from the religion of art to religion, Asbury has made two mistakes he cannot take back. He has shown that he is more foolish than the uneducated people who care for him, like his mother and doctor. At the moment, he has committed to live out the remainder of his life with his family, and, too, he has opened himself up to reflection on mortality. He is, like so many young people today, touchy, irritable, and oversensitive. Another way of putting that is, needy. If he cannot have a father, perhaps he can turn to the Father in heaven.

O’Connor wrote stories about guilt and grace, whose protagonists are losers busy politicizing their pathologies. That’s also the story of youth revolutionary movements since the ’60s. O’Connor shows why that collegiate class’s liberalism must fail—it will not lead to a real education or work, but instead encourage a kind of casual cruelty. The young are too inexperienced and irresponsible in our educational system; their ability to read and write confuses them about where they stand to adults, and at the same time tempts them with ideology, which can offer them the victories their sensitivity demands.

Ordinary life in a liberal society can be quite boring, which encourages extreme alternatives, not least because, in being unknown, their dangers can be attractive rather than fearful. Moreover, liberalism itself can be heightened to a demand to tyrannize on principle, attempting, so to speak, to turn all life into a college education where you have to prove you’re able to make the grade. Yet people cannot but fail to rise to the heights of humanity, so Progress is a cruel thing.

O’Connor does us a great favor in making such comedy out of the inner lives of young men who are not particularly impressive, because that’s the middle-class condition which higher education cannot eradicate. There may be a kind of mercy in her interest, her invasion of privacy, if you will, her attempt to know them better than they or their parents know them. We have to take seriously what’s obviously mad about the young, or how are they to become sane? Having gone this far down the liberal path of higher education, we must do it well or come to grief. So we must plunge into the depths of the soul; O’Connor can be a help in this adventure.

We are now months into the second Trump presidency, one that is markedly different, with significant changes not only from how past Republican presidents have governed, but also from Trump’s first term. Trump’s first administration enacted sweeping tax cuts built on growth ideas that had been circulated and refined for decades in conservative circles. There was also a significant deregulatory component to this agenda. Tariffs were imposed on Chinese goods, but they were not applied globally. Today, things have changed, and in some cases, remarkably. There has been no shortage of justifications and defenses for the new policy changes, many of which the readers of Law & Liberty can no doubt recite on demand.

It is essential to consider the arguments of policy scholars who are advocating for a shift to a conservatism that advocates for government intervention. The New Conservatives, a book recently published by American Compass, the think tank headed by political economist and lawyer Oren Cass, comprises previously published essays by its scholars, with the lion’s share written by Cass. The book is decidedly protectionist, pro-industrial policy, pro-labor union, pro-family policy, and proposes a more robust alliance between Silicon Valley and the government. The message is clear: entitlements shouldn’t be cut, nor should current tax rates on any labor or activity be reduced. In fact, Cass has indicated that he favors increasing taxes on wealthy Americans.

Central ideas these “new conservatives” share guide the essays in the inevitable direction of greater government involvement in almost every policy area. Most importantly, they argue we shouldn’t focus on the consumer but on the worker, especially workers engaged in the manufacturing sector. From this shift in focus from the sovereignty of the consumer to the sovereignty of the worker emerges a policy platform that launches America into the throes of a conservative social democracy, twenty-first-century style. An increased focus on the family in the form of transfer payments also joins the focus on the worker.

We live in the shade of a false account of trade and economics, Cass says. The free trade period in American life is largely an aberration, a detour from the real American success story of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, who championed the “American System” of tariffs, industrial policy, and internal improvements. This system launched the young nation into the roaring success it achieved by the beginning of the twentieth century. In short, young America greatly benefited from a protectionist American economy, and it should become so again under the circumstances we now inhabit. Cass further contends that economic luminaries David Ricardo and Adam Smith recognized the necessity of “bounded” economic markets that concentrated on the domestic front. Trade that moved beyond borders needed to be balanced and limited to goods for goods. Yet much of this account conflicts with economist Douglas Irwin’s magisterial history of American trade policy, Clashing Over Commerce, which surveys trade policy throughout America’s history and concludes that the country has alternated among revenue, restriction, and reciprocity as bases for trade policy. We have reentered a period of renewed trade restrictions. And we will learn its errors again, Irwin warns.

Building on his crabbed historical account of free trade, Cass announces in the book’s opening, “This is what elite failure looks like.” And he is here to lead us to a better tomorrow, one focused on manufacturing, with stronger worker policies, better supported families, improved economic security, along with growth and stability. We need it, according to Cass, because the underlying premise is that America, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is in a dire state that has been worsening for decades. The only way out is a revival of economic policies closely associated with past episodes of American progressivism. As Cass states:

An important point of departure for the new conservative thinking is a turn away from a single-minded focus on maximizing consumption, which has traditionally been the focus of economists and policymakers. People are workers as well as consumers, and their own health, the health of their families and communities, and ultimately the security and the prosperity of the nation depend as much on what they contribute through their production as on what they enjoy in consumption.

The focus on consumption and on what consumers want, in Cass’s mind, is a shortcut, allowing us to look away from the harrowing plight of the American worker.

We should ask why we focus on consumption in the first place, though. Has it been a false understanding of economists? Or is it a giant capitalist macroaggression against the American worker? Younger New Right acolytes have said outright to me that the focus on consumption is a hedonistic plot, evidence of a decadent society.

Why do we work? We indeed find meaning and frustration in our work, fellowship, and rivalries, as well as opportunities and disappointments. But through all of that, we work to consume because we need to consume; that is, we must satisfy our needs and wants, and through work, we acquire the means to engage in exchanges with others. Economically speaking, that is the point of work. Would you continue to do your job if your wages were cut by 10 percent, 15 percent, or entirely? No. You’d look for other work.

Our problems in education, family, patriotism, and work rates are undeniable, and many of them the New Right identifies correctly, but rooting them primarily in an economy built on the betrayal and deceit of hard-working Americans is simply false.

The purpose of an economy is to meet the needs of consumers, since consumption is the ultimate reason why we work. Conclusions follow this truth. One is that consumers don’t have the responsibility to keep certain workers employed. The producer must serve the consumer. Should we be required to buy things that are redundant or that we don’t need or want, to keep existing businesses alive? That is the absurd logic of Cass’s inversion of the consumption-production relationship. Moreover, feeding, housing, and clothing one’s family are essential expenses. How is making these consumption expenses more expensive pro-family?

We are all consumers, and redefining the economy around manufacturing workers inevitably leads to a cronyism framework in which the government supports special interests. In serving the consumer, by contrast, we best unlock the dynamism and creativity that crowns a market economy. Consumer choices determine which products or economic actions will best locate our comparative advantage and which will not. Through this process of discovery, investors gain a better understanding of where to invest, workers learn where to work, and producers determine the resources they need to bring goods and services to the market. How does the process appear when we focus on workers and government policies that attempt to engineer wages and economic sectors, while inherently favoring some sectors over others? What knowledge is relied upon? Where does it come from? How will it be deployed? Who are the decision makers? But rather than one more Massachusetts liberal or DC economic nationalist attempting to run our lives, the better part of wisdom remains the singular standard of consumer choice and how this choice is calculated, which inherently relies on core economic concepts that will always shape economic reasoning and best conduce to an economy of plenty.

Oren Cass is not alone in his nearly apocalyptic view of the economy’s plight and the workers within it. He is joined in this perspective by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, author of Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The original subtitle of Roberts’ book was “Burning Down Washington to Save America.” The image on the cover was a match being struck. But that subtitle and image were swapped out in the summer of 2024 because of their association with violence. There was an attempted assassination of Trump, and Roberts had also called during that summer for “a second American revolution.” The book’s publication was then delayed to the fall after the Trump campaign distanced itself from both Heritage and Roberts amidst the Project 2025 meshugas. But it’s the original presentation that seems more fitting for a book whose animating insight comes from the mouth of fictional sociopathic assassin, Anton Chigurh, from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Before killing another assassin, Chigurh asks him of his “rule in life,” and “if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” To Roberts, this is the question to be asked of conservatives.

In the following paragraph, Roberts explains that Chigurh’s question bears immediate relevance, “After all, if what the old conservative coalition understood to be its foundational principles [it’s rule in life] led us to this—the total domination of the Uniparty [i.e., the conglomeration of Republicans and Democrats], the demise of the American working class, and the erosion of the institutions that defined American life—of what use are those principles?” And what were those “foundational principles” of conservatism that ruined the working class and destroyed American institutions, Roberts asks. “The old conservative movement held that if you just got government out of the way, the free market, civil society, individual liberty, the nuclear family, and more would take care of themselves.”

What Roberts really describes is a caricature of libertarianism. Few conservatives of any kind will recognize themselves in it, of course. But then again, populists are more interested in caricatures than reality. And Roberts doesn’t stop there; there’s more: “a conservative movement that limits itself to this stale program is cosigning the Uniparty’s euthanasia of the American nation.” Roberts then refers to conservatives who disagree with his categorical dismissal of their position as “wax-museum conservatives” who “don’t know what time it is.” They are at a “dead-end” because “their principles presume that a healthy American society exists.” They continue to listen to “the abstract economic pronouncements of some long-dead Austrian aristocrat.” That childish insult is hurled at Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich von Hayek, one of the foremost economic, institutional, and legal thinkers of the twentieth century. Such immature attempts to marginalize thoughtful people and institutions, many of whom agree with the author on issues more than they disagree, fill the book’s pages. But that’s strange when you consider the federal government never really shrank such that conservatives could pronounce that American society was “healthy.”

Today’s conservatives in Washington stand on the shoulders of ideas, research, and statesmanship that took decades to build. They would do well to improve it, not denigrate it.

For Roberts as for Cass, economic reasoning does not possess universal qualities. It’s time-bound, historical, and embedded in circumstances. In many respects, their position reproduces that of the nineteenth-century German Historical School in its debates with the nascent Austrian Economics School. German historical thinkers relied on inductive reasoning, data, and historical episodes, reasoning from a constellation of facts to various social and national purposes for the economy. They castigated the Austrians for relying on methods of economic inquiry that were predicated on subjective individual knowledge regarding value and prices. There were universal economic principles, the Austrians demonstrated, rooted in economic truths knowable by reason, such as marginal utility, scarcity, price theory, comparative advantage, and opportunity costs; the disregard of these principles leads to economic decay as much as it leads to state aggrandizement. Yet, Roberts correctly concludes that housing prices are too high, and, in substantial part, this owes to government intervention. But he fails to draw the necessary conclusion that increasing supply in this consumption good relies on the economic principles mentioned above, principles that are operative throughout the whole economy.

As most readers are aware, one of Hayek’s key principles is that the human person best acquires knowledge through local interactions and exchanges with others. The knowledge possessed by investors, workers, consumers, and managers is accumulated through pieces of information, which actors use in the economy in their own inherently self-interested ways. It’s a key principle that spells the ultimate self-defeating nature of centralizing economic activity in political institutions. Both Roberts and Cass, though, have tied themselves to the mast of reindustrialization and increasing manufacturing jobs. And that requires industrial policy, which means the federal government, in this context, will engage in policy choices on behalf of one economic sector to boost employment within it, which inherently will come at the expense of other workers in other economic sectors. Contemporary American historicists will also lose the reincarnation of this debate just as their German intellectual forebearers did, regardless of the short-term political opportunism currently carrying them. The “abstract economic pronouncements” of a certain Austrian aristocrat are inconvenient truths for those favoring various types of government control over the economy.

We are all consumers, and redefining the economy around manufacturing workers inevitably leads to a cronyism framework in which the government supports special interests.

One is fully entitled to one’s own rhetoric, if not hyperbole, but economic truths are stubborn things. Conservatism in the postwar conservative period did not proceed on the premise that American society is fundamentally healthy, as Roberts states. The principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are fundamentally good, and there was always an assumption, as noted by Willmoore Kendall, that enough Americans still lived the American tradition of freedom “in their hips.” At the same time, there was also tremendous fomentation from progressive sources. The conservative movement itself came together, grew together, because of the New Deal Revolution of 1932, the new constitution declared by the Supreme Court in 1937, the soft-pedaling of communism in the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of anti-religious forces in the 1950s and 1960s, the augmentation of the welfare state in the Great Society, the marginalization of family and motherhood in the sexual revolution, and the liberal defeatism of the 1970s. Conservatives have always been at war with progressives.

We should consider another set of economic truths. Did the working class meet its demise at the hands of free trade, NAFTA, and the WTO as Cass and Roberts insist? No. As AEI economist Michael Strain and investor Clifford Asness observe: “The wages of nonsupervisory workers—roughly the bottom 80 percent of workers by pay, including manufacturing workers and service-sector workers who are not managers—have grown by around 60 percent over the past two generations. Over the past three decades, inflation-adjusted wages for typical workers have grown by 44 percent.”

Strain and Asness cite a different finding on overall wealth accumulation, observing that data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) notes that “families in the 51st to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution had an average wealth of $1.3 million in 2022, the most recent year data are available. That’s up from around $500,000 in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.”

What about those with low incomes, Strain and Asness inquire? “The CBO’s income data show that inflation-adjusted post-tax-and-transfer income for the bottom 20 percent of households more than doubled from 1990 to 2021.” And “these families saw their average real wealth triple from 1990 to 2022.” Poverty rates have declined using the government’s official measure from above 20 percent in 1960 to 11 percent today. The standard is relative, so some poverty will always be found.

What about the boys down at the plant? Are we overlooking them?

In their famous paper describing the “China Shock,” David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson observed a 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, concluding that imports from China resulted in a 21 percent decline in manufacturing employment, or a net loss of 2.4 million jobs. Numerous scholars have since questioned these findings of such job losses, reducing the number by half or even more. We should note the number of jobs created in America by imports, which economists also point to in evaluating China Shock. I don’t diminish job losses or the psychological toll they exert. It is a natural part of any freely functioning economy, however, and an inherent aspect of capitalism and America’s economic history. Six million jobs were also created during this same period in other sectors of the economy. Economist Jeremy Horpedahl has recently tested the jobs and incomes of the 10 cities most negatively affected by the China Shock. His findings indicate that most of them currently boast more jobs than they did in 2001. Moreover, these same cities have higher real wages for workers at every income level. Amidst the current push for reindustrializing America, we might wonder who will fill the already 450,000 open manufacturing jobs? Declinist narrative and DC opportunity mill meet economic reality.

In meeting the needs of consumers, the American manufacturing sector has increased productivity since 1994, the year NAFTA was implemented, by between 70-80 percent. As George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux has noted in this space, “the productivity of American manufacturing workers steadily increased from the end of WWII until 2012; it neither stopped nor even slowed when America’s run of annual trade deficits started in 1976.” This productivity increase came at a time when this same sector began to shed jobs in earnest towards the end of the 1970s. This would be evidence of a robust sector, and yet virtually every Western country has watched its manufacturing sector decline during this period. America differs in that its manufacturing sector’s productivity is almost unmatched. Besides, as Harvard Kennedy School, NBER, and Peterson Institute economist Robert Lawrence has noted, productivity growth is the “dominant force behind the declining share of employment in manufacturing in the United States and other industrial economies.”

We can quibble with why manufacturing productivity has not continued to increase since 2012, but we might consider consumers again, who, as they grow richer and live in more prosperous economies, choose to devote fewer resources to manufacturing goods. America is now a service-based economy, and if we are going to speak the language of trade deficit and surplus, it’s one in which we have a definite surplus. One can feel the collective shudder from the economic nationalists, but these are facts that can only be changed with economically suboptimal government interventions.

With data like this, Americans should wonder why they are consistently being misled by leaders on the populist left and right. Such doomsaying about the demise of the working class and the decline of the industrial heartland serves as a dangerous introduction to a politics of grievance, providing a powerful platform to those pushing these views. Our problems in education, family, patriotism, and work rates are undeniable, and many of them Roberts identifies correctly, but rooting them primarily in an economy built on the betrayal and deceit of hard-working Americans is simply false.

Moreover, the attribution of blame to the conservative movement as it existed before Trump famously came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy is another falsehood. There were certainly problems, when are there not? But the ideas that drove Trump’s first term to success were built on decades of right-of-center policy work, and it’s that first term that voters approved of in the 2024 election and want to see re-created in his second term. The notion that one can seemingly reinvent American conservatism from scratch, as if 70 years of history can be dismissed or disregarded, underscores the surreal nature of the project, one that views history more like Thomas Paine rather than Edmund Burke.

Today’s conservatives in Washington stand on the shoulders of ideas, research, and statesmanship that took decades to build. They would do well to improve it, not denigrate it. Besides, the economic populist program that Roberts and Cass endorse is not endorsed by most GOP voters, who continue to want traditional objectives of economic growth, limited and competent government, low crime, lower prices, and economic opportunity, plus an end to the ideological revolutionary nostrums of the Left. No significant constituency has emerged in favor of the tariffs. If tariffs, industrial policy, labor union alliances, progressive antitrust, a family policy welfare state, and other left-of-the-right populist notions prevent these voters from getting what they want and they return Democrats to power, then we will ask, “If following your economic populist program led to this, of what use was the program?”

Who bears the primary responsibility for shaping a child’s moral imagination: the state or their parents? Last term, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court answered with uncommon clarity in cases where the parents’ religion is at stake: when public schools press lessons that undermine the faith of young pupils, parents may halt participation. The decision matters on three planes. 

Doctrinally, it may signal a weakening of Employment Division v. Smith’s constraint on free exercise claims. Sociologically, it highlights the conflict that arises when government curricula collide with the religious sentiment of a substantial portion of the population, in this case shaped by the Abrahamic code. Politically, by giving religious families an opt-out from religiously burdensome curricula, it may paradoxically shore up public education against the voucher and homeschooling movements that demand a complete exit from government schools.

Mahmoud v. Taylor arose from the school district of Montgomery County, Maryland, which created an “inclusive” English language curriculum for students from kindergarten to fifth grade. In this curriculum, the students read or had read to them several books that many parents believed celebrated same-sex marriage and gender transitions. Initially, the county gave notice of the classes in which these materials would be used and permitted parents to opt out without their children incurring unexcused absences. But the county then changed course and required attendance. A coalition of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim parents sued, contending that the Court’s imposition of this curriculum violated their free exercise rights to bring up children in their faith.

The Supreme Court decision to uphold the parents’ free exercise claims rested on two doctrinal steps. First, Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, held that requiring children to attend lessons using these materials created “a real threat of undermining the religious beliefs of children” and thus burdened the parents’ free exercise rights. Second, the Court held that the neutrality of a law mandating curricula for all students did not insulate it from the strict scrutiny applicable to laws that burden religious exercise. While Employment Division v. Smith generally protected such neutral laws from free exercise challenge, the burden of this law was of the same type in the Yoder case, where the Court had upheld the Amish’s right to opt-out of a neutral legal requirement mandating high school education for fear that such instruction would distance their children from their parents’ religious beliefs and practices.

Both the doctrinal steps broke important new ground. First, in finding that material in a curriculum created a burden on free exercise rights, the court suggested that these readings could prove psychologically coercive to young children. Thus, as my friend Mark Movsesian observed in a recent podcast, Justice Alito applied an idea from Establishment Clause cases like Lee v. Weisman in which the Court previously held that government religious speech could be coercive in the context of a captive audience. This holding means that secular government speech can, in some contexts, provide the threshold for a free exercise violation.

And as the dissent notes, the scope of this holding will raise questions going forward for public schools. For instance, could a parent who professes a creationist creed opt out of a biology class in which evolution is taught? The theory for such a plaintiff parent under Mahmoud is that this curriculum would burden his free exercise rights. But the difference might well be that a high school student could be expected to treat the lesson as a scientific claim, which he could accept for purposes of the class but not otherwise. The burden on religious exercise is more questionable than in the case of a young child who would have trouble making such distinctions.

By giving religious families an opt-out from religiously burdensome curricula, Mahmoud v. Taylor may paradoxically shore up public education against the school choice movement.

Moreover, the compelling interest argument to meet strict scrutiny would also be stronger. Modern biology depends on the concept of evolution. English language instruction hardly depends on reading celebrations of same-sex marriage or gender transition. The problem here is that Montgomery County is going out of its way to morally indoctrinate children. Justice Thomas captures this aspect of the case when he observes that sex education is not a traditional curriculum in public schools. Thus, underlying the scope of Mahmoud’s holding may be an implicit history and tradition premise that has underpinned much of the recent Court’s constitutional analysis—in this case, the history and tradition of public education.

The Court’s circumscription of the scope of Smith’s famous neutrality holding may also have long-run implications. The Court was not clear about the exact nature of the burden on religious exercise that escapes the analysis of Smith. But Justice Alito did not rely on a fundamental due process right of parents to bring up their children—the so-called hybrid rights justification for Yoder’s application of strict scrutiny despite the law’s neutrality. Still, it is best to understand the exception to Smith as connected to children. Unlike adults, children cannot be expected to understand concepts like the neutrality of laws and thus may well feel the expression of neutral laws as offensive or undermining of their religion.

The Court’s treatment of Smith may also help set the stage for its overruling. When the Court considers overruling a case, it weighs whether the case’s holding has proved clear and workable. By widening an exception to Smith and not rooting it in a separate constitutional right, Alito, an avowed opponent of Smith, may hope to undermine its future viability.

This case also underscores the fault line that opens when governments promote a moral framework that opposes the religiously based morality of a majority or even a substantial minority of its people. The Abrahamic religions have been united for hundreds of years in teaching that the sexes are binary and that marriage is only between opposite sexes. It is true that some mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish congregations have recently jettisoned these positions, but these denominations remain a distinct and shrinking minority among these religions.

The social stakes of this case are thus higher than Yoder. The Amish are a tiny sect. Moreover, their almost complete rejection of modern life is likely to attract only a small band of adherents. In contrast, religions with traditional moral values remain a salient social and political force in America.

Nevertheless, same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. And progressives have assaulted binary gender categories. Given the liberal elites that exercise substantial control over education in much of the country, it is hardly a surprise that school curricula will often be designed to celebrate conduct and practices anathema to traditional religion. Literature for young children is usually celebratory. No one could read the books in this case without coming away thinking that same-sex marriage and gender transitions are good things. The teacher’s manual, suggesting that the instructor call out as “hurtful” the claim that a boy cannot become a girl, is designed to shut down religious and moral objections and assure civic conformity. The very decision to put these books in English language learning for young children is an attempt to make this perspective on sexual morality a seamless part of their upbringing, not a question that raises moral challenges.

The dissenters’ claims that these books are just factual depictions without normative resonance can be charitably described as playing economically with the truth. But they are nevertheless revealing. They do not wish to admit that creating a citizenry comfortable with same-sex marriage and gender transition is the point of the curriculum, because that seems like indoctrination. But such indoctrination is a logical demand of today’s progressive morality. To be sure, in a liberal society, it might seem possible to legalize same-sex marriage and even gender transitions, and yet at the same time not try to tamp down on strong criticism of these practices. But progressivism asserts that because such practices constitute identity, any such critique is incompatible with allowing such citizens to flourish. Hence, such moral opposition must be driven out of social discourse.

More generally, it is hard for those who see collective action as the way to bend history towards justice to permit pockets of what are regarded as reaction, even if they flow directly from traditional religious teaching. The same concern makes progressives leery of state support for private education, particularly of a religious nature. Opt-out authority in parents similarly creates a sphere of private authority within public education. It was Rousseau, whose political theories inspired liberals, progressives, and radicals, who attacked private education because it would simply transmit to the children the “prejudices” of their families. For him, education by the state is necessary to guarantee the primacy of the general will of democracy. Not surprisingly, praise of the democratic process by which local school curricula are established is a centerpiece of the dissenting opinion.

Given the Court’s constitutional authorization of school vouchers and the rise of homeschooling, progressives should be more grateful for this decision than their commentary has so far let on. Public school curricula for young and impressionable children hostile to traditional Abrahamic religions are recruiting sergeants for more school choice. And even when that movement is not successful in a particular state or locality, such curricula will encourage more homeschooling—the total opt-out option. Both results or worse for the progressive cause because they will allow students to be strengthened in what progressives would regard as prejudice and what conservatives regard as the well-formed traditions of centuries of religious teaching.

At the Founding, the state could leave religious morality largely alone because public, indeed elite, moral vocabulary aligned with that of most churches. Today, such alignment has diminished, and the government increasingly uses its classrooms to reshape the moral culture. But Mahmoud reminds us that the Constitution still grants parents the first claim on their children’s religious formation. When state instruction turns to dogma, the Constitution assigns parents the last word—and the right to withdraw.

Reforming the federal government’s largest entitlement programs is an imposing political project that will require those with shared concerns to work together on a common plan of action. The essays published in response to my original submission in this symposium, “The Path to Entitlement Reform,” are fine examples of constructive perspectives that should inform the development of a broader consensus on how to proceed.

The three essays, from Sita Slavov, Joel Griffith, and Thomas Savidge, differed in terms of emphases and focus, but each of the authors expressed, in their own ways, that entitlement reform needs to be tethered to values and principles if it is to be successful. It is not enough to enact any changes whatsoever so long as the fiscal math improves. What is done matters immensely too, especially from the perspective of ensuring the federal government plays an appropriate, and not a disproportionate, role in American life.

First Principles

As Slavov noted, entitlement reform can be based on either explicit or implicit values. For some, the purpose might be to pay for an even more generous social welfare system with higher levels of taxation. The goal would be less income inequality, even if that might lead to slower overall income growth for future generations. For others, the aim might be to shrink the state so as to maximize the space for individuals to plan their own lives and take responsibility for their welfare.

