If protectionism causes such disaster, why does it remain so popular? In a recent piece for National Review, Joseph Palange insightfully argues that it is because protectionists appeal directly to the working class. The transition from an industrial to a digital economy has devastated working-class places like Detroit or West Virginia, and falling back on sound economic theory will not answer the protectionists’ emotional appeals. Palange concludes that “free traders need to frame their arguments differently” and openly address the valid concerns of people who feel like they have lost something due to globalization.

One model for making this different kind of case is Winston Churchill. Not only was he the West’s savior from totalitarianism, he was also an ardent proponent of free trade. But unlike many of the bloodless economists who command the debate over tariffs today, Churchill was more likely to frame his opposition to protectionism in the romantic terms of “Tory Democracy.” He understood that, more than promoting mere economic efficiency, trade was a way to preserve and even advance a traditional way of life. That position, along with his commonsensical approach to oratory, made Churchill a hero to working-class people—and helped him win them over to the cause of free enterprise.

Churchill’s defense of free trade is inseparable from his broader “Tory Democrat” politics. The term was first coined by his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, to define a movement inspired by Benjamin Disraeli’s popular conservatism in the Victorian era. Rather than seeing the social classes as entities locked in an irrepressible conflict, the Tory Democrat believes that they can achieve a certain harmony within the context of a free society. As Churchill put it in an essay published in his 1932 collection Thoughts and Adventures, Lord Randolph “saw no reason why the old glories of Church and State, of King and country, should not be reconciled with modern democracy; or why the masses of working people should not become the chief defenders of those ancient institutions by which their liberties and progress had been achieved.” Where the retrograde Toryism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often treated power as the exclusive privilege of the upper class, the new Tory Democracy articulated by the Churchills sought to unite the entire British people around a certain conception of freedom.

In a short book on Churchill’s political thought, The Will of the People, his official biographer, Martin Gilbert, stressed that Tory Democracy was bound up with a profound reverence for Parliament. In that body, the people’s representatives could truly deliberate about and come to a shared understanding of the common good. As Gilbert wrote, Churchill believed this meant “that no one class, no one interest—economic, social, or political—no one segment of the political spectrum could use the system for its own exclusive interest.” Protectionist policies, though, advanced by either radical or reactionary politicians, threatened that delicate balance by putting the interests of favored firms or industries above the nation as a whole.

Churchill’s Tory Democracy always, therefore, prioritized market competition, unlike many of the paternalists who labelled themselves “One-Nation” conservatives in both his day and our own. “Central to his essentially Tory Democrat ideas,” Andrew Roberts writes in his recent biography, “was the concept of free enterprise, from which he never resiled.” Churchill was always wary of central planning, not just because he thought it could hamper economic dynamism, but also because he considered the concentration of power in the hands of bureaucratic experts a great danger to the social harmony Tory Democracy sought to achieve.

The benefit of free enterprise to the working class was one of the great themes of Churchill’s entire political career. In his very first political speech as a young man in 1897, Churchill said that “the British workman has more to hope for from the rising tide of Tory Democracy than from the dried-up drainpipe of Radicalism.” While he embraced certain regulations to ameliorate the sometimes-sordid conditions facing the working class, he also said that he hoped “that the labourer will become (as it were) a shareholder in which he works.” He saw the market economy not as something working-class people had to be shielded against, but rather something they ought to be encouraged to participate in more fully.

By the time Churchill was elected to Parliament as a Conservative, though, his father’s vision for Tory Democracy had fallen out of favor. Arthur Balfour assumed power as prime minister in 1902 and began pursuing a protectionist agenda in the hope that it could strengthen the British Empire against the rising power of the United States and Germany. Churchill was horrified by this turn of events and warned that promulgating new tariffs on behalf of the elite class would destroy the Conservative Party’s working-class base of support built by men like Disraeli and Lord Randolph. In a May 28, 1903, speech in Parliament, the young statesman prophetically warned:

This move means a change, not only in historic English Parties, but in the conditions of our public life. The old Conservative Party, with its religious convictions and constitutional principles, will disappear, and a new Party will arise like perhaps the Republican Party of the United States—rich, materialist, and secular—whose opinions will turn on tariffs, and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries.

The fundamental difference between Tory Democracy and protectionism, according to Churchill, is the difference between a deep spiritual principle and a shallow materialism. Balfour and the members of his coalition thought that they could win elections by offering bounties to key constituencies through tariffs. Churchill, however, thought this economic sophistry was a betrayal of conservatism’s responsibility to represent the whole nation. Although it meant breaking with the Conservative Party itself, Churchill crossed the floor of Parliament to carry on the defense of free trade. Although he joined the Liberals, he poignantly took up the very seat on the opposition benches that had been his father’s.

In the wake of this momentous decision, Churchill achieved political success precisely by rallying working-class voters against tariffs. He was involved with the establishment of an organization called the Free Trade League in the great manufacturing city of Manchester. In a speech at the League’s founding meeting, Churchill said the coalition aimed at making “it worthwhile for both political parties to be true to Free Trade” and “distinctly not worthwhile … for any candidate … to go in for Protection.” From the opposition benches, he conducted a kind of insurgent populist campaign against Conservative protectionists—something from which today’s free traders could learn a great deal.

Churchill’s first move was to link free trade to the glory of the Empire. “The history of British shipping, under the combined influence of free imports here and hostile tariffs abroad, is one of the most marvelous and impressive stories in the commercial history of the world,” he said in the aforementioned Manchester speech. Far from impoverishing the working class or relegating anyone to the status of winners or losers, free trade fueled a widespread prosperity that benefited every Briton. Above all, it was this prosperity that would hold the Empire together, not coercive power or central planning.

