Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

After almost five years of on-and-off production and an extensive trial by tabloid, Alec Baldwin’s infamous Western epic Rust finally premiered this month. It’s the story of a tragic death, where a faulty gun kills an innocent bystander, setting off a saga of sin, grief, and atonement as the culprit—the murderer?—plays out his shoddy hand in a high-profile clash with the law. This isn’t just the plot of the film, however, but the real-world tragedy that happened behind the scenes. 

If you know one thing about this film, it’s that cinematographer Halyna Hutchins—a wife, a mother, and by all accounts a dedicated and earnest artist—was shot and killed when Baldwin’s prop revolver misfired on October 21, 2021. That’s about the most definitive thing one can say about the events of that day: Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter charges were quickly dropped after a late filing in 2023; a subsequent grand jury indictment was dismissed with prejudice in 2024; and while Hutchins’ family settled an (undisclosed) wrongful death claim in 2022, civil cases between the family, Baldwin, and other members of the crew who interacted with the gun that day remain ongoing. In a case where intent is obviously absent and where all parties are reluctant to either cast or accept blame, the full truth of legal culpability, if it exists, will likely remain a mystery. 

But that doesn’t mean we can’t speak confidently on morality. 

Rust stands firmly in the tradition of the great American Western, a genre in which the actions of morally grey antiheroes come together in a firm moral code. From The Searchers to Unforgiven, every iconic hero, vigilante, or outlaw teaches us that no matter your intent, killing leaves an indelible mark on a man. Yet it’s often a brutal world or an unjust law that forces him to reconcile his dark nature with his good conscience in the first place. As Baldwin’s own tale plays out in an undignified opera in the press, it’s poetically tragic that this film should offer a path of conscience, so that all parties involved may have a chance at peace. 

Rust takes place in the waning days of the Wild West. It’s 1882, the law has finally come to the burgeoning frontier town of Hayesville, Wyoming, where thirteen-year-old Lucas (Patrick McDermott) is raising his younger brother Jacob alone after their mother succumbed to illness and their father killed himself from grief. Still grieving himself, Lucas is nevertheless saddled with adult responsibilities—tending the farm, serving as both caregiver and provider—but when another boy bullies his brother, his wilful youth wins out. He beats the boy to a pulp and makes an enemy of his victim’s surly father. 

Since the father is now out a farmhand, he plans to take Lucas back to his ranch to work off the debt, indifferent to what that means for Jacob. “I’ll come collect you in the morning,” he says, though Lucas has no intention of going. So when Lucas takes his faulty gun and crests a steep hill the next morning to fire a shot at a wolf seen stalking their livestock, we’re left wondering whether he missed or hit his target. The beaten boy’s father drops from his horse. 

The law quickly and callously finds Lucas guilty of premeditated murder, sentencing him to hang despite his “age and circumstances.” He believes it’s morally abhorrent to flee and leave his brother behind, but he reluctantly runs when his estranged grandfather, legendary outlaw Harland Rust (Baldwin), comes to spring him from the slammer. The story unfolds as the reluctant duo rebuild a relationship from the ashes of their shattered family, outrunning a villainous bounty hunter, and a brooding US Marshal on their way to freedom in Mexico. 

Hutchins’ cinematography carries much of the film, capturing the desaturated landscape of a dying Western frontier and the shadowy silhouettes of the even shadier characters within it. Even so, Rust is not a stand-out Western, mostly due to lazy writing, as character dynamics go largely unexplored. 

From this point forward, there will be spoilers. 

Why is Rust so feared and revered in the West? We learn that he burnt down the banks that took his farm and that he abandoned his daughter (Lucas’ mother) after the rest of his family died. But beyond a vague sense of regret, we’re told very little about the moral transformation that led him back to Lucas. Why frame the story around a suspensefully open-ended murder/accident only to abandon that storyline, never folding it back into the plot? We’re told to presume it was an accident, but we never really find out whether Lucas is a murderer or a victim of a cold, utilitarian system. With a schmaltzy happy ending that sees Lucas and Jacob reunited, we’re not even expected to thoughtfully speculate. At the end, Rust, who is an admitted murderer, gives himself up to the marshal on condition that Lucas be permitted to cross the border. But why is a supposed man of the law so easily convinced to let the boy walk free? He’s gruff and talks in morally ambivalent platitudes—so we’re just expected to believe he’s painfully disillusioned with his role as a faceless enforcer of heartless laws. 

The world today is just as cruel as it was in the West. The brutality of the frontier is but a metaphorical complement to human nature, a timeless fixture of the world anywhere humans inhabit it.

Rust is filled with so many nods to cowboy classics, however, it’s clear what filmmakers were trying to do, even if the execution was less than stellar. Baldwin, who co-wrote the script, said he found inspiration in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven, the story of a retired outlaw trying to live a peaceful life before his conscience, violent proclivities, and a merciless world pull him back to his old ways. We see implicit nods to The Searchers, not just in the vengeance-turned-redemption arc of an ex-Confederate trying to save his niece from her Comanche kidnappers, but in the iconic cinematography where darkened interiors open to vibrant outdoor backdrops, drawing a stark contrast between wilderness and civilization, and our own dark natures lurking subtly within the frame. Naturally, we also see echoes of Shane, in which the most classic line of the genre captures an ethos that has defined nearly every Western in the 75 years since: “There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks.” In the vein of these films, it’s possible to fill in the blanks. 

At the end of the day, Rust and Lucas are both killers—directly or indirectly, “right or wrong”—grappling with the pain they’ve both received and inflicted in an unforgiving world. Rust knows it, he accepts it, and to his shame, knows nothing can change it. He craves forgiveness, but doesn’t believe he deserves it; he doesn’t even know of whom he might ask it. The only absolution a man like Rust can have is to sacrifice himself to the hangman so that Lucas may have a chance to lead a good life. None of this depth is clearly articulated, but two solid performances between Baldwin and McDermott in Hutchins’ moodily lit fireside chat scenes are enough to bring the sentiment through. 

The other great theme of the Western genre—the tension between unjust laws and true justice in a brutal world—comes through in Lucas. The boy can’t run from whatever feelings of shame and culpability may materialize as they eventually did for his grandfather. He may have escaped the noose, but he is still a killer; he will have to live with it, alienated from his home as an outlaw in Mexico. Though Lucas can’t run from his conscience forever, he can and must run from the law. And he simply doesn’t have the luxury to process his shame in real time. 

In an earlier time in the West, his case would have likely been handled differently. We hear fond talk of these times throughout the film: how earlier generations lived more rugged, how they necessarily had to impose a stricter code on themselves, and thus personally uphold it against others—a rudimentary, but in many ways more noble, form of civilization. “The only order that exists in this world is the order we impose,” the marshal says early on about his role as a lawman, yet to realize his eventual compassion towards Lucas is the true hallmark of man-made order in a system of far-removed laws.

In Rust’s generation, perhaps this feud would have been carried on by Lucas and his victim’s son, fading into frontier lore. Perhaps a local elder would have seen the folly of an eye for an eye and told them to squash it. Or perhaps, with no authority to appeal to on the unsettled plains, it would simply have been forgotten as the way of the world. But for better or worse, with the railroad comes the cold, exacting, and impersonal force of the law. Is it right, given the circumstances, that the boy should hang? Or does the law, failing to grasp the ways of the world and people it governs, only perpetuate injustice? 

The film seems to suggest the latter, a nostalgia for a moral code superior to pure law. It’s this which allows man to fully unchain his conscience from his desperate circumstances, as Rust apparently discovered as an outlaw. But it’s this theme that goes sadly unexplored for Lucas. Free in Mexico, he ought to reflect on his sins, the boy he himself left without a father; no one will ever really have a happy ending. 

It’s the hallmark of any great Western to show that while the law may enact justice by its own standard, it cannot induce feelings of shame, it cannot offer absolution, and it most certainly cannot offer the most deeply personal interaction of all: forgiveness. These are what truly define a man’s life, and a good law conforms to a man’s own impulses here. But when the standards of law are off from the nature they should conform to, then he has no choice but to flee, even when his conscience bristles. 

You can say the charges against Baldwin were dropped because he’s Hollywood royalty, and a liberal elite in good standing with America’s cultural arbiters. Or, you can say that’s the only reason the charges were brought in the first place. It doesn’t matter—Baldwin is a killer, and nothing can change that. But has this saga of never-ending court cases, where Baldwin has degraded himself on a press tour of deflection, frenzied self-defense, and shameless victim posturing, helped anyone find justice, let alone peace? 

The normal human reaction to killing, even among the outlaws of the West, is to feel a deep sense of shame, to grieve those whom you’ve harmed along with the piece of the soul you’ve lost, and to seek atonement and forgiveness. One ought to give Baldwin the grace, as a human being, to assume that he does feel this way. But in his own way, he was forced to flee the law in just as undignified a manner as Lucas. 

In our litigious world, where the law is often far from impartial, and the media hunts for every misstep publicly and in real time, Baldwin, too, lacked the luxury of speaking with the dignified shame of a human being who took the life of another. Earnest grief is an implication, shame a confession—anything not carefully filtered through lawyers and PR consultants is a potentially life-ending liability. After all, Baldwin, too, has a family to care for. 

That’s not to defend what he did. But despite legal technicalities, there is no punishment the law can provide that would remedy this tragic accident. Can we accept and atone for our gravest sins? Can we recognize the atonement of others and forgive them for the sins inflicted upon us? These are the only questions that matter, not a hair-width’s difference of finger placement on the trigger of a gun that should have never been loaded in the first place. 

In many ways, the world today is just as cruel as it was in the West. After all, the brutality of the frontier is but a metaphorical complement to human nature, a timeless fixture of the world anywhere humans inhabit it. There can be no happy ending for anyone involved: Baldwin will never get a fair shake in the public eye, and the Hutchins family certainly can never be made whole, no matter the legal or civil outcome. The only path forward is to accept that sin is sin, no matter the intent, and that it is a perpetually sinful world we live in. It’s a deeply personal journey of reflection that should not and cannot play out in public. But it’s the only way anyone has a chance at ever finding peace.

Is there a right-wing version of “woke”?

Earlier this week, Rod Dreher used the term “woke right” in a worthy essay for the Free Press warning against the emergence of a dangerously radical trend that inclines right-leaning young people toward overt racism and antisemitism.

Almost immediately, however, Dreher repented of his use of the term. He had not realized that it was also used by people like James Lindsay, Konstantin Kisin, and others to criticize his own political friends. He quickly clarified that all he meant to include in the category were “the new racialists and anti-Semites of the right, especially the very online right, who I regard as malicious would-be totalitarians.” Not National Conservatives, postliberals, or Matt Walsh. And definitely not J.D. Vance!

In Search of Woke

It’s certainly fine for Dreher to clarify his meaning, but it’s hard not to chuckle at the fact that he redefined the term simply to match his own prior assessment of who does and doesn’t seem to be a racist and a “malicious would-be totalitarian.”

The affair reveals a problem with the “woke right” discourse generally. Plenty of people seem to think there’s something there worth examining (even if they use different terminology), but most are just looking to find a new name to call a group of people they already dislike without having to undertake any broader assessment. While some, like Christian apologist Neil Shenvi, do seem genuinely interested in understanding a phenomenon, far more are merely looking to command an epithet. Instead of asking what is going on, they just ask who deserves my indignation.

If we focus on the phenomenon itself, we might find that the lines are less clear than Dreher suggests. “Woke” is a term that captures vague sentiments better than concrete meanings. It is also a phenomenon with several elements, which can then be organized in a number of different ways. And people may share certain qualities and tendencies, but not others. Dreher wants to boil it down to an essential characteristic that makes it easier to point a finger at some people without having to examine others that he’s already committed to. Others, like Lindsay perhaps, define it more broadly because they do want to point their finger at Dreher’s friends. For Dreher, the essence of woke is “racism” (possibly combined with a subjective assessment of malice). Others, though, could say it’s the use of critical methods. Or an oppressor/oppressed framework. Or its shutdown, bully tactics like cancel culture. Which is the defining woke value?

