Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

The ongoing clash of the titans, President Trump and Elon Musk, is bringing into high relief the question of whether even the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth can stand up to vast private wealth allied to the power of advanced technology. Can mere political power—the checks and balances of constitutional government—ever hope to control the apparently limitless ability of technology billionaires to alter everyone’s lives? Will Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, having created entirely new digital societies, succeed in making themselves the gatekeepers of those societies? Will the new subjects of the new generation of tech builders get a democratic veto on the future being planned for us? Or will we wake up one day to be notified that installation of a brain-machine interface (BMI) is a “required update,” without which we will be unable to make a phone call or access our investment account? Will space travel soon require no government authorization, and colonies on the Moon or Mars be founded, not by NASA, but by the wealthy few who dominate aerospace technology?

We live in revolutionary times because technology is transforming every aspect of our lives—including not only how we work, but also how we connect with each other and find a sense of meaning. Tech founders and venture capitalists—the creators of artificial intelligence, space technologies, social media, cloud, and data platforms—are becoming global power players, whose tools are not just products, but networks that influence how societies function, how people think, how wars are fought, and how peace is made.

As in the socialist revolutions of the last century, the common people have yet to be consulted about these drastic alterations to our way of life, these new directions being set for our future. Socialists justified the lack of democratic accountability by claiming that the proletariat clung to the past owing to “false consciousness.” They could not be expected to discern the Shining Path that lay ahead, so they would have to be driven along it by force. Similarly, the tech titans of today assume that the vast multitude of tech users, many wedded to outmoded ways of life, will resist but will ultimately accept a future in which tech will give them unimaginable wealth and freedom. For now, they will have to be subject to tyrannous updates. Only Elon Musk, with over 222 million followers on his X account, seems concerned about legitimizing this tech future by founding an “America Party.” How successful his latest venture will be remains to be seen.

For now, the gap between Silicon Valley’s mindset and the rest of humanity is widening. The venture capitalists who invest in the most disruptive technologies tend to be techno-optimists like Marc Andreesen or transhumanists like Peter Thiel. All our personal and social problems, such men believe, are now capable of technological solutions. Human beings no longer have to be satisfied with the traditional limits of human nature or the vagaries of democratic politics.

Many tech entrepreneurs, understandably, are done with waiting for government to solve our problems. Elon Musk believed DOGE could save us from catastrophic levels of public debt, but the politicians wrecked his beautiful dream. Why waste any more time in Washington, DC, when the real solutions will be found through disruptive tech such as generative AI or new space technologies? Why rely on faulty human intelligence when we can create a superintelligent and invisible god in the cloud that can govern us, perhaps via BMI implants, far better than we govern ourselves?

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the rest of us could do with a little less disruption as we struggle to come to grips with the tech revolution. We are having breakdowns from all these breakthroughs. We worry that the tech billionaires are more interested in their own success, measured in dollars, than in our welfare. We are alarmed when the logic of finance drives venture capitalists to prefer dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military applications. Military tech cries out to be used, which means war. As Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon’s chief diplomat, once remarked, the only thing you can’t do with bayonets is to sit on them.

What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin.

Private adventurers getting out in front of public authorities are, to be sure, nothing new in Western history. The Dutch and British empires were launched by entrepreneurs who left the political constraints of their home countries to make fortunes in foreign lands. In time, their governments found it necessary to deploy ever more military power to protect their new overseas interests. Presently, they found themselves with empires. As the historian John Robert Seeley wrote of the British Empire in 1883, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” In North America, the restless expansion of British and French colonists ended up triggering the French and Indian Wars, an extension of the European Seven Years’ War that neither the British nor the French governments welcomed. Unplanned imperial overstretch nearly bankrupted both colonial powers, creating the preconditions for two revolutions, the American and the French.

The ambition to transcend the limits of human nature is also nothing new. In the 1660s, shortly after the formation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Robert Boyle jotted down what many scholars have seen as the Society’s to-do list. This was inspired by his mentor Francis Bacon, who wanted to reorient the sciences to more practical aims, principally “the relief of man’s estate.” More than a few items in this list sound strangely familiar:

• The Prolongation of Life.
• The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
• The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed.
• The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
• Potent Drugs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.

Some items would be described today as dual-use technologies:

• The making Armor light and extremely hard.
• A Ship to saile with All Winds, and A Ship not to be Sunk.

It wasn’t called the Royal Society for nothing. Kings and princes had been sponsoring new technologies since Prince Henry the Navigator developed a new naval vessel, the caravel, to explore commercial opportunities on the coasts of Africa. Scientific advances in Renaissance Europe from the beginning were linked with military competition between rival powers.

Entrepreneurs seeking to escape the constraints of government, then, are nothing new. Inventors have been trying to transcend the limits of human nature for centuries. Dual-use technologies are as old as warfare itself. What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin. Never before have the masters of technology had such power at a time when the public has so little trust in traditional institutions. Will the tech titans soon become the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, as Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said of poets? And if so, what can we do about it?

There have been other times in history when ruling institutions were weak and distrusted, and powerful individuals, lacking political legitimacy, have stepped into their place. Another great poet, Francesco Petrarch, spotted the problem in the fourteenth century, following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the discrediting of the Papacy’s moral authority—the two great universal institutions of the Middle Ages. He came up with a solution that sparked the Italian Renaissance, among the most glorious periods of cultural achievement in the Western tradition. For Petrarch, the problems of his day could be solved by a revival of ancient virtue, meaning the lost moral, intellectual, and spiritual excellence of the ancient world. Educating the new leaders of Europe in the classics, he believed, would bring about a general reformation of society and political life. Could a similar strategy be used today?

A decade or so back, tech entrepreneurs started organizing themselves to promote what they called “Peace Tech.” The idea was not to ease consciences by investing in progressive causes, like ESG investing. Rather, venture capitalists would incubate startups that would create “dual use” innovations of a different kind. These technologies, sometimes called “triple use”, included peace as a third pillar. They aimed to build a movement of tech entrepreneurs, coders, developers, and investors committed to using technology to save lives, predict conflict, mitigate violence, mediate tensions, and support post-conflict recovery.

There are all too many reasons to fear political capture of initiatives like Peace Tech, but perhaps a similar model could be used to launch a Petrarchan reform among the new generation of tech entrepreneurs. The Renaissance revival of ancient virtue succeeded by convincing the most prestigious leaders of Renaissance Italy that they could only bring order to the chaos of the times by creating a new class of men and women. This new elite would dedicate itself to moral and intellectual excellence. The governments of that time suffered from a deficit of legitimacy, but virtue—supreme competence, wisdom, and firm moral grounding—could build a legitimacy of its own. The peoples under their rule would willingly accept effective leaders who showed care for people of all classes as well as loving custodianship of sound Western traditions inherited from the past.

A true aristocracy of virtue in tech, or even a few individuals with humanistic leadership skills of an exceptional order, could alter the worldview of the new technocracy, and place technological advance in the service of humanity and the common good—rather than the other way around. In the Renaissance, some powerful but illegitimate rulers like Lorenzo de’Medici sought the good of their peoples without sharing power with them. By contrast, the Founding Fathers, many of them virtuous men trained in the classics, took the European tradition of aristocratic republics and made it more responsive to the will of the people. As is written in the Book of Wisdom, “A multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world.”

Despite being written 180 years ago, Richard Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser, speaks to contested aspects of freedom in modern-day life. It reflects the earlier conception of freedom that historian Sophia Rosenfeld documents in her new book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Heinrich Tannhäuser moves from license to liberty in the opera. The opera illustrates Rosenfeld’s argument that freedom traditionally meant freedom from bondage to disordered desire; it distinguished between liberty and licentiousness. This, in contrast to the dramatic twentieth-century inversion, in which moral license, rather than being an antonym of freedom, becomes a synonym for freedom.

Contrary to the way the opera’s drama is typically framed today, as revolving around Tannhäuser’s choice between profane and sacred love, the first words Henrich utters—even the first notes of the overture—make clear that Tannhäuser seeks the freedom of beatitude. In Act 1, Heinrich, enslaved by his sexual passion to the goddess Venus—today we would call Heinrich a sex addict—describes the opera’s dramatic trajectory (translation by Burton Fisher),

If I remain with you, I can only be a slave.
It is freedom that I long for: freedom, freedom, for which I thirst;
I will struggle and fight,
even if destruction and death await me:
therefore I must flee your kingdom.
Oh queen, goddess, let me go!

The drama in Tannhäuser does not revolve around a never-ending dialectical struggle between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, tempting though it may be to frame the drama as a choice for Heinrich between Venus (Dionysiac) and the chaste Elisabeth (Apolline).

From beginning to end, albeit with fits and starts, the opera revolves around Heinrich’s pilgrimage to free himself from his bondage, his addiction, as he seeks to attain the beatific vision. Ultimately, however, only death can free him from his bondage. It is not the death of romantic extinction, however, it is a death unto life. The dramatic movement arises from how those around him, his ostensible friends and allies, hinder and divert him from his pilgrimage, and from how others help him to free himself, even at great cost to themselves.

The opera challenges modern conceptions of what freedom is and provides a dramatic, and moving, display of what it takes to be freed from bondage to sin.

To be sure, I accept that Wagner’s opera embodies and reflects Romantic-era themes. Yet modern commentary often draws too sharp a line between Romanticism and Christianity. Thematic currents certainly existed in Romantic art that reflected heterodox, immanentistic religious sentiments. But there also existed currents in the movement more congenial to Christianity.

