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

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

In Search of Woke

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

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

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

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

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

Escape from the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Freedom to Respond

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

Voegelin did not think so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post What’s Behind the “Woke Right”? appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Yet recently, each new season has come with fresh complaints about the sport. It’s definitely not dying as some argue. But neither is its popularity rising. Many commentators and casual fans are concerned that the sport is too “boring” for modern audiences. And while more devoted fans would probably contest that description, there is a sense that something is amiss with the way the game is currently played. This has meant that for several years, a big part of the national baseball conversation has been about rule changes.

Playing By the Rules

Changing the rules of any game is a delicate business. In a very real sense, the rules are the game. They are constitutive of a game’s very essence. As a father of both a five- and seven-year-old, I have some recent experience explaining how baseball works, and it’s hard to explain the activity of baseball in a way that isn’t simply explaining the rules of the game.

Yet no one would say that baseball—or any game—simply is whatever the official rulebook says it is: you can’t change rules willy-nilly and still reasonably consider it the same game. Making a new rule that awarded runs for hitting the ball into a net in the outfield, for instance, would amount to creating something altogether different. In other words, games are essentially traditions—activities that we know primarily by playing them (or watching others play them) according to a set of rules.

We might, therefore, differentiate between two different, but not mutually exclusive, rationales for rule changes. On the one hand, they can respond to changes in the activity going on in the field, adjusting as necessary to maintain continuity with the game as we know it. On the other hand, they may try to make the game something different and “better” according to some detached sense of what that “better” means. Often, these changes are trying to achieve some goal that is extraneous to the traditional activity of the game itself (most obviously, making money).

A good example of the former is the banning of the infield shift in 2023. There had never been any hard-and-fast rule stating that shortstops must stand between second and third, and that second basemen must stand between first and second. But that was how the game had generally been played. As teams began to overload one side of the infield in response to advanced metrics showing where certain hitters were likely to hit the ball, it was believed that the practice had a stifling effect on offense that tended to spoil the game. Accordingly, the standard way of doing things was instantiated into a formal rule.

An example of the latter kind of rule change—and a particularly revolting one to baseball purists—is the “ghost runner” rule that places a runner on second base at the beginning of every extra inning. In this case, something entirely foreign to the game as it has traditionally been played (a runner simply placed by fiat on base, without earning his way there) was introduced because extended extra-inning affairs were thought to be so boring that they turned away casual viewers.

If games are traditions, as we elaborate and alter the rules, we may be trying to maintain the continuity of that traditional activity, or be trying to meet some other purpose—money, viewers, celebrity, or even just abstract “excitement.” And in some happy situations, these two might go together.

Game and Spectacle

Professional sports are both games and money-making enterprises, of course, so there is no getting around the incentives of wealth and popularity. Some people (the present author included) enjoy the game itself and pay good money precisely to watch people play it. There is plenty of money, though, to be made off those who don’t particularly love the game, but may engage with it for some other reason. We might lump these other reasons into the category of “spectacle.” Viewers who don’t have any great love of a particular game might nevertheless enjoy the stadium experience; might be interested in following celebrity players (or celebrities’ boyfriends who happen to be players); might be impressed by some of the physical activities involved in playing the game (those who don’t like basketball can still enjoy highlights of someone getting “posterized”); might enjoy the drama attendant on playoff chases or record-breaking feats; or they might just want something to watch on TV.

All that, of course, is fine and good. Often, the excitement and pageantry surrounding a sport flow naturally from the actual playing of it. For those of us who love a particular game, though, the fear is always that the desire for spectacle will lead to attempts to manufacture it artificially at the expense of the integrity of the game. And that is what makes rule changes so dicey. If you recognize that the rules are the game, changing them just to get more eyeballs can easily lead you into “destroy the sport in order to save it” territory.

Enter Rob Manfred, the Commissioner of Baseball. Manfred (who many fans believe hates baseball) has always been single-mindedly focused on “improving” the sport as a money-making spectacle. He dutifully declined to enforce the rules against several of the sports’ young, profitable celebrities when they were caught flagrantly and systematically cheating. Many also believe that MLB under his leadership changed the cores of the balls in an effort to generate more eye-catching home runs.

So likewise, most of the rule changes under his reign have been focused on improving the spectacle of the game for casual viewers. Working according to the “baseball-is-boring” thesis, he has established pitch clocks, universal-DH, ghost runners, an expanded playoff, and a host of ticky-tack regulations surrounding relief pitchers, pickoffs, mound visits, and more.

Not all of Manfred’s rule innovations have been as bad as purists predicted. The pitch clock, I thought, was an affront to the leisurely nature of baseball, but I must admit that it has not turned out to be as much of an intrusion in the game as I had thought (though I continue to doubt that delay-of-game penalties are the key to making baseball more popular). Some, like the infield shift ban, were likely undertaken with the purpose of attracting casual viewers, but could be easily defended on more traditional grounds. Others, like ghost runners, were simply unconscionable.

This offseason, though, Manfred suggested something beyond the pale—something that could only have been conjured up in the frenzied dreams of the most vulgar of imaginations: a “golden at-bat.” This would allow teams, once per game (at least initially), to pinch-hit any player at any time, even if the player is already elsewhere in the batting order. This sort of Harlem Globetrotters (or, more precisely, Savannah Bananas) gimmick would help ensure that the biggest money-making stars are hitting in the most pivotal situations. There is almost no possible argument to be had that it is in keeping with the character of the game. It’s a video-game cheat code that erodes a defining quality of baseball that limits the ability of any single player to dominate a game. And it is an attempt to generate “viral” moments out of thin air, when the game requires patience and buildup for them.

Given the universally negative reaction the idea received within baseball circles, Manfred backed off—at least for now. But its very suggestion should be like a firebell in the night: the monsters that run MLB will consider almost anything scraped off the bottom of the focus-group table. There must be another way!

The “Boring” Problem

Thankfully, there is another approach to increasing the excitement of baseball—one that remains authentic to the game as it has traditionally been played. A good case can be made that what ails baseball right now is not a lack of spectacle or star power, but a shift in the way the game itself is being played.

The “boring” complaint about baseball is mostly just a nice way of saying that the dang kids these days have the attention span of a gnat. But there is something to it: there is less regular action in a game than there has been in the past. The key problem, though, is not the time between pitches (as the pitch clock assumes), but what is happening to those pitches: increasingly, nothing.

Ironically, the relative lack of action in the game right now is the result of the one thing that execs long hyped as the most exciting play: the home run. In the past several decades, strength and conditioning programs have drastically improved, while advanced metrics and tracking technologies that monitor a swing’s “launch angle” have created an environment in which “swinging for the fences” is, for most players, the most efficient way to generate runs—even though it comes with lower batting averages and fewer hits overall.

Home runs, therefore, have become a dime a dozen. Players are hitting more of them than ever. And in between the long balls? Not much. The stats bear out how terrible current MLB hitters are at getting hits or even putting the ball in play. In 2024, the league batting average was .243, tied with 2022 for the lowest since 1968. That year, which set an all-time low of .237, became infamous for bad offense. Making matters worse is that batters aren’t even getting out in interesting ways; they’re just striking out. Astonishingly, the worst sixteen seasons in baseball history for balls put in play (which means the defense actually has to do something) are the seasons of 2009-2024. Correspondingly, those same years have seen strikeouts skyrocket to record highs.

I’d wager that most baseball fans and casual viewers alike would now say that a double, RBI single, stolen base, sac fly, and RBI single strung together is a far more exciting way to watch two runs being scored than a two-run homer bracketed by strikeouts.

The fact that the game is now so boom-or-bust shows that the actual playing of the game has degraded (which we purists don’t like), and means there is less regular, extended excitement to hold viewers’ attention (which the money-makers don’t like). There is a “golden” opportunity to think about tweaks to the game that might make “small-ball” hitting great again.

Give Me That Old-Time Baseball

Importantly, MLB does not have an overall offense problem—pitching isn’t dominating hitting. In 1968, paltry batting averages corresponded with a meager 3.42 runs per team game—the second lowest of all-time. By contrast, 2024 saw a comparatively robust 4.39 runs per team game, which is slightly above average historically. That just reinforces that today’s low batting averages are intentional and strategic. Players and coaches are choosing to embrace a plate approach that results in fewer hits but more home runs, because that strategy currently pays off in greater overall production and player value as measured by modern analytics. Rule changes, therefore, ought to be narrowly tailored to address that specific dynamic.

Could MLB tweak some rules that would make home runs slightly more difficult, and reward contact hitting? It would not need to make the home run a rare event, but at least alter the incentive structure so that a higher portion of players will find that it is more productive for them to focus on contact and average, rather than focusing on power and launch angle.

