Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

In Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor John Wilsey calls for harmony between religion and (political) liberty in America. “Harmony” implies the possibility of dissonance, a clashing relationship he assigns to religious postliberalism. If we are to infer a connection in Wilsey’s subtitle, however, what then is the relationship of religious liberty to conservatism? Since freedom for freedom’s sake is not the aim of conservatism, what is being conserved, and to what end? If, as Wilsey asserts, “Protestantism was essential to the ideas of the Founding” then must Protestantism in America be conserved? What else must be conserved?

Wilsey’s introduction has its own religious quality. It is a stirring jeremiad about “Americanness” illustrated by intentional and optimistic purpose in the character of Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, and Clare Boothe Luce, for example. Wilsey defends what he calls “evolutionary, dispositional, humanistic, and aspirational conservatism” against identity politics, right or left, and hyperindividualism. Wilsey summons us to save young people filled with anxiety and despair by revitalizing American values and inoculating them against the pessimism of postliberalism. We can, he says, use conservatism to preserve classical liberalism.

Wilsey then moves to his main argument with a short and sometimes playful introduction of conservatism. His argument centers on his experience beginning in the 1960s, when conservatism was a respectable intellectual and political movement. For Wilsey, conservatism is Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan. For his students, it is “conspiracy theories, defeatism, MAGA, the MyPillow guy, covfefe, Jerry Fallwell Jr., or kitschy Christian nationalism[,] … trivial, doleful, desperate, weak, and lacking intellectual rigor, imaginative clarity, or depth of character.” Conservativism should be “inspiring, animating, and life-giving.” What is needed, he argues, is a new conservative ethos inspiring us to “reach far beyond our own temporal existence.” This new conservatism is what he calls “aspirational conservatism,” a pre-political temperament, attitude, and way of life. It aims at a higher moral destiny guided by permanent things, tradition, and just order while reckoning with a sinful human condition. The first exemplar of Wilsey’s aspirational postwar conservatism is Russell Kirk.

While Kirk is likely familiar to most readers, Wilsey’s second exemplar is probably not: Peter Viereck, a poet and historian who taught at Mt. Holyoke College. Wilsey laments that Viereck “has largely been forgotten by many conservative scholars.” Viereck abandoned them first, however. He identified as a conservative in the 1950s but soon disassociated from the movement.

Unfortunately, Wilsey’s summary of Viereck’s dissatisfaction with other conservatives—Kirk, Frank Meyer, or William F. Buckley, for example—is too simple. For example, to say that Viereck’s “negative review” of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale “won him exactly zero points with Buckley” or that Meyer valued “dogmatic purity,” provides no real insight. Given that Wilsey’s project includes criticizing contemporary conservatism, what can we learn from Viereck’s critique of his own contemporaries?

Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence.

Though Wilsey doesn’t mention it, Viereck accused his contemporaries of playing favorites. One of those favorites, Viereck lamented, was Manchester liberalism (i.e., free trade), so one wonders if he would approve of Wilsey’s defense of classical liberalism or a marketplace of religions. Viereck is certainly a safer fit for Wilsey insofar as Viereck opposed nationalism, but Wilsey does not marshal Viereck’s arguments against it so much as his opposition to “Ottantotts,” which Viereck characterized as reactionary utopians relying on obscurantist nostalgia. Ottantottism, Wilsey believes, now characterizes much of contemporary conservative thought and action.

Wilsey’s third exemplar isn’t a person but what he calls the “Black conservative tradition,” exemplified by Thomas Sowell, Robert Woodson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Star Parker, for example. Though white and black conservatism “grew from different fields and soils,” Wilsey argues, “and should be considered distinct one from another,” there remains essential agreement and compatibility between them. What distinguishes black conservatism is that it was born resisting the unjust political status of blacks and therefore had to focus on reclaiming lost freedoms and directing individual achievement away from government redress. Central to this effort, Wilsey says, is the black church encouraging educational and economic community and opportunity. This discussion of black conservatism is worthy, albeit missing a nod to Shelby and Eli Steele. One wonders, however, whether in the spirit of religious liberty, Wilsey considers the Nation of Islam equally capable as the black church to empower.

Successive chapters on aspirational conservatism’s use of imagination, nationality, ordered liberty, history, and religious liberty are a combination of polemic, admonishment, encouragement, and biography. Wilsey argues that conservatism has traded both the “interior life” and pure religion for power politics. To counter this, Wilsey calls the reader to solutions including Great Books, stories of great Americans, and knowledge of transcendence. He argues that imagination and history are necessary not only for a correct conscience but also for both nationality and ordered liberty.

Imagination and history join to create nationality, which he says must be “re-created” every generation through ritual, symbolic practices, and civil religion rather than relying on presumed “facts” of nationality—the worst case being appeals to blood and soil. The latter refers to the worst impulses of postliberals. Fine enough, but what to do with (for example) Kirk’s argument that without British culture (including laws, faith, and institutions) America would have no culture at all? Kirk didn’t consider that culture a re-creation but a patrimony. It would be silly to assert, as some postliberals might, that only British people (whatever that means) may preserve British culture. But neither can it be re-created at will. Two centuries of British colonial rule in India barely eked out an establishment of British cultural institutions there. The Anglo-Afghan wars and our own War on Terror did nothing to create nationality. Culture includes abstractions and organic particulars. It can’t be bred into perpetuity, as postliberals would have it, but neither is it simply re-created. Both solutions are too simple.

Wilsey’s discussion of religion is likewise too simple. For example, he argues that one need not be a Christian to be an aspirational conservative—but it helps. Imagination is, as Wilsey defines it, not the creation of fictions but the perception of truth. God, he argues, is the compass for such a pursuit. But his argument suggests that this is so because God enables a transcendent consciousness not unlike being out in nature. So long as we acknowledge transcendent truth, then, do we even need existing religious traditions? After all, Wilsey says, “None of us can escape the consciousness of God—even atheists.” Why not then passively possess it as an atheist might, so long as one acknowledges a world beyond our senses?

Wilsey certainly encourages religion as a route to the natural (and moral) law. He also prefers that religion not be distracted by politics. These are not easily disentangled, however. In America, which Wilsey says had its identity and purpose shaped by Protestantism, was the deeply religious character of the struggle for American independence, abolition, or the civil rights and pro-life movements, then the co-opting of purer religion? Or were they a reflection of religion’s moral law, rightly working itself out in politics? As popular movements, did they appeal to consciences formed by a specific religious tradition? Or by walks in the woods? Was the reference to God in these appeals simply a foundation for transcendent truth, or did the mention of God summon hearers to personal moral accountability to a Divine Person who will judge them for moral lapses?

Wilsey also argues that religious liberty promotes religiosity through competition, but did the longstanding Christian America that Wilsey compliments as helpful for national identity and purpose exist because it simply beat out all competitors on its merits? Or is it more correct to say that it encultured millions of Americans because it enjoyed a monopoly on public institutions that were anything but secular, neutral, or remotely “competitive” until relatively recently? To argue that (Protestant) Christianity succeeded in America for centuries thanks to a truly free marketplace of religious ideas is akin to claiming that Americans chose cars, especially with combustion engines, because they are so obviously superior to bikes, public transit, or electric cars—ignoring the advantage gained from infrastructure and geography.

What may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful?

A few other blind spots and ambiguities are evident in Wilsey’s discussion of religious liberty. Like many others, his picture of America’s religiosity (because of its religious freedom) is juxtaposed against a relatively irreligious Europe. The argument here is not unlike juxtaposing bright capitalist South Korea alongside dark communist North Korea. There must be an explanation for these otherwise similar places being so dissimilar, right? Wilsey, like others, asserts that it is religious liberty. However, while it is true that Europe does have a few taxpayer-funded religious establishments, these establishments are almost entirely superficial and exist alongside extensive religious freedom, not unlike America’s. In short, neither religious freedom nor religious establishment is a believable explanatory variable.

Furthermore, how irreligious is Europe in fact? If religiosity is defined by belief in a higher being (the essential aid to truth, Wilsey argues) or identification with a religious tradition, Europe is surprisingly pious. Finally, if religious liberty is so important for deep religiosity, why is it that religiosity in America has decreased while religious freedom has increased over the last half-century? Why isn’t this more extensive religious freedom bolstering religiosity? Can it be instead that the relatively high religiosity of recent memory, the experience of Silents, Boomers, or Gen X, is owed not so much to religious freedom but to a more pronounced and discernible generational public piety fading ever since SCOTUS encouraged greater neutrality and secularity? See, for example, Aaron Renn’s thesis about a growing “negative world” for Christianity in America.

Finally, Wilsey’s arguments are tidier if one stays in a Western context. India and Lebanon have no established religion. Both are more pluralistic and religious than America, but they are also more syncretistic and given to religious violence. Why? Indonesia has a state religion, which should make them irreligious according to Wilsey’s reasoning, but its people are deeply religious. Furthermore, would all the faiths practiced in these countries sustain the ethos and institutions Wilsey appreciates in America? In the American case, Wilsey is presuming upon a particular kind of religious freedom, birthed under particular cultural (and theological) circumstances, in a certain organic and historical context—a context much richer than simply having God in one’s consciousness.

Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence. Wilsey is concerned with America’s declining role in the world, the rise of populism, a loss of support for American ideals and institutions, the decline of popular media, and the rise of social media. His students would identify problems like economic disruption, a widening wealth gap, and the perceived failure of American ideals and institutions. They would praise the variety of popular and social media.

Wilsey says that he does not intend the book to be a “Get off my lawn” moment, but are the younger generation’s concerns owed simply to an impoverished inner life and populist inclinations? Can conservatism adapt to these more emotional and alienated times? Is it as rational as Wilsey suggests? Or can it be more dispositional, as Michael Oakeshott suggested? For example, Wilsey dismisses epic poetry to make sense of the past because it is not “verifiable through evidence.” But his examples of the earliest historical research, Herodotus and Thucydides, did not presume to provide just evidence. They reflected sentiment. Even our contemporary Great Books movement, including classical education, assigns Homer next to Herodotus without hesitation because both reveal permanent things.

And even more to the point, what may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful? John Adams, for example, had a rich inner life, but his vision was enabled by men and women who were arguably populists in their time. If conservatism aspires to be more than a vision, especially in a marketplace of visions, these challenges must be taken seriously.

The following is based on a keynote address delivered by the author to the biennial meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association on March 27, 2025.

It is not a coincidence that the emptiness and aridity of so much of our era’s cultural and intellectual life comes at a moment when the arts and practices of conversation have become all but extinct. To be sure, people have not stopped talking to one another, even if they now often mistake an exchange of text messages, sent and received hunched over a tiny screen, as “talking,” and seem to prefer restaurants in which attempts at conversation end up like the discourse of platoon sergeants, shouted over the dining room’s racket. But a copious volume of words being exchanged does not translate into that thing called conversation. Particularly in an era in which openness and candor, even between friends, can prove to be dangerous in the long run.

A great deal has been said and written of late about free speech: whether it is even possible, whether it has intrinsic limits, whether it is inherently biased for or against certain groups, or whether it might be more injurious than beneficial to the well-being of a community. These questions all deserve airing. But I think most of us would agree that a greater degree of commitment to freedom of speech on our campuses and in our public life would be a salutary improvement over the walking-on-eggshells environment that we’ve had to endure for far too many years.

But what would be far better is a commitment to the kind of mutuality and breadth that the term “free conversation” implies. Particularly if Michael Oakeshott is right that conversation, as opposed to mere utterance, is such an important feature of our very humanity.

Oakeshott’s Conversation

So much of what Oakeshott valued is prefigured and modeled by that uniquely human activity, which he perhaps most famously referred to as “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” It is in conversation that “thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another,” without a “symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials.” And perhaps most remarkably, even audaciously, he contended that “it is the ability to participate in conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.”

What might we learn from him today, to help us in the work of restoring and reorienting ourselves?