One does not stretch to recognize a Christian theme in an opera in which the libretto provides “To Thee do I journey, Lord Jesus Christ, for Thou art the pilgrims’ hope.” And more diffusely, the common German Romantic trope of the redemptive female, I suggest, draws on the Biblical currents of traditional Christendom in which the Church holds a distinctively feminine identity as the bride of Christ.

That said, the opera shouldn’t be baptized; Wagner himself prevents that. Nonetheless, I think we can interrogate the opera for Christian themes, although interrogate it for themes that challenge today’s all-too comfortable Christianity as much as interrogate it for themes that challenge today’s antinomian conception of freedom.

The Chiastic Structure of Tannhäuser

The opera offers a basic chiastic structure.

The chiastic structure highlights three points about the opera. First, the opera is all about Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage toward beatific vision; it is not about a choice between profane and sacred love. This is clear musically as well as textually. The very first notes of the overture are those from the Pilgrims’ Chorus. The very last notes of the opera are those of Pilgrim’s Chorus. (Some versions end with a trebled “hallelujah,” but those are no more than sung exclamation marks.)

There is a musical shift, however, that emphasizes the concluding words of the libretto reporting Tannhäuser’s redemption: In both the overture and when the Chorus is sung by the pilgrims returning from Rome without Tannhäuser, the meter for the Pilgrim’s Chorus is 3/4. In the opera’s concluding use of the Chorus, it is in the measured and emphatic 3/2 meter.

The pilgrims’ leitmotif frames both the start and conclusion of the opera. Doing so musically links Heinrich’s fate with that of the pilgrims returning from Rome when they sing the Chorus at length in Act 3, “I lay my pilgrim’s staff to rest, because, faithful to God, I completed my pilgrimage!”

The music articulates the same outcome for Heinrich, the change in the meter underscoring the dramatic concluding words of the libretto, sung with emphasis by pilgrims and others on stage, “The salvation of grace is the penitents reward, now he [Tannhäuser] attains the peace of the blessed!” This is the end toward which the opera moves from literally the first notes of the overture.

Secondly, when Tannhäuser departs Venusberg, his pilgrimage not only takes him away from Venusberg, it also takes him away from Wartburg, and Elisabeth, as well. This is why the opera does not circle around Heinrich’s choice between Venus and Elisabeth: Heinrich does not leave Venusberg in order to return to Elisabeth and Wartburg. His diversion to Wartburg and Elisabeth represents a relapse; this diversion threatens his soul.

Finally, Elisabeth’s intercession for Heinrich is the pivot around which the chiasm inverts. The pivot, however, reflects a point of discontinuity for Elisabeth, a significant moment of change. Elisabeth was basically a besotted schoolgirl before growing up spiritually in answer to Tannhäuser’s crisis.

At the pivot, Elisabeth recognizes that in returning to Wartburg, Tannhäuser has placed his soul at risk. Contrary to the view that Elisabeth does little more than fulfill the Romantic-era trope of the sacrificial virgin, Elisabeth matures more than any other character during the course of the opera (including Tannhäuser). After the chiastic pivot, she reflects the deep love of Christ for his people, “Greater love has no one than that he lay down his life for his friends.”

The Dramatic Movement in the Opera

Act 1 opens with Tannhäuser, a medieval German minnesinger (akin to a troubadour) in intimate repose with the goddess Venus in her grotto in Venusberg. Satyrs, fauns, naiads, sirens, nymphs, and others cavort around the couple. (Some versions of the opera open with a longer orgiastic ballet.)

Tannhäuser is jarred awake by the “joyous peals” of church bells he hears in a dream. Moved by the beatific call, Tannhäuser presses Venus to release him from his bondage to her. Initially diplomatic in how he frames his request, Tannhäuser praises the goddess before repeatedly asking to be set free. Venus pushes back, declining his request. The disagreement escalates, musically as well as textually.

Tannhäuser comes clean with his change of heart, “Goddess of pleasure and delight, no! Oh, I shall not find peace and repose in your embrace! My salvation lies in Mary!” (Mary is a synecdoche for heaven and God’s presence.)

Venus and Venusberg disappear immediately; Tannhäuser finds himself in front of a shrine to Mary outside of Wartburg.

Before Tannhäuser is able to continue his pilgrimage, however, he meets a group of minnesingers from Wartburg whom he used to know. While acknowledging them, he begs them to allow him to continue his pilgrimage away from Wartburg. Not recognizing the desperate nature of Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage, they press him repeatedly to join them again and return to the castle. Tannhäuser resists each request until Wolfram, a previously close friend, entices Tannhäuser with the prospect of renewing his association with Elisabeth. The temptation proves too much; Tannhäuser capitulates. Now diverted from his pilgrimage, he returns with them to the castle, and to Elisabeth.

In Act 2, the community gathers with the minnesingers to witness their competition over who can improvise the best song. The Landgrave (the aristocratic lord) provides the topic of the competition: the minnesingers must improvise a song describing “the true essence of love.”

The first two minnesingers improvise insipid songs of drippy platitudes; Tannhäuser scorns their songs (as they deserve). But when it comes to Tannhäuser, that his return to Wartburg represents a relapse into bondage becomes clear: he sings a tribute to Venus and profane love.

His song scandalizes the assembly. The other minnesingers, outraged, advocate Tannhäuser’s exile, even death. While Elisabeth is shocked as well, she alone recognizes that Tannhäuser has returned to Wartburg morally wounded and disordered. Elisabeth intercedes for Tannhäuser, saving him from the mob.

This is the pivot in the chiasm.

Elisabeth’s intercession allows Tannhäuser finally to proceed with his pilgrimage, heading to Rome with other pilgrims to receive absolution from the pope.

In the final act, Elisabeth waits for Tannhäuser’s return from Rome. When the other pilgrims return, Tannhäuser is not with them. She recognizes that Tannhäuser is again spiritually lost. In response, Elisabeth fulfills the terms of prayer she made at the chiastic pivot, giving her life that she might draw even nearer to the heavenly altar to continue praying for Tannhäuser. She departs to die.

Tannhäuser subsequently arrives back in Wartburg. He is lost: The pope rejected his plea for forgiveness, telling him that because he had “sojourned in the Venusberg, from now henceforth, you are eternally damned.” The pope tells Tannhäuser that, as his (the pope’s) wooden staff no longer blossoms, “deliverance can never blossom for you.”

Without hope of redemption now, Tannhäuser braces himself to return to Venus. “I have lost my salvation, now let the pleasures of hell be mine.” Venus appears before him to receive him back, “Now be forever mine!” This return is its own judgment for Heinrich.

Before Tannhäuser departs, however, the minnesingers arrive carrying Elisabeth’s corpse. Wolfram tells Tannhäuser, “Your angel prays for you at God’s throne. She has been heard, Heinrich, you are saved!” Tannhäuser collapses before Elisabeth’s body and cries out, “Holy Elisabeth, pray for me!” And dies.

Another set of pilgrims arrives, returning from Rome. They return, however, with news of a miracle: the pope’s staff has blossomed. Heaven has overruled the pope; the miracle shows that redemption has “blossomed afresh” for Tannhäuser, and he has “attained the peace of the blessed.”

Elisabeth’s Maturation in the Opera

Commentary typically portrays Elisabeth as a unidimensional, “saintly” Elisabeth. The Romantic trope of the redemptive woman. Elisabeth does become saintly. But she’s an earthly-minded girl at the start of Act 2.

Elisabeth fell hard for Tannhäuser before he spurned her for Venus. In response to the hurt and embarrassment, Elisabeth petulantly withdrew from the activities at Wartburg. On hearing of Tannhäuser’s return, her heart flutters, “How strongly my heart jumps.” She sings, “I have been awakened to new life.”

When Tannhäuser subsequently sings paeans to Venus at the music competition, Elisabeth is as shocked as the others, perhaps even more so. Critically, however, she recognizes, as the others do not, that Tannhäuser is struggling to break free of spiritual bondage. Helping Tannhäuser break free of this slavery requires her intercession, an intercession requiring not only that she give up her own hopes for happiness with Tannhäuser as a couple, but that she sacrifice her earthly life for his eternal life.

At the chiastic pivot, Elisabeth recognizes that Tannhäuser’s diversion to Wartburg—and to her—meant a spiritual relapse for Tannhäuser, that he is once again in the demon’s thrall. Elisabeth recognizes this, and makes a fateful commitment to exchange her earthly life to secure Tannhäuser’s eternal life:

May the spirit of belief be granted him, just as the Savior once suffered. … Let him journey to Thee, Thou God of clemency and grace. … Forgive him, who has fallen, forgive the guilt of his sin. I will pray for him. May my life be prayer; grant that he may see Thy light, before he is lost in darkness. In joyful fright, let a sacrifice be dedicated to Thee. Take, oh, take my life: I no longer call it mine.

Elisabeth offering her life as a sacrifice likely strikes the ears of most modern American Christians as heterodox. Jesus, after all, is the sacrifice for the sins of people.

But Elisabeth’s offer is not quite as heterodox as it may initially appear. First, Elisabeth herself frames her request in the context of Jesus’s sacrifice, “just as the Savior once suffered.” And recall that Jesus enjoins his followers to “take up their cross,” the instrument of crucifixion, to follow him. Similarly, Peter writes that Jesus’s suffering provides Christians “an example, so that you may follow in his steps.” Paul refers to his suffering “completing what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of the body which is the church.” The Apostle even suggests he would be willing to be accursed so that he might save others.

From beginning to end, albeit with fits and starts, the opera revolves around Heinrich’s pilgrimage to free himself from his bondage, his addiction, as he seeks to attain the beatific vision.