A more restrictive limit on infield shifts, as well as tweaks to the strike zone, the pitcher’s mound, and/or the ball could possibly help, though it’s not clear if they could be crafted specifically enough to cut down on home runs without dampening offense in general or making the strikeout problem worse.

Two ideas could be particularly well-targeted for the problems with today’s game, though, both involving the size of the outfield. First, MLB could consider some general restrictions (or perhaps incentives) on outfield dimensions and wall height. That outfield walls vary from stadium to stadium has always been a hallmark of baseball, and that shouldn’t change. But there could be some limits imposed that attempt to eliminate “cheap” home runs, especially down the right- and left-field lines, where many stadiums have low and shallow walls.

Extending the walls would create more outfield space, making dingers more difficult and hopefully increasing the incentive to take a more contact-first approach. But it might just turn a lot of home runs into flyouts. Encouraging higher walls, though, could make home runs more difficult, while turning them into off-the-wall doubles and triples, which are some of the most exciting plays of the game.

The other major idea that MLB should consider is expanding the outfield by widening foul lines. Rather than running straight from home plate to the outfield wall, the foul lines could be redirected outward by a few degrees starting at third/first base. This idea has actually been around for over a century, as this extensive treatment recounts. One calculation showed that for every degree shift, it would result in about 3.4 points in higher batting average. So a very subtle change could significantly impact a player’s hitting strategy. Not only would it create more space for hits, it would create it in the areas most likely to result in exciting and productive doubles and triples. For many players, contact and ball placement might once again be the key to maximizing their productivity.

Small-scale trials of the idea in the 1970s, moreover, revealed it to be remarkably unobtrusive. Many players involved barely even noticed it. It would not revolutionize baseball, but might subtly bring it back closer to the more balanced style of play that has defined the modern game. 

The potential tension between what is good for business and what is good for the game won’t ever go away. Those of us who love the game as the game may hate that its future depends on the shifting interests of hoi polloi and the limited capacity of the youths to appreciate its beauty. But fortunately, the core complaints of those who care mainly about baseball’s commercial success can, at present at least, be addressed by rules that are authentic to baseball’s traditional identity.

If Rob Manfred takes his cues more from what happens on the diamond than from what’s said in the focus group, we might avoid the resort to gimmicks and cheat codes.

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

The post The Rules and the Game appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was proposed in 1972 with a seven-year deadline for ratification. Following a contentious debate, that deadline was not met, nor was an extended deadline of 1982 (the validity of which is questionable). The amendment, therefore, was defeated over 45 years ago. Moreover, several states rescinded their ratification well before Virginia’s pantomime. So while it is sometimes reported that the Old Dominion became the “38th state to ratify,” which would put the amendment over the requisite two-thirds majority, it was really nothing of the sort.

The whole episode passed fairly innocuously, quickly overshadowed by the presidential transition. The Archivist of the United States, who is statutorily responsible for certifying a constitutional amendment, restated her position that the amendment could not be ratified after the congressional deadline. It was notable, however, that several prominent individuals and institutions put out statements going along with the act, including some like Georgetown Law School and the American Bar Association that should value the rule of law. The short-lived affair is revealing—both of our constitutional system, and the kind of performative politics that is undermining it. Though the legal case for ratification of the ERA is weak, a look at Article V reveals plenty of wiggle room for hairsplitting disputes over the validity of amendments. And that possibility, in turn, reveals a constitutional system that depends on a “We the People” who actually value life together under the stable rule of law. Performative politics puts that system in grave danger.

Some of the ERA’s advocates have argued that, because no time limit is mentioned in the Constitution, Congress cannot impose one. This claim, it should be noted, ironically constitutes a hyper-literalism that goes well beyond anything mainstream originalists would espouse. But it is easily dealt with: Even if one concedes the substantive point (which is by no means obvious), it would simply mean that the congressional proposal of the ERA was itself invalid, and therefore none of the ratifications were effective.

Others have argued that states cannot rescind ratification. This is a more contentious question (though one rendered moot by the time limit). Nevertheless, the Constitution does not say one way or another, which by my reckoning at least, would leave states free to deliberate and act as they see fit. If a state initially votes against ratification, presumably they may reverse that decision later. (If not, when do we kick Rhode Island out of the United States?) And it would make no sense to allow changes in one direction and not the other.

Moreover, taking both of these positions together—that no time limits are allowed and states may never rescind their ratification—would mean that it is impossible for any amendment ever to be defeated. Progress could only ever go one way. That, it seems, would be a ridiculous conclusion to reach, one that is not obviously demanded by constitutional text and that is clearly out of step with the general objective of the amendment process—to ensure a broad consensus around any changes to the Constitution.

The ERA incident, however, does reveal an important and challenging element of the constitutional system. The tail end of the amendment process is very open-ended. Article V stipulates that an amendment “shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress.”

There is no final certification or other formal process that we have come to expect in the age of modern administrative rules. We search in vain for a final authority on any questions about validity. It shall simply be “valid.” The archivist’s role is, of course, not a constitutional one, but a statutory one—and it is more about record-keeping than authority. President Biden, it seems, believed the president may have some role. But certainly, there is no inkling of that in the text of the Constitution. And the fact that Biden only made his declaration at the very end of his term indicates that perhaps he did not really believe in a serious presidential authority.

One might think, then, that the question must be decided in the court system. But not so fast. In the past, the courts have opted not to decide controversies over amendment ratification. In Coleman v. Miller, the Supreme Court ruled that a debate over the legitimacy of a state ratification was a nonjusticiable political question. And rightly so. The process of ratification is a political one, not a legal one. And it is not at all clear that the Constitution offers anything approaching a legal rule for determining validity.

One might turn, then, to Congress, which is where the Coleman v. Miller Court pointed. In a concurrence, Justices Douglas and Frankfurter even said that Congress possessed “exclusive power over the amendment process.” Perhaps if push ever came to shove, that is where the issue might wind up. But that is a very problematic answer, too. Congress, after all, has a specific part of the process to play, as the proposer of amendments. That is very different than “exclusive power.” There is nothing in the Constitution that would suggest Congress has oversight over the other part of the process, which is in the hands of states. Moreover, as the proposer of amendments, Congress would have a stake in the game, and likely be systematically biased toward ratification. Congress considered eliminating the ERA time limit after Virginia’s “ratification”—which would have effectively raised the amendment from the dead in an attempt to make it the law of the land, despite the fact that it had been defeated by the states. Had that happened, it wouldn’t be hard to see the problem with identifying Congress as the final arbiter of this question.

We are, then, simply left with “shall be valid.” Our system does not offer any institution, like the King-in-Parliament, that exercises final authority over what rules ultimately govern our political system. It depends only on a plural authority—three-fourths of the states—which cannot speak with one voice. Such a system, perhaps more than any other, relies on an attitude of civil accommodation to one another. By “civil” here I don’t mean “nice,” but rather reflective of an underlying desire to live together under established rules and act accordingly.

The Constitution assumes that if three-fourths of the states ratify a constitutional amendment, those that oppose it will nevertheless accept that it “shall be valid,” valuing an honest, civil order over any perceived disadvantages of the provision itself. And for the same reason, if an amendment is defeated, its supporters will recognize its defeat (as Ruth Bader Ginsburg did with the ERA, for example).

The decades-long ascendency of the “living constitution” was the paradigm case of the dishonest path. It revealed that a significant part of the country saw its own substantive moral aspirations as overriding any commitment to a stable, shared political and legal framework.

The ERA flap, however, reflects our even more vacuous times. This was obviously not a serious attempt to change the Constitution. The people and organizations who put on a straight face to insist that the ERA was actually ratified knew that it wasn’t going to happen. These were mere performances for public consumption. At least the advocate of the living constitution could make the moral argument that his principles are so pure, his moral demands so imperative, that procedure simply must give way to what is right—even if it means undermining the general consensus around the validity of that system. Here, however, everyone knew there was no legal payoff. It was all about the show.

Yuval Levin has notably diagnosed the decay of American institutions by observing the way they are increasingly used as platforms—stages that one can use to enhance visibility and cater to an audience. In this ERA debacle, we have the Constitution itself used as such a platform. The individuals and institutions that played along with the presidential declaration were willing to sow distrust and discontent with our constitutional order, not to accomplish a moral goal, but merely to signal loudly their own purity and win plaudits from their ideological compatriots.

This sort of performative approach to law and the Constitution erodes the kind of civil ethic that our ordered political life requires. Let us hope that leaders and institutions of all political stripes can recover an appreciation for constitutional order, before we’re left with nothing but an arena of screeching sectaries.

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

The post Performative Constitutionalism appeared first on Law & Liberty.

