Law & Liberty https://lawliberty.org/feed/ Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and politics and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:28:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Law & Liberty https://lawliberty.org/app/uploads/2020/03/128x128.png https://lawliberty.org/feed/ 128 128 Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and politics and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 226183671 Of Rodents and Men https://lawliberty.org/of-rodents-and-men/ https://lawliberty.org/of-rodents-and-men/#respond Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Nadya Williams https://lawliberty.org/?p=67923

We're all city mice now.]]>
One recent morning, I was sitting by the window, reading a book with my first cup of coffee of the day, when something flickered on the edge of my eyesight and swiftly disappeared. “A mouse!” my panicked brain registered, but doubt immediately set in. In broad daylight? In my city house? But then, early the following morning, upon coming downstairs, my husband met the mouse in flagrante delicto—nonchalantly running along on our kitchen counter. Horror of horrors. 

The children were thrilled by the hubbub. I proposed that we burn down the house and move. But my husband wanted to try a less drastic solution first, and a visit to the hardware store combined with some peanut butter remedied the situation forthwith. It was all over in one sense. And yet, none of us are isolated beings—neither we ourselves nor the mice we meet along the way. 

I was affronted by an encounter with wildlife in my city house, but in fact, this episode is but a blip in the longer story of the coexistence of mice and men (and women, to be sure). We’ve all been city-dwellers for millennia now, regularly living in close quarters even if most people over 10 would prefer not to think about that fact. The city has been good to us, and yet it exacts its price. My furry friend and I are fellow travelers in more ways than one.  

Plagues and Pizzerias

A city mouse once came to visit a country mouse. So opens one of the most famous of Aesop’s Fables. Disappointed by the decidedly unimpressive dinner that the country mouse serves, the city mouse invites his friend to come to a fancy banquet at his place instead. The food there proves amazing, utterly unlike anything the country mouse has ever experienced before. But then the cats show up, and the mice barely make it out alive.  

The moral of the story is to be content with little, as the country mouse concludes at the end. Sure, the city mouse has much better food than the country mouse. But the city mouse also has to live with constant danger, with harrowing threats to life and limb. There are, it seems, tradeoffs to moving to the big city; the benefits come at a potentially high cost. And yet, whenever we casually reference this story, which has entered English idiom, we forget a crucial historical fact: There was a time when the city mouse didn’t exist. 

Rodents like mice and rats have become a commensal species relatively recently, historian Kyle Harper remarks in his book Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Historians, of course, pay attention to people. But perhaps now that we’ve experienced a pandemic in recent memory, we shouldn’t too easily forget the non-human agents of historical change, the ones who wreak havoc on man-made empires through the dissemination of deadly pathogens. There are four categories of parasites that can get us sick: helminths (fancy word for worms, who are definitely not fancy), protozoa, bacteria, and viruses. SARS-CoV-2 (aka Covid-19) is a virus. Malaria, one of the top killers in all human history, is caused by protozoa, whereas the Bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium. This brings us to another important point: collaboration is key to success, and not only for people.

Many of these parasites, invisible to the naked eye, hitch a ride on other, larger carriers—protozoa on mosquitoes, ticks on deer and moose, and of course, fleas on rats. Which brings us right back to those country rats and mice, who historically did not reach the same conclusion as Aesop’s protagonist, who was so content to go back home and never return to the city. Instead, once historical rodents discovered cities, they could never go back. The real-life country mouse that visits a city, in other words, tends to stay in the city. Its country-dwelling cousins can stay where they are, and plenty of them do, if they’ve never experienced the alternative. But the city mouse is here to stay. 

New York City rats are unabashedly American patriots down to their pizza-loving core.

Perhaps mice are not very different in this regard from humans, whose migration patterns also tend to go only one way. And that is precisely the point in the original fable. While using animals as protagonists, after all, Aesop’s fables reflected on human socio-cultural developments. It’s just that in this particular case, perhaps even more than in some others, humans and animals are remarkably alike. Once we discover cities, with their rich culture, restaurants, coffeeshops, and all the other trappings of civilization, we too become converts to the city life, expressly naming those bakeries and pizzerias as one of our motivating reasons—and turning a blind eye to the cat-sized rats that patrol the alleyways behind our favorite eateries. 

In fact, Harper offers a heartening tale about one of the ways the mouse’s larger cousin, the country rat, first discovered cities. He places responsibility with the Romans, whose mobility across vast swaths of land and sea in ancient Eurasia brought along certain species of rats from their native Asia to Rome and other cities as an unintended memento of their travels and works of conquest. (A worthy updated answer to the question: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”) The results have been, of course, nothing short of devastating. Harper reminds: “Although many a textbook still claims that the Black Death carried off a third of the continent, in reality, the best estimates are closer to half.”

Patriotic Rodents

It appears that our commensality with rats and mice is not benefiting us, humans. And yet, here we are, still city dwellers, right along with the rats and mice we ignore or, sometimes, accidentally ingest unawares. Because, as it turns out, we have the same tastes—culinarily speaking. In the film Ratatouille, a highly refined Parisian city rat turns his love of complex tastes into a career as a chef. Makes sense—and data shows, furthermore, that rats, like people, love their local cuisine best. But city rats are not just exquisite gourmands with a remarkably sophisticated palate—they, like people, adapt to their city and become a part of it. 

A report on New York City rats’ eating preferences used citation reports of NYC eateries to make some conclusions on “exactly where man and rodent break bread.” Leading the pack was American food. Out of the cited restaurants, “232 served American cuisine, 153 of them were Chinese-based, 71 served Japanese and 65 were Latin. Pizza spots were also near the top of the list, with 60 different restaurants showing evidence of rats. In the middle of the pack were Spanish and Thai restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops and delicatessens. Bringing up the rear were Kosher and Tex-Mex, which only had 8 eateries cited for rats.” 

New York City rats, in other words, are unabashedly American patriots down to their pizza-loving core. And while NYC is now really trying to crack down on its murine populace, the official Rat Czar, Kathleen Corradi, has her work cut out for her, with “several million furry problems to eliminate and no direct staff.” At least, it appears that the new requirement for the human city-dwellers to put their trash in containers, instead of setting it out in bags directly on the curb, has been fairly successful so far in reducing rat sightings. But will the rats ever fully move out? I expect that the success of the war on rats will, at some point, plateau. Perhaps the city rats will have to adjust their tastes in the meantime, settling for what’s available rather than living the high life of selecting their preferred takeout each night. 

And yet, there’s another option: City mice (and rats) could become country mice yet again. And the same goes for city people, who bear the burden of skyrocketing rent costs in New York City and some other large cities, instead of moving somewhere where the cost of living would be significantly more affordable. Wendell Berry has spent his entire writing career, now extending over six decades, bemoaning this pull of the city from the countryside time and again in his nonfiction and fiction. It doesn’t have to be this way, he repeatedly reminds. City life is the one we choose for ourselves, and all for what? For that stressful rat race of a life that Aesop’s original country mouse sensibly saw for what it was—not worth the constant danger and stress. 

But here’s the paradox: Somehow, without even realizing that it happened, we’re all city mice now, as far as the availability of luxuries and amenities in our lives goes. Yes, there are very traditional Old Order Amish who farm on the outskirts of my small Ohio town—these are the very people whom Berry repeatedly brings up in his nonfiction and fiction as examples of choosing the right priorities, treasuring the simpler life, and avoiding the worst of modernity. And yet, they drive their horse and buggy to the local Aldi, where I show up in my typical mom minivan. As we both stock up on produce and more, the contents of their shopping carts at times appear indistinguishable from mine, minus the frozen pizza. Uncanny. 

Sure, cities have enthralled humans and pests alike with their glamorous promises and offerings for millennia, and yet they also encourage our covetousness and often don’t deliver on the promise of happiness anyway. But then, idealizing the “trad” life is likewise pointless in this age of ubiquitous small luxuries, readily available to all, including my rural Amish neighbors. At least, I can say, after living much of our early lives in larger cities, both my husband and I have found it a comfort and delight to spend over a decade in a small town in Georgia, and now to call a small town in Ohio our home. Turns out that finding happiness by reverse migration—from city mice back to country-adjacent mice—is not just the stuff of Hallmark channel romances.

The End of the Line

At the zoo, the same week as Mousegate, we took a leisurely stroll through the Australia section, where my children were delighted to see a caged kookaburra. In his beak was a mouse, whole and readily recognizable, its long tail hanging limp to one side. For a few minutes, the bird primly sat on its perch, ignoring the onlookers. And then, shaking his head back in one abrupt swoop … reader, he ate it. 

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The Second Coming of America’s Funniest Writer https://lawliberty.org/the-second-coming-of-americas-funniest-writer/ https://lawliberty.org/the-second-coming-of-americas-funniest-writer/#respond Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Itxu Diaz https://lawliberty.org/?p=67931

In our humorless times, we could deal with a measure of P. J. O’Rourke’s satirical wisdom.]]>
Though P. J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology—and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.

Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand—even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes—the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well—are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a millennial or zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere.” Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling.”

The hippie student he was in the ‘60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy—until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut”—think John Lennon’s worst style—he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat.”

O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ‘60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ‘60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”

The problem of freedom—the central theme of O’Rourke’s work and thought—has been humanity’s problem since its very first day on Earth.

From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ‘70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon.” The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack.” As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history.” His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.

The turning point for O’Rourke came during 2003 with the death of his friend and colleague Michael Kelly in Baghdad. They’d traveled together to the Iraq War. Kelly, former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic when O’Rourke wrote there, was “embedded” with the Third Infantry Division, while O’Rourke covered the war “unilaterally.” The last time they spoke, Mike joked that he’d get stuck on the way to Baghdad, while P. J. would be “driving a rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abaya contests.” Instead, O’Rourke wrote, “I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed.” That’s when he decided the war party was over.

In 2015, when the Daily Beast offered me the chance to cover Spain and its surroundings, what thrilled me most was that I would occasionally share a corner of the front page with P. J. O’Rourke. He had just joined as a columnist a couple of weeks earlier. The Toledo-born writer had a knack for navigating both left and right-leaning outlets because he’d mastered the art of humor’s universality—he was too funny to spark grudges and too free to stay confined to one column. That’s a rare gift.

O’Rourke was a pioneer in spotting the clash between contemporary progressivism and humor. Today, that clash has worsened with “cancel culture.” “I couldn’t stay a Maoist forever,” he wrote in Republican Party Reptile. “I got too fat to wear bell-bottoms. And I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire. Plus, I couldn’t stand the left’s oppressive, dreadful seriousness.” He knew liberals seemed obsessed with stuffing their jokes full of political messages—making the message bigger than the laugh. Add to that their bad habit of taking themselves way too seriously, and you’ve got comedy that’s more likely to put people to sleep than make them laugh. Much of left-wing humor feels more about changing the world than cracking a smile. Real laughter, by contrast, is light, spontaneous, and wonderfully absurd.

O’Rourke was a free man in the most heroic sense. His defense of liberty wasn’t just an ideological stance; it was a way of life. He loved America but didn’t shy away from mocking its worst characteristics: “Wherever there’s injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening,” he wrote.

As a disciple of H. L. Mencken, O’Rourke’s great calling was spotting idiots—left, right, past, present, and even future ones. With Parliament of Whores, he tore apart the world of professional politics, not lingering too long on whether the targets of his skewering were “his people” or not. Though his stance was that of an underground—or punk—Republican, for O’Rourke, there was no single enemy. He had no problem taking shots at all politicians and parties alike when defending his ideas: “Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.” “Every government is a parliament of whores,” he declared. “The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”

He ridiculed the left’s environmentalism long before it began shaping our lives. After writing his essay “Ship of Fools,” he never missed a chance to mock those who use environmentalism as a position of moral superiority from which to take potshots at capitalism. There’s no difference between the anti-war, Beatles-and-Vietnam-era environmentalism and today’s climate fanaticism—O’Rourke understood full well that they’re just different faces of an ideology far more interested in dismantling capitalism than cleaning oceans.

O’Rourke’s satirical style led some to dismiss him as an economic expert, but it made him one of the most effective champions of libertarian-conservative thought.

His satirical style led some to dismiss him as an economic expert, but it made him one of the most effective champions of capitalism, Adam Smith—he even humorously reimagined The Wealth of Nations—and libertarian conservative thought. Until the rise of rockstar Javier Milei, no one had quite matched his ability to reach such a broad audience with that mission. “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators,” he wrote. And in Eat the Rich, he observed that: “Microeconomics is about money you don’t have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.” Through humor, he found ways to express serious truths.

In his later years, he remained the living satirist with the most quotes in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, but no publication championed his presence as they once did. Today, no newspaper would fund a comedic correspondent to Kyiv in the middle of a war; we live in strange times: now the comedian, Zelensky, leads one side of the conflict, while on the other, the leader seems to be losing his sense of humor. And in these thin-skinned times, no one would dare publish a poverty analysis with lines like, “Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.”

Poverty, freedom, good manners, stupidity, technological invasion, or the automobile—nothing escaped O’Rourke’s sharp eye. Everything remains relevant. Although, thanks to capitalism, poverty has decreased, the left still clings to the belief—almost like a ritual act—that it’s not capitalism but socialism that’s worked miracles. Freedom is always under threat, and our privacy is invaded. Good manners are definitely out of fashion among Twitter/X addicts. Stupidity is enjoying a global boom. The technological invasion is making our brains short-circuit. And now, they’re forcing us to trade in our cars for four-wheeled electric scooters.

The problem of freedom—the central theme of O’Rourke’s work and thought—has been humanity’s problem since its very first day on Earth. And so has the problem of the economy. Adam and Eve had to make a choice. They got it wrong, sure—but at least they taught us a key idea of capitalism: economics is the science of choices; if the choices are bad, the economy goes straight to hell.

Now that much of the West is experiencing a revival of libertarian and conservative ideas—with increasingly younger supporters—O’Rourke could serve as the perfect gateway drug. His sarcastic, provocative tone is always cheerful, and it’s also the best weapon against a left that seems more and more detached from reality, furious even with biology and science, while growing steadily more humorless and unbearably self-important. Let’s not forget that Judith Butler—the mother of progressive postmodern theories from the waist down—somehow managed to turn grotesque ideas, the kind that would’ve made us burst out laughing just a decade ago, into painfully boring books. You can’t respond to Butler with Blaise Pascal or Thomas Aquinas. Unless you want to lose your mind like her followers, there’s only one answer: with P. J. Take a look at the West and who’s currently in charge, and tell me if there’s a more relevant and timely warning than the classic from the author of Parliament of Whores: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

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Buckley and His Revolution https://lawliberty.org/buckley-and-his-revolution/ https://lawliberty.org/buckley-and-his-revolution/#respond Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:02:00 +0000 Law & Liberty Editors https://lawliberty.org/?p=68023

A Law & Liberty symposium on Sam Tanenhaus's Buckley.]]>
William F. Buckley defined the conservative movement in America. For decades now, friends and critics alike have been anxiously awaiting Sam Tanenhaus’s massive, authorized biography, which has sharply divided readers. Buckley was a complicated man, and this is a complicated book. Senior Writer Richard Reinsch and Contributing Editor John O. McGinnis offer their takes on this major new publication.

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Steering Right https://lawliberty.org/book-review/steering-right/ https://lawliberty.org/book-review/steering-right/#respond Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:01:00 +0000 John O. McGinnis https://lawliberty.org/?post_type=book_review&p=68093

Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley has certain limitations, but it captures the character of conservatism’s founding father. ]]>
The art of biography from Plutarch onwards shows how character is destiny. And superb books in the genre show how that character was shaped by upbringing and environment. In this respect, Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America is magnificent. Tanenhaus shows in detail “how everything Buckley learned and everything he became began at home.”

A middle child in a pack of ten, he had to become a performer from the start simply to be heard over his siblings. In such an articulate and rambunctious family, the young Buckley cultivated his innate talents for listening and then responding with witty repartee. From a father who was a wildcatter, as often on the cusp of bankruptcy as of great wealth, he inherited a risk-taking, almost swashbuckling, persona. Even his famous transatlantic accent was not a later life affectation but a holdover from his formative years at a British boarding school, one of the many stops in a meandering journey of early learning.

And most of all, he grew up a cradle conservative. While his family’s principal residence was in Connecticut, his parents were emphatically not Yankees. His father was the son of a Texas sheriff, and his mother the daughter of a Louisianian cotton broker. His father hated the New Deal, and the Buckley children competed to improve on their father’s denunciations. Thus, when Buckley arrived at Yale, he had the preparation and confidence to astonish his classmates by making powerful arguments against his liberal professors on politically and economically contentious topics. But despite his verbal facility, Buckley did not become a scholar. He absorbed ideas quickly in conversation but rarely pursued their depths through sustained study. What made him the biggest man on campus was the brio of his chairmanship of the Yale Daily News, not the originality of his academic contributions.

This background prepared him for what he became—the greatest controversialist in the nation and the broker of the most important political movement of his time, transforming conservatism from a moribund and reactionary philosophy to an effective ideology of governance. Tanenhaus is at his best in describing the sheer improbability of the achievement. Republicans had enjoyed substantial success in electing Eisenhower, a Republican, but not a man of the right, because he had made his peace with the New Deal. But Buckley recognized this kind of Republicanism would merely prove an interregnum between eras of increasing liberalism. The right needed to argue for a fundamentally distinct set of principles, not merely slow the implementation of the consensus liberalism of the time.

Just as his father had the confidence to drill where there was no assurance of striking oil, Buckley was willing to set up National Review as a conservative magazine of opinion where there was a likelihood of failure. He assembled a group of writers that encompassed the entire spectrum of conservative opinion from traditionalist Russell Kirk to fusionist Frank Meyer to the ex-Marxist, anticommunist dialectician James Burnham. These were a cacophony of voices, but Buckley here, too, was a good listener, allowing each to make his case in the magazine and making a politically astute synthesis of his own. Buckley’s empathetic nature enabled the kind of open tent that modern conservatism required if it was to corral different factions to create an effective movement.

But Buckley also recognized that he needed to police the boundaries of conservatism, keeping out the crazies and extremists. Tanenhaus shows how he outmaneuvered Joseph Welch and the John Birch Society, exiling them from the respectable right. Much later, he would do the same to its strand that threatened to be antisemitic, represented by the mercurial Joseph Sobran.

He was also willing to put his money where his mouth was. Journals of opinions are notorious financial sinkholes. And thus, Buckley needed to first support National Review with family resources and then with speaking engagement fees. But no political magazine has ever earned such a good return on investment.

As Buckley made conservatism a vibrant intellectual force, it attracted a new generation who had tired of consensus liberalism. While much of the literature on the 1960s has focused on the SDS and other left rebels, Buckley midwifed the Young Americans for Freedom, who set forth their charter at his estate. His brother-in-law and fellow NR contributor, Brent Brozell, ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, the book which propelled him to the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. Goldwater lost the election in a landslide but made Republicans, for the first time in a generation, an indisputably conservative party. Tanenhaus rightly credits Buckley as the single most important architect of conservatism’s twentieth-century revival.

Even a great biography has its flaws. Tanenhaus is a liberal, and sometimes out of his depth or out of sorts in addressing conservatism.

In the face of disagreement with other conservatives, including many at NR, Buckley backed Nixon in 1968. This move was a matter of calculation: he did not believe the newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan was ready to be a successful national candidate. Buckley’s pragmatic dictum to support the most electable conservative candidate (surprisingly not quoted by Tanenhaus) was decisive here. When Nixon was elected, Buckley enjoyed substantial influence: Nixon needed him to protect his right flank. Tanenhaus shrewdly contrasts his ready access with the more standoffish treatment he received in the Reagan administration. Reagan did not need the magazine’s protection and may have been annoyed by National Review’s announcement on his election that “we now have a country to run.” Reagan was a far shrewder and more calculating politician than most observers ever realized.

For all his successes, Buckley had his limitations. Tanenhaus is correct that he was not an original “thinker, still less a theorist.” But a complex society enjoys a division of intellectual as well as physical labor. Men like Friedrich Hayek were deep thinkers, but they were not great controversialists. Milton Friedman was both, but he did not have the encompassing vision and charisma to renew and hold together a political movement.

Buckley was also late in embracing equal rights for African Americans. This flaw, too, stemmed from his upbringing. His parents were Southern paternalists when it came to race. They treated their black servants so well that descendants of those servants had tears in their eyes when they described the family’s kindnesses. But they also secretly funded a newspaper in their second residence of Camden, South Carolina, that championed white resistance to desegregation. Though one of the great debaters of his time, Buckley’s blind spot on race caused him to lose his most famous encounter, his debate with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union. He came across as wholly without compassion to the degradations that African Americans had suffered as a group. But in time, he changed his views on the color line, welcoming and jousting with black radicals like Eldridge Cleaver and Jesse Jackson on his talk show, Firing Line, just as he did with other leftists.

More troubling is the evidence that Buckley’s risk-taking sometimes morphed into recklessness. He loved sailing but took unnecessary risks, resulting in two major insurance losses and a costly lawsuit after a man was lost overboard. He was sanctioned by the SEC for his manipulation of the radio company of which he was the dominant shareholder.

The book is full of revelations. While the popular image is that Buckley was rich because of his family’s money, that fortune rapidly dwindled. His wealth had in fact two sources. His wife inherited about $30 million, measured in today’s dollars. (Tanenhaus should have translated such past sums into present value. Because of inflation, the numbers he quotes are misleadingly small.) Every year, Buckley himself earned enormous sums—over $5 million a year from Firing Line and ample royalties from his books. He was the only author of his time whose fiction and non-fiction were regular bestsellers.

Tanenhaus also shows that Buckley knew about the origins of the Watergate break-in even earlier than Woodward and Bernstein. His friend from CIA days, Howard Hunt, had organized the burglary and, distraught after the death of his wife in a plane crash, confessed much of it to him. Tanenhaus is extremely critical of Buckley for his silence, thinking it a violation of professional ethics, perhaps even the law, to withhold this information. But Buckley was concerned about Hunt’s troubled children. His Catholic faith made his role as a godfather paramount.

Even a great biography, like a great man, has its flaws. Tanenhaus is a liberal, sometimes out of his depth or out of sorts in addressing conservatism. For instance, he argues that Buckley and National Review argued against civil rights by invoking John C. Calhoun, whom he characterizes as simply trying to protect the rights of minority slaveowners. But this analysis flattens the theories of Calhoun. To be sure, he was a defender of slavery, but his defense of minorities more generally, as John Stuart Mill recognized, made him one of America’s most distinguished political theorists. Tanenhaus faults Buckley for failing to have assimilated great works of political theory, but he himself shows no evidence of having read Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government. He also trots out the tired cliché of conservatism creating a New Gilded Age without analysis of the prosperity it helped bring to middle America and, through free trade, to many of the world’s wretchedly poor.

The book also feels rushed at the end. After the Reagan administration, we hear little of Buckley’s political analysis or ideas, despite his continuing to write a widely read column until his death in 2008 and appearing on Firing Line until 1999. Tanenhaus skates especially lightly over the succession crises at National Review—the magazine that Buckley recognized was his great legacy to the nation and conservatives. Like many company founders, he anointed heirs and then found them wanting. While Buckley got along famously with conservative titans like Burnham and Meyer in the early days, he could not find a replica for himself.

And Tanenhaus almost completely ignores his personal life. Chris Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup provides evidence of complex, contentious, yet loving and loyal relations between husband and wife and father and son. Perhaps Tanenhaus sees Buckley the husband and father as irrelevant to Buckley the conservative revolutionary, but public and private selves are rarely so neatly severed.