None of this impugns the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Rather, traditional Christian theology makes a distinction between Christ’s unique propitiatory sacrifice and his followers’ “eucharistic sacrifices”—sacrifices of thanksgiving—for God and each other.

As with Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac, sacrifice is a means by which the faithful can turn cheap talk into credible talk. Elisabeth offers her life to God to underscore the earnest authenticity of her prayer for his eternal good.

So, too, Elisabeth’s sacrifice of her life for Tannhäuser is not as alien to traditional Christian beliefs as it may seem at first. Elisabeth’s offer in this opera is not a Romantic gesture to non-being. While not emphasized much today, Christian baptism provides a proleptic death (and resurrection), a death that kills off the sin nature, freeing the person into life. This death liberates from sin.

Elisabeth and Tannhäuser do not look to death as extinction, but as release into the freedom of divine beatitude. Here, too, they reflect a deep Biblical longing. Paul, for example, longs for the beatitude that results from death, for “to depart and be with Christ is very much better.” This is ultimately the hope of liberation for Tannhäuser, why he sings of his death as part of his liberation from Venus.

This liberation is the opera’s story, from the first notes of the overture to the last notes the pilgrims sing. It is the move from licentiousness to the freedom of beatitude. Without suggesting that Wagner intended it to communicate a Christian message, or that it does not have its share of heterodox Romantic moments, the opera challenges modern conceptions of what freedom is, challenges easy-going assumptions among Christians of what it means to love one another, and provides a dramatic, and moving, display of what it takes to be freed from bondage to sin.

The sheer horror and bleakness of trench warfare is unrivalled. The humanitarian toll of the First World War, which began in August 111 years ago, is staggering, with 10 million military deaths, close to 7 million civilian deaths, and 21 million military personnel wounded. On July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme saw the deadliest day in British military history to date, with 57,000 casualties, including 19,240 dead. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission files reveal that 526,816 British and Commonwealth soldiers of WWI have no known resting place. Tragically, 338,955 have never been buried, and 187,861 have unidentified graves. It is hard to fathom the scale of devastation and brutality that could render half a million families bereaved without even a tangible location in which to mourn their dearly departed. How did half a million men die in service of their country, with no known final resting place? What spurred the idea of a single tomb to commemorate these men? 

These are the questions John Nichol endeavors to answer in his new book The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance. The bestselling author weaves archival research, diaries, and interviews with descendants and military experts to present a moving historical account that both haunts and edifies. A veteran who served in the Royal Air Force for fifteen years, Nichol is all too familiar with the complexities and camaraderie of war. He was taken prisoner in the Gulf War, and his highly publicized captivity became one of the most enduring images of the conflict. In this new book, Nichol quantum leaps between the past and the present to commemorate the fallen. 

At High Wood

If one single moment was emblematic of the loss of the Great War, it was surely there on the first day at the Somme, “when thousands of young men leapt gamely from their trenches, only to discover that woolen uniforms offer precious little protection against machine-gun bullets.” It was a cruel day in which one man was killed every 4.4 seconds. Two weeks later, a combined British-Indian force armed with lances charged into the jaws of a heavily armed, fortified German position equipped with machine guns. The writer explains that early in the Somme, the Allies had developed a strategy referred to as “creeping barrage.” A wall of exploding shells which moved slowly over enemy positions as infantry followed closely behind, with the hope being that any remaining enemy combatants would be forced to stay under cover as Allied soldiers advanced upon them. 

Nichol offers glimpses of the lives of some of the fallen. Bert Bradley with his pipe, young Alec Reader awaiting his release papers, and Sidney Wheater, the hockey player from Scarborough, all died at High Wood. A few hours later, Raymond Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, was shot while leading his men in an attack. In Ginchy, Harry Farlam from Derbyshire, who was so proud to be a Corporal, was killed the next day. Nichol cites the Duke of Wellington’s 1815 remark after Waterloo, “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” At High Wood today, it is estimated that 8,000 nameless soldiers from both sides still lie under the soil. “Many of the dead, never recovered and offered a permanent place to rest, still lie in the earth beneath my feet. So many Unknown Warriors. So many ghosts.”

Chaplain David Railton carried his personal Union Jack on the battlefield in France, taking great care of it. “The flag was a stirring symbol of home, of ‘Dear Old England’, as he put it. It brought a flash of colour to the muted greys and khakis of their dun-coloured surroundings. And it was a Christian symbol, too: a blood-red cross which offered, perhaps, the possibility of resurrection for those upon whom it was softly laid.” When a fresh corpse was deposited, the Padre would cover it with his flag and say a few prayers. He would do his best to identify the body and make a note of the burial location. By November 1916, the combined casualties of the British Empire, the French, and the Germans were in excess of one million, and many families had no closure. 

Fabian Ware, a newspaper editor and educator, thought deeply about the fate of the unidentified dead and their resting places in France. With colleagues, he started an operation comprising sixteen ambulances, a field hospital, touring cars, well-crafted crosses with inscriptions, and tarred bases to prevent rotting. Called the “Graves Registration Commission” (GRC), they were officially recognized by the War Office. Ware worked to establish general principles for burying and memorializing the dead after the war, and what followed was the establishment of the Imperial War Graves Commission, with the Prince of Wales as its president. Writer Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his eighteen-year-old son John in the Battle of Loos in 1915, was appointed literary advisor. It was Kipling who coined the majority of the phrases carved in cemeteries and gardens, and the phrase that is on the white headstones of all the Unknown Warriors: “A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.” Famed architect Sir Edwin Lutyens would design a majority of war memorials, including the Cenotaph. 

The Chosen One 

Railton understood the nation needed closure, healing, and a symbol to represent the devastating loss. Only 32 out of 16,000 British villages had all their men return alive from the war. He proposed that an unknown warrior be interred at Westminster Abbey, and wrote to its dean, the Right Reverend Bishop Ryle. The dean had the ear of both the King and the Prime Minister, and if anyone could get this sanctioned, it was he. Ryle replied three days later: “The suggestion of commemorating the Unknown Dead has indeed been made in different quarters. But your suggestion strikes me as the best I have received. If I could obtain the War Office permission, I think I could carry out the rest of the proposal—the interment, etc. And the idea occurs to me that it would be appropriate as a wonderful way of commemorating the Armistice.” 

Grieving mothers needed to believe the Unknown Warrior could be their precious son; widows had to hope he could be their beloved husband; and children had to be given faith that he could be their dear father. Thus, it was essential that the identity of the chosen Warrior remain unknown. All involved were sworn to secrecy and given specific instructions for the selection process. Four bodies were to be chosen. The whereabouts of the three “unused” bodies were to be sacrosanct. The body had to be a British soldier chosen from each of the big battle areas: Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. The bodies were to be brought to the headquarters at St Pol and placed in the Chapel on November 8, 1920. The parties bringing the bodies were to swiftly return to their areas. The final chosen Warrior would lie in a sixteenth-century-inspired English oak casket.

The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword.

The final chosen Warrior was transported by ambulance to Boulogne on the coast under military escort, along with six barrels of French soil. Soldiers, both British and French, and a plethora of photographers lined the roads approaching the port, eager to see the Unknown Warrior’s cortège. Nichol explains, “A bearer party of British and dominion soldiers was waiting to carry the Union Jack-wrapped coffin up to the Château’s library. The men had been carefully selected to represent all branches of the army: the Royal Army Service Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Garrison Artillery, the Australian Light Horse, the Canadian Infantry, the 21st London Regiment, the Machine Gun Corps and the Royal Army Medical Corps.”

That night would be the only time in which the Warrior was not under the protection of British troops. The “poilus” from the French 8th Regiment were chosen to guard him, in recognition of their valor in battle and as recent recipients of the Légion d’Honneur en masse. “At 10:30AM, all the bells of Boulogne began to toll, and after a blazing salute from the trumpets of the French cavalry, the great bass drums of the massed band began to thump out the sombre rhythm of Chopin’s marche funèbre (funeral march).” France had lost 1.3 million men in the war, and Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, well understood the intense human suffering. He unexpectedly travelled to the procession on his own volition and marched alongside General Macdonogh behind the Unknown Warrior. The Warrior set sail on the HMS Verdun, finally on his way home. He arrived on British soil to the chords of “Land of Hope and Glory,” then travelled by train to London Victoria’s station and onwards to his final resting place at Westminster. The French Unknown Warrior would begin his journey to Paris, where he was honored the following day as his brother-in-arms was being interred. 

A Place of Remembrance 

The Unknown Warrior’s parade began at Victoria Station, passed Constitution Hill and The Mall, stopped at the unveiling of the Cenotaph, and moved onwards to the abbey, where 20,000 applications had been received for around 1,600 places. Newspapers had come across the plea of a young boy who ended his letter with, “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.” A sentiment shared by many. Thanks to Queen Mary, wife of King George V, some places had been reserved for widows who joined dignitaries from across the Empire, including many Victoria Cross recipients, bestowing a very different honor as the Warrior’s peers. The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword. A writer for the Yorkshire Post captured the nation’s mood, “But never have I known any feeling comparable to that of today as I gazed on the flag-covered coffin that enshrined the sublime anonymity of a fallen soldier, from that to the simple but all-moving symbolism of the Cenotaph, and from both to the living, palpitating, pathetic multitude of mothers and wives stricken by the fell blow of war in these recent years. ” 

In the present, Nichol admires the ornate Unknown Warrior’s American Congressional Medal of Honor, affixed to a pillar near the Warrior’s tomb. It is embossed with the single word “VALOR.” More than 60 countries now have their own tomb for their own valiant unknown. Nichol shares that he and fellow Gulf War POWs gather every year on the anniversary of their release. They observe a moment’s silence before dinner and toast to absent friends who did not come home. 