Well, first of all, we can learn that what he called “the conversation of mankind” in his great essay on the voice of poetry is not merely a transitional state to which we have to accommodate ourselves temporarily, until a fuller consensus about all things, presumably grounded in science, can be arrived at. No, it is the human condition, at least the condition of civilized men and women. Our participation in that conversation is an end in itself, not the means to some other end, and not an activity incidental to our human nature, let alone as a reluctant and provisional accommodation to an imperfect world.

There is a paradox here. Our participation in a common life is what makes it possible for us to converse, while our differences are what make our conversations worth having. And it is by its nature something that requires a certain freedom and spontaneity to thrive. (Hence the term “free conversation” is a redundancy.) It is, as Oakeshott says in the “Voice” essay, and in other places as well, “not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit.”

The concept of “conversation” and its central place in the life of civilized human beings suggest to me some practical considerations that can be drawn from Oakeshott for the betterment of American life. And that is the way that conversation implies the central importance of proper scale in healthy human associations. A fully reciprocal conversation implies a certain propinquity and stability, and containment, rather like the hortus conclusus, the garden enclosed, of medieval lore. It fits well with Oakeshott’s emphasis on the local, which would be those kinds of communities whose scale can accommodate the possibility of conversation, and whose stability with reference to “place” makes those conversations rooted and distinctive. (The very etymology of the word, conversation, goes back to the Latin conversari, “to live with, and keep company with.”) In other words, the voice of Oakeshott ought to pull us back toward a renewed emphasis upon Burkean themes of local patriotism, as opposed to national and universalistic sources of identity, and toward the preservation of smaller-scale and local forms of association.

So that is one possible gift of Oakeshott’s emphasis upon the centrality of conversation. Let me mention another, which follows logically, and is, I think absolutely central to Oakeshott. And that is a release from the burden of purposefulness, from “the rage to reform,” as Oakeshott calls it, the burden that the predominance of the rationalist disposition, and of the enterprise associations through which it is expressed, including the regulatory state, imposes upon us. This release would be akin to the idea of the “usefulness of uselessness” or to the interesting parallel that has been drawn between Oakeshott’s insights and Johan Huizinga’s portrait of homo ludens, of man’s capacity for play as one of the necessary conditions for the development of human culture.

Oakestott warned, “a university will have ceased to exist” when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.”

I would put it even more strongly, that there is something barbarous and inhuman about a mode of existence in which one never allows oneself to repose in satisfaction and gratitude for what one has, or for the things one has been given by and in and through the conditions of one’s mere existence, but must ceaselessly seek to innovate, to grade it, evaluate it, improve it, reform it, remake it, perfect it. A philosophy that fails to resist that relentlessly instrumentalizing tendency is all too likely to succumb to it in one way or another, perhaps by emphasizing the degree to which the person is or can be self-made, thereby allowing the supposed primacy of the will to tyrannize over all other aspects of existence. Think of William Ernest Henley’s triumphant proclamation: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” The greatest of Rationalism’s illusions is precisely this illusion of mastery, an illusion whose rabid and single-minded pursuit is unable to produce either success or happiness. How much more humane is Oakeshott’s untriumphant but sweet description of poetry’s power to release us, and enchant us, with “a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.” A release from the burden of purposefulness.

Speech, Expression, and Conversation

What about a renewed commitment to free speech, in our culture and in our colleges? There I would be a bit more equivocal in my judgment, seeing such freedom as necessary but not sufficient. Necessary, because free speech is one of the chief ways that we test for the truth of our assertions. The most important defenses of free speech have never been the ones that assert that the truth is relative or unknowable or personal or tribal. Instead, they are the ones, such as John Milton’s great Areopagitica, that praise the refining fire of contrary opinions as the best way to complete the incompleteness of our knowledge. If the COVID years taught us anything, they taught us that we cannot allow ourselves to become mindlessly deferential to the putatively superior wisdom of censors and anointed experts to determine the truth for us.

But the restoration of free speech, and of the ethos that supports its flourishing, is not the full cure to what ails undergraduate education in America. Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it is also something more than that. It is a community of shared knowledge and memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present, as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built. Without the prior existence of that accumulated body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. That is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, and forms the basis of a rich and enduring common life.

Oakeshott’s vision of the university as “a place of learning” presumes such commonality as the necessary basis for the proliferation of a multitude of conversations—and the richer the commonality, the deeper and more varied and adventurous the conversations can be. But on the other hand, he warned, “a university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research,” when teaching has become “mere instruction,” and when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.” Is that not where we are now, for the most part … and that only on a good day?

It is here that I must regretfully express a significant disagreement with the Chicago Principles, so named because they were propounded at and promulgated by the University of Chicago, under the courageous leadership of its then-president, the late Robert Zimmer. I honor Dr. Zimmer’s memory and achievement, and I think he did a great deal of good in providing a text that over a hundred institutions have been able to rally around, to reassert the university’s fundamental commitment to free inquiry.

And yet the Chicago Principles leave an important problem unaddressed, and they compound that problem precisely by their failure to address it.

You may recall that the document is called the “Report of the Committee on Free Expression” … not of “Free Speech” (or not, for that matter, of “Freedom of Inquiry” or “Freedom of Conscience”). This is not an unimportant difference, although the text of the report also employs “speech” instead of “expression” in multiple instances, as if there were absolutely no difference between them.

Let me add that the Chicago Principles are not unique in emphasizing “expression” rather than “speech.” The Woodward Report, published in December 1974 by a committee at Yale headed by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward and still one of the best such guides to the virtues of academic freedom, also uses the same language. Its official title is the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale.”

In neither of these two influential documents is attention given to any difference of meaning between “speech” and “expression.”

There are consequences to such semantic slippage, particularly if it is conscious and deliberate. The ultimate justification for free speech is inseparable from the fact that it is speech that we are allowing to be free.

By saying it this way, I mean that speech, discursive language—what the ancient Greeks called logos—has a special dignity. It is the human gift par excellence. It is the medium through which we engage in rational deliberation, the way that we work things out together, solve problems, state and apply moral principles, or principles of action. We use it to map the battle plans that we will employ in the conduct of our lives. It is the means by which we are able to be “political animals” in the way that Aristotle describes us—not just animals that live together, but animals that have the capacity to deliberate together on questions of the common good.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—staged screaming, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, flag-burning, taking a knee—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech.

Animals share with us a capacity for expression of pain and pleasure, but not a capacity for speaking with analytical cogency about those things, holding them out at arm’s length, so to speak; describing them with the requisite precision, making judgments of value among them, and incorporating those judgments into the life of a human community. In fact, Aristotle is saying that it is our capacity for “partnership in these things” that makes a community possible. We might add that it is what makes conversation possible too.

Speech occupies a middle ground between thought and action, a sort of buffer zone in which we can consider, together, with abstract detachment, different courses of action, prior to acting upon one of them. The whole idea of allowing speech to be free depends upon its being securely situated in and mostly confined to this middle transitional zone. (Speech that represents a “clear and present danger” is proscribed precisely because it violates this fundamental understanding.)

We engage in this sort of provisional thinking all the time, as when we deliberate together in considering competing scenarios, whether Plan A is better than Plan B, which plan will have what consequences, and which simulation or imaginative projection is likely to provide us with a more accurate reading of future events, and thus a more effective plan of action. In a truly deliberative environment, individuals collaborate with one another in thinking through their plans, both in constructing them and then in evaluating them, implementing them, and considering together their moral implications. It is the singular virtue of speech that it makes possible such activity in the middle zone between thought and action.

This understanding of speech as a refuge for provisionality and reflection runs in remarkably close parallel to Oakeshott’s beautiful description of the university as a place offering “the gift of an interval,” as he put it in his 1949 essay on “The Universities”: a place in which one could “put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place.” University could be “an interval” in which “a man might refuse to commit himself,” in which he might “taste the mystery” of life “without the necessity of at once seeking a solution” for it. It provides us an opportunity to “practice that suspended judgment of which the ‘neutrality’ of liberalism is so pale a shadow.” And all of this, he concludes, happens not in a vacuum, but “surrounded by all the inherited learning and literature and experience of our civilization.”

Expression, the Opposite of Speech

Expression, however, is something distinct from speech. It is a more or less romantic term, an emotion-laden term, referring to forms of communication that may or may not be verbal, and may or may not be part of a deliberative process. Its romantic quality is reflected in the word’s etymology, deriving from the Latin exprimere, “to press out.”

Expressive liberty tends to be a one-way thing, a monologue, a cry of the heart, like the Sammy Davis Jr. song “I Gotta Be Me,” not a contribution to collective deliberation about truth. We sit back and listen to the monologue, like moviegoers in a darkened theater. We are spectators. The experience can be enthralling, moving, powerful, passionate. Shocking, even. If it is a great work of art we are confronted with, we might be uplifted, or feel our spirit crushed, by what we see. Perhaps our thinking about some social issue or historical personage has changed. If it is inferior art, perhaps not.

But either way, there is no room for us to answer it, to engage it, or to offer an alternative view in counterpoint. Expression qua expression is all about “my voice,” “my truth,” “my narrative”—and it must be heard! And in some sense, it must be deferred to or ignored.

One could write an interesting history of how this blurring of concepts came about in our general culture, how two things that were so clearly distinct a mere century ago have become so conjoined in our thinking as to be indistinguishable. But that is where we are now. “Words are violence!” shouted the student protesters at Middlebury College in 2017, borrowing the words of the novelist Toni Morrison to shout down their campus visitor, the sociologist Charles Murray, and threaten him and his host with violence. As if violence could also be an expressive act, a form of language. Such actions collapse all meaningful distinctions, and undermine the possibility of a college in which speech can serve its highest good, and provide its students with that gift of an interval, in which the high art of conversation can be enjoyed and cultivated.

But often the point of using an expressive gesture or image rather than a verbal declaration is precisely the imprecision that expressive symbolism permits. Words can generally be answered and contested and clarified and amended, in dialogue and conversation and debate with others using words. But the gesture has a powerful finality about it, an unanswerable quality—or it can only be answered by another unanswerable gesture: you insult me, and I insult you back; you block me, and I block you. This is the kind of gestural misanthropy in which our era increasingly specializes. It is not a good model for democratic deliberation, let alone conversation.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—taped-up mouths, armies of Atwood-inspired handmaids, staged screaming, audiences that wheel around and turn their backs on invited speakers or drown them out with chants, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, morons who glue themselves to valuable objects, flag-burning, taking a knee, kick-boxing Congresswomen as performance art—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech. The courts, including the US Supreme Court, have been indulgent in furthering this trend. I could multiply examples or emphasize that this is a practice of all political parties and persuasions, but the point is that we have come to accept passively the notion that these expressive acts are functionally equivalent to more conventional forms of speech.

Learning suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence.

But they are not. In fact, these examples represent the opposite of speech. Rightly understood, speech, logos, always entails the possibility of an answer, of interlocution, of dialogue, of engagement, of argument—in short, of talking back. Or, to put it more optimistically, of conversation. Instead of offering the opportunity for further exchange, such examples seek to foreclose the possibility with utter finality.

When we equate speech with expression, we deny or diminish the unique property of speech: as the medium of deliberation, of the interval, as that middle ground between thought and action, and as the instrument by which we are given an interim space, to seek and test the truth.

A Wild Flower Among the Wheat

Conversation is a term that defines the essential character of our complex and unique civilization, the civilization of the West. I believe it was Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the University of Chicago’s most influential presidents, who popularized the idea that the Western intellectual tradition was best understood as a “great conversation.” It is a way of talking about the West that may sound a bit hackneyed by now. But also may be, like Wagner’s music, better than it sounds.

For one thing, it pays attention to the fact that the thinkers of the past and their accomplishments do not die, but linger on in the present: as exemplars to be emulated, as foils to do battle against, or simply as sources of ideas and metaphors and models, but above all as thinkers who need to be responded to, and can be responded to. In that sense, Plato’s work is as alive today as it has ever been, as much a part of the activity of philosophy, and you can substitute a dozen other names for his, and the statement would be just as true.