All of that is to say that there are significant problems with pretending “woke right” is an unambiguous category. There is, however, an interesting angle to the discourse that makes it worth pursuing. When applied to the left, “woke” has always evoked something beyond a set of political preferences, aims, or tactics. At its peak, at least, wokeness seemed to cut to the very being of its adherents. It seemed to define entirely their sense of self and their orientation to the social, ethical, and even spiritual order of the world. Thus, it has often appropriately been seen as having a quasi-religious character. The year 2020 saw public ceremonies with liturgies, confessions, creedal statements, etc. There was ecstatic emotionalism; a rigid and sometimes violent demand of conformity; a puritanical moralism that often accompanied a lack of basic personal morality and decency. Wokeness was an all-consuming Cause that gave people a sense of meaning that they had not found elsewhere in the world around them, which they believed to be evil beyond redemption.

Is there a similar tendency in pockets of the right? To treat their Cause not just as a worthy endeavor, but as existential? To believe that only in their Cause can they find personal meaning and, indeed, salvation? That was, according to the great political theorist Eric Voegelin, a key quality of modern ideology. And Voegelin may help enlighten us on the qualities of left-wing wokeness and the right-wing counterpart that so many have been trying to define.

Escape from the World

Somewhat controversially, Voegelin framed his critique of ideology in terms of its conceptual and historical linkage with the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. Regardless of how helpful the historical “gnostic” connection itself is, Voegelin’s use of it undoubtedly provides a powerful framework for understanding radical ideology—and it’s one that seems to have the “woke” phenomenon pegged.

Voegelin’s concept of gnostic political ideology is mostly associated with the utopian or semi-utopian end at which it aims—the attempt to “immanentize the eschaton,” in his memorable phrase.

But equally important—and particularly intriguing with wokeness in mind—is the way these ideologues confront the world in which they currently live and operate. All gnostic movements, he argued, start with a radical alienation from the actual order of the world as experienced, generally resulting from a sudden collapse of cultural and institutional authority. For the gnostic man, “the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape.”

This means the ideologue’s dissatisfaction is rooted in a belief in the complete “wickedness of the world” as it is experienced, rather than any flaw in himself or human nature. In contemporary terminology, he understands the world in terms of a “hegemonic” power that entirely imprisons the thoughts and actions of all except the few enlightened. It is thus something that must be entirely overcome and replaced, rather than something to be mitigated, sidelined, or worked through. In the modern context of political gnosticism, the structure of social order is so overpowering, that only a revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary?) movement can break through its spell.

This (dis)orientation of the human being to his moral context seems to capture the woke political phenomenon, which takes extreme forms of critical theory as its conceptual starting point. Racism, for instance, is redefined from being a personal fault to a “systemic” one that necessarily infuses all aspects of common life, even if no one is actually doing or saying directly racist things. In that sense, it is commanding—it infuses our reality so fully that even those who do not want to be racist and do not think themselves to be racist actually are. No one is capable of resisting its evil influence except those who have the “secret knowledge” (gnosis) and work to destroy it in favor of a different, equally closed system of values.

Many “alt-,” “dissident,” or “new” right thinkers also tend to speak in such terms. They often present the various maladies of the modern world not as discrete pathologies flowing from the flawed nature of human beings, but as closed, commanding systems—structures that trap modern men and warp their minds in unperceived ways.

The source of cultural renewal is precisely in this freedom of the human being to encounter, reflect on, and respond to his circumstances.

Consider the concepts and metaphors that are often deployed in online discourse. The “red” and “blue” pills of The Matrix offer the choice to continue to live in the false, constructed reality or to gain secret knowledge that reveals true reality; references to “the regime” (relying on a tortured reading of Aristotle) suggest that all societies are governed by a coherent and closed system of values backed by power, and that political conflict consists in titanic clashes over which closed system we shall adopt. Alt-right celebrity Curtis Yarvin speaks of “the cathedral,” and masculinity advocates use the “longhouse”—both architectural metaphors that suggest the horizon is utterly closed around us, except for those few who have escaped; everyone is unknowingly dominated by the system.

Most of these are revolving around the idea, also prevalent in more mainstream discourse, that “liberalism” (broadly construed to include classical and progressive forms) is a kind of essence that infuses our reality rather than a pattern of behavior or a set of concepts that—for both good and ill—have emerged in response to the Western experience. Thus, in the balance of partisan conflict hangs not only offices and policies, but our very state of being. If the hegemonic forces are not defeated and replaced, we are cut off from living the good life.

It seems to me that this belief—that the world as we experience it is utterly alien, all-powerful, and destructive of our ability to live a good life—does represent a kind of perverse common ground between some pockets of today’s right and the woke. Precisely how that vision manifests when it comes to race, “oppressor” categories, or precise political tactics are less essential questions. Both translate politics into a religious endeavor, with salvation depending on collective human action. It is not hard to see how such beliefs lead to rampant conspiracy-mongering, the impulse to rigorously police words and deeds, and the belief that political action ought to aim at a comprehensive control of private life and civil society, either by expanding government or by collective pressure campaigns. It also combines a rigid moralism when it comes to demands on others with a complete lack of self-reflection or self-restraint. Everything is permitted for me, since my Cause is just.

Whether or not such tendencies on the right amount to a “woke” right seems to me a trivial question of labels. But the mirror ideological approach is important and troubling.

The Freedom to Respond

This way of understanding the world has at its core a denial of human freedom—not freedom in a moralistic sense that demands everyone must be free to think or do this, that, or the other. Rather, the freedom being denied is the capacity human beings always have within them to respond to the world in which they operate in light of truths and traditions that may be widely denied. The imminent order in which we live—including social and political life—certainly has a powerful influence on the way we understand the world. We are historical beings who understand ourselves by engaging and reacting to the symbols of our time and place. But does the social and political framework around us entirely bind our moral and intellectual horizon?

Voegelin did not think so:

The spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate; [ ] on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. … No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order. (emphasis added)

The source of cultural renewal is in this freedom of the human being to encounter, reflect on, and respond to his circumstances drawing on alternative cultural resources that can never be fully abolished. It is precisely such a response which indirectly produces new cultural symbols.

Nothing can ultimately separate us from our ability to live in truth, and to critique and unmask the errors of the present age.

That passage quoted above also speaks to a potential counterargument. Since the right-wing figures under consideration are precisely pointing to some version of modernity and modern ideologies as the hegemonic power to be unmasked, it might be argued, they must be exempted from falling into Voegelin’s category. Left-wing wokeness, progressivism, and critical theory are indeed dangerous and powerful forces in the world. So if these are seen as the cause of the disorder, then the right is only “woke” to a very real and present problem—the same one Voegelin himself diagnosed.

There may be something to this: many of the right-wing figures under consideration are at least somewhat aware of the destruction that left-wing ideologies have unleashed on modern society. But that recognition does not prevent them from falling into the same patterns of thought. By treating these ideological forces as hegemonic and commanding, the right-wing ideologue signals his agreement on the basic, servile condition of the human person and his agreement on the power that the revolutionary thinks he possesses. Cultures are built not by tradition or reflection, but by the will to power.

Voegelin was very clear that the ideologue, no matter how successful his Cause may be, does not actually have the ability to accomplish the full transformation of human life he seeks.

The gnostic revolution has for its purpose a change in the nature of man and the establishment of a transfigured society. Since this program cannot be carried out in historical reality, gnostic revolutionaries must inevitably institutionalize their partial or total success in the existential struggle by a compromise with reality; and whatever emerges from this compromise—it will not be the transfigured world envisaged by gnostic symbolism.

Those who are attuned to the errors and danger of left-wing ideology must contend with an essential question: what exactly is the consequence of such ideologies? Did they truly succeed? Are we now morally and spiritually trapped in a world created by them? Are we “blue-pilled” or living in a “longhouse”? If so, then we must acknowledge that their advocates were correct in their assessment of the human condition—that the will to power is indeed the guiding principle of our existence. A reasonable response would be for the enlightened few to learn from and mimic the revolutionary’s course of action.

Alternatively, are we living in an order that has been disturbed, confused, and partially transformed thanks to the destructive but ultimately futile efforts of the ideologues? In this case, we should be reassured that—whatever the revolutionary may think—nothing can ultimately separate us from our ability to live in truth, and to critique and unmask the errors of the present age. The most dangerous roadblock to cultural renewal, then, would be to accept the false premises about the human condition that ideologues like Marx, Gramsci, or Evola preached. Ultimately, their way of thinking about human beings is far more destructive of a healthy culture than their political advocacy.

Certainly, not everyone on the new right falls into such an extreme “gnostic” attitude, but some of its more “dissident” figures do. And certain terms, assumptions, and rhetorical devices that reflect this basic orientation often make their way into mainstream right-of-center discourse. Coming up with a list of who qualifies as “woke right” seems less important than recognizing the ideological tendencies. In interesting and disturbed times like these, labels and partisan coalitions aren’t as important as clear thinking and self-reflection.

I have heard it said that attempts have been made at staging productions of Plato’s dialogues, but that all have invariably flopped. I can’t vouch for the truth of that claim, but I can believe it. Intellectually, of course, Plato is gripping. And yet, as great a lover of Plato as I am, I fear that even I would fall asleep watching a dramatic reenactment of the Republic. Not enough “action,” in the conventional sense.

But did you know that there’s a ripping good yarn contained in the texts known as Plato’s “letters”? Therein, and especially in the longest and most famous Seventh Letter, Plato writes autobiographically of his political entanglements with Dionysius the Younger, the dissolute young tyrant of Syracuse. By accepting the invitation of his longtime friend and pupil, Dion of Syracuse, to realize the ideal of philosophic rule made famous in the Republic, Plato, by his own account, inadvertently precipitated the unravelling of the Syracusan regime, which finally plunged the city into a brutal civil war. In the pages of Plato’s letters, we find Plato the teacher, the counselor, the ally, the statesman; intrigue and faction in the court of a tyrant; grand political hopes dashed as famous utopian dreams become living nightmares—it is a stunningly dramatic and dynamic portrait of Plato and his philosophy.

And yet the experience of picking up and trying to read Plato’s letters tends to disorient the modern reader. For one thing, the political dynamics and major players of fourth-century BC Sicily are not very well remembered, which can make Plato’s narrative hard to follow. And to make matters worse, the authenticity and provenance of these letters have been the subject of fierce debate for centuries, which raises questions regarding their philosophic, historiographical, and biographical value. Thus, even though the skeleton of the story they contain is probably true, Plato’s letters suffer from an obscurity out of all proportion with their inherent interest.

The task of excavating the story of Plato’s political misadventures in Syracuse, of bringing it to life for a general audience of modern readers, is extremely complex. It requires extensive knowledge of classical Greek history, politics, culture, and philosophy, the ability to judge and to synthesize the accounts of varied and often conflicting historical sources, and, rarest of all, the discernment and literary talent to provide an education in the relevant background without sacrificing liveliness of storytelling. It is a great credit to James Romm that he was up to that task. In Plato and the Tyrant, Romm weaves together the threads of history, philology, philosophy, and archaeology with a deftness and erudition only a true classicist could possess. Historical details are illustrated by images of ancient Syracusan coins, vase paintings, and Sicilian ruins, the significance of Plato’s word choices are explicated by etymological lessons on the Greek roots of English words, complex scholarly arguments over fine points of historiography are distilled and clarified with admirable brevity, and all the while the reader is borne along on a journey of great historical and human interest. One senses from reading Romm’s work how lucky his students must count themselves for having found their way into his classroom.

In the long history of the study of Plato, there has never been widespread agreement about what Plato thought or how he meant to communicate it. It is inevitable that, as a scholar of Plato, I should have my disagreements with Professor Romm’s approach to the Platonic letters and what he does with them—especially since my most recent work culminated in a monograph on the subject, containing my own new English translation of the Letters and original interpretive essay. Romm will have no trouble finding supporters on those points where I will pick nits or bones; for the most part, he sides with the majority of scholars against my dissenting views. In particular, by assessing five of the thirteen letters in the collection as authentic works of Plato and dismissing the remainder as spurious, he rejects my heterodox contention that the Letters is actually a unified, semi-fictional work of Platonic philosophy, a one-sided epistolary novel in thirteen, artfully crafted and purposefully arranged parts. In a way, Romm recognizes the possibility of what I propose: he sees Letters Three, Four, Seven, and Eight as “open letters,” of which the salutation to one or more addressees is more literary device than real indication of Plato’s intended readers. But if that’s true, why couldn’t all the letters—indeed, the “Letters” as a whole—have been intended for broader dissemination? Had Romm acknowledged Plato’s authorship of Letter Two, he would have seen the importance of the claim there that “it is not possible for things written not to be exposed”: Plato writes nothing without anticipating that it will be published. In fact, the question of why Plato wrote as he did is a pervasive theme of the Letters—fitting for a text that, by its very form, emphasizes Plato’s role as author far more than anything else he wrote.