Nichol speaks of the similarities between Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s final journey and that of the Unknown Warrior. The nation mourned for both, with a deep and profound sorrow permeating all quarters. Pride was also thematic in both, “Pride in Her Majesty’s life and her legacy; pride in our Armed Forces and the role they played; pride, above all, in the feeling of what it is to be British.” After laying flowers at Buckingham Palace, I too was a proud Brit who undertook the arduous lying-in-state pilgrimage to pay respects to our Late Queen. It was the mother of all British queues, thirteen hours of walking through the bitter London cold beside the River Thames. We diligently journeyed past iconic landmarks, eventually reaching the Palace of Westminster at 2am. 

Yet as Nichol states, differences exist, too. “Instead of the crown, orb and sceptre lay the workaday steel helmet, webbing and bayonet of a soldier.” Her Majesty was by no means anonymous. With the Warrior, he was everyone, yet no one, yet someone. As written in a personal narrative after the Warrior’s funeral, “The most terrible words in all writing used to be There they crucified Him. But there is a sadder sentence now—I know not where they have laid Him. Surely ‘missing’ is the cruelest word in the language.” The Unknown Warrior was someone’s missing—and there were hundreds of thousands like him. 

I have worn a poppy to remember the fallen and their sacrifices every November since primary school. Blazer or Cashmere coat, made of paper or enamel, ‘tis there on my lapel. It is a reminder to myself and others of what John McCrae so poignantly wrote in the first stanza of his poem, which inspired the symbol: 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

There are rows upon rows of those who loved and were loved. Who, like us, indeed felt dawn and beheld a sunset glow. The century has turned, man’s propensity for conflict has not abated, and peace still comes at a cost. As the passage of time takes us further away from the Great War, Nichol reminds us of our duty to remember—lest we forget.

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) loom large in conservative thinking about poverty and related ills. It’s widely believed that we could restore social health by reining in big government and expanding private religious programs. George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism laid out the standard expansion plan. It called for giving religious nonprofits a better shot at government contracts. That framework has also been endorsed by Donald Trump. In a February 2025 executive order, Trump stated, “The executive branch wants faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship, to the fullest extent permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, programs, and other Federal funding opportunities.” In other words, the plan is to slot FBOs into the NGO state. This merits rethinking.

America’s welfare state relies on a vast network of private nonprofit contractors to enact social policy. From one perspective, that model seems conducive to building a larger FBO sector. From another, it seems designed to tempt FBOs into overlooking how reliance on public financing makes it harder for a program to keep the faith. Temptation is a concept to which one would expect FBO champions, of all people, to appreciate. Ill-advised expansions threaten FBOs’ integrity as religious organizations offering a meaningful alternative to the social services status quo.

Setting FBOs up for success means creating programs that outperform government in boosting school performance, sobriety and employment, and/or that which promote values to which government programs are indifferent or hostile. Without a strong sense of FBOs’ distinctive virtues and the distinctive pressures they face in a secularized culture, policymakers who encourage expansion are setting faith-based leaders up for failure.

Even the most casual reader of Scripture will find his attention constantly drawn to the poorest of the poor, the miserable, the chronically ill and disabled, convicts, and others living openly sinful lives. Out of such stones cast away (Acts 4:8-12), the church will be built. Scripture shows not only Jesus’ sympathy for the wretched of the earth but his extensive personal contact with them. That example instructs that, as Pope Benedict XVI once explained to Peter Seewald, “Giving can never mean primarily giving money … you must give of yourselves.” This notion of giving of yourself is distinctive to modern faith-based organizations, which stretch thin resources through marshalling volunteer labor.

Those without any personal contact with the poor are susceptible to panaceas and utilitarian theories, such as “effective altruism,” that fetishize efficiency. Mother Teresa took constant heat from critics for failing to operate on sound business principles. Straightforward redistribution with minimal overhead will often appear as the most efficient anti-poverty policy. But redistribution will never enact the kind of behavioral change so obviously necessary to anyone who has witnessed firsthand low-income dysfunction. Giving of yourself is also less individualistic than giving of your resources. Paying taxes that go towards Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc., is part of a social contract—a deal made between the free, rights-bearing individual and the government. A redistribution-centered policy promotes a sterile, transactional conception of social work that will always seem unsatisfying to those most moved to heal society.

More than secular programs, FBOs tend to care about behavioral transformation. Aiming for behavioral transformation can yield high failure rates, but that may be defensible. Graduation from a treatment program that everyone graduates from sends a weaker message than graduation from one that most people fail out of. Conservatives sometimes argue that FBOs’ excellence consists in their ability to outperform the secular welfare state. But it may be more accurate to say that their performance can’t be compared, as they often embrace standards of success that are both different from, and higher than, secular programs’ standards.

Those concerned about anti-Christian bias often frame the FBO question as a religious liberty matter. That framing only clarifies whether religious groups can contract with government. It’s less helpful in determining whether they should. In general, an organization spiritually motivated to serve the poor may take public money to do so, as long as it doesn’t discriminate based on sect and doesn’t use taxpayer dollars to evangelize. But evangelism is precisely how FBOs reach some people failed by secular programs. Take addicts. People in recovery often fail to stick the landing because they lack something or someone to recover for. Family and friends can serve that purpose, but addicts often lack healthy social ties. Indeed, one of the standard best practices of recovery is to avoid the “people, places, and things” associated with one’s old, using ways. Building new relationships—a new life, really—takes time, leaving the typical man in recovery feeling that the only person he has to recover for is himself, which is a lonely state of affairs. But religion is always there—to provide structure, guidance, and cause for persisting in one’s sobriety. If recovery is like conversion, maybe it should be conversion.

Evangelistic work is tough sledding with poor people leading complex lives. All at the same time, they’re trying to get their kids out of foster care, obtain their high school equivalency and some form of professional certification, maintain sobriety, and secure reliable transportation and stable housing. Amidst such chaos, it’s tempting to conclude that evangelization needs to wait. On the other hand, that waiting can wind up taking forever. A crisis can present special evangelical potential. People in recovery often testify that they became sober the same day that they became a Christian and that, moreover, they’d never have made it without their faith. Reflecting on testimonies like that will naturally lead to further reflections on whether similarly situated individuals are positively harmed when social programs eschew evangelizing.

Trust can’t take root amidst fears that the next presidential administration will renege on the deal. As the old saying has it, “with government shekels come government shackles.”

The orthodox tend to bristle when religion is pitched as a life hack for staying sober. But the argument is more dialectical than utilitarian. A recovering addict will be a better Christian if he’s sober. Further, good works have a strong evangelistic upside. In The Rise of Christianity (1996), sociologist Rodney Stark credits first-century health and human service ministries with the early church’s survival. He quotes Tertullian: “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’” Performing good works obviously holds evangelistic potential for the performers, too. Chuck Colson, Watergate con and founder of Prison Fellowship, once wrote: “The richest spiritual experiences I have known have not been in vaulted cathedrals surrounded by stained-glass windows but in the filthiest prison cells. Christians will miss the greatest blessings if they isolate themselves from the reality of the world in which God lives.”

Secularizing pressures, in the world of twenty-first-century social services, are unrelenting. One pressure point is staff. Should an organization desire to integrate Christian teaching throughout its work, success will depend on what kind of personnel they can hire in an age of diminished church attendance. In 2023, the bishop of Toronto gave an interview to The Pillar in which he lamented the impracticality of finding 40,000 teachers who are “fervently Catholic” to staff the parochial education system he oversees. Should religious charter schools get off the ground, they would in short order face a similarly impossible dilemma. The big organizations (Catholic Charities; Lutheran Services in America) are those most functionally indistinguishable from the secular welfare state. That may be due not only to compromised leadership but staffing exigencies.

Downstream of personnel concerns are those of leadership transition. Many FBOs are now led by a founder or CEO who took charge two to three decades ago and is now personally out of step with the twenty-first century’s more casually secular standards. What happens when that person dies or steps down? At bare minimum, a faith-based leader should be a churchgoer. Diminished church attendance, societywide, means that the pool of potential faith-based leaders is smaller than it was thirty years ago. In principle, leadership transition creates the opportunity for revival. And yet, in my years of experience interviewing and meeting with faith-based groups, mainly homeless service providers, I have found revival to be rare. Many new leaders come in promising continuity with their predecessors in terms of religious intensity. Many come in promising fiscal discipline, a sharper focus on “outcomes,” an expanded donor base, and enticing capital improvements. It doesn’t happen very much that a new leader comes in promising spiritual renewal and pretty much just that.

The compassionate conservative theory of FBOs was premised on pluralism, in both the social services and American religious life. Earlier in the twentieth century, it had been maintained that, without strict church-state separation, the Protestant majority would exercise unjust dominion. Religious pluralism dissipated those fears. Parallel to that, as a legacy of the Great Society’s insistence on “community action,” America adopted a highly decentralized, “nonprofit industrial complex” style approach to fighting poverty. President Bush was impressed by sociological studies directed by Catholic political scientist John Dilulio that had documented that low-income neighborhoods were dense with scrappy Christian groups doing vital work in youth mentoring, child welfare, crime prevention, and addiction. These groups were seen as being discriminated against by government funding norms, forcing them to, as Bush put it in a July 1999 campaign speech, “make bricks without straw.”