But there is a more fundamental way in which the West can be thought of as a long conversation. Its two most important constituent elements are called by the names Athens and Jerusalem, as expressed by the Church father Tertullian, and they were and are rivals. Athens stands for the spirit of free rational inquiry undertaken in a fully intelligible world whose contours and dimensions are fully commensurable with our powers of understanding. Jerusalem stands for the spirit of piety, which concedes the weakness of human understanding and the inadequacy of unaided human nature, and insists that we are utterly reliant for guidance upon the few ways in which God has revealed Himself and His will to us, and that such reliance constitutes a wisdom superior to any ratiocination, since God’s ways are not ours. It is by our faith that we are saved and not by our knowledge; and there is “nothing better than the fear of the Lord … nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord.” 

How to reconcile the two? We haven’t. (Aquinas has perhaps come the closest.) But the conversation between them is in some sense the essential core of Western intellectual history, and the secret of the West’s vitality—a life lived “between two codes.” We would no longer be ourselves, should we become all one or all the other.

I’ve called the relationship a conversation. Some have preferred to call it an antagonism, a great debate, or a warfare between science and religion, or something even more combative or martial. But the proper study of the Western past is more fittingly described by the notion of conversation, as Oakeshott understood conversation: as something that forswears the desire for victory by one side or another, or any similar form of closure, but instead exists for its own sake, recognizing and respecting all the elements in play.

“The pursuit of learning,” he says, is not a race in which the competitors jockey for best place, it is not even an argument or a symposium … we do not ask what it is ‘for’ and we do not judge its excellent by its conclusion” because in fact “it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day.” It thus suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time—an interval—from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence. Call it a foretaste of heaven, or a wild flower planted among the wheat. Or a rose in the cross of the present.

We can only hope that the cultural changes that lie ahead of us may not destroy what is left of this aspect of life in the university and more broadly in the republic of letters. I wish I could be more optimistic about that. But one does what one can, and leaves the odds-making to others.

Why are there so few men in the restaurants, bars, and coffee shops where the women like to recreate? This is the question posed by Rachel Drucker, 54, in the recent New York Times “Modern Love” column, Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. Drucker is a veteran of the 1990s sex positivity who worked for Playboy and its “affiliated hardcore properties,” and has plenty of experiences and exes to her name. She implores men to re-engage women like her as friends and lovers. 

Perhaps the saddest, most evocative lines of her lament are these: “There was a time, not so long ago, when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast. When the act of staying the night didn’t announce a relationship, just a willingness to be human for a few more hours.” 

If we think of sexual mores like a Goldilocks story, Drucker feels that she and her contemporaries came of age when everything was “just right.” The implied interpretation of events goes something like this: In the olden times, a relationship (or, in very olden times, an engagement or even a marriage) was a prerequisite for sharing a bed overnight. Today, with easy access to pornography and male resentment of women’s empowerment, people have lost interest in “be[ing] human.” It’s apparently too much even to ask a man to show up to dinner before asking to come upstairs. 

Where, a bewildered Drucker wonders, did the happy medium of her own experiences go? What happened to the casual sex that nevertheless entailed an intimate decency, which to some extent belied and delimited its “casual” moniker? 

That “happy medium,” however, never existed as such. It was a composite, transitional reality: the lingering fumes of the old rules and mores alongside the lived insistence on no rules or mores at all. So long as traditionalist sexual morality was widely accepted as legitimate, even if not widely practiced, those that flouted its dictates still did so with at least the plausible claim of covert discretion. But when the last fumes of traditionalism died out, the precarious norms Drucker remembers with such fondness disappeared as well. 

Today, in relation to phenomena ranging from sex and dating, to marriage and family formation, to sociality itself, there is an erosion of what so recently felt like unimpeachable standards. Perhaps, it turns out, those fumes of the old ways were responsible for the continuance of our baseline humanity, both personal and societal. Perhaps a post-patriarchal, post-religious, post-institutional world turns out to be a post-human world as well.

Mommy Wars No More

In the season six Sex and the City episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), perpetually single protagonist Carrie Bradshaw is dismayed that someone absconded from a party with her $485 stilettos. She is even more frustrated when the party host, a married mother of three, not only fails to reimburse her for the loss but also “shames” her, calling it “crazy” to spend $485 on designer shoes—ones that, in fact, she used to wear herself before she had what she calls “a real life,” intimating that Carrie’s unmarried, childless existence is less worthy of respect and deference than her own. 

Carrie, fuming, recounts indignantly to her friend Charlotte that she has bought this very friend an engagement gift, a wedding gift, and three baby gifts, not to mention traveling for her wedding. She has spent, in total, “over $2300 celebrating her choices.” Charlotte tries to offer context: “But those were gifts … if you got married, or had a child, she would spend the same on you.” Carrie responds: “And if I don’t ever get married or have a child, then, what, I get Bubkis? … If you are single, after graduation, there isn’t one occasion where people celebrate you. … I’m thrilled to give you gifts, to celebrate your life; I just think it stinks that single people are left out of it.” 

What Carrie fails to recognize is that we give such gifts not to celebrate these individuals’ morally neutral “life choices,” but rather to honor marriage and childbirth as laudable and societally desirable. If they are no longer seen that way, it is only a matter of time before not just the norms of dating (which emerged as a prequel to marriage and family) but also the broader norms of treating other people with reciprocal dignity erode as well. After all, the very notion of giving gifts to celebrate milestones like marriage and childbirth is, at bottom, a statement about our shared investment in the institutions to which we all, whether married or not, owe our societal stability. To personalize this reality in a resentful, individual way, as Carrie does, is to grossly underestimate the fragility of society itself. 

Like Carrie, Drucker wanted to be able to break all the old rules—and facilitate others doing so. What she, like many of us, does not understand is this: Discarded norms do not remain forever in their diminished place so that we can continue to break them, secure in the certainty that there will always be something, however remote, to push back upon. On the contrary, mores are difficult to form—but quite easy to break. 

Both the precipitous decline in fertility rates that everyone across the political spectrum now acknowledges as an impending crisis, and the melancholy of straight women who find men receding en masse from shared social and sexual life with actual, living women, can be understood as the unsurprising productions of a society that does not celebrate marriage and family as uniquely important institutions. 

Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

When adulthood was still considered, socially and professionally, to some degree inextricable from romantic partnership—that is, when perpetual singleness still raised eyebrows if not wagged tongues—we had more dates, leading to more marriages and more children. The erstwhile ability of 50-something single women to engage men as dinner companions cannot be separated from that broad social ecology. 

Yes, these one-time norms involved trade-offs. In an era that all but mandated matrimony, single women tended not to have the kinds of stable, well-established lives that today make tying the knot seem, to many, a next-generation Carrie Bradshaw, like a raw deal. Women in earlier eras also, more often than many conservatives want to admit, settled for terrible marriages. No one wants to go back to that. 

Many people, however, like Drucker, harbor great nostalgia for a time when we treated each other with basic decency. What they fail to recognize is that reciprocal decorum is not natural, but socially constructed. The old norms, for all their admitted limitations, institutionalized treating each other better than we default to treating each other without any norms at all. In Drucker’s youth, people largely flouted those old norms de jure while retaining their spirit de facto. While they may have conceived of themselves as rebels who discarded all the old mores, the truth is that they owed everything to the fumes of the very scripts that they saw themselves as having discarded. 

Today, by contrast, we have in fact adopted the nonchalant, “you do you” premise of Carrie’s screed—even while we still purchase (a diminishing number of) wedding presents. One predictable result of this total eradication of erstwhile norms is the dearth of men in the spaces where Drucker and her friends recreate. Another sad consequence is the devolution of our social decency more broadly. 

It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if No One Comes

In a recent essay titled “Go Where You’re Invited,” speaker and author Katherine Martinko highlights a viral video from therapist and author Esther Perel, in which Perel responds with insight to the now near-ubiquitous phenomenon of invitees to a social event canceling at the last minute. Mulling over the endless echoes in the comments on Perel’s video, along with her own experiences being cancelled on, Martinko offers: “It appears we’re living in a time when people don’t hesitate to bail on their friends for reasons that range from justifiable to absurd. This reveals an appalling lack of etiquette that gives zero consideration to what it takes to host an event of any kind.” Indeed, we are; and indeed, it does. 

Socially responsible millennials find it difficult to count on friends showing up to a planned gathering for the same broad reason that our single or divorced aunt can’t get a guy to invite her to dinner: The rules, judgments, and premises that produced the norm—in this case, showing up where you say you will—are long gone. 

Yes, technology has facilitated this decline in erstwhile etiquette. Just like the pill made commitment-free sex a lot less risky at baseline, texting made sending an invitation to a bunch of people much easier. Thus, as Perel points out, the people on the receiving end of an invitation often think they aren’t particularly important or central to the gathering. So, they don’t bother to respond, or they respond but feel no shame about cancelling at the last minute. Additionally, the ubiquity, ease, and breadth of at-home leisure—delivered food, streamed television and movies, and so on—means that going out is no longer necessary for entertainment. 

Nevertheless, the moral, ideological, and psychological aspects of this seismic social shift from a default of conscientiousness to a default of casualness cannot be discounted. 

Not so long ago, we had expectations of friends that reflected a bygone era of formalized, reciprocal sociality. Yes, the calling cards described in Jane Austen novels have been a remnant of the distant past for some time, as have the dance cards that persisted into the early twentieth century. But the commitment, courtesy, and reciprocity that those measures institutionalized persisted until quite recently, even in their absence. 

Of course, there have always been flakes, freeloaders, and idiosyncratic types who do not reliably follow mutually understood social expectations. But when those norms are nonetheless followed by enough people to remain expectations—and when those who don’t follow them as norms therefore pay some price—there remains a shared recognition that others’ time and attention have implicit and agreed-upon value. 

But today, the de facto adherence to the spirit of those old rules around social etiquette has disappeared, just like the rules themselves did a century-plus ago. So, everyone is free to accept the invitation but bail if something better comes along or if she “needs a break.” No one, however, wants to be on the other end of this new normal. 

As our growing crisis of loneliness shows, it simply does not work like that. Wanting to avoid social accountability but have access to social community is the equivalent of working in the porn industry and wondering where all the thoughtful dinner conversationalists went. 

Civilization, and its attendant civilized treatment of one another, it seems, takes a long time to build and no time at all to destroy. 

Many of us mourn the absence of niceties like acknowledging receipt of a gift and thanking the giver, feeling obligated to invite someone to one’s home after being invited to hers, or responding to invitations and then showing up when and where you say you will. But in order to understand the depth and breadth of what’s really going on here—rather than narrowly saying “the individual friend who didn’t thank me is rude” or “the individual guys who aren’t texting me back are jerks”—we have to recognize that these shared expectations of politeness and dignity were never inborn settings, but products of first de jure and then de facto socialization. 

Which is now gone—and by our own hand.

The ubiquitous self-care industry is chock full of reassurance that “it’s okay to say no,” and cautions against reflexively saying yes, and admonitions to “put yourself first.” Now, full disclosure: I would benefit greatly from a modest mindset shift in this direction, and so would many of the other highly attentive, responsible women in my friend set. Yes, many of us, myself included, are eldest daughters, and it shows. And yes, if we did not surge quite so reflexively to familial and communal responsibility, many of us would be healthier and probably also happier. 

Yet most of us operate the way we do because we are aware on some level that we live in a world that has defenestrated the collective institutions, mores, and social graces that once held people together. Those of us who understand this can throw our hands up at the absence of the institutions, mores, and graces that once existed to facilitate and institutionalize treating one another with warmth and dignity—or we can attempt to preserve, revitalize, and embody them. 

We who make the latter choice tend to find one another. And we tend to evince public respect for (even if we don’t privately follow) the rules and norms that undergird those institutions, mores, and graces to which we owe our own and myriad others’ lack of loneliness. 

My advice to Drucker and her friends, if I may be so bold: Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

My hope—and my hunch—is that some dinner invitations from men worth a “yes” won’t be far behind. 

The rise of artificial intelligence is the single most important trend of our time. The changes it will wreak on human life eclipse not only all other contemporary technological developments, but also any since the Industrial Revolution. The new pope recognizes its salience, choosing as his regnal name “Leo XIV,” because just as Leo XIII was confronted with the social change from the Industrial Revolution, he seeks to confront the even more dramatic change from AI.