Yet this biography unfurls a remarkable canvas. It is, at once, a vivid portrait of a singular man, skilled in all ways of contending, and of the broad sail by which he caught the prevailing winds to steer his nation on a new course.

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Getting Right with Buckley https://lawliberty.org/book-review/getting-right-with-buckley/ https://lawliberty.org/book-review/getting-right-with-buckley/#respond Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:01:00 +0000 Richard M. Reinsch II https://lawliberty.org/?post_type=book_review&p=68105

Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited William F. Buckley Jr. biography will leave conservatives disappointed.]]>
Conservatives have been waiting for Sam Tanenhaus’s official biography of William F. Buckley Jr. for too long. Twenty-seven years, to be precise. The last line of text in the acknowledgments on page 868 quotes Buckley shortly before his death, “I know I won’t see my biography.” So much procrastination and delay on the part of the author indicate a divided mind and an inability to focus on the project. Things change over 27 years, including authors, potential audiences, and even the public memory of a figure like Buckley. This disappointed reader must ask: Does the biography give us Buckley, or rather, a disconnected series of reflections about who the American liberal mind needs Buckley to be?

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America is a work of immense research and thorough study, replete with archival work, oral interviews, and an exhaustive examination of the subject’s life and career at every turn. Tanenhaus had untrammeled access to Buckley’s personal papers and calendar, and other materials. He presents a picture of the man enmeshed in a complex web of cultural, familial, educational, social, political, and interpersonal contexts. In certain respects, the reader now possesses more of Buckley than perhaps was wanted, or that even most closely informs what Buckley believed was his life’s mission. Almost no stone is left unturned in Buckley’s parents’ and siblings’ lives either.

One of the problems is that the book is not proportional to Buckley’s life. In a tome of almost 1,000 pages, fewer than 100 are devoted to the momentous period in Buckley’s life and the conservative movement, ranging from Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980 to Buckley’s death in 2008. The one thing most needful is lacking, that is, an appreciation and evaluation of the precise contours of the Revolution that the author identifies in the subtitle as Buckley’s chief contribution to American life. What was this revolution? On that crucial topic, Tanenhaus seems reluctant to offer an opinion.

Since Tanenhaus took decades to write the book, one must take note of the significant shift in the American Left over the last few decades. Did this change in left-liberalism influence the biography that Tanenhaus ended up writing? The Left in America has moved from existing as a relatively benign force routed by conservative victories in the 1980s and 1990s and therefore content to manage the welfare state, keep tax rates reasonable, and ensure stable economic growth, to becoming a revolutionary force incapable of affirming American citizenship, race-neutral policies, or even articulating the biological differences between men and women. Race and plasticized gender became its calling cards, weapons wielded to fashion an America in the image of egalitarian humanism. Crucial political, educational, and cultural institutions, most crucial to constitutional democracy, have been locked into racial stories, struggle sessions, or patriarchal oppression plays. Because the book is rooted in race, family, culture, and historical sweep as opposed to the distinct presentation of Buckley’s ideas, it is not an easy question to dismiss. Did a similar movement permeate the mind of Sam Tanenhaus?

Historically, conservative readers loved Tanenhaus’s magnificent 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers, which became a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A former editor of The New York Times Book Review and a liberal in good standing with the ideology’s professional accreditation unit, Tanenhaus, while researching the book, had reevaluated many of his convictions about anti-communism and the somewhat dismissive or complacent attitudes that liberals had long held regarding communist infiltration into the federal government during the New Deal and World War II. In the biography’s thorough examination of Chambers’s sources and files, he came to know the truth and realized that Chambers had told the truth about the espionage accusations against Alger Hiss, and much more besides. The strength of this biography, plus the favorable opinion of his son, Christopher, convinced Buckley that Tanenhaus should write his biography.

Tanenhaus avoids the evidence and the seriousness of thought and purpose that a man like Buckley put into a lifetime of forging the American conservative movement.

In 2009, Tanenhaus authored The Death of Conservatism, a post-George W. Bush-inflected account of how movement conservatism was spent. The book’s thesis was that conservatives had held power and brought the country to the brink of domestic and international ruin. (He also hubristically argued that conservatism should only serve as a modest corrective to ascendant liberalism and not a real alternative.) It now fell to the Obama presidency to rearticulate America’s meaning and purpose in a second New Deal policy matrix. Ironically, six months into Obama’s term, the Tea Party emerged, and the Obama presidency, following a pyrrhic victory on healthcare, was reduced to administrative state machinations. Tanenhaus had fallen in love indiscriminately with a moment in time and was badly exposed, having opened himself to being attacked by reality checks.

A few years later, Tanenhaus penned an essay asserting that American conservatism was one long footnote to the concurrent majority thesis of former vice president and political theorist John Calhoun. In his works of political theory, Calhoun conceived of additional limits on the Constitution’s requirements for passing legislation in order to further protect certain minority interests, including those of slaveowners. In arguing that conservatism should only be understood in a Calhounite context, Tanenhaus was saying that the effectual truth of conservatism in America is that it is a heretical, ahistorical, and cloaked attempt to grab rights and liberties for various subgroups like greedy corporations, racists, and religious fanatics by exploiting supermajority requirements in the federal government’s constitutional architecture. Tanenhaus’ message: The country would be better off without it. And Tanenhaus was already not so subtly playing the race card.

These points are worth mentioning, not merely to criticize Tanenhaus, but because they provide the background for understanding a book about a man of ideas, politics, and high culture who is reduced in many respects to the mere product of family and historical circumstances. In short, Tanenhaus seems fundamentally incapable of grasping that conservatives believe that ideas have consequences, that they take shape through the interaction of men’s minds with reality, nature, and God, and that we can articulate a philosophical foundation for American constitutionalism and the morality that underpins it. Tanenhaus, as a good American liberal, bows, however “moderately,” before the altars of class, race, and gender. These become the deft arrows he repeatedly shoots into Buckley’s oeuvre, rendering it a corpse instead of a foundational work capable of intelligently guiding future efforts.

In this biography, Buckley’s revolution remains undefined, not because of Buckley’s inability to limn its definition but because of Tanenhaus’s intellectual limits. The book opens oddly with an epigraph from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way:

Facts do not penetrate the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished. They did not engender those beliefs and are powerless to destroy them. They can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them. And an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the life of a family will not make it doubt either the benevolence of God or the competence of its physician.

From that opening encounter, the discerning reader knows that this biography is not just about Buckley but also about Tanenhaus and his intellectual prejudices. And what of the line about family never doubting or seeking a physician, refusing to seek any other source of wisdom? Did Buckley not let facts intrude upon his thinking and action? Should we only understand Buckley within the context of his family? Tanenhaus’s words diminish Buckley—the man who lived a life arguing, writing, speaking, interviewing, and attempting to rebuild the principles of faith, freedom, patriotism, and a commitment to the highest ideals of western civilization—to a figure ultimately lost in impenetrable prejudices and belief structures that remained impervious to the finer points of emergent reason and logic.

Praised and read by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Barry Goldwater, Henry Kissinger, among other leading statesmen of his day, a man who founded National Review in 1955, whose thousands of syndicated columns and essays, numerous books and novels, and years of his famous PBS Firing Line program elevated the status of American discourse and made conservative thought a non-negotiable force in American life is ultimately sealed within his time, incapable of being a living presence to future thinkers and political actors. Nonetheless, Tanenhaus does praise Buckley at the end, adding: In his death, many gathered “in affectionate remembrance of one it seemed natural to speak of as a great man.” He had been “the country’s greatest conservative,” and “left a vacuum no one since has been able to fill.” But this is all too little and too late.

The book is organized mostly along chronological lines. It begins with William F. Buckley Sr. and his ill-fated attempt to build an oil empire in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mexico. He succeeded, only to have the socialist revolution confiscate his business, leaving him with almost nothing. Determined to strike again, he successfully did—this time in Venezuela. The family was Southern and devotedly Catholic, with Buckley Sr. from the border region of Texas and his wife, Aloise Sterner, from a New Orleans family. They would have eleven children, with Bill Buckley as the fourth child. They split time between an imposing estate, “Great Elm,” in Sharon, Connecticut, and “Kamschatka,” a restored plantation in Camden, South Carolina.

Tanenhaus repeatedly reminds the reader of the father’s antisemitism, and his less-than-enlightened attitude about race and equality for blacks. He does note that the Buckley family’s attitude was also characterized by Christian charity, although this charity did not fully extend to advocating for civil rights and full legal equality. To his credit, Tanenhaus quotes Edward Allen, a former black servant in the Buckleys’ South Carolina home, who observed the decency and warmth of the family, including Buckley Sr., towards its mostly black servants. Allen noted that a white man once attempted, right in front of his father, to take his father’s job as a groundskeeper at Kamschatka. Buckley Sr. responded forcefully, “I wouldn’t hire ten of you.” Telling the man, “Get off my place.” Years later, after the Buckleys had sold Kamschatka, Allen, by then in his eighties, said that he remembered the Buckleys well. Sometimes he said he strolled past their home, and “every time, I look up to the heavens and thank God for the Buckleys.”

Seemingly, Tanenhaus’s overall purpose in writing this part is to link Buckley, National Review, and conservatism within a web of Southern racism. He spends entire chapters detailing race and the Buckleys. He reveals, for instance, that Buckley Sr. encountered and approved of the earliest manifestation of the infamous “Southern Strategy,” (at the time, a Republican electoral strategy meant to increase votes among the white electorate by stirring up racial anxiety about social change) and one that the family knew from its connection to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond who ran on the “Dixiecrat” ticket in 1948. Quoting Buckley’s father as saying in 1949, “I can’t exaggerate the interest in the East in a combination between dissident Southern Democrats and the Republicans,” Tanenhaus proposes that much of the opposition in the South to the New Deal and its economic program was rooted in racism, and the fear that the regulatory power of the government would lead to integrated workplaces and greater economic equality for blacks. In short, the through line for Tanenhaus, as it is for most liberal observers, is that the Southern Strategy and its incipient racism drove conservative politics to the present day, and helped create Goldwater, Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan, with Buckley riding the wave.

Tanenhaus notes that Buckley made racialist comments about blacks and intelligence at his prep school, Millbrook Academy, in the 1930s. He apparently opposed an interracial dance as an undergraduate in the 1950s at Yale, but supported the social event. Tanenhaus reminds us that National Review originally did not support civil rights legislation, although its stance would change as later thinkers, such as Harry Jaffa and Charles Kesler, among others, influenced the publication. Willmoore Kendall, Buckley’s academic mentor at Yale and a legendary early editor of National Review, also reversed his position. Tanenhaus does mention that Buckley later regretted and admitted fault for opposing the Civil Rights Act, but is unable to resist the temptation to add (his own personal view) that some of Buckley’s famous editorials on race and the South, most prominently “Why the South Must Prevail,” continue to make it difficult for many to take conservatism as a set of ideas not informed by racial animus. Really?

Tanenhaus goes too far here and fails to recognize how Buckley and the larger conservative movement he led became a salutary force on this issue, right up to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Harvard v. Students for Fair Admissions, where the Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act. Liberals on the Court, in the academy, and from their various cultural perches denounced the decision. Dividing people up by race has become their core ideological position. Conservatives repaired to the Declaration to recover truthful thinking on race, while liberals further uncovered their progressive ideology rooted in group rights, collectivism, and the rejection of the American Founding’s constitutional principles. The results speak for themselves. Tanenhaus can’t even bring himself to admit this. He approaches race and racism in a hopelessly Manichean way.

Buckley apologized and changed his mind about the issue. Conservatism itself would become the only significant force in American politics advocating for a color-blind constitution. But it’s not enough for Tanenhaus. The undertone of the book is that Buckleyite conservatism and racial discrimination are as thick as the morning dew on the South Carolina grass.

Another driving impetus of Buckley’s conservatism, Tanenhaus opines, was the “America First” antiwar movement led by Charles Lindbergh. The Buckley family rapturously followed Lindbergh, until Pearl Harbor. They were opposed to America entering the war and assisting the British. They believed that involvement in Europe’s war would lead to grave ills at home. Buckley followed his father’s lead, of course, and he was in prep school for most of this period. He later served as an officer in the Army, but never saw combat or left the United States. Tanenhaus’s rooting of Buckley’s conservatism in the America First movement seems a strange choice, completely belied by a deeper consideration of the ideas and the actions Buckley took after World War II.

While Buckley and his entire family were a part of the Lindbergh movement, so were many others in America. It was not an exotic position. That tune changed dramatically for everyone when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Moreover, far from isolationist politics, what Buckley expressed after the war, when the Soviet Union rose in opposition to the US, was a belief that America must defeat its communist foe. He believed in the rollback of communism globally. Tanenhaus documents at length Buckley’s defense of the principles behind Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist pressure campaign, which he expressed in a 1954 book, McCarthy and His Enemies, jointly authored with his close lifelong friend, Brent Bozell Jr. (who was also his brother-in-law, married to his sister, Patricia Buckley). Both Buckley and Bozell were more supportive of the galvanizing anticommunist thrust of McCarthy’s program rather than his tactics and bruising personality.

Does the biography give us Buckley, or rather, a disconnected series of reflections about who the American liberal mind needs Buckley to be?

There seems to be little here linking pre-World War II America First-ism with the postwar conservative movement that Buckley brought into being. Buckley closely hewed to the counsel of former New York University professor and famous public intellectual James Burnham, who was National Review’s chief foreign policy theorist. Both favored “psyop” campaigns against communists and domestic sympathizers to create the right images in people’s minds of what they were fighting against during the Cold War. Opposition to communism was one piece of glue uniting figures as diverse as Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk, and Frank Meyer, with Buckley the winsome leader of it all.

What we hear even less of in the book is Buckley’s opposition to the real revolution within the nation, that of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and his dramatic expansion of government, dismissal of separation of powers, blurring of the lines between government and business, and the creation of a welfare state in America. The opposition to the principles undergirding this progressive constitutional and economic project was the other main source of unity for the disparate band of libertarians, anticommunists, classical liberals, and religious and cultural conservatives that Buckley assembled in the pages of National Review. This practical fusion of thinkers, forged in anticommunist fervor and the need to roll back domestic power in the federal government, is crucial to understanding Buckley’s legacy. Its reason for existing was not in racism or America First-ism, but in a collection of ideas, principles, and actions that loosely cohered intellectually and were forged together in the fires of national political combat.

Tanenhaus faults Buckley repeatedly for failing to write a theoretical conservative treatment that could stand the test of time, and seems to use this to relieve himself of any serious appraisal of the principles at stake in the conservative revolution. While Buckley attempted to do so, writing a few chapters in a book that would have been titled The Revolt Against the Masses, it wasn’t Buckley’s comparative advantage. As most readers know, the conservative movement has never really been at a loss for theorists. Their names and books are well known and remain worthy of study and reflection. If we are in doubt about Buckley’s principles, perhaps this statement from Up from Liberalism (1959) offers guidance: “freedom, individuality, the sense of community, the sanctity of the family, the supremacy of conscience,” and “the spiritual view of life.” These pillars come into full view when “political power is decentralized.”

The liberal mind can easily relativize and dismiss the quote above, but for Buckley, each term is thick with theological, philosophical, anthropological, and constitutional content. In various ways and with different emphases, Buckley would draw on these pillars throughout his career. Conservatism is not an ideology or a rigid interlocking program of action with coin-in-the-slot answers, but is rather the attempt to preserve the Good, that which is bigger than man’s will or the momentary interests of a group or generation. “Each age must find its own language to represent an eternal meaning,” Whittaker Chambers poignantly stated. This definition, offered by one of Buckley’s closest friends and confidantes, one that Buckley admired, represents conservatism at its best. To pretend as Tanenhaus does that “in his time, as in our own, no one really could say what American conservatism was or ought to be. Buckley himself repeatedly tried to and at last gave up” is to avoid the evidence and the seriousness of thought and purpose that a man like Buckley put into a lifetime of forging the American conservative movement. It is both wrong and ungenerous.

The supremacy of conscience and the spiritual view of life were the most important principles of Buckley’s life, emanating as they do from his profound Roman Catholicism. Tanenhaus never really considers Buckley’s faith, a faith that directed his life in full. What kind of biography misses the essence of its subject? Perhaps Buckley’s attempt to fully integrate his life with the teachings of Christianity is a bridge too far for a secular liberal to grasp, much less analyze. Buckley even wrote a book about his Catholic faith, Nearer, My God, the contents of which are barely mentioned, though it traces back to his familial origins. Strange, then, that Tanenhaus wouldn’t evaluate it.

Sharper bones must be picked here at the end. Included in a book meant to be about William Buckley’s conservative revolution, inexplicably, Tanenhaus repeats the rumor that William Rusher, an early publisher of National Review, was gay, and avers that Buckley was considered by peers and enemies to exhibit gay attitudes and tendencies despite his opposition to homosexuality. All without a scintilla of hard evidence produced to support these insinuations. This calumny seems out of place and indicates a lack of sophistication when writing about a man and his family who were equally at ease in New York’s high society or the smoke-filled rooms of political discussion.

This book will come to be seen by many as the final word on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. It should not. In the end, it is dishonest, ungenerous, and unworthy of its subject.

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The Pacers’ Model https://lawliberty.org/the-pacers-model/ https://lawliberty.org/the-pacers-model/#respond Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Richard Gunderman https://lawliberty.org/?p=68133

Indiana’s collaborative style represents the best of individuality, freedom, and equality of opportunity.]]>
Win or lose, the 2024-25 Indiana Pacers are something special. After an undistinguished start to the season, they were the fourth-best team in the National Basketball Association, amassing a regular season record of 34-14 since the start of the year. In the playoffs, after defeating underdog Milwaukee, they beat the odds and defeated heavily favored Cleveland and New York. As of this writing, they have taken two games from one of the teams most heavily favored to win the championship in decades, the Oklahoma City Thunder. And in so doing, they have exemplified key features of classical liberalism.

In the best sense of the word, they are an individualistic team. That doesn’t mean that every player is thinking about himself, but rather that everyone on the roster is a unique threat, and it is common for a different player to shine in each game. The players themselves bring distinctive sets of abilities to the court, and the Pacers thrive not by making each player fit into a mold but by allowing each to remain true to his identity. The team is one of the most hyperkinetic in the league, which means that each player on the floor needs to work hard the whole time. And the coaching staff, led by Rick Carlisle, encourages each player to do what he judges best in the moment, while owning his choices.

The Pacers embody many of the principles of one of the greatest coaches in any sport, fellow Hoosier John Wooden, the first person to be inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. Wooden’s classic championship teams varied dramatically from one another, as did their winning strategies. His first championship team was also his shortest, with no players taller than 6 feet 5 inches. Yet they went 30-0 because each player knew how to “play tall,” intimidating opponents with a full-court press. Yet Wooden could also win with teams built around big men such as Lew Alcindor.

To watch the Pacers play is to behold freedom and autonomy in action. The players are unpredictable, creative, and always improvising. Instead of implementing a top-down plan, they focus on adapting moment to moment to opposing players. This often renders the game exhilarating, the ball moving up and down and around the court at breakneck speed. Offense and defense meld into one another with nearly unprecedented fluidity. Whether the players get the ball on a rebound, turnover, or score, it often reaches the opposite end of the court in just seconds.

Wooden trusted his players to exercise their judgment in the moment. Never was he seen diagramming a play on the sidelines. The winner of twice as many men’s national collegiate championships as his closest competitor—10—he delighted in challenging his much younger, fitter players to beat him in a race down the court. When they took off sprinting, Wooden would throw the ball to the opposite end, a lesson the Pacers have learned well. Likewise, when it comes to improvisation, Wooden often said that he hoped to be as surprised by what his players did on the court as the opposing coach.

The Pacers embody one of John Wooden’s favorite sayings, that the player who makes the team great is better than a great player.

The Pacers also embody equality of opportunity. It is not uncommon for more than five players to finish the game having scored in double digits, and their approach is balanced in an unusual way. They are not afraid to let a player or two shine, but the player in the limelight typically changes from game to game. There is no star that the rest of the team consistently relies on to pull them through. Each player is free to work his magic on the court on both offense and defense, and stymying opponents’ attempts to drive, stealing the ball, and blocking shots on defense is as highly prized as a hot hand.

During the regular season, seven Pacers averaged at least 10 points per game, and in the playoffs, the difficulty they present to opposing teams has been likened to a game of Whac-a-Mole. If the defense tries to key on one player, they seamlessly shift the ball to others, and when things are going well, their play resembles poetry in motion. They can drive the lane for a layup and then suddenly rocket the ball to a player on the perimeter, turning two points into three. A player who has an off night one game can come back and score 30 or more points the next.

Again, there are echoes of Wooden. During after-game press conferences, Wooden typically devoted considerably more attention to the squad’s unsung heroes than superstars such as Bill Walton. Most spectators saw what was happening only during game time, but Wooden took into account the many hours of conditioning, drills, and scrimmages that went into preparing each player to perform at his best. Wooden knew that his players had been prepared to excel, and only someone actually on the court could adapt quickly enough to the continuously evolving flow of the game.

In essence, the Pacers feel like more of a team than most NBA teams, precisely because they function more collaboratively. They embody one of Wooden’s favorite sayings, that the player who makes the team great is better than a great player. The Pacers often play 10 or 12 players per game, and their bench usually contributes far more points than their opponents’ bench. Players come and go, but the rapid flow of the Pacers’ game continues unabated, literally taking the breath away from many opposing players, who often begin to look winded well before the final buzzer sounds.

The Pacers also persevere, embodying the Churchillian directive, “Never give in. Never. Never. Never. Never.” Their tenacious defense forces opponents out of their comfort zone, and their rapid ball and player movement make it difficult for opponents to keep track of who they are supposed to be guarding. Their strong, Wooden-esque work ethic shines through as they apply full-court pressure throughout a game, ensuring that nothing comes easy for the opposing team. They stay with it right up to the end, and like Wooden’s teams, they often win in the last minutes or even seconds, after trailing most of the game.

In an Eastern Conference quarterfinals game, they rallied from a 7-point deficit in overtime to defeat the Bucks, when their odds of winning were approximately 2 percent. In game 2 of the semifinals, they staged a comeback and took the lead with only seconds to go. In an Eastern Conference finals game, they overcame a 14-point deficit to win in overtime, nearly triumphing in regulation except for the fact that a player’s foot was slightly over the three-point line. And in game 1 versus the Thunder, they rallied from a 15-point deficit to win with just 0.3 seconds on the clock. They don’t give in.

Wooden loved to say that failure is not fatal, but the failure to change might be. The Pacers are continuously changing, like a successful entrepreneur adapting to changing market conditions, except at a much faster rate. They are like the Greek mythological figure of Proteus, shifting their shape in ways that make it impossible for opponents to get a grip. The main ingredient of stardom, Wooden said, is the rest of the team, a truth that the Pacers embody to as great an extent as any team in history. They are—as any lover of freedom and responsibility cannot fail to see—liberty in motion.

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The Geriatric Executive https://lawliberty.org/the-geriatric-executive/ https://lawliberty.org/the-geriatric-executive/#respond Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:59:00 +0000 G. Patrick Lynch https://lawliberty.org/?p=68074

At what point is a person just too old to be president?]]>
The average American life expectancy is now about 77.5 years, following a recent dip after the COVID pandemic savagely attacked America’s elderly. Life expectancy has been steadily rising in most countries throughout the world, but especially in the developed world. While living to 90 was once a pretty big deal and living past 100 was virtually unheard of outside of Japan, it is now more common and will become even more so in the coming years. Advances in medical technology, pharmaceuticals, molecular sciences, and even nutrition and diets are reshaping the process of aging in our lifetimes. We still can’t beat death, and aging has health consequences, but we are pushing the boundaries and living longer and better lives.