Compassionate conservatism lost support after 9/11, when Bush’s attention shifted towards foreign policy. But not everyone was sad to see it fade. Author Marvin Olasky said that “compassionate conservatism mutated into a program to help local groups apply for money in Washington and learn how to work the bureaucracy.” There is indeed an essential grubbiness associated with the scramble for government contracts that carries great reputational risks for the faith-based sector. But the deeper problem is that pushing more FBOs into a reliance on government funding will give government leverage over them. Risks associated with that leverage have intensified in the era of “pen and phone” policymaking, which President Obama developed and his successors have continued. Any faith-based leader interested in contracting with government must be able to trust that he will not thereby sacrifice his organization’s integrity. That trust can’t take root amidst fears that the next presidential administration will renege on the deal. As the old saying has it, “with government shekels come government shackles.”

The steelman case for taking public money stems from need. It seems to be the case that private resources available to an FBO don’t grow at the same rate as the need in its host community grows. Many charitable organizations are philanthropically tapped out in their community; others could raise more private resources, but only via conforming to big philanthropy’s dubious whims. What faith-based social services guru Robert Lupton calls “toxic charity” possesses no moral superiority over mediocre government programs. Staying small is a recipe for barebones service offerings, which some FBOs might be content with, but many won’t. The hardest cases’ complex needs (“comorbidity”) necessitate an equally complex array of services. A modest-sized FBO may not be in a position to hire its own master’s level social worker, psychiatrist, clinical psychologists, nurse practitioners, job training and educational specialists. If you lead a good social program (who would want to lead a bad one?), it’s natural to want to help more people, or at least do a better job helping those to whom you’re already committed.

The best approach to expansion uses partnerships with government agencies as opposed to direct funding. Partnerships can facilitate access to more specialized services. In the best kind of partnership, government effectively makes an in-kind donation to an FBO. A shelter for single men hosts onsite detox services from an outside healthcare provider. The best partnerships are settled on the faith-based provider’s terms, not the government’s. A useful model is the San Antonio-based Haven for Hope, which boasts dozens of partnerships with government and other outside service providers. The federal government could play a role by urging more states and counties to, in exchange for funding, articulate how they’re actively exploring partnering with faith-based providers.

But proceed with caution. In rightwing circles, “O’Sullivan’s Law” stipulates that institutions that are not identifiably conservative become liberal over time. Consult, for example, the sad history of Catholic colleges (at least one of which currently offers a certificate in “Cannabis Studies”). Sullivan’s law most certainly applies to faith-based social service providers. Government funding can easily catalyze organizational drift from offering a distinct choice against the secular welfare state into serving as an echo of it.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, has received extraordinary attention in recent weeks, and for good reason. It is meticulously researched, tells an important story, and contains vignettes that will shock even the most cynical readers. It is also adroitly written. Although all readers know how the story ends, the authors created a genuine page turner. 

The book has a narrow focus, providing details about Joe Biden’s inner circle, as well as information about other top Democratic politicians and donors. It rarely expands outward to provide greater political or historical context. It nonetheless raises important questions that I hope all Americans with an interest in well-ordered politics and policymaking will ponder in the years ahead. Our increasingly dysfunctional Executive Branch suggests something has gone wrong with our constitutional order, requiring prudent reforms.

Original Sin is a rare work of political non-fiction that people across the partisan divide can enjoy, though for different reasons. Despondent progressives, looking for someone to blame for President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, can now point to some key figures who ensured that the Democratic Party would be in disarray in the months leading up to Election Day. Republican readers can relive the Schadenfreude of watching their opponents flame out. Even Biden loyalists should appreciate the sympathy the authors show the president, both for his sad decline and the heartbreaking personal losses he suffered over the previous decade, especially the death of one son and the legal and personal troubles of another. President Biden is presented as a tragic figure, not a villain.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, the Biden Administration’s “original sin” was the choice to run for a second term, despite clear signs of the president’s decline. Conservative pundits had been noting this for years, yet the president’s allies and, less forgivably, much of the mainstream media, denied that there was a problem. In a different era, other Democrats might have been more persistent in their efforts to determine whether Biden remained fit for the job, but because of their concern that another Trump presidency would end democracy in America, any criticism of the president was considered unseemly or even dangerous. Biden, after all, had defeated Trump once before. Could they be sure that another Democrat would have similar success?

Biden had previously declared that he intended to be a bridge to the Democratic Party’s future. When running in 2020, he telegraphed that he intended to defeat Trump, serve one term, and turn over the party’s reins to a younger standard-bearer. However, there was no mechanism in place to make him keep his word. His performance during his first years in office was, to most Democratic voters, acceptable. The Democratic Party’s presidential primary elections were perfunctory, at best. Insiders who witnessed Biden’s decline firsthand had few incentives to go public with their concerns. They feared being labelled as traitors, giving aid to Trump. Thus, most remained silent until Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024 made his growing challenges undeniable.

Biden’s eventual withdrawal from the race scarcely improved the Democrats’ chances. There was no time at that point to hold a competitive primary election. Furthermore, failing to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris risked alienating key demographic groups in the party, even if she was an uninspiring candidate. Despite being nominated without much of a fight, she was in a difficult situation. She had spent months insisting the president was in perfect health. In accepting his departure and taking his place at the top of the ticket, was she acknowledging her own dishonesty about Biden’s cognitive decline? She wanted to present herself as an agent of change, but she had difficulty articulating how, if at all, her priorities would differ from Biden’s. She had little choice but to run as a quasi-incumbent, stuck with the baggage of her predecessor, with an unclear vision.

The book drives home that the problems of the modern presidency cannot be entirely blamed on Trump and his allies. Depending on one’s political allegiances, it is either vindicating or alarming that we saw many of the same pathologies during both administrations. To support their president, but perhaps more importantly to defeat his opponent, Democrats were willing to lie, to bite their tongues, to abandon principles, and ultimately act in ways that proved counterproductive to their own cause. Biden himself engaged in some of the same practices for which he and other Democrats had justifiably criticized Trump, most notably a penchant for nepotism and the baffling decision to keep classified documents unsecured in his personal residence.

The authors make a strong case that, at least when it came to foreign policy, Biden proved up to the task. Whatever one thinks about his approach to NATO and Ukraine, he was intensely focused and pursued his agenda with skill—at least for the first few years of his presidency, before his decline became more noticeable. With a limited amount of energy to spend, however, he gave less attention to many domestic affairs. The authors suggest, for instance, that Biden was largely asleep at the wheel when it came to immigration policy, letting more progressive young staffers make unpopular policy decisions that Biden himself would have likely opposed if he were paying more attention. His perceived weakness on the border proved to be a political gift to his Republican opponents.

I have previously warned conservatives that the right’s declining human capital, as measured by voting patterns among the highly educated, will create inevitable problems. It was thus interesting to learn that the Biden White House, despite having a large talent pool to draw from, was not exactly brimming with great minds. For instance, we learn that certain Biden aides did not know the difference between astronomy and astrology. The Biden Administration was also circled by its share of grifting consultants, demanding extraordinary sums far outweighing any value they might provide.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency.

As a conservative critic of the Republican Party’s populist turn, convinced it has resulted in great mischief and damage to our political institutions, it was a strange relief to see that many of the problems I see in the contemporary GOP are also found among their opponents. This is not based on a desire to engage in “whataboutism”—the effort to deflect criticism by pointing out the other side’s failings. Rather, seeing similar issues emerge across the partisan divide indicates we suffer from systematic problems, and this knowledge will assist us as we seek to diagnose their causes and consider potential solutions.

The authors offer few suggestions about how we can avoid similar issues in the future. They suggest that presidents need to be more forthcoming about the state of their health, including their mental capacity. It would be straightforward to legally require presidents to take regular physical and mental exams, with the results provided to the public. This strikes me as reasonable, though I doubt we will see such a development during the current administration. 

I am insufficiently naïve to believe that as a nation we can reach a bipartisan consensus on many major issues at the present time. I nonetheless hope that more people across the political spectrum will conclude that the role of the presidency in American politics has changed for the worse, becoming a hindrance to functional politics. All of politics now revolves around presidential elections. Members of the president’s party in Congress now fall in line behind the president’s agenda, becoming mere auxiliaries of the White House. Members of the opposing party seek to block that agenda, and they look for any reason (justified or not) to hinder presidents with a deluge of investigations and impeachment threats. Those members who would follow their own judgment and principles, rather than toe the party line, determined by the president, are viewed as turncoats. Members no longer seem interested in safeguarding their own institution’s prerogatives, unless it is to score ephemeral partisan points.

The presidency will always remain the ultimate prize in American politics. This was the case even when the office was considerably less powerful. It should not be the only office that interests us, however. Not so long ago, conservatives argued that Congress, not the presidency, should be the most powerful and important branch of the federal government. It may be time to revisit their arguments. The late conservative scholars James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall, reasonably considered two of the conservative movement’s sharpest minds, argued persuasively that Congress was intended to be the most important branch of the federal government, and its diminishing influence represented a major problem.

Burnham argued in his 1959 book, Congress and the American Tradition, that maintaining freedom requires strong checks and balances, but also a strong legislative branch. This would keep power sufficiently diffuse and keep tyrannical impulses at bay. However, as the ideology he called “democratism” has increased in strength, it has resulted in the nation’s greater insistence that policy reflect a mythical general will. This ideology loathes intermediary institutions that can block the people’s desires. A presidential election, according to this thinking, represents a national mandate for the winner, and pushback from other branches or levels of government is viewed as a betrayal of democracy. The result is popular support for an accumulation of presidential power. Perhaps ironically, in the name of perfecting democracy, the public is clamoring for a Caesar.