Romm reduces Plato’s philosophic insight to his biographical circumstances. I believe that we do this to Plato at our own intellectual and cultural peril.

A first point I would make, then, is that we must be careful how we use the Letters. Romm mines the text for historical details of the story he wishes to tell, juxtaposing and triangulating with the versions given by later historians, biographers, and gossipmongers, to ascertain what “really happened” in Syracuse. But I would caution that even those Greek writers whom we now describe as “historians” were philosophers and teachers more intent on providing a profound education than on making a meticulous and comprehensive record of events. As for Plato’s activity in Syracuse, our primary source of information is Plato’s account in the Letters; details found in biographies written centuries later may, for all we know, have started as speculative rumors meant to fill gaps in Plato’s narrative. Just as the Peloponnesian War is not nearly so important an object of study in its own right as it is because a profound thinker, Thucydides, made it the canvas for his pedagogical masterpiece, the story of Plato in Syracuse, I would submit, should be of interest to us above all because Plato is its narrator.

But if Romm can interest a general audience in classics by bringing this Platonic drama to life—which I believe his book will and has—why rain on his parade by insisting that he has not adequately distinguished the forms and original purposes of his various classical sources? I would be less concerned about this if Romm had not taken on a weightier responsibility for his book than the recovery of a good story for the entertainment and edification of his readers. In his introduction, Romm recounts how the “spell” Plato had cast upon him as an undergraduate gradually lifted, how he had come to question Plato’s political philosophic wisdom, and how “the questions that first troubled [him] when the spell of Plato was broken” came to “trouble [him] even more when [he] came to the letters.” He articulates the possibility that Plato, the great moralist, wound up “collaborating with evil” in Syracuse, and that the Republic is meant to “obscure” his hypocrisy. He reports the famous judgment of Karl Popper that Plato’s Republic belongs to “the perennial attack on freedom and reason.” And he concludes his introduction by saying that his book will show us how “the wise can become more tyrannical by the company of tyrants.”

Romm thus suggests that Plato’s Syracusan story helps us to see a grave problem with Platonic philosophy, that we should not so much seek wisdom and understanding from the education Plato’s works provide as we should seek to learn an object lesson from them. We must not dodge this question. To put the matter bluntly, Plato’s political philosophy long predates, and so stands outside of, the liberal tradition upon which our civilization rests. If we have something of value to learn from Plato in our political moment, it will be no defense of liberalism per se—it will, in fact, appeal to pre-liberal and perhaps illiberal moral and political principles. This is not to say that Plato will counsel a break from liberalism. I, for one, see Platonic political philosophy pointing us to the preservation of liberal democracy through a reinvigoration of its noblest principles, guided by the Platonic virtue of moderation. Such a case can indeed be made on the basis of the Letters, where Plato repeatedly makes it clear—in letters Romm acknowledges as well as in some he athetizes—that he never condoned the wholesale substitution of one form of regime for another, especially by violent revolution. In this, Romm sees a reflection of Plato’s Sparta-philia, a longing for permanence and stability in a Greek world plagued by war, stasis, and moral decay. He thus reduces Plato’s philosophic insight to his biographical circumstances. I believe that we do this to Plato at our own intellectual and cultural peril.

I don’t have the space here to remedy the excessive vagueness of the foregoing claims and critiques regarding Plato’s contemporary relevance. I will instead limit myself to describing one substantive disagreement I have with Professor Romm’s reading of Plato’s Letters, indicating how our evaluation of Plato might hang on such a point.

Plato did not really believe in the possibility of philosophic rule as presented in the Republic, which means that Plato and Dion were on drastically different pages.

As messy and multipolar as the struggle for Syracuse became (elegantly clarified by Romm), Plato presents it as a battle between two factions: the tyrannical party of Dionysius and the anti-tyrannical party of Plato’s devoted acolyte, Dion. Throughout the Letters, Plato presents himself as having fundamentally, if moderately and contingently, supported Dion’s side in that conflict. Given the terms of Dion’s initial invitation to Plato, Romm naturally assumes that Plato hoped Dion might rule Syracuse as a philosopher king. This involves what I see as a critical error. Even though Dion himself is keen on the idea of bringing philosophic rule to Syracuse, Plato only ever represents him as having wished for Dionysius to be educated in philosophy for that purpose. It is surprising but undeniable upon reflection that Dion is never, in any of the Platonic letters, spoken of as having taken an interest in philosophic study himself. (Letter Ten shows how willing Plato was to endorse a view of philosophy among Dion’s circle that rested on a misapprehension of what the activity of philosophy is really like. Likewise, a careful study of Letter Eight shows that Plato and Dion do not have the same counsel for the Syracusans: Dion’s overly hopeful proposals must be compared with Plato’s much more practical, down-to-earth advice in Letter Seven.)

The Letters is about how Plato sought to present philosophy to the world, with the Republic as the centerpiece of his presentation. But even the Republic allows us to see that this presentation is steeped in paradox. Romm puzzles over the question of why Plato thinks the philosopher would return to politics, to “the cave,” after he has beheld the true world of the eternal “forms.” He fails to take note of the fact that, according to Plato’s Socrates, the philosophers have neither any obligation nor any desire to do so except in the ideal city he and his interlocutors have built in speech (cf. Letter Six). Only in that ideal city will the philosophers be compelled to administer the city as a just repayment for the regime’s cultivation of their philosophic natures. All this lends itself to the view that Plato did not really believe in the possibility of philosophic rule as presented in the Republic, which means that Plato and Dion were on drastically different pages. The distance that has grown between Plato and Dion by the time the latter is waging a war for Syracuse, which is made evident in Letter Four, is the fruit of Dion’s failure to grasp the meaning of Platonic philosophy.

In my book on the Letters, I share my own speculation as to why, if not to create philosophic rule, Plato went to Syracuse at all. In brief, I believe Plato’s literary project of defending philosophy in the wake of Socrates’s death achieved a kind of political success beyond even his own expectations, and that Dion’s zeal for philosophic rule put Plato in a bind. His decision to accept Dion’s invitation, as he makes clear in Letter Seven, had more to do with what the fallout would be for the reputation of Platonic philosophy if he should turn his back on this enthusiastic follower and benefactor than with anything he hoped to achieve politically in Syracuse. To be sure, that interpretation is itself up for debate. What is important for my purpose here is simply to emphasize that, unless we read the Letters closely as a work of Platonic political philosophy, we are prone to misunderstanding Plato’s intention and misjudging his character.

It must be said that Romm never really settles the question of whether the study of the Platonic letters issues in acquittal or condemnation of Plato. He comes back to it now and again—especially in his ninth chapter—indicating where a certain construal of the evidence might point to a harsher assessment of Plato’s thought and action than has been typical. But he tends to leave things at the level of suggestive “maybes” more than he draws conclusions or lays out a case of his own. If anything, the book ends with the suggestion that Plato stood above all for a government in which good rulers are constrained by good laws—a view with which I agree, and which I am glad Professor Romm has expressed. Yet I remain uncertain whether he has handled the matter in the most conscientious and responsible way. In his attempt to present the most entertaining and intriguing version of this tale, Romm often seems to seek out and present the theories that will most excite his audience. The possibility that Plato and Dion were lovers, which adds little to the substance of the story but to which Romm devotes considerable space, is probably the best example, but many other rumors and legends from sources of greatly varying reliability are sprinkled freely throughout the book. When Romm includes a vignette of lust, jealousy, and murder preserved by “Parthenius, a collector of salacious stories,” admitting that it is “impossible to confirm but too good not to tell,” he seems to describe what led him to include a great many of the episodes recounted in Plato and the Tyrant. Is it for this same reason that he has chosen to highlight the ways in which the story of Plato in Syracuse might be seen as evidence of Plato’s moral weakness or worse? Much as I am reluctant to make that accusation, I do wish Professor Romm had given more sustained and serious attention to the very serious question he chose to raise.

The placement of a new, 12-foot-high bronze statue in Times Square, New York City’s most famous tourist and entertainment district, by the Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit organization financed by local businesses, raises the question of just what public art is for. (The statue, made by London-based sculptor Thomas J. Price, will stand in place until June 17, as part of a system of rotating displays of contemporary art.) What is remarkable about the statue is its sheer ordinariness. It depicts an anonymous black woman, overweight and casually dressed, hands on hips, looking more or less straight ahead with a somewhat dour expression, despite the ambiguous title the sculptor gave it, “Grounded in the Stars.”

In a “guide” to the statue posted on its website, Times Square Arts (a division of the Alliance) explains that Price’s “multidisciplinary” work “confronts preconceived notions of identity and representation.” Elsewhere, the New York Times has described Price’s overall work in recent years as “directly critiqu[ing] the traditions of public monuments and portraiture.” According to a release by a Los Angeles gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which is currently hosting an exhibit of “related works” by Price at another New York location, people who have criticized “Grounded in the Stars” have misunderstood it as a “traditional monument,” when it is actually “an artwork about monuments,” which in conjunction with Price’s other works, “amplif[ies] traditionally marginalized bodies and redress[es] structures of hierarchy, inviting questions about who we choose to celebrate in art.”

According to Price himself, the intent of “Grounded in the Stars” and an accompanying set of stop-motion animations scheduled to be posted on Times Square billboards is to highlight “the intrinsic value of the individual and amplif[y] traditionally marginalized bodies on a monumental scale” so as to “instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity.” Indeed (quoting again from the Times Square Alliance), while “the young woman depicted in ’Grounded in the Stars’ carries familiar qualities, from her stance and countenance to her everyday clothing,” in her depiction “one recognizes a shared humanity,” while her pose and “the ease of her stance” constitute “a subtle nod to Michelangelo’s David.” Thus, the statue “disrupts traditional ideas around what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.”

The foregoing selections of what is, to be frank, academic and political gobbledygook from the art world exemplify the point that the late, great novelist and social and cultural critic Tom Wolfe skewered in his book-length essay The Painted Word: a painting or other artistic work that needs a couple of paragraphs or more (when posted in a museum) to explain what the artist was “trying to say” isn’t really art at all. We commonly gaze at paintings by artists ranging from Rembrandt and Franz Hals to, say, the French Impressionists or the Hudson River School with a view to appreciating their beauty, or the emotions their subjects inspire, without needing a guide to tell us what the painter’s aim was. (Commonly, with the occasional exception of a work like Picasso’s “Guernica,” we have no interest in the artist’s political views either, any more than we would look to a politician to provide us with insight into art.)

Going further, however, what can it mean to say that a sculpture isn’t really a “monument” but rather “an artwork about monuments”? If the sculptor’s complaint was that not enough monuments portray people he believes have been “marginalized,” why not just publish an essay making his argument?

As a Fox News columnist quoted by the Times points out, the celebration by art “professionals” of Price’s sculpture of an anonymous, unimpressive figure whose sole “distinguishing” feature is that she happens to be black stands in marked contrast to the official removal in 2022, following the George Floyd riots, of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt that had stood in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History for 80 years. While Roosevelt was a man of multiple achievements in and out of politics, the particular reason for honoring him in front of the museum is that he was an avid and accomplished naturalist. Nonetheless, the museum administrators proclaimed in explaining their decision, his statue—which depicted T. R. on horseback, accompanied by standing American Indian and African male figures (chosen, it is said, to represent some of the diverse areas of the world where he went hunting and exploring)—needed to be removed because it “communicat[ed] a racial hierarchy that the Museum and members of the public have long found disturbing.” (It was “hierarchical” simply because Roosevelt was the only member of the trio on horseback.)

Few of us possess the potential to rival the achievements of a Teddy Roosevelt. But one of the proper functions of great statues and other forms of art is to encourage us to make the effort.