Breakthroughs happen monthly now. OpenAI’s o3 model recently scored higher than 99.8 percent of competitive programmers—while the same lab’s Sora engine, launched in February and now being integrated into ChatGPT, can already generate minute-long, high-definition video from text. In July, frontier models from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI sat the International Mathematical Olympiad under the same four-and-a-half-hour rules given to the world’s brightest teens, solved five of the six problems, and earned gold medals. In April, a University at Buffalo team unveiled Semantic Clinical AI (SCAI), an architecture that grafts formal medical knowledge onto a large language model. SCAI scored as high as 95 percent on Step 3 of the US Medical Licensing Examination—better than most practicing physicians and ahead of every previous AI benchmark—showing that well-structured retrieval can turn AI into a skilled general diagnostician.

AI’s new methodological phase is the emergence of AI agents, systems that autonomously execute sequences of tasks in pursuit of a goal. This phase is called agentic AI, which builds on Large Language Models (LLMs) that have dominated AI in the last few years. Those LLMs are neural networks that understand the relation of words in text and can use that understanding to generate competent, even expert, answers on every subject.

Agentic AI marries the predictive eloquence of LLM to an institutional framework of memory, goal-seeking, and tool use. No longer confined to completing sentences, the system can now formulate a purpose, decompose it into ordered tasks, engage external software, monitor its own performance, and revise its course when it makes mistakes. In short, where the LLM offers fluent speech, the agentic overlay supplies the infrastructure necessary for transforming mere words into coordinated action. One way of measuring progress in agentic AI is the uninterrupted duration of its competent autonomy at human tasks.

A year ago: a few minutes spent sorting e-mail, drafting a paragraph of code, or a short speech.

Now: twenty to thirty minutes in which Deep Search on ChatGPT and other similar services produces memos on any subject. As Tyler Cowen observes, the answers “wipes [sic] the floor against any humans, pretty much across the board.”

By 2026–27: several hours, during which an agent can redesign a software module, or plan a fortnight of coordination for a business.

As the decade closes: days or even weeks, in which an agent may conceive a research project, run simulations, draft the article, and submit it for peer review.

Because of its current and future power, progress in AI has become a central national concern. For example, AI may offer a solution to the intractable fiscal situation in which the United States finds itself. The United States’ national debt stands at approximately 120 percent of gross domestic product. And it is rising since we are also running an annual deficit of about 6 percent a year. Neither party offers any solution to the problem. The Republican Party just renewed the tax cuts of Trump’s first term and added more without compensating cuts to the budget. When the Democrats were last in power, they added programs and government spending that also added to the budget deficit. Neither party provides plausible reforms to the middle-class entitlements that drive future deficits in an aging population. Both are committed not to raise taxes on any but the top two percent, which is completely insufficient to curb deficits and debt. The result is a sea of red ink as far as an economist can project.

Given the fiscal plight and political constraints, the only solution is sharply increased economic growth. AI provides the most plausible engine for that growth. As a general-purpose technology, like electricity, it can make almost every human enterprise more efficient. In business enterprises, AI can match output to demand in real time and trim the staffing once required to execute routine tasks. In medicine, it can help deliver correct diagnoses faster with fewer people. In my own field of law, it can draft contracts and briefs with human lawyers just doing the work of tweaking and revising.

In geopolitics as well, AI offers both opportunity and danger. If the West wins the AI race, it will be in a better economic and military position, particularly given that the battle will now be fought with AI technology—both to surveil the enemy and to launch attacks and create defensive shields. But if China gains mastery before the United States, it could replace it as the global superpower.

These three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models.

As a result of AI’s centrality, the Trump administration has created “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” encompassing three companion executive orders issued on July 23. Together, they erect a federal legal architecture for artificial intelligence that seeks to secure US primacy by accelerating innovation, expanding infrastructure, and projecting American standards abroad. The plan sets out more than ninety actions, from specific regulatory sandboxes encouraging innovation at the FDA and SEC to a more general revision of federal rules that “unduly burden AI innovation,” all premised on the proposition that prosperity and power in the twenty-first century will flow to the nation that commands the AI frontier.

The plan recognizes that AI will succeed in rapidly increasing economic growth only if it is not stymied by bottlenecks. It has substantial demands for computational infrastructure and the energy needed to power that infrastructure. Indeed, one way to think of AI is that it converts electricity into intelligence without the biological constraints on such conversion in humans. But electricity generation faces regulatory constraints.

As such, the first executive order in Trump’s bundle, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” attacks the bottleneck of the computational power needed for AI. It aims to shave years off construction times for the facilities needed for frontier model training by creating exclusions to environmental regulations for AI infrastructure. Cheaper and faster computing is the indispensable fuel of the AI age. Thus, unclogging permits promises to liberate AI progress.

This executive order aids AI development more by deregulation than subsidization. The promise of AI is so powerful that the efficient capital market ecosystem is sufficient to supply funds. The roadblock is government regulation. Thus, the focus of the executive order is to ease the regulations that may block its smooth development.

The second executive order, “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack,” turns US economic strength outward. A new American AI Exports Program authorizes the Commerce and State Departments to finance and shepherd “full-stack” AI packages, including chips, models, software, and cyber safeguards, to trusted allies. Wiring friendly nations with American technology locks in governance norms, buoyant markets, deepens supply-chain reliance on US firms, and denies strategic rent to adversaries.

Thus, the second order is designed to deploy AI to strengthen our international alliances. For all the talk of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, this executive order at least indicates the administration recognizes the importance of bringing allied nations within the ambit of America’s growing AI technology network. In the Cold War, the United States strengthened and integrated the West in two principal ways. First, it placed much of the West under a US security umbrella through NATO, additional multilateral pacts, and a web of bilateral alliances. Second, it was a principal mover in international trade agreements, like the GATT, which encompassed most Western nations and sought to tie them together economically. But today, the rise of AI makes our AI technological network the essential mechanism of integration and strength. And it is not Russia that is the principal challenger, but China.

As Dario Amodei (creator of the Claude Model) puts it in a memo that preceded the executive order:

a coalition [of liberal democracies integrated thought AI] would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.

The third order safeguards viewpoint neutrality. “Preventing Woke AI” bars federal agencies from procuring language models that embed ideological filters, mandating “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” as procurement conditions.

The aim is to make sure that AI does not compromise epistemic understanding by skewing answers to questions ideologically. There have been instances in which AI models seem to provide politically correct or biased answers. For instance, when asked to show a set of Founding Fathers, Gemini initially assembled a multiracial group of images in an obvious gesture to political correctness. Just as the Data Infrastructure executive order avoids subsidies to AI, this order avoids actual legal orders to the AI companies to be ideologically neutral—a matter fraught with First Amendment concerns. But the order does direct the government not to contract with companies that engage in distortions. The government has a substantial, indeed compelling interest, not to have its work distorted by ideological bias.

Taken together, the three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models the government pays for. If the bet pays off, long after the daily controversies of the Trump administration are forgotten, this set of actions may be remembered as the most important set of executive orders in the history of the American government’s relation with science.

When I was in middle school, I remember gathering wood each spring with my friends. The task grew into a passion or even a competition, as we raced to collect more. Did someone you know have a crate they were ready to part with for a good cause? What about a broken dining room chair? Why not clean out the loose sticks from the park on the other side of town? 

No, we were not Dickensian orphans desperate to heat our homes. Our quest was more pyromaniac in nature: We were stocking up for a special bonfire—Lag Ba’Omer, celebrated in May. The holiday’s origins are obscure, and there are several different stories connected with it. In modern Israel, where I spent my late elementary and middle school years, however, it has a special significance, as a celebration of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Wait, you might say, this is awkward. Bar Kokhba, the enigmatic messianic figure, did lead a revolt against the Roman Empire in AD 132–136, but it failed. He and his men were defeated utterly, with devastating consequences for the Jews. In addition to the high cost in human life, the Roman Emperor Hadrian punished the Jews by wiping off the map the very name of their land, changing Judea to Syria Palaestina, and paving the way to the modern name of “Palestine.” Hardly cause for celebration, right?

And yet, in his new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, military historian Barry Strauss does find things to admire. His researched yet highly readable account covers the three major revolts of the Jews against Rome, but also explains the long-term significance of these revolts (and the Jews’ military losses) for the present. At a basic level, “This is a tale of empire and resistance. It is also a story of resilience, an intangible but essential factor. Resilience refers to the strength of a society’s sense of its national identity and values. A resilient society has the will to withstand defeat and to recover from it. That, in turn, requires a certain culture, leadership, and institutions. … Ancient Jewry is one of history’s great examples of how a people can lose on the battlefield and yet prevail.” 

The modern Israeli celebration of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, the final one in Strauss’s narrative, makes a lot more sense in this larger context. Sometimes a military loss leads to long-term victory through forging a stronger sense of national identity.

Ironically, the Romans knew this as well. Resilience, after all, was their theme song too. In 280–275 BC, for instance, the Romans fought King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who joined forces with Greek city-states in southern Italy to challenge Rome. Pyrrhus won two major battles, but at such extreme cost as to give rise to the expression “Pyrrhic victory.” As the biographer Plutarch reports, Pyrrhus remarked that another victory of that sort would finish him off. Why? Because the Romans’ losses had no effect on their willingness to keep going. Time and again in early Roman history, we hear of devastating losses like these. And every time, the Romans simply raised a new army and kept fighting—eventually winning the war. But with the Jews, more than any other people under Roman control, the Romans seem to have met their match—at least, when it comes to resilience.

Strauss structures the book around the story of three major revolts of the Jews against Rome: the Great Revolt that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70; the Diaspora Revolt in AD 116–117; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in AD 132–136. While the focus is on the Jews and the Romans, the third wheel accompanying this awkward “date” is Parthia, the major empire to the east, which has been a thorn in Rome’s side since at least the defeat of Crassus and his army at Carrhae in 53 BC. Parthia was just as interested in expanding westwards as Rome was in expanding eastward. It also had a significant Jewish population and was practically next door to Judea. “Empires do not have friends; they have interests,” Strauss observes. This applies to both Parthia’s and Rome’s interest in Judea. Had Parthia taken over Judea, this could have become a base for taking over other portions of the Roman Empire.

Strauss opens his narrative with some important background on the history of Judea under Rome. This matters because “Judea had been in Rome’s orbit for 225 years when it rebelled in 66. Rome couldn’t tolerate humiliation in an established part of the empire like Judea.” This leads to the key question: why would “an established part of the empire” rebel? 

When it comes to the Great Revolt, historians have, in a way, struck gold. Of particular significance is the Jewish historian Josephus. A Jewish leader in the revolt early on, he then defected to Rome and ingratiated himself into Roman citizenship and the patronage of the Flavian dynasty, although still retaining his Jewish faith. Following the precept of “write what you know,” Josephus proceeded to spend the rest of his life writing about Jewish history. And in his history of the revolt, The Jewish War, he argued that the vast majority of the Jews had no desire to revolt from Rome. The war—and the devastation that followed because of it—was all the fault of a few radicals. 

But, Strauss notes, Josephus had goals of his own in blaming just a few individuals for the war. Other sources suggest, rather, that Judea was a powder keg waiting to blow up for a while. Indeed, there were several close calls earlier—murmurs of revolts nearly averted. There were many reasons for this tension—for instance, no one likes living under occupation. But the most important reason has to do with the Jews’ religious differences from other residents of the empire. Because the monotheistic Jews considered God their king, no other authority could supersede him. Yet the Romans required emperor worship as part of their polytheistic state religion. Most of the time, the Jews got exemptions, but occasional crackdowns threatened their ability to practice their religion faithfully. In such an environment, all that was needed for a full-blown war was the right conditions. And so, “the outbreak of war in 66, disastrous for Judea and destabilizing for Rome, demonstrates the absence on both sides of what is essential for peace: statesmanship. Hope, fear, and wishful thinking, all replaced realism.” 