In some ways, the push for free speech on campus and the emphasis on neutrality is its own kind of politicization. It is more subtle and less obviously ideological than the sort of politicization that it combats, but in mimicking the liberal values of political life rather than embracing those appropriate to its own activity, the university gives up its distinctive identity as a shaper of human experience. In doing so, it may be part of a general trend that gives ammunition to the critics of a broadly liberal political order.

The Politicized University

We can understand “politicization” to mean that an activity is undertaken according to the aims, values, or modes of a broader, systematic social vision—not according to ones particularly suited to the activity itself. It may be direct (through government control or regulation, for example) or indirect (when the self-understanding of those who participate in the activity is altered to understand their work in political terms).

This latter kind of politicization can take the form of straightforward partisan or ideological capture—razor blade companies that preach about toxic masculinity instead of getting a clean, smooth shave; or churches that sing hymns about politicians instead of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

But it need not always be so obvious. This form of politicization takes place when an institution consciously or unconsciously adopts values forged in and for the political sphere as the guides for how it ought to operate, even if they are not immediately applicable to the aims or activity of the institution itself. Consider how, for just about every corner of society (including the university, of course), you can find someone arguing that it ought to be “democratized”; or churches that have, without any immediate partisan aim, changed doctrinal teachings to bring them into line with political (as opposed to theological) notions of liberty or equality.

There is, of course, no shortage of the more obvious kind of politicization in higher-ed, from DEI departments to entire academic disciplines that barely hide their ideological purpose. It is this kind of “politics” on campus that has made free speech and neutrality a rallying cry today. But does this approach recapture the meaning of the university? 

To escape politicization, we ought to have an institution that is guided by values and practices appropriate to the academic pursuit. What exactly that entails is too extensive a question to explore in detail here—and it is likely to be a point of debate and contention with which any given university must wrestle. But it is reasonable to argue that the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge undertaken through specific forms of study lies at the center of the historic concept of the university.

Academic freedom, as McGinnis related, is a norm specifically associated with this particular pursuit—a freedom protected by universities with a corresponding duty to maintain academic rigor and a serious pursuit of knowledge. “Universities are a special kind of institution, and their ideal structure of freedom is suited not to the raucous public square but to a forum for the production of knowledge.”

The right to free speech, though it bears some similarities with academic freedom, is a much broader principle, emerging from and appropriate to a different, distinctly civil context. It notably differs insofar as it takes truth—and even a good faith pursuit of it—mostly out of the equation. The state should not punish wrong opinions, even foolish ones. But it would be absurd to embrace a general principle that no person should ever face consequences for being a fool. It simply is not the proper task of the state to deal out such judgments.

The discourse on campus free speech, for instance, often focuses on how “comfortable” a student feels expressing an opinion. Insofar as discomfort comes from stifling ideological conformity (which it often does), it is certainly a problem. But “comfort” in expressing political and social opinions is hardly a guiding principle for the pursuit of truth. Socrates, at least, was not known for making his interlocutors, including his students, comfortable with whatever political and social opinions they already held. The very mission of education as a pursuit of truth often requires discomfort and a direct challenging of preconceived opinions.

The free speech and neutrality approach also focuses heavily on “balance”—making sure that there is representation from “both sides” of our political discourse. This requires us to label various ideas or people according to which “side” they are on, which in turn perpetuates the fixation on where the university fits in the broader political landscape. That only makes it harder to appreciate the university’s own, internally directed activity. Inviting Charlie Kirk to campus to “balance out” an appearance by Nikole Hannah-Jones, for instance, does not particularly indicate that the university has shifted from political activism to the pursuit of knowledge.

The widespread protests roiling campuses across the country this year reveal the limits of the neutrality/free speech approach to depoliticizing campuses. It tends to treat all forms of “expression” as valid and protected, even as none of them are officially endorsed. Mass campus protests centered on political and social issues are to be welcomed, encouraged, and praised as a utilization of the right to free speech. It becomes a problem only if the protestors are violent or inhibit the movement, instruction, or expression of others.

The first official university statement concerning campus protests that turned up on a Google search was from the president of the University of Utah:

I hold an unwavering belief in the power of freely expressed ideas to improve our state and world. I want the students and faculty who lawfully protested yesterday to know their voices are heard and matter. They are welcome to continue to express their views legally and peacefully.

At the University of Utah, you have an absolute right to express your opinion.

He then goes on to note that all this must take place within the law, and explains the limits of campus protest in terms of the law. No doubt many if not most university statements are similar. And public universities are legally constrained to take something like this approach.

What is missing, however, is a sober consideration of whether political protest is in keeping with the activity of the university. I won’t belabor the point—but it is not. The street protest encourages participants and even onlookers to believe that the relevant truth has already been ascertained. Certainty in one’s beliefs is a prerequisite for this kind of political action. Moreover, the manner of communication is one that treats the exchange of “freely expressed ideas” (if that phrase is even applicable) as a matter of will and force—of showing one’s strength and forcing others to “hear” your “voice.” At the very least, this is in significant tension with the understanding of the university as a place of study.

Liberalism and the Disinterested University

The limitations of the neutrality approach stem from the fact that it continues to have political values guide the activity of the university—specifically, the values of the small-l liberal state. In broadly liberal political systems, we rightly expect the state not to be a “schoolmarm,” telling us what is right or wrong simply, or limiting our ability to order our lives and pursue human goods on our own, both as individuals and in associations of civil society.

Critics of liberalism sometimes present this as inherently relativistic, eroding commitment to any higher goods. “Whatever government does not honor is weakened by this neglect,” as one anti-liberal commentator argues. There is some merit to this view if liberalism is understood in the idiom of what I’ve elsewhere called “comprehensive politics”—as an activity that aims to systematically construct a particular kind of society. If we see the liberal political order as an attempt to comprehensively structure all social life, then its “neglect” of religion or—more to our point—the pursuit of truth, in favor of civil peace, social consensus, and balance within society can reasonably be seen as an attempt to lower the sights of human beings, depriving us of essential sources of truth and meaning.

This distinction accounts for much of the evolution of what we often call “classical” liberalism, which was mostly a teaching about the limits of the state, into modern, progressive liberalism, which has overseen the expansion of the political realm and the unleashing of centralized power. The latter takes certain principles that the older form of liberalism applied to political life (equality, liberty, neutrality, etc.), and makes them universal and generalizable ones, transforming them into something very different: principles that must permeate every corner of society for it to be considered “just.”

Understanding a liberal political order in a more distinctly civil sense—one that sees politics as a limited activity with limited aims—leaves ample room for higher goods. Indeed, one can see certain pursuits as too important to be left to the highly imperfect political process. But that means that a liberal polity may very well be made up of “illiberal” social institutions, in the sense that their activity is not ordered according to the same set of values as the activity of the state.

Robert Nisbet identified this as a potentially fatal flaw of nineteenth-century classical liberal theories, one that could ultimately make it self-defeating:

The great deficiency of this classical liberalism was its inability to recognize the indispensable importance of the social contexts of individual freedom, laissez-faire, and the noninterventionist state. So consuming was the emphasis upon the individual that the social sources of individuality tended to get neglected.

The tension and interplay between different sources of authority (each with its own mode of acting and appropriate values) is the key to individuality itself, shaping us as unique human persons. A liberalism that values individuality and limits the political realm in deference to the choices of individuals will degrade individuality itself if it transforms all social institutions after its own image, leaving society composed only of aggregated, homogeneous individuals and the state.

In this way, it is the various nodes of social authority, not the state, that give the unique character to a people and culture. Insofar as they abandon their distinctiveness and merely ape the values of political life—even the relative openness and toleration of the small-l liberal state—they create a cultural vacuum that cannot be filled by individual choice or the state (though both will try).

The university dedicated to the full pursuit of truth—not a defender of “expression” or an open forum for a balanced set of opinions—is not so much a “neutral” institution so much as a disinterested one. What goes on there will have social and political ripple effects, but those are not the guides of its operation. The disinterested university has the potential to be a unique purveyor of human goods that political activity cannot offer. It has the potential to instill certain habits and casts of mind that few other institutions value. It initiates a student into a conversation with a cultural inheritance and thus “conserves” that inheritance in a way politics cannot. And in freeing the mind from mass opinion, it “liberates” in a sense that transcends political liberation.

Yet today, very few university students are even remotely interested in the pursuit of knowledge. At best, they hope to gain a useful skill or read a few interesting books. At worst, they are gratified that their own unreflective “voices” are “being heard.” This is in part because the university has lost a sense of its uniqueness and has made itself an empty vessel to be filled by anything students, activists, politicians, or taxpayers demand.