Next, Churchill argued that high protective tariffs were a tax on workers and small firms for the perverse benefit of monopolistic cartels. “Here and there no doubt individuals will make great fortunes,” he went on to say, “But the small producer is very likely to lose and to be absorbed … in some great and greedy combine, and instead of being an independent producer standing on his own legs he will find himself a salaried servant of some great syndicate.” Churchill understood not only that small firms flourish through free trade, but also that they are the kind of businesses most people want to work for or even own. Rather than fall back on dry economic theory or the abstractions on which so many free traders rely, he instead chose to offer an aspirational vision of broad property ownership and an entrepreneurial spirit that had a far more expansive appeal because it answered the actual concerns of real voters.

Churchill made sure to couch all of these arguments in the most commonsensical terms possible. Take, for example, what is perhaps the most celebrated passage of the Manchester speech:

It is the theory of the Protectionist that imports are an evil. He thinks that if you shut out the foreign imported manufactured goods you will make these goods yourselves, in addition to the goods which you make now, including those goods which we make to exchange for the foreign goods that come in. If a man can believe that he can believe anything. We Free-traders say it is not true. To think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man thinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle.

Even with this favorable opinion of free trade, Churchill was not a natural Liberal. In a May 1924 conversation with Sir Robert Horne, he reportedly said, “I am what I have always been—a Tory Democrat. Force of circumstance has compelled me to serve with another Party, but my views have never changed, and I should be glad to give effect to them by rejoining the Conservatives.” When the influence of grandees like Balfour and his supporters eventually waned, Churchill returned home to his father’s party and worked relentlessly to reshape it according to free trade principles.

Nonetheless, Churchill himself did not always perfectly follow the wisdom of his Tory Democrat instincts. Although the reasons the Conservatives lost the 1945 election are somewhat complex, ranging from a lackadaisical campaign to a war-weary electorate, one that stands out is Churchill’s over-reliance on abstract economic theories to critique his opponents’ socialism. At the party’s expense, for instance, he printed copies of Friedrich von Hayek’s tract The Road to Serfdom and distributed them to voters. This was not the kind of popular rhetoric that would win over the masses, and the Labour Party wound up out-competing the Tories for working-class votes. In his book Churchill’s Trial, Larry Arnn calls the tone of the 1945 campaign an example “of Churchill’s magnificent stubbornness.” He railed against socialism because of his deep and abiding commitment to free government, and yet he failed to win over the broad base of support he needed in the moment.

But after this defeat, Churchill quickly changed tack. Andrew Roberts attributes Churchill’s changing fortunes in 1951, for instance, to the prioritization of “the Tory Democrat element of his political thinking over his short-lived libertarian beliefs.” He never abandoned free enterprise, but he did change the way he advocated for it according to the circumstances before him. As Arnn puts it, “Churchill thought that private property united rather than divided people, at least under the right circumstances,” including free trade, “a social safety net to help those in need,” and regulations for “the prevention of monopoly.” In other words, Churchill set out to demonstrate that free enterprise and constitutional government were not the source of the working class’s material concerns, but rather a solution to them. This argument, rooted as it was in the traditional commitments of Tory Democracy and the actual issues facing the electorate, won Churchill back the people that spurned him just a few short years before.

Today’s free traders, unfortunately, often sound more like Churchill did in 1945 than he did in 1951. They rarely use the kind of populist rhetoric he successfully deployed to defend their own positions, and are therefore often outflanked by the paternalistic advocates of protectionism. Instead of acting as the defenders of the nation’s prosperity that they truly are, free traders too often come across as rootless cosmopolitans concerned more about aggregate numbers than the health of a particular people. The economic sophisms dominating the thoughts of elite policymakers cannot simply be answered by better charts and graphs. As Churchill understood perhaps better than any other statesman, free traders must appeal to both voters’ heads and hearts.

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This mob-spirit inspired by the app has been on full display in recent weeks as large portions of America’s youth descended into hysterics over its uncertain future. Reactions from publicly melting down to allegedly planning literal acts of terrorism make clear that too many young people have an unhealthy dependence on TikTok. These are the sad outbursts of addicts, and even leaving aside serious national security concerns they vindicate Congress’s decision to move for greater restrictions.

But the freakout has not been limited to the youth. According to a recent Washington Post feature, some of America’s bestselling novelists are terrified that a blackout could spell doom for their careers. The Post reports that a segment of TikTok’s users, who call themselves “BookTok,” “has become a dominant commercial force in publishing.” They discover new books on the app, mostly romance, fantasy, and thrillers, and buy them in the millions. Some industry experts even believe that the viral bestsellers of “BookTok” have revitalized physical bookstores such as Barnes & Noble. But now authors and publishers are worried this growing group of readers will dissipate with the potential decline of their favorite app, leaving them without a market to sell their books.

We should, however, welcome the end of this pernicious force in American letters. While some may instinctively want to applaud anyone for opening a book when reading is in desperate decline, the kinds of work “BookTok” promotes are for the most part unworthy of any sort of celebration. Its collapse would be an opportunity to advance the cause of genuine literature. American letters deserve more than obscene fiction, bad prose, and videos that cannibalize viewers’ attention spans. The collapse of “BookTok” could be a moment to push for cultural renewal.