There are corresponding changes in what old age is, and what living older is like. As our lives extend and the quality of our lives continues to improve, there are shifts in our understanding of a normal life cycle: how long we should work, when we should start families, how long individuals can live independently, and what the age thresholds should be for Social Security and Medicare.

As birth rates decline globally, the cost of having children continues to increase, and families wait longer to have children, we will be forced to rethink aging. Our workforce will be grayer, retirements will need to be pushed back, and we will have to accept leaders in all walks of life who are much older than previous generations would have accepted. Since the elderly have more economic power and vote with greater frequency, we can expect our political classes to gray. But this is not a simple transition, because aging still means the prospect of diminished capacity, energy, and ability.

In fact, we just recently had a stark contrast between two widely known, older public figures who served in very prominent leadership roles but with now very different legacies that illustrate some difficult decisions we will be forced to make about the place of the elderly in America. At the ripe old age of 94, Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of all time, recently announced to a stunned audience at the annual shareholder meeting for Berkshire Hathaway that he would be stepping down as CEO. The group sat silently after he told them the news and then erupted in appreciative applause for the billions in wealth he had created for his shareholders and society at large.

Buffett’s long-time partner, Charlie Munger, passed away at 99 just a year before the announcement, and the two of them had overseen an increase in Berkshire’s stock to the tune of 5,502,284 percent from 1960 (when Buffett took control of the company) to today. If you’d invested 100 dollars in the company in 1960, it would now be worth about 5.5 million. Their performance as investors is unmatched in the modern world. While everyone in the audience knew that eventually Buffett would have to step down, no one was clamoring for it. The surprise among the attendees reflected that.

Contrast this with the end of the Biden presidency as seen through the first of several upcoming books about the Weekend at Bernie’s nature of his term in office. Biden entered office as the oldest president ever (until 2024), and while there were vague concerns about his energy level and engagement, those were set aside in the wake of the mishandling of the COVID pandemic by the first Trump administration, and the fact that Biden was able to “campaign” in relative seclusion because of the pandemic policies of lockdowns and isolation. In short, America didn’t get a full picture of Biden physically or mentally, and voted retrospectively to reject Trump.

As more and more information becomes public, it’s increasingly clear that Biden had lost the physical and mental abilities to be president well before the 2024 election. A small group of advisors shielded him from the media and other political leaders. The media itself was complicit in the cover-up. Rather than questioning if the president was up for the job, coverage served to push a narrative of capacity and leadership that simply didn’t reflect reality.

If a president loses it mentally while in office, we have no reason to believe we have the institutional means to address it.

In theory, the Constitution has been amended to deal with instances in which the president is incapacitated or unable to serve. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Congress began work on drafting an amendment to handle such an event. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was passed in 1967, and there are two key elements to it. The first is known as Section 3. This part of the amendment allows the president to delegate his power to the vice president for a temporary period because he believes he will be unable to serve due to a medical procedure. Presidents Reagan, W. Bush, and Biden were among the presidents who have temporarily granted their VPs presidential powers for surgeries. There is also Section 4, which has never been used. Section 4 states that if the VP and Cabinet deem the president unable to serve, they must inform Congress, which must vote within 21 days to potentially strip the sitting president of the office if all agree he cannot adequately serve.

But neither Section 3 nor Section 4 is relevant for the Biden case. He clearly was beyond temporarily incapacitated, but the actions of his staff throughout the second part of his term completely precluded applying Section 4 as well. Would Vice President Harris and the Cabinet have agreed in 2023, after all of them were arguing vociferously that Biden was fit to serve, that in fact they’d been lying all along and he wasn’t? Would two-thirds of Congress, which would have necessitated a number of Democratic votes, have agreed? Absolutely not. Instead, Biden drifted into a gray zone, not unlike an older grandparent one sees at Thanksgiving or Christmas. He was someone who could still occasionally tell a good story, complain about refereeing during the holiday football game, and pleasantly share a meal; however, he certainly wasn’t someone you’d want with the nuclear codes or managing complex policy. 

In short, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a black and white, yes-or-no way to deal with a president in a coma or with an obvious medical condition. Since even Biden’s doctors were claiming he was “fit to serve,” the cause for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would have led to a national crisis and partisan war.

Buffett was a fully engaged leader of a company worth more than $355 billion. He was constantly being tested by the challenges that emerged from being in the market. If his acumen and abilities were slipping, his colleagues and investors would have been pressured by market forces to make changes. And certainly, politics is not something that can be phoned in. Presidents have myriad responsibilities, and the job famously grays the hair of the young men who have assumed the office in recent years. And yet if a president loses it mentally while in office, we have no reason to believe we have the institutional means to address it, because we just saw that the available safeguards failed. Those around Biden who were shielding him held onto power and ignored their responsibilities to the American republic, focusing instead on their own self-interest.

The architects of our political and social institutions have focused almost exclusively on preventing individuals who are too young from having a significant influence on policy and politics. The American Founders set a minimum age for being president, for example. Conservative thinkers have long valued experience and wisdom.

Perhaps the best-known example of this was Hayek’s suggestion that there should be an upper chamber of a legislature stocked with older leaders, for an extended term which would insulate it from political pressures. Hayek believed, we can now naively see, that older individuals would be more statesman-like, above the fray of petty political fights with the longer wisdom of age.

How much have our views changed about who is “old” and who isn’t? In Hayek’s three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty, he proposes a legislature in which all the entering members would be 45 years old and serve 15 years until they are sixty. The citizens who would elect them would also be 45 years old. The practical effect would be to allow each age cohort to have representation in the congress for 15 years. Hayek believed that after 60, we couldn’t count on legislators to govern effectively. While he didn’t have a maximum age per se, his thinking was that the older generation would pass the torch and stroll gracefully into the sunset.

Consider the number of individuals currently serving in our legislatures who would be disqualified under such a system. The average age of the US Senate today is now 64, and that’s actually down from the past few years, as older Senators have died and left office. Politicians are living longer and holding onto office longer. Chuck Grassley is 91. Would Mitch McConnell really be stepping aside were it not for obvious health issues? How long would Dianne Feinstein have served had the same circumstances forced her to announce her retirement before she died in office? We certainly don’t face a crisis of youth and inexperience in our political leadership. After Biden, the American electorate chose Donald Trump again, who began his term older than Biden was when he entered the Oval Office. Americans are choosing to stick with our geriatric rulers.

Since we don’t see any end to this trend, what are the alternatives? What should liberty-oriented individuals think about this? Many people reflexively point to term limits as a solution, and proposals for them were very popular in the late twentieth century. But as the public increasingly selects older office holders, are such ideas feasible or likely? It seems to me they are not.

I can envision several ideas that might help. The first would be a mandatory neurological assessment for any president, regardless of age. Alzheimer’s symptoms can begin to appear in individuals as young as 50. It seems highly prudent to demand that individuals who command the world’s largest military submit to a regular exam administered by a cross-section of leading physicians to prevent having an obviously compromised leader in the White House again. We also should require that the entirety of the president’s annual physical examination be made public, and presidents should be required to disclose any long-term conditions that might undermine their ability to lead. Finally, we could apply criminal penalties to those hiding those conditions in the White House staff or to the presidents themselves. At first glance, this may seem drastic, but it could also be necessary to prevent another repeat of the debacle of Biden’s family and staff carting him out in public for embarrassing episodes and then vociferously claiming he was vigorous and capable.

At some point, we are very likely to face another administration like the one we just endured, in which a clearly incapable, elderly, mentally compromised individual will be entrusted with the presidency. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment seems designed to deal with a crisis, not a slow decline in the cognitive ability of the president. Short of the above-mentioned institutional changes, we are facing the same questions about our presidents as we do about our aging parents and grandparents. Some of them voluntarily give up their car keys and move into senior living. Others do not. Some can make these choices with reasonable judgment, and some families have to convince their parents to change their lives.

Politicians are not angels, and the Founders knew this. They are ambitious, self-interested people, just like Warren Buffett. We can’t count on them wisely handing over power. We need both a more robust way to assess how our leaders are doing and a way to address when they are not up to the job. Otherwise, we may get another “Weekend at Biden’s” presidency, and the results may be even worse than the ones we are experiencing now.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

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Environmentalists Lose Their “Perfect Tool” https://lawliberty.org/environmentalists-lose-their-perfect-tool/ https://lawliberty.org/environmentalists-lose-their-perfect-tool/#respond Wed, 18 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Jon Miltimore https://lawliberty.org/?p=68008

A unanimous Court decision corrects judicial overreach in interpreting environmental law. ]]>
In a ruling with sweeping implications for environmental law and infrastructure development, the US Supreme Court recently overturned a lower court decision that had halted the Uinta Basin Railway—a proposed rail line linking Utah’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national freight network.

The high court’s decision not only revived a major energy project but also corrected a troubling trend: the misuse of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to obstruct economic development through ever-expanding regulatory demands.

The legal battle was years in the making. In 2021, the US Surface Transportation Board (STB) approved the railway, which would serve an area accounting for 85 percent of Utah’s oil and gas production. But in 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia blocked the project, ruling that its environmental impact statement (EIS) was insufficient. “It is clear that the Board failed to adequately consider the Rail Policies and ‘articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action,’” the court wrote.

The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition—a group of eastern Utah counties backing the railway—vowed to appeal. Meanwhile, environmental activists hailed the ruling, calling the project “a financial boondoggle and a climate bomb.”

Their celebration, however, was short-lived.

Last month, in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition et al v. Eagle County, Colorado, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the DC appeals court in a ruling that will rein in judicial overreach under NEPA—a law that environmental groups and judicial activists have used not as a constitutional tool for environmental safeguards, but as a means to delay or derail infrastructure and energy projects altogether.

Who Gets to Decide?

Though environmental groups labeled the Uinta Basin Railway project a “climate bomb,” it’s important to note that the project was simply a proposed railway. The proposed project doesn’t involve new drilling permits or additional oil wells, just an 88-mile stretch of railroad through an expanse of desert. But as the Salt Lake Tribune noted, the project stood to triple oil exports from the basin—from 90,000 barrels a day to as much as 350,000.

In other words, the primary sin of the project was that it would result in increased output and transportation of oil and natural gas, which environmental groups argued could harm the environment.

At the center of the legal dispute is NEPA, the 1970 law signed by President Richard Nixon that requires federal agencies to examine the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects.

In the Seven County case, the STB concluded that the economic benefits of the railway project outweighed its environmental costs. The DC court said the STB couldn’t know if this was actually the case, since it did not sufficiently analyze the “upstream” and “downstream” environmental impacts of increased oil and natural gas transportation and production.

The STB, however, said these matters were out of its jurisdiction, stating it had “no authority … over development of oil and gas in the Basin nor any authority to control or mitigate the impacts of any such development.”

“Severe Difficulties” Satisfying Courts

Like many constitutional issues, the Seven County case comes down to a simple question: who gets to decide?

This is not always an easy question to answer. The US constitutional system was designed to be one of checks and balances, and recent history shows every branch of government has been prone to stepping outside of its constitutional authority.

Law professor Mario Loyola last year noted that the Seven County case is in some ways the mirror of the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to abandon the “Chevron deference” doctrine, which had given agencies leeway in interpreting statutes. “If deciding questions of law is the province of courts under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA),” wrote Loyola, “technical and policy judgments are the competence of administrative agencies—so long as they are acting within their jurisdiction and expertise.”

By overturning the DC Circuit, the high court affirmed that judges cannot impose open-ended environmental mandates beyond their statutory authority.

Loyola makes a good point. Courts should retain primary authority when it comes to interpreting the law, while agencies should be granted leeway in making technical or policy decisions—provided they operate within the bounds of the law. Historically, however, this has not been the way NEPA has been enforced.

Writing at The Atlantic, Nicholas Bagley points out that almost immediately following the passage of NEPA, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit took executive branch officials to task for approving a nuclear plant in Maryland without taking sufficient consideration of potential environmental harms. A flood of court orders followed.

“Within a couple of years, judges blocked construction of a huge oil pipeline in Alaska; delayed highway construction in Arlington, Virginia; and stopped a new dam in Arkansas,” Bagley writes. “Orders halting projects such as nuclear-power plants and forest-timber sales soon became routine.”

In response, federal agencies beefed up bureaucracy. Thousands of experts were hired, environmental reviews became longer, and public review times were extended. Bagley argues these changes were healthy to a certain extent, but came with costs. “Within just a few years,” he writes, “close observers were warning that agencies faced ‘severe difficulties’ in their efforts to satisfy the courts.”

The Uinta Basin Railway is an example of the “severe difficulties” federal agencies face in approving even minor infrastructure projects.

Consider that the STB initiated its environmental impact statement in June of 2019. An initial draft was released in October 2020, which was followed by a four-month public comment period that included half a dozen public meetings. By the time the EIS was completed in August 2021, it was 3,600 pages long and included 1,900 public comments.

The STB spent 26 months on its EIS only to have a federal court say it was “insufficient”—all over an 88-mile railroad through the desert.

A Supreme Reversal

When litigation is included, the environmental and legal process for building Utah’s small rail line will have taken longer than it took the federal government to construct the Hoover Dam.

For decades, scholars have criticized the EPA for overreach—and often with good reason. But activist courts have also played a major role. Indeed, NEPA had become one of the most powerful weapons environmental activists (and judges) possessed for killing infrastructure projects. Bagley notes that for judges “taken with the promise of the nascent environmental movement,” NEPA was “a perfect tool.”

Fortunately, in an 8-0 decision (Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate), the Supreme Court reminded lower courts of their proper role in a monumental ruling on May 29, emphasizing that it is federal agencies—not judges—that are responsible for evaluating the environmental impacts of projects:

Under NEPA, agencies must consider the environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible. Here, the Board correctly determined it would not be responsible for the consequences of oil production upstream or downstream from the Railway, because it could not lawfully consider those consequences as part of the approval process.

Those words came not from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who authored the majority opinion, but from Justice Sonia Sotomayor—arguably the most liberal member of the Court—writing in a concurring opinion joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.

Environmental groups that wrongly view fossil fuels as inherently harmful may bristle at Sotomayor’s decision. But the Court rightly held that NEPA was never intended to serve as “a substantive roadblock” to economic development. Yet that’s exactly what NEPA became, as environmental groups turned to the courts to halt projects they opposed under the guise of judicial review.

For years, some federal courts played along, taking “an aggressive role in policing agency compliance” and effectively paralyzing executive agencies. The Court’s majority offered a reset, laying out a more “straightforward” framework for NEPA cases going forward.

“Courts should review an agency’s EIS to check that it addresses the environmental effects of the project at hand. The EIS need not address the effects of separate projects,” Kavanaugh wrote. “In conducting that review, courts should afford substantial deference to the agency as to the scope and contents of the EIS.” 

The Court’s ruling couldn’t come at a more critical time. The US faces an uncertain energy future. To avoid a surge in energy costs, the country must access its resources and rapidly expand its power capacity.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is a step in this direction. At the same time, it restores a measure of constitutional clarity. By overturning the DC Circuit, the high court affirmed that judges cannot impose open-ended environmental mandates beyond their statutory authority.

NEPA may indeed have been “the perfect tool” for environmental groups seeking to thwart infrastructure projects they opposed—but after the court’s ruling, they’ll have to dig deeper into their toolbox.

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Putting the “Executive” in “Unitary Executive” https://lawliberty.org/forum/putting-the-executive-in-unitary-executive/ https://lawliberty.org/forum/putting-the-executive-in-unitary-executive/#respond Wed, 18 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 John Yoo https://lawliberty.org/?post_type=forum&p=67656

We cannot divorce the independence of the executive branch from its substance.]]>
In “Democratic Efficacy and the Unitary Executive,” James G. Rogers argues that the unitary executive enhances the democratic accountability of the presidency.

Rogers defines unitary executive, however, as only extending to the president’s constitutional right to remove inferior officials. But as a matter of theory, we cannot divorce the independence of the executive branch from its substance. While the Framers wanted to restore unity and independence to the executive branch, they also remained focused on the actual powers to be given to the president. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton observed that the president had to be directly elected, for example, rather than chosen by the legislature, and should be one man, rather than multiple leaders, to allow the executive to act with energy and speed. But Hamilton also wrote there that the president would possess well-understood powers, even in—or especially in—the area of foreign affairs and national security. “Of all the cares or concerns of government,” Hamilton wrote in Federalist #74, “the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand.”

The very theory of constitutional interpretation that established the unitary executive did not arise in the context of the removal power. The logic, announced most spectacularly by Justice Scalia in his dissent in Morrison v. Olson, maintains that Article II, § 1’s Vesting Clause grants all of the federal executive power to the president alone, subject only to narrow, explicit exceptions in the text itself. Under the pseudonym of Pacificus, Hamilton advanced the theory in defense of President George Washington’s declaration of neutrality in the wars of the French Revolution. The authority to proclaim neutrality did not depend on the president’s power of removal, but on an implicit executive authority to set and conduct foreign policy on behalf of the nation.

The story of the presidency has not been one of whether the president is really the chief human resources officer of the executive branch. The central element of the presidency has been the growth of its executive powers, not its powers of management. The Framers created the presidency so that a branch of the government would always be “in being” and could exercise substantive powers in times of crisis and emergency. Indeed, the basic theory of the unitary executive was born not out of a debate over removal, but over President Washington’s declaration of American neutrality during the wars of the French Revolution. Our greatest presidents failed not because they carefully husbanded the removal power, but because they responded to great challenges using every tool at their disposal, including their substantive powers as chief executive and commander in chief. Authority through the removal and command of subordinates, no doubt, was an element of executive power, but it was secondary to the more important issue—the scope of the president’s constitutional authorities.

It is true that the revolutionaries rebelled against King George III and his perceived oppressions of the colonies, but it does not follow that they opposed the idea of executive power. To most of those who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, post-Revolutionary efforts by the states to allow only weak executives with fragmented functions and powers had largely failed. Undermining the integrity of the executive branch had led to unstable, oppressive legislatures. The drafters of the Constitution came to Philadelphia in large part to restore the independence and unity of the executive branch—a republican, not a royal, restoration.

Independence put American theories of governance to the test, and they failed miserably. The Revolutionaries established one national charter, the Articles of Confederation, which soon proved crippled from lack of executive organization and leadership. The revolutionists wrote their state constitutions to undermine the structural integrity of the executive branch, and the results were legislative abuse, special-interest laws, and weak governments. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, even in a postwar time of relative peace and prosperity, led American nationalists to draft a new Constitution that would create a stronger, more independent executive branch within a more powerful national form of government. 

Enforcing the law gives the president the right to compel the obedience of private individuals and even states to the Constitution, treaties, and acts of Congress.

Why? As Gordon Wood has argued, the Framers believed that the 1776 constitutions had been the product of excessive revolutionary fervor. Unchecked by independent executives and judiciaries, the state legislatures had passed legislation infringing property rights, cancelling debts, and oppressing minorities. Factions, or special-interest groups, working at the expense of the broader public, had arisen. Unrestrained democracy had produced sharp and abrupt swings in policy that destabilized the newly independent states. The movement to restrain out-of-control legislatures, at both the state and national levels, proved so strong that Wood has likened it to a “Thermidorian” reaction. The object of this constitutional counterrevolution was a restored executive to check the excesses of the legislature, control law enforcement, appoint and manage government personnel, and conduct war and foreign relations.

The revolutionary state constitutions had created obstacles to good government, persuading the Convention delegates that a strong executive and republican government were not incompatible but mutually reinforcing. “A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution,” Hamilton argued in Federalist #70, “and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be in practice a bad government.” “Good government” required “energy in the executive,” and a vigorous president was now seen as “essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks” and “the steady administration of the laws.” 

It would be short-sighted to focus only on unity and independence to the exclusion of one of Hamilton’s other pillars—competent powers. In beginning his discussion of the president’s powers in Federalist #72, Hamilton observed that the “administration of government” falls “peculiarly within the province of the executive department.” It included the conduct of foreign affairs, the preparation of the budget, the expenditure of appropriated funds, the direction of the military, and “the operations of war.” Chief among the president’s enumerated powers was law enforcement. “The execution of the laws and the employment of the common strength, either for this purpose or for the common defense, seem to comprise all the functions of the executive magistrate,” Hamilton observed. The general grant of the executive power and the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” both restrict and empower the president. They make clear that the president cannot suspend the law of the land at his whim, as British kings had, but they also give the president authority both to enforce the law and to interpret it. Enforcing the law gives the president the right to compel the obedience of private individuals and even states to the Constitution, treaties, and acts of Congress.

At the time of the Constitution’s framing, executive power was also understood to include the war, treaty, and other general foreign affairs powers. Political theory developed by thinkers such as John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, and William Blackstone, as well as Anglo-American constitutional history from the seventeenth century to the time of the framing, established that foreign affairs were the province of the executive branch of government. Hamilton and the other Federalists did not look to the executive to manage war and peace for tradition’s sake. They understood the executive to be functionally best matched in speed, unity, and decisiveness to the high-stakes nature of foreign affairs. Threats to national security led to greater centralization of foreign affairs power in the executive. Article II gave the president the roles of commander in chief and chief executive. “Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand,” Hamilton wrote in Federalist #74. “The direction of war implies the direction of the common strength,” he continued, “and the power of directing and employing the common strength forms a usual and essential part in the definition of the executive authority.”

Rogers only incompletely advances the idea of a unitary executive. He argues for “unitary,” but not for “executive” in full. “The Executive Power,” as vested in the president by the Constitution, encompasses much more than managing federal employees. Article II vests powers of substance that come to the fore during crises. Some of our greatest presidents have accessed those grants to the great benefit of the nation, such as Washington in declaring neutrality, Jefferson in buying Louisiana, Lincoln in winning the Civil War, and FDR in preparing for World War II. Presidents can err when they misread conditions or turn their powers to purposes not envisioned by the Constitution. But as our nation struggles yet again with unprecedented threats to our national security, the need for the Constitution’s executive power becomes clear.

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A Charity Case https://lawliberty.org/a-charity-case/ https://lawliberty.org/a-charity-case/#respond Tue, 17 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Adam J. MacLeod https://lawliberty.org/?p=67942

The Supreme Court corrected three basic errors in its most recent religious liberty case.]]>
State supreme court justices often must resolve difficult issues in hard cases. No one expects them to get every hard case right. But judges who faithfully adhere to their oaths of office are unlikely to make obvious errors in easy cases whose issues are governed by clear rules and settled precedents. So, what is going on in Wisconsin?

Last week, in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed a ruling of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. A unanimous US Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin’s high court had rationalized religious discrimination by Wisconsin officials in violation of the First Amendment. Writing for the Court, Justice Sotomayor observed that this was not a hard case.

A charitable explanation for the Wisconsin ruling is that a majority of Wisconsin’s justices suffer deep jurisprudential confusion. The court committed three major errors. All three errors are conceptual as well as legal and constitutional. And all three errors matter because they are incompatible with constitutional rule and ordered liberty.