The foregoing discourse is not exactly a practical guide to policymaking today. Government funding of education means that many universities are also state actors, invariably blurring the very distinctions that are essential to understanding the proper roles of school and state. As McGinnis points out in his review, they are legally obligated to structure themselves according to the rules of the state. And given that many public universities are under the thrall of extreme ideologies, neutrality and robust free speech are likely the most reasonable strategies to pursue in these restrictive circumstances. But we should not be satisfied with this merely less-odious form of the politicized university or allow the slightly-less-politicized university to distort our understanding of the unique activity of that institution.

Private universities that have a degree of separation from the state ought to increase that separation as much as possible. And in cultivating a campus culture, they ought to separate themselves from politics more generally, thinking less about what is “legal” and more about what is appropriate to the environment and activity of the university. Some form of academic freedom is essential. And there is little reason to think a university should restrict the expression of serious ideas undertaken in a spirit of conversation and productive exchange. But they may determine that street protest—though perfectly legal—is not an appropriate activity on their campus. As for public universities, the “Overton window” becomes a problem, but we ought continually to scan the horizon for new opportunities to advance the separation of school and state.

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

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In fact, one might be forgiven for wondering at the fact that more bullets haven’t been flying at political rallies. You don’t have to look far on any social media outlet to find people salivating at the prospect of a politics of enmity and blood. And these are not just occasional cranks that nobody listens to, but often people with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers and sometimes with serious money behind them.

The enmity is only slightly masked among the more “respectable” classes, who still present politics in existential terms, simply leaving the “destroy our enemies” as an unspoken implication. That is part of why the attempt on Donald Trump’s life is so disturbing. Added to the inherent shock of an assassination attempt is the fact that it seems like such a natural extension of the kind of politics we see around us all the time. To confirm, one merely needs to look at the many deranged online reactions to the shooting.

Aside from the growing number of extremists who hunger for escalation, the name of the game now seems to be moderation, for a few days at least. Stone-faced media pundits wonder if we’ve taken things too far; politicians put out press releases about how we must seek “unity” and “lower the temperature” of politics.

But as Peggy Noonan observed at the Wall Street Journal, it all seems so pro forma. Maybe there will be joint press conferences, a photo-op on the Capitol steps, or a brief period of respite from “fascist” talk. But will we get anything that’s beyond surface-level? To parse the metaphor, there is no wall thermostat to simply “turn down the temperature.” Calls to de-escalate are all to the good, but they are almost all focused on the epiphenomenal—the problem isn’t the rhetoric, per se. The problem is where the rhetoric comes from. That rhetoric is just part of a system of complex incentive structures that systematically poison political talk, ideas, and action.

One characteristic of today’s disease in the public mind is that it seems to be driven specifically by our political life—not by underlying social conditions. American society is not one that, on paper, should be seething with hatred. The tension in public life is not driven by a suppressed underclass groaning against oppression. There is no grand sectarian religious enmity. At a personal and local level, race relations have never been better. Religion, class, race, and a host of other elements, of course, all feature prominently in the cacophony that is public debate, but only after they have been fit into a larger national political narrative. Most Americans, even the extreme partisan agitators, honestly seem to care less and less about whether someone is black or white, an active Christian or an atheist, an East Coast elite or Midwestern farmer, so much as they care what kind of American you are, as the Internet meme goes. They care about the political “community” you are a part of, and what identity markers you embrace.

The vitriolic politics we practice is not feeding off already-simmering social tensions. It creates these identities and “communities,” most of which would not otherwise cohere on their own. Rather than managing and mitigating the tensions that naturally arise in any society, our political process actively generates new ones and calls forth the worst in human nature to bolster them. If there is to be a serious effort to make this moment a turning point—to tame the existential, “by-any-means-necessary” politics—it would require more than press releases or calls for a fabricated unity. It would require serious thought about our political practices and how they might change.

It may be impossible to say in advance what that sort of reflection would entail. But it would have to go beyond “taking a step back” or the other clichés and instead consider some deeply rooted qualities of our public life that incentivize the vitriol.

It would need to consider why so many people seem to have given themselves entirely over to politics. Why do so many find a quasi-spiritual fulfillment in it, such that they can only see it in truly existential terms? This sort of person is constitutionally incapable of “turning down the temperature.”

That may lead to consideration of the decay and cooptation of so many other sources of community and authority outside of the struggle for national political power. Today, national politics tries to pull everything into its vortex. College campuses are platforms for violent protest; the bathroom policies and library collections of primary schools are matters of national debate; churches often identify themselves as much by political labels as religious ones; business and economic life is infused with political symbols and posturing; local communities have been burned down to make a national political point. Even the individual person is increasingly understood in terms of “identity” markers that have been forged in the fire of partisan debate. Given this reality, is it so surprising that people begin to feel that everything they love is at stake in national political conflicts?

Then there is the oft-observed distrust in institutions. Americans have no confidence in their constitution, laws, and political institutions either to perform the specific function they traditionally fulfill or to properly form and restrain the individuals operating within them. And one can’t understand the distrust in our political institutions without realizing that it is well-earned: The powers of Congress, the courts, and most obviously the presidency and its behemoth executive administration have been routinely misused to reward friends and punish enemies, betraying their core purpose and eroding any limits. It is little wonder so many people reach for irrational hope in parties, movements, and persons of whatever ideological brand that promises to purify things from the ground up.

This in turn leads back to the incredible amount of concentrated power in the hands of our national government, which inevitably gathers in the executive branch. Few people blink an eye when someone refers to the job of the president as “running the country” (a phrase both of our two most recent presidents have used). One man, with the flick of a pen, can drop bombs on any part of the world; cancel private debt; choose not to enforce laws that the representatives of the people have instituted; bribe the institutions of civil society to conform their policies to an ideological model; unleash swarms of officers from massive federal enforcement or regulatory agencies to harass any man, woman, child, business, or organization in the country.

That kind of power is up for grabs every four years; it can swing drastically from one direction to another on a crisp January morning, through a process that the average citizen has only a token participation in. In these circumstances, a simple call to “unity” falls flat, for it is easily absorbed into the cycle of fear and resentment: Unity on whose terms? Unity under whose auspices?

Paranoid conspiracists are wrong to suggest that every part of life is being controlled and dominated by this or that nefarious group. But the power at stake and the corresponding mentality of public officials give these stokers of discord more than enough grist for their mill. We don’t live in a repressed dystopia. We retain many freedoms so valuable that they are taken for granted. And our Constitution and traditions provide us with remarkable resources for reviving a healthy form of civil life.

Yet we do increasingly seem to be in the midst of a widening gyre put into motion specifically by our manner of political practice. For the “temperature” to be turned down, it would take more than rhetoric. It would require a different way of thinking about and engaging with fellow citizens, one in which people don’t feel that every aspect of their life, even their very personal identity, is on the line every four years in a winner-take-all battle. It would require a citizenry open—perhaps out of exhaustion—to moderation. And it would require a wise and far-sighted statesmanship that seems nowhere in sight.

All that might just mean it’s impossible. But if we truly want a healthier civic culture, it will require a change that goes beyond words.

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

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This sort of constitutional politics is the notion that political activity aims at protecting and managing the interactions between various elements of society as they are—that society is not a canvas on which dreamers can bring their visions to life, but a collection of real persons and institutions constituting many sources of authority that require an agreed-upon settlement on how their common life together is to be conducted.

The authors, however, incline toward what we might call comprehensive politics—the notion that political activity aims at an all-encompassing, systematic, and intentional ordering of social life to approximate as best as possible a perceived ideal of the whole.

These categories represent two opposed inclinations that underlie our political life. They are not themselves ideologies or theories, but primal and intuitive dispositions toward political activity—including governance, policy, rhetoric, the partisan struggle for power, and the activity of mass movements that seek to influence the patterns of social life on a large scale. They are answers (often unarticulated and unexamined) to the question “What is politics supposed to do?” Much of our political activity, rhetoric, and theories build up distinct edifices on one or the other of these inclinations, which tend to remain under the surface.

Tracing out this distinction in our political language, analysis, and practice helps to better understand the cause of much of our present social and political disorder, and it offers a degree of clarity to the often distorted and ambiguous vocabulary we use to describe politics. In attempting to delineate these inclinations, I do not offer anything particularly novel. The categories identified are a synthesis of different ideas found in many twentieth-century conservative and conservative-adjacent thinkers including Nisbet, Oakeshott, Hayek, Sowell, and others. But as conservatives today continue to try to find their intellectual footing, it is essential to reimagine and rearticulate ideas that help us understand the words we use and the world we inhabit. Only then can we wisely choose the manner in which we ought to engage politically.

Comprehensive and Constitutional Politics

Comprehensive politics is characterized by a tendency to focus on the aggregate social conditions of the whole. It is monistic, seeing social life as a fundamental unity: the overriding goal of political activity is to make the various parts of society conform to the vision or contribute to the mission of the whole. In the words of Robert Nisbet, this kind of political community seeks to bring “all lives, all ends, all values, and all means into total articulation with one another.”