Having grown up in the New York City area, periodically visiting the Museum on school trips as well as with my parents, and later bringing my daughters there, I actually found the statue of Roosevelt the most memorable part of the museum (surpassed only by the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton inside). As a student of politics, I have found much to disagree with in the Progressive political thinking that Roosevelt turned to during the last decade of his career, as he sought to regain the presidency. But like anyone with the least familiarity with his life, I cannot avoid being inspired, even awed, by his many achievements—from overcoming debilitating asthma by “roughing it” (a model he recommended to all Americans in “The Strenuous Life”), to the charge up San Juan Hill, and eventually as president. And for the record, as president he not only issued Executive Order 8802, creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee, the most important Federal move in support of the rights of African Americans since Reconstruction, but named black officials to significant federal positions, even in the South, and was the first occupant of the White House to invite a black leader (Booker T. Washington) to dine there with him.

For those wondering about the fate of the Roosevelt statue: following its removal, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation announced it would accept the item as a long-term loan from New York City for display at the library, scheduled to open in Medora, North Dakota, in 2026. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt IV remarked, in language more appropriate for one of those New York art critics than of his ancestor, that it was “fitting that the statue is being relocated to a place where its composition can be recontextualized to facilitate difficult, complex and inclusive discussions.” In fact, the library’s remote location—admittedly the site where the young T. R. went to build up his physical constitution—makes it unlikely that it will facilitate many discussions, inclusive or otherwise. And in any event, not only is the statue currently in storage, but no plans have been announced for it to be displayed even when the library opens. Sic transit gloria.

In this context, it is worth recalling an observation the great French analyst Alexis de Tocqueville made in Democracy in America. The general equality of condition among Americans (of course, excluding slaves), in contrast to the relatively fixed social and political hierarchy that characterized European nations like France, suggested to us “the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of man.” That is, seeing how far many of his compatriots (and likely, he himself) have already advanced beyond the attainments of previous generations inspires the American to strive to surpass them. Tocqueville even quotes the explanation an American sailor gave him of why Americans build their vessels to last only a short time: since “the art of navigation makes such rapid progress daily” because “the most beautiful ship would soon become almost useless if its existence were prolonged beyond a few years.” Tocqueville portrays these words of a man of low social condition as exemplifying “the general and systematic idea according to which a great people conducts all things.”

Few of us possess the potential to rival in our lives the achievements of a Teddy Roosevelt. But one of the proper functions of great statues and other forms of art (including music and literature) is surely to encourage us to make the effort. Had the sculptor of “Grounded in the Stars” wanted to contribute to the inspiration and elevation of black Americans, there are plenty of real achievers—in statesmanship, education, literature, sports, music, the military, for starters—he could have chosen to memorialize. Instead, in a 2020 essay for Time magazine, he explained that his work aimed to show that “if you’re a black person being represented in sculpture, you don’t have to be an athlete, or strike a pose, or fulfil an expectation.”

Of course, the greatest artists did not limit their portrayals to persons of high achievement. But do most African-Americans really want to be “represented,” in one of the world’s most public spaces, by an anonymous statue of a perfectly ordinary-looking woman? In what way, in the words of the Times Square Alliance, does “Grounded in the Stars” “disrupt” our understanding of which figures deserve to be “monumentalized,” other than to say that mediocrity is good enough, and any endeavor to surpass it is inherently “hierarchical” and therefore racist? Not only Tocqueville and T. R., but Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Martin Luther King Jr. would be appalled.

The debate about the proper function of intelligence in the US is as old as the nation. Several founding fathers, indeed, even patriarch George Washington, recognized the need for espionage to be kept secret from the Continental Congress—with all the attendant risks of abuse—to help win the war for independence. The debate then centered on whether the new country could free itself from sullying Old World intrigues and who would, or even should, oversee a secret apparatus for the new republic.

Today, intelligence is a permanent fixture in the US government. Now the debate is about the appropriate scope and reach of national security intelligence on balance with the protection of American civil liberties. This is the “constant crisis” in Jeffrey P. Rogg’s sweeping new book, The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence.

The book is a work of even-handed historical writing by an author with deep roots in national security studies (Rogg has taught as a member of the faculty of the US Naval War College, the Citadel, and the Joint Special Operations University). The book is also a balanced, thoughtful, and well-grounded discussion of the tumultuous growth of the national security intelligence bureaucracy, the professionalization of US intelligence, and the evolution of intelligence oversight.

The Spy and the State is a significant accomplishment of genuine scholarship. The author’s deep understanding of the US Intelligence Community (USIC) is evident in his excellent use of a wealth of primary sources, including published and archival materials ranging from government documents and period newspapers to relevant case law and the unclassified records of individual US intelligence agencies. Rogg also makes good use of secondary sources to provide insight and assessments from authors with special expertise, including the history of wartime US intelligence and of specific agencies. While The Spy and the State sometimes reads like a textbook, with some sluggish writing, Rogg is a disciplined researcher keen on offering detail. The book is well documented with more than 80 pages of notes and an outstanding bibliography. This book, then, will be welcomed by both scholars and students seeking to enhance and enlarge their understanding of the USIC.

Civil-Intelligence Relations

The Spy and the State is a history of the USIC seen “through the lens of civil-intelligence relations and the major themes of control, competition, coordination, professionalization, and politicization.” For this work, Rogg adapted the ground-breaking analog of civil-military relations advanced by Samuel P. Huntington in his book The Soldier and the State (1957). It’s a worthwhile model for Rogg to have acknowledged and adopted. Mirroring Huntington’s work, Rogg shows how the development of intelligence as a profession in the twentieth century, and attendant civil oversight, can regulate the role of intelligence in the national security state.

This work explores the USIC’s history by examining US intelligence in each of four wartime eras: the Revolutionary War to the Civil War; the Civil War to the end of World War II; the Cold War; and the present, post-Cold War era. This approach is more than a nod to the march of time. It acknowledges the dominant role military intelligence played in creating the USIC. Today, an estimated 80 percent of the nation’s classified intelligence spending is earmarked for military intelligence activities. Moreover, “each successive war,” Rogg explains, “saw the country engage in intelligence activities on an even greater scale, and each postwar period revealed the challenges that retrenchment posed.” With the era-by-era approach, the author illustrates how the changing nature of the US role in the world led to the establishment of the nation’s permanent intelligence community.

Bureaucracy and Rivalry

Rogg describes how the USIC grew by fits and starts, hamstrung as much by a failure to establish a profession of intelligence as by rivalries across government bureaus assigned various intelligence functions. For example, the author recounts episodes in the bureaucratic wrangle between the departments of State, Justice, and Treasury for control of various aspects of intelligence. For a time, Secret Service agents were “loaned” to other executive departments to pursue domestic law enforcement and counterespionage investigations, while still reporting to their managers at Treasury. That unsatisfactory arrangement spurred the Justice Department to create its own secret service, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI, later FBI).

The tangle of competing interests, Rogg observes in a telling insight, was made even more contentious because executive departments unilaterally formed their own intelligence services. Congress had no say in the creation, organization, and mission of the Secret Service, and the BOI, much less a say in the War Department’s Military Information Section (eventually the Military Intelligence Division of the Army General Staff in WWI), or the Navy Department’s Office of Naval Intelligence. Ultimately, only two of the current eighteen US intelligence agencies—the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—would be chartered by Congress.

While Americans have often been able to reset civil-intelligence relations after a threat has passed or egregious abuses have been checked, Rogg is far less sanguine about future relations.

Rogg contends that before the onset of the Cold War era, every intelligence service in government was “straddling a fault-line in American civil-intelligence relations,” a blurry area between acceptable foreign collection and detested domestic surveillance. Various agencies, and their respective executive departments, all attempted to collect foreign intelligence, conduct domestic law enforcement investigations, surveil American citizens, and launch counter-espionage operations in the US. This, Rogg explains, was an outgrowth not only of the lack of coordination between executive departments, but of “mission creep.” He gives the example that when Secret Service agents uncovered a threat to President Cleveland, the Service simply expanded its role beyond investigations of counterfeiting and financial crimes to include protection of the president. Rogg argues that unbridled expansion and duplication were also the result of the failure of Congress to exercise any effective oversight of the growing intelligence community as the nation entered the twentieth century.

Permanence and Oversight

The Spy and the State offers readers an illuminating record of the spotty, ineffectual, and often politicized nature of oversight of the intelligence community. Rogg makes the case that the USIC in its first historical era remained “discretionary, disorganized, uncoordinated and unprofessional.” The author also describes how the intelligence community expanded in times of war and contracted in times of peace. He then neatly traces the robust growth of the nation’s intelligence capabilities in World War II and shows how that growth and the onset of the Cold War marked the end of another historical era.

At this pivotal point in the history of the USIC, Rogg ascribes an outsized influence to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The author contends Donovan “permanently transformed the American intelligence system,” and “set the conditions for an independent intelligence organization and, at long last, [a] profession.” It is more likely that while the influential and well-connected Donovan was then in the right place at the right time, the exigencies of the Cold War, the catastrophic intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, and growing Congressional discomfort with the power of the executive branch spurred legislation that created the CIA in 1947. Rogg points out that legislation created two specific statutory missions for the CIA: to coordinate the activities of the USIC and furnish intelligence analysis to inform policymaking.

The fledgling CIA, however, attracted OSS veterans to its ranks who were intent on “seizing covert action” as part of its mission set. In so doing, the agency “absorbed an organization and culture that undermined its original statutory missions.” Rogg charts the uneven course of the CIA’s early covert actions. He acknowledges that policymakers steered the agency towards misguided forays and outright interference, for example, with the internal affairs of Burma, Guatemala, and Iran. By hewing to historical records, the author easily dispels any lingering notion that these were activities of rogue elements of the CIA; covert action was an integral part of Cold War strategy.

The Spy and the State recounts the covert missions of the 1950s and the agency’s soiled record in the 1960s and 1970s. The CIA’s mind-control experiments, surveillance of journalists and students, assassination plots, and other domestic intelligence operations did not escape public exposure. Media accounts spurred Congressional inquiry, and the Church and Pike Committee hearings were at the forefront to establish permanent legislative oversight. In the most telling part of his book, Rogg makes a clear-eyed account of how abuses and blatantly illegal actions by the USIC eroded public trust in government and fostered suspicion of the power of the administrative state.

Despite the growing professionalization of the intelligence community, and more vigorous oversight, the author shows that some of the most egregious abuses of the reach and power of the USIC occurred in the post-Cold War era. Rogg argues that “during the Global War on Terror, the government unleashed its powerful intelligence apparatus, undermining civil liberties and eroding constitutional rights in the process.” Enabled by the PATRIOT and Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Acts, new guidance issued by then Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for example, blurred the line between law enforcement and domestic intelligence. As a result, the FBI was able to gain access to NSA’s powerful surveillance tools. The agency’s PRISM program collected information from private companies and automatically sucked up data from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and others. The Bureau then expanded its use of National Security Letters (NSL)—administrative rather than judicial subpoenas—to collect information from tens of thousands of individuals each year. Because the NSLs also contain non-disclosure provisions, the FBI now had “the power both to investigate and to silence.”

The Spy and the State is as much of a historical account as it is a work of keen contemporary observation and incisive commentary. Informed by the judgements of history, the author in his conclusions argues that the combination of the national security state, its attendant administrative state, omnipresent surveillance technology, Big Data and AI, and a massive intelligence apparatus looms as an authoritarian threat in American civil-intelligence affairs. While Americans have often been able to reset civil-intelligence relations after a threat has passed or egregious abuses have been checked, Rogg is far less sanguine about future relations.

“The American people,” Rogg warns readers, “must assert their role in the US intelligence system more directly in the future than they have in the past—their liberty and security depend on it.”

Driven in part by the revival of a classic knit sweater emblazoned with an American flag, “Ralph Lauren nationalism” has emerged as a trope among online talking-heads. Well-dressed political scientist Samuel Goldman is also known for his sharp takes on menswear. He joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent article for Compact magazine that tackled the concept. There may be something to the Ralph Lauren aesthetic that captures an essential quality of the American character, Goldman argues, but it’s not exactly what the highly-online chatterers think it is.