Then there is the critical question of intergenerational equity. Slavov stresses that continued borrowing to finance consumption beyond what today’s voters are willing to pay for with taxes should be seen for what it is: a failing that violates the core value of justice. What is borrowed today lessens economic opportunities for future generations. Trust funds and other budget rules can help institutionalize the principle that today’s voters should not be free to impose excessive and avoidable costs on future taxpayers.

Griffith took up the cause of the young from a different perspective. His focus is on giving today’s workers more agency when planning their financial lives by personalizing Social Security through investment accounts. Such a reform would create a direct link between earnings and wealth accumulation for retirement, and would give millions of workers with modest incomes access for the first time to the higher returns available from equity investments and corporate bonds. 

The unstated but important values underlying the recommendations in my essay are close to what Savidge urges as a benchmark for measuring progress. For a century, defenders of a properly conceived liberalism have struggled to hold back the powerful political impulse to hand ever more power to the state in the name of economic security. It is the reason Social Security and Medicare are much larger today than when they were first conceived. The starting point for entitlement reform should be a reassertion of a sound perspective on the proper role of the state in public life, which can then inform whether gradual reforms would move in the right direction, or not. Simply raising taxes to whatever level is necessary to pay for untargeted and inefficient programs is not the answer. The recommendations in my essay were aimed at reducing the cost burden of entitlements to a level that would be tolerable, in part by prioritizing assistance for the lowest-income households.

Savidge hints at another important factor, which is prudence when weighing options. Some half-measures are better than others. For instance, it might be acceptable to agree to a payroll tax increase as part of a larger Social Security reform plan if the other provisions create the needed stability and financial space for individuals to better plan for their retirements using their own savings and resources. On the other hand, it should never be acceptable to entirely foreclose certain pathways that facilitate individual agency, even if doing so might improve the fiscal outlook.

Trust Funds

Savidge also raises a question about the value of referencing trust funds when pursuing entitlement reforms. As he notes, federal trust funds for Social Security and Medicare do not hold invested financial assets in the same way private trusts do. Rather, these trust funds are accounting devices created to provide information to elected leaders. Their purpose is to track income and outgo across multiple decades with the intention of ensuring that dedicated tax receipts roughly match spending over time. When the trust funds are projected to become depleted, as is now the expectation for both Social Security and Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) in the 2030s, the issuance of the annual trustees reports puts Congress on official notice that corrective reforms are needed to restore balance.

Reforms which restrain future spending and provide additional space for individual responsibility and initiative should be seen as progress, even if these reforms seem to fall short of a full transformation of what now exists.

In my original essay, I argued that the trust fund construct could be used to advance needed reforms because they are familiar and accepted by both Congress and the electorate as appropriate devices for disciplining program spending. While it would be better if elected leaders acted more promptly on the warnings from the Social Security and Medicare trustees, history shows that it is not easy to ignore warnings of trust fund insolvency indefinitely. In 1983 for Social Security, and in 1997 for Medicare, Congress approved significant program changes with the express intention of preventing the relevant trust funds from becoming fully depleted of reserves. 

Trust funds are admittedly imperfect tools for restraining entitlement spending, but they are the tools now available, enjoy a degree of public support, and are far better than no tools at all.

Avoiding a Crisis, or Planning for It

Savidge’s perspective is informed by an expectation that nothing of consequence will change absent a crisis, and that when the inevitable crisis arrives, new possibilities for reform will emerge that otherwise would not be available while voters are protective of the status quo. He recommends working on principled but practical plans that can be picked up when the time is right.

It is an important perspective, but it implies that those who share his dedication to free markets and limited government will have leverage when the fateful day arrives. It is not obvious that this will be the case. It would seem at least possible that the political storm that a debt-induced economic calamity might unleash could precipitate a renewed push for even more forceful state intervention in the economy, with deficits and debt addressed via inflation and high taxes rather than reforms. There are certainly examples of such turns from history (see Argentina, pre-2023).

Moreover, a crisis does not yet seem entirely unavoidable. There are, of course, many indications that the nation’s political processes have been struggling in recent years, but that does not mean nothing will ever happen without a clear rupture forcing elected leaders to take action. For instance, it is still possible that the expected depletion of trust fund reserves in Social Security will induce Congress to take up legislation bringing expected spending in line with revenue in the coming decades. Such a measure need not be disruptive to current beneficiaries or involve precipitous tax hikes, which means it might be possible for it to pass even during a period of relative economic stability. The recommendations offered in my essay were based on the assumption that proceeding with such reforms as soon as possible would be preferable to waiting for an unpredictable crisis to upend the status quo.

Other Perspectives

The US has an ideologically diverse population, but it is important to recognize that the main entitlement programs were put into federal law during periods when the Democratic Party was ascendant. In 1935 and again in 1965, Congress was run by large Democratic majorities, which created the conditions conducive for ambitious program expansions.

Moreover, every high-income democracy has put in place similarly expansive social welfare programs. The US is in some ways an outlier in that it is the only major advanced economy that has not adopted a fully nationalized version of health insurance enrollment. Some countries, such as Germany, allow private entities to operate in the health sector, but they do so with more restrictions than is the case in the US.

When considering this history, it is reasonable to assume that it will be very challenging for a political movement to aggressively alter the direction of federal entitlements if the party that largely created what now exists opposes the reforms. It is not that such a turn is inconceivable, but it would certainly represent one of the more consequential political developments in US history if indeed it did occur.

Some recent history confirms the uphill battle that proactive politicians face when advancing reforms that break with the traditional designs of the existing programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush proposed to offer workers a voluntary personal account which would partially displace the existing Social Security benefit formula. If it had been adopted, millions of modest wage workers would be enjoying a higher level of income in retirement than they currently do under the current program. Despite the plan’s many advantages, the administration found it impossible to get traction to advance it in a GOP-controlled Congress, or even get it a fair hearing.

If the assumption that major reform is likely to require some level of bipartisan cooperation is correct, the implication is that those pushing for reforms will find themselves negotiating changes with counterparts who have entirely different objectives in mind. It was in this context that the recommendations offered in my original essay were made.

That does not mean capitulation to the status quo (with higher taxes) is inevitable. Rather, it means that reforms which restrain future spending and provide additional space for individual responsibility and initiative should be seen as progress, even if these reforms seem to fall short of a full transformation of what now exists. Today’s programs are not so big as to suffocate what is still a largely dynamic US economy. Further restraint on the government’s largest programs will help ensure that remains the case.

In Abundance, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson clearly state their thesis in the introduction: “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it.” And that’s the problem. Their thesis doesn’t make sense because they fail to consistently define the word that appears three times in that statement: “we.”

Klein and Thompson see their book as a missive to the American left and an antidote to the “degrowth” ideology that has taken hold in parts of it. Their vision for “abundance liberalism” is more about a shift in focus and emphasis than an entire ideological overhaul for the left. It has spurred debate within the left about whether it presents an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes that cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election or is merely a “neoliberal” wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It is neither. People who are more favorable to free markets may be tempted to applaud left-wing authors, conceding that government isn’t always the answer, but Klein and Thompson still don’t understand the role of individualism and markets in creating the abundance they desire.

“We” is the main character of Abundance. Klein and Thompson must use the word hundreds of times in the book, as it often appears multiple times per page. By the end of a book, the reader should be able to confidently say who the main character is, but I have no such confidence. The end result is that the book isn’t about anyone, so it isn’t telling anyone to do anything.

The most obvious antecedent of “we” would be the book’s two authors. But try to put that into their thesis statement: “To have the future that Klein and Thompson want, Klein and Thompson need to build and invent more of what Klein and Thompson need.” That’s sort of true as a mantra of self-help, but the book isn’t about Klein and Thompson trying to improve their own lives.

Sometimes when writers use “we,” they intend to include the reader as well. Let’s give that a try: “To have the future that Klein, Thompson, and I want, Klein, Thompson, and I need to build and invent more of what Klein, Thompson, and I need.” That doesn’t make sense, either. I don’t necessarily want the same future that they want, and even if I did, we don’t need the same things, and I don’t know them and can’t work together with them to build or invent anything.

Maybe I’m being too literalistic. Maybe they mean Americans in general. Okay, let’s substitute that in: “To have the future Americans want, Americans need to build and invent more of what Americans need.” At one level, this is a truism. At another level, it runs into the same problem as before: 340 million people don’t want the same things, need the same things, or all work together to build or invent anything.

One of the more damaging habits in policy writing is to use “we” to mean “the government.” E.g., “We invaded Iraq,” “We need to stop taxing imports,” “We should restrict immigration.” This usage has a sort of nobility in its democratic aspirations and is excusable in casual speech. But it leads to all sorts of analytical errors in serious writing by treating the government as something that naturally works in the public interest.

The habit is nonetheless common, so maybe Klein and Thompson are exhibiting it. Let’s see: “To have the future the government wants, the government needs to build and invent more of what the government needs.” Definitely not. The government is not the primary builder or inventor of the stuff people use every day and never has been. This would also be a straightforward totalitarian vision for society, and that’s not what Klein and Thompson want.

Klein and Thompson do write that their intended audience is American liberals, of which they are two. So maybe that’s the “we” they have in mind. “To build the future American liberals want, American liberals need to build and invent more of what American liberals need.” That doesn’t work, either. They write about energy production, healthcare, transportation, housing, and other things that affect all people regardless of ideology. They aren’t arguing for some kind of American liberal secessionist movement.

The unavoidable conclusion is that “we” in Klein and Thompson’s thesis statement must refer to different people in each of its three instances. As far as I can tell, the most accurate rendering of it based on the rest of the book is: “To have the future Klein and Thompson want, other people need to build and invent more of what Americans need,” with the added stipulation that “what Americans need” is defined as “what Klein and Thompson want.”

They are clear about what they want. Their vision of the future involves a lot of green energy, mass transit, housing construction, and research and development investment. They want vertical farming, lab-grown meat, automated technology, and supersonic airplanes.

Some of this vision sounds attractive to me. Some of it does not. That’s fine, and it’s true of all visions of the future. But they assert that this vision is the future that “we” want. I should be included in “we,” but I am not.

The second “we” is about building and inventing. Klein and Thompson are writers. They don’t build or invent things. I’m a writer, too, so this isn’t about me either. Lots of people have jobs where they don’t build or invent anything. And millions of Americans don’t have jobs at all (children and retired people being the two largest segments of that category).

Commitment to the rule of law and to markets requires comfort with outcomes that one might disagree with.

This is the most nonsensical “we” because it can’t include the people who wrote the word or many of the people who will read it. It refers to other people, in whom Klein and Thompson are disappointed.

For example, they notice the paradox between the advances in technology and the decline in construction productivity over the past several decades. They write, “You’d think we could build so much more, so much faster, for so much less money, than in the past. But we can’t. Or, at least, we don’t.”

Personally, I don’t think Klein or Thompson or I or most people could build more efficiently, because most people don’t work in construction. Notice what they did, though. By using “we,” it now becomes your problem that construction productivity has declined. Then, the switch from “can’t” to “don’t” implies that this is some choice that everyone made that everyone should just get together and reverse, and then construction productivity would rise again.

That’s not how politics works, and it’s not how life works. If I become less productive in my job, there are any number of different reasons that could happen. Maybe I just get lazy. Maybe there are other things happening in my life that distract me. Maybe my boss is a jerk, and I lose motivation. Maybe a new government policy inhibits me from working as efficiently as I could. Maybe it’s all of those things at the same time.

But it’s not everyone’s fault if I become less productive, even if the reasons are related to other people. If I go about trying to solve my slacking by looking for a root cause in the way that other people are thinking about my job, I’m not going to be very successful.

That’s basically the approach Klein and Thompson recommend. “A lens is what we have sought to offer here,” they write. “There are rhymes that we have found across these challenges, echoes across these problems, but they are not unified enough to yield a single set of answers.” (Here, “we” actually does refer to the authors.)

They’re right that there is not a single set of answers, and they have won praise for their rejection of the leftist “degrowth” movement that sees economic advance as a problem. But I expect a little bit more from policy writers than merely being against poverty. And it’s clear that Klein and Thompson don’t understand how abundance happens.

Individuals are the ultimate decision-makers in a society. They are naturally part of groups (families) and often choose to organize themselves into other groups (corporations, governments, religious institutions, etc.) in ways that are healthy and beneficial. But individuals in the end have to choose to show up to work, use their brains to come up with new ideas, and persuade others that those ideas are worth developing.

One reliable way to get other people to do things for you is to allow them to make money from doing it. And there is already a mechanism by which that happens: markets. People get paid for coming up with good ideas and providing goods and services that make other people’s lives better. The development and expansion of markets around the world have delivered more abundance than thousands of years’ worth of human thought possible.

One reason markets work is that they do not need there to be “a single set of answers.” They work with decentralized information spread throughout society that is possessed and used by different individuals. That information condenses into a price, which is a signal to others that informs their decisions. They allow for the appearance of top-down coordination where none exists, and they perform better than attempts at top-down coordination because they incorporate information that top-down planners cannot access.

The answer Klein and Thompson are yearning for is markets. But they are respected American liberals, and respected American liberals can’t run around referencing Adam Smith or F. A. Hayek or Milton Friedman. So they’re just lost, aimlessly writing about stuff they want other people to do for them.

Because they lack the acknowledgement of the power of markets, though, there is a dangerous element behind what they’re saying that they don’t seem to recognize. The other reliable way to get other people to do things for you is to force them to with the threat of punishment. That’s what governments do.

In some cases, this method is justified. In most of the cases Klein and Thompson are considering, it is not. The government should not force people to build solar panels or farm a certain way, or eat certain foods. But Klein and Thompson have a very specific idea of the future that involves certain choices being made in those areas. So how are they going to get other people to do it?

The reader gets a taste toward the middle of the book. They bemoan that “liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than outcomes, that it seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.” All those pesky rules are getting in the way of what “we” want.

It is not a coincidence that one of the twentieth century’s great theorists of markets, Hayek, was also one of its great theorists on the rule of law. The concepts are connected and mutually reinforce each other. Commitment to the rule of law and markets requires comfort with outcomes that one might disagree with.

Klein and Thompson don’t seem comfortable with that. What is supposed to be a fresh take on policy issues winds up simply being an answer to one of the oldest questions in politics: How do we (the good guys) get them (the bad guys) out of the way so that we (the good guys) can do good things? Their answer to those who disagree: Lie back and think of abundance.

The Constitution’s Framers believed that a government of separated powers was least likely to threaten the liberties of the people. Accordingly, the government they created was a tripartite structure—a bicameral legislature (a Senate and House of Representatives) to make the laws, a president to enforce or execute the laws, and a judicial system headed by a Supreme Court to interpret the laws.

Initially, Congress was expected to be the most important of the three powers, and for that reason, the Framers focused most of their attention on the legislative powers of Congress, providing specific powers and imposing specific restrictions on the two legislative bodies, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The presidency and the judiciary, on the other hand, received much less attention, and their authorities were described, respectively, simply as “executive Power” for the president and “judicial Power” for the court system. Although the president has some additional important authorities, such as the appointment of other government officials, these generally require the consent of the Senate. The only other executive powers of wide-ranging significance are his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the statement that “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Over time, however, the Supreme Court has substantially enhanced the authority of the president, well beyond what the Framers seem to have intended. Most recently, this was made clear in a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in 2000, called Seila Law v. CFPB. Supreme Court decisions specifically on the president’s powers are extremely rare—perhaps a dozen over the last 250 years. Seila Law is one of those cases. There, the Court allowed the president to take control of an independent regulatory agency created by Congress and known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Court’s holding was bolstered by this language:

The Framers deemed an energetic executive essential to “the protection of the community against foreign attacks,” “the steady administration of the laws,” the “protection of property,” and “the security of liberty.” Accordingly … they gave the Executive the “decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch” that characterize the proceedings of one man.

This is entirely accurate. The Framers certainly wanted a president who could act with dispatch and protect the country in time of war. In Seila Law, however, the Court went well beyond this wholly acceptable description of the president’s powers:

Unique in our constitutional structure—the Framers made the president the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government. Only the president (along with the Vice president) is elected by the entire Nation. …

The resulting constitutional strategy is straightforward: divide power everywhere except for the presidency, and render the president directly accountable to the people through regular elections. In that scheme, individual executive officials will still wield significant authority, but that authority remains subject to the control of the elected president.

This description of the president’s powers justified extraordinary executive powers for a majority of the Court, but it goes too far. The presidency is not the most democratic and politically accountable official in government. Congress is at least as accountable, and far more representative of the American people as a whole. The president isn’t even elected directly by the people; he is elected through an Electoral College system, and in fifteen cases since 1844—including 1992,1996, and 2024—the College has elected a president who had not received a majority of the popular vote.

The Court’s reading of the Framers’ intentions suggests that the Framers wanted the president, acting unilaterally, to use his presidential powers as though he were a tribune of the people, not just as the official responsible for enforcing or executing the laws. But this idea cannot be found in the accounts of how the Constitutional Convention created the presidency.

The delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention did not think they were creating a president who would rule a civil society.

A delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which drew up what is now the US Constitution, would find it remarkable that today’s president might have such authority. That delegate would remember that there was no consensus on the nature of the presidency—or even whether to have a president who was a single individual rather than an executive council—until the very end of the convention.

Then, something called the “Committee on Postponed Parts” was charged with considering all the issues that hadn’t been resolved during the three months the delegates had been debating the Constitution. One of those unresolved issues was the presidency. The delegates generally believed that a chief executive was necessary to enforce or execute the laws, but many of them were wary of a single person elected by the people. They feared “an elected monarch.” The major counter-proposals were an executive council and a single person elected by Congress instead of popularly.

The committee reported on September 7, a few days before the convention’s adjournment, proposing that the president would be a single person, not a council; elected by the people, indirectly through an electoral college; with a four-year term and the possibility of re-election. The Committee’s decision became the Convention’s decision, probably because the debate process had simply run out of time. But compared to Congress, the president still had only the authority to execute the laws, to be the commander in chief in wartime, and to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Congress itself had eighteen specific powers, such as laying taxes, coining and borrowing money, declaring war, and raising and supporting armies.

James Madison’s extensive notes on the Convention’s proceedings also do not support the Supreme Court’s view of the presidency as an inherently powerful figure described in the Seila Law decision. Certainly, it was necessary to have someone to execute and enforce laws, and a single person would be better for the “activity, secrecy and dispatch” that the Court cited. But there is nothing at all in Madison’s notes, or the newspaper articles known as the Federalist Papers—written largely by Madison and Alexander Hamilton—to the effect that the presidency was an inherently powerful figure because he was in the Court’s view “the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government” or “directly accountable to the people.”

No, the president had an important job—to execute the laws made by Congress and interpreted by the judiciary—but not to unilaterally govern the country.

Thus, as James Madison, writing as Publius, wrote in Federalist #70:

Those politicians and statesmen who have been the most celebrated for the soundness of their principles, and for the justness of their views, have declared in favour of a single executive, and a numerous legislature. They have, with great propriety, considered energy as the most necessary qualification of the former, and have regarded this as most applicable to power in a single hand; while they have, with equal propriety, considered the latter as best adapted to deliberation and wisdom, and best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people, and to secure their privileges and interests.

The Supreme Court’s view in Seila Law is the very opposite of this. It sees the presidency best positioned to conciliate the confidence of the people and to secure their privileges and interests. This runs counter to the underlying theory of the separation of powers—expressed by Madison—which sees the president as an expeditious actor, but Congress as the entity to address the privileges and interests of the people.

Some may argue that the United States, having risen to the top among all the democratically elected nations of the world, should be led by a powerful president who is no longer burdened by waiting for a contentious Congress to make up its collective mind. This view is certainly the result of the many wars of the twentieth century and the dangers of today’s world. The president, as commander-in-chief, might be best suited for these challenges. But the delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention did not think they were creating a president who would rule a civil society.

Liberal education is in a state of perpetual crisis. Over the past two years, the University of Tulsa’s Honors Director, Jennifer Frey, built a program where students read “thousands of pages of difficult material every semester” and participated in “small, Socratic seminars” marked by vigorous and civil debates about ideas. But in a recent New York Times editorial, Frey recounts how the newly installed provost decided that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” To save money, distinctive programs were cut, staff eliminated, and a new mandate―increased class sizes―was issued. However, this shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Before Frey’s arrival, Jacob Howland described how the new university’s board of trustees were business people first, educators second. The lesson learnt here is that who is in charge is as important as who is in the classroom.

Before I discuss university governance and the possibility of reviving liberal education, it would be helpful first to survey the landscape of American higher education. Besides its number (nearly 4,000 universities and colleges) and diversity (private, public, regional, etc.), what makes the American system of higher education unique is the different purposes and values that its array of institutions offers. Some are comprehensive; others are narrow; some are religious; others are civic-minded. This assortment of university missions―and not just generous federal funding―made American higher education “the envy of the world.” What created that envy was a diverse educational marketplace able to cater to the various needs of a continental nation.

What is troubling is the trend that this diversity in university missions is being homogenized into a singular purpose: pre-professional training. The latest manifestation is the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and pre-professional studies (e.g., business, nursing). At the same time, humanities majors have declined by almost a third between 2012 and 2022, with no bottom in sight. Social science majors also have dropped. How did we get here? What are the consequences? And what are the possible remedies?

Authority, Data, and Equality

The factors often cited for the rise of pre-professional training in American higher education are the declines in government funding and high-school student demographics, the increased costs of college tuition and student debt, and the politicization of the humanities and social sciences. Fewer resources and greater costs have led both universities and students to seek a more career-aligned education at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. But there are three additional factors that have played a role that are often neglected. They are authority, data, and equality.

The first is authority: who has the power to recognize the legitimacy of an institution of higher education? To answer this, we must look briefly at the history of accreditation. Starting in the late nineteenth century, accreditation was established to ensure the academic quality of colleges and ease student transfer between schools. Over time, specialized accreditation bodies (e.g., law, medicine) and regional organizations (e.g., the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities) emerged and conferred the authority to recognize legitimate colleges and universities.

It wasn’t until 1952 that the federal government became involved with accreditation with the passage of the G.I. Bill for Korean War veterans. The bill was limited to students enrolled at accredited institutions and designated a peer review process as the basis for evaluating institutional quality. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the non-governmental Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) were authorized to recognize reputable accrediting bodies. That is, neither the federal government nor CHEA accredits individual institutions, but published a list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies. Without the imprimatur of that list, federal student loans were not eligible to colleges and universities. While there are some exceptions, American universities and colleges need access to those student loans in order to stay financially afloat.

The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

This traditional division of supervising higher education―the federal government monitors issues of financial support and access, accreditors examine educational quality, and states focus on consumer protection―was changed in the 1960s and 1970s with the federal and state governments relinquishing their responsibilities to accreditors. With access and consumer protection incorporated into their mission, accreditation bodies now monitor schools so that all students and groups have equal access to education and that universities demonstrate students are learning (assessment).

These two responsibilities are amenable to metrics of quantification. For example, access is determined by such metrics as how many students receive financial support, graduate, and become employed afterwards. Assessment likewise has been transformed from qualitative peer reviews and self-studies to numerical data that correlates with student learning objectives. Universities are accountable to these metrics, with poorer outcomes interpreted as a sign of failure rather than a baseline from which the institution should improve.

Accreditors, therefore, not only have appropriated more power but have channeled that power into the currency of quantifiable data. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with relying upon data to make evaluations about academic quality. However, the data accumulated for these evaluations are divorced from educational achievement, e.g., looking at post-graduate salaries rather than foreign language passage rates. Academic quality, consequently, is defined by these metrics and misses not only educational learning but also evaluations of students’ character and the interiority of their lives. Such currency flattens educational distinctions, nuances, and idiosyncrasies, the hallmarks not only of the humanities and social sciences but more broadly of liberal education. By contrast, STEM and pre-professional studies align well with quantifiable metrics because of the nature of how they structure and disseminate knowledge.

This support of the datafication of the university is, in turn, a manifestation of the American value of democratic equality. Data, as the numerical assignment and valuing of reality, has the illusion of being objective and transparent. It is therefore a valuable commodity by which accreditors, administrators, teachers, and students evaluate themselves. Those experiences, activities, and moments not amenable to the pre-set standardized categories of evaluations are ignored.

The power of data resides in its apparent objectivity, an attractiveness that is especially appealing in democratic societies where, according to Tocqueville, individuals believe that everyone has an equal right to understand reality for him- or herself. In democratic societies, everyone relies upon his or her own judgment to make decisions and reduces everything to its practical or utilitarian value: to “accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better.” But because everyone is equal, no one is certain that his or her judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus dominated by easily quantified data.

Data, consequently, is the crystallization of democratic judgment because nobody can challenge it: it is objective, transparent, and universally accessible. When universities apply data appropriately―such as student retention and graduation―schools can learn where they fall short and remedy it. The problem today is that universities only use data to measure against standards that seem objective, like post-graduate salaries. This, in turn, replaces the diverse and competitive market of American higher educational missions with the monopoly of pre-professional training. The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

Beyond the Mandarin Class

Given this landscape of American higher education, those who seek leadership roles must follow this path of numerical counting―a path antithetical to liberal education. Values like wonder, discovery, and purpose are resistant to meaningful quantification. The result is an administrative class and leadership that think, speak, and decide on data alone.