Comprehensive politics implies a plasticity of human beings, who are the product of their broader social context. That context, in turn, is consciously molded by those who wield power or influence—either today or long ago, having set in motion a process that now unfolds according to design. This provides simple, monocausal explanations for unfavorable social conditions, which are the product of “capitalism,” “liberalism,” “global elites,” or “the Regime.” In short, things are bad because someone at some point arranged for life to be this way. Social order is the direct result of a social orderer.

Political activity, then, is seen as a straightforward contest between rival visions of the Good that are to be imposed on society. These visions are derived a priori, but need not display great coherence—they may be arrived at by reason and philosophy, by reconstructing a perceived golden age, or perhaps simply by the crude combination of basic human desires. Most center on the elevation of a particular value—equality, justice, piety, personal autonomy—as superior to and overriding all others. Politicians speaking in this idiom need not talk of trade-offs and least-worst scenarios, but of addressing root causes and proffering final solutions.

Comprehensive politics, therefore, elevates particular substantive outcomes over procedural rules and institutions. Political activity is to be judged by the extent to which aggregate social conditions match the preconceived vision of the Good Society. Procedural norms, constitutions, rights, divisions of power, and the rule of law can easily hinder this pursuit. At best, therefore, they are accorded a secondary status as constraints on the primary activity of politics.

Moreover, comprehensive politics may also transform procedural commitments into ideals to strive after. Democracy (itself a procedural practice for selecting governors) may morph into “Our Democracy”—a package of desired substantive policies and social outcomes that ought to be protected, even against the will of voters. Commitment to a constitution may slip into a pursuit of the never-fully-attained “ideals” or “Spirit” of the Constitution. A belief in equal treatment under law can morph into a quest to create by conscious choice a more comprehensive human equality. 

While comprehensive politics starts with a dream of what could be, constitutional politics starts with what is: the actual people, institutions, and authorities of any given society. Rather than focusing on a constructed vision of the whole to be evaluated and adjusted, it sees aggregate social conditions as the byproduct of multiple sources of authority, ones which often pull in different directions. To protect that kind of plural society, governance must also be the product of multiple sources of authority that have found consensus.

Human beings may be capable of changing over time, and such change may come largely from their social circumstances, but those circumstances are so infinitely complex—and the human capacity for understanding so limited—that they cannot be explained by single, purposive causes, or consciously manipulated to attain certain desired ends. The planner, innovator, revolutionary, or counterrevolutionary who attempts to do so may succeed in destroying fragile institutions and destabilizing social order, but he rarely winds up with the society he set out to build.

Constitutional politics, consequently, presents political activity as a process of settlement, and a seeking after consensual order, acceptable to the various parts of society. Politics has neither the ability nor the moral authority to function as the creator and intentional molder of a society. But it may establish procedures for living peacefully and productively together in a particular place. This notion of political activity allows for a great variety of other nodes of authority to flourish that need not all point one way.

Constitutional politics is not an attempt at “value-neutrality,” as some devotees of comprehensive politics suggest. The sort of rules, procedures, and institutions that characterize constitutional politics is neither “value-neutral” nor simply the product of one particular, cohesive, and coherent set of values. They can, rather, represent what Roger Scruton called “the residue of human agreement” that “grows from within the community as an expression of the affections and interests that unite it.”

A Distorted Vocabulary

The divide between comprehensive and constitutional politics does not line up with most of the political identifiers thrown around, and actually reveals tensions and ambiguities in the very words we use to define them.

It helps explain the shift in the meaning of “liberalism” from a doctrine largely centered on limited government and the rule of law to a movement devoted to a complete liberation and equalization in all things. This shift is not an inexorable “next step” in the logical unfolding of liberalism, as some argue, but the re-articulation of older, largely constitutional liberal values in the idiom of comprehensive politics.

The division also complicates the “conservative” label, dividing those who see civil life as guided by established patterns of activity that change only gradually from those who go around muttering “1788,” hoping to recreate society after their model of a supposed golden age.

Likewise, a “populist” may be revolting against unaccountable elites who have sought to impose a particular model on society, or they may be revolting against “undemocratic” institutions that prevent the use of power in the service of their own preferred vision. A “libertarian” rejection of big government may be motivated by skepticism and distrust of planners, by a rigid moral outlook defined by permissiveness, or by a perceived mission to unleash the power of human creativity to transform the world.

Nearly every important political concept—“nations,” “social justice,” “capitalism,” “order,” “the common good,” to name just a few—is similarly susceptible to very different understandings depending on the inclination one takes.

The Ascendency of Comprehensive Politics

But while both inclinations have a foothold in our political tradition, and both maintain influence in public understanding, most of our public rhetoric and analysis on all sides today tends to reflect the assumptions of comprehensive politics. Our basic constitutional structure still exists, of course—to the annoyance of anti-constitutional op-ed writers—but we mostly no longer speak in the idiom of constitutionalism. Comprehensive politics has a natural appeal that has been augmented by a host of circumstantial factors over the last century: technological advancement, including the rise of mass communication; war, which of all political activities, most calls upon a comprehensive bridling of society; and the decline of religious belief, which left a spiritual void often filled by devotion to more earthly religions like that of the nation, humanity, or abstract principles. Perhaps most importantly of all, the incentives of mass democracy encourage comprehensive politics, as they call for grand visions, transformative promises, and identitarian appeals that can cut across local practices and prejudices to build up large-scale political coalitions.

A host of contemporary ills can be chalked up in part to the dominance of the comprehensive inclination, many of which serve only to further its entrenchment in our language and thought process: the expansion and centralization of the state, the adoption of “living” or “moral principles” approaches to the Constitution (which effectively negate it by making it a tool to be used by political movements), the increasing tendency to seek spiritual fulfillment in political activity, and even conspiratorial thinking, from “institutional racism” to the belief that everything is a “psyop”—these are just a few examples.

One of the most pervasive problems, however, is the tendency to diminish institutions and nodes of social authority (except for the state), seeing them as extensions of and secondary agents of broad political projects working toward the single end determined by the whole.

As Thomas Sowell describes it, his “unconstrained vision,” tends to construct a standard of “social responsibility” that requires “businessmen, universities, and others” to “discern the social ramifications of one’s acts” and make their decisions according to their aggregate calculations of social benefit, rather than according to the logic of their distinct activity. Civil society may be coopted in this way by direct political regulation, and by government incentives that purchase their submission. But the tendency is most pernicious when the notions and habits of comprehensive politics seep into the very identity of the institutions themselves, causing them to reconceive their mission in terms of broader political objectives. When this occurs, the institutions cease to be their own sources of social influence and authority and become instead foot soldiers in armies commanded by others. They do not uphold the values essential to their particular task but instead adopt values appropriate to the ascendent political cause they have attached themselves to.

This manifestation is one root of a host of contemporary phenomena, including ESG regulations, “virtue signaling” on the part of business and social institutions, “effective altruism,” woke churches and MAGA churches, ideological indoctrination in schools, and universities (and/or their students) that are committed more to political activism than the pursuit of truth.

In undermining the functional autonomy of these institutions, comprehensive politics takes away the source of real, stable social order that emerges from people’s own choices. The cross-cutting influences of various civil society institutions shape the character of people in a way that no “Regime” planning ever can, and they help develop the shared expectations citizens have of one another. When they become hijacked by sweeping political trends—and when the overriding political demands on these institutions inevitably fail to unify society or provide the kind of social order promised—we are left only with disorder and maladjustment.

Yet those who resist the current politicization of such institutions often themselves speak the language of comprehensive politics and are animated simply by a different, systematic vision of the whole. In doing so, they have further lost sight of the kind of political practice that can encourage the conditions of a free and stable social order.

In between the fringes that increasingly seem to drive discourse, there are plenty of people who desire normality. They do not dream of civil war, of executing their own “march through the institutions,” of rectifying the wrongs of colonialism, or of pushing every social boundary to achieve peak liberation. They want, by and large, normal lives focused on the things in front of them—families, schools, churches, communities, recreation—and they want a political and social order that allows them to pursue such goods. Politics is so universally conducted in the comprehensive idiom that such people are likely to be written off simply as “non-political”: politics, it seems, just doesn’t speak that language. The constitutional idiom, however, does speak the language of normality—of a social settlement that derives from and protects normal life. The great multitude of the supposedly “non-political” may, therefore, be the best possible avenue for the revival of constitutionalism.

As the consequences of our comprehensive politics become more and more dire, it is the instinct of many to indulge even deeper the fantasy of total control. But for those who would prefer genuine order, freedom, and normality, it is all the more necessary to reinvigorate and reintroduce the language and practice of constitutional politics.