Related Links

“The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism” by Samuel Goldman

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. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. Our guest today is Dr. Samuel Goldman. He is the associate professor of political science at George Washington University, as well as the executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom and Democracy and director of the Politics and Values Program. He’s written God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America, and his second book was After Nationalism. He has a third book on higher education, right? Is that right?

Samuel Goldman (01:13):

That’s right. Conservative Critics of Higher Education.

James Patterson (01:16):

Yes, there he is. So I guess it’s too late for me to say this, but Dr. Goldman, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Samuel Goldman (01:22):

Thanks, James. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, but especially on a subject of such pressing national importance.

James Patterson (01:29):

Exactly. So it is summertime, or it’s about to be, and so we don’t always need to be very serious, although this is in a way very serious for certain enthusiasts. But we’ll be talking about Sam Goldman’s article, “The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism,” published on April 25, 2025, for Compact Magazine. And why don’t we start with the big picture here, which is why is it so funny or so interesting that so many people are adopting a Ralph Lauren aesthetic given what Ralph Lauren was doing when he was creating that aesthetic?

Samuel Goldman (02:10):

So the piece sort of takes us its point of departure genre of tweets or memes that can be found on Twitter and probably other places as well that are tagged “Ralph Lauren nationalism,” and they have these images of beautiful models wearing tartans and tweeds and riding horses in the desert or in other improbable scenarios. And the implication is that this is something that has been lost. I was going to say, you open up a magazine, but of course we don’t do that anymore. You open up your browser and you get this algorithm that pushes advertising on you, and it depends what you click on, but you don’t see beautiful people in this exotic, yet also vaguely American fantasy world. And this is presented as sort of a conservative or even reactionary statement that what we have now is slop. It’s ugly, it’s stupid, it’s not even cosmopolitan.

(03:24):

It’s sort of the lowest common denominator, globalized. We used to have this proud aesthetic vision. And there’s some truth to that. But it’s interesting as I go on to argue in the piece, because what Ralph Lauren was really doing in the second half of the twentieth century, and especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was recreating or imagining a whole vision of America that was not reality and was not derived from his own experience of vaguely old money, WASP-y life. It was something that a Jewish kid from the Bronx created from movies and books and watching people on the street. And I draw reader’s attention to this not just as a sort of pedantic corrective about what Ralph Lauren was really doing, but also to suggest that this is the sort of cultural nationalism or cultural patriotism that we need. It is optimistic, it embraces freedom as a core American value. It’s not “pluralist” in the hard multicultural sense, but it is flexible and welcoming and open-ended. That’s a lot of what I and others like and admire about this country. So Ralph Lauren nationalism, yes, but I don’t think it means quite what some of the people who are making these memes believe.

James Patterson (05:01):

Yeah, there’s a sort of a “RETVRN to Tradition,” and that return is always spelled with a V. And the tradition of Ralph Lauren is, as you point out, actually a kind of freewheeling repurposing of even older men’s wear traditions that at the time of his doing that were considered pretty subversive. And so it’s odd that something that’s subversive, not really in a political sense, but just sort of upending a lot of norms in menswear would be something that would ever become conservative. So what is it that Ralph Lauren did to menswear that made it a contemporary aesthetic people long for again?

Samuel Goldman (05:43):

Well, so Ralph Lauren emerges as a cultural figure in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and this is the moment of real collapse in traditional standards of dress and behavior. You look at movies or photographs from 1960 and basically every man is wearing a suit and often a hat, women are wearing dresses and gloves. Just ten years later, the world looks very, very different. And there’s a passage in Saul Bellow’s great novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. I allude to Bellow in the piece, where he describes riding a New York City bus in the late ‘60s, and he says, you can see everything: cowboys, Indians, Siberian hunters, but no longer the traditional Western bourgeois uniform that had been pretty stable for about a century before that. So this is the moment when Ralph Lauren emerges, and what he does is make elements of traditional clothing: tweed coats and suits and ties and shined shoes. But he makes them novel and appealing, and, it’s a cliche, but sexy again by drawing on what he had seen in the movies as a kid growing up in the Bronx in the ‘40s and ‘50s, his interest in Western and Native American culture, this sort of safari fantasia that he derived, I think probably from books of H. Rider Haggard or something like that, all of which were made into films.

(07:44):

And he makes this traditional clothing that had become very staid and boring and unappealing, something that people wanted to wear again.

James Patterson (07:57):

And it was bound up in a kind of restoration of a memory for who the Anglo-Protestants WASP-y types were and points of leisure and work when the bourgeois uniform, as you put it, had essentially domesticated and worn out a sense of a type of life, right? Everyone in a gray flannel suit with a white pocket square and a TV fold, and the most that you might get is a clip with your favorite college football team on the tie. This sort of new aesthetic was exciting, but it was also very American, unlike say, the Siberian hunter of Saul Bellow’s imagination.

Samuel Goldman (08:44):

Right? Well, what’s American about it I think is the indifference to rules. So just looking at the core tailoring in Ralph Lauren’s imagination, the suits and ties shirts and sport coats, a lot of that was derived from British sartorial culture. But in Britain there were very strict rules about what you could wear in certain settings and at certain times, and there are all of these anecdotes of people who committed these terrible faux pas because they were wearing the wrong tie in the wrong place. And part of I think the rebellion against these more traditional modes of dress was a resistance to that kind of regimentation and status enforcement. What Ralph Lauren did basically was just to put it all together in any way that he wanted, whether it corresponded to the traditional expectations for setting and time or not. So I’ve been talking about Ralph Lauren mostly as a guy who sold suits, and he did. But the more interesting things in the Ralph Lauren aesthetic are the way that he combined what were regarded as casual or sports or workwear with traditional tailoring, which is something that people do all the time now. It seems intuitive, but in the early seventies when Ralph Lauren was wearing, say, jeans, cowboy boots, a denim work shirt and an English style hacking jacket, so a kind of sport coat that was designed for riding horses. That was not something that people did, and that reflected this freedom that he asserted to put together things that he liked and believed were beautiful without caring about the social conventions.

James Patterson (11:13):

It’s funny then, so if you were on that bus and you saw that person you just described in that outfit, he would actually fit in with the other unusually dressed people, but we don’t see it that way because of the great success Ralph Lauren had in developing this uniquely American aesthetic. Another element to this story, and you’ve already alluded to it, is another really sort of American feature here is that Ralph Lauren isn’t a WASP, he’s a Jewish kid from the Bronx.

Samuel Goldman (11:45):

Right? Yeah. I was discussing this with someone on Twitter when the piece came out and he said something like, well, Ralph Lauren was just producing for the mass market things that WASPs had been wearing in gentleman’s clubs and on polo fields and so on, and there’s an element of truth to that. But it’s important to remember that Ralph Lauren had no personal experience of those things. As you say, he was a Jewish kid who grew up in the Bronx. So rather than sort of developing organically from his own social experience, his aesthetic was a pastiche of things he saw. In those days, you could walk around midtown and see well-dressed people and imitate them. That’s less true these days. Of the movies he watched, of the books he read, of the magazines that he browsed. So once again, I think the way to see this is as an act of imagination, almost a kind of collage, rather than simply a mass market version of something that already

James Patterson (13:10):

Existed. Yeah, there’s a kind of comparison made to the attire of one billionaire by the name of Elon Musk here. It says that he attended a cabinet meeting in a t-shirt, peacoat and baseball cap. Why does this not work when it worked for Ralph Lauren’s pastiche?

Samuel Goldman (13:33):

Well, I think in part it’s because Musk, as far as I can tell, and whatever his other qualities seem to be, absolutely, this is a mixed metaphor I guess, but tone deaf or colorblind when it comes to aesthetics. You only have to look at the Cyber Truck to sort of wonder what he thinks is beautiful. And that I think is consistent with his background in the tech world where not just casual dressing, but a kind of defiant sloppiness became a way of distinguishing oneself and also expressing superiority to the finance guys and the lawyers who wore suits. So there’s an element of trolling in Musk that I don’t perceive in Ralph Lauren. He wasn’t trying to provoke anyone. He was trying to look good as he understood it. But also Musk just seems indifferent as so many rich and powerful people do to questions of beauty or really any distinction between public and private.

(14:57):

And maybe that’s a kind of deeper issue that we could get at. It used to be believed until very recently that certain forms of dress and conduct were appropriate when you were presenting yourselves to others, even if they were not what you might choose by yourself or among friends and family. And I think we’ve lost that sense of public responsibility, not only in dress, but also in speech and manner. And I myself have been talking about doing things on Twitter, so I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, but social media probably plays a role in that and Musk, at least in his current incarnation, is a creature of social media, and that seems to be reflected in his choice of attire.

James Patterson (15:53):

There’s this kind of Hegelian decelsionism mentioned here in fashion terms in your article, he says, “As the writer, Bruce Boyer has pointed out change in men’s clothing since the French Revolution has followed a predictable arc, garments begin as military gear or sports clothing and then are adapted for less regimented pursuits. After a period of familiarization, formerly casual items become acceptable as business dress. A few decades later, old fashioned working attire shifts to evening or ceremonial purposes. Finally, the ceremonial wardrobe is relegated to servants where it may survive in anachronistic glory for a very long time. This cycle is the reason doormen and fancy buildings as sartorial enthusiast Tom Wolfe absorbed, observed, in Radical Chic dressed like 1870 Austrian colonels.” That is a paragraph that had me actually laughing to myself to the point I actually had to explain the article to my wife, this sort of decline that follows from this sort of militaristic to sweatshirt aesthetic. What is going on here? You implied earlier that it might be actually a show of power or show of authority that you can defy existing standards. Is that what’s happening?

Samuel Goldman (17:19):

Well, I think that’s certainly following up on your last question. I think that’s certainly part of the point that Musk was trying to make. And if you look in the photos of the cabinet meetings, most of the people present are wearing traditional business attire. And of course, Musk is saying, “I’m truly important. I don’t have to wear a uniform like the rest of you drones.” And the ability to defy rules is almost always an assertion of power or superiority. So I talk in the piece a little bit about one of the great inspirations and precursors to Ralph Lauren, the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, who developed a lot of aspects of the modern male wardrobe. And in doing that, he was breaking many of the rules that he was subject to in Edwardian England. So all sorts of things that now seem quite formal, like the flannel suits you mentioned a few minutes ago, flannel was regarded in the nineteenth century basically as athleisure.

(18:39):

I mean it was what you wore to play tennis, it was sweatpants. So for the Prince of Wales, then the King, then the Duke of Windsor to adopt flannel as an everyday business or quasi business material was like wearing sweatpants or flees. And we sort of miss that. If we look at the pictures and say, oh, well, everyone’s wearing a suit. It’s all so formal. In a sense it is, but standards are always changing. And it’s true that there’s this pattern that Bruce Boyer, whose work not only on clothing but also on music and other aspects of American culture, I highly recommend to everyone. There’s a cycle that goes back really to the French Revolution, which is when the aristocratic court no longer set the standard for men’s dress. Before the French Revolution roughly, to be well dressed was to dress the way you would dress in the court of the King of France.

(19:48):

And for obvious reasons that became less tenable after 1789. And since then, for almost 250 years, almost every innovation in men’s clothing has come either from the military or from sports. That’s where new forms of clothing come from. And there’s this sort of cycle where they start as uniform gear or sportswear, and then men, especially men of the upper class, start wearing those things outside their intended purposes. And there’s a reason for that, which I think connects to what we were saying about Musk. It’s a way of saying you don’t have a job or you don’t have the kind of job where people tell you what to wear. If you can come to work or conduct your regular day dressed in extracted bits of uniform or in what you would wear to engage in sports, what you’re saying is, I don’t really need to be here.

(20:50):

So that’s a status move. That’s a power move. Then as more people lower in the social hierarchy, imitate these models, what had been slightly risque assertions of status are normalized as business dress. And that’s exactly what you see with something like the flannel suit, which when the Prince of Wales started wearing it in the twenties was not quite right, not something that you would wear to work in a bank or law office. But by the 1950s and 1960s, that has become the paragon of professional attire, especially in the United States. The Brits never quite reconciled themselves to flannel suits. But then there is a further rebellion where this business uniform is associated with what your dad wears to an office and job that he hates, and people who want to demonstrate their independence of that kind of life then appeal again to new sources in military or sportswear or after World War II.