For Burnham, the transition toward executive supremacy was an existential danger to liberty. It is notable that, as an uncompromising Cold Warrior, Burnham understood the importance of a strong executive, but he also recognized its dangers. Unfortunately, much of the right today seems to wholeheartedly embrace executive power as the only solution to the problems they perceive with American governance. Burnham has received renewed attention from the intellectual right in recent years, largely because of his realistic approach to political power, both at home and abroad. I hope that more of his contemporary admirers will revisit his arguments on this question.

Kendall, for his part, also believed in the importance of a strong legislative branch, and warned against allowing other branches to usurp its powers. He argued that there are always two majorities in America: the presidential majority and the congressional majority. The presidential majority, being national in its scope, is perceived to represent the popular will of the nation. It prefers fast action, it is dismissive of deliberation, and it is inclined to demagoguery. The congressional majority, in contrast, better represents the nation’s diverse interests, makes decisions after lengthy debate, and ultimately provides a more accurate reflection of the people’s will. Kendall’s thought, I should note, has also received renewed interest from conservatives, in part because, of all the major post-war conservative intellectuals, Kendall is one of the very few who could be plausibly described as a populist. Unlike other conservatives of his day, he never exhibited anti-majoritarian views. He sincerely believed in majority rule, but he argued that the legislative branch was the best institution for discerning and implementing the majority’s will.

I am not suggesting that a rebalancing of power that weakens the executive branch will prove to be a panacea to the kinds of problems presented in Original Sin. Congress, of course, has its own gerontocracy problem, especially the Senate. However, Congress will never be so completely dominated by one person, and it would not long allow a senile member to maintain one of the more important positions of leadership. We could furthermore also start demanding that members of Congress also submit to annual health exams and publish the results. If this proves insufficient to drive out incompetent members, changes to the current seniority system that benefit long-term incumbents may be worth considering. In any case, it is time for members of Congress to claw back much of the authority they have given to the presidency, which alone would lower the stakes of presidential elections. A more independent legislative branch, less fixated on helping or hurting the president, would also be less apt to reward politicians according to their talents as sycophants or thoughtless obstructionists.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency. Partisan vitriol and polarization are not going away anytime soon, but I hope good-faith observers of American politics will recognize that neither side of the divide has a monopoly on shameful behavior, and the rot is deeper than a few vain political leaders. The cult of the presidency has become a hindrance to responsible government, regardless of which party occupies the Oval Office.

Every right is a liability. A pension, a healthcare benefit, a tax deduction—even the right to private property—derives its validity from being legally enshrined in one form or another. Yet beneath this legal articulation lies a fiscal reality. Protecting and enforcing each of these rights requires a financial commitment that the state must honor through lawful public means: transparent and lawful taxation, properly allocated budgets, and reliably managed currency.

Trouble begins when the state reaches the limits of its financial capacity. At that point, it can no longer fulfill its fiscal commitments within the boundaries of law. Instead, it begins to meet them at the margins of legality—through improvisation, manipulation, and disguised extraction. The result is not just economic degradation. It is the erosion of the rule of law.

This raises the question of what, exactly, the rule of law demands. Legal theorists have offered a range of answers, often speaking of it in idealized terms. Some define it procedurally: the rule of law requires general, prospective, stable, and publicly known laws. Others adopt more substantive definitions, encompassing rights to property, equality before the law, or access to justice. Some go further still, suggesting that the rule of law must include expansive claims to social and economic justice—redistribution, affirmative rights to housing and employment, environmental equity, and so on.

But these accounts share a common limitation: they treat the rule of law as a purely ideal concept. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it creates a risk—we focus so much on what the law should be that we overlook what it needs to function. The result is a vision of legality disconnected from the practical realities that sustain it.

This means that the rule of law is not simply an independent variable in the architecture of the modern state; it is also a dependent one. Lawyers—inveterate normativists that we are—tend to fixate on what the law ought to be, losing sight of the material and institutional conditions it requires to function. But the rule of law does not arise from legal principles or political will alone. It relies on underlying material and institutional conditions—especially the state’s ability to remain fiscally solvent.

When that solvency erodes, the machinery of legality begins to stall. Rights go unenforced, procedures become empty rituals, and the state operates increasingly by discretion rather than by law. When the state nears the outer limits of its fiscal capacity, the consequences are stark. The state then turns to functional substitutes for taxation: methods of financing public obligations without formal tax increases or budgetary debates. Chief among them is inflation.

History is full of episodes where state insolvency did not merely erode legal order—it obliterated it.

Inflation is a tax by other means. It transfers wealth from savers to the state, from the private sector to the public ledger, without a single vote being cast. It erodes the real value of nominal public liabilities—such as pensions, social benefits, and government debt—diluting what the state owes its citizens. It also distorts private obligations, quietly rewriting contracts and undermining expectations. But that is a separate concern. What matters here is that inflation operates as a form of unlegislated taxation, bypassing the formal procedures and public accountability that define democratic legality.

Inflation is only one such tactic. Depending on the seriousness of the fiscal shortfall—and on the government’s ability or willingness to reduce spending—insolvent states may also freeze bank accounts, convert savings into low-yield bonds, impose retroactive taxes, or use regulatory takings to confiscate private assets. They may declare emergencies to bypass legislative procedures, defer payments, or devalue the currency overnight.

These are not routine exercises of administrative discretion within a stable legal framework; they are extraordinary responses to fiscal breakdown. I witnessed some of these measures firsthand growing up in Brazil during a period of fiscal distress and hyperinflation (which at one point reached 6,000% annually), when emergency decrees, account freezes, payment moratoria, and index manipulation became part of everyday life. While such actions were typically carried out under color of law, they blurred the line between legality and expediency. What unites them is the substitution of legal rule with administrative discretion—a shift that tends to gradually undermine the rule of law.

History is full of episodes where state insolvency did not merely erode legal order—it obliterated it. Ancient Rome offers a distant, but instructive, illustration. While the Roman Empire lacked a modern legal order, it depended on legal and monetary institutions to maintain stability. In the third century, mounting military expenditures, administrative burdens, and declining revenues led emperors to reduce the precious metal content of coins. But debasement meant to stretch limited fiscal resources unleashed high inflation. Faced with growing instability, Emperor Diocletian issued the 301 AD Edict on Maximum Prices. The law fixed prices under penalty of death; yet it proved unenforceable, drove commerce underground, and contributed to a broader erosion of confidence in imperial institutions, paving the way for the mounting civil strife that followed.

Many centuries later, Weimar Germany offered a modern counterpart: a constitutional state undone in no small part by fiscal collapse. Hyperinflation in the early 1920s wiped out savings, shattered public trust, and made a mockery of legal and contractual commitments. In response, German jurists developed the theory of Wegfall der Geschäftsgrundlage—the disappearance of the basis of the transaction—as a way for courts to adjust debts and obligations no longer tenable in nominal terms. In the chaos that followed, the door was opened to the demise of democratic institutions and the rise of political forces we now recall with unease and revulsion.

Argentina offers a more recent example. In the early 2000s, confronted with a collapse in public finances and an inability to meet its obligations, the government faced a deep fiscal and financial crisis. It responded by freezing bank accounts and soon after forcibly converting dollar-denominated deposits into devalued pesos—an emergency measure that wiped out household savings and shattered financial expectations. In the years that followed, the state manipulated inflation statistics, seized pension funds, rewrote private contracts by decree, and expropriated private assets, all under the banner of expediency. These were not merely improvised policy responses; they marked a deeper unraveling of legal certainty. As the state’s solvency eroded, so too did the rule of law.

Brazil tells a parallel story. There, fiscal fragility has repeatedly corroded the reliability of legal protections. In the 1980s, facing acute budgetary strain and hyperinflation, the government relied on monetary restatement mechanisms, wage and price controls, and complex indexation formulas to reallocate resources outside the formal budget process. These tools not only altered private contracts but also allowed the state to quietly redefine its own obligations—delaying, diluting, or reshaping payments it was otherwise bound to make. The pattern continued into the early 1990s, when President Collor—the first democratically elected leader in decades—abruptly froze personal checking accounts of individuals and companies in a desperate attempt to reduce liquidity and contain inflation. The move upended financial expectations and triggered a wave of litigation that dragged on for more than twenty years. Although the severity of these interventions has diminished, the underlying dynamic of fiscal weakness compromising legal certainty remains visible in Brazil to this day.

Law continues to be cited, but no longer constrains. Its forms persist, but its substance erodes.

Even the United States is not immune. In 1933, amid collapsing revenues and rising debt burdens, President Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard, nullified gold clauses in public and private contracts, and required citizens to exchange their gold holdings with the Treasury under threat of severe criminal penalties, including prison. These extraordinary measures sharply reduced the real value of federal obligations and triggered a constitutional showdown. In the 1935 Gold Clause Cases, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld Roosevelt’s actions, even as it acknowledged the threat they posed to the sanctity of contractual commitments. A generation later, in 1971, President Nixon, facing mounting balance-of-payments pressures and eroding confidence among foreign central banks, suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, severing the last external check on US monetary expansion. From that moment on, fiscal and monetary restraint would rely almost entirely on domestic institutions: rules, norms, and political self-restraint.

But as expenditures grew and deficits deepened, those internal constraints began to erode. Over the past two decades, the Federal Reserve has purchased trillions in Treasury securities—especially in response to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic—effectively financing deficits without direct legislative approval. These measures, while technically legal, bypass the deliberative rigors of the budget process. Informal workarounds like these have increasingly displaced formal fiscal governance. The result is a slow but significant institutional drift, and one that blurs the line between emergency response and permanent exception—a quiet slide toward rule without accountability.