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There are often tensions and contradictions in the lives of creative geniuses. In the recently released authorized docuseries Willie Nelson and Family, one can follow the tension between Willie’s love of community and tradition on the one hand, and his unfettered individualism on the other. Throughout his life, Willie has appreciated the need for deep friendships, family, community, and the traditions—particularly musical ones—that are passed down by them. But flowing out of his hippie mentality, he also has a compelling drive to do things his own way and an inability to adjust himself to the expectations of others. That combination was just what country music needed when Willie first emerged.

Most people of my generation associate Willie primarily, or even exclusively, with marijuana—he’s known now as a symbol of his way of life as much as he is for his music. The series gives pot its due, as well as Willie’s unique persona and philosophy of life. But the story it tells leaves no doubt that Willie should be known and appreciated first and foremost as an incredible musician whose ambition, celebrity, and persona—though all strong—never overtook his simple love of singing a good song.

Willie’s childhood contained elements that would be with him the rest of his life—broken marriages, strong familial love that overcame them, and music. His parents split up shortly after his birth, giving up him and his older sister Bobbie (with whom he would form perhaps his strongest, lifelong bond) to their grandparents, who were not wealthy but were musical. They bought Willie his first guitar and Bobbie a piano, and they gave both of them opportunities to perform. Aside from singing gospel songs in church, Willie’s first gig was playing for a polka band in a dance hall. As he grew up, he played in a number of bands and also bounced from job to job until he found more regular work in radio stations. After some limited songwriting success, he moved to Nashville with his first wife and young children in 1960.

At the opening of the third episode, Willie explains that great music defies trends. It “never goes out fashion,” even if it undergoes surface changes like the seasons. The country music executives in the 1960s didn’t quite buy that. They were focused on following the fashion, and at that time, the fashion was “The Nashville Sound,” which mimicked popular music with effusive vocals, lush strings and choirs in the background, and comfortable lyrics that appealed to sophisticated middle-class listeners. When Willie arrived in Nashville, he was immediately put in that stultifying box. He found instant success as a songwriter (most importantly penning the existential “Hello Walls” and the Patsy Cline hit “Crazy”) but his own albums did not take off.

With his relaxed vocal phrasing, behind-the-beat manner of singing, and the unique sound of his classical guitar, Willie’s style called for less production and less pretension than Nashville was used to. But the record executives didn’t think anyone wanted to listen to simpler songs in the rougher folk, western, and honky-tonk styles that had defined country music in the preceding decades. It didn’t occur to the decision-makers that someone could restore that style of music by reinventing it and breathing new life into it. Willie had always loved old-school country stars like Autry, Jimmie Rodgers, and Ernest Tubb, but he had also been inspired by non-country artists. His guitar style was heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt, and his singing style by Frank Sinatra. Willie wanted to sing in the tradition of that old country music, but he was going to do it his own way.

His chance came after a move back to Texas in 1972, a (second) divorce, and a house fire shook him out of a period of creative complacency. In Austin, he found people more willing to experiment outside of the boxes developed by marketing gurus. It was a place where “the hippies and the rednecks got along,” thanks in part to shared love of a music that was a blend of rock, folk, and country sounds. Success came in direct proportion to the amount of control Willie got over his records. He was able to use fewer rental session musicians and more of his own band in his records (his sister Bobbie being one of the first and most important additions), and he was given the freedom to start making the kind of music he wanted. And after he signed a contract that gave him complete creative control, he immediately made his multi-platinum breakout album that is a perfect example of Willie’s traditionalism and innovation.

Red Headed Stranger is a concept album that tells the story of a preacher who, “in the year of ‘01” was driven out of his mind by a cheating wife. He murders her and her lover, and wanders (and kills again) on the road until, at a point of desperation, punctuated by an instrumental rendition of the redemptive hymn, “Just As I Am,” he finds peace again in a new love and a new home.

The series emphasizes the album’s sparse instrumentation and minimal production. “Ain’t nothing much on the record except a whole lot of soul,” observes Ray Benson. Willie recalls that he spent only $2,000 of his $60,000 recording budget. While the presenters are right to describe that approach as trailblazing and innovative, they don’t do much to stress how traditional of an album it is, too. Its simple, “man-with-guitar” sound was a throwback, and Willie has written elsewhere that he had country artists of the ’40s in mind when he recorded it. Many of the tracks on the record were traditional tunes or ones written decades earlier. The best example is one of Willie’s most recognizable songs—“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” which was written in the ’40s and recorded by some well-known artists, including Roy Acuff and Hank Williams. But the song—and the style of music it came out of—was on its way to obscurity had Willie not picked it up, refashioned it, and made it timeless.

The documentary’s treatment of Red Headed Stranger is somewhat odd, presenting it out of chronological order so it can be used to describe Willie’s musical style. But that approach loses the sense of drama you get when you’ve just followed Willie out of Nashville to find his own sound. The series also downplays the controversy that the album sparked. One Columbia executive called it “a piece of shit” that sounded like it had been recorded in a “living room,” and there was some resistance to releasing it.

The Troublemaker is another album highlighted in the series that serves as a great example of Willie’s imaginative engagement with the tradition he inherited. The gospel album was a staple of any country recording artist of the ’60s and ’70s. But these records were often phoned-in affairs that checked off the “gospel” box; none of them had the life and freshness of The Troublemaker. The album came out of a New York City recording session, the first to feature his sister Bobbie on piano. As they relate in the interviews, the two were singing songs they had sung in their grandparents’ home as children, but the songs were given the Willie treatment—rendered in a honky-tonk style with an instrumentation (Bobbie on piano and Mickey Raphael on harmonica) that would define his sound. The album alternates between up-tempo numbers that sound like they’re coming out of a particularly spirit-filled revival tent, and slow and ponderous ones reflective of a man looking for peace, with a cheeky original song in the middle poking fun at those who wouldn’t want a long-haired hippie singing about Jesus. Willie had found a way to get a record full of Baptist hymns not only to the top of the country charts, but also onto the Billboard 200 pop charts.

The success of albums like these was a sign of the new life and new direction the traditional country sound was starting to find. For a tradition to be more than stale repetition, it needs imagination that can find fresh ways to bring out its merits and make it new each morning. Artists like Willie, Waylon Jennings, and others showed that they could find commercial and artistic success they were free to experiment, to incorporate elements of blues and rock and roll, and to bring their individual musical identities into conversation with folk, honky-tonk, and western swing styles. It was music that sounded authentically country, but also new and exciting. Needing a catchy name for the trend, marketers called it “outlaw country,” a term Willie didn’t care for, as it seemed designed simply to put him in a different box. The series perhaps doesn’t dwell quite as much on the Willie and Waylon era as one would expect. The producers seem eager to show how Willie went on to transcend country. But his contributions to the genre, which always seems to have trouble with its identity, can’t be understated.

Given that Willie had rebelled against the pop-music-inspired sounds of Nashville, it is ironic that he would go on to find as much cross-over success as any country artist of his time in the late ’70s and ’80s. He recorded American songbook staples on his Stardust album (which again infuriated the record bosses, who wanted “more of that outlaw shit,” now that they knew it would sell) and then covered several pop and rock songs on Always on My Mind. The key to his success was that he never tried to mimic anyone else’s sound or become a pop musician—whatever he was singing, it was authentically Willie. He never ceased to be a country artist; he just showed that a country artist could sing a good song, no matter where it came from.

“The life I love is making music with my friends”: so goes Willie’s 1980 hit “On the Road Again.” The second half of the series focuses heavily on the “friends.” As he found success, Willie brought his friends up with him. Unlike so many music stars, there are no great falling outs to be covered, but many lasting bonds. He recorded a multitude of duets—with country superstars like Merle Haggard, old friends whose moment had long passed, like Hank Snow, and pop stars like Julio Iglesias. And of course, he and his buddies (who also happened to be the “Mount Rushmore of country music”) combined to form the super-group, The Highwaymen.

He also found new, lasting friendships in this period. After recording “Seven Spanish Angels” with Ray Charles, the two became very close. (Willie recalls the difficulty of trying to play chess with Charles, since both sets of pieces in Charles’s set were the same color!) Willie is shown visibly moved as Charles, nearing the end of his life, sang at Willie’s 70th birthday concert. At Charles’s request, Willie sang “Georgia on My Mind” at his funeral.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Willie’s friends also came out of the woodwork for him during his headline-making trouble with the IRS. When the government auctioned off his belongings, many items were purchased by old friends (even the tour bus driver) and given back to him. Of course, Willie ended up getting out of the debt by doing the thing he did best—singing songs.

Neither emphasized nor ignored in the series is how the other side of Willie’s character—his independence and unwillingness to change for others—contributed to his rocky family life. He had three divorces, all brought on because Willie had moved on to a new love. His second wife found out about a longstanding affair only when she received a hospital bill for the birth of Paula Nelson. And an unsteady upbringing may have contributed to the alcoholism of his son Billy, who took his own life in 1990. That is just one example of the good amount of pain in Willie’s life, despite his carefree persona.