(22:01):

The really novel development is work wear, looking not only to the top of the social hierarchy, but to the bottom. Wearing what a longshoreman or a cowboy would wear. And as that in turn is adopted by normies, what had been traditional business dress moves on to servants. And this it seems to me is what’s happening with the modern suit as it developed in the twentieth century. It had a good run for 75 years or more. It was the definitive uniform of wealth and power. Now, wealthy and powerful people, and again, Musk is a symbol of that, don’t dress that way. It’s something that their servants and followers wear. And what that probably means if the pattern holds, is that in, I don’t know, 20 or 30 years, only waiters or doormen or other people who are in directly servile positions will wear this remnant of the twentieth century.

James Patterson (23:19):

Yeah, you mean they’ll be wearing peacoats with t-shirts and baseball camps?

Samuel Goldman (23:24):

It may take to the end of the 20th century before we get there, but you’re right to bring that up because that is the pattern, because we all want more status and the signs of more wealth than we actually have.

James Patterson (23:39):

It seems as though the cycle has accelerated for a lot of men’s fashion, even though it doesn’t fall into menswear anymore. There was during the 2010s, I think what really put the final end to this was COVID, but it was something called “hype beast” culture, where it was all about small street wear sets of clothes that would drop in limited editions in different places. And that was the extent to which you would find people, men, especially interested in attire was primarily in having collectors items on their persons. And there would be interviews with people about how much they’d spent either in the original market or in the secondary market to acquire some of these. Is this really where menswear is going to end up?

Samuel Goldman (24:31):

Well, I think one thing that has really changed since Ralph Lauren’s era is that we no longer have a common mass culture in the way that we once did. And Lauren’s great success as a businessman was to take these things that previously you had to buy in special stores and you had to know what you were looking for and put them in the mall where everyone could buy them and make it a true mass phenomenon. And this is one of the other things that’s different when you look at just pictures of ordinary people before about 2000, I would say maybe a little bit later, everyone kind of looks the same, kind of looks coherent, and that’s a function of mass consumption because everyone is buying from the same stores that have the same basic items. So everything is consistent. What’s happened since then as a result of social media, individualized commerce, where you can get whatever you want from anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, is that you can really do your own thing in a way that was much more difficult and expensive in the past.

(26:07):

So people talk a lot about the casualization of dress, and of course that’s right. What’s even more striking in some ways is the growing incoherence of dress where it’s not just that different people dress in very different ways in the same settings, but also what they wear is a collection of incoherent items thrown together in a way that I think just looks terrible. And part of the reason I wrote this piece and I’m sort of sympathetic to people tweeting these Ralph Lauren nationalism memes is that we just look awful. America looks awful, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

James Patterson (26:57):

I’m very self-conscious because I’m in the midst of moving, so I’m dressed very awfully. 

Samuel Goldman (27:04):

I know, but no one can see you.

James Patterson (27:05):

Oh, that’s true. That’s true. 

Samuel Goldman (27:08):

On a podcast, no one knows

James Patterson (27:15):

One of the other pressures on the American public. It’s not just the casualization of the standards, but it’s also, as you point out later in the piece, the changing nature of production, the transition of Ralph Lauren from these kind of decontextualized repurposed British and American menswear trends was also the creation of the more casual Polo line that became one of the first street wear products that I was talking about earlier. There is a hilarious discussion of “Bury Me with the Lo On” by Thirstin Howell III–I will require anyone to go read that themselves because it was peak Sam Goldman to me. But what about the backend to production and financialization has also had such an effect on menswear and why we look so awful today?

Samuel Goldman (28:12):

Yeah, so I was very happy, first of all to have a pretext to quote the rapper Thirstin Howell III in this piece

James Patterson (28:21):

Just an outstanding name.

Samuel Goldman (28:24):

I don’t have many opportunities to do that. So that was a pleasure for me. And as you say, it is an interesting part of this story that in the late eighties and early nineties, a lot of the Ralph Lauren products and especially the Polo stuff, were adopted by rappers who just loved it, and they wore it in a very distinctive way. So instead of a tight fitting polo shirt that a tennis player might wear, they were loose and baggy and they preferred bright colors and a lot of contrast. But I mentioned that in the piece partly to dispel this idea that this aesthetic and these products were only appealing to WASPs or wannabe WASPs, they really captured the imagination of everyone. But I think that in pop culture, to the extent I can tell, just as in the rest of society, there is much less interest these days even in appropriating and repurposing and recombining traditional clothing and iconography.

(29:55):

When my wife forces me to watch the red carpet at some award show, a lot of the celebrities just look weird. And among the men anyway, it’s clear that they and the people who dress them just have no idea how things are supposed to fit. And I think that’s a feature in the increasing uglification of America. As we lose practice dressing intentionally and with some aesthetic purpose, we forget how to do it. And if you follow the menswear internet, as I’m ashamed to say that I do, there’s another genre of meme that shows male celebrities who wear suit jackets with the tag still sewn on. When you buy a jacket off the rack, there’s a little branded tag on the sleeve. They leave those on because they or whoever tells them what to wear doesn’t even know that that has to come off

James Patterson (31:05):

And they don’t open the vents.

Samuel Goldman (31:06):

Right? And the vents remain sewn. So unlike Ralph Lauren who knew how to make these elements of traditional clothing elegant and appealing today, the celebrities, the musicians, the sort of cultural figures, they are the worst advertisement because they look terrible.

James Patterson (31:32):

And one of the things that your answer made me think of immediately was that there’s a lot also of androgyny in male fashion, and maybe it’s because the people who do so much of the styling today are used to working with women and they know nothing about menswear, and so they’re just putting men in women’s clothing because that’s all they really know. And of course, the little secret to all of this is that there’s much less money than there used to be in a lot of this stuff. And so it may be also harder to find the people you need for doing publicity for films, considering the budgets for those get blown on marketing and post-production, and the publicists that used to run these things don’t know who even to go to. So maybe the whole reason for uglification might also be that the people we used to look to at reference points can no longer afford to get people to put them in the right clothes.

Samuel Goldman (32:32):

That is possible, but I still find that hard to believe. It is true that the cost of high quality menswear and especially a high quality tailoring has increased substantially beyond inflation even within my lifetime. And that’s largely due to a decreasing supply of labor. There are just not that many good tailors anymore. 

James Patterson (33:05):

There is exactly one in Naples.

Samuel Goldman (33:08):

There are very few. And my alterations tailor here in Washington just closed his business. He’s probably in his seventies. He’s going to retire and he deserves it. But I’ve chatted with him about this and he said he couldn’t find anyone who wanted to take it over. So there are fewer people with the skills, and that inevitably drives up prices. That said, it’s not that expensive, at least for people who are presumably rich. And that’s why I’m so confused, not so much by Musk, who again, I think is making a point, but by people who are in business or in politics or other areas of public life and would almost certainly afford to look better than they do, but they either just don’t care or they don’t know how.

James Patterson (34:09):

I read a couple years ago, a book by Anthony Bradley, he’s at the Acton Institute, and it was actually a defense of fraternities, which is not something you hear people defend all that often. And one of the features of fraternities, I was in one as an undergraduate at the University of Houston, was that you actually had to wear formal attire to meetings, for at least my chapter. And if you were a pledge, if you were a person who was trying to join, you actually had a class in which we taught you how to do a forehand knot and explained how the front of the tie is supposed to be longer than the back. And a lot of the socialization into menswear has just sort of disappeared. And the fact that I’m having to do this when I’m 20 years old to these guys as pledges was something that was pretty funny to me in retrospect, because I guess this has been happening for a long time.

Samuel Goldman (35:11):

Maybe I should go into that business. I could be a traveling consultant and teach fraternity brothers how to tie their ties. But of course, you’re right, which is that we have lost or are rapidly losing the social institutions that pass on this knowledge. And that means that you have to kind of figure it out yourself, which you can do if it’s something that you are interested in. But that means also that it becomes a form of hobby.

(35:52):

And there are people who have this hobby. I am among them–and there are dozens of us, as they say on Arrested Development–but it seems to be disappearing as a normie phenomenon. And again, I think that’s important because our physical surroundings matter to us. What we see and what we hear and what we wear is relevant to the way that we conduct ourselves. And it’s a broader discussion maybe for another time, but that’s again, what I think has been lost. We no longer believe that public responsibilities even exist, let alone that they are relevant and worthy.

James Patterson (36:55):

Well, unfortunately, we’re going to have to leave it at that. We started with this optimism for a return to Ralph Lauren nationalism, but..

Samuel Goldman (37:05):

It’s good that you’re stopping me because I was going to start talking about gnosticism and romanticism, and nobody wants to hear that in the summer.

James Patterson (37:13):

It’s a summer podcast. We’re not doing narcissism. My goodness. Again, the essay is “The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism.” The author is Samuel Goldman. Dr. Goldman, thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Samuel Goldman (37:28):

Always a pleasure, James.

James Patterson (37:28):

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.

In discussions about religion and public life, there is often a well-intended emphasis on commonalities among traditions. Shared moral values such as compassion, charity, or human dignity are put front and center in efforts to reinforce support for liberal principles. While I wholeheartedly embrace these commonalities, we should be careful not to flatten religious distinctions in the name of pluralism.

The recent backlash against liberalism—particularly from more conservative circles—stems in part from a perceived hollowing out of religion and community in the service of liberalism. Patrick Deneen has argued that liberalism creates a kind of “mono-anticulture,” an acid that dissolves the traditions, customs, and culture of any particular people or place. For committed believers, theological distinctions matter. And they often do not appreciate when their faith is co-opted for other ends, especially when that process seems to dilute the integrity of their beliefs.

This concern is not limited to theology only. Religion is a central part of what we call civil society. Journalist Tim Carney has defined civil society as “the stuff bigger than the individual or the family, but smaller than the central government.” It includes churches and religious organizations, but also schools, neighborhood organizations, and other voluntary institutions. They are the things we do together; the primary generators of social capital. The worry is that liberalism—especially economic liberalism—undermines this “associational life.” Globalization may make us citizens of the world, but does it also make us worse citizens at home? Is the social capital of local communities outsourced along with everything else? I understand the concerns behind these questions, but I think there are good reasons to be far more optimistic about the sociality of liberalism.

Political scientist Robert Putnam famously argued in his book Bowling Alone that participation in America’s civic institutions has eroded over the years. And Carney has placed the blame for this erosion at the feet of several culprits, including over-centralization in both business and government. “Walmart’s America,” according to Carney, undermines the creation of local community. Local bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and mom-and-pop stores are victims of the market’s creative destruction and the establishment of big chains. On the other hand, Carney has also argued that big government crowds out civic institutions through similar means. The welfare state, for example, makes charity through local churches and organizations obsolete. Civil society can’t compete with big business and big government.

I find Carney’s analysis to be mostly correct. I am certainly concerned about economic centralization and the possibility of big businesses currying protectionist favors from the government. But this concern is over a lack of market competition and liberalization, not the mere existence of successful big retailers. Large retail stores such as Walmart improve consumer welfare (especially for low-income consumers), mainly through their low prices. These outcomes led former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman to describe Walmart as a “progressive success story.” Carney has acknowledged these important outcomes while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of smaller, allegedly more civic-oriented businesses.

But empirical work with state-level data has found that Walmart’s community penetration has no real impact on the small business sector (such as mom-and-pop stores) or self-employment in the long run. A 2009 study published in the journal Public Choice used various indicators for social capital—including church attendance, team sports, club meetings, family dinners, voting, volunteering, etc.—and found that Walmart has no statistically significant effect on them. Similarly, economic freedom has been found to have no statistically significant impact on memberships in community organizations, voting, or volunteering. (The associations it does negatively affect are rent-seeking ones like unions.) Big retailers like Walmart aren’t leaving ghost towns with shuttered stores and decaying churches in their wake. They’re literally just increasing people’s purchasing power. Commerce may make people less parochial, but this is hardly the same thing as destroying local communities. In fact, commerce seems to undermine the worst tendencies of localism: exchange across communities and borders leads to more cooperation, tolerance, and peace with a wider array of people. 