Josephus’ view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, with the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance. 

Nero, the emperor when the war broke out, was known for many things. Statesmanship is not one of them. But Nero inadvertently paved the way for the establishment of the next imperial dynasty, the Flavians, by appointing the elderly statesman and seasoned general, Vespasian, to subdue this revolt. Nero’s reasoning? Vespasian was of too low a birth to be a candidate for power. Therefore, he could be trusted to not take advantage of access to multiple legions during this war to do something bigger, like make an imperial bid. 

The history of the tail end of the decade proves Nero wrong. The revolt of Vindex in Germany in AD 68 was just the first in a series of revolts across the empire and indirectly precipitated Nero’s suicide. (Vindex has also yielded top-notch modern Roman historian jokes about “windexing” Nero out of power.) In the empire-wide chaos that was AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian rightly decided that he could make a successful bid after all. Leaving his son Titus to manage the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian departed Judea for Italy. Just three years after Nero appointed him to lead the Roman forces in suppressing the Jewish Revolt, Vespasian was emperor. Having a military commander for a son proved to be key for his ability to subdue a rebellious province and defeat another imperial contender all at the same time.

Throughout this revolt, the best documented of the three in this book, Strauss provides the play-by-play reports of military action that armchair military historians love. But I appreciated even more his interest in humanizing the various actors through trying to understand their motives. Who was Josephus? Who was Vespasian? Who was Titus? How and why did they do what they did? We get to know them at least a little bit in the process. 

Adding further depth to the story Strauss tells, reminding us of the complexities of history, lesser-known figures come out of the historical shadows—like Helena, a queen from Adiabene on the edge of Parthia, who converted to Judaism a generation before the revolt, and whose descendants supported the Jews in the war. And then there is another Jew in Roman service, in addition to Josephus—one Tiberius Julius Alexander, who was Titus’s chief of staff during the war. What must it have felt like for him to serve the Roman commander in defeating his own people? He was, in fact, not the only one.

Then there were the ordinary residents of Jerusalem, who were sold into slavery afterwards. Strauss brings up the story of one young woman, whose tombstone yields details about her life: Claudia Aster (perhaps her Jewish name was Esther) was enslaved in Jerusalem and taken to Italy. The man who bought her freed her and married her. It is he who set up the tomb, mourning the death of his wife, aged just 25. Was she captured as a child, or was the capture close to her time of death? We don’t know. But we see how some of the captives, at least, were incorporated into Roman society. Such was the Roman way. 

But this was not the end of the revolt—or its mystique. The siege of the Jewish rebels’ final stronghold at Masada, once Herod’s luxury refuge castle-cum-palace, did not conclude until AD 74, another four years after the fall of Jerusalem. Yet again, we have every reason to question Josephus’s account: was this operation quite so spectacular and heroic as he recounts? In this case, it’s not the winners who tell history, but the losers: “Josephus makes Masada into a parable. He pits Jewish love of freedom—romantic, foolish, doomed, but noble—versus Roman power—brutal, relentless, irresistible, and yet ungrudging in its admiration of courage, even on the part of its enemies.” This view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance—national resilience against all odds. 

Strauss devotes nine chapters to the Great Revolt, supplying the context and then detailing the war. The other two revolts receive only a single chapter each. The reason is familiar to historians of ancient history—it has to do with the nature of evidence available. We simply do not know nearly as much about either the Diaspora Revolt or the revolt of Bar Kokhba. Neither had a Josephus to document it. We are, as a result, at the mercy of archaeology and occasional references from other writers—although in the case of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, a few letters from the man himself have survived. 

Still, the mere existence of these two revolts after Rome’s crushing defeat of the Jews in the first one says something in and of itself. “The Diaspora Revolt (AD 115–116) demonstrates the enduring military traditions of the Jewish people, even without a state of their own.” So does the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which also shows the Jews’ mastery of guerrilla warfare—the one type of warfare the Roman legions had a difficult time countering. The legions were just too well-trained and used to fighting in formation. 

Nevertheless, the Romans eventually prevailed, and following the crushing defeats in three successive revolts, the Jews finally learned the lesson: “war was not the proper means to ensure national survival.” Instead, the answer was spiritual. In this way, Strauss notes, the revolts and their consequences inspired the rise of Rabbinic Judaism, a Judaism that did not rely on the Temple for spiritual access to God. This period of successive Jewish revolts also saw the solidification of the split between Judaism and Christianity. Military events, after all, have ramifications beyond simply geopolitical. 

Nearly two millennia later, we see the continued resilience of the Jewish people—and continued testing of that resilience by Israel’s modern neighbors. True, Strauss notes, we should not underestimate the horrors of antisemitism, both historical and more recent. And yet, the same resilience is now on display in the nation of Israel, into whose stories of patriotism the revolts against Rome have been woven—cue my middle school Lag Ba’Omer celebrations. 

And yet, there’s a warning here as well. Patriotism’s relationship to history is bound to be complicated. Good historians take what seems simple and straightforward and make those straight paths crooked—and, as a result, more factually accurate. Strauss is a skilled guide to these crooked paths in all their complexities. 

It is an honor to respond to my colleague Philip Wallach’s comprehensive and depressingly persuasive overview of the self-inflicted irrelevance of Congress. As any reader of his essential 2023 book Why Congress will attest, Wallach is among the nation’s leading scholars of the legislative branch. My own perceptions of the institution’s contemporary strengths and weaknesses have been so thoroughly shaped by his analyses that I am inclined to simply nod in agreement as I read his essay.

Rather than quibble, then, I would propose a friendly amendment to his assessment, offered in an effort to understand the causes and motives behind the peculiar self-effacement he describes. It is, after all, a phenomenon in need of several layers of explanation. Why would ambitious politicians undermine their own power?

Part of the answer surely lies in the evolution of our political culture in the direction of rhetorical performance art rather than substantive legislative action. A more performative politics almost necessarily advantages the president, who, as a lone figure, is simply better able to carefully stage his actions and manage his brand, and better positioned to draw the attention of the nation. Legislators thus increasingly come to understand themselves as supporting actors in a fundamentally presidential drama, and to behave accordingly.

But another crucial part of the story, as Wallach suggests, has to do with the excessive centralization of power within Congress. That dynamic has left most members with too little legislative work to do, and put most of the agenda-setting authority in the hands of a few party leaders who tend to be closely aligned with presidents of their own party or implacably opposed to presidents of the other party. This has focused Congress’s attention on the presidency and has created less room for interesting differences to emerge within both parties. That in turn makes it difficult for strange-bedfellow coalitions to form in ways that might facilitate legislative negotiation both within and across party lines.

That such centralization has happened is beyond dispute. But that it should have led to a weakening of Congress in the inter-branch struggle for power is actually profoundly ironic, since the centralization of power in the hands of congressional leaders has generally been pursued with the intent of strengthening Congress and its members, not weakening them. A better grasp of why a more consolidated Congress has become a weaker Congress could teach us a lot about this constitutional moment.

The modern push for centralization began in earnest in the House of Representatives in the mid-1970s. It was driven in large part by a perception among younger and more progressive Democrats that their policy agendas were routinely thwarted by the power of committee chairmen—who were generally older and more conservative Southern Democrats. Congressional politics meant intra-Democratic Party politics back then, about halfway through what would ultimately be a four-decade stretch of Democratic dominance of the institution. The majority party in Congress felt itself stymied (and therefore also weakened in its struggle against a Republican president) by its own internal diversity.

In an effort to better distribute power in the institution and empower the increasingly dominant progressive wing of their party, congressional Democrats pushed to reduce the power of committee leaders in favor of party leaders in Congress. And this centralization of power (along with the consolidation of the budget process, which the same Democratic majority pursued at the same time) was also viewed as a way to concentrate and increase Congress’s power in relation to the executive.

That trend toward centralization, pursued with both of those aims in mind, advanced gradually over the subsequent two decades but was then supercharged by the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. In an effort to strengthen the position of a Republican Congress against a Democratic president, the Gingrich Republicans sought to empower the Speaker of the House to more effectively wield their coalition at will and so command a power center that could compete with the president’s control of the executive branch. For this purpose, committees were further weakened, and party leaders came to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over the legislative process and the policy agenda of Congress. As had happened two decades earlier under Democratic control, these changes began in the House and then the Senate embraced them too, if a little more modestly.

The same dynamic was pressed even further in congresses under the control of both parties over the past 25 years. By now, members have come to think of the sheer managerial dominance of party leaders in Congress as a natural feature of the institution. But in historical perspective, it is actually quite unusual. And it has badly deformed Congress’s understanding of its own role.

That deformation has led to what now looks like an intentional weakening of the institution by its members. But that is as much an effect as a cause of Congress’s modern travails. The centralization and consolidation of the institution were intended to strengthen it, and even to give the average member more power (since party leaders are accountable to their broader memberships, while committee chairs are focused on narrower interests). But it has done the opposite, because it was rooted in an error about the fundamental purpose of our national legislature.

That error is a function of a progressive conception of Congress, which argues that Congress’s core purpose is ultimately to advance major legislation in pursuit of a coherent policy agenda on behalf of the majority party. This is not a crazy notion, but it reflects an incomplete understanding of the goals of our system of government.

Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary.

If Congress’s purpose were merely to advance major legislation, it would be reasonable to attribute its problems to its radical inefficiency. Bills move too slowly, too many of them never reach the finish line, and the process of legislation is just too chaotic and unfocused. If that were the source of Congress’s weakness, then centralizing the institution might be a reasonable solution. By giving party leaders more power, reformers could improve the efficiency of the institution and get more done. Such a view would see the reforms of the past half-century as justified, and call for more moves in the same direction—perhaps eliminating the filibuster, or further consolidating the budget process in the hands of party leaders.

But the fact that changes in this direction have only made Congress weaker should cause reformers to reconsider their premises. And that fact is hard to dispute. Centralizing power in the hands of party leaders has left most members with little to do (sending them in search of cameras and social-media followers), and has driven Congress to view itself as structurally ancillary to the presidency. In other words, it has had exactly the opposite effect that the reformers sought when this trend toward centralization began.

The same is true of the modern budget process. The mechanisms intended to allow Congress to consolidate its strength in opposition to the president are now routinely used to render Congress a mere facilitator of the president’s agenda. This is particularly evident in the uses of budget-reconciliation bills, which have come to be understood as a way for a president to achieve key goals when his party has only narrow majorities in Congress—a repurposing that would have seemed utterly bizarre to the authors of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Why have reforms of Congress achieved the opposite of their intended aims for decades? Because Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation. It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines. This is what the institution exists to do, and it is why the legislative branch is meant to be the focal point of political action in a system intended to sustain the political life of a vast, immensely diverse democracy.

Congress is intentionally inefficient so that getting anything done will require relatively broad majorities, which can only be achieved through negotiation across factional divisions. The system is intended to restrain narrow majorities, to maximize the legitimacy of legislative outcomes. But reformers who value efficiency above legitimacy have undermined the institution’s capacity to achieve its core purpose—they have tried to make bargaining less necessary, and in the process, they have led members to think of themselves as less necessary.

The failure to facilitate negotiation and bargaining is a key reason why Congress so rarely passes major legislation now. But that is one symptom of the underlying problem; it is not the heart of the matter. The weakening of rank-and-file members of Congress is another symptom of the same failure to facilitate negotiated accommodations. And so is the weakening of Congress in its struggles for power with presidents.

Properly understood, Congress’s strength, and the strength of each of its members, is a function of the institution’s plurality and internal diversity, and of its capacity to facilitate broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains. By losing sight of that source of its power and pursuing mere efficiency instead, Congress has lost the bulk of that power (without actually gaining much efficiency). And by continuing to misdiagnose its shortcomings, Congress now actively surrenders its power on purpose, and increasingly falls into what Wallach aptly describes as “an overwhelming sense of passivity.”