The case arose under a Wisconsin law that requires employers to pay taxes into a scheme of unemployment insurance and exempts religious, nonprofit employers. The Catholic Charities Bureau claimed this tax exemption. But the Supreme Court of Wisconsin decided that Catholic Charities’ charitable ventures are not “operated primarily for religious purposes,” as state law requires. The court acknowledged that Catholic Charities and its subsidiaries are motivated by an explicit Christian mission and are governed by the bishop of a Roman Catholic diocese. But the court asserted that these religious institutions “offer services that would be the same regardless of the motivation of the provider.” The court concluded that Catholic Charities’ “activities are primarily charitable and secular.”

The Wisconsin court held that it did not violate the First Amendment to withhold the exemption from Catholic Charities. A dissenting justice charged that the court’s reasoning “excessively entangles the government in spiritual affairs, requiring courts to determine what religious practices are sufficiently religious under the majority’s unconstitutional test.” But the majority disagreed. “The review we endorse in this case is a neutral and secular inquiry based on objective criteria, examining the activities and motivations of a religious organization.”

The Wisconsin court also insisted that its holding would not infringe Catholic Charities’ free exercise rights. Catholic Charities can afford the tax. To require Catholic Charities to participate in the state’s unemployment compensation scheme, therefore, did not place a “constitutionally significant burden” upon its religious exercise, the court concluded.

Religious liberties are not contingent on sovereign will, Justice Thomas insisted.

In reversing, the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously held that the Wisconsin ruling was not neutral between different religions, as long-established First Amendment doctrine requires. The Establishment Clause, as the US Supreme Court has interpreted it over several decades, prohibits governments from favoring any religion over any other. This rule of “denominational neutrality,” as the Court calls it, requires strict scrutiny of any law or application of a law that distinguishes between religions, treating one more favorably than another.

Wisconsin violated the neutrality rule. To affirm that violation was the Wisconsin court’s first error. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule,” Justice Sotomayor acknowledged, “but this is not one.” Wisconsin officials engaged in a “paradigmatic form of denomina­tional discrimination.”

Wisconsin drew a line between religious charities based on “theo­logical differences in their provision of services.” Wisconsin deemed Catholic Charities and its affiliates ineligible for the tax exemption “be­cause they do not ‘attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith,’ ‘supply any religious materials to program participants or employees,’ or limit their charita­ble services to members of the Catholic Church.” On that reasoning, Catholic Charities “could qual­ify for the exemption while providing their current charita­ble services if they engaged in proselytization or limited their services to fellow Catholics.” But Catholic Charities and its affiliates argued that Catholic doctrine forbids them to use “works of charity for purposes of prose­lytism” and requires them to serve everyone. The burden on religious exercise is obvious.

The implications of this first error for ordered liberty are profound. The problem is not mere favoritism. A state supreme court that arrogates the power to draw the boundary between religious and non-religious activities by religious associations has seized the power in principle to nullify the religious freedom of those associations by defining their free exercise of religion out of legal and constitutional existence.

Writing a separate concurrence, Justice Thomas identified a second error of the Wisconsin court. Catholic Charities Bureau operates through a separate corporation from the Diocese that oversees it. For the Wisconsin majority, this meant that Catholic Charities is a separate “organization” from the Church, and the Church’s religious motivations, therefore, were irrelevant in ascertaining Catholic Charities’ primary purpose.

As Justice Thomas observed, that “hold­ing contravened the church autonomy doctrine,” another well-established constitutional rule. It requires Wisconsin’s courts “to defer to the Bishop of Superior’s religious view that Catholic Charities and its subentities are an arm of the Diocese.” Religious institutions have a First Amendment right to structure their legal affairs in the manner best suited to their own ecclesial governments, theological doctrines, and practical, legal needs. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has no power to decide which corporate structure is sufficiently religious for a church’s ministries.

The Wisconsin court’s legal error, Thomas explained, was to identify the association of charitable Roman Catholic believers with the legal structures that the association uses to carry on its business. The Roman Catholic Church “is a single worldwide religious insti­tution,” not a legal sub-entity incorporated in the state of Wisconsin. Though the Wisconsin justices acknowledged that the Bishop of the local Diocese directs Catholic Charities and controls its affairs, they nevertheless “viewed Catholic Charities and its subentities as distinct, nonreligious or­ganizations merely because they are separately incorpo­rated.”

The Wisconsin court’s conceptual error was, in Justice Thomas’s words, to think of “religious institutions as nothing more than the cor­porate entities they have formed.” Churches and other religious communities have an existence of their own, which is not reducible to their formal, legal structures and not contingent upon the laws of a state or judgments of secular officials. Whether its rights and obligations are secured by a corporation, a trust, or some other legal fiction, a religious group exists in reality, independent of its recognition in positive laws and legal and equitable judgments.

Justice Thomas pointed out the implications of this conceptual error for civil liberties and the rule of law. Quoting an 1835 decision of the Vermont Supreme Court, Justice Thomas explained, “To conclude that a religious institution has no existence outside its corporate form ‘would be in effect to decide that our religious liberties [are] dependent on the will of the legislature, and not guar­anteed by the constitution.’” Religious liberties are not contingent on sovereign will, Justice Thomas insisted, because “religious institu­tions are a parallel authority to the State, not a creature of state law.”

The majority of justices of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin are not equal to the powers that they arrogated. Secular courts have no legal or constitutional competence to adjudicate questions of canon law, religious or theological doctrine, or ecclesiology. And as the Wisconsin majority opinion illustrates, elite lawyers often lack professional competence to address such questions, as well. Most of the top law schools no longer require law students to learn jurisprudence and legal history, much less canon law. And increasing numbers of lawyers have no meaningful experience of religion.

A society comprised of charitable persons is immeasurably better off than a society whose members only do what they are obligated to do.

Thus, it is not surprising that most of the Wisconsin justices misunderstood religion. Not all religious people proselytize. Though the Christian religion involves evangelization, winning converts is neither the totality of the Christian religion nor its essence. The Christian life consists of acts of obedience. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus of Nazareth instructed his followers. Among those commandments are several injunctions to perform acts of charity. God will reward those who give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked. If anyone demands your shirt, give him your coat as well. Above all, love your neighbor as you love yourself.

The Wisconsin justices committed a third conceptual error, which the justices of the US Supreme Court did not correct—indeed, Justice Jackson compounded this error in a separate concurrence. They misunderstood charity. In the minds of the Wisconsin justices, the “religious motivation” for Catholic Charities’ charitable work was “not enough to receive the exemption” because non-religious organizations can provide the same services. The charitable services, therefore, “are secular in nature.”

In this line of reasoning, the justices identified charity according to its outward action and effect, without regard to its motivation. They identified the relevant “activities” as “job training, placement, and coaching, as well as services related to activities of daily living.” Whether these valuable ends are pursued for “religious or secular motivations,” the justices speculated, “the services provided would not differ in any sense.” Therefore, they concluded, the services are activities of a “wholly secular endeavor.”

That conception of charitable action, identifying charity with its effects and consequences, mistakes the character of charity. A charitable intention is what makes an act charitable. To be charitable is to intend to give what one has a right to retain, and to yield up one’s rights with no claim or expectation of reciprocity, for the sole reason that the recipient will benefit. Paying taxes and making payrolls of social services agencies are not acts of charity. Donating time and money that one has no duty to give, so that another may learn or eat, is charity.

Because it is the intention that makes an act charitable, the primary values of charity are moral and spiritual, not pragmatic. As Thomas Aquinas taught centuries ago, acts of charity, such as almsgiving, have an internal effect on the soul of the almsgiver, bearing the “spiritual fruit” of loving another person more than riches. And such acts can also generate gratitude and benevolence in the recipient.

Charity’s moral value is its central aspect. Charitable acts certainly can produce what Aquinas called “a corporal effect, inasmuch as they supply our neighbor’s corporal needs.” But what makes charitable action so valuable, and a chief reason why we extend to charitable actors so many special, legal privileges and immunities, is that charitable actions make charitable persons. And a society comprised of charitable persons is immeasurably better off than a society whose members only do what they are obligated to do.

Is charity religious? In theory, charity can be secular. Every human being has the capacity for charity. But in practice, charity is a religious phenomenon. Viewing the full sweep of human history reveals that charity is a distinctly religious virtue and almost exclusively a religious activity. While many societies throughout history have practiced hospitality and altruism, the Jewish and Christian religions invented charity. And it was Christian societies that placed charity in the mainstream of civic life and gave it a unique place in our fundamental law.

By redefining charitable action according to its material effects, rather than its intention and spiritual value, the Wisconsin majority attempted to make charity commensurable to non-charitable forms of poor relief. This false equivalence opens the door to threats to ordered liberty. If government welfare programs, social engineering projects, or other secular, non-charitable endeavors can produce equal or better results, and if it is the results that matter, then those in power may decide that we can do without charity. If we don’t need to preserve rights to perform charity, then officials may decide they don’t need to respect the autonomy of charitable associations. And we may end up with more rulings like that of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin.

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The Externalities of Postliberalism https://lawliberty.org/the-externalities-of-postliberalism/ https://lawliberty.org/the-externalities-of-postliberalism/#respond Tue, 17 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 James R. Rogers https://lawliberty.org/?p=67953

Postliberals and traditional conservatives can have a policy debate on grounds that are recognizable in market theory.]]>
The policy argument on the American political right these days between postliberals with (some) populists, on the one hand, and Reaganite and market-oriented fusionist conservatives, on the other hand, is, in essence, an argument over externalities. More particularly, the argument is over what’s included in our set of policy-relevant costs and benefits when we consider policy problems and solutions. The controversy circles around postliberals proposing the inclusion of a set of non-pecuniary costs when identifying policy problems and when considering policy change. Recognizing this means there is enough common ground for constructive debate over policy rather than each side arguing past the other.

To be sure, the philosophical divide between postliberals and market-oriented conservatives (and classical liberals) goes deeper than the policy divide. But Americans, and conservatives in particular, have long had experience with modus vivendi-type policy coalitions constructed out of groups with incompatible philosophical commitments.

“Externalities” are costs or benefits imposed on (or received by) people not party to a market exchange or action. The action or exchange of one set of people imposes costs (or confers benefits) on others who are “external” to a transaction. A canonical example of a negative externality is an increased probability of lung disease as a result of breathing auto emissions from other people’s cars. An example of a positive externality is those spared from contracting an infectious disease because other people got vaccinated and, as a result, did not transmit the infection.

The above are textbook examples of externalities. While rightwing postliberals (and left-wing anti-neoliberals) generally eschew conventional economic jargon, many of their criticisms of markets or market outcomes really only argue for the recognition, and remediation, of un- or underrecognized negative externalities. Postliberal arguments can be accommodated by existing market theory, albeit by that part of market theory that considers market failure.

For example, while the market’s “creative destruction” can expand the economic pie, the process can also impose real costs on people in the form of disrupting lives and communities formed in reliance on settled, if imperfect, expectations of the future. (This is Karl Polanyi’s basic argument in The Great Transformation.) Another example is that increased globalization can attenuate supply chains. This can increase the fragility of domestic markets, thus making economic disruption more likely in response to otherwise remote events across the globe.

While these may seem like novel arguments, careful market theorists have long recognized that the idea of “cost” is broader than often conceived. For example, Harold Demsetz observed in his seminal 1967 article in the American Economic Review, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights,” that externalities can be both “pecuniary as well as nonpecuniary. No harmful or beneficial effect is external to the world.”

Similarly, F. A. Hayek rejected blanket ideological “appeals to the principle of non-interference” in the market economy. He endorsed empirical rather than rationalistic (or a priori) approaches to policy, arguing that government measures to address policy issues like negative externalities “must be examined in each instance” to judge in each case whether “costs will outweigh the advantages.”

That postliberal criticisms of the market can fit within a well-known category of “market failure” does not of course resolve the policy debate.

This does not mean giving a free pass to the mere assertion that the benefits of remediating a negative externality exceed the cost, but it does mean that evidence rather than ideology should be the guide on both sides of the policy argument.

This is not new. Adam Smith proleptically exemplified Hayek’s admonition when discussing a rationale that would justify national restrictions on free trade.

Adam Smith on National Defense and Free Trade

While generally favoring free trade in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith nonetheless famously argued that national defense can justify restricting trade with other nations in order to encourage domestic production or conservation of strategic materials needed for defense. Often styled as an argument Smith provided in favor of tariffs, Smith’s argument discussed the possibility that government subsidies (“bounties”) be provided for domestic production of goods critical to defense (rather than tariffs).

While Smith argued in application to a specific policy domain, the form of Smith’s argument is simply a specific example in which the benefit of the trade restriction is greater than the cost; he applies a simple cost/benefit calculus.

Smith provides an argument from an externality. That is, he argues that government intervention would provide a benefit beyond, or external to, the benefits to the parties immediately engaged in international trade of a particular good critically needed for national defense. The loss of the gains of trade to the nation, which occurs with certainty, would be compensated by a probabilistic increase in security.

The value of “increased security” would result from a lower probability of conflict breaking out in the first instance as a result of maintaining domestic production of the critical good, or from an increased probability of winning a conflict or minimizing the magnitude of loss should war actually break out.

The aura of mathematical calculation should not divert attention from the highly subjective elements involved in reasoning through the tradeoffs; the identification or calculation of the underlying parameters—the comparative probabilities that a conflict breaks out with and without the policy intervention, and the cost of a conflict if one does break out—is fraught with subjective judgment calls.

Yet while subjective, the necessity of making the judgment calls is inescapable. As a result, there would likely be policy debate over the magnitude of the foreign threat, the fragility of the international supply of the critical defense good, and over the actual dependence of the nation’s defense on the particular good in dispute. The accuracy of these judgment calls would be known, if ever, only in retrospect. As a result, the policy debate would be entirely appropriate and, again, inescapable.

While Smith limits his argument to national defense (although other externalities make an appearance later in The Wealth of Nations), the form of Smith’s argument is not similarly limited. The policy question is what external benefit or loss we seek to obtain or avoid with a policy intervention relative to the cost of that intervention. (And, to be sure, not all externalities require government intervention to solve. Nonetheless, externalities involving numerous actors unable to easily coordinate their behavior will typically require government intervention. That said, calibrating the appropriate type or level of government intervention in response to an externality can be fraught with practical difficulties.)

While goods like avoiding economic and social disruption of communities, or promoting national solidarity or national greatness, or increasing the availability of meaningful industrial jobs all require the making of highly subjective judgment calls on the nature of the benefit, they’re not really different animals than Smith’s argument justifying policy intervention in international trade to improve a nation’s defense capacity.

Importantly, that does not mean that the assertion of an amorphous, subjective “good” always wins the policy debate, but it does mean that the existence of an amorphous and subjective good does not rule out the need for authentic policy debate. Indeed, careful modern property rights analysis recognizes that identifying what externalities “count” for intervention changes with changing circumstances.

Externalities Change Over Time

Much of the debate today between postliberals and traditional market-oriented Reagan conservatives is, implicitly, an argument over what counts as an externality; that is, what interests we recognize as belonging to people and therefore what counts as a harm when taken away.

Postliberals and (some) populists, for example, advance interests of social solidarity and the dignity of manufacturing work as elements lost with the globalization of US trade. While these may be novel assertions in the context of the sorts of values policymakers (and academics) have typically considered in recent generations, their novelty does not really present a problem for bringing those values within the traditional theoretical structure of policy debates regarding externalities.

Phenomena like social solidarity and dignity doesn’t mean giving postliberals a pass on evidence and proof.

As noted earlier, in his 1967 AER article, Harold Demsetz pointed out that externalities can be “pecuniary as well as nonpecuniary.” While there are issues of identification and measurement, that interests such as solidarity and dignity are “nonpecuniary” does not rule out recognition of their loss as externalities.

Even more piquantly in Demsetz’s discussion is his observation that our concepts of what constitutes an “externality” naturally change over time with the advent of new economic and social circumstances. Demsetz’s argument in his 1967 AER article is dense but important:

Every cost and benefit associated with social interdependencies is a potential externality. …

Changes in knowledge result in changes in production functions, market values, and aspirations. New techniques, new ways of doing the same things, and doing new things-all invoke harmful and beneficial effects to which society has not been accustomed. … The emergence of new property rights takes place in response to the desires of the interacting persons for adjustment to new benefit-cost possibilities.

While interests such as social solidarity and the dignity of manufacturing work aren’t property interests in a narrow sense, the argument nonetheless is that in some identifiable way, these aspects of life and work “belong” to Americans and, as a result, their loss represents a real loss to many Americans. This loss, postliberals and populists argue, deserves to be taken into consideration when weighing policy costs and benefits.

Discussion of social reliance interests related to policy change is a matter of course in other areas. For example, US courts consider the significance of “reliance interests” in current law as one factor judges take into consideration when contemplating changing or overturning legal precedent. While the terminology is borrowed from contract law, no one suggests that overturning a judicial precedent constitutes an actionable breach of promise or an actionable deprivation of a property interest. Nonetheless, as a matter of legal policy, judges consider social reliance on previous decisions, and the cost of confounding settled reliance interests, as a relevant factor when considering whether to overturn precedent.

Identifying and Measuring External Costs

That postliberal criticisms of the market can fit within a well-known category of “market failure” does not, of course, resolve the policy debate. The question, as in all policy debates, is what’s the evidence that a problem exists and what’s the evidence that a proposed policy solution would actually address the problem?

On the one hand, simply asserting that “the pervasive logic of the market system has caused a decrease in social solidarity in the US” isn’t enough to warrant policies with real economic costs. (Nor is de rigueur citation of Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation.) After all, even in a planned economy in which the means of production are wholly socially owned, changes in the technology of production or in consumer preferences would require planning boards to deploy labor and capital in new and different ways. These changes are no less socially disruptive simply because a planning board instigated them rather than the market. Further, social policies in market economies can cushion the impact of these changes without jettisoning the market in toto. Recall, after all, that Polanyi does not criticize economic change in itself, and he underscores that the system he advocates would make ample use of markets. Rather, Polanyi criticizes market “systems” (let the reader understand!) in which abstract market forces dictate an unduly rapid pace of economic change.

At the same time, the difficulty of empirically accounting for phenomena like social solidarity and dignity does not mean that the phenomena do not exist. In this, as in other policy debates, we must avoid repeating the error of Sir Arthur Eddington’s ichthyologist, who uses a net with a two-inch mesh to catch the fish he studies. When then asked about the study of fish that are less than two inches long, the ichthyologist nods, dismissively waves his hand and responds, “That’s no problem, ‘cuz what my net can’t catch ain’t fish.”

But this also doesn’t mean giving postliberals a pass on evidence and proof. For example, in their book The Politics of Virtue, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst criticize the materialism of modern market economies while also repeatedly (and implausibly) claiming that many of the policies they advocate won’t have any significant negative impact on current living standards. Yet if, in fact, renewed social solidarity and dignity (and other values postliberals identify) are valued by people, then they would be willing to trade away at least some material gain to obtain these greater goods. “Man does not live by bread alone,” after all.

The point, however, is that postliberals and traditional conservatives can have a policy debate on grounds that are recognizable in market theory. Postliberals press the outer boundaries of what we normally consider to be negative externalities. But that’s to be expected, if not actually predicted, as Demsetz observes, given the dramatically changing “social interdependencies” that result from globalization and from the extent that the market penetrates modern life.

To be sure, the possibility of shared areas of policy agreement neither entails nor necessitates philosophical convergence between postliberals and market-oriented conservatives (and classical liberals). Nonetheless, recognizing the possibility of a modus vivendi in some areas of policy would allow these philosophically divergent groups to move ahead together in substantive policy areas.

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Save the Libraries https://lawliberty.org/save-the-libraries/ https://lawliberty.org/save-the-libraries/#respond Mon, 16 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Robert C. Thornett https://lawliberty.org/?p=67764

America has a long and proud history of supporting public access to books.]]>
American steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie donated over $40 million to construct 2,509 libraries—1679 in the US and others in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and even distant countries like Serbia, Malaysia, and Fiji. By 1919, nearly half of the 3,500 libraries in the United States were Carnegie libraries. “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people,” said Carnegie. “It is a never failing spring in the desert.”

By contrast, from the fall of Rome to Nazi Germany to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the dismantling of libraries has been a mark of cultural decline. It demonstrates an indifference, if not hostility, toward the intellectual needs of society.

Yet today, an increasing number of schools are defunding, closing, or repurposing their libraries under the banner of “progress” and “innovation,” and under the false assumption that libraries are just rooms full of books which can be found online or stored in a cheaper or more convenient location. For example, in June, the school board in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, eliminated funding for middle and high school library books from next year’s budget. Waiakea High School in Hilo, Hawaii, is now converting its library into a health education center for careers like nursing and physical therapy. Some of its 26,000 books and other materials are being moved to a spare classroom, while the rest are being donated to the community.

In a case that drew the ire of many, even the mayor of Houston, a June 2024 photo from Houston Independent School District (HISD) showed all the furniture in one elementary school library newly rearranged for the coming year. The bookshelves were pushed up against walls and windows, often blocked from reach by other furniture, to make room for row after row of individual desks. It was part of the new superintendent’s “New Education System,” under which HISD school libraries were turned into “team centers” housing disruptive students removed from class for disciplinary reasons.

At an HISD hearing on the issue, one Wheatley High School student protested the change: “I live in Fifth Ward. There’s not a lot there [in the school library], but what is there should not be turned into a [team] center, especially when I am constantly there. I read a lot, and I just feel like that is not what needs to happen.”

The student’s words, “I am constantly there,” speak volumes about the value of libraries. “Constantly” and “there” indicate time and place. A library is a fortress guarding time and space for the exploration of books from intrusions. Libraries are among the real “safe spaces” schools need. Houston ISD says it now allows students to access books on a phone app, as if this were an adequate substitute. But a phone is not a reading space, and it steals time by embedding the act of reading in a world of distractions.

To be sure, many school libraries today are underutilized. In a vicious cycle, as schools allot more funding to digital resources, libraries’ book collections often diminish, which only amplifies the impression that libraries are unnecessary. The answer, however, is not for administrators to shrug their shoulders and give up on school libraries. It is to find creative ways to improve them and attract students to them again, just like successful cities find ways to bring people back to underutilized downtown areas.

The good news is that some schools are doing this. The Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries has awarded 4,000 grants totaling $23 million to expand, update, and diversify the book and print collections of low-income schools across the US. (Bush was an elementary school librarian in Austin, Texas, and has a master’s in library science.)

And many schools are transforming their library spaces. For example, in 2019 New York City Public Schools started the VITAL (Vital Instructional Transformative Accessible Learning) Libraries grant program, funded by the Edith & Frances Mulhall Achilles Memorial Fund, which awards two $50,000 one-time grants each year for schools to develop a sustainable model to make the library an essential resource in the school that is integrated with students’ experience. One long-term goal of the VITAL grants is to create a community of stakeholders who will ensure that the school library program is not dismantled. At one grant recipient, Curtis High School on Staten Island, this stakeholder community includes such diverse members as a parent coordinator, assistant principals, custodians, and the school’s robotics teacher.

In another New York City Public Schools project, in the early 2000s, the Robin Hood Foundation’s Library Initiative helped fund the construction and overhaul of libraries in some of the city’s poorest elementary schools. It enlisted dozens of architects and graphic designers, who turned dilapidated libraries into vibrant central spaces.

Schools are using many strategies to attract students to their libraries, some innovative, others tried-and-true. One is to allow students to have more input. This can include allowing students to make book requests, obtaining the books quickly, and having library “brand ambassadors” who generate ideas for the book collection, selections for the book club, and future events and programs. KC Boyd, the 2022 School Library Journal School Librarian of the Year, keeps the bookshelves dynamic by rearranging them regularly. Librarians can prominently display books connected to current class topics and projects, which requires communication with teachers. The librarians at Fauquier High School in Virginia run “book tastings” in which students rotate from table to table sampling books of different genres using a five-minute timer. And some libraries are hosting events for reading literature or original poetry, or adding podcast recording spaces and makerspaces with supplies.