So concerns about economic liberalism’s erosion of civil society aren’t really borne out by the evidence. But there are good reasons to be concerned about economic centralization through government power. Recent research using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset has looked at how state ownership of the economy affects civil society institutions and found that greater state ownership of the economy leads to repression of and lower participation in civil society organizations and religion. State ownership of the economy also reduces the autonomy of civil society organizations and increases state-sponsored monopolies among them. Finally, civil society organizations are less likely to have influence among policymakers where there is greater state ownership of the economy.

Similarly, Ginny Choi and Virgil Henry Storr of the Mercatus Center found that more people in market societies report being active members in recreational organizations compared to nonmarket societies. According to their data, religious affiliation is about the same in both market and nonmarket societies. Overall, they showed that those in market societies have stronger personal relationships, social network support, and more civic engagement. Healthy, influential civil societies are found predominantly within market economies. Markets provide the space in which civil society, social capital, and associational life thrive. Adam Smith’s commercial society and civil society go hand-in-hand.

The true reality of liberalism is pockets of varying associations all competing with one another; keeping each other in check, but also tolerating one another to some degree.

And while many tend to associate social capital with participation in non-work institutions, we should not discount the social capital generated within workspaces: those realms of business competition. A report from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life found that over half of Americans met someone they consider a close friend through work. Work friendships also increase job satisfaction, meaning, and a sense of appreciation and value. Strong relationships at work are associated with strong relationships at home and within the community. This is likely why Peter Drucker believed “the work bond” to be “the most powerful human bond” next to family. Or, as Adam Smith put it, “Colleagues in office, partners in trade, call one another brothers; and frequently feel towards one another as if they really were so.”

Another report from AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility demonstrated a strong relationship between income and social capital, but the source of income matters: a $10,000 increase in market income is associated with a 0.23 standard deviation increase in social capital. However, a $10,000 increase in government transfers is associated with a 0.08 standard deviation decrease in social capital. Working and earning a living in the competitive market boosts social capital. Government welfare, on the other hand, crowds it out.

What this demonstrates is that a liberal, commercial society is bubbling with social activity. And it reveals the true reality of liberalism: pockets of varying associations all competing with one another; keeping each other in check, but also tolerating one another to some degree. These voluntary associations have their own boundaries, values, and community rules that are typically pretty restrictive. In some sense, liberalism consists of a multitude of competing illiberalisms.

Think about your own associations. You can’t just not show up for work or refuse to do your job. (Well, you can, but you’ll end up getting fired.) Universities have honor codes and academic standards. If you break the rules or consistently make poor grades, you will no longer be a student. Churches have certain beliefs and practices. Severe violations of these can lead to excommunication in some traditions. And the list goes on, from club memberships to online groups and so on. Each of these associations has its own unique ways of being and its own sets of expectations for participants. Each has its own form of orthodoxy. The voluntary nature of a liberal society allows participants to choose their community.

What this means is that liberalism is not opposed to orthodoxy. It is opposed to a dominant and coerced form of orthodoxy. Liberalism’s genius is that it creates space for multiple orthodoxies without allowing any single one to reign unchecked. Ironically, it may allow orthodoxy to remain more purely orthodox. In the case of religion, as James Madison argued in his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” one must be free to worship as one chooses in order to truly worship. Government influence, he warned, risks corrupting “the purity and efficacy of religion,” transforming it into a tool for “upholding the thrones of political tyranny.” This amounts to “an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” As one scholar has noted, Madison feared that government interference with religion would “harness the Church to serve governmental purposes rather than divine purposes. It thereby tempts the Church with a form of idolatry.” The paradox is that only in a liberal and pluralistic society can orthodoxy remain truly faithful to its own highest claims and ideals. 

The political philosopher Chandran Kukathas described these competing orthodoxies and associations as an archipelago: a series of somewhat illiberal islands floating in a sea of liberalism. These associations remain voluntary, and the barriers to exit are low. People are able to associate and disassociate how they choose, which makes these associations competitive. But competition isn’t the only thing that liberalism produces. It also produces compromise and cooperation across different associations. As we engage in all three, we begin to discover that we actually need each other; that we all matter. The late economist Julian Simon argued decades ago that the ultimate resource isn’t oil, gas, or some other natural resource. It’s us. It’s the ingenuity that emerges when we work together.

Jazz has been humorously described as a series of “wrong notes.” But others argue this is incorrect: there’s no such thing as wrong notes in jazz. That’s what makes it jazz. The sound of jazz music is dynamic, but often dissonant. It’s inventive and unwieldy. This is why it can be an acquired taste. There is a lot of improvisation, with each musician playing off of each other in a respectful give-and-take. It sometimes feels like it is going to descend into chaos, but the underlying chord structures and melodic motifs hold it together. By the time it’s over, you’re awestruck by the brilliant complexity of the piece, some of which was done on the fly. I would argue that if jazz were a society, it would be a liberal one.

Of course, this has been the point of some conservative critics. In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver described jazz as “the clearest of all signs of our age’s deep-seated predilection for barbarism.” And it’s true that jazz can sound unruly at first, especially compared to something like classical music. But beneath the surface is a deep, often invisible structure. Improvisation is the result of incredibly disciplined musicians acting within a number of musical constraints. Yet, the style of jazz allows for the display of practiced skill, mutual responsiveness, and shared but implicit norms. The result is not chaos: it is a living, breathing, negotiated order. (An order that Weaver himself came to recognize as preferable to the alternatives.)

Georgetown professor Paul Miller has noted that “Jazz emerged precisely because of the blurriness and fluidity of cultural boundaries—fluidity which nationalism [and identity politics] seeks to eliminate.” For Miller, “Nationalism is the identity politics of the majority tribe; identity politics is the nationalism of small groups.” The “cultural fluidity, intermingling, and change … was the essential precondition for jazz.” Cultural fluidity, intermingling, and change are the essence of a liberal, pluralist, commercial society. In the midst of competition, compromise, and cooperation, we learn to see the humanity in those who think differently. And we just might make some new friends along the way.

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

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The central normative claim for the unitary executive is an irony. It claims that expanding presidential authority over the entire executive branch enhances rather than diminishes the system of checks and balances established in the US Constitution. While it is possible that some form of “plural executive” would be superior to the Constitution’s unitary executive—a majority of state constitutions adopted forms of the plural executive, after all—the national government’s statutorily-created plural executive manages only to diminish the Constitution’s system of checks and balances by decreasing the authority of a democratically-accountable president over the executive branch.

Revivifying the Constitution’s form of unitary executive more broadly offers a remedy to a disturbing trend in today’s polarized electorate as well. While enhancing the president’s authority over the executive branch is often styled to threaten presidential authoritarianism, I suggest that subjecting the executive branch to the oversight of an electorally-accountable president would, in fact, lance the political boil that has led increasing numbers of Americans to express doubts about democracy and to favor a “strong leader who is willing to break the rules.”

Below I first define a “unitary executive” and distinguish it from “plural” executives. The purpose is not narrowly definitional or historical. Rather, understanding what constitutes a “plural executive” in itself can provide a convenient legal test by which to judge deviations from the Constitution’s unitary executive. Next, I examine the important role the unitary executive plays in the Constitution’s system of electoral accountability and institutional separation of powers.

Before turning to this discussion, however, it merits noting that two separate questions often become conflated in discussing the US government’s unitary executive. There is the descriptive question, whether the Constitution establishes a unitary executive, and there is the normative question, whether a unitary executive for the national government is (or remains) an optimal institutional design for the nation in the modern era.

It is possible, for example, to believe that the Constitution designed a unitary executive and yet at the same time also believe that the unitary executive is not an optimal institutional design for the national government (or that it is no longer an optimal design for the national government).

To tip my hand, I believe that the US Constitution requires a unitary executive, but I am largely agnostic whether a unitary executive necessarily produces the best outcomes in all policy domains. It is possible that adopting aspects of state-level plural executive design might produce superior outcomes for the nation than does the unitary executive. Nonetheless, I argue that compared with the forms of the plural executive that have been statutorily adopted, particularly the immunization of large parts of the executive bureaucracy from electoral accountability, the Constitution’s unitary executive is, on balance, a superior form of executive organization.

Distinguishing Unitary and Plural Executives

Just what is a “unitary executive”? A starting point is Justice Scalia’s observation in his dissent in Morrison v. Olson that in providing that “the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States” the US Constitution endows the president not only with “some of the executive power, but all of the executive power” (emphasis in original). This means that the president has authority to direct all parts of the executive branch and to fire anyone in the executive branch or, at least, to fire anyone with authority over policy. The doctrine thus asserts presidential authority over statutorily created independent executive agencies and would limit Federal merit protection at most to executive branch employees who exercise no policy influence.

In contrast to the lengthy enumeration of legislative powers granted to Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the Constitution’s basic stipulation of executive power is a model of brevity and generality. To be sure, additional executive powers are listed after the initial statement Scalia quotes in Morrison, for example, that the president is commander-in-chief of the military, has the treaty-making power (with Senate approval), makes appointments, and, significantly for discussion here, takes care “that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Nonetheless, the list is shorter and more general than the list of legislative powers held by Congress.

While popular commentary often suggests that the theory of the “unitary executive” is little more than a recent invention of authoritarian-oriented conservative legal scholarship, the topic was extensively canvassed at the Constitutional Convention and formed a critical and central feature of presidential power in the Constitution. Indeed, it is all but identified by name in the commentary of the founding era. Alexander Hamilton, for example, provides an extended consideration of “unity” in the executive branch in Federalist #70.

To understand what Hamilton means by “unity” in the executive, it is useful to understand the forms of plural executives with which Hamilton contrasted the unitary executive. In doing so, it’s important to distinguish different forms of the plural executive, not least because Hamilton criticized a very different form of plural executive than the type of plural executive employed in most US state governments today.

Hamilton emphasizes both the need for unity in the executive and that the initial protection against executive overreach is democratic accountability.

The two types of plural executive Hamilton inveighs against in Federalist #70 are institutions in which, first, two or more individuals share the same executive power, and, secondly, executive councils whose “control and cooperation” is necessary for gubernatorial action, even if in the form of council involvement merely as “counselors” to the governor.

Of note is that, in contrast to plural executives with two or more individuals concurrently or hierarchically sharing the same executive power, the plural executive that a majority of US state governments have adopted horizontally partitions separate executive powers or functions among different individuals. The separate officials then hold full or unitary executive power and responsibility within a limited policy or legal domain. These executive officials are elected separately from the governor and are independent of his direction and control.

While the US Constitution rejects all forms of the plural executive, the distinction between the hierarchical/concurrent form of plural executive that Hamilton criticizes in Federalist #70 and the horizontal form of the plural executive US state governments employ does blunt his criticism as applied to the state governmental form of the plural executive: Hamilton argues that shared or concurrent authority allows blame shifting among the actors sharing executive power and, as a result, confounds the ability of voters to hold executives responsible for administration. Because the respective domains of modern state plural executives are horizontally partitioned rather than vertically stacked, the modern state system doesn’t share this particular disability.

Understanding the plural executive as the foil to the unitary executive provides a straightforward test for whether the principle of the unitary executive has been statutorily compromised: Whenever the design of an executive institution shares the characteristics of a plural executive, then it is inconsistent with the unitary executive. That is, if the president’s executive authority is shared concurrently or hierarchically with other officials, or if the president’s executive authority is partitioned to another institution, whether judicial, legislative, or an executive agency not controlled by the president, then the unitary form of the president’s executive power has been compromised.

It may also be useful to note what the theory of the unitary executive does not entail. First, the theory asserts that the Constitution extends presidential control over only the executive branch; it does not extend presidential power over legislative or judicial matters. Thus, for example, President Truman’s attempt to assert presidential authority to nationalize the steel industry during the Korean conflict—an assertion of legislative authority rather than executive authority—is not buttressed by the theory of a unitary executive. Further, attempts by Congress promiscuously to delegate legislative authority to the executive branch are not endorsed by the theory. Rather, the doctrine seeks to recover the robust separation-of-powers doctrine underlying the US Constitution by reining in congressional attempts to circumvent democratic accountability by immunizing parts of the executive branch from the single elected executive branch official, the president.