This pattern is not merely a matter of economic policy. It reveals something deeper: the contingent nature of legality itself. The monetary constitution—the framework of rules and norms that governs how money is created, valued, and managed—serves as a backbone of the broader legal order. When fiscal pressures grow too great and those rules give way, legality begins to unravel. Law continues to be cited, but no longer constrains. Its forms persist, but its substance erodes. What remains is a hollowed-out shell: the rule of law in appearance, but not in effect.

To preserve the rule of law, we must stop treating it as an autonomous force, detached from material realities. Legal constraints depend on solvency. No constitutional text or institutional reform can substitute for the fiscal capacity that makes law enforceable. The rule of law may restrain the state—but only if the state can afford to be restrained.

AI didn’t break higher ed. It revealed the cracks: falling standards, eroded norms, and a growing disconnect between degrees and the job market. These problems predate ChatGPT. Colleges had already begun relaxing expectations around attendance, participation, and performance, especially through online and hybrid formats designed for convenience, not rigor. But the shift wasn’t merely structural. In chasing enrollment and cutting instructional costs, many institutions de-emphasized disciplines with deep traditions of structure and rigor, expanding instead into programs that are easier to scale online—but often less grounded in formal methods or measurable outcomes.

Online and hybrid courses haven’t just changed how students learn; they’ve reshaped what many now expect from faculty, coursework, and from college itself. Even in-person classes now often mimic online ones: asynchronous lectures, automated grading, and minimal oversight. Access may have expanded, but rigor declined. Worse, the system created perverse incentives for both sides. Students can drift through with minimal effort, while colleges collect tuition without paying for proctors, classrooms, or meaningful engagement. By Fall 2023, over half of all undergraduates were enrolled in at least one online course, down from a pandemic peak of 61 percent in 2021—but still far higher than the 37 percent pre-pandemic baseline (NCES).

Courses are filled with countless deadlines for assignments submitted through LMS—on time, flawless, and perfectly formatted. But unless you watch a student produce the work, it’s often safer to assume they didn’t. The occasional flawed submission is almost a relief—it signals genuine academic effort. But when the norm looks artificially perfect, we pile on more busywork to preserve the illusion of difficulty.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1984, when I took financial accounting at the University of Missouri, the grade came from a proctored midterm and final. We had two lectures each week of frenzied note-taking, plus a one-hour lab where the TA demonstrated problems. Homework wasn’t graded—no points, no deadlines. Just a simple question: do you want to learn or not? That structure built discipline, self-efficacy, and the understanding that not all effort is rewarded equally. Today, students in my financial accounting sections complete roughly 75 graded tasks, and the reality is that students are often rewarded for meeting deadlines more than mastering material.

Max Weber described the rise of the industrial economy as rooted in a cultural shift: work became not just survival, but a moral calling. The “protestant ethic,” he argued, prized discipline, method, and accountability—values that once shaped serious education. Students were expected to struggle, persist, and improve under structures that demanded real effort.

Today, we’ve traded that ethic for a customer-service model. The burden of failure has shifted from student to institution, and colleges have responded by softening deadlines, removing requirements, and lowering standards—all in the name of “access.” According to the 2023 Faculty Attitudes on Technology survey by Bay View Analytics and College Pulse, nearly half of tenured faculty say academic standards are falling, and over a third admit to lowering rigor to avoid failing students.

Lowering standards doesn’t help students—it undercuts them. Young people don’t thrive on indulgence. They grow when they’re expected to stretch, struggle, and improve. Easy grades and endless accommodations don’t build confidence, but instead erode it, leaving behind resentment and a quiet contempt for a system that demands so little.

The collapse of expectations has less to do with student effort than with the erosion of program structure. Disciplines like accounting endure because they are built on formal logic, practiced with precision and verified through accountability. In 1494, Luca Pacioli laid out the method of double-entry bookkeeping and insisted it be taught “diligently and with great care,” under a master who explained both the mechanics and the reasoning. That philosophy of disciplined learning became the foundation of global commerce—and it still works.

The university has long served multiple aims: cultivating moral character, transmitting culture, building intellectual capacity, and preparing students for economic life. These goals are not mutually exclusive—but in today’s debt-driven landscape, it’s understandable that students and families focus on financial returns. When institutions mislead on that front, they erode trust not only in their economic promises, but in their civic, moral, and intellectual mission as well.

That ideal of a rigorous education that forms both intellect and skill has quietly been abandoned. In place of structured, skill-based instruction in fields like accounting, nursing, and engineering, many programs now emphasize interpretive, feelings-driven coursework that rewards compliance over competence. The result? Business graduates fluent in “behavioral science” who can’t read a financial report—but can recite ethical frameworks developed by faculty later discredited for research fraud.

Higher education has failed in two ways: by misrepresenting what degrees are worth, and by eroding the standards that give education meaning. AI didn’t cause these failures; it has simply revealed them.

The problem goes beyond pedagogy—it’s economic. Too many degree programs are misaligned with labor markets, yet they’ve become central to the business model of higher education. Students select these programs believing they’re acquiring valuable skills, but often graduate into careers that don’t require a degree at all.

Just as Max Weber observed that prosperity was fueled by a new ethic of disciplined work, the age of artificial intelligence will demand thinkers trained in structure, logic, and rigor.

Take the University of New Mexico’s psychology program, its second-largest undergraduate major. It advertises pathways into clinical work, management, and executive leadership. But the data tells a more constrained story. According to the College Scorecard, median earnings for UNM psychology graduates five years out hover around $45,000—roughly equivalent to the wage for Social and Human Service Assistants, the most likely outcome, though likely not the career students imagined when they enrolled. Students enrolled with the promise of upward mobility. What they got was debt and disappointment.

This is bigger than one program at one school. Psychology is the fifth most commonly awarded bachelor’s degree nationwide, with 129,600 degrees conferred in 2021–22 (NCES, Table 322.10). But it also ranks among the majors with the highest underemployment and lowest median earnings (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2024). That misalignment between promise and outcome is at the heart of higher ed’s trust problem.

Psychology isn’t inherently unserious. But in too many institutions, it’s taught more as a vibe than a discipline, an appealing blend of activism, pop science, therapeutic language, and minimal math demands. For students uncertain about their future, it feels relevant and affirming. For universities chasing enrollment, it’s low-cost to deliver and easy to market. The result is a major that often substitutes engagement for rigor, offering students neither the intellectual structure of the sciences nor the labor-market traction of the professions. This isn’t merely misrepresentation—it’s institutional negligence.

And it raises the central question in education: who are we teaching, and what are we teaching them? For centuries, the “who” was narrow, often restricted by class, gender, and race. Expanding that access is one of higher education’s great achievements. But access alone is not justice. If we broaden the “who” without safeguarding the rigor of the “what,” we give students seats in the classroom but deprive them of meaningful outcomes. A degree means nothing if it represents nothing. It may carry symbolic weight, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Students may not always see the gap at first, especially if grades are high and expectations low. But over time, outcomes speak louder than intentions. And when those outcomes disappoint, trust in the system collapses.

That failure doesn’t just appear in earnings data; it shows up in the classroom. A system willing to exaggerate economic outcomes cannot be trusted to assess learning outcomes. Students learn quickly what’s real and what isn’t. They see a university that rewards the appearance of effort more than the substance of learning. Work is submitted that wasn’t written by the student, and instructors pretend not to notice. Assignments are polished, but understanding is shallow. The rituals of college persist, but the substance has withered—and under scrutiny, the system unravels. Not because of AI, but because of poor leadership.

That’s why AI feels so dangerous to modern universities. It doesn’t just threaten pedagogy—it exposes the illusion. When anyone can generate passable work with a prompt, the weakness of our assessment systems becomes obvious. The answer isn’t to ban AI. It’s to raise standards. Design assignments that demand original thought and reinforce structure, effort, and accountability.

If we want students to thrive in a world of intelligent machines, we must demand more of them—not less. That means restoring rigor in the classroom and holding students accountable for their own learning. Real learning pushes them beyond comfort and into competence. There is no shortcut. We already know what works: proctored exams, high expectations, and treating learning as the student’s responsibility, not the institution’s. These reforms may shrink enrollment, but they will restore higher education’s integrity and purpose, and create the conditions for sustainable growth.

We are entering an era of economic expansion that will dwarf the Industrial Revolution. Just as Max Weber observed that prosperity was fueled by a new ethic of disciplined work, the age of artificial intelligence will demand thinkers trained in structure, logic, and rigor—on a scale we’ve never seen.

But higher education is not preparing them. Instead of deep, demanding scholarship, many colleges now offer convenience, illusion, and credential inflation. As Jefferson warned more than two centuries ago, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

At its best, higher education is both a cornerstone of civil society and a driver of economic mobility. The public recognizes this and supports it through generous subsidies. But like any large, publicly funded system, higher education suffers from inefficiencies and abuse. Chief among them is the erosion of rigor: colleges have replaced the hard work of instruction with rubrics, deadlines, and automated tasks. Students submit work they didn’t write. Faculty assign work they don’t read. What passes for engagement is often simulation. And at the program level, degrees are frequently misaligned with labor markets—sold as pathways to opportunity but producing few measurable returns.