From a design standpoint, many school libraries have added artwork, like murals and sculptures, and comfortable, all-mobile furniture. Some have put high-traffic offices, like the student activities office, nearby, so students must pass through the library to get there. And many school libraries have seen student use skyrocket after changing to a “learning commons” model, which designates separate zones for classroom space, quiet study, and collaboration with “team tables” and laptop charging stations. Librarian Rebecca Webster of Fauquier High School in Virginia says, “After COVID especially, students forgot how to talk to each other,” so she loves seeing students talking at the team tables. Her fellow librarian, Becca Isaac, says, “Before, [the team areas] might have been the ‘shushing zone,’” but redesigned partitioning allows students seeking conversation and quiet to coexist.

Perhaps the most fundamental way to attract students to school libraries is to have a friendly, helpful librarian who knows students by name. But many are disappearing. For example, in Massachusetts, a recent article reports that the New Bedford School District has 13,000 K-12 students but only one librarian, who works at New Bedford High School. None of the district’s eighteen elementary or middle schools has a librarian, making it a “librarian desert.”

Backward cultures find reasons to dismantle libraries. Wise, flourishing cultures find ways to build and expand them.

Good librarians can change lives. As Leah Gregory of the Illinois Heartland Library System puts it in a 2023 article, “A school librarian can turn a resolute non-reader into a voracious reader by suggesting a magical book that converts them. It’s a miracle that happens regularly in school libraries, but it requires a staff member who has the time to build a connection, a collection to pull from, and the skill to do reader advisory.”

Sometimes, all it takes to get students looking at books in the school library is someone taking them there and pointing out interesting examples of what is available. For example, a decade ago, I was teaching geography at a community college, and I had assigned a project to research and design a trip to another part of the world. The instructions required at least ten sources, including three books. “Three?” students said, as if this was way over the top. A few weeks later, one piped up that they had been to the college library and found it contained no books about Mozambique, their destination, nor about Africa in general. Skeptical, after class, I strolled down to the library and found a long bookcase filled with books about Africa, with many sections on Mozambique. It was then that I realized how little experience some students have with finding books in a library, rather than just using it to chat and work on their laptops. So I collaborated with the librarians to set up mini-field trips to the library in which we showed the students where they could find books on every inhabited region of the world. Over the rest of the semester, I found myself bumping into my students in the library, looking for books for their project.

There are also schools that never had a library to dismantle. “I have never worked in a school with a functional school library,” wrote Philadelphia public school English teacher Lydia Kulina-Washburn in her 2022 Education Week article Book Bans? My School Doesn’t Even Have a Library. “In the absence of school libraries, it is not uncommon for teachers to create private classroom libraries from donations. Like mine in Room 250, these usually take the form of clusters of orange Wawa shelving crates.” If book apps on phones were enough, as an increasing number of school districts seem to believe, why would teachers be scrambling to build physical libraries in their classrooms?

A US Department of Education study found that 61 percent of low-income families with kids had zero books for children in the home. This often leaves it to school libraries to introduce students to the world of books. But the current trend of closing, shrinking, and repurposing school libraries robs many students of the opportunity to discover and love books. Moreover, it stands in stark contrast to America’s long history of finding innovative ways to connect people with books and spaces to explore them.

For example, the concept of a bookmobile—a library on wheels—was invented by an American librarian with the mind of a social entrepreneur. In 1902, Mary Lemist Titcomb became head librarian at the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland, which had just opened the year before as only the second county library in the US. It was there that Titcomb started a book outreach service which sent boxes of 30 books each to some 66 “book stations” located in stores, post offices, and other public places. But she realized that the books still were not reaching many rural dwellers. So she enlisted Joshua Thomas, a janitor at her library who lived in a rural area, to drive a horse and buggy full of books out to the countryside. Her instructions were to make sure families have enough time to browse and enjoy the books. “The book goes to the man,” said Titcomb, “not waiting for the man to come to the book.”

During my own early childhood in the DC suburbs, our area’s bookmobile was a library in a truck. It would roll in each week during summer and park for an hour at the entrance to our townhouse development. The driver-librarian would open the doors, and I would step up and scour the shelves from microscopes to baseball fundamentals to the Sioux Indians to Frog and Toad and Encyclopedia Brown. At the end of the hour, I would step back down onto the sidewalk and walk home with a big stack of books in my arms, and the bookmobile would roll on to the next stop.

Long before Mary Lemist Titcomb invented the bookmobile, many of America’s Founders also worked extensively to build and support libraries. For example, in 1731, a 25-year-old Ben Franklin and his philosophy club, the Junto, founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first public library in what is now the United States.

Thomas Jefferson allowed friends and the public to use his library at Monticello in Virginia, where he amassed between 9,000 and 10,000 volumes. It was the largest personal book collection in the early United States. Jefferson inherited some of his books, while others he obtained through book dealers in Georgetown, Washington, DC, New York, and Philadelphia. And he procured many books during his five years in Europe as America’s Minister to France. He sailed home to Virginia with trunks full of books from across Europe. In 1814, after the 3,000 volumes in the Library of Congress were lost when the British burned the US Capitol building, Jefferson more than doubled the size of the library by selling the government 6,487 of his own books. They were left in their original bookcases, which were put into ten horse-drawn wagons and hauled 300 miles from Monticello to DC. Jefferson described the collection he sent in a letter to his friend Samuel Harrison Smith, DC’s most prominent journalist and newspaper owner:

I have been 50. years making it, & have spared no pains, opportunity or expence to make it what it is. [W]hile residing in Paris I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hands … [and] during the whole time I was in Europe, in it’s principal book-marts, particularly Amsterdam, Frankfort, Madrid and London, [I searched] for such works relating to America as could not be found in Paris. … and after my return to America, I was led to procure also whatever related to the duties of those in the high concerns of the nation.

When the final shipment left Monticello for DC, Jefferson wrote to Smith, “Our 10th and last waggon load of books goes off to-day. … [And] an interesting treasure is added to your city, now become the depository of unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the US. and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.”

What Jefferson, Franklin, Titcomb, and Carnegie all understood was the value of putting books in people’s hands. Too often today, centuries of work are being reversed by misguided initiatives that shrink the distribution of printed books. A 2024 article in Publisher’s Weekly reported that “In 2022 there were 162 million fewer books on US library shelves than in 2010, a roughly 20% decline.”

On the other hand, in 2021, six Congressmen from both houses introduced the Build America’s Libraries Act, which would provide $5 billion to build and upgrade libraries in underserved communities across the country. And the exploding classical school movement centers on daily reading and discussion of great books. These developments are in step with Americans’ long history of finding innovative ways to connect people with books.

Backward cultures find reasons to dismantle libraries. Wise, flourishing cultures find ways to build and expand them. Rather than using new technology as an excuse to downsize and repurpose libraries, we can better use it to orchestrate funding and logistics to expand school library collections and design and improve library spaces. Anyone donating to schools should recognize that school libraries are often an endangered species and consider stipulating that their donations are for the maintenance and expansion of libraries—especially ones on the brink of extinction. The real progress lies in creatively improving school libraries and educating students about what they have to offer, turning deserts into springs once again.

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The Uniqueness of the EU https://lawliberty.org/the-uniqueness-of-the-eu/ https://lawliberty.org/the-uniqueness-of-the-eu/#respond Mon, 16 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Henry T. Edmondson III https://lawliberty.org/?p=67808

Is the European Union collapsing, or is it simply continuing to evolve?]]>
One of the “founding fathers” of the European Union, Jean Monnet, famously said, “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” The most serious crisis occurred in 2009–10, the eurozone crisis, which put in jeopardy the common currency shared then by 12 EU countries. The euro survived, although no other EU countries have adopted it since, even if they are obligated to do so. Other major challenges have involved terrorism, immigration, the challenge of populism, and now the defense of Europe against Russian aggression without the assurance of American backing. This seems to be the greatest crisis yet. 

The European Union has both boosters and critics, but, given the threats of China, Iran, and Russia, and the failed or failing countries in Africa, it is in everyone’s best interest if the EU succeeds, though that may well take significant “forging,” to quote Monnet. What it will be in ten years’ time is difficult to predict, but the EU is not going anywhere. 

Though the Federalist Papers were ignored during the genesis of the European Union in the 1950s, and in its evolution since then, they are nonetheless useful as a means of analysis of the EU. Hamilton’s introduction to the Essays, in which he ponders the unique American undertaking, speaks to the EU project as well. Hamilton notes, 

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Hamilton may have overstated the case, given that the colonies already had well over a century of semi-autonomous self-governance as well as the advantage of the English government model. The EU, however, is arguably sui generis, something new, in a category of only one. Perhaps even more than America, it was created in “reflection and choice,” although some might argue that the “reflection” was insufficient. 

Treaties, Black Pots, and Black Kettles

Even though the US was an early proponent of the EU, hoping for a bulwark against the Soviet Union, the EU is the entity that conservatives love to hate; at times, there are even hints of schadenfreude when the EU finds itself facing challenges or crises. The few progressives who pay attention to the EU are in a sour mood as well, but in their case, it is because they think the project is failing. Both George Soros and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman speak of “the tragedy of the EU” insofar as it is falling short of a United States of Europe, largely governed by a supranational government.

To be sure, there is plenty to criticize, although some critics are apocalyptic. Others maintain that the EU was irreparably flawed from the start. At the least, the EU is finding just how difficult it is to acquire a common culture. At times, though, criticisms of the EU remind one of the proverbial “pot calling the kettle black,” an observation that some admit, even if implicitly. American conservatives criticize the EU for its “democratic deficit,” although the phrase is never well defined. To be sure, every democratic country suffers from a democratic deficit, which we might say is the gap between its political ideals and its governance. On our side of the Atlantic, citizen confidence in US institutions is at a disturbingly low level. A widely circulated poll a few years back found that Congress is less popular than a colonoscopy, a root canal, lice, or telemarketers. In the last several elections, American presidents have been elected, not because of who they are, but of who they are not, namely, their predecessor. Our electoral process is suppressing talent and integrity.

If anything is to unite Europe, and satisfy the quest for a “European identity,” it may be a recovery of its Judeo-Christian heritage.

Criticized as well is the EU’s expectation that the concept of the nation-state will give way over time to a new system of governance. That expectation, though, seems to be dead in the water, to the disappointment of Europhiles: the nation-state is alive and well. In the US, a destructive ideology of “globalism,” perhaps even more radical than the quest for “ever closer union,” has as its effect the non-enforcement of the country’s southwest border, a devastating act of malfeasance that has only recently been addressed. At best, it will take years to manage. Critics charge that the EU has precipitated cultural decline, evident in religious apostasy, declining birthrates, and the social instability brought about by massive immigration. The US, however, has startled even Europe with its freefall into moral anarchy. Who would have thought it would take a British fantasy author to tell Americans that they are embracing gender madness?

The Lisbon Treaty and Sleeping Beauty

The legal basis of the EU is a series of member country treaties; the European Union was born in 1957 with the Treaty of Rome and now numbers 27 countries. Although the idea of a united Europe has been around for centuries, most admit that the impetus for the modern undertaking was to ensure that Germany did not wreak havoc on the continent a third time. In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty formally recognized the “European Union.” The treaty preamble contains the informal motto of the EU: “ever closer union.” In 2004, the EU produced a “constitution,” or a “constitutional treaty.” It failed, however, to secure the required unanimous approval of all 27 countries. Some of its features were copied into the Lisbon Treaty (2007), which expressed more, though still modest, concern for a common defense.

For years, the EU has enjoyed the luxury of talking about a common defense with nothing to show for it, except an annoyed NATO, which found such EU aspirations redundant, and thus competitive. The Lisbon Treaty, moreover, created the position of High Representative for the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Although not the first to occupy the position, Italian Frederica Mogherini assumed the office from 2014–19, though the Eastern European EU countries expressed concern, suspicious that she was too sympathetic with Russia after its invasion of the Ukraine. At an EU summit, Mogherini tried to explain, “European defense has sometimes been seen as synonymous for the creation of a European army. This, however, is not the path chosen by the EU and its member states.” She added dubiously, “What we have built is even more ambitious than a European army.” 

On a more hopeful note, Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, has just assumed the position that Mogherini occupied; she seems an apt choice for the role as her family suffered grievously from Soviet-occupied Estonia, in which several immediate family members were deported to Siberia. Kallas has expressed strong public support for Ukraine. 

In December of 2017, the EU established PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation). Though it fell far short of a common military, its ambitions did include ancillary services: a Medical Command, a Cyber Rapid Response Team, Military Disaster Relief, and improved Maritime Surveillance. In a rather odd tweet about PESCO in 2017, and hopeful it would create an EU military force, then EU Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker fancifully announced, “She is awake, the Sleeping Beauty of the Lisbon Treaty.” 

Yet, “the mountains heaved, but brought forth a mouse.” The EU’s common military, the European Corps (Eurocorps), is an army corps whose headquarters number all of 1,000 soldiers, stationed in Strasbourg, France. At least the location is symbolic: the Maginot Line runs less than five miles from the city center. Sleeping Beauty still sleeps, and there is no prince in the offing, though there is a new seriousness, both in Brussels and in member countries, of military spending—even if it means deficit spending. Some of the countries that are derelict in meeting their obligations to NATO, and encouraged by the current president of the EU Commission, have pledged to meet NATO’s 3 percent of GDP, or even more. 

The effort, however, will be uneven; for example, the leftist Spanish government, comfortable behind the Pyrenees, explains that responding to climate change will be a major part of its defensive contribution. In addition, the EU is accelerating the process of adding new members; those candidate countries are in the Western Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia (Bulgaria and Croatia are already EU members). In addition, the EU is looking seriously at Georgia, Moldova, and even Ukraine. A notable success of the EU thus far, has been to offer a safe haven to former Soviet Block countries, and several of them provide a buffer between Russia and Western Europe. 

A Political or Spiritual Crisis?

Unlike Americans, who can point to philosophical antecedents from which the country drew inspiration—even if those sometimes self-contradictory antecedents stimulate debate—the EU has studiously avoided political philosophy, perhaps because of overconfidence in rational design, perhaps because of the devastation wrought by Marxism and Nazism, probably a combination of both. Kant’s hyper-rational “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795) is somewhere in the background, even if it is not recognized. In trying to explain the EU, a prominent Member of the European Parliament (MEP) once told me that it had something to do with Rousseau’s “General Will,” taken from The Social Contract (1792). He did not seem able to elaborate, although he may have been correct. More apropos might be the thought of José Ortega y Gasset, especially his Revolt of the Masses (1930), although his warning of “hyper-democracy” and his promotion of a ruling elite would have been a hard sell. 

If anything is to unite Europe, and satisfy the quest for a “European identity,” it may be a recovery of its Judeo-Christian heritage. This was debated in a peculiar way in the attempt to write the EU constitutional treaty in Brussels in 2003. The question arose, and was debated for weeks, whether the preamble should include a recognition of Europe’s Judeo-Christian roots. The issue bedeviled the assembly, and when all was said and done, no mention was included in the document; some even worried that it would alienate Muslim immigrants. In 2011, the European Commission recommended to the member countries that citizens find a more “inclusive” holiday greeting than “Happy Christmas.” 

Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), however, asserts that Europe’s religious heritage is not an irrelevant relic. He addresses the question in The True Europe: Its Identity and Mission, (2024), which was sympathetically reviewed on this site by Paul Seaton. Benedict is, as Seaton titles his review, “A European in Full,” yet his warnings about the future are dire: “European rational law is in a crisis, now that it has completely relinquished its religious foundations and de facto runs the risk of turning into a rule of anarchy.” Ratzinger asserts, “There can be no future Europe that would jettison … the heritage of the Christian West.” “History,” he explains, “cannot be turned back.” In saying this, however, Benedict is not advocating a nostalgic return to a bygone era; he fully embraces the continent as it is today, and it is one, he maintains, in which “Christian faith can coexist and make room for different political positions.” Such an environment will offer “binding force,” which “safeguards a maximum of freedom.” If not, he warns, we will witness a “post-European” society.

Conclusion: Federalist #85

As a bookend to essay #1, in Federalist #85, Hamilton draws on Scottish philosopher David Hume to say that a successful constitution needs time. In the last paragraph of #85, Hamilton quotes from Hume’s “The Rise of Arts and Sciences,” in which the Scottish philosopher argues that, at a certain point, nothing can improve a government other than experience, time, and trial and error. 

The zeal for attempts to amend, prior to the establishment of the Constitution, must abate in every man who is ready to accede to the truth of the following observations of a writer equally solid and ingenious: “to balance a large state or society (says he) whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it. The judgments of many must unite in the work; experience must guide their labor; time must bring it to perfection, and the feeling of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they INEVITABLY fall into in their first trials and experiments.”

What might a “successful EU” look like? The answer is not an easy one. If we look upon the EU as a nation-state, then a Comparative Government perspective is apt, and one could do no worse than consider the Preamble to the US Constitution and judge the EU by those criteria. If the EU, however, is analyzed from an International Relations perspective, that is, as a kind of international organization, then different criteria might apply: We would hope for an entity with a substantial global presence, in a meaningful alliance with the US and other like-minded countries, and a sturdy member of NATO. Since the EU is its own category, it may be that if it at least satisfies the best of both categories, we might then deem the EU successful.

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The Republic on Parade https://lawliberty.org/the-republic-on-parade/ https://lawliberty.org/the-republic-on-parade/#respond Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:01:00 +0000 James Hankins https://lawliberty.org/?p=67870

Public demonstrations of what we have in common can counteract negative self-images created by rioting and militarized law enforcement.]]>
At the present moment, our screens are full of images of rioting and violence, and both parties are straining to craft visual narratives based on those images to build popular support for their partisan policies and worldviews. American political leaders used to cultivate positive messages in public and conduct “oppo research” in secret. Now both parties accentuate the negative, all the time. The opposite party is the enemy: they are fascists, they are possessed by demons. The professed goal of both parties is to stop the other one from destroying the nation. The preferred remedy is to throw members of the “enemy” party in jail or even assassinate them. What is on our screens at present is crafted to promote partisan goals by inflaming negative emotions. Successful “visual arguments” (as Christopher Rufo calls them) help the parties seek power but cause great damage to the country as a whole. Edmund Burke wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” But how can we love our country when the streets are full of burning cars, when thugs are looting and attacking public buildings, when law enforcement, backed by military force, is forced to use violence to maintain order?

A recent trip to Italy put some ideas in my head about how this problem might be addressed. Italy is not usually considered a model of political unity, given its history since the Second World War of revolving-door governments. But one thing Italy is very good at is generating a love of country that transcends politics. This is often misunderstood by Americans when they read in the news about the turbulent political cultures of countries like Italy, France, and Greece. What we outsiders often fail to appreciate is that fractiousness in the sphere of politics can be managed in those countries because they are held together by deeper bonds in the sub-political sphere. Bonds of affection and loyalty among citizens remain firm thanks to strong families, private and civil networks, pride in common achievements, and a beloved way of life. Usually, such bonds are invisible to outsiders, but on rare occasions, they come into public view.

On the morning of June 2, 2025, I awoke to find myself trapped. I had rented a serviced apartment near the Roman Forum, thinking to spend the end of a short research trip in Europe in the city that, for me, has always been a spiritual home. Though I have spent altogether more than seven years of my life in Italy, I had somehow forgotten that June 2 was the Festa della Repubblica, the public celebration that commemorates the creation of the Italian Republic in 1946. The apartment I had chosen turned out to be along the principal access lane for VIPs attending the great celebratory parade and had thus become, for a few hours, a high-security zone. Our little half-block had been cordoned off and was being patrolled by state police and army units. There was no entry or exit. In compenso, from the third-floor windows of my apartment, I found myself with a ringside seat for the great parade.

The parade took place between 9 a.m. and noon and began at the Altar of the People on the Vittoriano—the enormous white marble monument to King Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of Italy, that dominates the center of Rome. A bugle sounded as the president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, laid a wreath on the grave of the Unknown Soldier. This set a tone of solemn gratitude to those who had fought for Italian liberty. Then nine jets from the Frecce Tricolori, the national aerobatics team, roared over the monument, spewing fumes in the colors of the Italian flag: green, white, and red.

Aeroplanes of the Frecce Tricolori aerobatic unit of the Italian Air Force spread smoke with the colors of the Italian flag over the Altare della Patria before the Republic Day parade in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Simona Granati – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

A large crowd had gathered in the Piazza Venezia in the bright sunlight to see the spectacle. The most popular sight, apart from the jet flyover, was the personal guard regiment of the president. These are known as the Reggimento Corazzieri (cuirassiers), all men over 6’4”, magnificently dressed in their ceremonial armor with plumed helmets. “A man is but an ass / who fights in a cuirass” sings the son of King Gama in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Princess Ida, but for public ceremonial, no mere military tunic, no matter how many medals are pinned on it, can match gleaming armor.

Cuirassiers during the celebration of National Unity and the Armed Forces at Altar of the Fatherland in Rome. (Photo by Roberto Monaldo /LaPresse / Alamy Live News)

After some short speeches by the principal officials of the republic, the presidential group climbed into a motorcade so as to take up its place in the reviewing stand at the center of the processional route—directly opposite my window. The route led from the Vittoriano down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which had been cleared of traffic and lined with bleachers, to the Colosseum. That famous ruin was draped for the occasion in an enormous, 2000-square-foot flag of Italy. The parade, beginning with several dozen marching units, was to process from the Vittoriano slowly down the Via, then reverse direction and parade back from the Colosseum with a different set of parade units. On either side of the parade route lay the ruins of the imperial forums that long ago had been at the center of ancient Roman public life. Ancient Rome was a silent witness to the parade, with its own message: momento mori.

The whole spectacle was elaborately choreographed to include not just the numerous units of the Italian armed forces, which all seem to have their own marching bands, but representatives of all the various organs of state and Rome’s public services. No one, clearly, wanted to be left out. Also present in the procession were representatives of the European Union, NATO, the diplomatic corps of various nations, and Cardinal Archbishop Baldassare Reina, the vicar general of the Diocese of Rome. Each of the twenty provinces of Italy had units present. Every major Italian department of state had formations in the march, but there were also many private associations meant to embody the best of Italy. Italian Olympic medalists marched, but the Gruppo Sportivo dei Paralitici, Italy’s participants in the Paralympic Games, also rolled by in their wheelchairs. There were units from Italy’s various police forces as well as fire and rescue workers. Hospital nurses, wearing grim faces in response to recent budget cuts, formed a distinct body. The Roman police rode by in their blue-and-white vehicles, led by the chief of the Roman police, driving a Ferrari painted with police colors. That was an only-in-Italy moment! A group of students from a liceo classico (a high school for the study of classical languages) who had won awards for essays on ancient Roman history, came up to the reviewing stand and were handed their prizes by the president. Military parade music (another Italian specialty) was continuous, varied, and often exhilarating. The parade stopped only once, so that Rosalba Pippa, the popular singer known as Arisa, could perform before the reviewing stand the national anthem “Fratelli d’Italia” (which also happens to be the name of Italy’s ruling party, led by Giorgia Meloni).