Like many social media platforms, TikTok is designed to capture users’ attention. The app’s primary revenue source is advertising, so it needs to keep users scrolling for as long as possible. And by all accounts it is very successful at that—in 2023, for instance, the average user spent 53 minutes scrolling on the app per day. The reason TikTok is so effective is that it takes advantage of our animal instincts. The serotonin hits of each bite-sized video and the dopamine rush that comes with the platform’s gamified social aspects capture users’ brains at the expense of their souls. Simply put, TikTok achieved such overwhelming popularity because extremely short-form videos are far easier to consume for a short-term reward than, say, slogging through Count Tolstoy’s War and Peace. As Nicholas Carr has famously claimed, “the Internet is making us stupid.”

Is it any surprise, then, that the kinds of books social media makes famous are altogether vulgar? According to one open “BookTok” advocate, the hashtags #smut, #smutbooks, and #spicybooktok had a combined audience of over 4.8 billion last year. While some laud these hypersexualized books for being somehow “feminist,” their actual content is shockingly indecent. For example, one of the most successful “BookTok” titles—Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us—has even been criticized by real feminists for glamorizing domestic abuse. Internet democracy has not uplifted these users’ literary tastes but rather utterly debased them.

Many devotees of “BookTok” are no doubt very earnest readers simply engaging in escapism or enjoying the thin trappings of community they have found online. They just love books, and they want to spend time with other people who share that love. Some may even be uncomfortable with the wilder and more libertine side of their coterie. But that kind of sentimentality does not change the fact that this deeply unhealthy literary subculture is built around cheap entertainment, or that it stifles genuine literary aspiration.

More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed precisely this danger democracy poses to literature. In the second volume of Democracy in America, he noted that aristocratic and democratic cultures produce very different works of art. Aristocracies are more concerned with the peaks of greatness than democracies, which “habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful.” As a result, artists—including writers—in democratic ages tend to lower their aims and “in place of the ideal they put the real.” Standards decline and the possibilities opened in cultural explosions such as the Renaissance seem closed off to democratic peoples.

Another problem Tocqueville saw in modern letters is the way they tend to become industrialized in democratic society. “Democratic literatures always swarm with these authors who perceive in letters only an industry,” he noted, “and for the few great writers that one sees there, one counts vendors of ideas by the thousands.” Authors abandon the pursuit of greatness for mere commercial success. This tendency is on full display with the “BookTok” titles. The sorts of novelists popular in that corner churn out soulless content to be consumed en masse rather than work to achieve genuine artistry.

Despite his awareness of these problems, Tocqueville wanted to build what Russell Kirk would later describe as “a democracy of elevation against a democracy of degradation.” He knew that universal equality had become a permanent fact in the West, and that reactionary dreams of returning to earlier aristocratic social forms were doomed to fail. But instead of surrendering to despair, he came to the young American republic to look for those tendencies in democracy that could be ennobled. As we examine the digital wreckage of our contemporary culture, Tocqueville’s hopeful observations can perhaps point us towards means of renewal at our hands.

One of the most elevating habits Tocqueville discovered among Americans was a healthy respect for classic literature. Greek and Latin flourished in American schoolhouses, as did the study of the ancients’ greatest literary achievements. But perhaps even more striking to Tocqueville was the triumph of British literature on American frontiers. “There is scarcely a pioneer’s cabin where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare,” he noted, going on to recall that he “read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log-house.” By treasuring British literature, he concluded that Americans “transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary usages that are current in the aristocratic nation they have taken for a model.” The chivalric sentiments of a Walter Scott or Jane Austen—both popular in the United States when Tocqueville visited—inspired citizens to become true gentlemen and resist democracy’s most illiberal spirits.

Classic literature can still help us defy the “democracy of degradation” today. The Great Books curricula that are experiencing a resurgence in higher education and the classical school movement growing at the K-12 level are both evidence of Americans’ need for a deeper rootedness. And it is no coincidence that many of these programs are moving to entirely ban smartphones from their classrooms. Teachers and parents understand that TikTok and other apps of its ilk are a distraction from the actual business of education and stunt students’ growth into full human beings. The ephemerality of a thirty-second video, or the kind of literary taste it cultivates, can never truly contend with the permanent worth of a timeless tradition.

But beyond simply importing aristocratic manners, Tocqueville also believed that something about democracy itself could call forth poetic beauty. “Poetry in my eyes is the search for a depiction of the ideal,” he wrote. While this kind of investigation of nature came easily to certain aristocratic writers, he also foresaw a way that democracy’s wider horizon could lead literature further up and further into that search:

People who lived in aristocratic ages made admirable depictions by taking certain incidents in the life of one people or one man for their subjects; but none of them ever dared to include the destiny of the human species in his picture, whereas the poets who write in democratic ages can undertake that. At the same time that each one, by raising his eyes above his country, finally begins to perceive humanity itself, God manifests Himself more and more to the human spirit in His full and entire majesty.

One of the finest poets of America’s democratic faith, William Faulkner, also believed literature could achieve this kind of greatness in our own time. In a speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Southern novelist said that that “the poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about” the permanent things in the human experience. By expressing “the old verities and truths of the heart” in new words, Faulkner believed that the “poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” In his stories about triumph and loss, suffering and sacrifice, love and honor, Faulkner found a way to express universal truths in a particularly American idiom.

“BookTok” is one symptom of American writers’ general abdication of their responsibility to follow in Faulkner’s footsteps. Instead of taking up the high charge of pioneering a literature for a democracy of elevation, they embrace the degradation of the social media marketplace. But in the long run, that decision is precisely what will make this cohort of authors irrelevant. If their writing cannot survive this kind of challenge, then it certainly does not deserve to do so.