An unintentional loss of congressional power thus preceded the willful surrender of congressional power that we now see. In essence, reforms of Congress over the past half-century have operated on the premise that members are the problem and leaders are the solution. This has led members to recoil from power, and since congressional leaders are actually answerable to members and their priorities, that has, in turn, led Congress as a whole to recoil from power. Addressing this problem would require re-empowering the middle layers of Congress, and especially the committees. Reformers would have to recreate the possibility of members wielding power in order to reawaken the desire for it.

This suggests that any revival of the legislative branch would require members to become reacquainted with the sources of Congress’s strength, and therefore with the core purpose of the institution. Congress is a venue for negotiated legislative accommodations. Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making such accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary. Fifty years of reforms have fallen on the wrong side of that line.

The sorry state of the legislative branch, which Wallach so ably describes, is therefore intentional only in part. Ironically, Congress became weaker partly through reforms aimed at making it stronger. Those efforts backfired so badly because they were rooted in a misunderstanding of the fundamental purpose of the institution. Recovering a proper understanding of that purpose is key to Congress’s future.

A confident, hegemonic republic somehow begins to careen into chaos and civil strife. Its ruling class has been steadily concentrating the republic’s immense wealth in its own hands, ignoring the growing precarity of the less well-off. As instability rises, this class, which had also largely monopolized political offices, begins to lose credibility in the eyes of the rest of the populace. Demagogues, arising out of the ruling class but exploiting the popular hatred against it, flourish. At the same time, political corruption runs rampant, and political trials become frequent. Yet they often prove to be more a vehicle for entertainment or vindictive score-settling than a forum for justice. Transitions of power become fraught, irregular, and marked by violence. The dangerous logic of one-upmanship means that violations of laws and norms by one side all but guarantee worse violations by opponents when the political tides inevitably turn.

This is how Josiah Osgood depicts the last decades of the Roman Republic, clearly suggesting many worrying parallels between it and the contemporary American one. In his Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, he uses the rhetorical career of Rome’s greatest orator and philosopher-statesman, Cicero, to illustrate Rome’s collapse into civil war and tyranny. Rising from obscure birth to the consulship on the strength of his rhetorical skills and political acumen, Cicero also witnessed the final fall of republican liberty and fell himself in the rampant extrajudicial killings that marked it. His severed head, displayed on the rostra from which he had so often held crowds spellbound with his speeches, was a fitting signal that in Rome the era of rule by law and persuasion had been replaced by the rule of force.

Though much of the book is focused on illuminating the way late republican trials worked and the art by which speakers like Cicero could move audiences, Osgood also attempts to diagnose the causes of the republican order’s collapse. As the subtitle of the book subtly implies, he correlates Cicero’s ascent with Rome’s descent. Osgood is not heavy-handed about this: he does not assign Cicero a great deal of personal blame for Rome’s fall, and he even depicts the statesman in a semi-sympathetic light. But he does suggest that Cicero resisted the reforms that were needed to address Rome’s economic divide. Worse still from Osgood’s point of view is that, despite Cicero’s general principle of opposing political violence, he appears to have endorsed extrajudicial killings when the outcome suited his desires. To Osgood, this makes Cicero complicit in—and emblematic of—the blindness and hypocrisy of Roman elites.

Written in an accessible manner of a good storyteller, the book is an easy and engaging read. Bearing the marks of its origin as a set of true-crime stories of ancient Rome, almost every chapter of the book focuses on a different trial in which Cicero was involved. Osgood relates the salacious details that emerge in these trials—affairs, poisonings, bribery, treachery—with evident gusto. But he also uses these elements as jumping-off points to inform the reader about Roman history, institutions, and famous personalities. For anyone wishing for an easy but also informative and engaging introduction to the world of the late Roman Republic, this book would be excellent.

It appears less aimed at scholars, who would learn less from Osgood’s accessible presentation, and into whose controversies he rarely wades. Osgood’s diagnoses of the causes of Rome’s fall, summarized in the first paragraph of this review, largely tread well-worn ground. A partial exception to this is his focus on the wild nature of Roman trials and the Roman court system more generally. His narrative illustrates compellingly the ways in which Roman trials violate what we would today consider basic legal principles: flagrant appeals to emotion, nasty character attacks, outrageous counter-accusations to deflect blame—all often without the slightest shred of what a modern court would consider reasonable evidence. Lawless Republic shows how Cicero himself was a master of many of these tactics.

Expanding beyond biography, though, Osgood often points to these trials as both indicators and indirect causes of Rome’s decline, painting a picture of institutions fraying and collapsing. He also frequently calls attention to the more structural injustice inherent in them: the privileging of elite testimony over that of commoners and Romans generally over foreigners, the treatment of women and slaves, and how these trials often exonerated those obviously guilty of great cruelty and corruption.

Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior.

Osgood certainly has a point. Rome’s trial norms would never pass modern muster, and Rome’s treatment of those outside the circle of elite male citizens is morally unjustifiable. But he also somewhat downplays how, from a world-historical perspective, the Roman trial system was a tremendous achievement for justice and liberty. After all, the principles of a fair criminal trial are not self-evident, and the Romans made great strides in developing what we would today call due process. For instance, the Romans held sacrosanct the idea that no Roman citizen should be put to death without a jury trial and an appeal to the people (provocatio). Roman trials had (admittedly flawed) rules of evidence and procedure. And although Rome’s oppression of those subjugated to it is appalling, one looks in vain for another ancient empire that established a court specifically to try those of its own ruling class who had mistreated its subject peoples. Indeed, one would find few modern examples of such consideration of foreigners’ interests, either. But that is exactly what the Roman extortion court—flawed as it was—did. Cicero’s successful prosecution of Verres in that court showed that at least sometimes, Rome would do justice by her subjects.

This is no small thing. Rome is perhaps the first great polity in world history to systematically attempt to restrain its own abuse of power—both of its elites against its ordinary people, and of the political community as a whole over others. The attempts at self-restraint were clumsy, inconsistent, hypocritical, and ultimately failed. But that Rome even tried distinguishes it from most historical analogues. Cicero himself would contribute to this project of self-restraint, articulating a theory of just warfare to limit the use of force, refusing the numerous opportunities to unjustly enrich himself when governing Rome’s provinces, and condemning unconstitutional concentrations of power at peril of his life.

The spirit of self-restraint, however imperfect in the Roman case, would be a good model for emulation in a modern hegemonic republic. This is especially so if Cicero’s own diagnosis of Rome’s decline is to carry any weight with us today. According to him, Romans began to lose their freedom as soon as Rome stopped upholding the principles of freedom and justice with others. In On Duties, Cicero contrasted the contemporary period of corruption and self-interested rapacity with a time when Rome functioned as “protectorate of the world,” when “the Roman people maintained itself by acts of service, and wars were waged for the sake of allies or for the safety of our realm[,] … the ends of which were marked by clemency.” To Cicero, it was no accident that the Roman toleration of injustice toward others ultimately culminated in injustice at home—no band of robbers can help but eventually start robbing each other.

Osgood shows how the waning Roman Republic was also marked by what some today decry as “lawfare”—the use of courts and criminal trials to attack political opponents. He seems somewhat to disapprove of Cicero’s participation in this culture of lawfare, yet he also shows compellingly that Rome was experiencing profound political corruption very recognizable to modern eyes: bribery, extortion, cover-ups, attempts to interfere with elections, violent resistance to transfers of political power, and more. Osgood also decries Cicero’s other, less frequent reaction to this: reluctant endorsement of political violence ostensibly to halt other political violence or to overthrow a tyrant. But as he himself notes, increasing violence brings one ever closer to a Hobbesian state of nature. So, what is one to do when peaceful political processes give way to armed mobs roaming the streets? Without trials or violence, one’s only recourse would seem to be surrender.

In fact, we might say that Osgood’s narrative and the history of the late Roman Republic illustrate that, as long as republican politics is going to produce conflict that extends beyond the ballot box and senatorial debate, it is far better that it be lawfare than actual warfare. What seems to have eroded the stability of Rome’s institutions is not so much that its elites were subject to politically motivated trials, but that they so frequently evaded justice nonetheless. Consuls could sell Rome’s foreign policy to bribe-bearing potentates from abroad, candidates for office could stir up mobs to obstruct election results, and tribunes could exercise their vetoes to protect obvious wrongdoers. The immunity to prosecution afforded by holding public office made gaining office a near-necessity for crooked elites, for which they might kill. And this security could in turn be compounded by using that office, once won, to enrich friends, rig juries, and otherwise ensure that even when a term of office expires, their corruption and malfeasance could go unpunished.

Osgood’s book is timely and very persuasively illustrates the way violations of political norms and principles of justice form a vicious cycle. When one candidate disburses a few bribes to win office, it justifies and incentivizes the next to offer bigger ones. When one candidate resorts to political violence and retribution against enemies, it only ensures that when his opponents gain power, they will do the same and worse. The book stands as a warning against that kind of tit-for-tat politics, and the tu quoque reasoning that so often justifies it.

Moreover, Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior. The power of rhetoric and demagoguery in any popular republic should give us reason to doubt that elections will serve as a sufficient check on elite misbehavior. We should count ourselves lucky to have a more developed and thick set of judicial norms and procedures than did Rome. We should zealously and scrupulously protect and revere these rules. They have a chance to save us from Rome’s fate.

A broad respect for the rule of law means that it is less likely (though not impossible) for an innocent politician to be convicted in a proper trial. And for this reason, we should perhaps be less squeamish about the idea of subjecting our political leaders to them when evidence of corruption or political misbehavior arises. To try a popular leader for political crimes may be dangerously destabilizing. But as the example of Rome shows, to allow popular leaders to get away with political crimes is in the long run far more dangerous.

Thomas More was a “failure,” but one worthy of emulation—even or perhaps especially today, five centuries later. So declares Joanne Paul, in a preface to her engaging and exquisitely researched biography, Thomas More: A Life.

But a failure how? More rose from modest origins to become Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. In Samuel Johnson’s judgment, he was “the person of greatest virtue these [British] isles ever produced.” He would posthumously become a Catholic saint, not to mention the hero of a play and a movie (A Man for All Seasons) that won the Oscar for Best Picture. How then was he a “failure”?

More lived through a fulcrum period in Western history when the Christendom of the previous thousand years was disintegrating and the modern secular state was beginning to emerge. This was a transformation that More anticipated with dread, and he dedicated his enormous talents and the best years of his life—indeed his life itself, which he eventually sacrificed on a scaffold—to resisting it.

But his resistance would “come to nothing,” Paul explains. “It is difficult to point to any event or moment in Tudor history and claim that it would have been vastly different without his intervention.”

Even so, Paul sees in More’s failure something admirable and ominously timely. “Tyrants, it will not surprise you to learn, still exist. Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will—a will driven by self-interest, pride and desperate paranoia—rule today as they did 500 years ago.” And More’s “willingness to stand firm and speak truth to an overwhelming power is as relevant in today’s world as it was to that of Henry VIII.”

Not everyone has admired More, of course. He has been depicted (in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, for instance, or in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels) as a shriveled-up, mean-spirited inquisitor. Paul herself does not overtly take sides in these interpretive contests. She mostly follows the literary strategy of “show, don’t tell,” rarely offering her own speculations or judgments about More’s decisions and deeds (except in the preface and the epilogue, where she briefly steps outside her scholarly persona).

Her descriptions themselves are superbly textured. Much of the book reads almost as if Paul had followed More around with a video camera, deftly recording (with all the sights, sounds, even smells) the events, discussions, and disputes through which his life unfolded. How were the chambers decorated? Who was there, and how were they dressed? Who spoke first, who responded, what exactly did they say? The detail is remarkable—I often found myself wondering, “How does she know all this stuff?”—and it helps bring More’s world to life.

It was an earthy world, but also a sacramental world, with constant connections to transcendence. Paul thus tells us about the numerous religious festivals, processions, feasts, and ceremonies in their splendid particularities: the candles, the vestments, the liturgies, the music, the bells. These things constituted the consecrated world that More attempted desperately but unsuccessfully to preserve.