When higher education is publicly discussed, it is often characterized in terms of ideological, cultural, and curriculum battles between left and right. What is missing in this conversation is the need to address how administrators and board members understand higher education and how it is manifested in the missions of their schools. The concerns of finances, as expressed in data, are critical for the health of the university, but even more so is the question of values and purpose. The datafication of the university can’t answer these questions. Only humans can.

The first step that schools can take to promote a diverse and competitive market of higher education is to provide instruction to board members about the history of education and the institution that they are leading. One of the oddities of American higher education is that board members often lack an understanding of the history and purpose of education, even that of the institution they lead. As a result, these members approach the university from their own perspectives, which are usually from a business mindset since many are asked to serve in part because of their financial contributions and their professional networks. To introduce these members to the history and purpose of education would expose them to a different set of values that can’t be captured by data.

Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting.

The second step is for faculty to reassert their roles as administrators. While there are circumstances when it makes sense to bring in an administrative leader from outside the institution, it is frequently better for the university that faculty be promoted as administrators within―and then only for a limited period before they rotate back into faculty. One of the results of this faculty responsibility is that university culture benefits in terms of institutional memory and a sense of continuity and community. Administrators have a stake in the long-term health of their institution and are perceived by faculty as part of the university rather than apart from it. Again, another oddity of American higher education is that more than 80 percent of college presidents are external hires compared to 30 percent of CEOs of major corporations. The consequence is that a president upsets the university applecart in pursuit of new metrics of success, only to depart soon after for the next gig, leaving faculty and staff resigned to the next experiment of another incoming leader.

The third step is for the school as a whole to determine its mission: what are its values and educational purpose? This is not just faculty and administrators but includes students, staff, alumni, and other stakeholders. Then the school must ask itself how they―from board member to president to student to staff―hold themselves accountable and evaluate success? For now, quantifiable metrics will be required, especially for accreditation reports, but these are not the only ways to determine accountability and success. For instance, qualitative methods exist to evaluate leadership accountability and student success. And even more meaningful are the relationships that are sustained between alumni and the university, faculty and students, staff and administrators. While these relationships cannot be measured, they can be articulated and provide purpose for people and the institution they serve.

The fourth step would be to provide alternative methodologies for how accreditation bodies and governments evaluate schools. As stated previously, there is a value in data to evaluate universities, but it should be one among many tools. Higher education leadership and public pressure can nudge governments and accreditation bodies to be more open to non-numerical assessment. But more importantly, scholars and educators need to devise different methodologies and practices to evaluate academic quality and standards for their institutions. These could include entrance and exit examinations, qualitative assessment, and student portfolios.

The fifth and final step is to articulate and demonstrate the value of the type of education one’s institution offers. This particularly applies to those colleges whose mission is liberal education. Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting. They must find ways to blend the old and the new―the perennial principles of liberal education with the current circumstances of today―to promote liberal education’s promise that in studying it one becomes authentically human.

The challenges that American higher educational institutions confront are myriad, from a loss of public trust to government funding cuts to declining student enrollment. But what is neglected in this conversation is the loss of mission diversity―of values and purposes―that traditionally has characterized the marketplace of American higher education. It is this diversity that has served this vast continental country well.

The repurposing of the University of Tulsa’s Honor Program is representative of a troubling homogenization trend in American universities. Liberal education colleges and programs are its most recent casualties, but if this trend continues unabated, the variety in American higher education will disappear. To prevent this from transpiring, American higher education leaders need to think and rethink their institutions’ values and purpose and discover new ways to make the old seemingly new.

Anthony Kronman is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, and his latest book, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age, offers a fresh conservative theory. The argument starts from his conviction that the Enlightenment’s ideals of equality, toleration, and scientific rationality define “the civilization we call home.” He believes there is “wide and stable agreement” about the worth of these liberal principles, so our political problem is that of the classical humanist: how best to cultivate the soul morally and aesthetically.

True Conservatism insightfully poses a double challenge. On the one hand, it forces conservatives to lay their cards on the table. Is their anti-modernism really a dissent from the high ideals of the Enlightenment? For instance, post-liberal conservatism argues that liberalism incubates massive and recalcitrant inequalities between city and countryside, white- and blue-collar workers, and the oligarchs of the contemporary means of communication and users. The core complaint is a shortfall in equality, confirming Kronman’s observation that “we are all progressives by default.” If conservatism is to resonate, it must make an honest peace with modernity. 

On the other hand, Kronman challenges progressives. Are we wise to junk a tradition that taught the West how learning and beauty train the proud to gloriously manage their passions? Are we edified by immodestly mocking an inheritance that has made us more cultured? If conservatism must reconcile with modernity, progressivism must embrace the humanist’s cultivation of excellence and piety. 

Kronman superbly frames politics between Enlightenment rule of law and the humanist’s refined liberty. He is a syncretic thinker—which I admire—but has he done enough to show how Enlightenment rationalism sits comfortably with humanism?

False Conservatisms 

Descartes kicked off modernity with the epistemological problem of whether we ever know the world around us, and Kronman holds fast to verifiable knowledge: “the truth is preeminently what science declares it to be.” Much of Kronman’s conservatism stems from his love of the Great Books, but nowhere does he dwell on the varieties of evidence and proof that humanism employs. The humanist’s broad theory of truth haunts Kronman’s treatment of allegiance, specifically his struggle to find a stable place for love within his reason-based political order. 

Kronman argues that the progressive’s skepticism towards love of family, nation, and God mutilates the spirit. Historically, conservative allegiance follows the ordo amoris. A recent controversy in American politics, the order of charity depicts love expanding from self to family, then community and country, and finally cresting in love of God. Metaphysically, these ordered loves cascade from the font of God’s love. Kronman’s anxiety over the voluntarism in Christianity’s cosmology of love makes Kronman privilege the God of the arch rationalist, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a deity that does not love. Kronman’s appeasement of scientific progressivism triggers a theoretical incongruity that ill suits humanist elegance. The incongruity is that Spinoza’s God does not ground the ordo amoris. We love and sacrifice; God does not. 

True Conservatism opens: “The rich and enlightened societies of the modern West are the most prosperous, tolerant and democratic the world has ever known … a sober observer may be forgiven for thinking that ours is the most brilliant civilization that has ever existed—because it is.” An echo of the famous End of History thesis by Francis Fukuyama is clearly heard, and Kronman believes the achievement of the Enlightenment emboldens progressives to further enshrine liberal ideals in our institutions and mores. After all, liberal nations have been, he believes, “the leading edge of a global revolution,” one that has defeated “the great reactionary movements.” 

Churlishly discounting this great achievement, “the conservative cause has lost its way,” concludes Kronman. His resources are the Great Books, and so recent conservative theorists are not highlighted—there is no mention of Roger Scruton or Patrick Deneen, and Alasdair MacIntyre only gets brief mention in a footnote. Enough is said, however, to help us place Kronman’s theory amongst contemporary options. 

Libertarians, he argues, exaggerate equality since they validate any consumer choice, even if it offends “beauty and truth.” Neutral about value preferences, libertarianism undermines “the Ciceronian ideal of connoisseurship,” where the arts and sciences build character. Amongst other false conservatisms presented, Scruton likely qualifies as a Humean. In David Hume’s political thought, custom orients us politically. With its emphasis on history, Kronman concludes that Hume’s politics is an irrationalism, of a piece with his skepticism towards science as hard truth.

In Kronman’s telling, even an Aristotelian-Thomist like MacIntyre is ultimately wedded to Christian voluntarism, obedient to mysteries that cannot be rationally explained. Deneen’s post-liberal political theology similarly falls foul of the same irrationalism. 

Delusional Progressivism

Contemporary conservatism fails because it either undermines human grandeur or is irrational. Progressivism also has deep problems, however. Riding the coattails of scientific progress, progressivism is a “destructive illusion,” victim to arrogant self-sufficiency. Our “ruling prejudices” maintain that God is merely a private belief, nation an accidental attachment, and forebearers worthy only of criticism, not care. This lack of humility is not a recipe for ennoblement. Historically, Western achievement has built on the legacy of classical humanism.

Bedeviling our age is “the demotion of excellence,” the product of “a spirit of plebiscitarian rule.” Contrasting with our egalitarian self-congratulation, “judgements of rank are pervasive in classical literature and philosophy.” Kronman credits Augustine with moderating “Cicero’s aristocratic hauteur,” but after egalitarian exaggeration, Christian beneficence itself needs tempering by the cut and thrust of Attic competition. 

Christianity softened ancient aggression by proposing that all humans are created in the image of God, an image of love between persons. Since Christian conservatism is unworkable, a better foundation for equality is needed. The imago dei is, Kronman cleverly proposes, merely “an interpretative gloss on a more primitive duty,” one better captured by Heidegger’s idea of the clearing. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) excavated the early Greek astonishment at the sheer fact of human intellect. Of a piece with his rationalism, Kronman believes that intellection provides better protection of human worth than the capacity of persons for love: moral consideration is owed to “all who share the experience of standing out from the world in the ecstatic awareness of time that is the root of every human endeavor.” Appreciating that persons are “companions of the clearing” secures equality, thinks Kronman, and in addition, empowers liberty to act again on the humanist’s appreciation that “excellence is sovereign among values.” 

Tying dignity to intellectualism comes with a cost, however, and undermines Kronman’s account of friendship. 

To the equality, toleration, and scientific rationality that define us, Kronman should have added commerce. Our civilization is the product of an Industrial Enlightenment, and I wish Kronman had spent time on Adam Smith, specifically his portrait of a true friend. The amiable man, says Smith, is someone of “the most exquisite sensibility” who through sympathetic restraint aligns his sentiments with those around him: “When we bring home to ourselves the situation of his companions, we enter into their gratitude, and feel what consolation they must derive from the tender sympathy of so affectionate a friend.” 

Equating God with an eternal cosmos, Spinoza rejected the idea of creation ex nihilo. He did so, because orthodox Christianity must finally fold into the act of an “unfathomable will.”

The political problem of law and liberty requires the balance of sense and sensibility. Alert to the debt all owe to family, country, and the divine, conservatism reasonably adds humility to liberal self-assertion. This necessary supplement regards sentiment, not axioms. Humanist modesty is less about judgement and more about trust, less about propositions and more about gratitude. Hence, Aristotle’s wide definition of reasonableness in Poetics: “Under reasoning fall those effects which must be produced by language; these include proof and refutation, the production of emotions (e.g. pity, fear, anger, etc.), and also establishing importance and unimportance.”

Consistent with his rationalism, Kronman employs a cognitive account of friendship. His model is biography. “Who are we, really? We wonder but never know. Only our successors are in a position to say.” A biographer, Kronman argues, makes a person better known—but not necessarily better loved. Family members and ancestors, says Kronman, “deserve the honest afterlife that only their successors can give them.” The same turn to honest appraisal of friends figures in Kronman’s patriotism. 

“A life without patriotism is as incomplete in human terms as a life without friends and for the same reason.” All have need of roots, he believes, and the peculiarities of geography and history are inescapable. “The goal of American life is to make it possible for each of us to be proud of our accidental inheritance.” Lest he go back into Hume, however, Kronman emphasizes judgment: even more than a friend under a searching biographical lens, country is “more properly subject to moral review.” Once under judgment, loyalty “to the good in an inheritance” can be calibrated. We are far from Smith’s idea of amiable friendship. Rather, a rational probing of allegiance is the first emphasis, not gratitude for, and taking consolation in, familial and national inheritance.

Reason and Roses

The progressive’s marginalization of the divine is a losing wicket, says Kronman, for “every religion is a response to the universal human longing for a connection to eternity.” However, progressives are right to be suspicious of Christianity. If Spinoza is the hero of the argument, Augustine is its villain. To be modern, conservatism must separate itself from the irrationalism of Augustine’s voluntaristic cosmology of love. About good political order, Kronman says, “the post-Augustinian answer is, only an order that has been freely willed by the individual or community whose order it is.” This voluntaristic construction was unknown to the ancients, and only with Spinoza is a complete rationalism reintroduced into the West. 

Spinoza offers, Kronman relates, “a God that is nothing but explanation and necessity, from whose nature the orthodox Christian attributes of freedom and will have been completely expunged” (emphasis original). Equating God with an eternal cosmos, Spinoza rejected the idea of creation ex nihilo. He did so because orthodox Christianity must finally fold into the act of an “unfathomable will.” To the mystery of uncaused action, Spinoza opposed “implacable logic,” and only the latter is compatible with scientific positivism, believes Kronman. 

Kronman’s presentation of Spinoza makes explicit the tension that dogs his effort to reconcile scientism and humanism. Quoting Spinoza, Kronman relays that God is “a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essence.” There is thus an “infinite gap”—and not an analogy—between God and humans. By contrast, the long humanist tradition—ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern—relies on congruity (convenientia) for the link between God, cosmos, and persons. In humanism, congruity connotes a comely and harmonious connection rather than strict implication. 

Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric gives an example of congruity. He argues that in addition to science there are proofs of character that persuade: “Proofs from character are produced, whenever speech is given in such a way as to render the speaker worthy of credence—we more readily and sooner believe reasonable men on all matters in general and absolutely where precision is impossible and two views can be maintained.” In appealing to the person of Jesus, Christian humanism dwells on a person’s character to convey the difficult truth that friendship involves sacrifice (John 21:15-25). The life of Jesus is a reasonable proof that love and sacrifice are the height of humility and grandeur. 

An example of an incongruity is Spinoza’s God of necessity and implacability, which is not an example of divine friendship and sacrifice in sympathy with our friendship and sacrifice. Dante’s rose explains. True Conservatism closes by reflecting on Spinoza’s signet ring engraved with a rose along with the Latin Caute, meaning caution. The lesson of the ring, proposes Kronman, is the conservative truth that wariness must attend endeavor. In contrast, the humanist Dante depicts cosmic order as a comely rose. In the rose, the world of spirits coheres with humans, the petals and the Trinity, the ovary (Paradiso XXXI). In a congruous conservative humanism, Dante has the angels flitting around like bees “inflowering” the people with the divine sacrificial love of which human dignity is worthy.

With a few weeks of perspective, what can we say about the brief conflict between Iran and Israel?

It doesn’t matter that much that Iran’s nuclear program was not “obliterated,” as the Trump administration claimed. No one believes it was. The world’s leaders and media have long since factored in Trump’s hyperbole and learned to put a steep discount on such words. That’s a telling commentary on American diplomacy under Trump. But it matters less for Israel and Iran than one might think.

Having bombed Iran once, Israel has definitively demonstrated its willingness to do so again. Trump is more mercurial, but he has at least demonstrated how easily he can be maneuvered into complying with a fait accompli once the Israelis move first. The physical infrastructure of Iran’s program is damaged, not destroyed, and could be repaired. But it could be bombed again.

Which means that more lasting damage has been done to Iran’s appearance of regional strength, to the perception that it would become a nuclear power in due course, and that its enemies and rivals lacked the will to stop it. Those mirages have evaporated for good. The Persian emperor has no clothes.

But he’s unlikely to be graceful about it. Though an armistice was patched together, a de facto state of war exists and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Iran has been waging a hot and cold war against Israel, the United States, and its Arab neighbors for forty-five years, motivated by its theocratic, revolutionary ideology. What Trump wants to call the Twelve Day War is more accurately seen by Tel Aviv and Tehran alike as a twelve-day campaign in a much longer conflict.

But it is a conflict which Israel, for now, is winning. Having demonstrated unmatched military success and superpower backing, Israel is poised as a regional hegemon. What kind of hegemon it will be remains to be seen. It could act with magnanimity to seek reproachment and peace with the Palestinians and its neighbors, and at least a cold peace with Iran. But neither Israel nor its neighbors seems likely to move that way. The only safe prediction about the Middle East is that it will continue to be plagued by violence, instability, and privation for years to come.

Iran’s Fifty-Year Conflict

Most observers have probably forgotten, or never knew, the details of the longer conflict. They are worth remembering because, despite Americans’ renowned historical amnesia, the rest of the world understands that history matters.

That history includes Iran’s role in the 1983 Beirut bombings, the 1988 tanker war, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, support for Shia militias throughout the Iraq war, and the 2006 Lebanon War. It includes Iran’s ten-year war against Iraq in the 1980s, an attempt to sponsor a coup in Bahrain in 1981, decades of treating Syria and Lebanon like colonies, and its sponsorship of Houthi rebels in Yemen.

It includes a troublingly recurrent dribble of reports that Iran had or has some sort of relationship with al-Qaida. And it includes a list of Iran’s half-baked but destabilizing plots: Iran tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US—on US soil—in 2011. It plotted to assassinate former US national security advisor John Bolton in 2021 and 2022. Iran has caused diplomatic incidents with Denmark, Albania, Belgium, and the Netherlands over various failed attacks across Europe. 

Why does Iran do this? Because ideology matters. Despite a century of so-called “realists” telling us that only power matters, most observers intuitively understand that if a state professes a religious duty to seek your death, you are not safe—ask Salman Rushdie. Iran’s ideology is barbaric, inhumane, and at war with the basic tenets of human civilization. Most governments in the world accept the principle of national sovereignty, territorial inviolability, and the legitimacy of the international system. Iran joins a very small group of nations that blatantly, repeatedly, and violently reject those principles.

Israel’s Response

Which is why Israel treated the October 7, 2023, attack as the last straw. When militants from Hamas—yet another Iranian proxy—stormed into Israeli territory and murdered 1,200 people, Israel chose to calibrate its response not to that attack alone, but to a half-century of Iranian aggression and to a century-long campaign by its enemies worldwide to deny its legitimacy and subvert its existence.

Israel was also responding to a long string of ineffective counterattacks. Reagan did nothing in response to the Beirut bombings in 1983; Clinton did nothing in response to Khobar Towers in 1996. Bush fought back against Iranian proxies in Iraq—and lost. Israel fought to a draw in Lebanon in 2006.

Netanyahu is likely to be remembered more for military ambition (and intelligence failure) than diplomatic courage.

Unconventional methods fared no better. The Stuxnet computer virus probably set back Iran’s nuclear program in 2011—but only temporarily. Israel allegedly sponsored the targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists in the 2010s, again to unsatisfying effect. Decades of sanctions and diplomacy only resulted in a deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2015—with ineffective enforcement mechanisms.

Trump took the most drastic—even rash—step when he exacted a small measure of revenge with a drone bomb that killed Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, in January 2020. But for what? The strike was like the 1943 bombing raid that killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor, minus the war that overthrew his government. It was a one-off with no strategic effect.

That accounts for the present war’s brutality and length. Israel had no patience for another one-off reprisal strike, another round of diplomacy, or an ineffective campaign that only kicked the can down the road. Israel wanted a definitive war. It is probably bloodier than any Israeli conflict since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And Palestinian civilians have paid the price.

The Nuclear Question

In 2016, I argued that Iran was functionally a nuclear power, a “near-nuclear” state whose “acquisition of nuclear weapons is virtually assured.” Because of that, Iran didn’t actually have to cross the nuclear threshold. Regional security dynamics have “already adjusted to treat Iran as a nuclear power.” The US had little choice but to sponsor an Israeli- and Saudi-led regional order to contain Iranian influence, I concluded, which meant “a militarized crisis with Israel is possible and even likely.”

I was wrong about Iran’s “virtually assured” acquisition of nuclear weapons because I was right about the militarized crisis with Israel. What I did not foresee was that Israel would successfully use the looming crisis with Iran to destroy Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Those had been the major obstacles to direct action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Having removed the implicit threat of terrorist retaliation, Israel and the United States were free to go after Iran’s nuclear program with impunity.

In doing so, Israel was following a long-standing doctrine that it will not allow hostile states in its neighborhood to possess nuclear weapons, having bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981 and Syria’s at al-Kibar in 2007. Note that the three different bombings occurred under three different prime ministers in three different decades from two different political parties: the strike on Iran was not solely a function of Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership or political agenda, and Israel’s nonproliferation policy will long outlast him.

To Israel belongs the credit for keeping the Middle East nuclear-free—except, of course, for Israel’s own rumored program. Hypocrisy is the price of hegemony. And Israel is the regional hegemon: that much should be clear from the past eighteen months of warfare—if not the past seventy-five years. When a nation can, with impunity, wage war on essentially any of its neighbors at will; use their airspace at will; impose its nonproliferation doctrine on an entire region; assassinate entire terrorist networks; leverage the foreign policy of the world’s sole superpower; and still be the most prosperous and flourishing society in the entire region from Gibraltar to the Kyber Pass, that’s hegemony.

The New Hegemony

What sort of hegemony will it be? That seems less clear, as it depends on the future of Netanyahu’s government and its stance towards the Palestinians, its neighbors, and the future.

The biggest unanswered question of the war is: what next? What is Israel fighting for? It is clear what the war is against: Hamas, perpetual terrorism, Iranian hegemony, and Iran’s nuclear program. But war—effective war, successful war, just war—uses violence to build a better peace. What is the peace that Israel is fighting for?

Netanyahu does not seem to have an answer, and therein lies the problem and the likely seeds of forever war. One could imagine an Israeli Prime Minister seizing the moment to act with magnanimity and courage, as Menachim Begin did when he signed the Camp David Accords, or Yitzhak Rabin did when he signed the Oslo Accords. They could envision peace between Israel and its neighbors that included a place for the Palestinians. Netanyahu is not that prime minister. He is likely to be remembered more for military ambition (and intelligence failure) than diplomatic courage.

Of course, Begin and Rabin had credible interlocutors with whom to negotiate. There is no Palestinian leadership, the Iranian government seems in no rush to talk, and the Arab states are not lining up to join the Abraham Accords. That is their choice—but it means they are standing idle while the era of Israeli military hegemony begins.

The image of a white picket fence and a house to call your own often comes to mind when discussing the American Dream, but this image is just a shallow reflection of a much deeper concept. It may be true that the dream is actualized through meaningful access to housing; however, it is ultimately about living freely and flourishing by adhering to the ideals of the American Founding, through which one pursues happiness and reaches one’s fullest potential. That dream is made possible when individuals have access to housing that is affordable, well-located, and suited to different lifestyles.

Without these preconditions, the American Dream is much harder to achieve.

Yet for decades, institutional barriers have threatened this foundation. Zoning laws, restrictive regulations, and environmental policies are just the beginning of many obstacles that drive up the cost and limit access to housing opportunities. This bureaucratic entanglement in the world of real estate is no accident. Inflated prices and restricted housing access are prime examples of the consequences of a political philosophy that fears growth and rewards obstruction.

To prevent the consequences of unchecked regulatory policies, we must change our institutional arrangements in order to strengthen private property rights. The expansion of housing opportunities will result from the protection of private property by minimizing restrictive regulations. Housing policy must, therefore, be evaluated by a deeper standard that asks whether it will help or hinder the pursuit of happiness in America.

The American Dream and Where It Happens

In pursuing the promise of the American Dream, individuals primarily seek housing that they can afford. Yet securing housing within a budget is often insufficient for reaching one’s full potential. Various living options provide individuals with communities that better align with their needs and goals.

The location of a house not only determines housing prices and the type of community, but is crucial in providing access to work opportunities. It is of little use if an affordable home is not close enough to specific job markets and transportation. Moreover, housing located near schools and fitting job opportunities better enable people to find work that aligns with their goals.

However, location is not the only thing that matters. There must also be a variety in housing options. Different housing is necessary for people of different ages and stages in their careers and financial situations. Access to housing fitting their specific situation allows them to lead fulfilling lives.

Access to appropriate housing, however, is becoming more and more difficult. For example, according to a recent Realtor.com survey cited by Fox Business, 75 percent of US adults still consider homeownership an essential component of the American Dream. However, the US homeownership rate has declined to around 65 percent as of late 2024—a clear signal that while the goal is still widely valued, many are simply unable or unwilling to attain it. The access to housing “services” is not achieved only or always by ownership, but the disparity between those who see ownership as vital and those who can actually own a home is indicative of a broader problem.

This growing space between dreams and reality is not coincidental. When regulations restrict growth—when permitting takes years and fees and prices strangle new development—the opportunity to flourish is diminished. The limitation of where people can live ultimately limits who those individuals can become.

Housing Diversity and the Anti-Industrial Ethos

However, on top of obvious natural market conditions, people are often priced out of suitable areas by restrictive zoning laws that inflate costs further. This only makes the ideal home increasingly unattainable. These roadblocks are not only the result of bureaucratic oversight but are indications of resistance to healthy growth and development. Today, people no longer embrace the idea of building more homes with enthusiasm. They act with suspicion and resistance. This resistance reflects a broader agenda that seeks to limit growth in the name of environmental protection and restrain technology. It sees development as a threat to character and calls for nature to be protected for its own sake.

In The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Ayn Rand argued that many modern intellectuals treat progress as dangerous. For them, “Technology is man’s enemy and should be restricted or abolished.” While she wrote provocatively, her insight is pertinent.

Arguably, this mentality dominates policies affecting housing today. Regardless of the meritorious aims hoped to be achieved by zoning regulations, in city after city, new housing proposals are greeted not with welcome but with protest. Growth is seen as an assault on the environment, a force that must be stopped. This cultural suspicion of building is not rooted in data—it is an aesthetic and moral reaction. It favors the static over the dynamic, the known over the possible, as embodied in the “precautionary principle” behind many regulatory decisions. This mindset animates NIMBYism, fuels procedural delay, and gives rise to a legal culture that elevates environmental review over economic need.

Housing is not just shelter—it is the infrastructure of human flourishing.

One of the clearest examples of legal boundaries deteriorating into extreme anti-industrialist policy is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Its original goal was to ensure that the federal government considered environmental factors when developing major projects. However, as noted in a recent article, what began as guiding principles that called for environmental consideration resulted in out-of-control green tape.