The potential collapse of “BookTok” and the industry grown up around it presents an unlikely opportunity. The phenomenon was the culmination of a revolutionary process of untrammeled democratic leveling, and now the evidence before us is clear: this digital free-for-all has been a literary catastrophe. Rarely are societies given the chance to arrest revolutions like this, but in its small way the TikTok blackout is just that. Earnest readers and writers not only deserve better, but have a responsibility to seek out the best books they can find. One hopes that TikTok’s demise could inspire them to do just that.

The good news for American letters is that there is a world elsewhere. Plenty of poets and novelists are still willing to resist the tendency of our times in search of a literature of real substance. A number of magazines and online journals still achieve what T. S. Eliot once called “the essential functions of a literary review.” These writers and critics understand full well that they have inherited a great tradition they have a duty to foster and defend. The faith that inspires them—their hope for a humane culture—is a kind of leadership of its own, pointing the way out of our digital democracy of degradation. It is only up to us, the reading public, to support them and join in their search for something much more elevated.

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Recently in these pages, Professor David Schaefer repeated this argument while critiquing a new book, Neil S. Siegel’s The Collective-Action Constitution. He concluded his critique with a biting aside: “We should indeed feel grateful that [the Constitution] was designed not by devotees of game theory, but by men whose experience and education had equipped them with a realistic understanding of human nature.” I politely protest. We game theorists have long been proud to claim James Madison as one of our own. 

In reply, I would make a plea to non-mathematical humanists: give game theorists a chance. We are not your enemies. Many of us are, in fact, your allies, if only you will have us. 

Humanists, including it seems Professor Schaefer, often believe that mathematics is about numbers. Human nature and human societies defy quantification, and so, they conclude, mathematical tools must be inappropriate for their description. This conclusion is false. Statistics, of course, measure the world with numbers—but other branches of mathematics, including game theory, are much more about logical relationships. Often, the only numbers we use are 0, 1, and, on a bad day, 2. We don’t need much more. A case in point: in A Beautiful Mind, after fruitlessly working numbers on chalkboards and trying to quantify pigeon perambulations, John Nash finally invents the Nash Equilibrium while staring, not at equations, but at a beautiful blonde. Are we game theorists really so different from the rest of you?

Ironically, when arguing against game theorists, humanists often deploy arguments long ago perfected by—you guessed it—game theorists. That’s precisely why conservatives and classical liberals need us. 

Many of game theory’s most famous results are impossibility results: not idealistic descriptions of how to achieve desired outcomes (as in the book Schaefer reviews), but blunt truths about what humans cannot achieve. Impossibility theorems ought to be the foundation of conservative and classical liberal philosophy. From Burke to Babbitt to Buckley, most conservatives have spent their time athwart history yelling stop. Our entire mission, for 250 years, has been to tell the utopian dreamers that their crazy ideas will not work, that we would all be far better off reforming at the margins than inventing a new humanity. 

Arrow’s Theorem and its heirs are the most famous of these impossibility results. In his introductory of Political Games, Macartan Humphreys summarizes these results bluntly: “There is no general will.” Political philosophers have quibbled, quarreled, and ignored these results for seven decades, but their logic is inescapable: there is no such thing as a general will. It is not logically possible to reliably aggregate people’s desires into a single, collective “will.” And that means there is no such thing as an objective, rational, “collective” weighing of costs against benefits when people disagree, and so it is a simple absurdity to call ours a “collective-action” constitution, especially when discussing “goods” (like abortion rights) which we certainly do not hold in common. 

Professor Schaefer wants to make this critique, but he struggles to do so. The book suffers from “very strained reasoning,” he claims, but to justify this claim he resorts to a string of rhetorical questions, e.g. “What could it mean to ‘assign values’ to the costs and benefits of [for instance] different abortion ‘regimes’?” Had he come armed with a little game theory, he could have swatted down the idea of a collective-action constitution for what it is: a merely cosmetic exercise to disguise a tired, sagging progressive agenda with mathematical mascara.

Above, I wrote that game theorists have long claimed Madison as a kind of patron saint. William Riker, who brought game theory firmly into political science, seems to have begun this reverence. In his celebrated Liberalism Against Populism, Riker exalts James Madison as “the original American spokesman for liberal democracy,” and he contrasts Madison’s restrained vision of republican democracy (constructing a government to limit tyranny) with more expansive, Rousseauistic visions (“computing” and implementing a “general will”). As his title might suggest, Riker’s project, which he executed decisively, was to prove that the latter view of democracy was logically untenable, and that game theory should force us to embrace, instead, the classical liberal view. 

Game theory has shown, I think quite conclusively, that the purpose of government cannot be to find and execute a general will, because a general will cannot exist. Rather, we must judge governments by the liberties they tend to secure. If this sounds familiar, it should—it is essentially Federalist #51. Our glorious Constitution was crafted by proto-game theorists, men whose experience and education had equipped them to structure coalitional dynamics to frustrate factional ambitions and protect the liberties of all. 

Nor are game theorists mere creatures of politics. Michael Chwe, for instance, has applied our methods to understand great literature in his Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Here at Law & Liberty, others have been known to take a similar approach. As these writers demonstrate, game theory can help us understand the very things that make us human. Ultimately, we game theorists are often humanistic lovers of liberty, people striving for humility and irony and a deeper understanding of the world. When we consider politics, we take James Madison as our north star. I trust that political theorists would not wish to be judged by the latest Rawlsian rehash. Please do us the same courtesy, and don’t judge us by warmed-over progressivism thinly veiled with a few cant phrases about “collective action.” In short, dear lovers of liberty, the problem is not all game theory, but bad game theory.