But of course, that world was not all candles and festivals; it was a scene of pervasive violence and political peril as well. As an infant, More was nurtured within a morning’s walk of the murderous doings by which Richard III seized power. As an adult, More lived through a series of foreign wars and, even more ominously, internal political developments whereby Henry VIII consolidated despotic power while dispatching into exile or to execution those who stood in his way. “These matters be King’s games,” More observed, “as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds.”

But More was not a mere spectator of these “stage plays”; he was a central player. This role was the result of a portentous choice—a choice that in one form or another many confront again today. In a political world fraught with danger, corruption, and outright wickedness, should a person attempt to retain his purity by remaining politically detached? Or should he immerse himself in the world, perhaps even compromising himself, in an effort to guide political matters in a satisfactory direction?

More’s friend Erasmus, the renowned humanist scholar, implored him to stay clear of kings’ affairs, to continue in the scholarly and literary work reflected in More’s classic Utopia. But More made a different choice, guided by St. John Chrysostom’s counsel to pursue a life “busy among cities.” And thus he rose from lawyer and local lecturer on St. Augustine to undersheriff of London, thence to foreign diplomat, to member and later speaker of the House of Commons, to close friend and counselor to the king, to Lord Chancellor.

It was in his last years, however, that More’s character—both his admirable qualities and what at least from a contemporary perspective may seem his more censurable tendencies—manifested themselves most starkly. Two developments dominated these last years: the effort in England to suppress the spread of Protestantism, and the tumultuous and transformative doings that surrounded Henry’s campaign to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to consummate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More participated vigorously in the first of these developments. He tried desperately to avoid involvement in the second. And in each instance, he failed.

As king’s councilor and especially as Lord Chancellor, More energetically opposed the introduction of Lutheranism into England. He wrote treatises denouncing Luther and his ideas. He vigorously enforced laws prohibiting the importation or possession of Lutheran writings. He imprisoned and interrogated suspected Protestants, sometimes at his own home. And when the suspects persisted in their heresies (as he believed), More sometimes had them burned at the stake.

More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Such actions provoked both defenses and fierce criticisms at the time, and of course, they are even more disturbing to contemporary liberal sensibilities. Critical biographer Richard Marius discerned in More’s actions a deep anger and almost depravity of character. Hilary Mantel described him as a “blood-soaked hypocrite.” Defenders have argued, conversely, that More was only enforcing the laws; that the number of Protestants condemned to death under his administration was small compared to the number of Catholics who would be executed under Thomas Cromwell, More’s successor as Henry’s right-hand man; and that More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Paul describes the measures More took, and she reports More’s own explanations. Severe measures were necessary, he argued, to protect innocent believers and indeed the kingdom from a deadly theological contagion that would undermine civilization itself. Such discipline was also often the best remedy, he said, for the wayward heretics themselves (for whose welfare More always professed concern).

Were these defenses sincere, and did they justify More’s actions? As usual, Paul tells us what More did and said but offers no “innocent or guilty” verdict of her own.

As for “the king’s Great Matter”—namely, his desire to separate from Catherine and to marry Anne—it was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s failure to achieve papal approval for the annulment that led to his downfall and to More’s appointment to replace him as Lord Chancellor. In accepting the appointment, More obtained Henry’s permission to follow his conscience. But as the controversy escalated and as Henry’s obsession intensified, it became impossible to remain detached. More seems to have cooperated as much as he could. At one point, he appeared before both Houses of Parliament and made the king’s case in lawyer-like fashion, presenting the supporting arguments and evidence without purporting to give his personal views.

And when this was not enough, More resigned the office, hoping to live out his life in private with his family and his books. But it was too late for that.

As it became clear that the pope would not grant the annulment, Henry concluded that the only way to end his marriage was to separate from the Roman Church. To that end, the king and his men employed various barely or not quite legal means to intimidate the English clergy into submission. They revived and expanded an old legal theory of “praemunire,” which forbade appeals to Rome, in order to indict the entire clergy for illegality and disloyalty. When the prelates failed to act on a proposal to make Henry head of the church, the king’s men invoked an old legal maxim treating silence as equivalent to assent. Parliament was induced to amend the definition of treason so that any criticism of the king would now qualify as treasonous if done “maliciously” (a term that, as More anticipated, turned out to mean pretty much whatever the king and the judges wanted it to mean). The law was being cynically used—and abused—to achieve whatever those in power wanted.

And then new laws were passed requiring all English subjects to take an oath affirming the validity of the annulment, the succession of Anne as queen, and, by clear implication, the elevation of the king to be head of the church. More’s refusal to take this oath led to his imprisonment in the Tower of London for fifteen months and, eventually, his trial and execution. Both the king’s men and More’s friends and family pleaded with him to take the oath, as nearly everyone in the kingdom (including his family) had done. He was repeatedly assured, even on the day of his trial, that if he would simply affirm the words of the oath, he would be restored to his freedom and his family. Yet he refused, saying simply that he could not act against his conscience.

Whether he was justified in this refusal was and is debatable, but his courage through the whole affair is unmistakable. Paul relates all of the pertinent developments in riveting detail: the legal maneuvering, the confrontations with Cromwell and others, the earnest conversations with and letters to More’s family. She does so again with little commentary, but it is impossible not to discern the integrity and depth of More’s character through these excruciating events.

Paul reports More’s famous declaration at the scaffold that he was the king’s good servant but God’s first: “As he went to his death, however, More could comfort himself with the assurance that he had lived his life—and given his life—in service of those things he held most dear.”

So, yes, he had lived and given his life in service of those precious things, but he had not managed to preserve them. In an epilogue, Paul portrays the transformed, disenchanted world that was to follow, employing her principle of “show, don’t tell.” Chapter one of the book relates how More was born just after the celebration of Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and it describes the “thousands of small flickering lights” as the “people of London—young and old, male and female, rich and poor—processed through the winding streets” of the city. A century later, the epilogue reports, “no candles were carried by Londoners through their city” for Candlemas. The Tudor revolution had banished the celebration.

More’s efforts had failed. But Paul suggests that they nonetheless had their value, and that they are relevant still:

Those, like Thomas More, who stand up to these men [of power] and remind them of higher principles, deeper truths, greater duties, must be remembered for their efforts, even when they come to nothing. … They are the figures who inspire us when a great booming voice from above tells us we must obey, must submit, and a voice deep within us responds, no matter how quietly, “No.”

I rejoiced when I heard that my children’s school had canceled their weekly library hour. I’m sorry. I know how that sounds. Truly, I am a bibliophile; my kids have been surrounded by piles of books, quite literally from conception. I’ve devoted countless hours to reading to them. But for years, I ground my teeth at any mention of the school library.

On one level, my angst stemmed from niggling practical problems. I hated the mad hunts on library day for random books I had never heard of until we were about to be late for school. I scowled at the new entries on our school bill when we couldn’t find them. It just felt like a massive headache we didn’t need. One could argue, with some justice, that I should lament my own organizational failures instead of resenting hapless librarians. Here’s the harsh truth, though. No book the kids brought home ever became a family favorite. And shared libraries (both public and school) are becoming obsolete. 

It’s not just libraries. In the shadow of advancing technology, many things that have contributed enormously to our civilization are passing away. I’m not exactly celebrating here; in many ways, it’s quite terrifying. But as a parent, it feels self-indulgent to marinate in nostalgia. My kids are going to live in this world regardless of how I feel about it. I’d rather help them figure it out than just close my eyes and pray.

As a conservative, I have a natural suspicion of techno-optimists. Large language models are the big newcomer, and they do raise many new concerns. Everyone appreciates this in the abstract, but talking with fellow conservatives (both older and younger), I don’t always find it easy to make common cause. Many seem inclined to shun AI and other new technologies, to “just say no” or at least encourage everyone to use them as little as possible. I understand, but to me that feels like dereliction, a refusal to face up to the task at hand.

I suspect the difference in perspective stems partly from the age and interests of my kids. Four of my five sons are now in the tween-and-teen range, with a wide range of interests that can obviously be advanced through the use of technology. Older adults can default to a “personally I’d rather not” stance, while parents of young kids often warm to the “Tech Exit” strategy, reasonably believing that young children don’t need screen-based entertainment and are better off in the sandbox. That’s fine, but with older kids, the conundrums get harder. If my children just wanted to rot their brains with first-person shooters, that would be an easy call, but if you have raised your kids to be curious and inventive, they’re likely to want to use technological tools to advance healthy and meaningful pursuits. Parents still have the authority to ban the bots, but the bar on adequate justifications rises considerably. 

It’s chilling indeed to imagine a dystopian future in which people cocoon themselves in a virtual world of pleasantly pliant AIs, like a softly lit hall of mirrors.

The problem calls for careful consideration. Let us return for a blissful moment to the library. Libraries were always my happy place in childhood, and as a university student, I loved studying in the stacks. Some years ago, though, I had an eye-opening experience when I tried to make An Event out of a public library trip in early summer, helping my kids choose summer reading books. I wanted to show them how much fun it could be to browse the stacks and explore their interests and hobbies. But as we ran searches and scoured shelves, I realized I was inadvertently teaching them something else. It didn’t make a lick of sense to explore their interests at the library. Classics are cheap to buy, and for specific interests or hobbies, the library’s offerings were dated and limited in scope. We could have spent the whole afternoon hunting, and come away with far less useful material than my phone would furnish in 45 seconds. That was before large language models existed. 

On hearing this story, some people reflexively start looking “laterally” for adequate reasons to keep the libraries even though they are (by today’s new standards) both inefficient and comparatively ineffective at fulfilling the library’s original defining purpose. Perhaps we should value libraries for the human element: librarians, other patrons, public story hours. We might cherish the experience of walking through book-lined stacks, basking in the delightful smell of old pages. Perhaps the inefficiency itself should be seen as a positive good, since knowledge is more treasured when we have to work for it. 

I am not entirely unmoved by these arguments, especially because I do think that indexes, card catalogs, reading rooms, due dates, and the stacks themselves did much to enrich my own young life. But realistically, people rarely keep doing things in antiquated ways for the sake of the lateral goods. Sometimes it’s positively irrational to do that. Practical reason moves us to prioritize our actual goals over diffuse fringe benefits.

Libraries are just the start, of course. The range of things that you or your kids might want to learn from AI or other new technologies is simply enormous, and in many cases, newfangled methods will offer clear and commanding advantages over more traditional methods. 

As it happens, my sons moved into adolescence at just the moment when large language models were descending upon the world, which honestly felt like a bait-and-switch. I had spent years bracing myself for fraught discussions about social media, data theft, pornography, online gambling, scrolling addiction, video game addiction, cancel culture, and online predators. Those conversations happened, but they weren’t particularly hard. My kids (the older ones at least) already know quite a lot about those issues, but they haven’t asked for social media accounts or personal devices; they don’t even seem to want them. It helps, no doubt, that they attend a K12 parochial school where few kids have those things. It helps that they stepped into adolescence a few years after the “anxious generation” went into a tailspin, giving them (and their parents) the chance to learn from past mistakes. But whatever the reasons, they know that the virtual world can be dangerous and bruising, and show little enthusiasm for flinging themselves into that fray.

Here’s what they do want. They want AI to analyze their last chess game, so they can understand why the opening they just used didn’t work. They want it to generate a map of the travels of T. E. Lawrence, to facilitate their ongoing debate about his strategy as presented in Lawrence of Arabia. They want to know what Jane Austen means when she says that Mr. Darcy has “considerable patronage in the church” not enjoyed by his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. They want an explanation of SpaceX’s latest projects, and its relationship to the US Space Force. They want to know which hard baits are most effective for going after walleye in southern Minnesota in high summer. They want to create a board game that models market growth in the early industrial era more accurately than Brass Birmingham. Once AI has helped them to develop some rules, they can be found drawing up plans for 3-D printed pieces to help them play test their game. That’s just a small sample from the past couple of weeks. It’s a bit exhausting, honestly. Hey kids, how about a nice video game?