NEPA and other anti-industrial policies have a chokehold on meaningful project development, causing costly delays and hindering innovation. When environmental policy is fueled by restriction rather than guidance, the result is not greener cities but fewer homes, longer commutes, and higher living costs.

Public Choice and Political Failure

Cultural opposition does not entirely explain the issues in our housing system. To understand the deeper failures in housing, we must also look to the incentives that drive decision-making on every level.

Public choice theory analyzes political behavior and the incentives that drive self-interest. The theory begins from a simple premise: people are people, whether they work in the private or public sector. Their behavior is shaped not by moral superiority or institutional label, but by rules and rewards. Zoning commissions and planning boards, accordingly, are not populated by angels, but respond to external pressure from organized homeowner groups, vocal opponents of change, and entrenched interests with something to lose. 

With housing, this explains why zoning commissions are often driven by vocal homeowners who resist development to protect their property values, while those who would benefit from more housing—young renters and future residents—are unorganized and underrepresented. The result is a system of prevention and delay rather than abundance and opportunity.

To paraphrase James Buchanan, these problems are structural, not just personal. Restoring a housing environment fit for the American Dream requires more than replacing officials. It requires reforming the rules that shape their decisions. Land use governance must be redesigned to reduce barriers and protect the freedom to build from politically powerful opposition. We must evaluate political outcomes by examining rules, incentives, and structures—not merely intentions. The structure of land use decision-making rewards delay, empowers obstruction, and penalizes innovation. Thus, high prices and long waits are predictable outcomes. The system is working as it was (inadvertently) designed.

This system of incentives does not just slow housing development—it actively limits the types of housing before they can even be built. For example, many cities ban the construction of duplexes or require minimum lot sizes through zoning. These rules force builders to focus on homes that are large and expensive instead of more affordable ones. Furthermore, the artificial boundaries of urban areas restrict where development can occur and, in turn, raise prices within those limits.

By preventing diverse housing options such as apartments or duplexes, communities shut out housing that would provide young people and those with less means stability and room to grow. Here, the system does not offer what people need. Supply is far from demand, not because the market cannot reach equilibrium, but because restrictive policy prevents it.

This systemic issue is not only economic but human. The restrictions that cause high prices, long commutes, and other limitations directly undermine the promise of the American Dream.
For example, New York City recently eliminated rental brokerage fees and is on track to broaden rent freezes, allegedly to protect renters, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. These regulations quickly backfired. Landlords raised rents by hundreds of dollars, often outweighing initial savings. As the WSJ article put it, the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act (FARE) “lit a fire under pre-existing rent growth,” forcing prices higher in an already strained market.

New York’s current housing market shows how price controls and procedural barriers sustain the crisis, shift costs, and create roadblocks. When incentives are skewed, well-meaning policy often backfires. The very renters these polices claim to be helping are the people who pay the price.

The Housing Question and the American Dream

Everything we have argued so far should not be interpreted as claiming that some of the interests protected by zoning and environmental regulations are illegitimate or not worth protection.

Our argument is that there is a better way of balancing competing claims and making them harmonious by private covenants and case-by-case decisions. Renewed respect for property rights is preferable to bringing in the coercive power of the state to situations that cannot possibly be assessed ex ante by legislators or assumed to be taken by impartial and not interested regulators.

If legislators and regulators can be pressured by one or other group, there is no reason to believe that justice will be done. The most politically savvy group will win, as countless cases in which zoning rules are “adjusted” to attend to special interests demonstrate. What is given by coercion may be taken by coercion, with all the deleterious consequences in terms of growth that uncertainty causes. That is the lesson of zoning practice, not one of protection of individual rights.

Ultimately, the American Dream should be discussed in moral or cultural terms; behind every dream, however, lies a material structure that makes it possible. Housing is not just shelter—it is the infrastructure of human flourishing.

Today, the Dream is not threatened by market forces but by policy failures and ideological resistance. Many fear growth, distrust builders, and reward delay. This logic must be reversed. Growth should no longer be treated as a vice but as a public good. Preserving the American Dream requires us to challenge the cultural suspicion of abundance by reforming zoning and streamlining permitting. Most importantly, it requires us to recognize that housing is not merely a special interest but a human need essential to freedom and flourishing.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

If you say just one thing about the ancient Greeks, say that they had good taste. Probably no culture in ancient history was more renowned for the beauty it produced than Athens during its High Classical Period, when the statesman Pericles oversaw a citywide rebuilding project after the Persian invasion of 480 BC. The revolution in arts and letters that followed was era-defining. In Virgil’s Aeneid, when the patriarch Anchises lists off the distinctions of civilizations besides Augustan Rome, he pays his respects to peoples who can “mold breathing bronze” and “coax living faces out of marble.” He doesn’t even have to mention the Greeks by name—every reader would have realized who he was talking about. The way Cubans are known now for their cigars and Scots for their whisky, Greeks were known for making beautiful things.

Today, the word “classical” is practically synonymous with a certain sense of purity and proportion, embodied in fluted columns and lissome marble nudes. But in Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato, Hugo Shakeshaft argues that the Greeks were enamored with beauty well before the Classical period. His focus is on the Archaic period, starting around 800 BC when the epic poems of Homer were first composed. Those earlier centuries, Shakeshaft argues, set the stage for Classical authors like Plato to make loveliness itself an object of philosophical scrutiny. “Beauty bore a transcendent power and value in Greek culture long before Plato gave it new life in his philosophical musings,” he writes. As far as we can see from the historical record, the Greeks were always in awe of beauty. If they came to understand it deeply in the age of Plato, that was because they had loved it dearly since the age of Homer. More than that—they held it sacred. That is what Shakeshaft’s book is about.

It is not a book that will be relished from cover to cover by the general reading public. Shakeshaft, a postdoctoral fellow at Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, is a scholar writing for scholars. But that’s what makes Beauty and the Gods so useful as a repository of information on its subject. Those not in the habit of reading academic prose for pleasure will still find it beneficial to consult the book on questions of particular interest. The material is well organized into five chapters on the divine power of beauty in Greek epic, music, natural landscapes, architecture, and figural art. 

Shakeshaft’s approach is a synthesis of art history, literary analysis, and archaeology: there are close readings of famous poems like Homer’s epics and Sappho’s lyrics, but also detailed analyses of vase paintings and temple sites from Delphi to Sicily, richly complemented with color images. The overall effect is a kind of immersion in what the world of Homer and Sappho must have looked, felt, and sounded like. Shakeshaft manages to be nigh on exhaustive within his chosen time period—an impressive feat in itself with such an unwieldy and wide-ranging topic—and he makes some intriguingly subtle arguments along the way.

One early Christian writer (erroneously, but wonderfully) related the Greek word for beauty (kalos) to the word for “call” (kaleō). His point was that beauty, various and difficult to define as it may be, always calls us toward itself. It’s what makes things literally attractive—the alluring face or the body you can’t resist looking at, the room you want to sink into and never leave, the landscape on the postcard that makes you wish you were there. This force of attraction makes beauty feel like a breath of something otherworldly wafting across the earthly plane. If bodies, rooms, and postcards have almost nothing else in common, the thing they share must be something beyond them all, something above our physical existence. In the language Medieval writers came to use, beauty is transcendental, on a par with other eternal ideals like goodness and being. It is in but not of the world.

A tricky thing about beauty when compared with the other transcendentals, though, is how often it seems to be “in the eye of the beholder.” That cliché, in that form, comes from Margaret Wolfe Hungerford’s Molly Bawn—a nineteenth-century novel known chiefly for being mentioned in Joyce’s Ulysses and for containing that line. Even there, in its first appearance, the saying is described as “an old axiom.” Hungerford wasn’t observing anything about beauty and its subjectivity that ancient Greek authors hadn’t already noticed. In one of her justly famous lines, the poet Sappho declared that “some say the most beautiful thing on the dark earth is a cavalry corps; some say a host of infantry; some say a fleet of ships. I say it’s whatever you love best.” The coy vixens of Lesbos that made Sappho’s heart flutter seemed worlds apart from the lethal weapons that set the blood of more martial poets racing. 

Today, this fact is often cited in support of the fallacy that because beauty is subjective, it must be arbitrary. Archaic Greek thought on the subject was more subtle than that. Of course beauty is necessarily something we perceive (what else would it be?), and it’s true, if somewhat trivial, that different people sometimes perceive it in different things. More interesting is the fact that the experience provoked by beauty—the flutter of the heart, the racing of the blood—is recognizably similar from person to person. The Greeks were aware of this too, and they called the universal longing that beauty inspires by the name of love. It was, they sensed, a primordial force holding the world together. “Love, most beautiful among the deathless gods,” was one of the first deities to set the world in motion according to Homer’s rough contemporary, Hesiod. In this mythology, writes Shakeshaft, love “represents the generative force of attraction driving the cosmos’ evolution.” 

Even the most earnest efforts at artistic revival will fall short unless they aspire upward to that higher source of beauty, the wellspring from which all goodness also flows. There is no true beauty without the gods.

This is an idea with a long afterlife. It helped inspire Dante’s vision of God as “the love that moves the sun and other stars.” It seemed to Francis Bacon like a precursor to the scientific principle that certain universal forces explain and drive “the natural motion of the atom.” Whatever the powers are that draw fire upward through the air and bind the chemical compounds of our bodies together, they are closely related—if not identical—to the tug that pulls the heart toward beautiful things. The Greeks’ infatuation with beauty was not some frivolous pastime, adjacent to their more serious philosophical interest in natural science. The two pursuits were really one and the same.

To heed the call of beauty in its most refined forms was, for Archaic Greeks, to come cheek to cheek with the ultimate powers of the universe. This is one common thread that Shakeshaft sees running through practically all the sources he reviews, from the writing scrawled on the thighs of votive statues to the poetic reflections of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Beauty is the thing humans share most intimately with the gods in Greek theology: “Deities bestow beauty on mortals, which likens them to deities and attracts their interest as a result.” Other academics have puzzled over Archaic paintings and sculptures, wondering whether they depict gods and goddesses or beautiful young mortals. But Shakeshaft, in a nice bit of anti-pedantry, argues that it may be missing the point of such imagery to try drawing the line too sharply between men and gods. Maybe it’s supposed to be hard to tell the difference. Maybe the whole point is that human loveliness is the closest thing on earth to a vision of the divine form.

If this seems tantalizingly close to the Biblical principle that mankind is made in the image of God, that’s because Greek storytellers were coming from a different angle at core truths that Jewish prophets also embedded into their scriptures. Shakeshaft occasionally takes stock of Near Eastern hymns and poems, including those in the Bible, which dwell on similar themes. “Oh worship the lord,” say the psalms, “in the beauty of holiness!” Few societies on earth, except some very modern ones, have doubted that beauty is a gift shared with this world from beyond. If the Bible tends to emphasize the beauty of holiness, however, the Greeks tended to insist on the holiness of beauty. Wherever they found it occurring in nature, they assumed the gods were there—so much so that the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder had the Greek pantheon in mind when he wrote that “trees served as the first temples of the gods.”

If beauty is sacred, it’s tempting to believe that it’s also a mark of divine favor. The Greeks of the Classical period had a word, kalokagathia, which came from mashing the word for “beautiful” and the word for “good” together. Some interpreters have taken this to mean that, as art historian Alexandra Sofroniew puts it, “the ancient Greeks believed that being beautiful on the outside was a reflection of a good person on the inside.” Shakeshaft deftly puts paid to this notion: “such statements drastically misrepresent Greek sources,” he writes. From Homer on down, Greek writers easily distinguished between what we might call “inner” and “outer” beauty. Among the warriors of the Iliad, Paris on the Trojan side and Nireus on the Greek side are both handsome weaklings with pretty faces but little martial prowess to speak of. All the same, the very idea of kalokagathia betrays a willingness to associate excellence of form with excellence of character. In Greek story and statuary, gods seem just as susceptible as mortals to the misapprehension that being good to look at means being good per se.

This was and remains the most troubling thing about beauty. “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” are often grouped together as the three great transcendentals, and Keats—channeling what he took to be Greek wisdom—even went so far as to say that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But if goodness is obviously good and the value of truth needs little defense, beauty often comes paired with idiocy, frivolity, and outright villainy. It can deceive and perplex as well as enrapture. Beauty is so obviously desirable that it’s hard not to feel as if it should, in a just world, belong to good and moral people. In the real world, things don’t always work out that way. Hesiod may have been right that beauty itself draws the world together in love, but it’s equally true that beautiful things can come imbued with other, more sinister traits. The artists of the Archaic period were alive to this complexity, though they don’t seem to have solved the problems it posed.

In a sense, that may have been what Plato was trying to do in one of his greatest dialogues, the Symposium. Shakeshaft points out that this watershed in the history of thought drew deeply on concepts already latent in the Greek tradition. “Part of its brilliance lay in calling on traditional ideas and repurposing them.” The dialogue is ostensibly a series of speeches in praise of love. When Socrates’ turn comes to speak, though, he relays a lesson he learned from the priestess Diotima about the holiness of beauty. Love is a grasping beggar, a child of poverty, in search of beautiful partners to mate with. But the beauty love finds immediately to hand in the world is jumbled and confused, “tangled up with flesh and men and things and all the rest of that mortal junk.” A soul that wants to refine itself has to examine its own desire for beautiful things—beautiful people, beautiful artwork, beautiful ideas—until it siphons off the essence of beauty that is reflected in all those things and yet distinct from them. In itself, earthly beauty is riddled with impurities. It will eventually decay and deceive. But it is also a glint thrown off from a greater light on high. Understood in that way, it can lead to God.

Shakeshaft refrains from intervening in contemporary politics, but the intellectual history that leads to and from Plato is most definitely still unfolding. A recent Calvin Klein ad, featuring the obese rapper Chika Oranika spilling out of her underwear, has become representative for many of a long-running effort to strip physical attractiveness of any meaning or value whatsoever. Usually this is done by insisting on ugliness where beauty is obviously to be expected. One predictable reaction has come from “vitalists” and other Nietzscheans who assert that toned bodies and square jaws do, indeed, correspond to moral virtue and genetic nobility. President Trump’s intervention into this debate, in both of his terms, has been to issue executive orders “promoting beautiful federal civic architecture.” This translates directly to reviving the neo-classical style favored by America’s early architects. 

Critics of the orders have portrayed them as representing an endorsement of the view that there really is no daylight between kalos and agathos. But there’s another way of looking at things to be learned from the Greek tradition. If it’s wrong to equate visual beauty with moral goodness, it’s also dishonest and unacceptably absurd to ignore the manifest spiritual value of beauty altogether. The trick, as Diotima explained, is to regard even the most ravishing earthly beauty as representative on the physical plane of something much higher on the spiritual plane, something “that always exists and never changes or passes away.” Even the most earnest efforts at artistic revival will fall short unless they aspire upward to that higher source of beauty, the wellspring from which all goodness also flows. There is no true beauty without the gods.

Praise has been nearly universal for Andor. The Disney+ Star Wars TV show, set between the events of Episode III and Rogue One, about the rise of the rebellion against the Empire, had its series finale top the Nielsen ratings, and the overall season has a 96 percent critic rating and an 89 percent audience rating from Rotten Tomatoes. It’s been praised by outlets like The New Republic as “The Best Star Wars You Will Ever See,” and won over the popular YouTube critic (and hater of pretty much everything modern Star Wars), “The Critical Drinker.” In an age where fans are divided by nearly everything Star Wars, and all of their projects seem to underperform, this show has seemingly done the impossible. And with the series having officially ended with its second season, there’s very little chance of opinions changing about Andor anytime soon.

One of the most interesting things about discussions around Andor is that, unlike most Star Wars fare, people don’t just see it as a great piece of entertainment but a true work of political art speaking about our time. The New Republic calls it “all too relevant to the real-life politics of 2025.” The New Yorker titled a piece from their website, “How ‘Andor’ Injects Contemporary Politics Into ‘Star Wars’ I.P.” The Guardian argues, “So much of the language in Andor’s second season immediately recalls the fear-mongering that facilitates the current onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza.” Likewise, author and former Youth Pastor John Pavlovitz recently posted on X, “If you watched Andor, you know what’s going on right now in Los Angeles.”

This is where Andor is somewhat problematic. As a piece of TV, Andor is great. As a piece of political commentary, it’s highly dubious. And the more seriously we take it, the worse it makes our politics.

Andor follows the adventures of Cassian Andor, a reluctant member of the Star Wars rebel alliance fighting against the Galactic Empire, along with his friends and enemies on either side of the conflict. In the final season, the Empire builds up to creating its greatest weapon: the Death Star, which it can only do if it seizes by force the minerals from the citizens of the planet Ghorman, even though it will mean massacring many of the inhabitants and taking direct control of it.

There’s no doubt that Andor deserves every bit of artistic praise it’s getting. It’s really well-written and mature storytelling against a backdrop of the mythic fable of Star Wars we all love. Characters in Star Wars have never been so layered, so morally grey, so thoughtfully full of contradictions that are so in keeping with how human beings are. Never has Star Wars delved so deeply into why freedom matters, or how complex and morally compromising rebellions are.

Leaders of the rebellion, like Luthen Rael, do terrible things to their followers with an aim to beat the Empire. Senator Mon Mothma tries desperately to balance standing up to the emperor publicly and supporting the rebellion privately without giving him an excuse to jail her. Syril Karn truly believes he’s the good guy for supporting the Empire. Meanwhile, the Empire does not simply invade Ghorman by force. Instead, it resembles real totalitarian regimes by playing a long propaganda campaign that makes their invasion and occupation seem legitimate.

If our society is what’s being critiqued as the Empire, and violent rebellion is the only ultimate solution, then it rather awkwardly sides with those who use political violence in our own country today.

But what makes Andor such great TV is exactly what makes it such bad politics.

While this realism and mature storytelling elevate the material, it fosters problematic implications if you try to apply it to our present-day circumstances. Star Wars works on a binary of good and evil, light and dark sides of the force, the Rebellion and the Empire. That’s great if your film is told like a fairy tale, where these are abstract ideas that took some work to apply to particular situations in our own world. Even where Star Wars has been political before—such as making allusions to Vietnam and George W. Bush—they were abstracted enough that the focus was on the underlying principles, so how you applied that message was up to you.

Yet Andor’s heavily adult storytelling constantly insists you apply the franchise’s childlike reasoning and solutions to real-world adult politics. In the first season, they deal openly with the politics of police brutality and their cover-ups, with private prisons, and the colonial occupation of indigenous peoples. In this season, they check off stormtrooper crackdowns of illegal immigration, sexual assault, and the giant propaganda machine involved in justifying state-sponsored abuse of protestors and genocide—things that either have happened in our own society, or at least reflect charges we are repeatedly accused of.

Moreover, they tend to cast largely the same level of fascist symbolism to all the above abuses. And they condemn as naive anyone who doesn’t see the need to rebel with violence. Mon Mothma’s attempt to fight the Empire above board, the Ghormans’ attempts to protest peacefully, and Sryil’s belief in being a good person within the system all come to ruin. Eventually, this must be replaced by violence and war. Only Luthen—who from the beginning sees violent overthrow as the only option—is validated in the end.

If our society is what’s being critiqued as the Empire, and violent rebellion is the only ultimate solution, then it rather awkwardly sides with those who use political violence in our own country today. Adrienne LaFrance wrote for The Atlantic about the disturbing trend of bipartisan political violence:

In addition to the recent assassinations in Minnesota, Americans have in the past year alone witnessed two assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the Midtown Manhattan murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO; an arson attack at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of a young couple leaving the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington; the murder of an 82-year-old woman in a firebombing attack in Colorado; and the attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis. With startling frequency, Americans are attempting to resolve political disagreement through violence. And all the while, leaders at the highest levels of American government are aggressively stoking this national bloodlust and demonstrating a willingness to carry out violence against citizens.

Most people who love Andor would condemn such violence. But I’m not sure they’re being consistent. Americans increasingly believe we live in a dystopian empire nightmare. And when we are told by fiction like Andor that the only way to stop empires is through violence, choosing violence is hardly surprising.

Even if you buy that we live in a dystopia, it doesn’t follow that violence is usually a good answer. In fact, it’s typically a terrible one. A 2024 comparative analysis of 65 quantitative studies revealed that “nonviolent revolutions generally lead to more positive institutional outcomes than violent revolutions across domains like democracy, security forces, foreign relations, ethnicity, culture, and well-being.” Moreover, “nonviolent resistance movements are more likely to facilitate transitions from autocracy to democracy, improve democratic qualities like civil liberties, transform security forces and judicial systems in rights-respecting directions, and enhance well-being measures such as life expectancy.”

But you hardly need a study to tell you that. History is littered with violent revolutions that were then simply replaced by comparable or worse dictatorships: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, etc. Meanwhile, famous non-violent revolutions have had great success—particularly in Western countries that Andor’s fans are so quick to compare the show to. Consider the Indian Independence movement and the American Civil Rights movement of the ’60s.

That’s not to say violence is never justified. But you have to be clear when it is and when it is not. This is one place that Andor, for all of its “adult” politicking, doesn’t ever seem to actually wrestle with. What’s the line between a government that does wrong but you can still protest peacefully, and one you can’t? There is a brief debate between the Ghormans that goes nowhere.

This cavalier attitude toward political violence may stem from its very romantic views of freedom and tyranny. The manifesto of freedom by the show’s Karis Nemik from the first season is often quoted by starry-eyed fans and is quoted in the show’s series finale:

Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Not to be mean, but this is silly. Most of world history has been defined by tyranny, and the freedoms we have today developed only with long experience, and were conceptualized by brilliant thinkers like John Locke, Montesquieu, and many more who laid the intellectual groundwork for the kind of freedom we have. It’s why we couldn’t militarily transplant it somewhere like Afghanistan or Iraq. 

A show about rebels fighting the empire is much more exciting than ordinary people who disagree just a little bit on politics.

This brings us to the most important point. America (or Western civilization, if you want to broaden it) is not the Empire. I’ve written before about how the idea that we live in a dystopian totalitarian hellhole is largely laughable. Not only is violence consistently going down and wealth and prosperity consistently going up for the rich and the poor alike, but rates of racism and sexism are going down, while freedom itself remains robust and continues to grow. We don’t live under an Emperor Palpatine who can direct the entire media as a propaganda machine to his will. (If you don’t believe me, look at the countless news outlets that criticize each democrat or republican president at any given time.) We don’t live under an empire that commits mass slaughter against its own citizens. Perhaps that’s why, where there’s been police brutality in recent years, peaceful protests have brought it down. Perhaps that’s why, when the government tried to mandate COVID vaccines for employees, normal lawsuits got the Supreme Court to strike it down.

The reality is that we like to think that our political opponents are villains, but they’re typically not that different from us. One study showed that both the left and the right vastly overestimated how many people on the other side agreed with extremist views. As author and evolutionary psychologist Steven Stewart Williams described: “For example, lefties guessed that most conservatives wholeheartedly agreed with racist views, when less than a quarter of them agreed even a little. Conservatives, for their part, guessed that most lefties wholeheartedly agreed with banning free speech, when only a third did even slightly.”

So why do we imagine people on the other side are so bad? One reason is that it’s more exciting to imagine the other side is so bad that it justifies violence. As one study showed, “sensation seeking predicts support for a violent activist group.” That’s the appeal of shows like Andor, too. A show about rebels fighting the empire is much more exciting than ordinary people who disagree just a little bit on politics.

It also ironically makes things feel more hopeful. While we might not live in a dystopia, we still have problems in the world. If our problems are due to some villain we can fight and defeat, then the problems might go away. If not, there may be no way to fix them once and for all. As author and Soviet Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.” But the cost is too high. Because if we aren’t living in a dystopia already, we will be the ones who make it that way through our attempt to overthrow it.

Then what can we do? How do we fight the injustices we see in our day and our time? The boring answer is still the true answer. We do what we’ve always done, because it’s worked, and it’s continued to work. We live our ordinary lives, working, loving each other, making art, speaking out, and using the political process to change the world for the better. It’s not as fun as the version we see in Star Wars. But it’s the adult answer.

Andor is a great show that brings a level of adult drama to Star Wars never before seen. But it’s still ultimately a fairy tale. Those wishing to apply the politics of a galaxy far, far away to our own will likely find themselves on the dark side rather than the rebellion. And like Syril, they may not find out until it’s too late.

Can Big Tech save the West? That question is at the heart of Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp’s new book, The Technological Republic. He posits that Silicon Valley really can address the threats, internal and external, America faces—but only if titans of the industry abandon the consumerist model and liberal ideology which defined the sector in recent decades. In this symposium, our writers weigh in on Karp’s vision and its prospects for revitalizing our civilization.

The West faces a crisis of confidence on a scale unseen for decades. Just as an axis of revisionist powers—China, Russia, and Iran—threatens the post-Cold War global order, the citizens of the United States and other countries that have benefited the most from those arrangements are beginning to question its very foundations. Will the rise of right-wing populism and left-wing identity politics knock the United States from her position of leadership? Will the people of the West have enough nerve to defend their freedom against the gathering storm?

In their new book, The Technological Republic, Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska argue that America still has the resources to win this fight—and that they can be found in Silicon Valley. Karp is the chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a software company that makes intelligence and defense tools for the US military, and Zamiska acts as head of corporate affairs and legal counsel at the same firm. They believe that Big Tech companies have been focused for too long on digitally serving individual consumers and instead must apply their technical know-how to national security problems for the sake of the common good. Their book is, in a sense, an attempt to articulate what engineers’ skills mean for their vocation as citizens. 