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A serious study of the American Revolution would do much to restore the national faith, but so too could rewatching an important film from the recent past: National Treasure. Premiering twenty years ago this week, the movie may seem on the surface like a somewhat silly adventure flick. The plot is absurd and the acting is cheesy. But digging a little deeper, a careful viewer will find it contains important lessons about what it means to be a patriot in an age of doubt. 

Without question, National Treasure ranks with the Indiana Jones series as one of the great treasure hunt movies of all time. It opens with a young Benjamin Franklin Gates (played as an adult by Nicholas Cage) learning from his grandfather (played by Christopher Plummer) about the “Templar Treasure,” a hoard of gold and artifacts accumulated from the greatest civilizations of the West. Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome all contributed something to this trove, which eventually makes its way to colonial America and comes under the protection of the Founding Fathers. 

This is an admittedly ridiculous premise. In real life, there was no Masonic conspiracy to hide a literal treasure from tyrannical Redcoats. But from this opening scene, the philosophic connection between the United States and the broader Western tradition ought to be clear. America was not founded on some rejection of our civilizational forebears, but rather as the culmination of that inheritance. The real treasure the Founders sought to protect was a certain view of the dignified human person, born free and equal and deserving protection from arbitrary power—what Edmund Burke called “the spirit of an exalted freedom.”

Nonetheless, the ridiculousness of the film is actually part of its appeal. Only Nicholas Cage could have played Ben Gates. His performance teeters between a suave history professor and a half-crazed conspiracy theorist—but it works. Cage is entirely believable as a man driven by his absolute confidence in what he believes, even when the respectable historical community mocks him and dismisses the serious work he’s done hunting for the Templar Treasure. The movie’s exciting action scenes add to the sense of both adventure and curiosity, set as they are from an aircraft carrier to catacombs under New York City to the National Archives in Washington, DC. It is not exactly globe-trotting, but the film does give an enjoyable tour of some of America’s most important historical landmarks.

After being initiated into the mystery of the treasure, Gates devotes his life to searching for it and protecting it from those who are unworthy of its riches. He comes to learn that the Founders left behind clues to the treasure’s location—including a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence itself. While Gates is a trained historian who respects the past, he has to race against another team of treasure hunters who only care about wealth and will destroy any history that stands in the way of their greed. 

The Declaration’s hidden map, revealed fully at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, is a symbol of an important truth. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss argued that the greatest thinkers of history buried their meaning between the lines of their books because they “were very far from being exponents of society or of parties.” Instead, he says, “They defended the interests of philosophy and of nothing else.” The fact that the greatest treasure of the West is concealed within this key political document points to what is in fact the fundamental object of Gates’s pursuit: enlightenment.

In many respects, Gates’s quest for the treasure constitutes a kind of faith. In the film’s best scene, his love interest, Dr. Abigail Chase (played by Diane Kruger), asks him why he is so certain that the treasure is real even though he is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for believing it is. He replies, “No, but I hope it’s real. I’ve dreamt it’s real since my grandfather told me about it.” Gates goes on to explain that he wants to find the treasure because he needs “to know that it isn’t just something in my head or in my heart.” 

Over the course of the film, Gates’s attitude embodies what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called the “knight of faith.” In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard paints a picture of a knight who is desperately in love with a woman even though circumstances mean they can never be together. One option, what Kierkegaard calls the “ethical,” is to infinitely resign oneself to those circumstances. But the “knight of faith” approaches the situation differently—he says, “I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible.” This is the famous Kierkegaardian “leap of faith,” what he considers to be the highest way of life. 

Gates’s relentless pursuit of the treasure is precisely this kind of leap. During that opening conversation, the young Gates even asks, “Grandpa, are we knights?” and kneels to take a chivalric oath to defend the treasure and his family’s honor. He takes that vow seriously as an adult. In a callback to an earlier scene in the movie, Chase goes on to remark, “People don’t really talk that way, you know?” Gates replies, “I know, but they think that way.” He believes so strongly in the treasure, and in the ideals of the Founding it represents, that he is willing to risk everything—his “life, fortune, and sacred honor”—to find it. 

At one point in the film, Gates and his team follow all the clues to an empty room. It seems that its guardians had moved the treasure away years before. But just before he slips into despair, his father (played by Jon Voight) points out that the mere existence of the room is a sign that Gates’s faith is true. “We’re in the company of some of the most brilliant minds in history because you found what they left behind for us to find,” he says, “and understood the meaning of it.” Then and there, at what could have been their darkest moment, the team resolves to carry on the search. 

This really is the task set before all patriots. Yes, the country’s history is full of dark moments and reasons to doubt the ideals symbolized by the Declaration. In so many ways the United States fails to live up to the American dream and the Western heritage. But patriotism necessitates a kind of faith-seeking understanding, a hunt for the deepest principles and truest meaning of the republic. Gates can be a model for the way that we ourselves engage with American history.

Of course, shortly after this moment of crisis, our intrepid treasure hunters find the object of their quest behind yet another puzzle. Instead of keeping the treasure for themselves, though, they decide it is too great for any one man to possess. Like the Founders believed about government, they choose instead to divide it up and “give it to the people.” In other words, the quest led our heroes to a deeper understanding of the Founding’s principles. 

While National Treasure may not be the most chic or stylish film ever made, it is a fun adventure with a real depth. It is a movie about what it means to love our country, even when that love is a hard thing to do. Studios may not make movies like that anymore. But ultimately, National Treasure still gives audiences an image of an American faith we must renew.

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at an event hosted by Hudson Institute Political Studies, of which the author is a 2017 alumnus.

The post “People Don’t Talk That Way Anymore” appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Despite what Lind thinks, the American Founding is not a dead letter. Our Constitution is rooted in eternal principles that point the way towards true social renewal. The ideas that animated the Founding are still full of vital energy, and the actual deeds of the Founders can serve as models for political action.