There were a few short speeches by the Republic’s principal office-holders, but these stressed the common values of the patria—liberty, democracy, and peace—and reminded the crowd that the Republic’s legitimacy was based on a popular referendum held 79 years before. Decorum appropriate to the occasion was observed, partisan messaging kept to a minimum. Prime Minister Meloni spoke of the defense of common values, but got in a dig against “professors” who criticized the Bersaglieri, a unit of the Italian army associated with colonialism. The Bersaglieri, as Meloni well knew, are always among the most popular parade units, with their weird head-gear that looks like a small forest animal has been attached to it. The Bersaglieri also get attention by running, not marching, when they are on parade, creating a challenge for the embouchures of their marching band. So Meloni’s “profs” were a well-chosen target. The opposition party leader also kept things positive, contenting himself with a single dark allusion to the dangers of populism. None of this politicking was sharp-edged enough to disturb the good humor of the crowd. The dominant notes expressed were a heart-swelling love of Italy and gratitude to those who had made sacrifices to keep it free.

A positive celebration of our history, political creed, our great achievements, and our heroes could help counteract the effect of the dispiriting scenes we have been witnessing in recent years.

The end of the parade was marked by a spectacular performance by the Acrobatic Parachutists of the Italian army, who, jumping from helicopters, performed stunning aerial maneuvers while emitting smoke trails in the national colors. The three paracadutisti made a perfect landing at the end of the parade route, right in front of the Colosseum. A last attempt at crowd-pleasing was offered by the sanitation workers. They followed the marchers with a squadron of spanking-new garbage trucks, driven in coordinated, curvilinear patterns. They also picked up the trash.

So let me ask this: Why can’t we in the United States hold a parade something like the Italian festa for our upcoming celebrations next year of America’s 250th birthday? During his first presidency, around 2017, Donald Trump proposed holding a “big and beautiful” parade in Washington, DC to honor US military forces. The parade never materialized owing to logistical problems and cost considerations. It was predictably opposed by the usual suspects who complained that it would promote militarism and colonialism. In his second term, however, the president has swept aside any bureaucratic and ideological objections and scheduled, for tomorrow, a military parade in honor of the US Army’s 250th birthday, which just happens to be his own birthday too.

It is too late for tomorrow’s event to amount to more than a celebration of these twin birthdays. I live near Cambridge, Massachusetts, and can hear the grinding of teeth from here. But in the coming year, there will be time to plan an event that could draw broad public support and benefit our public life. A patriotic parade, reconceived more broadly as a positive celebration of who we are as a nation—our history, political creed, and our great achievements, our heroes—could help counteract the effect of the dispiriting scenes we have been witnessing in recent years. It could also be fun, and we could use some good humor in our civic life. Let’s work together, then, putting country ahead of politics, and celebrate next year the goodness that still fills our country and the good that our country can still do for its citizens and the world.

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The Morality of Mad Men https://lawliberty.org/the-morality-of-mad-men/ https://lawliberty.org/the-morality-of-mad-men/#respond Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Michael Auslin https://lawliberty.org/?p=67846

A show about the Age of Aquarius may help explain the end of the Great Awokening.]]>
It has been 10 years since AMC’s Mad Men ended. As the show finished its retelling of the upheavals of the 1960s, the real America was entering a decade of similar convulsions over race, sex, demography, and economics. Now, after our own age of rage, we can better appreciate the traditional view of society that lay beneath Mad Men’s whiskey- and cigarette-infused glamour. The fictional experiences of the men and women of ad agency Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price, not only serve judgment on the excesses of the ‘60s, but also help explain a likely conservative turn in American social and political trends in the decade ahead. A story about the Age of Aquarius may explain the beginning of the end of the Great Awokening.

Mad Men began its story at the end of what many once idealized as the post-World War II Golden Age, with its cultural and social certainty, long-defined genders and gender roles, and a feeling of common national purpose. Those verities were to be flayed, strip by strip, throughout the series’ seven seasons, as it tackled conformity, sexism, and race relations. Mad Men ended its tale in the early 1970s, at the beginning of post-modern America, a country socially freer and more equal, yet also more lost and lacking in identity, community, and confidence. The show exposed traditional values as hypocritical, outdated, and even immoral—until they ultimately were vindicated by the series’ conclusion.

Like most of current American popular culture, Mad Men largely ignored organized religion, and a subplot that could have explored the decline of faith was dropped early in the second season. Also uneven were the show’s attempts to deal directly with prejudice, whether antisemitism or race relations and the civil rights movement, its transient Jewish and Black characters seemingly pushed to the center of the stage for a few moments.

Mad Men’s focus was the WASP world entering its death throes in the 1960s. From that perspective, it is the cinematic counterpart to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, his classic study of the changes in White America from 1960 to 2010. The show delivered its ostensible message about the hypocrisy of middle-class White American life in the very first episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Urbane, handsome New York advertising executive Don Draper spends his evening drinking with his youthful subordinates and having intimate relations with a young woman. He then quietly enters a suburban home late at night and sits in his sleeping children’s dark bedroom while his wife, her face encased in shadows, stands silently in the lighted doorway, the two of them isolated physically and emotionally from each other.

Mad Men may have been at its most poignant in these early seasons, in its elegiac depiction of late-1950s/early-1960s suburbia. While the series meant to peel away the veneer of false utopia attached post facto to American suburban life—White, privileged, family-centered—at the same time it fed back into every sense of loss, whether actual or imagined, by those who currently live in the real world birthed during the era Mad Men fictionally portrayed.

For that reason, the saddest character in the series was not the hopelessly lost Don Draper, but his picture-perfect first wife, Betty, whose tragic arc in many ways seems truest to the show’s sub rosa message about the world that has passed. Long after their split and the collapse of their supposedly perfect life, the specter of what Don lost when Betty divorced him for his serial infidelities haunts him (and us) throughout the rest of the series.

A child of privilege and a former model, Betty appears to have won life’s lottery. She entertains perfectly and is the envy of her circle of suburban friends and her husband’s co-workers. She lives the life of mid-century leisure that we are to assume most women aspired to, but only a small fraction attained. Yet we come to see that she is emotionally stunted, betrayed by her husband, callous towards her children, and in almost every way unsatisfied. Even her own remarriage, to a man more successful and prominent than Don, seems less a vindication of her worth than a desperate attempt to recapture what she lost when she defended her honor by finally kicking Don out of the house.

Mad Men delivers an unsparing portrait of our modern existential crisis.

If the Drapers’ hometown of Ossining, New York, is cynically portrayed as a suburban Eden hiding serpents and trees of forbidden knowledge, then Don and Betty’s split throws them both out of the Garden. Unlike their Biblical forebears, however, they are condemned to wander separately, alone even when they have found new mates. Don’s pathetic wistfulness, when he visits his children in Betty’s new home late in the series, is a visceral reminder that he chose a path that destroyed the happiness they all could have had. During these scenes, one cannot avoid remembering Don’s piercing speech from the first season, during his ad pitch to Kodak executives for their new Carousel slide projector. As joyous scenes from his own family’s past flash on the projector screen, Don both sells to his clients and relives for himself a hopeful and innocent life that is fast disintegrating in his turbulent present, yearning for a return to “a place where we know we are loved.” 

It is that remembrance which makes Don and Betty’s last phone call to each other, near the very end of the series, so heartrending. Few television shows have so starkly portrayed the pain of divorce and its effects on all involved. Unable to get over their disagreements even so many years later, Don and Betty nonetheless seem haunted by the harsh finality that what they had will never be recovered. Both suffer the almost unbearable pain of confronting their past’s aborted future as an alternate reality they let slip out of their hands. In that brief phone conversation, the ghosts of what that life could have been swirl about them both, etched vividly in a piece of acting by both leads that cannot be overpraised.

By then, Betty has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, a mordant twist by the show’s writers, who showered us with innumerable smoking scenes throughout the series. Indeed, Betty was rarely seen without a cigarette, her ethereal looks and perfectly coiffed hair often wreathed in smoke. Cancer is the cruelest blow for Betty, a horrid, slow wasting of the beauty that defined her. And her demise is the more brutal, for she has just begun, after so many years wandering in her own personal purgatory, to climb up from the depths of the meaninglessness of her life by enrolling in college. She is fated not to finish the degree that will give her a sense of her own individuality, but she has seen across the river to a land where she knows that life has promise and meaning and is thus in her own way saved.

Betty lives her final days on her own terms. We last see her sitting in her usual poised style at her kitchen table, serenely smoking the cigarettes that have already killed her, while her once-estranged daughter Sally takes up the household chores at the sink. Even the farewell letter she pens to her daughter, giving precise instructions for how her body is to be prepared for her funeral, is at once unbearably heartbreaking and an affirmation of her spirit.

Compared to Betty’s journey, Don’s odyssey is far more ambiguous. The moral questions at the center of Mad Men become clear through the character of Don Draper. As a Madison Avenue man, Draper is possessed of uncommon excellence, a full development of the social “virtue” that brings success in the cutthroat professional world he inhabits. Yet as a private man, Don lacks all real virtue, his life being bereft of any excellence as a husband, father, or friend. An aristocrat at the advertising storyboards, he is spiritually and emotionally a beggar amidst the plenty of post-war upper-middle-class life. He is one of T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men, stuffed men,” between whose idea and reality falls the shadow.

Don’s alienation from those around him grows throughout the series, leading to two failed marriages. We learn early on why Don is so isolated, for he is, above all, alienated from himself. He is a man living a lie at the very core of his being, having taken the name and identity of a fellow soldier who was killed during the Korean War due to Don’s own battlefield carelessness. Yet the adoption of a false identity was the only way for an orphaned child of a drunk and a prostitute to escape the claws of the Depression-era life that held him until he shipped out for Korea. The lie at the center of his life unravels his first family and prevents him from developing true bonds with his children, Sally and Bobby.

The only one who truly understands and loves Don is, ironically, the widow of the man whose identity he stole, Anna Draper. Don has set her up in a home in the idyllic southern California of the early 1960s, and it is only when he visits her, in their platonic love, that he goes by his real name and can be his true self, Dick Whitman. And when Anna dies, Don is left truly alone in the world.

In less-skilled hands, Don’s story would be simple melodrama, but both series creator Matthew Weiner and actor Jon Hamm breathe despairing life into Don. By bringing together two such lost souls in Don and Betty, Mad Men delivers an unsparing portrait of our modern existential crisis.

Unlike the renewed family man Pete or the dying but certain Betty, Don seems fated to continue his wanderings, unable to grasp the simple yet profound truths that give meaning to life.

As the story arc comes to its close, Weiner and the writers reveal, perhaps unwittingly, the conservative ethos underlying the series. Don’s second marriage, to the winsome, honest, and ambitious Megan, collapses through his jealousy and (again) infidelity. He then believes he has fallen in love with Diane, a waitress who has run away from her family and now him. In chasing after her, Don finds her former husband, living with a new family in a nondescript, middle-class suburb in the Midwest. Diane’s former husband is portrayed as a prickly, repressed, provincial man, all due to his openly expressed and deeply-held religious beliefs. Yet he immediately discerns Don’s lame ruse to find Diane and drives him from the house. Don flees, discovering that this anonymous, unremarkable, unaccomplished Midwesterner is far more real and stable than he, the entirely false Manhattanite. Whereas Don’s interior is nothing but a jumble of untamed lusts, corruption, and lies, this God-fearing man possesses not only a solid core but the insight into human nature that Don so tragically lacks.

That lesson is reinforced in the series finale, when Pete Campbell, Don’s younger colleague, makes a traditional, life-affirming decision. Pete was introduced in the series’ first episode as a wealthy, callow youth willing to do anything to climb the corporate ladder. He follows Don’s path into infidelity and a broken marriage, even moving to California to live a carefree life. Yet Pete matures over time in a way that Don seems desperate to do but cannot. Pete ultimately reconciles with his estranged wife and flees from Manhattan, where his family has lived for generations, to Kansas City, bringing wife and daughter in tow. Pete has learned that he is incomplete without his wife and that both California and New York City are irredeemable, filled with temptation and immorality. When Pete and his family board their private jet (he is the jet company’s new president) for their new life in the Midwest, what could have come across as a brief, hackneyed scene instead exudes optimism that Pete will honor his second chance.

In very different ways, Betty Draper and Pete Campbell have matured and found fulfilment, one through tragedy, the other through rediscovering the permanent things. Other characters, too, grow during the series, like Joan, the sexpot secretary-turned-businesswoman, and Peggy, who starts out as a mousy secretary and finally breaks the advertising world’s glass ceiling.

Don, however, remains a lost soul. It is perhaps no surprise that he finds himself, at the very end of his journey through Mad Men, at the famed Esalen Institute, in California’s Big Sur. Esalen represents the culmination of America’s journey through the 1960s. From the man in the gray flannel suit, Don has become an avatar of the new consciousness, seemingly making his traumatic emotional breakthrough.

The enigmatic final scene of Don, the very last in the whole series, was as controversial as the first. As he sits above the sun-washed cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, blissfully listening with closed eyes to the chime of the morning meditation bell, Don’s face breaks into a wide, satisfied grin. Has he at last found inner peace and the stability that has so long eluded him? Or, has Draper figured out a way to salvage the wreckage of his career and return to the top of the advertising mountain? The immediate transition from the grinning Don to the iconic 1973 Coca-Cola commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” all but demands the latter interpretation. Yet I had become so invested in, if repelled by his character, that I wanted to believe that Don, too, had found happiness, and that the Coke ad was a brilliant means of playing on the viewing audience’s nostalgia for a seemingly less cynical time when such corny, new age optimism still was fresh. Regardless of whether he has repaired his emotional wounds or simply ensured corporate immortality, the fact remains that we leave Don Draper as we found him at the beginning of the 1960s—alone.

A decade after that last scene, after a similar period of social and political upheaval, an audience in 2025 is likely more attuned than Mad Men’s original viewers to the knowledge that even if Don believes he has found a new, truly worthwhile path, Esalen and all the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s were illusory Edens, and that those who succumbed to their embrace would move on, always dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Unlike the renewed family man Pete or the dying but certain Betty, Don seems fated to continue his wanderings, unable to grasp the simple yet profound truths that give meaning to life and which demand both discipline and sacrifice to something greater than oneself. 

One may have hope that Americans have learned this hard lesson. False utopias, radicalized mob violence, and the denial of nature and reality all have darkened our national horizon in recent years. A turning away, back to something more grounded and tested, seems to have started. The morality of Mad Men illuminates this laudable trend and may even help strengthen its fragile roots.

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Eco-Terrorists Aren’t What They Used to Be https://lawliberty.org/eco-terrorists-arent-what-they-used-to-be/ https://lawliberty.org/eco-terrorists-arent-what-they-used-to-be/#respond Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 John Bicknell https://lawliberty.org/?p=67760

Fifty years on, The Monkey Wrench Gang remains a problematic text for environmental activists, who are inclined to endorse its violent tendencies.]]>
The protesters who flung pumpkin soup at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in 2024 claimed, as all such protesters do, that they were justified in their action because some higher principle—in this case, unsustainable food production—was at stake.

Like their compatriots in Just for Oil, who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers two years earlier, they surely did not doubt their moral righteousness or question that they were following in the honored footsteps of their eco-terrorist predecessors.

In his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey tells the story of four disparate eco-warriors who load their Jeep with the tools of destruction and attack billboards, road-building machinery, and bridges in Utah and Arizona. Their ultimate aim—pondered but never planned—is to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam. As their violence increases, the forces of economic development step up their efforts to stop the group, and eventually do, at least for a while. The gang reunites in Abbey’s posthumous sequel, Hayduke Lives!

A misanthropic provocateur, Abbey surely would have scoffed at the indirect action of hurling the contents of a can of Campbell’s at an unoffending picture. Abbey was a proponent of what he euphemistically called “direct-action environmentalism,” by which he meant the violent destruction of the tools of development—bulldozers, surveyor’s stakes, the Glen Canyon Dam.

The soup throwers were practicing anything but direct action. Blowing up dams is just too hard. Let’s spill lunch at the Louvre.

In life, Abbey always had a hard time fitting in with his erstwhile allies in the environmental movement. A half century after the publication of his seminal novel on eco-terrorism and 36 years after his death, he still does. 

His writing is suffused with anti-government rhetoric that at first blush might be appealing to some on the right. But his preference for “direct action”—violence—to achieve his political goals is now being wholeheartedly endorsed by sizable factions of the political left.

The Province of the Outlaw

The Monkey Wrench Gang got mixed reviews. Sales grew mostly through word-of-mouth among like-minded activists. The New York Times didn’t get around to reviewing the book until almost a year after publication.

“The book is not a gem of literature,” wrote reviewer Kenneth C. Caldwell in Landscape Architecture Magazine, who also doubted any potential to inspire real-life violence. “I doubt if the book will kindle fires of unquenchable rage in our hearts, causing us to cast down T-squares and take up cases of Dupont dynamite.”

Others saw something else in the book. William Marling, an author and literature professor, credits Abbey, possessor of two degrees in philosophy, with being “set apart from those who toy with the ‘conquest of nature’ paradox from a great philosophic height by his ability to distinguish not only between Camus and Cocteau but between columbine and penstemon as well. When the ingredients coalesce correctly, he is a powerful writer.”

Perhaps too powerful. “This book counsels insurrection and sabotage,” Marling asserts. “It contains explicit descriptions of procedures for dynamiting bridges and destroying earth-moving machinery. Reading it, one cannot help but feel that Abbey intended the information to be of practical use.”

Abbey always tried to maintain a strategic ambiguity on this point. But he once told an interviewer, “I write in a deliberately outrageous or provocative manner because I like to startle people.” In that, at least, he was successful. In his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, Douglas Brinkley called The Monkey Wrench Gang “revolutionary, anarchic, seditious, and, in the wrong hands, dangerous.”

How, then, did the book become a popular success and a touchstone for the modern environmental movement?

For one thing, it made environmentalists cool, “the province of the outlaw,” in the words of Abbey biographer David Gessner. Abbey put on the page what thousands were thinking but were not yet prepared to do. Reading about it in a comic yet serious novel allowed people who would never in real life set ablaze a billboard or pour sand into a bulldozer crankcase a sense that they, too, were participants in the revolution.

Another Abbey biographer, James Bishop Jr., wrote that while the theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang was “environmental hooliganism,” it nevertheless came “closest to reaching that place of Abbey’s most steadfast convictions: a romantically idealized world in which the Industrial Revolution has been aborted, and society has reached a steady-state equilibrium where man and the land can exist in harmony.”

That, perhaps, explains why Abbey has a deeply devoted cult following, but has not emerged beyond that. 

Abbey’s rants against “industrial tourism” and his insistence that we’d all be happier without air conditioning, roads, automobiles, antibiotics, or many other conveniences of modern life amount to a platform that tells voters: all you have to do is agree to be poorer, and we can save these rocks. As much as we all love rocks, that’s a tough sell.

A Direct Descendant of Abbey’s Writings

In a post-9/11 world, Abbey’s dalliance with eco-terrorism has made him an even tougher sell in some quarters, while elevating him to icon in others. During one of his many appearances on college campuses, Abbey was asked if he really wanted to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. “No,” he told the students. “But if someone else wanted to do it, I’d be there holding the flashlight.”

Writer Doug Peacock, a friend of Abbey and the primary inspiration for the novel’s lead character, George Washington Hayduke, does not hem and haw about Abbey’s role in inspiring eco-terrorists. “The radical environmental group Earth First! Was a direct descendant of Abbey’s writings,” he wrote.”

Abbey rejected the notion that he was endorsing terrorism, drawing a distinction between sabotage and terrorism. “If the wilderness is our true home, and if it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction—as it certainly is—then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private quarters, by whatever means are necessary,” Abbey wrote in the essay, “Eco-Defense.”

If “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Abbey seemed to be saying, so must the pinions and junipers of Utah’s slickrock country. 

“Whatever means are necessary” seems pretty clear, especially when standing next to his invitation to suicide bombers to take a lunge at Glen Canyon Dam.

Abbey’s defenders like to draw a distinction between damaging property and killing people. 

In his essay “One Man’s Terrorist,” Michael Branch, a professor of environmental literature, justifies the destruction of earth-moving machinery, billboards, and surveyor’s stakes—prime targets of the Monkey Wrench Gang—as doing no person any harm.

“Using a chainsaw to fell a billboard is no more violent than using a welding machine to construct one,” Branch writes. 

The contention that if no human is harmed, then it can’t be terrorism is faulty on its face. If you blow up a synagogue because you hate Jews, it’s an act of terrorism, whether there are any Jews inside or not.

Abbey was not unaware of the way the book could be, and was, perceived. He worried that he would be “accused of rash crimes … every time some Boy Scout sugars a bulldozer, or shellacs an earth-mover.” He was right to worry. A collection of terrorism biographies published two years after 9/11 profiled “twenty-six people who figure prominently in the story and history of terrorism,” including Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski. Abbey is right there at the front, his smiling, bearded countenance first alphabetically, followed by Gerry Adams and Yasir Arafat.

Am I a Racist?

Still, it is not his role as mad prophet of eco-terrorism that makes Abbey something of an untouchable among more conventional environmentalists.

Abbey’s friend and fellow environmental icon Wendell Berry summed up the case best in his essay, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey.” Abbey, writes Berry, is “seen as a problem by people who are, or who think they are, on his side.” These erstwhile defenders “have an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him.”

The central problem, according to Berry, is that many of his critics “assume that Mr. Abbey is an environmentalist—and hence that they, as other environmentalists, have a right to expect him to perform as their tool.” But, Berry writes, “he is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of any other kind.” 

Brinkley compared Abbey to Don Quixote, and “the windmill Abbey wanted to tear down most was the Glen Canyon Dam.” Others have suggested Harriet Beecher Stowe or Upton Sinclair. He is more often compared to Henry David Thoreau, but biographer James Bishop Jr. astutely notes that The Monkey Wrench Gang is “more Orwellian than Thoreauvian.” Abbey’s vision is in many ways bleak—the alternative futures amount to a choice between a darkscape of industrial wasteland or a post-industrial anarchy shorn of every modern convenience. 

But in this age of intersectionality, the real challenge is Abbey’s views on non-environmental issues. Abbey opposed immigration, wrote and said untoward things about racial minorities, called welfare “a subsidy for baby production,” was proudly sexist (“To the editors of Ms. Magazine, NY: “‘Dear Sirs …’”), called the Peace Corps “an act of cultural arrogance,” and owned guns (“I load my own ammo”).

Abbey considered his essay “Immigration and Liberal Taboos” among his personal favorites. Solicited and then rejected in 1982 by The New York Times, it was subsequently rejected by Harper’s, Atlantic, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Mother Jones. The left’s intolerance for dissenting opinions is not a new thing. 

The piece was eventually published in 1983 by Phoenix New Times

Abbey argued that “it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished people. … How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization? … Harsh words: but somebody has to say them.” And Abbey very cheerfully did, while pondering the criticism.

“Am I a racist?” he asked himself in his journal. “I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.” At the same time, Abbey believed it was never fair “to evaluate the quality of any individual by reason of race. You cannot judge the worth of a man by his skin color, bone structure, I.Q., body chemistry or genetic inheritance. … However, there are significant differences among the various races, both in character and in achievement. It is intellectually dishonest and socially condescending to pretend otherwise.”

As the editor of his published journals wrote, a sanitized, politically correct Abbey “would be—well, no Edward Abbey at all.”

Abbey, Jefferson, and Lincoln

Fifty years on, The Monkey Wrench Gang endures. 