There is something admirably earnest about this vision, especially in an era defined by bitter irony. The authors’ unabashed love for our civilization is bracing, and one hopes that it will help recruit patriotic young engineers for Palantir and similar firms working on national security issues. They are also refreshingly clear about the threats we face, externally and internally, from deeply anti-civilizational forces. The book is therefore an effective call to arms for technologists. At the same time, though, it somewhat lacks a narrative about the overarching meaning of the American Republic sufficiently powerful to move the whole people, something that, as its authors recognize, is absolutely necessary for the coming struggle. 

As we prepare for these challenges, we cannot underestimate the radical change wrought by the Digital Revolution. The wonders coming out of Silicon Valley will upend nearly every aspect of our lives and completely remake our economy, both by automating significant parts of day-to-day work and possibly exposing us to new and terrifying risks from autocracies exploiting these new technologies. Karp and Zamiska argue, therefore, that “the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software.” Figuring out how to handle the great leap in innovation, according to our authors, is the great governance challenge of the twenty-first century.

One model for the kind of solution they proffer is the alliance between science, industry, and the government formed during the Cold War. Originally coming about during World War II (the Manhattan Project looms large in the authors’ minds), these ties became stronger across the long struggle against the Soviet Union. Scientists understood that they played an important role in defending the West against totalitarianism, and political leaders found ways to support and develop their expertise. Karp and Zamiska see the much-maligned “military-industrial complex” as a key reason for America’s victory over Soviet communism and the possible inspiration for a reconstitution of the present-day tech industry.

But the major difference between the Cold War and today’s geopolitical problems, though, is the technological platforms through which conflict is waged. Before the Berlin Wall fell and the Digital Revolution commenced, competition was all about producing more ships and planes, guns and ammunition, missiles and warheads. Now, Karp and Zamiska write that we live in a “software century.” They do not dismiss bullets and atoms altogether, but they are more concerned with the bytes behind AI targeting systems guiding drones and robots. To name one example of this possible future from earlier this year, Ukraine launched the first-ever all-drone assault on Russian positions. The future of war is not just mechanized, in the authors’ minds, but also automated.

The American Republic was not just constituted to promote prosperity or innovation, but rather above all to assert a certain vision of the human good itself.  

While it is understandable why executives at a company like Palantir put so much faith in artificial intelligence, it is possible they take the case for automated warfare too far. For one, they somewhat evade the thorny ethical questions surrounding drones and battlefield AI. But more importantly, as the ongoing war in Ukraine proves, conventional weapons still dictate the outcome of conflicts. Of late, the United States has struggled mightily to ramp up production for ammunition, from the more advanced Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to comparatively basic 155mm artillery shells. Developing more advanced weaponry to meet future threats is important to be sure, but so is simply manufacturing enough materiel to defend American interests, given present concerns. Policymakers need to balance futuristic aspirations like Karp and Zamiska’s with the actual needs felt by those already fighting on the front lines. We might be living in a “software century,” but hardware still matters. The defense industry must find ways to advance any technology essential to national security.

That being said, Karp and Zamiska’s diagnosis of what went wrong with Silicon Valley specifically and their prescriptions for fixing it can be applied to revitalize American industry more broadly. They see American corporate life as fundamentally decadent, trapped within the bonds of a noxious consumerism and paralyzing political correctness. Rather than focusing on innovation, they assert that “the vast majority of an individual employee’s energy during their working lives is spent merely on survival, navigating among the internal politicians at their organizations, steering clear of threats, and forming alliances with friends, perceived and otherwise.” Workplace politics distract us all from innovating.

The problems of this decadent hierarchy are compounded by the civilizational nihilism of America’s technocratic elites. Karp and Zamiska thunder against not only the moral relativism endemic to the academy and other commanding heights of culture, but also more radical anti-civilizational impulses that undermine the concept of greatness itself. They rightly cite the deconstruction of Western civilization courses in higher education as one symptom of this terrible disease of self-hatred. How can we innovate on behalf of a civilization we are taught is fundamentally unjust? Why would technologists use their talents to defend a country their mentors and teachers tell them is on the wrong side of history? 

This critique of America’s cultural and political atmosphere goes beyond the countless broadsides against “wokeness” already launched by reactionary malcontents. Before founding Palantir, Karp pursued a career in academia and briefly studied with the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas; he is no man of the right, and therefore his narrative does not sink into all the vapid ideological clichés so much of the right-wing media seems to embrace. Instead, The Technological Republic’s authors opt for a much more sophisticated—and insightful—critique of the state of American capitalism. According to them, in Silicon Valley, the “prevailing ethical framework” has been a sense that we can engineer solutions to all of mankind’s problems. As shiny as this promised future may seem, however, the authors warn that this techno-utopianism “has devolved into a narrow and thin utilitarian approach, one that casts individuals as mere atoms in a system to be managed and contained.” As a result, Big Tech’s leaders often dismiss the enduring moral and cultural questions at the heart of Western civilization as anachronisms or distractions from their humanitarian planning. 

In other words, America’s innovative edge is dulling first and foremost because we are losing sight of the true moral content of our civilization. Rather than embracing a sense of collective purpose or political project of the West, the Silicon Valley tech barons who dominate the economy today adopted a kind of “technological agnosticism,” concerned above all with capturing and monetizing individual consumers’ attention. This is why, they argue, most of the tech innovations in recent years have had more to do with social media and streaming services than actual developments to improve human life in meaningful ways. Silicon Valley unleashed market forces, which have atomized society, largely because we collectively cannot envision a larger end for it. Even philanthropic fads in Silicon Valley, such as “effective altruism,” fail to achieve the sense of collective purpose akin to twentieth-century anti-totalitarianism.

As an alternative to this corporate decadence, Karp and Zamiska call for the “reconstruction of a technological republic” through “a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.” They believe we, as a society, need to give more serious thought to the meaning of the good life and how we can pursue it together, and then apply this teleology to the technological problems of the day. As much as the authors rightly worry about radicals stripping civilizational content from our schools’ curricula, though, they do not offer much by way of an upbuilding alternative. They seem unwilling to fully express their own firm definition of the good life or national identity.

On some level, this is because Karp and Zamiska remain trapped within the paradigm of liberal technocracy. The ultimate source of this problem is that they reject the notion that the American Republic was constituted around a definite conception of the human good. They avow, rather, that the liberalism of the Constitution does not order liberty in one particular direction or another. Western civilization, in the authors’ view, is worth defending not for the sake of any sense of transcendence it bequeaths to its inheritors, but rather because it provides a space in which engineers can best pursue solutions to the chief problems of modern life in more-or-less morally neutral ways.

We cannot underestimate the radical change wrought by the Digital Revolution. The wonders coming out of Silicon Valley will upend nearly every aspect of our lives and completely remake our economy.

This open-ended liberalism is deeply entwined with their repeated insistence that “the miracle of the West is its unrelenting faith in science.” They therefore view the proper end of politics primarily as a shield to scientific endeavors and free inquiry, or even a prop to the private firms they believe are pursuing those purposes, rather than orienting society towards certain eternal truths. At certain points in the book, they even hint at support for the troubling possibilities of transhumanism, embracing artificial intelligence almost as though it were an altogether new form of life. As much as some of their foreign policy goals may align with traditional conservative priorities, the authors’ overall conception of the aim of the social contract diverges wildly from the older view that conservatives advocated.

Like most progressives, then, Karp and Zamiska articulate a political theory that remains technical rather than spiritual. They leave open the possibility of faith but do not insist on it as a solution, which means their framework for thinking about self-government will collapse into the same kind of hollowness as the corporate decadence they would have us escape. Despite their prophesying about changes the future could bring, they cannot quite provide a compelling account of the permanent things in human nature worth fighting for.

For the Founders of the American Republic, by contrast, freedom was nothing less than the holiest of causes. In his first inaugural address as president, for instance, George Washington insisted that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government” depended on “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People.” For him, as for the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the soldiers who fought the Revolution, maintaining a free republic against tyranny was a truly civilizational mission with a deeply theological importance. To them, freedom was the highest good, not just because it is an efficient way of organizing society, or even because it opens up inquiry and innovation, but instead because a free society is the kind best suited to human nature. The Founders understood that liberty is one of the deepest longings with which human souls are endowed. The case for the West—the case for victory—cannot be made in full apart from that conviction. 

The Founders paired this robust conception of human nature and liberty with a profound appreciation of the limits of power that Karp and Zamiska seem to lack. In many ways, this republic was actually constituted around this idea of dignity in order to resist the ideology of boundless progress that would later become so popular in Silicon Valley. In his famous Newburgh Address, Washington himself declared that the “last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining” was a kind of enlightened restraint and a rejection of all forms of absolute power. In promoting this ethical critique of tyranny as the root of American citizenship, the Founders were embracing the philosophical core of the Western heritage—something later revolutionists, from France to Germany to Russia, instead rejected. 

While the American Revolution was by no means a simplistic Luddite reaction against technological development, its humane premises should leave its inheritors deeply skeptical of any and all attempts to use technology to transcend our nature. And in the global arena especially, our country’s finest hours have always come when we resist the temptation of appeasing autocratic and totalitarian forces, even when they make revolutionary appeals to progress or deploy powerful new technologies. The American Republic was not just constituted to promote prosperity or innovation, but rather, above all, to assert a certain vision of the human good itself.  

In the end, that is why it will take much more than Silicon Valley optimism to secure the future of freedom. Despite these shortcomings, though, The Technological Republic is a significant book partly because it can help readers understand the very real industrial and digital challenges posed by the modern world. But even more importantly, reflecting on our responsibilities to uphold a virtuous liberty in these tumultuous times can remind us that we are not simply consumers in a technological economy, but citizens of a great and humane republic.

Participants in mass political discourse have an unfortunate tendency to define their own beliefs simply as the negation of their enemy’s. Just say the opposite of what the bad guys are saying, and you must be right. Witness how many “never-Trumpers” wound up becoming progressive Democrats to spite the “Orange Man” or how the desire to “own the libs” has become almost the only recognizable quality of most “conservative” Internet figures. 

For the last half-century at least, the left has defined itself largely in opposition to the inherited political, social, and cultural traditions of the Western world, in what Roger Scruton called a “culture of repudiation.” Anything that can be identified as a product of “white,” “European,” “Western,” or “American” values is suspect at best—the outgrowth of a hegemonic power structure that maintains itself on the backs of the oppressed. Such an attempt (more on that later) to reject their cultural inheritance wholesale has distorting effects—not just on their own minds, but also on their opponents’. One such effect is that anyone who declares himself in favor of Western civilization or America is perhaps too readily embraced as a worthwhile voice.

But not all who cry “Lord, Lord!” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And not all who cry “Western Civilization!” are actually friends of the civil order, culture, and freedoms that Western countries have been blessed to enjoy. Enter the tech bros.

Palantir executives Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas Zamiska have written a book that bemoans the rejection of Western civilization. It argues that patriotism is important. It is critical of wokeness. It makes a case for greater emphasis on humanities education. For these reasons, The Technological Republic has found admirers—mostly among conservative readers. But while it may recognize several troubling trends, what it offers in response is a toxic blend of collectivist politico-morality and crony capitalism draped in an American flag.

Ostensibly about the lack of public spirit in Silicon Valley, the book does not hesitate to make more sweeping claims about what ails society, often channeling the pseudo-conservative observations of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Tech companies are too hesitant, they argue, to do business with the federal government—primarily the military. This is bad in part because it will mean a strategic imbalance when it comes to America’s geopolitical rivalries. But more importantly, they see it as a crisis of identity and a sign of a lack of purpose.

Silicon Valley’s hesitancy comes not just because of activist employees and customers, but because their leadership has been raised in an environment of moral atrophy. They have been taught to repudiate traditional sources of meaning that, in the authors’ minds at least, find their fulfillment in a robust commitment to a national mission: “The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual.” For the authors, war—particularly manifested in the Manhattan Project—is the model of political activity, with each part of society willing to play its part in the national symphony directed by the state and made possible by the brave new world of technological mastery.

The alternative to this model, they suggest, is a low consumerism that distracts the public with frivolities. Much is made of “Farmville,” the vapid, web-based game that enjoyed a brief period of intense popularity in the early 2010s. That example is meant to symbolically represent any tech advancement not made with and for government. This, they say, is what “the market” produces: digital trinkets that offer entertainment or convenience but nothing that gives us meaning and purpose in our lives.

Thus, the premise of the book hinges on the crucial and pervasive error that seems universal today: namely, that there is a binary choice between, on the one hand, loose individualism centered on passing desires and, on the other, a commitment to a collective national vision. There is no suggestion at all that human beings may find meaning and purpose beyond their own appetites in anything other than politics. 

Their concern for the humanities and the cultivation of the mind, for instance, is rooted in a fear that people aren’t thinking hard enough about what our grand national mission should be, and they may not have the mental vocabulary to drum up the thumos to give oneself over to the cause: “An overly timid engagement with the debates of our time will rob one of the ferocity of feeling that is necessary to move the world,” they worry. Religion is only briefly mentioned, but it turns out the authors want God only for his instrumental value in bolstering the state: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state?”

The book studiously fails to question any of the conceits of collectivism or even point to its limits. The authors frequently speak of what “we,” “the nation,” and “the public” have done or must do, as if those are all unitary thinking, willful beings. For instance, they claim that “we have … ceded direction over our interior lives … to the market.” (Speak for yourself.) In one telling phrase, they even address culture in the same way: “We have, as a culture, decided.” This isn’t all that uncommon in casual discourse, but it is revealing. Culture doesn’t think, decide, or act. And the solution to a corrupted culture is not simply to hope that, as a whole, it will think, decide, or act differently.

The radicals of the ’60s were the fruits of the previous generation, a golden age of national vision that untethered its people from traditional authorities aside from the state.

As for the dangers of collectivist thinking, the authors never consider whether the government may be its own kind of consumer, with its own kind of base and selfish desires to fulfill when it gets in bed with big business. It is almost always treated as the straightforward advocate of “the public interest.” There is little or no discussion of how that substantive “public interest” is to be determined other than that “we” ought to decide it. There is no concern that their prescription would merely result in crony capitalism, leading to a farcical game in which industries, particular companies, and their political allies try to outdo one another in showing how their interests are vital to the “public good.” They do seem to recognize that China is largely operating on their model and using it to pursue terrible objectives. But we would never do those things.

Their collectivism also extends to morality. A moral life, they suggest, is defined as having “grand belief structures” and “affirmative conceptions of what a collective life could or ought to be.” Those who are skeptical of such visions, the authors label “amoral.” This sort of “grand plan” morality implicitly denigrates both human freedom and traditional checks on personal behavior, both of which fall before the demand that we play our part in re-creating the world according to the commanding vision. One of the West’s greatest civil achievements has been its demonstration that a moral life is compatible with—indeed, made possible by—freedom from a commanding vision.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw, however, is that for all the insistence on this grand political vision, Karp and Zamiska never bother to formulate what that vision really is. The phrase “political project” is peppered across the pages as the key to breaking out of “our” malaise. They also recognize that there is no naturally occurring unity across America, and thus the national or civilizational purposes they seek must be consciously “constructed” or “manufactured” through a uniform education system, forced conscription, or national service. But what exactly we’re pursuing is left vague. It’s clear enough that conquering nature is more their speed than purifying morals or equalizing outcomes, but the main point seems simply to be that we need some national project—any national project. As long as humane technologists are in charge, their refined imagination will surely come up with something.

There is certainly much to critique about Silicon Valley and the vapid products its companies hawk. And the success of “Farmville,” Instagram, and other examples is at least partially due to the hollowed-out minds and chests of modern man. But this is not the product of free markets or any perceived decline in belief in the nation. Far more important has been the erosion of overlapping social authorities that once contributed to the formation of character at the local and personal level.

And nothing did more to undermine these sources of social authority than the pursuit of national missions. The full-blown culture of repudiation was not born fully formed and armed from the head of Abbie Hoffman. It came only after decades of twentieth-century nationalization across Western countries (the very decades Karp and Zamiska yearn for) had eroded, absorbed, or politicized the role of churches, local communities, and private associations. The radicals of the ’60s were the fruits of the previous generation, a golden age of national vision that untethered its people from traditional authorities aside from the state. As the children of this generation came to see the failures and hypocrisies of the various national “projects” that had replaced those authorities, they saw the only reasonable response as a rejection of everything.

Conservative readers—of this book and of social commentary more generally—would do well to recognize that a self-declared commitment to Western civilization is not in and of itself indicative of a salutary teaching. When so many enemies of civilization are upfront with their hostility, perhaps it has become too easy to forget that draping oneself in the flag isn’t any guarantee of pure motives. There is still no shortage of deceptive wolves in sheep’s clothing, and no shortage of bad visions for civilizational “renewal.”

In fact, even the culture of repudiation itself is a kind of debased civilizational project, even if its advocates would blanch at the suggestion. The culture of repudiation was not entirely a foreign virus that infected Western civilization out of nowhere. It was, rather, a distortion of and overreliance on certain elements of the very tradition the radicals thought they were rejecting. Political toleration and self-criticism are distinctive qualities of Western civilization. In grasping on to these and similar values and attempting to make them universal, commanding principles, these radicals inadvertently established a new set of hegemonic Western values.

Indeed, the left-progressive or “woke” cause quite often manifests a haughty civilizational chauvinism in how it depicts and engages with non-Western civilizations, reflecting the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is only the West that is enlightened enough to reject its cultural inheritance.

Which is to say that Western civilization is a house with many mansions. And attempting to single out a particular value or principle—whether it is self-criticism or the spirit of scientific discovery—and make it the centerpiece of a political “project” is not the way to renew civilization. That will only build a house on sand. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Karp’s company, which has acquired nearly $1 billion of government contracts recently, would be working on data consolidation for the government that could easily translate into a master database on every American. That sort of information in the hands of the state would seem to be a significant threat to the liberties that Western countries have held dear. But there is nothing to fear—the CEO in charge has read Allan Bloom.

Theologian and social critic Os Guinness observed in his essay, “Our Civilisational Moment,” that “the world is fast approaching one of the great turning points in history.” The West, he says, is “on the wane,” living off “memories” of its animating ideals. “Renewal” of those ideals and the West, “is as possible as decline,” he writes, “though highly demanding because of what it requires.”

In The Technological Republic, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp, aided by his co-author Nicholas Zamiska, applies a similar critique to Silicon Valley. He contends that American elites, and tech leaders in particular, have abandoned any notion of advancing the national interest or addressing “the most pressing challenges that we collectively face” in favor of a shallow and single-minded obsession with “solving everyday consumer problems.” This misallocation of talent and lack of focus leaves the United States vulnerable, he argues, because the balance of hard power in the twenty-first century will be determined by supremacy in emergent AI technologies focused on military applications.

Karp posits that we must “rise up and rage against” this vapid consumerism. But fixing Silicon Valley lies outside our grasp so long as our tech elite—and culture more broadly—adheres to a “thin version of collective identity, one that is incapable of providing meaningful direction to the human experience.” Rebuilding a “technological republic” in which science and engineering protect US interests and push civilization “up the hill,” requires “an embrace of value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.”

Karp, however, stops short of identifying the deepest sources from which value, virtue, and culture can be drawn and defined. He describes the effect of cultural drift and its influence on the tech sector but fails to engage the ongoing debate over whether the West can experience renewal without reconnecting with its historical moorings in the Christian faith.

Karp begins his argument by pointing to two trends that, working together, have undermined the West’s prospect for maintaining an advantage in hard military power. First, the state has “retreated from the pursuit of large-scale breakthroughs,” such as the Internet, ceding such efforts to the private sector. Second, “the Silicon Valley giants that dominate the American economy have made the strategic mistake of casting themselves as existing essentially outside the country in which they were built.”

He contends that this divergence of the tech sector from the public interest is not historically determined. Many of the Founders, such as Jefferson or Franklin, were inventors. The United States emerged from World War II as the world’s preeminent superpower in part due to the efforts of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Vannevar Bush, whose technical brilliance pulled the United States into the atomic age. “This was the American century,” he writes, “and engineers were at the heart of the era’s ascendant mythology.” That mythology has since disintegrated, however, and Karp argues convincingly that Silicon Valley has embraced a kind of nihilism, leaving its leaders “often unsure of what their own beliefs are,” or whether “they have any firm or authentic beliefs at all.”

This critique of tech elites is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’ description of “men without chests.” They are highly intelligent and competent but driven by desires beneath the realm of moral virtue. Many of the tech workers in Silicon Valley blithely believe “the relative safety and comfort in which they live are the inevitable consequence of the justice of the American project, not the result of a concerted and intricate effort to defend a nation and its interests.” Karp argues that this detachment from the national interest comes at a dangerous moment, as the emergence of military applications of AI presents a “crossroads that connects engineering and ethics,” forcing us to “choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend.”

The Technological Republic is at its best when it explains how the erosion of a shared vision for Western civilization has impacted our ability and willingness to innovate to solve our most pressing social problems.

Rather than build with a higher end in mind, however, Karp contends these “technological agnostics” build merely “because they can, untethered from a more fundamental purpose” beyond the acquisition of wealth, status, and the power of their own creations. He traces this impoverished sense of purpose to movements beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s which aimed to deconstruct a common conception of the West cohering “around a set of shared practices or traditions that made possible, and indeed, bearable, collective existence at a grand scale.” In place of this coherent system, we now have a “thin conception of belonging to the American community” based on a vague sense of “rights” and neoliberal economics, and an impoverished community centered around entertainment, sports, and popular culture. Our culture is a “balloon cut loose,” as it were, from its historical moorings.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley got its start in the midst of this period of deconstruction. Indeed, Karp proposes that it was self-consciously built on a desire to escape the strictures of institutional business and government cultures and to embrace individualistic identities. This desire for individual empowerment, divorced from any thick overarching purpose or meta-narrative, morphed into an obsessive focus on serving trivial consumer ends at the expense of tackling “broader and more significant endeavors.” While embracing the free market, Karp objects to the “shallowness” of the tech sector’s “ambition and abdication of everything beyond the light hedonism of the moment.” Much like the Final Pagan Generation of Fourth Century Rome described by Edward Watts, tech elites are spending down the vestiges of a lost cultural heritage with nothing to replenish it.

That is not to say that Silicon Valley lacks any redeeming qualities. Karp pauses to consider the innovative organizational culture that enabled the tech sector’s “domination of the modern economy.” He praises tech firms with internal hierarchies echoing improvisational theater and honeybee swarms, in which status roles can morph moment by moment as actors “play” different parts, all “without an overbearing and unnecessarily centralized mechanism of control.”

These organizational qualities, in Karp’s view, can empower an “engineering mindset” endowed with the creativity, responsiveness, and non-conformity that is badly needed in American life. At its best, the Silicon Valley model is a subculture that enables creative non-conformists to escape the rigidity of traditional corporate life and exercise a “voracious” and “ruthless pragmatism” that is willing “to bend one’s model of the world to the evidence at hand, not bend the evidence.”

Karp posits that to rebuild a technological republic, we must direct Silicon Valley’s engineering mindset “toward the nation’s shared goals, which can be identified only if we take the risk of defining who we are or aspire to be.” This requires marrying the “engineering mindset” with a resurrected “sense of national and collective identity” oriented toward human progress. That objective faces several hurdles, however. The modern Left has, in the name of inclusivity, “so hollowed out the national project that one could argue that there is no longer much of substance into which anyone might be included.” That is not to say that the Left has fully abandoned any overarching narrative, but its bare “commitment to capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be sufficient; it is too thin and meager, to narrow, to sustain the human soul and psyche.” In the author’s telling, “an aspirational tolerance of everything has descended into support of nothing,” leaving the Left “unable to offer an affirmative vision of a virtuous or moral life, whose content it long ago stripped away to the bare essentials.” We must, Karp writes, “take seriously the possibility that it will be the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, that will make possible our continued survival and cohesion.”

Diagnoses of the West’s slide into decadence, stagnation, and ennui have been frequently chronicled, such as in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence and Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society. Karp provides a similar critique but narrows the aperture to focus on tech as a specific, and exceptionally influential, segment of society. Elsewhere, he frequently comments on the dominance of the US tech industry, noting in a New York Times interview that “86 percent of the top 50 tech companies in the world just by market cap are American.” A staggering fact, to be sure. His concern, however, is that this dominance will be squandered as competitors like China race forward with developing military applications for AI, while the United States fritters away its advantage as its leading tech firms focus obsessively on building trivial applications to serve the “whims of late capitalist culture.”

His frustration with this “misallocation” of resources leads him to demand that tech leaders come clean about their priors. He develops this argument in a passage worth quoting in full:

We believe that the reluctance of many business leaders to venture into, in any meaningful way and aside from the occasional and theatrical foray, the most consequential social and cultural debates of our time—including those regarding the relationship between the technology and the state—should give us pause. The decisions we collectively face are too consequential to be left unchallenged and unexamined. Those involved in constructing the technology that will animate and make possible nearly every aspect of our waking lives have a responsibility to expose and defend their views.

Karp seemingly attempts to do those tech leaders the favor of taking this step for them. Much of The Technological Republic is an exposé and critique of our “current era of innovation,” which is “dominated by the indiscriminate construction of technology by software engineers” who are building untethered from any purpose directed toward the common good. That untethering was driven by the intentional hollowing out, largely by the political Left, of a robust concept of national identity or a cohesive set of universal values and aspirations that could hold the broader body politic together, short of a thin veneer of “tolerance” for all views. But, in Karp’s words, “the problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.”