Lind has been part of the “national conservatism” vanguard for some time now. In fact, he gave a speech on industrial policy titled “What Would Alexander Hamilton Do?” at the last National Conservatism conference. Lind has either become persuaded that he was in error for asking such a question, or is now a hypocrite. This more recent essay reveals there is nothing nationalist, let alone conservative, about his ideology. Instead, he panders to the deeply unpatriotic liberal establishment’s low opinion of the American Founding.

Conservatism should be a defense of the permanent things, but Lind seems to suggest there are no enduring political truths. Nationalism should aim at preserving the nation as it really is, but Lind seems to sneer at its history. Though he blusters about the limits of “the powerful technocratic progressive strain on the American center left,” there is little in his ideology that resists the tug of tinkering and central planning. Surely conservatives can find a better approach to politics in the Founding.

The Founding and the Idea of the Common Good

There are major flaws in Lind’s account of the American Founding. At National Review, Jay Cost, Jack Butler, and Dan McLaughlin have done able work poking holes in his narrative. Beyond these clear historical problems, there are also deep issues with Lind’s treatment of the Founding’s political theory.

Lind is undoubtedly correct that some libertarians have overemphasized certain aspects of the American Founding. As he and his allies in the national-conservative camp eagerly point out, many on the right have for decades prioritized individual liberty over a vision for the common good. By denigrating the Founding, however, Lind is seriously neglecting the actual common good the nation was constituted to secure.

What exactly was the Founders’ vision for the common good? In his 1776 Thoughts on Government, John Adams wrote that “The foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people.” Nations are not mere material entities; they are spiritual bodies. “The noblest principles and most generous affections in our nature then,” Adams continued, “have the fairest chance to support the noblest and most generous models of government.” To that end, the Founders sought to root Americans’ sense of the common good in exalted conceptions of liberty and virtue.

The American Revolution was fought in defense of the people’s rights. The Founders knew that absolute power and arbitrary government substitute private will or the desires of a faction for what is truly necessary for the flourishing of all citizens. Therefore, the Founders put strict limits on the powers government can exercise, and separated those powers both vertically between the states and the federal Union, and horizontally between the three branches of the federal government.

At the same time, though, the Founders believed that virtue was necessary for a healthy republic. “If there is a form of government then, whose principle and foundation is virtue,” Adams wrote in his Thoughts on Government, “will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?” Citizenship requires the people to rise above private or factional interests. To stay free, the Founders believed, a people must act virtuously.

Still, the Founders were no utopians. They understood that a primary role of government is to step in when virtue does not prevail. The Founding was not some anarchist rejection of all authority or power. In Federalist 70, for instance, Publius maintains that “energy” is “a leading character in the definition of good government.” The Framers of the Constitution gave the federal government more power than it had under the Articles of Confederation precisely because they wanted it to energetically secure the common good.

The wisdom of the Constitution is a balance between energy and limits, individual rights and the common good, freedom and virtue. The most pressing questions facing our country—from national security or economic policy to the drug crisis or other social issues—need answers with just such a balance. In this way, the Founders established standards of political judgment to which the American people can repair.

Remembering the Deeds of the Founders

Whatever we may conclude about the political theory of the American Founding, it is important to remember the men who articulated it were something more than ideologues. They were statesmen. In The Federalist, Publius denounces “theoretic politicians” more dedicated to ideology than the actual practice of politics. The Founders did not just leave us musty documents and statements of theory—they left us deeds to revere.

Lind, however, refuses to interpret the Constitution on these terms. At times, his essay sounds as though it could have come from the pen of Charles Beard, the progressive historian who argued that the Constitution’s ratification was a kind of conspiracy by economic elites to protect their power and privilege. Lind attempts to draw a sharp contrast between the men who declared independence and the men who framed the Constitution. He claims that populists “tend to identify with the grassroots anti-British rebels of the War of Independence,” and “not with the bewigged gentlemen in stockings and buckled shoes who wrote the federal Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787.”

But what does Lind think populists should make of George Washington? He was a leader among both the “grassroots anti-British rebels” and the “gentlemen… who wrote the federal Constitution.” Washington unified the populist energy of the minutemen and the political theory of the colonial elite to forge a nation strong enough to defy the total might of the British Empire. Surely Americans today can learn some lessons from Washington’s greatness.

Washington’s true significance lies in his political action. His statesmanship should serve as a model of prudence. In war and peace alike, Washington’s deeds can teach Americans how to harness the energy of the nation. His humble retirement from both the Continental Army and the presidency can teach us also about the limits of power.

In times of heated political division, Lind’s rejection of the example of Washington and the other Founders would handicap our ability to pursue the common good. The American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution can both demonstrate how political rivals can come together in times of emergency to rationally deliberate about the common good. Our leaders need more of the Founders’ prudence, not less.

Washington is a symbol of the American Founding. We put his face on our money, erected a monument to him in our nation’s capital, and lovingly preserve his home because he embodied the dearest principles and highest aspirations of our republic. Dismissing this as mere “ancestor-worship” as Lind does is to dismiss the nation itself.

Postliberalism’s Leftward Drift

For some time now, the so-called “postliberal” writers associated with Compact have been drifting leftward. Over the last year, Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and editor of Compact, has become an advocate of the New Deal and “social democracy.” Certainly when it comes to economic policy and national security issues, there is little to distinguish Compact’s writers or the broader, so-called “New Right” from liberals in the Democratic party.