The waltz through Willie’s life includes many other interesting vignettes on all the things one would expect—his legendary guitar, Trigger (so worn that it now has a second sound hold), his smoke-filled tour bus (his regular quantity of weed was so high that it once got him suspected of trafficking), and his creation of Farm Aid. And there is mercifully little about his very progressive politics. The producers wisely chose to focus on stories that all, in some form, revolve around the bigger, unifying theme of his life—making music with his friends.

When Willie came onto the scene, country music needed someone who appreciated a song more than a production. It needed someone who loved the distinctive country tradition. And it needed someone with the imagination to innovate outside of the established boundaries. As odd as it may have seemed, country music needed a hippie.

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There are at least two ways one can think of conservatism: as a general manner of understanding or engaging in political life, or as a practical political program or movement. Both tend to be highly contentious. One would hope that the former informs our understanding of the latter. But it is easy to let the arrow go the other way—to let partisan politics reshape our understanding of what it means to be conservative.

Both the National Conservatism and Freedom Conservatism statements, and the broader discourse in which they take place, tend to speak to both of these questions in a sort of ill-defined middle. Talk of basic “foundations” and “fundamentals” is used liberally alongside very specific points of policy, and it’s never quite clear where one begins and the other ends. The National Conservative declaration, for instance, includes statements affirming that all nations must be culturally rooted in a religious tradition and that we ought to invest more heavily in R&D if we’re going to beat the Chinese. The Freedom Conservatism statement, likewise, affirms that certain liberties are “essential to a free society” and that we have to get this national debt under control.

The tendency to blur the lines between specific policies and more fundamental premises is not particularly helpful when seeking clarity. This was one of the reasons I opted not to sign the Freedom Conservatism statement, even though I agree with ninety percent of it, and share the desire to push back against the right’s growing affection for nationalism and centralized political power. I had the sense that the statement defended many of its commitments (which I generally share) simply by declaring them to be foundational principles. I think that repeats a mistake that contributed to movement conservatism losing its bearings, and doesn’t clarify precisely what a conservative approach to politics entails and requires in our present moment.

Particularly, I was struck that most of the principles it outlines do not appear to be distinctively conservative: equality before the law; freedom of conscience and freedom of speech; protection of private property; and the practice of fiscal discipline. In the 1990s, most any center-left liberal would have affirmed the value of such things, at least in principle. And I don’t think there’s anything stopping moderately left-leaning people today from affirming them. These are the important and reasonable practices of any free, small-l “liberal” political order.

That does not mean conservatives shouldn’t be committed to these things. We absolutely should. But what makes conservatism distinct, I think, is not so much its commitment to these small-l liberal practices, but its understanding of why they are valuable, and how they are to be maintained and defended.

For instance, though the statement does like to use the language of fundamentals, there is nothing in it suggestive of how or why we learn from our past; nothing about human imperfectability; nothing about taking our policy bearings from the norms, expectations, and traditions of society; nothing about the need to rely on prescription; nothing about the value of social continuity. These are the sorts of things that set apart the conservative understanding of the small-l liberal political order from the understanding put forward by pure liberal theory.

I don’t mean to place too much blame. The statement was not political theory but a rallying cry, and as such, it may serve a useful function. But we should be careful not to define conservatism on the basis of partisan manifestos, even if we agree with them. We can get ourselves into trouble when we loudly affirm our commitment to certain things without a thoughtful recognition of why we do so.

I’ll offer just one example. The conservative commitment to individual liberty and to equality under law, I think, emerges from a recognition of human beings’ (and, especially, one’s own) intellectual and moral imperfection, and a corresponding skepticism of the ability of powerful, expansive government (always directed by imperfect men), to create a just social order. If, however, we take liberty and equality simply as “self-evident” principles or declare them “fundamental”—without this conservative foundation—we might easily begin to see them as a permission slip for a never-ending political quest to make the world ever more free and ever more equal. Or we might find it increasingly difficult to square our defense of liberty with a rejection of the left’s demand for absolute individual autonomy and equity. Or, more to the present debate, we might program Caesarist tendencies in young conservatives who—not appreciating the deeper reasons why the modern, centralized state can never simply be turned to good ends—naturally grasp for the “levers of power” whenever the “regime” fails to live up to their particular vision of freedom and equality.

And when I see in the “Freecon” statement the rhetoric of the “shining city on a hill,” of a “world[] led by the United States,” of “promissory notes,” and of the “moral obligation” that private institutions have to uphold certain political principles, I get an uneasy feeling that this statement may be calling simply for a return to an early-2000s conservatism that had indeed lost sight of more foundational conservative premises and (in part) set the stage for the revolt of the New Right.

Granted, this reads a certain vibe into the statement that I’m sure some of its signatories might deny. But I do think that among critics of national conservatism more broadly, serious reflection on the failures of conventional, movement conservatism is often lacking. The national debt skyrocketed under movement conservative presidents. A movement conservative president championed a massive, nationalized education program. No serious, sustained effort at decentralization was ever undertaken aside from a few block grants here and there. And, of course, the Iraq War was justified by a movement conservative in the name of high principle. This is why directly facing up to the failures of movement conservatism should be a central part of any attempt to refocus conservative political efforts on our liberties, communities, and constitutional order. If it’s not, National Conservatives will continue to win easy points by deriding their critics for just repeating “stale platitudes.”

I don’t think the planks of the Freedom Conservatism statement are actually stale platitudes. They are vital commitments that are being abandoned by both the right and left. But I don’t think that simply repeating them is enough—either to achieve greater clarity on conservatism for ourselves or to counter the new right-wing narratives so attractive to many young people on the right. At the intellectual level, we ought to rearticulate the distinctively conservative case for these values, and at the practical level, we ought to show how their recovery can address our present moment of turmoil.

These criticisms are offered in a friendly spirit. I hope the statement can generate some enthusiasm among conservatives for liberty, constitutionalism, and locality. The foregoing merely demonstrates two points: First, that I am a bit of a fastidious crank when it comes to such matters. Second, and more importantly, that we should make sure to go beyond Manifesto Conservatism.

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

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The premise is simple: Religion has salutary benefits for social and political life. But once it is seen primarily in a political context—when it becomes merely a “state engine”—it fails to provide those benefits.

If you attempt to make the end of Religion to be its Utility to human Society, to make it only a sort of supplement to the Law, and insist principally upon this topic, as is very common to do, you then change its principle of Operation, which consists on Views beyond this Life, to a consideration of another kind, and of an inferior kind.

Burke certainly had in his sights “enlightened” clergy who were uncomfortable defending the faith on the basis of the old dogmas and so instead stressed its moral dimension and necessity for peaceful civil life. But he may also have had in mind utilitarian and political understandings of pagan religions. And the general reflection on the outward, social effects can be useful in many contexts.

If he meant that one ought never to speak of the social benefits of religion, there would be ample evidence that he abandoned this view later in life, when he had much to say on the subject. But there’s no reason to think that’s what he had in mind. Rather, his comment is about the way religion is publicly presented and understood.

The social benefits of religion come precisely because it is something that transcends the political, and they depend on the manner in which religion is approached by the people. When we come to think that eternal rewards and punishments are aimed primarily at the immediate, political “purposes of a moment,” they become less impressive to us: “We cool immediately, the Springs are seen; we value ourselves on the Discovery; we cast Religion to the Vulgar and lose all restraint.”

In his later life, as a staunch defender of the established church, Burke would identify the social benefit of religion as its ability to overawe all other social calculations and considerations. It reminds us that all we say and do has cosmic significance. Placing all human endeavors next to the sublimity of God, as he noted in his Philosophical Enquiry, has the effect of diminishing our opinion of ourselves and our capabilities: “Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him.”

Religion, then, could have the effect of dampening experimental and revolutionary fervor—what reader of the Book of Job, for instance, could ever dare to say that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again”? If political authority is seen as part of God’s providential order, we will “look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent to pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians.”

But importantly, it also ought to have the same humbling effect on those who exercise that political authority: “All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awefully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society.” This manifested in “politic caution” and a “moral timidity” (hardly the language of today’s politics) when pursuing any great political undertaking. The one who exercises power must even “fear himself.”

The political benefits of religion, then, rely on the humility that true religion ought to produce. And, as the young Burke suggested, it could only come as a side effect of a religion that was not focused primarily on political and social affairs. To the extent that religion is seen as (or actually becomes) a political project, it no longer forces us to “contemplate so vast an object” that we “shrink into the minuteness of our own nature.” It presents us, rather, with just another human social project. So even as he spoke of a “consecrated” state, Burke could also say without contradiction that “politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.” Should the pulpit ever come to be understood as a political soapbox, it would lose its salutary social effects. “The Springs are seen.”

