Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

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

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

Do We Believe in Representation?

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

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

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

What does that mean, exactly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Bleak Is It, Really?

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

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

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

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

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

How to Make It Better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entrance into Notoriety

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

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

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

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

Unreviewable and Nearly Unreadable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pablo Picasso of the Philosophical World

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

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

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

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

Times of Radical Mediocrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Russian Threat

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

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

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

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

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

Auguste Comte

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

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

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

America and the World Wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cold War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The West and Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Beautiful Abundance We Share” 

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Elites 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the Dopey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mirror, Mirror

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

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

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

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