Much like the liberals they supposedly despise, Lind and his comrades have adopted a low materialism in politics. Rather than spiritual goods such as liberty, honor, or virtue, they would have Americans pursue “nice things” like a higher minimum wage or more socialized medicine. Lind does not disagree that technocratic solutions to these material problems are necessary, he only believes the proper ones are slightly different than those currently advocated by the ruling elite.

Material welfare is certainly an aspect of the common good, but a key conservative insight is that man is more than matter. “Civilization can only be creative and life-giving in the proportion that it is spiritualized,” Russell Kirk once wrote. “Otherwise the increase of power inevitably increases its power for evil and its destructiveness.” Our idea of the common good must be inspired—like the Founders’—by a fuller account of human nature.

At the end of his essay, Lind suggests that some of the Founders may have “relevant views” which should only be defended or applied to present circumstances in a limited way. He expresses concern that treating the Founding as a “sacral authority,” though, would chain us to dead history. Lind is right that the future is in our own hands. But he is wrong about the past.

As we reckon with serious challenges, the words and deeds of the Founders should serve as an inspiration and a guide. They offer us a far grander vision than the naked materialism of liberals and postliberals alike. Even lying in their graves, the American Founders are still more relevant than Michael Lind.

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Most people surely can see through the Butcher of Bucha’s propaganda. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been characterized by war crimes, atrocities, and acts of genocide—it is absurd to hear him speak of “ethical waypoints and moral principles.” There is nothing remotely Christian about the way Putin has targeted civilians. Unfortunately, though, some conservatives in the West seem to be at least somewhat receptive to Russia’s “traditionalist” messaging. Few on the right have fully embraced Putin, but too many have expressed a certain twisted admiration for how he “owns the libs.”

Some may feel sympathy for Putin out of partisan reflex. Even if President Biden has dragged his feet on delivering vital aid, he has made support for the Ukrainian cause a major rhetorical priority. His Democratic party is increasingly politicizing the issue, too, in a cynical attempt to alienate moderate voters from Republicans. In our polarized moment, supporting Ukraine should be a bipartisan cause. But mere partisanship cannot fully explain the respect certain figures in right-wing media show a tyrant like Putin.

Many on the far-right see Putin’s Russia as a bulwark against Western degeneracy. They rightly see aggressive social liberalism and the “woke” movement as threats to American culture. But by hailing Putin as a leader against Western leftism, these reactionaries are betraying the very principles that make America great. 

This is not the first time in history that Western rightists have looked to Russian autocracy in search of weapons to use against liberalism. In nineteenth-century France, Alexis de Tocqueville understood that the conflict between Russian principles and American principles would define the next stage of mankind’s political development. Inspired by Tocqueville’s analysis, another writer, named Astolphe de Custine, traveled to Tsarist Russia in the hopes of understanding the alternative to liberalism.

What Custine saw in Russia terrified him. Far from autocracy securing the possibility for human flourishing against anarchic liberalism, Custine came to understand it as another kind of lawlessness. Even as he maintained his skepticism about Jacobin radicalism, Custine came to understand Russia offered no legitimate alternatives to constitutional government. Perhaps Custine’s journeys in the empire of the Tsars can help twenty-first-century conservatives understand why defeating Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is essential to the future of freedom.

Tocqueville’s Prophecy about America and Russia

Alexis de Tocqueville concludes the first volume of Democracy in America by drawing a contrast between the American and Russian peoples. He was struck by how, in the early nineteenth century, both countries took a leading role in world affairs. Other countries seemed to have arrived at their natural limits, but Russia and America were both expanding their frontiers.

Tocqueville saw great forces at play behind the course of human events. In his mind, the United States and Russia represented alternative arguments for the best way of life. The choice before mankind boils down to a decision between these two arguments. Even more important than any armed conflict between the two regimes were the philosophic principles each embodied. 

In Russia, the argument for authority prevails. The collective is valued more highly than the individual; central power directs the lives of those under the regime; and dissent is stamped out. In other words, the organizing principle behind the Russian regime is the sanctity of authority.

In America, the argument for freedom prevails—the individual’s rights come before the collective; power is dispersed as widely as possible; and dissent is commonplace and even encouraged. In other words, the organizing principle behind the American regime is the sanctity of freedom.

Tocqueville says that Russians tend to concentrate “all the power of society in one man,” whereas Americans decentralize power among the people. “The one has freedom for his principle means of action,” Tocqueville writes, and “the other servitude.” He concludes this arresting passage with a paragraph many have interpreted as a prophecy of the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union: “Their point of departure is different, their ways are diverse; nonetheless, each of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold the destinies of half the world in its hands one day.”

It is clear to anyone who reads Democracy in America that Tocqueville favored the argument for freedom. Though he was honest about America’s manifold flaws, he nonetheless believed that equality under the law, political liberty, and other principles of the American Founding were the best hope for good government and human flourishing. 

Custine’s Search for Authority

Not everyone agreed with Tocqueville on this point, however. One of his readers—Custine—worried that democratic revolutions were squandering the Western tradition and throwing society into disorder. Upon reading the first volume of Democracy in America, Custine was inspired. If Tocqueville could travel to America to understand the argument for freedom, he thought, then he could travel to Russia to understand the argument for authority. His reflections on the journey were published in 1843 as Letters from Russia.

It is easy to understand why Custine sought out the Russians’ argument for authority. He was born in 1790, the son of a marquis who nonetheless supported the French Revolution. Sadly, that sympathy was not enough to save the elder Custine from the guillotine’s blade. In Letters from Russia, Custine says that as a young boy, “the servants scarcely spoke to me of anything but the misfortunes of my parents; and never shall I forget the consequent impression of terror which I experienced in my earliest intercourse with the world.”