Karp capably diagnoses the icy, effective pragmatism and metaphysical emptiness that lie at the center of Silicon Valley’s culture. And he points up the dangers of casting such a powerful industry—one that has achieved a “level of concentration of wealth and influence … never before seen in modern economic history—adrift from the national project. “We have made the mistake,” he writes, “of allowing a technocratic ruling class to form and take hold in this country without asking for anything quite substantial in return.”

To mitigate this, he calls for the reanimation of a “shared culture, language, history, heroes and villains, stories, and patterns of discourse” as a means to bind the West together. This path “will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor.”

But Karp does not prescribe how to reconstitute collective experience and values, or what specifically can fill that void. He nods toward the “set of ideals” that drove young people to embrace the Silicon Valley subculture: “freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.” And he approvingly recounts the “old means of manufacturing a nation,” including such “civic rituals” as “an educational system, mandatory service in national defense, religion, a shared language, and a thriving and free press.” In this, he calls for a revivification of an American, and perhaps Western, civic religion of sorts. Unanswered by Karp is how this revivification will be catalyzed. What spark will reignite the flame of Western culture after decades of deconstruction? Karp puts the question, and a possible answer, as follows: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state? What have we built, or aspired to build, in its place?” In asking these questions, he peers over the edge, but does not enter, a robust conversation about the role of organized religion in sustaining Western institutions.

Karp’s book, in the end, is a search and cry for a cultural OS that will power the killer app of market capitalism and free liberal society into the future.

In his magisterial book Dominion, historian Tom Holland traces the development of Western civilization as an outgrowth of Christianity, its basic assumptions, values, categories, and concepts intimately interwoven with Christian values. In his telling, whether this debt is acknowledged or not, the West is “firmly moored to its Christian past.” Karp briefly acknowledges this, quoting professor James K. A. Smith, who said that “‘Western liberal democracies have lived off the borrowed capital of the church for centuries.’”

Several thinkers have gone further and acknowledged the substantial benefits that a strong Christian church and widespread faith entail for the social order. In his book Cross Purposes, Jonathan Rauch—himself an avowed atheist—has called for a renewal of what he calls “thick Christianity.” Christianity, he contends, provides the background condition that allows liberal society to flourish: “There is no secular substitute for the meaning and grounding which religious life provides.”

Prominent academic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a recent convert to Christianity, has compared Western culture divorced from Christianity to a “cut flower” that maintains its shape and beauty momentarily, but ultimately will fade, having been disconnected from its source of sustenance. Much like Holland and Rauch, she observes in her essay, “Our Christian Inheritance, Western Civilization, and My Personal Journey,” that the features of our liberal society we take for granted—recognition of equal human dignity, fundamental rights, respect for the rule of law, and limited government—are direct lineal descendants of Christian theology.

At the core of these ideals is the belief that humans possess dignity not because of their capacity to compute, use language, reason, or meet other performance-based metrics, but rather because of who and what we are: created in the image of God. Or in the words of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” This framework offers a possible response to Karp’s concern, for example, that AI will overtake humanity as we build with no purpose in mind. The concept of imago Dei necessarily distinguishes humans from non-humans, including AI. Moreover, consistency with human rights and true human dignity derived from the imago Dei cabins the uses for which AI may be deployed.

Karp quotes Robert Oppenheimer as saying, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” A Christian ethic responds to the impulse of “building because you can.” You build for the good of humans.

The Technological Republic is at its best when it explains how the erosion of a shared vision for Western civilization has impacted our ability and willingness to innovate to solve our most pressing social problems. Karp powerfully explains how the deconstruction of shared collective experience, purpose, and identity has resulted in the trivialization of our tech sector to serve purely consumerist ends. He articulates how recapturing those collective goods is essential not only to social cohesion but also to technological advancement and national security.

His contribution, however, must be viewed alongside the broader ongoing conversation over the need to renew religious institutions as an integral support to a liberal order that embraces human dignity, fundamental rights, and the separation of powers. As part of that conversation, Jonathan Rauch recalls John Adams’s words: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Echoing Adams, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has compared Christianity to an “operating system” for Western society. Karp’s book, in the end, is a search and cry for a cultural OS that will power the killer app of market capitalism and free liberal society into the future.

How much money would you sell your ancient liberties for? Or let’s put it another way: how much money would you wish the government to save in a trade-off for an essential element of freedom and justice in the English-speaking world? The ancient freedom to which I am referring is the common law institution of trial by jury. David Hume, in The History of England, referring to “trial by … jury of twelve freeholders,” believed that this institution is “very ancient in England, and was fixed by the laws of King Alfred.”

So, how much money for this ancient institution? How about for £31 million (or just over $41.6 million). Let’s put that sum of money into context. As Robert Jenrick MP, the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, noted, this sum is merely 0.2 percent of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice budget. Despite the minimal savings that are estimated, the Labour administration in the UK is considering restricting this foundational judicial procedure. For instance, crimes from sexually assaulting a child to fraud may be restricted to judge-alone trials.

Adam Smith in his Lectures on Jurisprudence said, “The law of England, always the friend of liberty, deserves praise in no instance more than in the careful provision of impartial juries.” Writing about “procedural safeguards,” such as trial by jury, F. A. Hayek noted in The Constitution of Liberty that in “Anglo-Saxon countries,” these safeguards seem “to most people as the chief foundations of their liberty.” Indeed, the institution of trial by jury is the cornerstone of the criminal justice system and is deeply rooted within the legal tradition and practice in Anglo-American law.

Removing juries also removes, as Tocqueville expressed it, “a mode of sovereignty of the people.”

As the scholar Harry Potter noted in his book Law, Liberty and The Constitution, 1166 was a significant moment because Henry II, after counsel and consultation, “promulgated the Assize of Clarendon,” and “this was a landmark in the history of the jury.” Roger Scruton in England: An Elegy notes that the jury with its Saxon and Norman elements “took something like its modern form following Assize of Clarendon.” Indeed, a jury and its impartiality are necessary to our conception of justice. Additionally, the very existence of a jury is central to our idea of the rule of law. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America wrote:

When the English adopted the institution of the jury, they were a half-barbaric people; they have since become one of the most enlightened nations of the globe, and their attachment to the jury has seemed to increase with their enlightenment.

This attachment does not seem to be shared by this present Labour administration. Of course, Sir Tony Blair, when he was Prime Minister, also endeavored to restrict the right to trial by jury. Indeed, Labour has a negative track record on our constitutional heritage.

So, if you would not throw this liberty away for the money, how about saving a bit of time and freeing up some sitting days? Say, 9,000 Crown Court sitting days a year? Sarah Sackman, a Labour MP and a government minister, expressed in the House of Commons that the “Lord Chancellor commissioned Sir Brian Leveson to undertake a once-in-a-generation review of the criminal courts.” The result of this commission was a report by Brian Leveson called Independent Review of the Criminal Courts. To use a concept that was partly developed by George W. Cary, the report lacks “constitutional morality.” Sir Brian seems to refuse to “abide by the restrictions and imperatives” of the British constitutional tradition. For instance, he claims in the report that there exists no constitutional or indeed “any form of general common law right to trial by judge and jury.” Moreover, he claims that Magna Carta does not provide “a legal basis to claim a right to a jury trial as a constitutional right.” Leveson has said that Magna Carta only refers to trial by “peers” not “jury.” It does appear that he is calculating that his sophistry will be persuasive enough for the government to make economies in the judicial system despite the constitutional immorality.

The report is wide-ranging, but for our purpose here, I shall focus on his recommendations to the Labour administration for changes to trial by jury. His recommendations are:

(1) Defendants should be able to elect not to have a trial by jury;
(In England and Wales, there is a very limited right to this, e.g., where there is a concern about jury tampering, unlike in the US, where being able to choose between jury or bench trial is fairly common.)

(2) There should be judge-alone trials when the trials may be long and complex;

(3) Trial by jury should not be used in serious and complex fraud cases.

As John Randolph of Roanoke had suggested, there is a difference between change and reform. These recommendations are not meant to reform, improve, and strengthen our existing concepts of justice but to change them. One would have thought that the Labour administration would recoil from such recommendations and also distance itself from the report. But no! The Minister of State in the Ministry of Justice at the dispatch box in the House of Commons said that the Government welcomes “the ambitious recommendations that he has put forward.” Why, you may ask? Because, according to the Minister, the Labour Government “must consider any measures that will put our courts on a more stable and sustainable footing.” In other words, to save time and money. Perhaps, the minister did not mean that the government welcomes the curtailing of jury trials, but the report in general? No, this is not the case as Sackman said, “We will carefully consider Sir Brian’s recommendations on jury trials, along with everything else, before providing a formal response to Parliament in the autumn.”

The reasons provided by Leveson, who has a track record of endeavoring to restrict the use of trial by juries, for these recommendations for diluting this core safeguard for our freedom are revealing. Leveson does not believe that the jurors have the capacity to understand the complexity of fraud cases. He makes this plain, writing that cases that are “serious” or “complex” “should be tried by judge alone.” These cases will be “defined by their hidden dishonesty or complexity that is outside the understanding of the general public,” and that Leveson believes it is “difficult for the jury to understand or assess … some of the evidence.” Again, he does think that the general public is not up to the job of justice and believes that the “increasing length of trials” and the “substantial burdens placed on jurors” are too much of a burden on ordinary people.

Turning to Adam Smith again, the Scotsman observed that “the jurymen are your neighbours who are to judge of a fact upon which your life depends.” Leveson desires to remove your neighbors from the judicial process, and the Labour administration “welcomes” it. Russell Kirk wrote in America’s British Culture that “the English people looked upon common law as their law, the product of their historical experience; it was not something imposed upon them from above.” Sir Roger Scruton similarly argues that the “idea of the law of the land” drew “credibility” from two key procedures, and one was trial by jury. If the Labour administration implements Leveson’s recommendations, it will partially remove one of the core pillars of credibility of the law. Removing juries also removes, as Tocqueville expressed it, “a mode of sovereignty of the people.”

This mode of sovereignty of the people is essential as it acts as a democratic check on the power of the state. For instance, Scruton argued that the jury system “ensured that the law remained responsive to the ordinary conscience, since juries would not convict if the penalty seemed to be severe or the crime a mere formality.” Indeed, Adam Smith argued that “people are generally disposed to favour innocence” in criminal cases. Removing juries and replacing them with new judge-alone courts will not ensure any of the benefits that enhance our liberty and justice that juries provide. Having the general public, via jury duty, participate in the administration of justice improves and enhances the reputation of the law and ensures that the general public sees the law as ours and that it is liberty-enhancing and enabling rather than a top-down imposition on our freedom.

Sir Patrick Devlin remarked that “trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.” It seems to me that this Labour administration desires to extinguish the lamp that shows freedom lives in far too many areas of British life, including trial by jury.

As I began to write this, the US Treasury had just announced the publication of the 2025 Social Security and Medicare Trustees reports. The reports unsurprisingly bring more bad news, highlighting James Capretta’s point that “the economic risks are real and rising with each passing year.” The latest reports show that the combined Social Security Old Age and Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds will only be able to pay full benefits until 2034, one year earlier than reported last year. Meanwhile, Medicare Hospital Insurance (also known as Medicare Part A) is projected to pay full benefits only until 2033, which means funds are now expected to run out three years earlier than previously projected.

This dire state of Social Security and Medicare highlights the need for both forums such as these and for a plan of action. I concur with Capretta’s lead essay that “reforms that involve continuity and gradual change” will be far more palatable to policymakers and voters than radical changes. I cannot, however, turn away those “sharp departures” from our present situation. Being familiar with Capretta’s great contributions to the subject of entitlement reform, I’m sure he would agree that “no singular way forward” includes wrestling with the larger ideas and offering “sharp departures” from the status quo when the situation calls for it. We must be alert to opportunities and have the discernment to know when and how to apply and blend those ideas.

Those of us advocating for entitlement reform cannot lose sight of why entitlement reform is important: sound reforms make it easier for Americans to find work, keep their hard-earned money, and remove barriers to quality care. 

While it is helpful to focus on what can be feasibly achieved in the realm of policy, we cannot ignore those guiding principles and models. F. A. Hayek wrote that those guiding models will come across as entirely out of reach or unfeasible. Being unable to achieve the ideal policy scenario, however, does not mean we should stop at what can be feasibly achieved. By holding our situation up against our principles and ideal models, we hold ourselves accountable. When we realize we are not living up to those ideas, we are stirred to make what feasible improvements we can to slowly move toward those ideals.

Gradualism in Practice

Capretta’s policy insight shines through here, noting that “sharp departures” from current programs (despite having merit) are more likely to be dismissed and ignored. He offers several notable adjustments to Social Security and Medicare.

He notes that “nothing should be considered off the table.” For Social Security, Capretta suggests tax increases, means testing, and raising the retirement age for future retirees as possible strategies. For Medicare, the more complicated of the two, a workable reform plan could involve tax and premium adjustments on the revenue side, with adjustments to inflation indexing on the spending side.

While these adjustments offer gradual change within the status quo, reformers must be prepared for opposition. Even the most modest changes can come under fire as an attack on retirees. Take, for example, the Medicaid reforms in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act to reduce future Medicaid spending to $880 billion by 2035. Michael F. Cannon notes that, if this reduction were successful, “the program’s annual growth rate would merely fall from 4.5 percent to 3 percent.” Despite a mere reduction in growth (in other words, Medicaid spending will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace), opponents of the spending reduction have come out in full force, opposing the reforms.

Capretta also offers regulatory reforms as a means of improving competition in the health insurance market. He discusses the possibility of standardizing insurance offerings and clinical requirements, and revising rules in Medicare, Medicaid, and the commercial market to encourage consumers to choose lower-priced offerings. These reforms may gain more traction, especially when presented as mechanisms to increase access to care and options for care. One obstacle, however, may be the concentrated interests that benefit from maintaining the status quo. As the logic of collective action shows, those concentrated interests, whether they are insurance companies, healthcare providers, or Medicaid recipients themselves, form a relatively small, motivated, and homogenous group with strong interests in preserving and expanding Medicaid. Those shared goals make organizing easier and reduce the risk of free riding, whereas the broader population of taxpayers has more diffuse and less coordinated interests. Elected officials will cater to these smaller groups’ demands in the hopes that doing so will get them reelected.

No society that sees state-controlled healthcare and interventionism as desirable will embrace sound healthcare reform.

Capretta’s proposed solutions are within reach, but they will still face opposition, especially from those who benefit from the status quo. This is why we cannot abandon those core principles and ideal models.

Another potential fix not mentioned in Capretta’s lead essay would be closing the Medicaid provider tax loophole.

The Medicaid provider tax is used by states to maximize Medicaid spending paid by federal taxpayers. As Brian Blase and Niklas Kleinworth found, state governments use taxes on insurance companies that participate in Medicaid managed care and then use the money raised by provider taxes to claim additional federal reimbursement, which is then returned to those same providers with added supplemental payments. 

Now that provider tax reform has been solidified into law and there is a proposed federal rule set to strengthen those restrictions, slowing unsustainable Medicaid spending and broader Medicaid reform feel within reach. To that extent, those reforms must also grapple with the same problems caused by the logic of collective action that I mentioned previously. Once again we must reserve some of our capabilities toward winning the battle of ideas.

The Trust Fund Illusion

In terms of changing those tacit ideas about entitlements, I offer one point of contention with Capretta: we cannot concede the truth regarding the nature of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. While he wrote in a 2023 article that the trust funds were created to ensure long-term financing, it is necessary to clarify what that assurance entails. That assurance is backed by the promise of tax increases, spending cuts, and taking on additional debt, not any prefunded assets. The federal government admitted so in its FY 2000 financial report:

These balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures—but only in a bookkeeping sense. … They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury, that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.

Social Security and Medicare accounts, unlike an Individual Retirement Account or a Health Savings Account, are simply records of tax payments and contain no funds. That assurance is promised through future taxes, debt, and/or cuts to other federal programs.

As my colleague David Rose notes, this does not necessarily make Social Security a Ponzi Scheme, but in some cases, it makes the situation worse than a Ponzi scheme. Rose comments, “Even though a trust fund was built up to deal with this baby boomer problem, it is filled with special securities that must be presented to the Treasury for redemption, which the Treasury can only do by issuing new debt dollar for dollar.” Social Security and Medicare are not voluntary programs (unlike a Ponzi Scheme). Over the lifetime of these programs, politicians eager to secure votes supported changes that increased benefits to current voters at the expense of long-term program viability and broader fiscal solvency.

Many Americans mistakenly picture the money they are paying into these programs through payroll taxes being held in an account tied to their Social Security number. Instead, their payroll taxes are being used to fund benefit payments for today’s retirees, while their benefits will be paid for by future workers, many of whom have yet to be born. When discussing the program’s financing, the American people are at least owed the truth.

What Ideas Will Be Lying Around?

To reform entitlements, we must change hearts and minds. Here, Hayek is again helpful. As he notes in the Constitution of Liberty (and a major focus in The Essential Hayek), the “state of opinion” that determines how policymakers make decisions comes about from ideas that have slowly germinated across society. “New ideas,” Hayek wrote, “start among a few and gradually spread until they become the possession of a majority who know little of their origin.” No society that sees state-controlled healthcare and interventionism as desirable will embrace sound healthcare reform. In Capitalism and Freedom, however, Milton Friedman noted that real change is only produced in the event of a crisis and that change will “depend on the ideas that are lying around.” We will need both the ideal models based in principle as well as the more practical solutions, such as the ones Capretta offers in the lead essay, lying around when the entitlement crisis begins. Ultimately, it will be up to us to discern when and how to apply both types of ideas by remaining vigilant and alert to opportunities.

For nearly 60 years, Alan Dershowitz has enjoyed a remarkable career as a law professor and practicing criminal defense lawyer. In 1962, he graduated first in his class at Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, he joined the Harvard Law School faculty, where he was granted tenure in 1967 at age 28, becoming the youngest full professor in the school’s history at that time. Dershowitz taught at Harvard for 50 years, writing dozens of books and countless articles, while simultaneously becoming a leading criminal defense lawyer in many high-profile cases, including the O. J. Simpson trial.

A lifelong civil libertarian and a political liberal, Dershowitz confounded his colleagues in 2020 when he joined the defense team for President Trump in his impeachment trial before the US Senate, which resulted in an acquittal. Dershowitz complains that his tony neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard, his longtime summer retreat, have shunned him since he began to defend Trump. Dershowitz is also an outspoken champion of Israel and a supporter of Zionism. In 2024, Dershowitz announced that he had departed the Democratic Party due to his disgust with what he considered the anti-Jewish tone of the Democratic National Convention.

Now 86, Dershowitz stays busy with television appearances, scholarship, and writing. He remains one of the most impressive legal minds of his generation. When I heard that Dershowitz had just written a book that he describes as his “magnum opus,” I was eager to read it. The Preventive State—a term that Dershowitz coined in the 1960s—refers to governmental policies designed to prevent serious harm before it occurs. Dershowitz wrote his student note at Yale on the punishment of inchoate crimes—unsuccessful attempts to cause harm—and early in his career, explored the involuntary commitment of individuals suffering from mental illness, ostensibly to protect themselves or the public.

In The Preventive State, Dershowitz returns to these themes, but expands the issues to include a host of modern-day threats: crime, domestic terrorism, nuclear proliferation, environmental hazards, infectious diseases, gun violence, offensive speech, hostile military action, and more. Technology has enhanced both the potential for causing serious harm and the presumed ability to predict such harm before it occurs. Dershowitz endeavors to synthesize an overarching “jurisprudential framework” for addressing the prevention of serious harms while preserving essential liberties. Realizing that “prediction will never be perfect,” Dershowitz concedes that “this book will necessarily be a work in progress,” and that constructing a “holistic” framework to deal with a “quickly developing and constantly changing phenomenon is a daunting task.” That is an understatement.

How successfully does Dershowitz make his case in a slim book (less than 200 pages of text)? In his foreword, retired Justice Stephen Breyer concludes that “Dershowitz makes his case,” but other readers may find the one-size-fits-all approach to be simplistic and unworkable. In all of the situations Dershowitz addresses, the magnitude of the threatened harm must be balanced against the predictive accuracy of the preventive measure. When the government attempts to prevent future harm, Dershowitz posits that there are only four possible outcomes: an accurate prediction of harm and a successful prevention of it (what he terms a true positive); an accurate assessment that there is no threatened harm, with no preventive action (a true negative); and the more problematic scenarios of a predicted harm that would not materialize with or without preventive measures (a false positive); and the failure to predict a harm that could have been prevented with appropriate action (a false negative). The former (“true”) outcomes are beneficial to society, while the latter (“false”) outcomes are harmful.

False positives run the risk of infringing essential liberties with no corresponding benefit to society. Dershowitz cites the compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and other genetically unfit individuals—upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927) during the heyday of the eugenics movement—as the classic example of a false positive. He comments that “Buck v. Bell will be remembered by history as among the handful of the worst Supreme Court decisions, though authored by one of the greatest jurists (Holmes) and joined by some of our most distinguished justices (Brandeis, Taft, and Stone).”

There is no substitute for acting in good faith and with common sense—both of which have been lacking in recent years.

False negatives are equally consequential. What if the US government had been able to predict—and prevent—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or 9/11, or Soviet espionage to steal classified information relating to the atomic bomb, or the use of federal funds by the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses? While we’re at it, what if the government had been able to anticipate—and prevent—the assassination of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, or John Brown’s attempted insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, or President Obama’s disastrous 2016 nuclear deal with Iran? Historians could play this counter-factual parlor game endlessly—and some do. My point is that for every lamentable false positive in our history, we can find an equally lamentable false negative.

Hindsight is 20/20, but we must resist the false allure of omniscience. We don’t have a crystal ball to divine the future. Contra Dershowitz, there is no “science of prediction.” Humans are fallible and their predictions (and actions) are often mistaken. The history books are full of such mistakes; this will never change. It is easy to condemn decisions such as Buck v. Bell (decided by an 8-to-1 vote with no dissenting opinion) and Korematsu (decided by a 6-to-3 vote in a decision authored by the progressive Justice Hugo Black) after the fact, but one must acknowledge that when it comes to lawmaking and judicial review, contemporary circumstances—the zeitgeist—matter more than abstract theory.

Dershowitz grants as much, quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s aphorism from The Common Law that “the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.” Holmes’s pragmatism is also evident in his quip that “hard cases make bad law.” Dershowitz concurs, recognizing that “in a democracy the ultimate policy choices—often tragic choices among evils—must be made by its citizens.” As Dershowitz notes, during wartime, many nations (not just our own) have preemptively detained those perceived to be disloyal or dangerous, in the interest of national security.

Dershowitz’s formalistic typology categorizes all potential outcomes into one of four conceptual boxes. The difficulty lies in applying the rigid matrix to real-life situations. Here, Dershowitz’s model offers little practical utility. When it comes to assessing risks of catastrophic harm, and analyzing the risk of false positives (weighed against the risk of inaction—or false negatives), factual distinctions are critically important.

The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII is not the same as evaluating public health measures during COVID, or responding to the perceived threat of “climate change.” Preventing a mass-casualty terrorist incident is not the same as “stop and frisk” tactics by police officers walking their beat, or issuing a prior restraint on the press. Restricting speech to avoid perceived “harm” is different than so-called “red flag” laws denying citizens their Second Amendment rights, or waterboarding suspected terrorists to prevent catastrophic harm.

In short, the myriad situations Dershowitz tries to analyze under the same rubric—cash bail pending trial, censoring “harmful” speech, surveillance (or even torture) of suspected terrorists, preventive warfare, mandatory vaccines, red flag laws, etc.—warrant separate scrutiny depending on the facts. Dershowitz admits that “so much properly depends on the values at stake—on the content of the costs and benefits, the substance of what is being regulated, and the identity of those on whom the costs are imposed and the benefits realized.” This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of an overarching “jurisprudential framework.”

Yes, all preventive measures should be scrutinized objectively and dispassionately (or pursuant to a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” as Dershowitz would have it), the basis for “predictions” of future harm must be compelling (and honestly rendered), and due consideration has to be given to the risk of both false positives and false negatives. But in the final analysis, there is no substitute for acting in good faith and with common sense—both of which have been lacking in recent years. Government policy toward the COVID pandemic and national intelligence abuses (e.g., the Russian collusion hoax) are just two examples.

Toward the end of the book, after a great deal of window-dressing, Dershowitz reveals the heart of his proposed jurisprudential framework: “procedural protections required for preventive state interventions,” consisting of a sliding scale for the requisite level of proof, depending on the length of involuntary confinement, and leaving aside forms of government authority other than confinement. When the government seeks to institutionalize an individual for a year or more, whether the proceeding is civil, criminal, medical, or administrative, Dershowitz’s proposed standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Shorter periods of confinement warrant a lower standard, so that one to ten days of incarceration can be justified by “probable cause” or a “preponderance of the evidence.” Proposed intermediate standards for other durations of detention include “clear and convincing evidence” and “proof by heavy preponderance.”

Dershowitz’s framework presumably anticipates an adversarial proceeding before an impartial judicial officer, because he specifies the procedural protections that various lengths of confinement would entail. Ninety days or more would require a full panoply of due process rights, including the right to counsel, discovery, cross-examination, exclusion of hearsay, and “scrupulous” appellate review. This strikes me as unworkable. A contested adjudicatory hearing with discovery and appellate review could take months or even years. How is such an unwieldy process going to enable the prevention of imminent threatened harm?