There’s a sense of being flanked. Not only did we (my husband and I) not prepare for this sort of campaign, we actively paved the way to it by encouraging our kids to be intellectually curious, creative, and resourceful in pursuing personal interests. All my lessons in reading and understanding a text now bolster their case for using AI to look up literary references. All my lectures about mindless scrolling and “snackable” feeds come back to haunt me when they rightly observe that they won’t need to bump around the Internet gleaning snippets of information if I just permit Gemini to give them a quick response. Large language models can be wrong sometimes, and they know that. But if one only wants fishing tips, or fodder for casual dinner-table debates, aren’t they reliable enough? 

It feels obtuse to spurn such a valuable tool. High-handed lectures on alienation just sound silly when you’re standing in a Walmart aisle trying to select appropriate fishing equipment. Why not just take out your phone and get the needed information? But it’s all quite discombobulating: even as I smile and my children’s enthusiasms, taking a genuine maternal pride in that relentless curiosity, there’s that voice in the other ear whispering, “So, you signed your family up to be guinea pigs for the next technological revolution. What could go wrong?”

Some of the risks are obvious. I know all about student cheating, of course, and the nightmare it’s causing for universities. I fully agree that students must read, write, and articulate ideas if they are to develop their rational faculties. But those aren’t the problems that top my list, because the young people that most concern me are not particularly averse to reading, writing, or articulating ideas. 

Syntheses can be transformative, in a good way. But when is synthesis enhancing our capacity to think, and when is it undermining it?

On a very different front, I am deeply concerned by the things I read about chatbots being used for a simulacrum of love and friendship. Already there are tragic stories about ChatGPT ushering mentally fragile people further along the path to insanity, but as sad as those cases are, I’m even more concerned about the ways in which pseudo-intimacy with machines could erode people’s ability to navigate real human relationships. Truthfully, flesh-and-blood humans can be a real pain sometimes, and when they are, you’re not allowed to switch them off and go about your life. On the other hand, real people can love you, as an algorithm cannot. It’s chilling indeed to imagine a dystopian future in which people cocoon themselves in a virtual world of pleasantly pliant AIs, like a softly lit hall of mirrors. When it comes to chatbot intimacy, “just say no” certainly is my best advice, to my children or anyone else.

But when LLMs are used as tutors and sources of information, the questions get much harder. Here too, there are painful losses on the horizon. The decaying libraries may be the harbinger of worse things to come: crumbling universities, soulless novels, faltering minds, and imaginations. A host of questions arises here about how models should be trained, and by whom. But none of that changes the fact that AI tools, right here and now, can do much to enhance our knowledge. As a great thinker once noted, all men by nature desire to know. Can we “just say no” to the desire to know?

It’s something of a cliche by now that it’s bad to “let AI think for you.” I don’t per se disagree, but the relationship between AI and “thinking” is not straightforward, however. The transformative power of the large language model lies in its tremendous capacity for synthesis. Synthesis can be a very important exercise of human rationality, which the LLM can potentially short-circuit, and yet there’s clearly nothing new about relying on outside sources for synthesis. The OED, in its day, represented a new and powerful synthesis. Atlases are a kind of synthesis. The periodic table of elements is a synthesis of another sort. Syntheses can be transformative, in a good way, and in an unimaginably complex world, we clearly need them. But when is synthesis enhancing our capacity to think, and when is it undermining it? Unclear.

Further, it’s a familiar truth that distraction has been one of the most problematic side effects of social media, smartphones, and other recent technological advances, in part because they placed an enormous amount of data at our fingertips but forced us to do some work to marshal different tidbits and synthesize them. Large language models can do much to remedy that problem, renewing our capacity to focus. What if AI could actually lessen people’s absorption in the virtual world? It’s a possibility we should at least consider. 

Honest skeptics need to acknowledge this much at least: if we refuse to use LLMs, or prohibit them for our kids, genuinely valuable opportunities will be lost. Ancient Greek tutors exist in this world, but not many, and not at a price I could afford. Chess grand masters could provide the high-level analysis young chess nerds want, but they’re unlikely to return our phone call. Answers may vary, but it’s simply a fact that AI is forcing us to confront “how should we live now” questions in a new way. In my mind’s eye, I’m suddenly back in that public library, struggling to explain why we should check out a fraying, dated book on a subject that a new YouTube video could cover in a fraction of the time. Again, I’m floundering.

In the end though, there is this. The questions of this moment are difficult. It’s not right to leave the young and inexperienced to wrestle with them alone. The world has changed, with unclear implications, but at least if we live it out with our kids, we have some opportunity to offer guidance.

As I worked on this column, I could hear my husband and boys downstairs, working on a project of their own. They’re renovating our home library. The old shelves were overflowing, so my husband is surrounding the room with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves. We still love books, you see. Some beautiful things may survive this moment of transition, but if we truly want to save them, we’ll need to be both prudent and circumspect. No one ever saved civilization by suppressing the desire to learn.

Ten years ago on this site, I documented the rise of America’s most prominent socialist, Bernie Sanders, from his surprising victory in a mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont, to becoming a member of the House of Representatives, then the US Senate, and now a leading national left-wing politician. I called his version of socialism “genteel” and asked if it really had any relationship with the hard-edged revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America who wanted to confront the owners of capital, take control of industries, and fight for unions and working people.

Whether they are consciously copying Sanders’ footsteps to becoming the leading advocate for overthrowing America’s “oppressive” capitalist system or not, we now have three individuals who either call or align themselves with socialism serving as mayor or in a very strong position to become mayor of large American cities. Like Sanders, these individuals espouse some very left-wing policies. But can someone serving as a mayor, even the mayor of America’s largest city, really pursue “socialism”? Can local politics ever be socialist?

Chicago’s Brandon Johnson won the general election just two years ago, and now in New York City, Zohran Mamdani is the winner of the Democratic primary, which will likely give him the keys to Gracie Mansion. Then just last week in a very surprising outcome in Minneapolis, another socialist, Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic party at a convention, rejecting the incumbent Jacob Frey because he failed to support a resolution calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas conflict last year and not supporting policies such as carbon taxes and rent control. Arguing, correctly, that they don’t work.

Socialism has been growing in popularity and favorability among the two groups that carried Mamdani to victory in New York—Democrats in general and young people in particular. The day after his stunning victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that it was an army of young volunteers who helped organize his campaign and push him over the finish line, convincingly defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Socialism has steadily become more popular among young people and the left in recent years. A Pew poll from 2022 showed 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable impression of socialism, and that a majority of Americans aged 18–29 preferred socialism to capitalism. Drilling further into the data, the poll found that young Democrats in particular were predisposed towards socialism because it would redistribute wealth and use state power to provide a plethora of various services and other “freebies.”

Mamdani’s bread and butter policies were chosen to appeal to younger left-leaning voters in New York, specifically rent control, subsidized public transportation, government grocery stores, and other superficially appealing (and ultimately disastrous) proposals. Fateh has a similar vision for Minneapolis.

Part of the problem is that for a long time, there was at least one party that staked out a fairly consistent position in favor of less government and more markets, in its rhetoric. That was the Republican Party, coming out of the roots of the Goldwater Revolution through the Reagan presidency up through the end of George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House. The party of the “right” was fairly consistent in at least talking about capitalism and limited government positively. But the GOP now supports tariffs, economic planning, and huge domestic spending programs, alongside strengthening the military. That shift allows Democrats to move further left on a wide range of issues, and the election of these two individuals offers a glimpse of one potential future of American national politics.

Leaving aside national politics, an interesting question remains: Why are we seeing socialism become popular at the local level, particularly in these three cities? First, in the case of New York and Minneapolis, these candidates were successful through unconventional electoral processes—ranked-order voting in Mamdani’s case and a nomination by a local party in Fateh’s. Second, all three of these candidates have won in very blue cities in which socialism is more favorably viewed, but none with the support of blue-collar voters. In Chicago, Johnson was the former head of the teachers’ union, which is one of the most politically powerful organizations in the state. In New York, Mamdani won with support from the “a little rich” boroughs of Brooklyn and other areas filled with highly educated elite voters who believe they are the underpaid relative to their fellow elites on Wall Street and in tech. Resentment by them fueled his victory while working-class voters in the Bronx and Staten Island rejected his calls for government grocery stores, housing the homeless in subway stations, and rent control. Fateh won the support of hard-left party delegates in a city that was the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

There is one more key reason why socialism is becoming more popular among heavily blue cities, and Fateh mentions it prominently on his campaign page when he begins his “Vision” by noting that the White House is occupied by Donald Trump. Of course, this is in conjunction with Trump’s policies. He says he wants to create a Minneapolis that is “the last line of defense” against President Trump and what he calls his “posse of unelected billionaires” in a nod to Elon Musk. I would wager that Mamdani enjoys a similar tailwind in this election. It’s also worth noting that Sanders was elected mayor in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was to begin his first term in office. Coincidence?

Expecting the mayors of their cities to lead the resistance, though, is naive. It’s like signing a punter to solve a football team’s passing game. Mayors have limited powers to take on the national government and a responsibility to handle local policy challenges, not to issue proclamations in support of Middle Eastern policies.

Will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.”

Any thoughtful citizen needs to see what this posse of soon-to-be-elected, self-proclaimed socialists is selling. They have little managerial experience; they are rehashing failed policies that will simply lead to a larger public sector that none of these cities can afford. What’s more, increasing public sector spending in many of the areas they are suggesting has never been effective at addressing the problems these individuals are claiming to solve. That is why blue cities have been losing population and Democrats are bleeding blue-collar support in metropolitan areas.

So, will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.” Historically, socialists have advocated for the abolition of privately held property that would be replaced by collective ownership and central control of the distribution of goods through central planning rather than markets. This has led to decreases in inequality, basically by making everyone tremendously poorer, for example, in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Modern advocates for socialism promote it as a much milder version of the Soviet communist model, but the principles share a lot of similarities. Consider Mamdani’s calls for the abolition of privately owned housing and government provision of retail food. Those are steps towards intervention in two critical areas of daily life. Of course, he lacks the power to confiscate people’s homes and build large public housing projects on 5th Avenue. So can a mayor really be a socialist?

The founders of the Bloomington School of political economy, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent, were always reluctant to describe local politics using sharp divisions between “markets” and “government.” They correctly recognized that the market is an institution that needs some third party to maintain property rights and enforce contracts. Governments need some form of wealth creation to pay for services. They argued that neither can exist in a vacuum without the other.

Rather, cities and localities offer different bundles of services, with individuals exercising choice to decide how those services are provided. Take something simple like trash collection. A city can hire a bunch of full-time employees and equipment, then build its own landfills to handle trash removal and waste disposal fully publicly. Or they could work with private sector providers to pick up trash, contract out with private landfills, and deposit the garbage with them. Most city services can now be provided by private companies, and most cities use some mix of public and private. Here in Indianapolis, the parking meters are run by a private company. Education is moving towards a mix of public and private.

And as the Ostroms correctly noted, it is mayors and city councils who decide how those services are provided. All three of the socialist-ish mayoral candidates seem to be in agreement with the broad principle that more public provision of things is good. For example, Johnson in Chicago is fighting to curtail school choice and protect public teachers’ pensions and salaries, which may be a principled belief, but it also satisfies his strongest group of supporters. Mamdani’s goals of rent control and “free” public transit, along with curtailing police power, might also be principled but satisfy his core supporters. But none of those are necessarily “socialist”. In fact, it looks quite a bit more like a lot of urban governance during the 1960s and ’70s—a period of notoriously poor performance by most major American cities.

That period of failed governance included what became known as “white flight,” when large numbers of city dwellers fled to the suburbs when faced with unsatisfactory governance. Exit is always an option for citizens when it comes to localities. To pay for these “socialist” policies, taxes will increase on “the rich,” who will undoubtedly flee the city to avoid those higher tax rates. At this moment, both Chicago and New York are in tenuous fiscal positions because of unfunded pension funds for government employees. While Minneapolis is in a somewhat better position, it also has approximately $100 million in debt from such pension commitments to government workers.

While the music of the 1960s and 70s is something to enjoy, its urban governance, bankrupt cities, crime-ridden streets, and poor public services are not. And no matter what label you put on them, they will not bring the workers’ paradise socialism promises.

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