A theme running through retrospective essays on Abbey and his work is speculation on his reaction to climate change. All conclude, naturally, that he’d be on their side. But none wonder about his response to the destruction of habitat wrought by acres devoted to the production of “clean” energy.

It’s difficult to imagine the Don Quixote who ranted about paved roads, visitors’ centers, and flushable toilets on public lands would get behind the idea of deploying solar panels or windmills across his beloved desert.

Abbey wrote that “a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,” sounding suspiciously like Thomas Jefferson justifying the need for rebellion every 20 years. If “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Abbey seemed to be saying, so must the pinions and junipers of Utah’s slickrock country. 

It’s a dangerous philosophy. When each man decides for himself how much violence is justified to achieve political ends, the most violent tend to come out on top. 

Abraham Lincoln, an admirer of Jefferson, said, “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

If, in reading The Monkey Wrench Gang, conservatives are enticed by Abbey’s anti-government rhetoric, they should heed the words of Lincoln and remember that, eventually, like the left turning on Abbey over immigration, the revolution always devours its own.

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Politics of the Cradle https://lawliberty.org/politics-of-the-cradle/ https://lawliberty.org/politics-of-the-cradle/#respond Thu, 12 Jun 2025 10:01:00 +0000 John O. McGinnis https://lawliberty.org/?p=67833

Whatever one thinks of baby bonuses or child-tax credits as policy matters, the debate over “natalism” lays bare the deepest fault line in modern politics.]]>
Few debates matter more to the West’s future than the widening divide between left and right over the simple act of having children. Inside an April pronatalism conference in Austin, the roster stretched from the more traditionalist Catherine Pakaluk to libertarian Bryan Caplan. Outside, left-wing protesters branded the gathering “neo-Nazi.” The answer to the question of whether children are worth having will shape everything from fiscal policy to cultural identity. The roots of the quarrel are worth tracing.

That even childbirth now falls under the old slogan “the personal is the political” may shock. Yet it follows naturally from each camp’s bundle of larger ideological commitments. For conservatives, increasing fertility in the West is part of the defense of its civilization. Europeans and other groups that were at its heart are no longer reproducing themselves. Across the OECD, the total-fertility rate has slid to 1.5 children per woman; in Italy and Spain, it hovers near 1.2, and even in the United States, the latest CDC release puts the rate at just 1.63—far below the 2.1 replacement benchmark. For many conservatives, every newborn is a vote that the West remains worth inheriting.

The religious right also has theological reasons for favoring procreation. The Abrahamic religions share the injunction to be fruitful and multiply. All greatly value motherhood. The most iconic image in Western art—the Madonna with Jesus—is an encomium to the pairing of woman and child. Bearing children affirms the belief that God made a good world. We may fall short of that promise, but the act itself testifies to the cardinal virtue of hope.

Natalism also gains support from the right’s rawer political calculations. The crisis of fertility among its native populations contributes to the graying of population and the reduction of its workforce. Yet all Western democracies have pay-as-you-go social security systems dependent on a high ratio of workers to retirees. These brute facts create a fiscal dilemma. Across Europe, leaders duck pension reform but recognize that raising already high taxes would strangle growth. In the United States, leaders likewise dodge entitlement reform and propose hiking taxes only for the top 2 percent. Soaking the rich will not put much of a dent in our record peacetime debt. The obvious solution is to increase the worker-to-retiree ratio by making the population younger. Conservatives would rather accomplish that through increasing birth rates rather than massive increases in immigration. The latter is thought to threaten the distinctive national cultures they value and destabilize politics.

The left does not share these positive reasons for supporting fertility. It does not think Western civilization is one that necessarily should be continued, and is generally indifferent to religion. But the left has other reasons of its own to resist natalism.

One is feminism. Many feminists have persistently argued that social structures keep women from being equal to men in achievement—in the arts, in the sciences, and in business. One of the greatest impediments is the family structure where women undertake more unpaid labor than men, particularly in raising children. Increasing child-care subsidies and supporting early education might look like a fix. Yet nations that lavish money on day care still see women falling behind men in pay and prestige. Once they have children, most women still want to spend more time nurturing than men. Thus, the only way to prevent women from becoming parental specialists is not to become parents.

Another reason that some on the left are not enthusiastic about bringing children into the world is the environment. More people create more pollution and burden the Earth’s biosphere. In some more radical views, new generations are likely to be despoilers of the natural wonders of the earth that need preservation.

If low fertility is causing a fiscal and economic crisis, in the West, the left’s solution is to fling open the borders to more migration. The left believes that foreigners have as much right to enjoy the higher living standards in the West as those who already live there. Indeed, among some more radical voices, they may often have a greater moral claim, because their poverty is caused by the West’s colonialism. The left welcomes the multicultural transformation of the West that great inflows will bring. “Diversity is our strength” is its mantra.

To be fair, the left is no monolith; plenty of progressives still toast big families. Yet, as with transgender orthodoxy and erasure of national borders, it is the activist vanguard that writes the party script. Their chill toward procreation flows from faculty lounges to platform planks, then filters down to voters who sense disdain. Elite ideas tug Democrats leftward long before the rank-and-file notices

History shows that creeds hostile to the cradle soon confront their own demographic sunset.

It might be argued that what is really depressing fertility is not ideology but economics. Housing costs, student-debt burdens, and delayed marriage no doubt matter. But citizens of the West, including the young, are far wealthier and live far more comfortably than in past eras, where fertility rates were much higher. Medical assistance, like IVF, increases the effective reproductive span of women. But Sweden and Hungary show that baby bonuses and family leave pad wallets, not bassinets. Values and culture, not subsidies, rock the cradle.

The contest over childbearing carves a deep rift in today’s political landscape. The left-radical position is likely to damage their party’s political standing. The impulse to have children is deeply ingrained; indeed, from an evolutionary perspective, children are the goal of human life. It is true that contraception has cut the close link between sex and reproduction, but human nature prompts the desire for children in ways other than through sexual desire. Children are cute, and there are few other ways most of us can leave an enduring mark on the world. Thus, this latest left position is going against the human grain.

Moreover, the ideological reasons for skepticism about bringing children into the world may be seen by many as the reductio ad absurdum of left positions. If feminism means that women must avoid having children from being beguiled into an unequal relation with men, feminism then demands that women give up a great source of human fulfillment to be true feminists. If environmentalism opposes the propagation of humanity, such environmentalism seems to prefer the rest of the natural world to the one animal that can see it whole. Treating immigration as a stand-in for native births slips into oikophobia—those who, in Gilbert & Sullivan’s jab, “praise, with enthusiastic tone … every country but their own.”

History, however, shows that creeds hostile to the cradle soon confront their own demographic sunset. The Shakers—an eighteenth and nineteenth millenarian sect who enjoined celibacy on their adherents—are unsurprisingly no longer around. While children do not directly inherit their parents’ political beliefs, there is a correlation in the ideology between parent and child. A growing distaste for having children on the left will, other things equal, push the nation toward the right.

In terms of contemporary politics, the stance against children is sure to continue to push the so-called “normies” (this generation’s echo of the “silent majority” of the 1960s) away from the left. The “normies” now shaping American elections are the large, loosely organized bloc of middle-of-the-road voters—disproportionately non-college, suburban or ex-urban, and culturally conventional—who recoil from both progressive identity politics and hard-right theatrics. Their irritation with the left concerning issues such as transgender athletics or “defund the police” policies stems from a mix of practical worries (fairness in sport and public safety), moral intuitions grounded in mainstream religious or communal norms, and a perception that progressive elites impose niche values without democratic consent. Outnumbering the zealots on both flanks, normies now choose who governs in close races.

Few positions will rile normies more than contempt for the desire to have children. Enthusiasm for having children has been a widespread and religious cultural norm for virtually all of human history. Skepticism of having children is the paradigm niche issue pressed by certain elites. A preference for immigrants over native children is an extreme version of open borders that normies also reject.

It is true that some of the pronatalism of the right may also be off-putting. Some celebrity advocates for more children hardly model the stable families most parents envision. Even the very name “natalism” can alienate ordinary people because it appears to create an odd term for something that comes naturally. Even so, the quirks of the famous and a pompous Latinate label will offend less than open hostility to child-baring.

Whatever one thinks of baby bonuses or child tax credits as policy matters, the fertility fight lays bare the deepest fault line in modern politics. The left, increasingly doubtful about the worth of the West, treats birth as a lifestyle choice to sometimes be discouraged. The right regards it as constitutive of human flourishing. The quarrel over the cradle is thus no social-policy sideshow. It is the distilled essence of two rival creeds. Tell me where an ideology stands on the need for babies, and I can tell you where it will stand on much else.

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Recovering Germany’s Conservative Tradition https://lawliberty.org/recovering-germanys-conservative-tradition/ https://lawliberty.org/recovering-germanys-conservative-tradition/#respond Thu, 12 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Matthias Oppermann https://lawliberty.org/?p=67721

Conservatism in Germany may have fallen on hard times, but a group of thinkers from its past can help us recover the best of its tradition.]]>
In 1927, the most successful attorney in Silesia published a book on conservatism that he knew would be immediately forgotten. Georg Quabbe informed his readers in the introduction that “conservative writings of some length” shared the fate of Johannes Brahms’s Wiegenlied. That lullaby was sung everywhere—except at cradles. Likewise, conservative books were read by some, “but not by conservatives or by those who might become conservatives.” He was right. Conservatives—specifically, members of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) at the time—did not read his book, and if they did, they did not understand it. Quabbe’s book, with its strange title Tar a Ri, is now as forgotten as its author. It is indeed a German peculiarity that books on conservatism, as Quabbe understood it, are rarely read—or even written.

This partly explains the current state of conservatism in Germany, which is marked not only by the intellectual poverty of public debate but also by the absence of a conservative party worthy of the name. American conservatives who believe that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has filled this void are mistaken, as they misjudge the party’s character by interpreting it merely as another variant of so-called right-wing populism. But the ideologues of that party look back to the antiliberal conservatism of the Weimar Republic, represented by the Völkisch movement, the so-called Conservative Revolution, and the national revolutionaries. They do not aim to reform liberalism as the foundation of German democracy; rather, they seek to abolish it entirely and dream of an illiberal democracy. The most prominent representatives of these tendencies are Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD parliamentary group in the Thuringian Landtag (state parliament), and Maximilian Krah, the party’s lead candidate for the 2024 European elections. When Krah told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in May 2024 that the SS was not a comprehensive criminal organization, Marine Le Pen felt compelled to distance herself from Krah and the AfD. Krah was elected to the Bundestag in 2025. In addition, AfD members have close ties to the Kremlin.

On the other hand, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), abandoned conservatism long ago. If the CDU ever had a conservative core, it was ordoliberalism—the German variant of liberal conservatism, or conservative liberalism—similar in many ways to American fusionism, though more open to government intervention. After World War II, its advocates included intellectual giants such as Wilhelm Röpke and the first federal economics minister Ludwig Erhard, the architects of the country’s miraculous economic recovery. Today, though, ordoliberalism in Germany is in poor shape, largely due to Angela Merkel’s tenure, during which the party’s liberal conservatives often felt politically exiled. But the most serious blow came only recently. In March 2025, Friedrich Merz, who has led the CDU since 2022, accepted nearly all of the Social Democrats’ demands in order to secure his election as federal chancellor. He agreed to an investment package worth 500 billion euros, to be implemented through a so-called special fund—that is, by circumventing the constitutional debt limit. Merz wanted to pass a much-needed 500 billion euro package for defense investments, but the SPD only wanted to accept it in combination with the infrastructure package. So the CDU leader agreed. One could say that he had no other choice. But to pass both packages, the CDU/CSU and SPD needed a two-thirds majority, which they no longer had in the newly elected Bundestag. They therefore rushed the package through the outgoing Bundestag, with support from the Greens, before the new parliament convened—in other words, with a majority that, in effect, no longer existed.

This was a procedure that, while legal under the Basic Law, clearly violated the spirit of parliamentary government. Merz may have marked the beginning of the end of a long narrative that could rightly be called “The Strange Death of Conservative Germany”—a story that began a few years after the founding of the Empire by Otto von Bismarck in 1871, when conservatism was overtaken by ethnic nationalism and antisemitism. It reached its climax in January 1933, when the DNVP helped bring Hitler to the chancellorship. For this reason, after 1945, it became difficult for conservatives to openly identify as such. Christian Democrats who considered themselves conservatives avoided invoking German traditions and instead looked to the British Conservative Party as their model.

Today, that is no longer enough. Given the challenge posed by the AfD, which presents itself as a nationalist party, moderate conservatives must reconnect with their own past. Conservatism in Germany needs a fresh start—one that looks back to the period before 1933. The radicalization of most conservatives during the Empire and the Weimar Republic does not mean that there was no liberal conservative tradition in the country. On the contrary, it was vibrant throughout the nineteenth century and remained the position of a strong minority even after 1871.

Thinkers like Quabbe, Grabowsky, and Stahl can serve as valuable guides in today’s Germany, where the twin dangers of “illiberal democracy” and “undemocratic liberalism” threaten the political balance as everywhere across the West.

This moderate conservative tradition was primarily Prussian, and the image of Prussia as a purely militaristic state is a gross oversimplification. The historian Heinrich von Sybel—who understood Edmund Burke better than any other German scholar of the nineteenth century and described himself as a “conservative Whig”—wrote in 1866 that during the first 150 years of its existence, from 1701 to 1851, the Prussian state had been at war for only 25 years. In contrast, France, Russia, and Austria had each already reached that number by 1789, counting from 1714. He also noted that, in 1866, Prussia had far more elements of self-government—he deliberately used the English word—than most observers realized.

Sybel was a National Liberal who placed his hopes in the founding of a German nation-state under Prussian leadership—one that would be constitutional and liberal. But even Prussian conservatives did not wholly reject the principles of liberalism; it was largely a matter of degree. Moreover, the common portrayal of Prussian conservatism as the anti-intellectual ideology of the Junker aristocracy is overly simplistic. As publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler wrote in 1960, nineteenth-century German conservatism—from Friedrich Gentz to Friedrich Julius Stahl—was “a product of urban cosmopolitanism.”

Friedrich Julius Stahl, who had been a professor of legal philosophy, constitutional law, and canon law at the University of Berlin since 1840, became the most important conservative thinker in Germany after the failed revolution of 1848, and the only one to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for conservatism. He was elected to the Prussian Herrenhaus (House of Lords) in 1849 and was appointed by the king as a lifetime member in 1854. Stahl was an influential, though not a great, politician. As leader of the Conservative Party in the Herrenhaus, he defended the Prussian constitution, enacted by the king in 1850, while acting as a staunch opponent of liberalism and all forms of political change. In practice, he was more of a standpatter than a visionary conservative. His true significance lay in his role as a political thinker.

Stahl’s thought must be understood as a response to the ongoing conflict between reaction and revolution that had shaped the German states since 1830. He sought to develop a living conservatism that could transcend this antagonism through the establishment of a “real constitutional monarchy.” Born into a Jewish family in southern Germany in 1806, Stahl converted to Lutheranism in 1819. He offered a conservative conception of the Rechtsstaat (rule of law), defined by the tension between the “moral kingdom” of God and the secular world—a world in which the free individual must act autonomously. This secular world needs a framework, which Stahls calls the “state.” The state is the secular reflection of the “moral kingdom,” in which man must act independently but in accordance with the norms of the “moral kingdom,” i.e., with Christian values. For Stahl, history is shaped by human agency, but informed by divine law. By his action, man cannot progress towards the end of history, because this end would be the “moral kingdom,” which is God’s domain alone. Stahl believed that the Reformation’s great contribution was to affirm individual responsibility within history. For this reason, he opposed all forms of theocratic doctrine, including those found today in Catholic neo-integralism.

In practice, this doctrine led to a real constitutional monarchy as the embodiment of the Rechtsstaat: the monarch was the source and center of power, but he was also bound by the law like any other citizen and had to accept limitations on his authority by an elected parliament with budgetary control. This doctrine had greater practical impact than the ideas of most other conservative thinkers in Europe. Bismarck, perhaps unconsciously, followed Stahl’s model when drafting the constitution of the North German Confederation in 1867—a constitution that became the framework of the German Empire four years later.

Although Stahl’s doctrine cannot be directly applied to a liberal democracy, its central concept—the “moral kingdom,“ which grants freedom by anchoring it in a higher moral order—remains relevant for conservatives today. Stahl spoke of “freedom in obedience,“ but one could also call it “freedom in order,“ which requires the autonomous but responsible individual, without whom a constitutional government cannot work. Stahl’s “freedom in obedience” can be seen as the Prussian version of the “moral, manly, regulated liberty” praised by Burke. Above all, it is important to remember that Stahl was by no means an opponent of freedom or any kind of progress. In his view, the revolutionaries of his time were right to demand freedom’s advance, but they lacked a true understanding of what freedom meant. In this sense, Stahl’s political thought can still offer insight in an age marked by extreme liberalism.

Unfortunately, his teachings faded into obscurity during the German Empire. Two main factors contributed to this: first, the growing radicalization of conservatism, and second, Stahl’s Jewish origins. Though he had converted to Protestantism, the rapid rise of racial antisemitism during this period deeply affected German conservatism. That the greatest conservative thinker in Prussia had been born Jewish made him unacceptable to most conservatives of the time.

There were, of course, exceptions. Unlike the German Conservative Party, the smaller Free Conservative Party in Prussia—later known in the Empire as the Reichspartei—was never affected by antisemitism. Together with the National Liberal Party, it formed part of a liberal-conservative spectrum. It remained a minority current, but it did exist.

In 1912, the journalist Adolf Grabowsky joined the Free Conservative Party to promote his concept of Kulturkonservatismus (Cultural Conservatism) in the journal The New Germany. Like Stahl, Grabowsky was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, and he sought to convince German conservatives that antisemitism was their original sin. “Judaism—or more precisely: German Jewry,” he wrote, “is an intimate part of German culture.” He accused the antisemites of driving Jews into radicalism—into the arms of left-liberalism and social democracy—through their “insane agitation.”

Grabowsky’s greatest achievement, however, was to argue that the idea of progress should not be ceded to the political left—whether to the left-liberal Fortschrittler (progressives) or the Social Democrats: “Conservatism is not—this cannot be emphasized loudly enough—identical with regression, not identical with the negation of progress. On the contrary: conservatism, because it is an aristocratic worldview that clears the way for the fittest, is identical with progress and the ever-increasing elevation of life.”

After Germany’s defeat in World War I, this form of liberal conservatism found little space in the Weimar Republic—if anywhere, it survived in the national-liberal German People’s Party (DVP). The more explicitly conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), by contrast, became increasingly radical until it ultimately transformed into a fully-fledged Völkisch nationalist party. Intellectual conservatism during this period was largely the domain of the heterogeneous and radical currents associated with the Conservative Revolution. It is telling that one of its leading figures, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, declared in his infamous 1923 book The Third Reich that Stahl was not “the founder, but the destroyer of conservatism in Germany.” Moeller found “liberal traits” throughout Stahl’s thinking—and this was not meant as praise. He pointed, for example, to Stahl’s “predilection for English constitutionalism” and to “the notions of progress into which he involuntarily falls.”

Given the challenge posed by illiberal parties, moderate conservatives must reconnect with their own past. Conservatism in Germany needs a fresh start—one that looks back to the period before 1933.

There were few moderate conservatives at the time who recognized Stahl’s greatness. One of them was the Austrian Peter Drucker, who had studied law in Germany and was working for a newspaper in Frankfurt am Main during the final years of the Weimar Republic. The son of Jewish parents who had converted to Lutheranism, Drucker was already convinced by 1932 that he would not be able to remain in Germany if Hitler came to power. As he later recounted, in order to “make sure that I could not waver and stay,” he decided to write a book about Stahl—one that would make it impossible for him to have any association with National Socialism.

This pamphlet presented Stahl as the conservative thinker to read in order to overcome the crisis of the time. The mere fact that Stahl had been born Jewish made this argument provocative enough, but Drucker went further. He insisted that “the conservative theory of the state must affirm the state because and insofar as it represents an obligation,” but it must also “prevent the state from becoming the only obligation, from becoming the ‘total state.’” Every form of power, he argued, was “evil and demoralizing, destructive,” if it was “not bound to a divine, immutable order,” if it was not “bound to God’s plan for the world.”

After Hitler’s rise to power, Drucker emigrated—first to Britain and later to the United States, where he became an influential economist. His book on Stahl was among those burned publicly by the National Socialists on May 10, 1933.

Another thinker who took Stahl seriously was the aforementioned Georg Quabbe, arguably the only moderate intellectual conservative of the Weimar Republic. Born in 1887 to a tradesman’s family in Breslau, he studied law and became a successful attorney. Originally a member of the DNVP, he resigned from the party in 1930 in protest against its growing radicalization under Alfred Hugenberg. He then joined the People’s Conservative Association, a splinter group composed of relatively moderate—though not necessarily liberal—conservatives.

Following his first book, Tar a Ri, Quabbe published a second in early 1933 titled The Last Reich: Nature and Development of Utopia, which could be read as a veiled critique of National Socialism. Both works were later banned by the Nazis. When the Rotary Club of Breslau suggested in 1936 that its Jewish members resign, Quabbe, though Protestant, left in solidarity. During the war, he hid Jews in his home. After the war, in 1946, he became the first Attorney General of the State of Hesse and presided over the first legal proceedings against National Socialist criminals.

The title of Tar a Ri already hinted at his commitment to a liberal conservatism. Tar a Ri means “Come, O King” in Irish, and Quabbe claimed that this phrase was the origin of the word “Tory.” In fact, he presented himself as a great admirer of Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli (“the most ingenious conservative of all time”), and Sir Robert Peel (“one of the noblest representatives of our disposition”). He firmly rejected antisemitism, the Völkisch movement, and what he called “extreme conservatism.” He denied that conservatism was a strict ideology, instead defining it as a disposition always in tension with its opposite: the progressive disposition. Though he described himself as a “progressive conservative,” embraced parliamentary government, and accepted constitutional liberalism, he remained what Germans call a Vernunftrepublikaner—a republican by reason, rather than conviction.

His monarchism, however, was largely theoretical—more of an attitude than a political program. At the end of Tar a Ri, he concedes: “The call for the king is nothing more than a signal to gather a defeated army, and at the end of this book I find myself wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to shout ‘Come, O wise man,’ since kings are so easy to find and come so much faster.” Why was this “wise man”—a new Burke—needed? To resist the reality that “humanity as a whole has taken on the progressive sign today.” The “eternal pendulum law of world history,” Quabbe argues, requires a balance between the conservative and progressive tendencies of human nature.

Quabbe was a critical conservative friend of constitutional liberalism. He understood its flaws and its constant vulnerability to sliding into extreme progressivism. Thinkers like him, Grabowsky, and Stahl can serve as valuable guides in today’s Germany, where the twin dangers of “illiberal democracy” and “undemocratic liberalism” threaten the political balance as everywhere across the West. Tar a Ri, it seems, is a book for our time.

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Moral Failure and Government Intrusion at Harvard https://lawliberty.org/moral-failure-and-government-intrusion-at-harvard/ https://lawliberty.org/moral-failure-and-government-intrusion-at-harvard/#respond Wed, 11 Jun 2025 10:01:00 +0000 Michael B. Poliakoff https://lawliberty.org/?p=67820

This is not how you fix the problems at Harvard.]]>

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

To understand the crisis in American higher education, it is necessary to hold two thoughts at once. American higher education remains the envy of the world, with seven of its universities in the top 10 of Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. Yet the behavior on many campuses has caused public confidence in higher education to plummet. With a recent drop of 21 percentage points, only 36 percent now express a lot of confidence, while 32 percent have little or no confidence. Among those dissatisfied with higher education, politicization stands as a major cause of their dismay. Significantly, though, the public does not seem happy about the attacks on higher education coming from the administration, with only 27 percent approving. Those mixed messages may be the fingerpost for finding a solution.