Coercive preventive measures not involving confinement (censorship, surveillance, suspension of Second Amendment rights, and many others addressed by Dershowitz earlier in the book) are inexplicably left out of this procedure-oriented jurisprudential framework. Instead, for non-custodial government interventions, he proposes a “proper balance” between expected “false positives” and “false negatives.” Dershowitz dubs this mathematical relationship—reduced to a ratio—a “framework for mistake preferences.” He cites as a benchmark the maxim that “it is better that ten guilty be wrongfully acquitted than even one innocent be wrongly convicted.” He suggests that “comparable numbers can be assigned to other preventive intrusions, such as shooting of fleeing suspects, government mandated censorship, vaccination … and red flag laws.”

I try to picture in my head the image of a policeman in hot pursuit of an armed suspect at night, simultaneously weighing the risks of a false positive versus a false negative and mentally calculating the appropriate ratio. This proposal is absurdly—even laughably—unrealistic, which Dershowitz seems to admit when he states, “It would be more vexing to try to come up with numbers for steps taken to prevent climate change, preventive military actions, or other macro measures.” Another understatement.

While unsatisfying as a comprehensive theory, The Preventive State is still a well-written book loaded (some would say padded) with interesting nuggets and personal asides. For example, we learn that when Richard Lawrence attempted to assassinate President Andrew Jackson in 1835, failing only because both of his loaded pistols misfired, Lawrence could only be charged with a misdemeanor because, at the time, a felony required the infliction of actual harm. Miraculously, Jackson was unharmed. Accordingly, Lawrence’s bail was set at $1,500, which—fortunately—the defendant was unable to post. The federal prosecutor was Francis Scott Key, author of the lyrics to what became our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The test for a reviewer is “Did you like the book?” Despite my reservations, I did.

At trial, Key did not actively oppose Lawrence’s assertion of the insanity defense; the jury took only five minutes to find that Lawrence was insane. Key’s trial strategy was not motivated by compassion, but pragmatism. He realized that Lawrence would likely be incarcerated far longer as a madman than as a culpable criminal. In fact, Lawrence died while in confinement at what is now St. Elizabeths Hospital, decades later in 1861. (Ironically, President Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was also housed at St. Elizabeths following his 1982 acquittal by reason of insanity, until his eventual release in 2018.)

Dershowitz engagingly chronicles other presidential assassinations—both attempted and successful—to illustrate the great importance of false negatives. His point is that English common law, which influenced our early legal system, was based on punishment for actual, rather than threatened harms. American criminal codes have moved away from this limited scope and now prohibit “inchoate” crimes such as “attempts,” “conspiracies,” and so forth.

Dershowitz is a longtime opponent of the cash bail system (as well as capital punishment). His anecdote-laden treatment of these subjects, as well as sentencing and “preventive detention,” is basic and slightly off-topic. He favors electronic monitoring of criminal defendants (in the form of ankle bracelets) prior to trial in lieu of incarceration. Dershowitz’s enthusiasm for the Bill of Rights apparently does not include the Second Amendment; his chapter on gun violence drips with disdain for the private ownership of firearms.

Extending his analysis to foreign affairs, and to emphasize the importance of government surveillance, Dershowitz observes that

Israel’s failure to know about and prevent the massacres of October 7 may go down in history as among the most inexplicable intelligence failures by a nation that spent billions of dollars on information gathering.

On the topic of terrorism, Dershowitz is surprisingly receptive to the efficacy of torture in some situations. He notes that “the evidence clearly shows” that torture has produced “actionable intelligence that may save lives,” citing several historical examples. In his previous writings, Dershowitz has proposed judicial warrant procedures (to be granted only by the Chief Justice of the United States) for non-lethal interrogation techniques in extreme cases when circumstances justify the intrusion.

The Preventive State is more like a detailed seminar discussion guide than a formidable legal scholar’s “magnum opus.” The book is a mixture of war stories and dusted-off lecture notes relating to criminology, criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy. Throughout The Preventive State, Dershowitz refers to Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Sigmund Freud, social Darwinism, and even military history and the Torah. At times, Dershowitz drifts off into asides about “inequality,” the derivation of rights (which he posits are not endowed by our creator), and the elusive nature of utopian solutions. George Floyd, “climate change,” and Dershowitz’s gallbladder surgery all make an appearance. In a self-referential fashion, Dershowitz cites and quotes from some of his previous books and articles. At age 86, this prolific scholar is entitled to a victory lap (or two).

The test for a reviewer is “Did you like the book?” Despite my reservations, I did. Even if the proffered “jurisprudential framework” is unconvincing, Dershowitz makes a thoughtful and erudite plea for future leaders to avoid “striking the balance too much on the side of security and too little in favor of liberty.” 

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

– Flannery O’Connor

Halfway through The Habit of Being, the tome of Flannery O’Connor’s collected letters, there is a cryptic sentence offered to O’Connor’s friend and professor, William Sessions. It is made more brilliant in that it was an off-handed postscript:

P. S. She is full of Theory. The Theories are worse than the Furies. 

Though we don’t know to whom O’Connor was referring, we are abundantly clear how she feels about her.

Now, for those unfamiliar with Greek and Roman mythology, the Furies were three sister goddesses who dwelled in the Underworld until summoned for vengeance. They were Alecto (endless anger), Megaera (jealous rage), and Tisiphone (vengeful destruction). Born out of the blood spilled from the titan son Cronus’ vicious castration of his own father, they hectored and harried, tortured and tormented those who violated a moral precept or legal code, especially those pertaining to offending the gods or family honor. Most famously, Orestes, who avenged the murder of his father Agamemnon by killing his own mother Clytemnestra, was relentlessly pursued in his unatoned guilt by the hellish Furies. 

The Theories to which O’Connor is referring, however, are the fashionable literary postulates that distract from the story and wallow its readers in abstraction. After reading an outlandish interpretation of her short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor fumed,

The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology. … Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

Crestfallen at the state of the academy and the stunted students they were teaching, O’Connor mourned, “My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.”

Like the Furies of Greek and Roman literature, the Theories are everywhere. Now understand, observing the way the world conducts itself and then framing a theory around that which is witnessed is a normal way to operate. We would be lost if we navigated the world with forever-new particulars unaided by overarching themes and a guiding sense of cause and effect. But it is the worship of Theory and its zealous misapplication that O’Connor most vigorously rejects.

The Theories, it turns out, don’t reckon with pesky nuances like human free will and brokenness, biological facts and political realities.

Forever, there has been a drunkenness on Theory. The dreamy sophists in ancient times, the haughty thinkers during the Enlightenment, and the siloed experts in the modern age have crafted baffling theories unchastened by nature and untethered from reality. Shortly after the scientific method was devised, it was radicalized by those who felt that everything was subject to it, and anything that fell outside the ambit of the scientific method was either poppycock or irrelevant. 

A perfect example of such obeisance to the Theories was a debate that pitted the starry-eyed scientism of Harvard professor Steven Pinker against the philosophic sure-footedness of literary critic Leon Wieseltier. The topic? The proposed role of science in “purifying” the humanities. Responding to all the “wondrous means” by which science can technically deconstruct (and yet somehow augment) literature, Wieseltier sighed,

How art works is not the most penetrating question that can be asked about it. Many years ago I attended a lecture by Roman Jakobson on patterns of consonant placement in Baudelaire’s “Le Chat,” and it was the least enlightening discussion of a poem I ever heard. “Behavioral genetics can update folk theories of parental influence with discoveries about the effects of genes, peers, and chance, which have profound implications for the interpretation of biography and memoir.” Profound? I think not. Whatever its genetic roots, a man’s experience of his father is his experience of his father, and the representation of that relationship in a biography or a memoir demands empathy and probity more than a hunt for phenotypes.

Exuberant acolytes of the Theories get it all wrong. Before an architect draws up his plans, he must survey the ground. Someone once observed that Adam Smith drew up The Wealth of Nations after witnessing the bartering in the local market, whereas Karl Marx crafted the Communist Manifesto in the isolated, smothering stacks of the British Library. Paradoxically, originators and adherents of the Theories (who boast their inveterate rootedness in science) have a tendency to lazy credulity. Not understanding the square peg of human nature, they force it violently through the round hole of the Theory. 

Certain modern activists latch onto arcane theories surrounding race and gender, economics, and political philosophy. Fueled with righteous indignation, ivory-tower intellectualism, and oversimplification, they lash out at the way things are and impatiently insist upon the way things ought to be. After all, it feels good to be right—to know how to fix something reinforces our sense of value in a world of ineptitude. And it feels good to be angry, fired with passion so as to live a meaningful life. But, as O’Connor would warn, “Conviction, without experience makes for harshness.” The results are not only destructive, but ineffective. The Theories, it turns out, don’t reckon with pesky nuances like human free will and brokenness, biological facts, and political realities. And yet, when these Theories inevitably fail in their real-world application, activists refuse to learn and, instead, double down on their implementation. We have repeatedly been told that Communism, for example, “works.” It only needs a “proper application.” The natural consequence of such thinking is smoldering ash instead of exuberant life. 

Reductionist, de-contextualized, and warped out of all proportion, the Theories curiously cause people to stop thinking. “Studies show” and “research claims,” “the experts agree” and “science insists,” are the openings to most sentences from the Theories. And yet, the true thinker counters with “What studies?” and “What quality?” and “Who was studied?” and “Toward what end?” Even more importantly, healthy skeptics (not vain contrarians) of the Theories ceaselessly ask how the Theories comport with one’s experience and insight, intuition and common sense. The ultimate purifier of the Theories is the inexhaustible question, “Does this make sense?”

The Theories, like the Furies, are unrelenting. They are like a swarm of bees. A casual perusal of the news will inform you that “What you see isn’t, in fact, what is! Listen to our [fill-in-the-blank] theory!” Political theories and social theories, medical theories and philosophical theories, religious theories and literary theories inundate us. Some of them are good. Many of them are just plain awful.

In a 1961 interview with Esquire magazine, William F. Buckley Jr. famously admitted, “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” That’s because Harvard is plagued by the Theories. 

Are you?

On June 5, 2025, the Supreme Court decided Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, a case about judicial standards for determining whether employment discrimination occurred, which favored or disadvantaged persons of different genders. What implications, if any, does this unanimous decision have for the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement?

DEI’s Momentum and Judicial Pushback

Central to the DEI agenda is the imperative to classify all persons under its control into racial, ethnic, or gender categories. These persons do not need to assent to their classifications. Indeed, they may find their most important identities elsewhere in religion, politics, social class, occupations, family structures, etc. No matter, the DEI bureaucracy will not classify them in those categories because the movement’s endgame is to divide groups into those underrepresented and, by logic, overrepresented. Doing so makes it easier to assert that the former are oppressed and the latter oppressors. No identification of current specific discrimination is necessary before DEI-based preferences are employed.

The DEI movement had, until recently, enormous success. Campuses, corporations, media, professional associations, foundations, art institutions, sports teams, and many other private groups subscribed to the DEI ideology and backed up that adherence with substantial funding and compulsory hiring practices. Dissenting from DEI could be professional suicide in many areas of American life.

DEI’s ultimate victory appeared when President Joe Biden signed, on his first day in office, an executive order titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Because of these orders, federal funding in many agencies, even for scientific research awards, suddenly became contingent on incorporating DEI goals.

Particularly affected were the expansive new federal Covid relief programs. Although it was obvious that all Americans could be infected during the pandemic, federal agencies used DEI concepts to distribute funds. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) declared that the Biden-Harris Administration was committed “to equity across the Department by removing systematic barriers and building a workforce more representative of America.” In 2021, the USDA would forgive 13,000 to 15,000 loans to non-white food producers at a potential cost of up to $4 billion. A subsequent USDA program excluded white farmers from disaster relief funds.

Some states began to follow “equity” redistribution efforts. In Minnesota, for example, Governor Tim Walz signed a law in May 2023 providing state grants to help “emerging” farmers make down payments to buy land. A wide range of persons were prioritized for the limited state appropriations available, unless they were able-bodied, heterosexual white men.

Furthermore, the racial and ethnic categories commonly used in DEI programs were “imprecise,” “overbroad,” and “arbitrary.”

As these DEI programs were embedded so widely in both the public and private sectors, at first, it seemed nothing could stop them. Then, conservative ligating agencies began court challenges. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Southeastern Legal Foundation won cases against USDA preferences in five federal district court cases all over the country. (Wynn v. Vilsack, Faust v. Vilsack, Miller v. Vilsack, Holman v. Vilsack, and Strickland v. Vilsack).

A powerful new anti-DEI judicial standard was articulated in another 2021 case (Vitolo v. Guzman), instigated by WILL, which ended the restaurant relief policy of deprioritizing white male owners. The Sixth Circuit held:

The government has a compelling interest in remedying past discrimination only when three criteria are met.

First, the policy must target a specific episode of past discrimination.

Second, there must be evidence of intentional discrimination in the past. Statistical disparities don’t cut it, although they may be used as evidence to establish intentional discrimination.

Third. The government must have had a hand in the past discrimination, it now seeks to remedy.

In 2024, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) challenged Minnesota’s land distribution race and sex priorities on equal protection grounds. Before a judicial decision could be reached, Governor Waltz quickly signed legislation removing the racial and sexual priorities.

All over the country, state requirements that their professional licensing boards reserve seats for women and minorities have been abandoned after litigation began. Race-based scholarships have been found illegal on dozens of campuses and organizations, such as the American Association of University Women, the American Chemical Society, Southwest Airlines, and McDonald’s, have altered them to become race-neutral. 

Of great consequence, decades-old federal preferential programs have not survived federal district court scrutiny in a flurry of decisions. The 8(a) program’s racial procurement preferences ended in 2023 when the Center for Individual Rights won in Ultima Service. Corporation v. US Departmentt of Agriculture. The Minority Business Development Administration gave up excluding white owned businesses from its services after the 2023 Nuziard v. Minority Business Development Agency decision. The Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program is now subject to a 2025 proposed consent decree between the Department of Justice and WILL that will end preferences for minority and women-owned firms competing for federal transportation grants for highways, airports, and seaports across the country. Significantly, none of the Covid-era or subsequent preferential business decisions were appealed by the Biden Department of Justice.

The most important rebuke to racial preferences ostensibly used to promote diversity was the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina (SFFA). The Court found that public and private campus use of such admission preferences violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Civil Rights Act’s Title VI, because “race may never be used as a ‘negative’ and … may not operate as a stereotype.” Furthermore, the racial and ethnic categories commonly used in DEI programs were “imprecise,” “overbroad,” and “arbitrary.”

Unusual Facts Create Rare Judicial Unanimity in Ames

Given the already emerging judicial opposition to racial classifications and preferences since 2021 in a variety of courts in multiple contexts, what impact will Ames have on the DEI movement? Like many Supreme Court decisions, Ames can be read very narrowly. The case specifically involved a judicial test developed after the Court’s 1973 McDonnell Douglas Corporation v. Green decision. How should courts consider employment discrimination claims when there were no clear-cut discriminatory rules involved, only contentious claims of discriminatory treatment? Marlean Ames had worked for the Ohio Youth Services agency since 2004 and was eventually promoted to program administrator. In 2019, she applied for a new upgraded management position, but her supervisors rejected her bid and then demoted her, resulting in a significant pay cut. There could be many reasons for that action, but the fact was that Ames was a heterosexual woman, and the promotion went to a lesbian, and her old job was awarded to a gay man. Sorting out the motives involved to see whether a Title VII violation had occurred would be complicated. The District Court and later the Sixth Circuit ruled in summary judgment that Ames did not even make a prima facie showing of discrimination. As a member of a majority group, she had an “additional burden” of not possessing the “background circumstances” which those courts and in four other circuits around the country thought were necessary to weigh the particular evidence. Those “circumstances” meant that it would only be a “rare employer” that would discriminate against members of a majority group, a perfect DEI sort of analysis. 

Justice Gorsuch, however, said during oral argument that the Supreme Court was in “radical agreement.” The background circumstances rule was struck down 9-0, and the case remanded for further consideration. So, did Ames resolve any broader questions? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the nine-page Court opinion stating that Title VII’s text “draws no distinction between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs. The provision focuses on individuals rather than groups.” Contrary to DEI theory, Congress had established the same protection for every individual without regard to the individual’s membership in a minority or majority group.

The Court’s affirmation that persons identified as part of a “majority” or a ” minority” group have the same civil rights is a very powerful simple rule that will eventually have an enormous impact.

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, concurred and took on the larger question of the legitimacy of making legally relevant group distinctions. That issue had decided the fate of group preferences in the lower courts in Vitolo, Ultima, Mid-America, and Nuziard. Citing SFFA. The concurring Justices reiterated that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Title VII cannot be applied differently to individuals depending on their assigned group membership. Furthermore, they challenged the whole concept of “majority” and “minority” groups. Women, they pointed out, are a statistical majority nationally, but a minority in some occupations and a majority in others. Racial groups may be minorities nationally, but may predominate in many localities. Further, racial categories are frequently overbroad because “American families have become increasingly multicultural and attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time.” They declared: “Thankfully today’s decision obviates the need for courts to engage in the ‘Sordid business of divvying us up by race or any other protected trait.’” Finally, citing from an America First Legal Foundation brief, the justices found that the “background circumstances” rule was “nonsensical” because “a number of this Nation’s largest and most prestigious employers have overtly discriminated against those they deem members of so-called majority groups. American employers have long been ‘obsessed’ with ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ initiatives and affirmative action plans.”

The Trump Administration’s three major anti-DEI executive orders (“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferences,” January 20, 2025; “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” January 21, 2025; and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” January 29, 2025) not only revoked old DEI policies, but commanded specific disabling actions by the federal bureaucracy. These initiatives may not survive another administration, but it is highly unlikely that the text of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act’s Titles VI, VII, and IX will change. Hundreds of DEI-based group preferences still exist in governmental and private programs all over the country. Federal courts, however, have established multiple precedents that all individuals are entitled to equal protection and that the group-based preferences on which DEI depends are illegal. The Ames decision is another important plank in that Constitutional foundation.

Since Ames is a very new decision, it has not yet been cited by other courts or other rule-making bodies. It is consistent, however, with the direction lower courts have been going since 2021 in striking down preferential programs. Furthermore, it is a unanimous SCOTUS decision, written by Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown, the most likely justice on the Court to dissent on civil rights issues. The Court’s affirmation that persons identified as part of a “majority” or a ” minority” group have the same civil rights is a very powerful, simple rule that will eventually have an enormous impact in a variety of settings and will undermine the group-based premises of all DEI programs.

Winston Churchill reflected that “no part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening.” A century later, the origins of the First World War should still interest us for what they reveal about the causes of great power conflict. An underappreciated insight from the Great War is that anxieties incited by imbalances among “rising” and “ruling” powers—popularized by Graham Allison as the “Thucydides Trap”—can overcome the stabilizing influence of shared interests, institutions, and ideologies. Too often depicted as an ideological clash of democracies against dictatorships, the Great War was in fact fought between liberal states with similar societies, interwoven interests, and cooperative habits. It was fratricide, not kulturkampf. Today, the example of the Great War should discourage us from reducing Sino-American tensions to ideological differences or assessing common interests and cooperation as a means of insurance against war. In 1914, a close-knit community of states succumbed to the anxieties that provoked a great power war. Washington and Beijing today have an even narrower margin to avoid Armageddon.

What Caused the Great War?

Graham Allison’s Destined for War examines (among other cases) prewar Anglo-German relations through the “Thucydides Trap,” a prism derived from the ancient Athenian’s dictum that “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” Allison subscribes to Thucydides’s judgement that fear, honor, and interest drive political action. His analysis suggests fear is an especially salient motive in fin de siècle geopolitics. He contends Germany “rose further to threaten British industrial and naval supremacy,” bringing disquiet to Whitehall. He cites British unease that the growing German navy seemed intended for, in the Admiralty’s assessment, “war with us.” In turn, he situates Germany in a worrisome position between an aggressive Russia and an anxious Britain. Specialists on the outbreak of the war, like David Herrmann, Christopher Clark, and T. G. Otte support Allison’s attention to fear, examining how fear of the future and fear of losing allies drove Europe towards conflict.

Allison omits ideology from his analysis, the most commonly invoked cause of the Great War, even by those who waged it. In 1913, General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War asserted Germany had been “robbed” of its natural boundaries, had a duty to “check the onrush of Slavism,” and that “war is a biological necessity.” David Lloyd George pronounced in 1914 that Britain fought to rescue Europe from “the straight road to barbarism” presented by “the Prussian military caste.” In 1917, Woodrow Wilson branded the Central Powers “autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.” Since then, Barbara Tuchman has portrayed Wilhelmine Germany as infatuated with militarism. Fritz Fischer and A. J. P. Taylor made the Great War the culmination of Germany’s nineteenth-century Sonderweg from liberalism to authoritarianism. Robert Kagan attributes Germany’s encirclement “solely” to its domineering Weltmacht, or pursuit of world power. Ideology also matters to scholars sympathetic to Germany. Whitehall Germanophobes for Christopher Clark, Tsarist grandiosity for Sean McMeekin, and death-obsessed modernism for Modris Ekstein shadow the road to war.

The World of Yesterday

In truth, however, pre-war Europe’s ideological differences were modest. Excepting republican France, fin de siècle Europe’s great powers were governed by combinations of crowned heads, elected legislatures, and written constitutions. Britain and Germany particularly resembled this norm—and one another. Kaiser Wilhelm was “Cousin Willy” to King George and doted on by his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Germany’s Reichstag and Britain’s parliament were elected on broad franchises. German ministers were not legislatively accountable like British ones, but both needed legislative assent to borrow, raise, and spend money. Independent judiciaries administered law in both. The 2.5 million union members in Germany and 2.2 million in Britain were easily the continent’s largest labor movements. Traditional elite vestiges, like the Prussian Landtag or the British Quarter Sessions and House of Lords, attracted resentment but, apart from the Lords, avoided reform. Social detente was attempted to ameliorate class conflict. Otto von Bismarck’s “Practical Christianity” established the world’s first social welfare regime and inspired the British Liberals’ “People’s Budget.” Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s (unsuccessful) Prussian Landtag reform aimed to mollify labor. More effectively, the British Liberals partnered with the fledgling Labor Party in the 1906 election.

“Nationalism” did not prevent continuous Anglo-German governmental consultation on security questions like warship construction. Anglo-German naval officers often fraternized at festivals like “Kiel Week.” Moreover, when war came, it was greeted with ambivalence. Most British unions reacted with an “industrial truce,” while Prime Minister H. H. Asquith secured parliamentary support for war only by dividing his Liberal Party. In Germany, unions held massive anti-war demonstrations before heeding Kaiser Wilhelm’s plea for inter-class Burgfrieden to defend Germany against reactionary Russia. Rather than reflect a cleavage between democratic and autocratic societies, Germany and Britain were comparable ones with similar concerns and interests. 

Fear encouraged the great powers to risk war in the present rather than risk a worse power balance subsequently.

What is more, pre-war Europe was cooperatively integrating. The overlapping interests of European finance actuated Norman Angell’s 1912 claim that “commercial interdependence” would “create a consciousness which must make for more efficient human cooperation, a better human society.” International agreements coordinated maritime law, telegraphy, railroads, postal services, and tariffs. Summits at the Hague regulated warfare in 1899 and 1907. International Protestant denominations convened a World Missionary Conference in 1910. Socialists had been gathering in the International since 1864. This international culture encouraged compromise during disturbances like the Boxer Rebellion, the Moroccan Crisis, and the Balkan Wars. Peace activists like Bertha von Suttner celebrated pacificism’s movement “from the hands of the so-called Apostles into the hands of the powerful and into the minds of the awakening democracy.” Not only “could Europe act together,” reflects historian John Keegan, it could “also think and feel together” through its cosmopolitan elite, middle-class pursuits like foreign tourism, and working-class socialist internationalism.

The Great War helped to rupture common bonds and stoke ideological animosity. Yet these are its consequences, not its causes. Anxieties over power imbalances drove Europe to war. Fears were inflamed by Germany’s rise, Britain’s decline, Germany’s sense of encirclement, and common dread of isolation during crisis. Every European power in 1914 worried that their strength would decline, and their counterparts’ increase in the future. Fear encouraged the great powers to risk war in the present rather than risk a worse power balance subsequently. Conflict occurred despite comity and commonality. 

Today’s World—and Its Risks

Americans have persistently understood and responded to the challenge posed by China’s rise in ideological terms. Many have looked to economic, social, and political convergence to soothe Sino-American tensions. Bill Clinton declared that “the best path of advancing freedom in China is for the United States to intensify and broaden its engagement.” George W. Bush predicted: “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.” In 2013, Nicholas Kristof decided Xi Jinping would “spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well.” Five years later, Mike Pence beseeched the CCP to “return to the spirit of reform and opening” so that Sino-American “prosperity and security grow together, not apart” once more.

Detractors of engagement with China also prioritize ideology. Andrei Lungu links CCP hostility to the United States to its 2013 “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” naming democratic “universalism” an existential threat. To Joseph Torigian, Xi believes in “continuous self-revolution” to avert liberalization. Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher advocate defining Sino-American relations as a “new cold war” because the old Cold War models how to “achieve victory without war” against a “capable, belligerent, Leninist regime.” Departing from Pence, Mike Pompeo in 2020 declared: “America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries.” Xi’s “bankrupt totalitarian ideology … informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism.” Invoking Richard Nixon’s words in 1967, Pompeo concluded, “the world cannot be safe until China changes.”