Not only does a politicized religion fail to carry with it the benefits of the genuine article, it actively encourages the opposite tendencies. When religion is treated as a “state engine,” he says, “we value ourselves on the Discovery; we cast Religion to the Vulgar.” Instead of diminishing ourselves in our own eyes, it elevates us, as those chosen to wield a sword of righteousness. We have diagnosed society, identified its moral failings, and prescribed the cure to “the vulgar” who need it. God does not overawe us and our political plans, but is made to be a promoter of them and guarantor of their success.

As Burke would eloquently argue throughout his life, unity around a genuine religious tradition can have great social benefits insofar as it places politics in a context that reveals its own insufficiency and limits. But his observations are a reminder that the question of public religion is much more complicated than a matter of whether, abstractly, religion is good for social life. Also at stake are the substantive teachings of the religion itself, the public perception of it, and its effects on the souls of those wielding it.

Minds shaped by the pulpit may, depending on what is taught there, lead to better citizens and better statesmen. But pulpits focused mostly on political matters are necessarily degraded from their true purpose and therefore self-defeating. Such religion is easily reduced to a convenient civic morality that flatters, rather than diminishes our ambitions for political and social endeavors. When that happens, religion hasn’t consecrated the state, but the state has humiliated religion by rendering it just another tool put to use in human affairs.

It’s not clear that the religious right of the last century, or those voices on the right today rhetorically pushing for a more robust public religion, appreciate the sort of distinction Burke describes. Do politicians in pulpits, megachurch campaign rallies, Bible photo-ops, and governors “claiming” their states for Jesus make it more likely that the American public will express “humility and gratitude before God,” as the National Conservatives hope? Or do such public displays merely signal all the more clearly that the religion being practiced is a creation of partisan politics; a human instrument crafted “for the purposes of a moment”; a “state engine” that will be of no efficacy?

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

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This fatal incredulity is a staple of the modern horror movie, going right back to its origins. Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, and into the ’50s, Universal Studios released its classic monster pictures. These were the movies that fixed the form in Americans’ minds: even if you’ve never seen them, they have helped define what you think of as a scary movie. Try imagining a stereotypical vampire without stage actor Bela Lugosi’s viscous Transylvanian baritone, immortalized onscreen in Dracula (1931): “I never drink … wine.”

This was the first of the true Universal classics. From its opening scene, the engine of the plot is doubt. “That’s all superstition,” says the real estate agent R. M. Renfield when warned about fearsome creatures that “feed on the blood of the living.” Viewers who had read Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel knew already that Renfield would soon become Count Dracula’s twisted lackey, gibbering in a lunatic asylum about his hunger for the blood of insects. In the film, it is Renfield’s disbelief that makes him such easy prey: he has no room in his imagination for vampires, and so he never sees them coming.

In the next year, Universal released The Mummy, familiar to Millennials by way of the 1999 remake starring Brendan Fraser. The original movie opens on archaeologist Joseph Whemple, who uncovers an ancient curse beside the body of a long-dead priest. Though his friend Dr. Muller pleads with him to leave well enough alone, Whemple grumbles, “I can’t permit your beliefs to interfere with my work.” Whemple’s assistant, the bluff young Ralph Norton, is still more callowly dismissive: “Surely a few thousand years in the earth would take the mumbo-jumbo off any old curse.”

When it proves that time has not cancelled the power of the old gods, Norton descends into a cackling insanity as the mummy walks among us. Like Renfield, Norton is driven mad by powers he refused to acknowledge even as possibilities. The modern mind cracks open under the assault of the supernatural, its brittle walls burst and broken by things it refused to conceive. The crucial error is to exclude all possibilities but rational ones—when in reality, “most anything can happen to a man in his own mind,” as Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) says in The Wolf Man (1941).

Though Talbot does not believe in real werewolves, he has enough good sense to acknowledge that human philosophy can never encircle the heavens and the earth so entirely as to bring all things under the force of reason. “All astronomers are amateurs,” he tells his son (Lon Chaney), who will soon find himself twisted into the form of a wolf: “when it comes to the heavens, there’s only one professional.”

And there is the heart of the matter. For in point of fact we don’t believe in werewolves or vampires, or in ancient curses—at least not in quite the literal way that these movies depict them. The misgiving we express in horror movies isn’t that these sorts of monsters will materialize in the flesh. No, horror bears witness to a much subtler anxiety: the anxiety that man’s mind can never totally grasp, and so domesticate, the whole of creation. Again: “When it comes to the heavens, there’s only one professional.”

This is why the ancestor and originator of all modern nightmares is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the book that helped create horror and science fiction alike as dominant popular genres. Universal’s 1931 rendition of Frankenstein, famously starring Boris Karloff, deviates wildly from Shelley’s original. But the movie retains Shelley’s diagnosis of her tragic hero, the Faustian doctor who hunts with “gladness akin to rapture” to “learn the hidden laws of nature,” as Shelley writes.

This almost worshipful curiosity, innocent or perhaps even virtuous in itself, mutates under the influence of grief into a ravenous quest for power and immortality. Dredging up and recombining chunks of human flesh in his laboratory, stripping the physical world of every enchantment and taboo, Dr. Frankenstein arrives at last at a kind of magic that actually works: the magic of material science, which gives him power over life itself. “First to destroy life, then recreate it,” says Frankenstein’s old professor, Dr. Waldman, in the movie: “there you have his mad dream.”

To bring all things into rational and mechanical order, subduing the physical world through the power of understanding—that is Frankenstein’s project, and ours. Once all things are describable in mathematical terms, then all things are controllable in predictable ways, even and especially our own bodies and minds. This is the appeal of regarding the human person as “a chemistry lab made of meat” or a computer program to be “hacked,” as it has become fashionable to do. That which has no spirit also has no idiosyncrasies, and so can be made to work just like a machine.

But to strip the world of souls is to fill it with monsters. That is what Frankenstein discovers, and what we are beginning dimly to realize. By restricting his vision only to matter, by refusing to countenance the kinds of spiritual truths and natural pieties that would have held him back from robbing graves, Frankenstein blinds himself to every reality that cannot be brought under the power of his new science.

And there are such realities: the human form is not merely meat but the embodiment of a soul. The human mind is not simply a chemistry set but the seat of sorrow and joy, virtue and vice alike. Close your eyes to spiritual entities and they will not cease to exist: they will simply haunt the edge of your sight like specters. If you do not respect the human soul as a living thing, it will haunt you as a ghost.

Which explains why no horror movie can work without a skeptic, someone who refuses to believe in things that are not dreamt of in his philosophy. The skeptic is us: starting at a world that is more than matter, unable to see it for what it is. We are menaced by the supernatural precisely because we have refused to concede that it might exist.

So it is significant that our horror movies very often feature psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Take Halloween, the 1978 classic whose latest sequel, Halloween Ends, is in theaters this year. Mike Myers, the masked slasher who lurks in the shadows of that franchise, gives us chills because he is beyond the ministrations or even the understanding of contemporary psychoanalysis. “I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up,” explains Myers’s psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis. Eventually “I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.”

Here is a truly blood-curdling notion: there might be sorrows that clinical analysis cannot medicate or cut away, disorders that cannot be understood as neurochemical patterns and so brought under neurochemical control. That is the fear which drives Halloween, made flesh in the vacant eyes behind Mike Myers’s expressionless mask. He is a contorted reflection of everything we cannot acknowledge in ourselves—the parts of us that have no place on an MRI scan and cannot be tamed with the application of physical tools.

Or take Smile, another movie that has gripped audiences this Halloween. The psychiatrist Rose Cotter, who finds herself tormented by a grinning spirit of self-destruction, turns to her own therapist and demands a prescription for the drug Risperdal to cure her “fleeting moments of self-induced hallucinations.” But when her therapist turns out to be yet another manifestation of the same demonic force, Rose has nowhere left to turn. The demon is more than psychiatry can name or subdue—which means it is more than she can bear.

Neither science nor psychotherapy is without its uses. There are no werewolves, and no child of God is really irredeemable in the way that Mike Myers seems to be. But the point of our collective nightmares, the horror stories we tell ourselves this time of year, is not that some boogeyman might jump out from under our beds: it’s that some things exist which cannot be explained or drugged away with more and better physical science.

The mind itself cannot reduce everything to atoms, for the simple reason that the mind must be something more than atoms; material science itself relies on concepts and ideas that are more than material. The refusal to acknowledge this fact is what makes Frankenstein, and not his monster, the real cautionary tale. The mind of man can do great things, but it cannot bring the universe to heel. In that department, “there’s only one professional.”

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