Harvard has been among the worst offenders, with cancellations, shout-downs, disruptive encampments, and egregious antisemitic conduct. It makes a poor example of an innocent victim of unjust governmental persecution, as shown below. But whose interests are served if the cancellation of a $60 million federal contract and nearly $3 billion in grants and revocation of tax-exempt status cripple one of our country’s great research hubs? While the government is rightly concerned about apparent civil rights violations, discrimination, and campus behavior that violates the law, the treatment Harvard is receiving from the Trump administration is neither measured nor reasonable nor, according to many legal scholars across the ideological spectrum, within statutory authority. Yet worse is the federal government’s apparent willingness to accept the damage being done to American scientific progress. The administration’s indiscriminate cuts have impeded research to combat tuberculosis, HIV, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.  

The administration needs to take stock of the perilous precedent of intrusion beyond statutory authority into higher education governance. The federal government’s shot over the bow, so to speak, can be a catalyst for an overdue course correction. But putting that cannonball through the hull, while at the same time exceeding legal authority, would be an incalculable act of harm to the nation.

Harvard, however, must be honest about its failings, ready to apply remedies, and be energetic in its implementation. It is fair to start with recent items from Harvard’s rap sheet. On December 5, 2023, then Harvard president Claudine Gay notoriously tried to hide behind the pretext of “context” when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules against bullying and harassment. Less well known, but highly illuminating, is her silence, not long after the October 7 terrorist massacre, as a mob on Harvard Yard surrounded a student wearing a kippah, blocking his path and shouting “shame.” It does not speak well for Harvard that one of the perpetrators, whom the Suffolk County Court punished for misdemeanor assault, received, one year later, a $65,000 stipend from the Harvard Law Review for work “in the public interest.” The other convicted student was selected as a class marshal by his graduating class at the Divinity School. Harvard’s secretive governing board, the Harvard Corporation, stuck by President Gay, even as evidence of her serial plagiarism mounted, until the scandal ultimately forced their hand. She returned to the faculty with compensation of approximately $900,000.

President Gay’s failures are only part of a tawdry history of professional and ethical failures at Harvard.

On June 29, 2023, the same day that the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard that race-based admissions violate the US Constitution and that Harvard was out of compliance with the law, Harvard declared, “We will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values”—that is, Harvard would find ways to use race as a factor in admissions. A previously optional prompt for application essays became mandatory: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?” Harvard appeared ready to use this question to find demographic information about applicants.

A wholesale assault on university-level research signaled in the freezing of grants to Harvard will be catastrophic for the well-being of America.

Harvard has had scant place for those who dissent from its progressive policies. Seventy-seven percent of the faculty now self-report as liberal or very liberal, and only 3 percent as conservative: The maintenance of its monoculture has been willful, and its treatment of those who violate it is brutal. In 2019, Harvard removed Professor of Law Ronald Sullivan and his wife from their positions as faculty deans of Winthrop House after it came to light that he served, as lawyers are wont to do, on the legal defense team of someone accused of a heinous crime—in his case, Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, who had enjoyed a distinguished teaching career, was shunned and ostracized when a student director of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) found her insistence that male and female are valid scientific terms “transphobic,” even though Dr. Hooven had unequivocally confirmed her support for transgender rights. The dean of arts and sciences at that time was Claudine Gay. Neither Dr. Gay nor anyone in Dr. Hooven’s department came to her aid, and no graduate student would work with her once she was labeled with the scarlet letter of transgressing DEI standards. Economist Roland Fryer’s meticulous research showed that blacks were not more likely than whites to be the victims of police shootings—although blacks were more likely than whites to be subject to unwarranted police stops. This was heresy for the woke. It was not long before Harvard took its revenge under the pretext of punishing Professor Fryer for jokes told by and to colleagues in his laboratory. The Office for Dispute Resolution had recommended “workplace sensitivity training” to resolve the contretemps. But with Dean Claudine Gay as a key participant in the final adjudication by a panel of tenured faculty, the recommendation of the Office for Dispute Resolution rose to a two-year suspension without pay and the permanent shuttering of his laboratory.

Then came October 7, 2023. The next day, while Israel reeled from the immensity of the Hamas assault, 34 Harvard student groups celebrated Hamas and blamed Israel for the terrorist attack it suffered. President Gay needed three days to condemn the atrocity and distance Harvard’s leadership position from the student groups. How serious was Harvard about restoring order after the campus was overtaken by encampments that interfered with classes and co-curricular activities? When students occupied a building on campus, the deans brought them burritos and Twizzlers. On May 10, acting on his threat to the students occupying Harvard Yard, interim president Alan Garber put 20 students on “involuntary leave” after they refused his attempt to negotiate an end to the encampment. Four days later, he reversed that decision when the protesters agreed to disperse.

Harvard’s report on antisemitism, released on April 29, is searing. For example, it reproduces a graphic used in four sections of a required Harvard Graduate School of Education course. The “Pyramid of White Supremacy” places the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League in the category of offenses just below hate crimes. There is significant evidence of anti-Israel dogma appearing in official Harvard classes. Harvard’s decision to release the antisemitism report simultaneously with its report on anti-Muslim bias sends a strong signal that Harvard is still incapable of addressing directly and purposefully the increasing campus antisemitism that then president Lawrence Summers identified and decried already in 2002.    

Harvard’s other self-inflicted wounds can only serve to offend the sensibilities of the public. Harvard’s “Red Book,” General Education in a Free Society, written in the spirit of the West’s emergence from World War I, called for learning “the general art of the free man and the citizen” and suggested a course called “Western Thought and Institutions.” Now what stands is a tepid requirement with a menu of some 20 courses, including “Ethics of Climate Change.” By 1975, even students majoring in history faced no requirement for a course on the history of our nation in the curriculum for the major.

Enumerating the sins of Harvard is not difficult, and Harvard will need to be more transparent and specific than it has been about the way it will measure the effectiveness of its reforms. Moving forward will not be easy, and if it is to happen, both Harvard and the Trump administration will need to adjust their positions and their rhetoric. There is every reason to do so.

Harvard can justifiably remind the nation of the breakthroughs, especially in health sciences, that its partnership with the federal government has yielded. In 2014, with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Harvard’s Douglas Melton generated functional human pancreatic insulin-producing cells from stem cells, putting us on the way to a type 1 diabetes cure. In 2024, Harvard’s Gary Ruvkun, funded by NIH, was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of microRNA (miRNA). The discovery underpins therapies for cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, strokes, alcoholism, and obesity. The list of federally funded grants to Harvard that help us live longer and better is very long.

A wholesale assault on university-level research signaled in the freezing of grants to Harvard will be catastrophic for the well-being of America. Harvard has begun layoffs. Speaking of freezing, biodata from 350,000 individuals, representing 45 years of research, are in jeopardy of loss without funding to maintain the massive freezers that store them. The samples have led to the discovery of the dangers of trans fats, the link between obesity and breast cancer, and that between cigarette smoking and coronary disease. Ongoing research into the early detection and treatment of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) under government contract with Harvard Medical School is under work stop.  

Other nations are hungry to gain a share of America’s global leadership in science and medicine. Americans have won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine than any other nation can boast. But according to a survey conducted by Nature, of the 1,600 scientists polled, 75 percent are considering leaving the country. The process of luring our scientists abroad has, in fact, started. France’s Centrale Supelac has allocated 3 million euros to finance research projects that were cut in the US. Aix-Marseille Université announced it is accepting applications for its Safe Place for Science program. It will support about 15 American scientists and appears to have received over 150 applications. The title of a May 2025 article in the Financial Times, “UK steps up efforts to woo scientists fleeing the US,” says it all.

Another potential victim in this contretemps is the law. The haste to punish Harvard, and other elite institutions, must end. Process matters. Title VI, which prohibits discrimination, has clear procedures for investigation and sanction (42 U.S.C. § 2000d). Revocation of Harvard’s tax-exempt status based on the factually very different 1983 Supreme Court case Bob Jones University v. United States is unlikely to survive legal challenge, but the specter of weaponizing the IRS should strike alarm across the political spectrum. A weaponized IRS will be an equal opportunity tool for future presidents to abuse, as if the matter of Lois Lerner was not sufficient warning. As Justice William Rehnquist noted in his dissent in Bob Jones University v. United States, the IRS must not arrogate to itself the making of policy that is the prerogative and responsibility of Congress. Muse on Cicero’s words, “It is impossible for a state without law to use its faculties. … We are slaves to the law, so that we can be free” (“Pro Cluentio,” 146).

What, then, is the way forward?

On April 11, 2025, the General Services Administration, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services sent a five-page letter to President Garber with the administration’s demands. Many of the demands are straightforward and reasonable, such as procedures to curtail disruption and deplatforming, a policy to control the wearing of masks, better student disciplinary codes, merit-based hiring and admissions, monitoring of donations from overseas, and ending DEI. Others, like the demand for changes in governance procedures, submission of admissions and hiring data to the federal government, and hiring a “critical mass” (unspecified) of new faculty to achieve intellectual diversity in each department, along with the admission of a “critical mass of students,” suggest a dangerous agenda of governmental control.

Moreover, a campus nearly devoid of faculty identifying as libertarian or conservative is prima facie evidence of ideological discrimination.

There is room for productive negotiation. There are even issues outside the April 11 letter that could meaningfully be addressed. Indirect cost rates that universities add to the cost of implementing a federal grant for their administrative expenses deserve scrutiny and transparency. (Harvard charges 69 percent on top of the project cost.)

For Harvard not to comply with the administration’s call for a policy curtailing the wearing of masks to conceal identity is senseless. All colleges and universities will benefit from a policy that forbids the wearing of facial coverings on campus, except for medical or religious reasons, and mask-wearers should always be ready to present ID to campus officers when asked. Such a policy has been implemented at three Virginia public universities (the University of Virginia, James Madison University, and Virginia Commonwealth University). Columbia University has signaled its intent to comply. Tighter policies to stop disruptions and student misbehavior are eminent common sense.

Moreover, a campus nearly devoid of faculty identifying as libertarian or conservative is prima facie evidence of ideological discrimination. Harvard will need more than verbal assurance of meritocratic hiring practices to convince anyone of its newly asserted ethic, though there are less intrusive ways to do this than the precipitous hiring demanded by the federal government.

Attempts to evade the Supreme Court ruling ending race-based admissions are unconscionable. At the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, the co-defendant in SFFA v. Harvard, the board of trustees resolved not only to ensure scrupulous observance of the decision but to extend race-blind practices to hiring and contracting. Nothing like that came from Harvard. Governing boards that, for good reason, do not want Leviathan’s intrusion into their campuses need to ensure fair admissions, fair hiring, and freedom from discrimination. This is their moment for strong, principled institutional governance. There are powerful figures within the Harvard community who understand this and are speaking out forcefully and eloquently.

But it must be said out loud: Limited government is a core value within the American concept of liberty, especially for classical liberals and conservatives. It is reasonable and wholesome in a free society for private institutions to challenge governmental fiat and intrusion into their operations. It behooves the Trump administration to respect such boundaries.

Holding two thoughts at once and recognizing complexity in crafting policy has not been a virtue demonstrated by either the Trump administration or by elite universities. It is time for that to change.

Editor’s note: This essay originally misstated the year of Claudine Gay’s congressional testimony as December 5, 2024. It has been updated to its correct date of December 5, 2023.

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Effective Governance and the Executive https://lawliberty.org/forum/effective-governance-and-the-executive/ https://lawliberty.org/forum/effective-governance-and-the-executive/#respond Wed, 11 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000 Kevin Frazier https://lawliberty.org/?post_type=forum&p=67678

A more unified executive branch will not address the unique problems of our current political context.]]>
Political theory that becomes unmoored from political reality creates a dangerous disconnect—one that undermines the fundamental purpose of governance itself: human flourishing. This core truth has repeatedly emerged throughout American constitutional history. The Articles of Confederation, while theoretically sound in their protection of state sovereignty and checks against centralized power, ultimately failed in practice, proving inadequate for addressing the commercial, security, and unity challenges of the early republic. Similarly, the original constitutional provision for state legislatures to elect senators—a system designed to protect federalism and ensure deliberative selection—eventually collapsed under the weight of practical concerns about corruption, deadlock, and democratic representation.

Rogers’s defense of the unitary executive theory would benefit from greater consideration of its practical fit with the underlying purpose of our constitutional order. While intellectually rigorous and grounded in constitutional text and history, it risks becoming another case of constitutional theory that floats above the turbulent waters of actual governance. The daily evidence of administrative turbulence, limited accountability, and expansive uses of executive power contradicts the neat theoretical constructs that unitary executive proponents advance. Rogers himself seems to acknowledge this disconnect by explicitly limiting his analysis to descriptive rather than normative claims.

However, this separation between constitutional description and normative evaluation creates a fundamental problem. Any enduring analysis of the unitary executive must engage with how this structure functions amid contemporary political dynamics—the intense polarization, the weakening of institutional norms, the collapse of congressional oversight capacity, and the increasing concentration of power in the presidency. A constitutional theory that cannot account for these realities may confine its utility to academic discourse.

The fundamental test of any governance structure must be its capacity to advance human flourishing—to create conditions where citizens can lead secure, meaningful, and self-directed lives. By avoiding engagement with how the unitary executive theory operates within our current political landscape, Rogers sidesteps the most crucial question: Rogers sidesteps the most crucial question: Does this constitutional understanding actually serve the interests of the people? Without addressing this question, even the most elegant constitutional theory remains incomplete at best and potentially harmful at worst, perpetuating structures that may undermine the very liberties the Constitution was designed to protect.

The Unitary Executive in Practice

Two key aspects of Rogers’s defense of the unitary executive lack sufficient grounding in the political reality of today. First, he contends that a unitary executive fosters accountability. Second, he contends that this conception of executive power aligns with a robust system of checks and balances. When considered in light of the current political moment, neither rests on sturdy ground. 

On accountability, the sort of accountability hoped for by Rogers under a unitary executive does not materialize when subjected to empirical scrutiny of electoral outcomes and political discourse. Ironically, the very concern that Hamilton expressed about a plural executive, which Rogers paraphrases as allowing “blame shifting” and confounding “the ability of voters to hold executives responsible for administration,”—has manifested in a different form under the unitary model.

The current political reality reveals a Congress increasingly controlled by members more loyal to party than to institutional prerogatives.

This manifestation takes the form of what might be called a “unitary dividend”—a phenomenon that parallels the concept of a “liar’s dividend” in public discourse. Just as the liar’s dividend allows those with a tendency toward dishonesty to strategically leverage their mendacity by selectively claiming what they meant what they said, the “unitary dividend” enables administrations to expand executive authority to its furthest boundaries when politically advantageous, while strategically disclaiming responsibility when those same powers produce unfavorable outcomes. Recent administrations—both Biden’s and Trump’s first and second terms—have repeatedly leveraged this dividend, exercising extraordinary executive authority on certain issues while simultaneously arguing that other governmental actors bear the constitutional responsibility when their initiatives falter. The result is a fog of accountability that leaves the public uncertain where to direct their democratic judgment. Though the Biden administration never explicitly embraced Rogers’s conception of the unitary executive—defined as the “president [having] authority to direct all parts of the executive branch”—its operational approach often reflected precisely this understanding.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a compelling case study of this unitary dividend in action under the Biden administration. President Biden exercised sweeping executive authority by instructing Anthony Fauci and other officials to implement what many considered an expansive and intrusive federal pandemic response, including the suspension and termination of federal employees who failed to comply with Fauci’s directives. Yet when politically expedient, the administration redirected blame toward various external actors—social media platforms, vaccine-resistant citizens, and perhaps most significantly, Congress. This strategic oscillation between asserting maximal executive authority and deflecting responsibility created precisely the accountability confusion that proponents of the unitary executive theory, including Hamilton, had hoped to prevent.

Similarly, despite asserting significant authority in directing the nation’s foreign policy apparatus, President Trump frequently redirected responsibility toward Congress when confronting unfavorable geopolitical developments. In 2017, congressional actions became the administration’s preferred explanation for heightened tensions with Russia, despite the executive branch’s constitutional primacy in foreign affairs. More recently, Trump has partially attributed ongoing trade volatility with China to Congress’s passage of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, creating a narrative of divided responsibility that obscures the administration’s own policy choices. This pattern of selective accountability coexists with the administration’s willingness to exercise far-reaching foreign policy authority that sometimes operates at the boundaries of established legal and political norms.

This historical pattern reveals a misalignment between the theoretical accountability promised by unitary executive and the lived reality of our democratic system. Rogers, like many constitutional scholars, works from an idealized conception of voter capacity that assumes citizens possess sufficient information, political knowledge, and civic motivation to first identify the responsible governmental actors and then translate that assessment into electoral consequences. The empirical record tells a different story—one where voters consistently support parties that have implemented unpopular or even demonstrably harmful policies, where complex lines of authority remain obscured, and where the theoretical clarity of the unitary executive dissolves into the murky waters of modern media strategy and political messaging.

In short, the promise of democratic accountability through a unitary executive faces significant challenges in today’s political environment. A strong executive with centralized authority may paradoxically dilute accountability by creating a system where responsibility is more difficult to pin down. When executive power is concentrated in a single figure with broad authority and minimal means of accountability outside of the extreme of impeachment, the public may lack an effective means to evaluate the complex chain of decisions and delegations that occur within the executive branch. The tendency of recent administrations to develop and execute sophisticated media strategies may also shift narratives of responsibility away from the administration.

Checks and Balances

This lack of clear accountability invites a broader constitutional concern: How do our traditional checks and balances respond to emerging power vacuums and institutional ambiguity? The systems of checks and balances envisioned by Rogers assumes that Congress and the courts act in defense of their respective institutional powers, thereby counteracting the fervent expression of executive power involved with the unitary executive. Political reality suggests otherwise. A unitary executive is not necessarily in conflict with a system of checks and balances. A Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.-type analysis makes this clear. The first bucket involves each of the three branches fully and vigorously using their respective powers. In this case, checks and balances are firmly in place. The second bucket occurs when the executive operates under the unitary executive theory, yet only one other branch takes the equivalent approach. Here, the system of checks and balances may not immediately or adequately prevent an executive from exceeding their authority. But, on the whole, the system works as intended. Finally, on the third bucket, an executive operates to the full bounds of the unitary executive theory while the other two branches evidence deferential tendencies to the executive. This scenario raises significant concerns as to the viability and sufficiency of the system of checks and balances. We may find ourselves here now, facing a governance landscape in which the legislature hesitates, the courts retreat, and the executive assumes expansive authority over technologies shaping the public sphere.

The current political reality reveals a Congress increasingly controlled by members more loyal to party than to institutional prerogatives. Congressional representatives often demonstrate greater allegiance to a president of their own party than to Congress as an institution, rendering legislative checks ineffective. When public confidence in political institutions erodes, as multiple polling sources indicate is occurring, traditional checks and balances may no longer function as intended.

Effective governance requires systems that can respond to complex challenges with appropriate speed, expertise, and democratic input.

Similarly, the judicial branch, particularly the Supreme Court, has demonstrated a complex relationship with executive power. While sometimes providing checks on executive overreach, the Court has also shown deference to presidential authority in key areas like national security and immigration. The current 6-3 conservative majority on the Court may further complicate this dynamic, potentially showing greater deference to certain uses of executive power while restricting others based on ideological rather than constitutional considerations.

Though the occurrence of this third bucket may seem like an anomaly, it warrants further and more frank analysis by Rogers.

Effective Governance and the Unitary Executive

The primary blind spot in Rogers’s piece rests with his selection of constitutional principles to defend the unitary executive; he omits effective governance. In my own work on the right to effective governance, I argue that “early Americans shared a belief that the underlying purpose of the government was to advance the well-being of the governed.” That belief informed the decision to abandon the flawed Articles of Confederation and adopt a structure more aligned with the social, economic, and political realities of the day. Rogers failed to explore whether a unitary executive, in practice, has advanced the general welfare. As an aside, effective governance need not and should not have a partisan valence—it merely refers to the capacity of the government to address the essential purposes for having a central authority, such as coordinated international and economic policy, provision of national defense, protection against invasions of fundamental rights, and the like.

Effective governance requires systems that can respond to complex challenges with appropriate speed, expertise, and democratic input. The unitary executive theory, while appealing in its theoretical clarity, may actually impede these goals in practice. As evidenced by recurring administrative failures across administrations of both parties, concentrating decision-making power in a single executive has not demonstrably improved government performance on some of the aforementioned basic aspects of effective governance.

The structural flaws of a unitary executive reveal themselves in systematic governance breakdowns that go beyond individual leadership qualities. When presidential authority dominates the executive branch, we often witness the deterioration of institutional expertise as career officials with specialized knowledge depart amid shifting political winds. The centralization of decision-making authority creates bottlenecks that prevent nimble responses to emerging challenges, as evidenced by the sluggish adaptation to numerous crises over the past two decades. Perhaps most concerning is the policy whiplash that occurs when each new administration reorients entire agencies around presidential priorities rather than enduring public needs—a phenomenon we’ve seen play out dramatically across trade policy, healthcare implementation, and immigration enforcement.

Consider the cascading failures we’ve witnessed in critical infrastructure oversight. The Federal Aviation Administration’s delayed response to alarming air traffic controller shortages exemplifies how centralized control can impair timely action. Despite years of internal warnings from technical experts, political appointees delayed implementing recommended staffing reforms. This pattern repeated itself with the East Palestine train derailment, where regulatory capture and centralized decision-making diluted safety standards that independent regulators had long advocated. These weren’t failures of individual leadership but predictable outcomes of a governance model that subordinates expertise to hierarchical control. More generally, a massive reduction in executive branch staff does not bode well for the ability of the federal government to efficiently and sufficiently respond to threats to public well-being. As Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, relayed to The New York Times

The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment headcount, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service.

Similarly, troubling patterns emerge in how executive agencies handle fundamental rights. The due process failures in immigration proceedings stem directly from the executive branch’s ability to reshape entire enforcement apparatuses without meaningful checks. When presidents can unilaterally reconstruct agency priorities—as we’ve seen with abrupt shifts in enforcement targeting, detention policies, and asylum procedures—the consistent application of law gives way to political expediency. These compromises of fundamental rights aren’t bugs but features of a system that concentrates too much authority in a single elected official with incentives that often diverge from safeguarding individual liberties.

What these cases highlight is that the unitary executive theory fails to address a fundamental requirement of democratic governance: institutional capacity to deliver results that serve the public good while protecting core rights. A governance model focused solely on hierarchical control without equal attention to expertise, deliberation, and institutional knowledge may consolidate authority without improving outcomes. Historical experience suggests that effective governance emerges not from concentration of power but from thoughtfully designed systems that balance democratic accountability with professional expertise, rapid response capabilities with careful deliberation, and centralized coordination with distributed implementation.

Conclusion

Rogers’s exploration of the unitary executive makes valuable contributions to our understanding of constitutional design. However, its disconnect from contemporary political reality undermines its practical relevance. A more balanced approach would recognize that effective democratic governance requires not just clear lines of authority, but also robust institutional capacity, appropriate checks on power, and mechanisms to ensure that democratic accountability genuinely functions.

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