Throughout the book, Custine consistently holds that the French Revolution was simply a brutal murder spree, perpetrated by vicious ideologues, and defended by ugly sophisms. Jacobinism’s radical democratic creed is, in Custine’s mind, deeply anti-human. In this regard, Custine’s critique of democracy is not unlike contemporary conservative critiques of liberalism. Revolution turns the whole nation into a victim, sacrificed on the altar of impious abstractions and profane falsehoods.

Custine left France primed to accept the arguments for authority he thought he would find in Russia. His personal experience and political beliefs biased him in favor of the strength of the Tsars, and the supposed orderliness of their empire. But his experience of Russia itself changed everything for Custine.

The Tyranny Custine Saw in Russia

“I went to Russia to seek arguments against representative governments,” Custine wrote. “I return a partisan of constitutions.” The actual operation of Russian autocracy horrified him. Custine saw in its brutality and leveling tyranny an echo of everything he hated about the Jacobin Terror.

Throughout the book, Custine recounts anecdote after anecdote about autocrats abusing their power. It makes for depressing reading. The horrors in his stories about Russian serfdom resemble the horrors of American slavery. The willingness of the state to use the sword against the people shocked Custine. He deplored the way Russia’s cities resembled military barracks.

Custine came to Russia hoping to find that the autocracy encouraged the people to pursue virtue—but he found that living under tyranny made many of the people into little tyrants themselves. He came to see that “the excesses of despotism” produce only “moral anarchy.” 

Custine especially lamented the way that Russian autocracy encouraged “a population of deputies and sub-officials” in the bureaucracy to develop an “air of importance and a rigorous precision which seems to say, though everything is done with much silence, ‘Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state.’” Arrogance and lies permeated tsarist Russia, and Custine hated what he witnessed.

Above all, though, Custine’s spirit rebelled against the religious oppression which pervaded Russia. “The Russian policy has melted the church into the state, and confounded heaven and earth,” Custine said. “A man who sees a god in his master, scarcely hopes for paradise, except through the favor of the emperor.” The Jacobins and the Tsars both presented themselves as representatives of some divine principle. This sense of self-righteousness, Custine says, is exactly what makes for the worst kind of tyranny.

Custine came to believe that Russian autocracy was a great anti-social conspiracy to maintain the vast inequalities between those with power and those without it. He said that “there is at this day, in Russia, more real inequality in the conditions of men than in any other European land.” 

None of this is to say, though, that Custine was utterly disgusted by every element of Russian society. In his travels, he found much beauty to admire. In one letter, he describes the glories of acapella singing in an Orthodox marriage service: “I could fancy I heard the heart-beating of sixty millions of subjects—a living orchestra, following, without drowning, the triumphal hymn of the priests. I was deeply moved: music can make us forget for one moment even despotism itself.”

Ultimately, Custine thought that the task of the West was to find the proper balance between the argument for authority and the argument for freedom:

Though a democrat in Russia, I am not the less in France an obstinate aristocrat: it is because a peasant in the environs of Paris is freer than a Russian lord, that I thus feel and write. We must travel before we can learn the extent to which the human mind is influenced by optical effects. This experience confirms the observation of Madame de Staël, who said, that in France, “One is always the Jacobin or the ultra of someone else.”

In the conclusion of Letters from Russia, Custine adds that this aristocracy must be rooted in restraint and the pursuit of virtue: 

I hate pretexts: I have seen that in Russia, order serves as a pretext for oppression, as, in France, liberty does for envy. In a word, I love real liberty—all liberty that is possible in a society from whence elegance is not excluded. I am therefore neither demagogue nor despot; I am an aristocrat in the broadest conception of the word. … Barbarism takes more than one form: crush it in despotism and it springs to life again in anarchy; but true liberty, guarded by a true aristocracy, is neither violent nor inordinate. 

Custine understood that societies should not liberate citizens from every duty or obligation. But his travels in Russia taught him, like Tocqueville’s travels in America, that human beings should be free to pursue the destinies God has in store for them. The proper object of conservatism is what Edmund Burke once called “an exalted freedom.” Order may be the first need of all, but it is not the sole or final need. Arbitrary government is inherently disordered. There is no reason for the West to imitate the disorders of Russian autocracy.

The Argument for Freedom and the War in Ukraine

Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine have proven that tyranny still characterizes the Russian regime despite the years that have passed since Custine traveled to Saint Petersburg. Tsars may have given way to communist ideologues, and the Soviet Union may in turn have lost its grip on Eastern Europe—but always the argument for authority prevails in Russia. In Russia, central power has regularly crushed individual liberty.

Putin understands that Ukraine’s decision to stand free, maintain its independence, and defy Russian tyranny is a threat to the argument for authority. In a paranoid essay published just seven months before he launched his invasion, Putin claimed that Ukraine is being turned into an “anti-Russia,” and even that Ukrainian independence “is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction.” The idea of a functional Slavic democracy on Russia’s Western border is unacceptable to Putin precisely because it would discredit the argument that authority is the primary requirement for human flourishing. 

If a free Ukraine can survive this onslaught and thrive in its aftermath, the entire ideological edifice of Putin’s despotism would be thrown into question. More and more Russian citizens may ask their regime to respect the basic freedoms they are owed as human beings. They may demand Putin open the political system, purge corruption, and give the people power they have been denied for centuries. 

“The spectacle of a people’s struggling energetically to win its independence is one that every century has been able to furnish,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. In our century, Ukraine is providing a fresh example of such a struggle. Ukrainians are making the argument for freedom—and Americans should be proud to make it with them.

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