Shared values do not obviate clashing interests.

The problem with prioritizing ideology is not that sanguine hopes for engagement have been proven groundless. More problematic is conflating ideological antipathy as a driver of war. Ideological animosities compound the risks of war, and ideological mobilizations often sustain warring nations. Yet the Great War’s example underscores that anxieties induced by power imbalances are weightier drivers of war than ideology. Unless tempered by attention to these anxieties, expectations that “changing” China will make the world safe could prove just as groundless as engagement’s gauziest hopes. Sino-American war would be a serious risk even if China’s leaders commemorated Liu Xiaobo rather than Mao in Tiananmen Square.

Shared values do not obviate clashing interests. Britain and Germany could both submit to liberal governance at home and clash over what Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow termed Germany’s “place in the sun,” Britain’s desired naval preeminence, and their common concern in July 1914 not to lose allies by balking at conflict. Ideological hostility did not incite these clashes; security expectations commensurate with their power did. Autocratic or otherwise, China is likely to take positions on its borders, political economy, global military presence, and a litany of other areas conflicting with American positions. American naval navigation in the South China Sea, American leadership in new technologies, American influence at global institutions, and in the Indo-Pacific would produce friction with any Chinese regime. 

Nor do shared values remove fear. German liberals looked to Westminster’s example, but feared the Royal Navy’s threat to their commerce. Lloyd George and Churchill’s admiration for German social welfarism did not dispel the specter of Germany conquering France. Even if future Chinese statesmen respect the Gettysburg Address, American partners in East Asia will face a nearby superpower capable of threatening their security or detaching them from Washington. And will China feel any safer athwart American allies than Germany felt flanked by Britain’s Franco-Russian friends? Future compromises could depend on both states accepting less than what they perceive as necessary to their security. In such circumstances, both could imagine conflict in the present as less perilous than a weakened position in future crises.

Another insight from the Great War is to qualify our confidence in mutually self-interested cooperation. Lyle Goldstein advocates “cooperation spirals” between China and the United States. From modest confidence-building measures, Goldstein imagines these spirals culminating in agreements on issues like Taiwan. Recently, William Hurst and Peter Trubowitz proposed Sino-American military dialogue and a “code of conduct” in the South China Sea. Common interest in stability and measures to sustain it do not guarantee peace. Few states benefited more from the status quo than Britain and Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm’s tears, Moltke’s nervous collapse, and Edward Grey’s foreboding over “the lamps going out in Europe” suggest Anglo-German leaders apprehended war’s disasters. Europe’s great powers maintained many “cooperation spirals.” Britain and Germany compromised over Morocco in 1905 and 1911 and persistently discussed naval armaments. They even refrained from blows in a Bosnian crisis in 1908.

Ideological comity, shared interests, and cooperative habits are likelier to alleviate than exacerbate great power tensions. There is certainly no question that a less odious regime than the CCP would benefit China’s people. Yet heeding the example of 1914, we should not assume ideological rivalry primarily drives the risks of Sino-American war. Nor should we look to cooperative habits as insurance against conflict. Europe’s great powers were more ideologically aligned, institutionally integrated, and cooperative than China and the United States could become in the foreseeable future. Allison’s warning that power imbalances inflame anxieties, which cause wars, means catastrophe is never distant. Lacking Europe’s safeguards before 1914, catastrophe is potentially quite close today.

Andrew Doyle is a satirist and comedian, but also a serious writer, with a doctorate in Renaissance literature. His most famous creation, a stroke almost of genius, is the character of Titania McGrath, a young female woke fanatic who ascribes all the ills of the world, and many others besides, to the patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, sexism, capitalism, etc. Titania is a self-righteous, humourless, intolerant, ignorant know-all, whose opinions are uttered with ironclad self-confidence. It was so brilliantly done, and unfortunately so plausible, that at first some people wondered whether Titania McGrath was a real person.

I regret to say that this present book is not wholly satisfactory. It is too long and unfocused. The problem begins with the title and the sub-title: is the end of woke here and now, to come, or already complete? If the culture war went too far, how far was far enough, and who declared it in the first place? Answers to these questions are not forthcoming. 

Those who are woke or anti-anti-woke claim that in essence wokeism was always a phantasm of the political right, that it never really existed, that it was a straw man conjured up by conservatives to reverse the social changes principally associated with the 1960s: but this is rather as if communists or anti-anti-communists were to claim that communism had never existed.

Wokeism is, of course, somewhat diffuse, but that does not prove its non-existence. A cloud exists, even if it cannot be precisely delimited, and the absence of precise delimitation is no reason for not referring to it. There may be no logical connection between climate catastrophism, for example, and the theory of gender, which denies the biological reality of sexual dimorphism, but it is a sociological fact that certain logically disconnected beliefs nevertheless tend to cluster together. It is not surprising that Greta Thunberg went straight from climate change activist to pro-Palestinianism, the main connection between these causes being that of her psychological need.

Doyle provides a succinct characterization of woke ideology. It is, he says, “An ideology underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is produced in the context of linguistic and cultural frameworks, that knowledge is a construct of power wielded oppressively through language, and therefore censorship and other authoritarian measures are necessary to reshape society.”

This reshaping is, of course, to be carried out in the name of social justice, but entails the wielding of great, unopposed, and even totalitarian power by those who consider themselves enlightened—namely, the woke.

There is no central committee, or Lenin, of wokeism. It spreads not by overall design, but like an epidemic disease. Universities are foci of infection, and just as epidemics spare certain parts of the population, relatively speaking, so wokeism is like the measles of the educated. It is precisely because there are now so many of them that it affects every level from subeditor to government minister. 

It is an awkward fact, seldom acknowledged, that the great majority of great art, including literature, has been produced under conditions of censorship. 

Doyle is convinced that wokeism is in its death throes. He might be right, but I am not convinced. The whirligig of time brings in his revenges, and no political victory is final. Certainly, the election of Donald Trump was a severe blow to wokeism, but he will not be president forever, and if his presidency should end in disaster, whether caused by him or not, a president of a very different stripe might be elected. If so, some form of wokeism might be resuscitated (we have already seen Zohran Mamdani chosen as Democratic candidate for the mayoralty of New York). Like the reports of Mark Twain’s death, those of the death of wokeism might well be exaggerated—albeit Mark Twain did eventually die. 

The author does not explain why he thinks that wokeism is in its last throes, other than the election of Trump. Is it collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and is it its evident intellectual absurdities that will bury it?

An important question that the author does not address is whether wokeism has advanced as far as it has because of the opportunism or careerism of its supporters, or because of their true beliefs. Are the woke cynics or true believers? The two possibilities are not absolutely opposed because even opportunists may come truly to believe whatever doctrine suits their career. Most people, after all, are not out-and-out scoundrels, and few openly pursue their own interests by the conscious propagation of lies. Thus, they come in time to see the lies necessary for their personal advancement as abstract truths. 

I suspect also that we have raised a generation of educated people who believe that any difference in outcomes between identifiable groups of people can only be accounted for by prejudice and illicit discrimination. If they believe this, they will remain susceptible to the siren song of wokeism for years to come. Thus, any dismantling of the bureaucratic apparatus inspired by absurd doctrines might prove only temporary.

There is much in this book about the arcana of the disputes between feminists and the transsexual lobby, and between the latter and homosexuals, which I think will not interest most readers. What future generations (if there are any) will make of the energy expended on questions raised by transsexualism in societies that face so many serious threats, economic, political, and strategic, I hesitate to predict. Perhaps the expenditure of such energy is best thought of as a displacement activity, like that of a mouse that washes its paws when confronted by a cat. We create problems for ourselves in order to avoid other problems. 

Certainly, it is more difficult to avoid wokeness than might at first appear. The woke ideology, or sensibility, is inherently polarising and easily calls forth a mirror image of itself. The French television satirist, Cyril Hanouna, who has made a career of mocking woke sentiments, and who is therefore as dependent on the continuation of wokeism as Ibram X. Kendi, said, “I will defend all that is anti-woke,” as if any counterclaim to a false claim must therefore itself be true. And there is a temptation to respond to the 1619 Project by the elaboration of an official history equal and opposite to it, with an equal desire that it should be imposed. 

There is a certain lack of subtlety in the author’s argumentation. In a chapter titled Strangled Muses, he says that woke censorship has strangled artistic expression, or at least crowded out all that is not woke, and I am in sympathy with this view. It is certainly true that publishers, for example, seem to demand wokeness even, or perhaps especially, for books for young children. The curators of museums now badger visitors with woke sentiments, and drag them into the labels of exhibits, bleeding, kicking, and screaming, as it were. On a recent visit to the British Museum, I noticed the gay pride, not the British, flag fluttering from the flagpole. Homosexuality has become a love that dare not dare not speak its name. 

Woke censorship strangles art in a peculiarly unpleasant and dangerous way, like North Korea’s, for it not only proscribes, it prescribes.

But it does not follow from the fact that woke censorship strangles artistic expression that all censorship does so. On the contrary, it is an awkward fact, seldom acknowledged, that the great majority of great art, including literature, has been produced under conditions of censorship. This does not by itself justify censorship, of course, for freedom is for freedom’s sake, not for great art’s sake. The end of society as a whole, moreover, is not only to produce great art.

But it is true that woke censorship strangles art in a peculiarly unpleasant and dangerous way, like North Korea’s, for it not only proscribes, it prescribes. Prescriptive censorship—the demand not only that some things must not be said, but that some things must be said—is the worst kind of censorship known. It leads not only to tedium, but to a sense of violence being done to one’s mind, because the things that must be said, and cannot be denied, are usually gross and obvious falsehoods. To be forced to accept and repeat falsehoods is worse than being merely prohibited from saying something. 

This brings us to the question, also not discussed in this book, though obviously germane to it, of self-censorship. The anti-woke now talk of self-censorship as if it were self-evidently undesirable. The most minimal reflection will, or should, demonstrate that this is not so (here I assume that other people’s minds are like mine). It is perfectly obvious that one should not always say the first thing that comes into one’s head—the world is not a psychoanalyst’s couch—and that there are many times when certain truths should not be uttered. The way to be a bore, said Voltaire, is to say everything; the way to be a boor is to say the first thing that comes into one’s head. Nor does it follow from the fact that one is permitted to say x that one should say x, or that it is wrong to refrain from saying x. 

There are difficult questions concerning publicly funded cultural institutions, which are subject to capture by woke ideology, that this book passes by. Of course, a purist might say that there should be no such institutions, that all should be privately funded, but this seems to me a counsel of ideology rather than of perfection. Besides, there will always be public monuments. 

There is the problem, however, that the very rich of today, for one reason or another, do not appear to have the discrimination necessary to create worthwhile cultural institutions (I speak gross modo). But who, on the other hand, is to decide what is to be publicly subsidised, and on what grounds? Is it to be by show of hands and popularity, in which case the lowest common denominator will usually win? Or is it to be by direction of the cognoscenti, a knowledgeable elite that sets itself up in distinction to the hoi polloi, that as we have seen, is susceptible to extreme ideological capture? 

The greatest harm done by wokeism is its destruction of cultural unselfconsciousness and its transformation of so many of us into ideologists or counter-ideologists. Henry Clay Frick, for example, did not have to agonise over what great art was, or under what conditions it was produced; he collected it, to the great benefit of New Yorkers and others. And this was true, pace the multiculturalists who complain of Eurocentrism, of the collectors of non-European art.

The author is not over-optimistic about a post-woke world. He says, “A happy ending is out of the question, but perhaps we might settle for a tolerable one”: that is to say, a world in which ignorant (and ideologised) armies do not clash by night.

Death came to Edgar Allan Poe much as it had to the doomed characters who haunted his tales of the grotesque: strangely, symbolically, and shrouded in ambiguity. It is fitting that we should begin there, in that Baltimore setting where the mystery still clings like fog to the facts. “The subject [of Poe’s death] is famously fraught,” writes Richard Kopley. Within that careful academic phrase lies the whole terrible admission of our inability to grasp the ultimate meaning of a man who lived always at the edge of meaning itself.

Kopley, distinguished professor emeritus at Penn State DuBois, has given us Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, a monumental biography spanning 714 pages, nearly a quarter of them devoted to endnotes, as if even these might contain buried clues. The final details, however, are as enigmatic and horrible as Poe’s greatest stories.

Poe died on October 7, 1840, at forty years old, that fatal age when a man’s devils either claim him or release their hold forever. On September 26, he had parted company with two fellow writers, John M. Daniel and John R. Thompson, reportedly in “high spirits.” At half past nine that evening, he encountered Dr. John F. Carter; then he dined with relations who claimed he was sober when midnight struck, and he took his leave. Next, the steamboat at four in the morning carried him into the void.

“At this point, on board the vessel,” Kopley says, “Poe needed someone with him—a friend and protector, someone who would watch out for him. He should not have been alone.” But alone he was, just as in many ways he had ever been. “We lose sight of Poe for several days,” Kopley writes. “There is uncertainty; there is mystery.” Poe, in his last hours, lived out the genre he had perfected, stepping across that threshold between the teller and the told.

What followed seems like a collaboration between Poe and his inner demons. Kopley’s chronology staggers under the weight of conflicting testimonies, but a recognizable plot emerges: On October 3, witnesses beheld a man stupefied and struggling, stripped of his clothes like the victim of theft, semiconscious and delirious. The hospital received him in the grip of apparent mania. Tranquilized, he surfaced briefly into consciousness only to speak incoherently to his doctor, his mind already half-departed. The vigil lasted four days, his condition spiraling downward until October 7 brought his last words: “Lord help my poor soul.”

Here, Kopley offers his most penetrating observation: “For years, Poe had integrated his life in his work—perhaps now, at the end, Poe was integrating his work in his life.” This is a creative way of saying what every astute reader of Poe already knows: that the boundary between the man and his creations had long since dissolved, that he had written himself into existence as surely as he had written his characters, and that his demise was simply the conclusive revision of a text he had been composing his entire career.

Poe represents a peculiar Southern type who wears the mask of gentility while something altogether more desperate writhes beneath: Andrew Jackson with his dueling pistols, Jesse James with his bank robberies that were somehow rituals of honor, Doc Holliday coughing blood into his cards, Faulkner drowning his demons in bourbon and prose, Walker Percy stalking purpose through the ruins of Christendom. These figures carried a distinct burden: the knowledge that civilization is a thin veneer, that beneath the courtly manners and code of honor lies an abyss that no amount of breeding can fill. They were refined men who peered into the darkness and found it looking back at them.

Poe’s origins, however, were far from privileged, despite the education he would later receive. Born in Boston to thespian parents—his mother a gifted actress, his father considerably less talented—Poe was orphaned at the age of three. He was subsequently raised by John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant who provided him with a gentleman’s education but never legally adopted him.

The horrible chaos that pulses through Poe’s work demanded of him the most laborious plotting and organization; they are creatures of deliberate design even as they mime disorder.

Poe’s academic promise was evident during his time at the University of Virginia, where he distinguished himself scholastically. However, financial troubles—stemming from his complicated relationship with his foster father—forced him to leave before completing his studies. The boy who had been raised in comfort but never security found himself back in Boston, the city of his birth and first exile, enlisting in the Army while his pen began to earn modest victories. Even then, as success beckoned however faintly, his relationship with Allan crumbled, one of many such collapses that would define his life.

For a man who passed away at forty, there is much to recount: the War of 1812, which impacted his early years, and the development of a young republic as he shaped his own identity. But the essential pattern was established early and never varied: death as his constant companion, loss as his most faithful muse. The toll call reads like a sad litany: not merely his parents in those first difficult years, but Jane Stanard, the young woman who awakened his poetic sensibilities, and then his older brother William, claimed by the same consumption that had taken his mother. But it was the passing of Virginia Clemm Poe that broke something in him beyond repair.

She had been both his wife and first cousin. Kopley highlights the much-discussed, troubling detail: “The printed document for the marriage bond stated that the bride was twenty-one years old, but she was actually thirteen.” Poe himself was twenty-six. For just over a decade, they lived as man and wife, until tuberculosis claimed her, too. After Virginia’s death, his drinking grew worse, his melancholy deepened, and the genius who had written so eloquently of premature burial began to live as if he had been buried alive himself.

We may think we know Poe from our schooldays. We can recall, if not recite, “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells.” We remember the fiction that made us shiver: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Yet Kopley’s book inspired this reviewer to return to these familiar texts with adult eyes, and the shock of recognition was profound. What seemed merely odd during my youth appeared far more disturbing to the middle-aged me: the work of a suffering mind that had stared too long into the fundamental dread of existence and found there not chaos but a sickening order, not meaninglessness but a meaning too precise and pitiless to bear.

This claim may appear at odds with an earlier statement, since describing a sickening order and a meaning too precise and pitiless to bear seems to conflict with the claim that civilization is only a thin veneer concealing an abyss no breeding can fill. One vision presents the universe as grimly systematic, bound by terrifying determinism; the other suggests chaos, the void, nothingness itself. Yet in Poe, these are not opposites but twins, for the abyss reveals itself as sickening order, and both chaos and cruel systems alike serve as wellsprings of dread. The horrible chaos that pulses through Poe’s work demanded of him the most laborious plotting and organization; they are creatures of deliberate design even as they mime disorder.

Take Poe’s “The Visionary,” which Kopley dubs “a rich tale, comprising two sections.” Here, Poe shows civilization as a mask of elegance and ritual stretched thin over the abyss of despair and doom. The Marchesa Bianca (so named in the original version of the story) moves through Venetian nobility with grace, but her beauty and station are veils drawn over quiet suffering, emotional burial, and death’s approach. Her bond with the mysterious rescuer (aesthete and fatalist) unfolds not in open speech but through silent signs, missed moments, and a final meeting as formal as it is fatal.

The adorned setting—palaces, canals, ornaments—only deepens the mockery of human artifice before a universe ruled by merciless precision. The rescuer’s death by poison is no random despair but a calculated surrender to a fate he has long foreseen. His meeting with the Marchesa bears the weight of tragic inevitability, doomed not by chance but by the very architecture of Poe’s world, one where beauty, longing, and death are chained by inescapable, pitiless order. Beneath culture’s illusion lies decay’s certainty. The story thus works a double horror: civilization as brittle pretense, and the universe as a stage whose script was written before the curtain rose.

Kopley’s research is formidable. He’s assembled a vast chorus of primary sources, weaving quotations in and out of his narrative with such relentless thoroughness that his own voice sometimes disappears entirely beneath the accumulated testimony of witnesses, critics, and correspondents. His is scholarship by accretion, truth by documentary saturation, as if the sheer weight of evidence might pin down a man who spent his life eluding definition.

Yet perhaps this method is fitting for Poe, who was always more echo than substance, more shadow than flesh—a riddle best understood through the voices of others, the traces he left in letters and reviews, as well as the memories of those who knew him briefly and incompletely.

On June 14, protesters gathered in cities across the country under a bold banner: “No Kings.” They marched again under that same cry two weeks later, and rallied again in some cities on July 4. The slogan is intended as a rebuke to what they perceive as a creeping authoritarianism in American politics, particularly directed at President Trump, whose critics accuse him of cultivating a “regal presidency.” Whatever the merits of those charges may be, the imagery accompanying these protests—mannequin heads in French wigs, toy guillotines, and revolutionary theater—evokes not America in 1776, but France in 1793.

It’s powerful symbolism, but the progressive Left has chosen the wrong revolution to celebrate. On July 4, 1776, America did indeed declare, in effect, “No Kings.” But the revolution that followed lacked the radical aims of the later Jacobins. Our Founders were altogether more restrained and philosophical, and therefore their project has been far more enduring. They may have fought a war to defend their rights, but unlike the French Revolution, they never let loose violence and terror, which upended the social order altogether.

In part, the Founders’ moderation was a consequence of their deep-rootedness in the political thought of John Locke. The Englishman, writing almost a century before the American Revolution, held that the government’s sole purpose is to protect pre-existing natural rights: life, liberty, and property. When the government fails to do so, citizens have not only the right but the duty to withdraw their consent. The Declaration of Independence echoes this logic precisely: governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and when they become destructive of those rights, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

That is a protest against tyranny—but a protest grounded in order and principle, not chaos.

The current “No Kings” movement borrows more heavily from the French model than Anglo-American sources. In their Revolution, sovereignty was not a means of protecting rights, but of redefining them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the “general will” replaced individual conscience with collective conformity. The result, infamously, was not ordered liberty but the Reign of Terror—the new regime devoured its own children in the name of the people. Under Maximilien Robespierre, the “general will” justified mass executions of anyone who disagreed, often without trial.

John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau both began with the premise that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but their paths diverged sharply from there. Locke believed that individuals possess natural rights—life, liberty, and property—that exist prior to government and must be protected by it. Rousseau, by contrast, held that rights are shaped and defined by the collective, and that true freedom comes only through submission to the “general will.” Where Locke saw the social contract as a safeguard for individual liberty, Rousseau saw it as a tool to forge civic unity, even at the expense of dissent. The result was two starkly different visions of freedom: one rooted in restraint, the other in control.

We still see echoes of this divergence in American politics today. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked, “I believe in our collective conscience. So, I don’t have any master plan, but I believe that the people will show me the way.” That sentiment may sound democratic in passing, but it reflects the Rousseauian idea that legitimacy flows not from principle or process, but from the mood of the crowd. Liberty is not secured by intuition or collective conscience—laws, institutions, and limits on power secure it. Unlike Rousseau and his statist heirs, our Founders understood that freedom cannot simply be redefined by a simple majority.

America’s revolution was different because it did not just reject kings—it also rejected mobs. It chose a structure of liberty, not a spectacle of rage.

Today’s protestors may not call for literal guillotines, but their chosen symbols suggest a comfort with revolutionary excess. A movement claiming to resist authoritarianism ought to look more carefully in the mirror. In recent years, many of the same voices decrying executive power as “anti-democratic” had little objection when left-of-center Presidents Obama and Biden stretched that power in service of their own goals. The issue seems less about defending democracy than about discrediting any outcome or leader they happen to dislike. And that’s precisely the kind of arbitrary rule the American founders revolted against.

This is not to say that concern over concentrated executive power is unfounded. Conservatives raised similar alarms during the Obama years, just as progressives now object to Trump’s rhetoric. But what’s missing in today’s movement is consistency and humility.

In his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public, former CIA analyst Martin Gurri describes the rise of “Homo informaticus,” a hyper-connected citizenry whose first reflex is to negate. Armed with smartphones and social platforms, the public now wields a decentralized “no-power” that can topple reputations or derail policy within hours. Yet the angered mob rarely coalesces around durable, constructive programs. “Any untoward event,” Gurri warns, “can draw a networked public into the streets, calling for blood.”

The “No Kings” rallies exemplify that pattern: they film toy guillotines, place guillotines on signs and shirts, and lampoon an imperial presidency but offer no better architecture to replace it. In other words, twenty-first-century mobs achieve Rousseau’s instantaneous unanimity without enduring Rousseau’s committees of public safety; they magnify grievance while remaining institutionally weightless. Unless channeled by structural guardrails—such as the ballots, bicameralism, and federalism prized by our Madisonian system—this digital negation risks repeating the French cycle of demolition without design.

History offers a cautionary preview: two late-eighteenth-century revolutions unleashed popular fury, yet only one translated it into lasting liberty. The American Revolution, though born of conflict, was fundamentally constructive. It produced a written constitution, institutional checks and balances, and a governing structure designed to preserve liberty by limiting power. The French Revolution, by contrast, tore down institutions without building durable replacements. In place of monarchy, it elevated committees, cults, and mobs—all in the name of virtue and the people. The American Founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to establish a republic of laws. The Jacobins demanded blood to purify a society of enemies. One gave rise to ordered liberty. The other ended in the guillotine.

The genius of the American Revolution is that it said “No Kings” and “No Committees of Public Safety.” It distrusted concentrated power of every kind, placing checks and balances between the branches of government, and between the government and the people. That is why July 4 celebrates not just rebellion, but constitutionalism—a nation of laws, not of men.

It is fair, even noble, to oppose executive overreach. But the test of a protest movement is not only what it resists, but what it proposes in its place. The founders did not simply reject monarchy; they established a durable republic founded on natural rights and limited government.

If today’s “No Kings” movement wants to honor that legacy, it might revisit the source. Begin not with Rousseau and Robespierre, but with Locke and Madison—men who knew that liberty depends not on “general will,” but on ordered liberty.

The road of history is fraught with political movements driven by passion, unmoored from principle, that tended to crown tyrants. From Alcibiades, the self-serving populist of Athenian democracy, to Napoleon, to Fidel Castro, the crowd’s will has too often paved the road to centralized, unchecked power. America’s revolution was different because it did not just reject kings—it also rejected mobs. It chose a structure of liberty, not a spectacle of rage.

If we are serious about preventing either thrones or mobs, Congress could begin by reclaiming the authorities it has lazily ceded. Require explicit re-authorization of national emergencies after 90 days; regulate trade through Congressional action; mandate legislative approval for any regulation with a multi-billion-dollar impact; tighten the War Powers Resolution to force an up-or-down vote before extended deployments. Such acts would not suffocate executive energy, but they would re-anchor it to popular consent expressed through deliberation rather than acclamation—a thoroughly Locke-and-Madison remedy for twenty-first-century anxieties. That legacy is worth defending—not with guillotines, but with guardrails on governmental power.