The justification for constitutionally creating plural executives at the state level, after all, is specifically to create executive offices independent of gubernatorial oversight and control. To be sure, the purpose of doing so is to enhance the performance and accountability of the distinct executive offices and functions; the means of doing so, however, is to immunize these other offices from gubernatorial direction and control. If, for example, the state attorney general pursues legal policies at variance with the priorities of the governor, or even pursues legal policies for the state directly contrary to the governor’s express preferences or directions, the governor has no power to remove the attorney general.

Thus, for example, legally limiting the president’s power to fire a member of the executive branch to “for cause” issues effectively endows the reviewing judge with the oversight authority akin to an executive council and therefore creates a plural executive. (We might note that in Federalist #70, Hamilton explains that the “unity” of the executive is destroyed when even merely a “part” of executive power is made subject “to the control and cooperation of others.”)

The Unitary Executive in the Constitution’s System of Democratic Accountability

Often overlooked in James Madison’s famous discussion of how the Constitution’s separation-of-powers system protects liberty in Federalist #51 is that the institutional checks and balances discussed there are merely an “auxiliary precaution” to the “primary control on the government,” which is the democratic accountability of the different institutions to “the people.”

So, too, a central feature of Hamilton’s argument about limitations on the executive branch in the Federalist #70 is the president’s democratic accountability. And it is the lack of this democratic accountability of independent executive agencies and merit-protected executive bureaucrats that is a major concern with the statutorily created forms of the plural executive in the US national government.

In Federalist #70, Alexander Hamilton famously observes that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” He then discusses the institutional “ingredients” both for an energetic executive and safety against executive overreach:

The ingredients which constitute energy in the executive are unity; duration; an adequate provision for its support; and competent powers.

The ingredients which constitute safety in the republican sense are a due dependence on the people, and a due responsibility (emphasis added).

Hamilton emphasizes both the need for unity in the executive and that the initial protection against executive overreach is democratic accountability (“a due dependence on the people”). He subsequently develops the connection between the two ingredients throughout the remainder of Federalist #70. That is, he explains how the unitary executive promotes democratic accountability. This necessary condition for the energetic executive generates its own safeguard.

In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Court acknowledged that the removal of executive officials was an “exclusive and illimitable power” held by the president.

To take a concrete example, in requesting the resignation of William Humphrey as a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt explained, “that the aims and purposes of the Administration with respect to the work of the Commission can be carried out most effectively with personnel of my own selection.” FDR articulated a desire for a unity of purpose in the executive branch, a necessary condition for Hamilton’s constitutionally efficacious “energetic executive.” The alternative adopted by the Court in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States in effect created a plural executive design in which one executive official can work at cross purposes with another. This effectively destroys the needed “unity” of the executive as explained by Hamilton.

While Humphrey’s Executor is widely taken as the Supreme Court’s green light for the constitutionality of independent executive agencies, the Court’s language is substantially more circumspect. In the decision, the Court made much of the claim that the work of the FTC at the time was not executive, but rather was only legislative and judicial work.

While the Court danced around the issue, it nonetheless felt compelled to summarize the dicta regarding presidential authority vis-a-vis executive officials in Myers v. United States with a breadth that literally recognizes no limit:

The actual decision in the Myers case finds support in the theory that such an officer is merely one of the units in the executive department and, hence, inherently subject to the exclusive and illimitable power of removal by the Chief Executive, whose subordinate and aid he is. Putting aside dicta, which may be followed if sufficiently persuasive but which are not controlling, the necessary reach of the decision goes far enough to include all purely executive officers. It goes no farther; much less does it include an officer who occupies no place in the executive department and who exercises no part of executive power vested by the Constitution in the President (emphasis added).

Even in Humphrey’s Executor, the Court acknowledged that the removal of executive officials was an “exclusive and illimitable power” held by the president.

The Court in Humphrey’s Executor also emphasized a different aspect of the FTC, that in setting up the FTC Congress designed the Commission to immunize it from presidential influence. That is, Congress designed the FTC to immunize it from democratic accountability. This, of course, is a critical aspect of modern bureaucratic organization in the US and implicates issues centrally related to executive power in the national government.

Immunizing the Exercise of Executive Power from Democratic Accountability

As noted earlier, Hamilton argues in Federalist #70 that a necessary “ingredient” to promoting the safe exercise of executive power under the Constitution is the executive’s “due dependence on the people.” In that paper, Hamilton at length develops the argument that the unitary executive promotes democratic accountability by simplifying the lines of accountability, that is, by reducing the set of individuals whom voters need to hold responsible for the exercise of executive power to a single person, the president.

There are two items to note immediately: First, while Hamilton regarded democratic accountability as a virtue, subsequent generations of American politicians and commentators did not, particularly during the Progressive era; the virtue of democratic accountability became the vice of partisan meddling by the president.

Far from being an incidental aspect of bureaucratic design, the goal of many Progressive-era bureaucratic reforms was intentionally to immunize significant portions of the national bureaucracy from democratic influence. We might note that in seeking to immunize significant parts of the Federal bureaucracy from democratic accountability, the national government steps even further away from the unitary executive than do even state plural executives. In state design, the constitutionally independent heads of separate departments or divisions are themselves elected and so held democratically accountable. In contrast, the head officials in national-level independent commissions and agencies neither face elections nor are they accountable to elected officials.

Needless to say, entire forests have been felled discussing the immunization of significant portions of the national executive bureaucracy from democratic accountability. It is important to underscore that while “democracy” is a god-term in the US, Americans did not design their institutions to channel democratic sentiments without mediation.

After all, the theory of the Constitution itself seeks to limit some forms of democratic accountability in order to enhance others. Hamilton famously observed in the Federalist #71:

There are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing current, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recommendation. … The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.

The Court in Humphrey’s Executor summarized the Congressional debates establishing the FTC in a similar line, albeit one pressed to the limit:

The debates in both houses demonstrate that the prevailing view was that the commission was not to be “subject to anybody in the government but … only to the people of the United States”; free from “political domination or control” or the “probability or possibility of such a thing”; to be “separate and apart from any existing department of the government-not subject to the orders of the President” (ellipses in original).

It is possible that better policy can be produced by independent agencies headed by Commissions with the sort of partisan balancing and electoral immunization as designed for the FTC and other independent agencies. But a couple of observations.

First, belief in the real possibility of “non-partisan” governance was a hallmark of Progressive politics of the era. (Consider Progressive reforms to create non-partisan city governments and even the adoption of “non-partisan” state legislatures in Minnesota in 1913 and in Nebraska in 1934.) Nonetheless, the Court’s claim that the commission becomes “subject … only to the people of the United States” seems a curious one. How, exactly, was the FTC to be subject to the people of the United States without being subject to elected politicians or being subject to their own elections (as are state plural executives)?

Secondly, the notion that statutorily splitting representation on the FTC between the two major parties makes an institution “free from political domination or control” is today (if not historically) theoretically suspect. After all, even in the 1930s and before, politicians and commentators intuitively knew that the pivotal or median voter on the FTC could dictate the outcome of a vote. To be sure, the parties were less polarized in the 1930s than they are today. But even a century ago, policymakers knew that whoever appointed the median commissioner could dictate commission policies in an entirely partisan fashion.

Finally, whatever the wisdom of independent executive agencies, the most breathtaking aspect in the short quotation from the Court’s decision in Humphrey’s Executor is the Court’s gloss over the glaring constitutional conundrum: Exactly how does a commission that is “separate and apart from any existing department of the government” fit into the existing constitutional design no matter how liberally one wishes to construe the document?

Even if we agree with the theory underlying the immunization of the FTC and other independent agencies (as well as merit-protected employees), the move represents a significant constitutional revision, one that we might want to implement via constitutional alteration, but one inconsistent with the Constitution’s theory of executive design.

Returning presidential authority over the executive branch—all of it—by revivifying the unitary executive is one means that would increase the electoral responsiveness and democratic accountability of the bureaucracy.

While I am open to the possibility that, appropriately amended, a fourth electorally unaccountable branch of the national government could generate better policy outcomes than one in which the entire executive branch (independent agencies as well as currently merit protected employees) is subject to immediate direction and oversight by the president, two considerations lead me to give the nod to the latter.

First, the tremendous expansion of the administrative state over the last century would seem normatively to invite the extension of democratic control over the bureaucracy rather than its contraction. While I generally believe James Q. Wilson’s claim in his book, Bureaucracy, that career government bureaucrats are, for the most part, willing to follow the lead of political appointees at the head of their respective agencies, nonetheless there are issues of bureaucratic inertia and culture that presidents are elected to challenge and would do so if empowered with full executive authority.

I frankly would expect the vast majority of career bureaucrats to continue from one administration to the next even with a revivified unitary executive. Nonetheless, as FDR explained in his letter to Humphreys, presidents should be able to staff executive agencies with bureaucrats who fully and enthusiastically reflect the president’s aspirations for the executive branch.

This is not so much a matter of empowering presidents in themselves, but of empowering elections as the checks and balances they were to be in the constitutional design. At least if Americans are still committed to democratic decision-making. The return of presidential authority over the executive branch—all of it—holds out the additional possibility of stimulating interest in elections. The reason is straightforward: who is elected president would matter more with greater presidential authority to direct the policy outcomes of the executive branch. The implications for American voters, however, are even more far-reaching than that of stimulating their interest in elections.

Increasing Presidential Authority Can Decrease the Authoritarian Temptation

There’s a further implication of restoring electoral accountability of the national bureaucracy by revivifying the unitary executive: I suspect in something of an ironic twist that increasing presidential authority over the executive branch can decrease the authoritarian temptation many Americans already report in surveys. One driver of modern populist politics, particularly on the right, is the feeling that vast sections of the national bureaucracy are immune to electoral outcomes. That is, all continues as it was despite what occurs in elections. This has promoted a feeling of political inefficacy among voters, particularly on the right.

This, in turn, has increased populist demands for a “strong leader” and increased skepticism of democracy in America. Surveys indicate greater interest among Americans than in peer democratic nations in a strong leader and decreased confidence in democracy. For over ten years now, surveys have reported that the percentage of support of Americans for a “strong leader” is about a third higher than in democratic peer nations. And the percentage of Americans who believe that democracy is “bad” or “very bad” is about three times higher than in democratic peer nations. (More recent survey results can be read here.)

So, too, according to an IPSOS poll from late 2023, 40 percent of all Americans (and 56 percent of Republicans) believe that “to fix [the US] we need a strong leader willing to break the rules.” Sixty-six percent of all Americans (and 76 percent of Republicans) believe that “[the US] needs a strong leader to take back the country from the rich and powerful.” And 63 percent of Americans (and 74 percent of Republicans) believe that “experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me.” More generally, almost 90 percent of Americans believe that the US political system is broken, with 63 percent expressing little to no confidence in the future of the US political system.

I would suggest that a good amount of frustration these surveys report among Americans stems from the inelasticity of the bureaucratic state to electoral change: presidents come and go, but the bureaucracy soldiers on with little change. The exasperation does not result in resignation; rather, the thought of many Americans is that if the election of mainstream Republicans cannot alter the course of the national bureaucracy, then perhaps electing a strong leader “who breaks the rules” can do so.

Because the authority of the elected president is limited over the executive branch, and because no alternative electoral mechanism exists to assert control over the national bureaucracy, Americans increasingly feel democratic participation doesn’t matter. This is the concern with the so-called “deep state.” Given that the design of the national bureaucracy is intended effectively to immunize much of it from electoral accountability, many voters, particularly on the right, feel the only option to change things is to elect a strong leader who is a rule breaker.

Returning presidential authority over the executive branch—all of it—by revivifying the unitary executive is one means that would increase the electoral responsiveness and democratic accountability of the bureaucracy. This is a first and critical check on executive power, in addition to the checks and balances that nest executive power within a system with distinctly defined (and enforced) legislative and judicial powers. While this change would increase the president’s power over the executive branch, this increased authority nonetheless enhances the checks and balances of the Constitution’s separation-of-power system. Further, expanding the authority of the president over the executive branch, and so expanding the democratic accountability and responsiveness of the national bureaucracy, holds out the promise of addressing an important cause of the disturbing belief, increasing among Americans, that nothing short of a “strong leader willing to break the rules” could change the trajectory of the modern bureaucratic state.

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from [Untitled].

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