Defenders of the system point out, rightly, that not all value can be measured in dollars. Intellectual growth, civic understanding, and moral development matter, and higher education has long been a home for those goods. Greek and Latin, subjects without discernible economic return, carry enduring civic value. However, while these goods are real, they’re often pitched as byproducts of programs marketed as career gateways. When students take on debt expecting increased earnings, those promises become a public concern. We have no macro-level tools for measuring intellectual development, but we can measure debt, wages, and employment. And by those metrics, many programs fall short. Degrees marketed as career pathways often produce earnings no higher than a high school diploma.

Federal law now reflects this distinction: under Section 84001 of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, programs that fail to improve earnings over a high school baseline lose loan eligibility. Colleges are free to offer philosophical enrichment or spiritual exploration. But once they take public funding and market themselves as engines of economic opportunity, they incur an obligation to deliver. As the line goes: Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. The moment you take Caesar’s coin, you accept Caesar’s accounting.

Ever since President Trump launched his protectionist tariff agenda at the outset of his administration, economists have offered a common plea to other countries: do not retaliate. This wisdom must often contest with the impulsive political pressures of trade wars, and yet it is the soundest economic path. Politicians often believe that retaliatory tariffs place a burden on the foreign country that picked the fight. Retaliatory tariffs tax your own population by burdening them with higher prices and fewer consumer choices. The actual result, however, is akin to imposing a blockade on your own ports to spite an adversary who chose to do the same to their ports. This strategy seldom ends the trade war though, because the bulk of the resulting economic pain is self-inflicted.

Trump’s early targets largely ignored the counsel of economists to forego retaliation. Canada, then in the midst of an election campaign, imposed countervailing duties on American goods as its Liberal government sought to project an image of strength in the face of international bullying. Trump responded by doubling down. The situation with China rapidly devolved into a retaliatory standoff with threatened US rates on Chinese imports reaching 145 percent, and China’s countermeasures increasing to 125 percent. Both sides de-escalated from this brink in May, but only partially. The US now imposes a 30 percent tariff on most Chinese imports, whereas China now taxes American goods at 10 percent—substantial hikes over the single-digit rates that prevailed in the 2010s.

Until last week, it appeared that the 27-member European Union was about to join the retaliatory trade war. With Trump threatening a 30 percent tariff on European goods, EU leaders floated the idea of invoking their “Anti-Coercion Instrument” (ACI)—an aggressive suite of retaliatory tariffs, export and import controls on the US, intellectual property restrictions, and limitations on American investors in Europe. Suddenly, on July 28, Trump appeared to pull a rabbit out of his hat by announcing a sweeping trade deal. According to the White House announcement, the EU would accept a 15 percent US tariff on European goods, or half the threatened rate, but also significantly higher than the average 1.47 percent duty that existed before Trump started his trade war. Pre-Trump EU rates on American goods were even lower, sitting at about 1.35 percent before Trump’s term, but the White House now claims that Europe will further reduce these mostly vestigial levies on a small number of products.

The US-EU announcement sent shockwaves around the political press. Trump declared “victory” over the Europeans. French officials raged at the outcome, calling on Brussels to reverse course and deploy the retaliatory ACI. Other European leaders seemed resigned to the fate of accepting higher American taxes on their exports, calling it the least-bad outcome. On the American side of the debate, some tariff-skeptics reacted with surprise, even suggesting that Trump’s tactics had upended conventional wisdom about trade wars. Oren Cass, the protectionist lawyer who runs the “New Right” think tank American Compass, appeared to be confused by the development even as he celebrated. Cass declared on a podcast that the EU’s unexpected turn away from retaliation somehow disproved all of the economists who had been pleading with the EU to resist retaliation.

Surprisingly few commentators have paused to examine the underlying strategy that led to the US-EU tariff de-escalation. Almost all sides of the debate have accordingly missed a subtler lesson, one related to legal and institutional dynamics at play.

Before digging deeper, it warrants mention that the EU “trade deal,” like the others that Trump has announced to date, is not a conventional trade agreement between nations. Neither Congress nor its European counterpart has voted on the specific terms, which may not even exist beyond the verbal pledges that Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made in a meeting on the day of the announcement. There are no publicly available documents containing the text of this “deal” or any other that Trump claims to have secured. Trump and his counterparts have not even formally signed anything that would legally bind them to their terms. The EU deal is at best a framework of loose commitments that may or may not be formalized at some future date.

And therein lies the key to understanding why some nations have opted against a retaliatory strategy. The tariff agenda sits on an extremely shaky legal and political foundation. Tariffs remain unpopular in the United States, with recent polling showing that American voters oppose them at a margin of almost 2-to-1. The EU and other countries might accordingly believe that their best strategy is to wait Trump out until a future election outcome reverses his trade war.

More importantly, Trump has eschewed even conventional US tariff statutes when implementing his current measures. Up until this spring, most US tariffs followed the procedures laid out in obscure federal statutes: the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the Trade Act of 1974, and a handful of other measures. These laws contain clauses that allow the president to impose temporary tariffs on specific goods or countries if certain stipulations are met, such as a national security need, or evidence that another country has been “dumping” goods into the United States or trying to injure its industries. 

The rationales behind these clauses are often politicized, but they nonetheless contain specific statutory requirements to invoke. Usually, that means the White House must formally investigate whether the conditions have been met and submit its findings to a regulatory review process. Congress also has formal oversight powers to review any tariffs enacted under these clauses, and may vote to reverse the president’s decision. Most presidents have made periodic use of these clauses to impose limited tariff measures, including Trump’s tariffs on China from his first term. But all of these measures have taken place under relatively strict statutory processes and review requirements.

Not so with Trump’s current round of tariffs, which are far more expansive than anything he attempted in his first term. Instead of using the aforementioned trade statutes, Trump has claimed the power to impose tariffs by unilateral executive order under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. By using IEEPA, Trump believes he can enact new tariffs for almost any reason he wants. He has accordingly set new tariff rates by posting letters to foreign leaders on Truth Social, or by announcing the terms of an “deal” that he made in an informal conversation with a foreign head of state.

The biggest risk to Trump right now is that the appellate and Supreme Courts both strike down his IEEPA tariff orders, and with them every “deal” he has secured to date.

There’s a huge constitutional problem with Trump’s use of IEEPA, though. This statute does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. It does not even contain the word “tariff” or any of its common synonyms. Trump has merely inferred that he has this power through a tendentious interpretation of IEEPA’s “emergency” provisions.

Trump’s use of IEEPA now faces a serious challenge in the federal court system. Earlier this year, the US Court of International Trade ruled that Trump misused IEEPA. The ruling is under a procedural pause as the case makes its way through the federal appellate system, but the clock is ticking. A federal appellate court will likely rule on the case in August, which in turn will probably fast-track it to the Supreme Court in its next term. If the courts continue to rule against Trump, his entire tariff agenda—including every single “deal” made under his IEEPA orders—could be voided in an instant.

Although Trump is fighting to have the trade court’s ruling overturned, the underlying legal issues present a tough sell for the White House’s lawyers. In addition to Trump’s strained interpretation of the IEEPA statute, he faces a constitutional obstacle. Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide tariffs and tariff rates under its tax and commerce powers. 

Previous court rulings have upheld laws wherein Congress authorized the president to modify tariff rates under certain conditions, such as the aforementioned Trade Acts of 1962 and 1974. But they’ve never authorized the president to simply set the rates himself for any reason he wants. The long-established “nondelegation doctrine” requires Congress to set an “intelligible principle” for the executive branch to exercise a delegated power, and the parallel “major questions doctrine” bars executive branch agencies from deciding policy questions of great economic and political significance on their own without express congressional authorization. The Court of International Trade cited both doctrines in its determination that Trump abused IEEPA to impose tariffs. A majority of justices on the current US Supreme Court have also ruled against the executive branch in cases involving similar questions, such as West Virginia v. EPA in 2022 and in their rulings against President Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive federal student loans without congressional authorization (a detailed explanation of these legal arguments may be found in the amicus briefs filed in relation to the case).

Returning to the international arena, Trump may be playing with fewer cards than he realizes when he attempts to negotiate tariff deals. The EU and other governments know that time is on their side with both the tariff lawsuits and the US political climate. And that recognition changes the dynamics of their strategies by shifting them away from retaliation. Consider the possible scenarios.

The biggest risk to Trump right now is that the appellate and Supreme Courts both strike down his IEEPA tariff orders, and with them every “deal” he has secured to date. Courtroom outcomes are never guaranteed, and they tend to operate on the judges’ own schedules, but this outcome could conceivably occur in a matter of months. If that’s the case, then the EU has every incentive to take the 15 percent tariff “deal” and just wait it out until the courts make their determination.

Suppose that the Supreme Court punts on the case for procedural reasons, or finds a rationale for upholding the tariff policies. Even in this scenario, waiting may still be the more prudent strategy for the EU and other trading partners abroad. They may be banking on Trump losing one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms, as often happens to the incumbent president’s party. If the Democrats regain the majority, they will almost certainly remove a procedural rule that Republican Speaker Mike Johnson imposed back in April to prevent floor challenges to Trump’s IEEPA tariffs (Johnson adopted this rule because he currently lacks the votes to defeat a direct challenge if a handful of free-trade Republicans break ranks and vote with the Democrats). An opposition Congress would make it more difficult for Trump to enact tariffs by executive decree, thereby limiting his ability to use them as leverage for his “deals.”

A third scenario could play out in the 2028 election, where both political parties will be nominating new candidates due to Trump’s term limits. On the unlikely chance that the current IEEPA tariffs are still in place in 2028, their survival into the next administration would come down to a simple pen stroke. Since Trump enacted his tariffs by unilateral executive order, they could also be rescinded by any future president at will. Here, the absence of any codification of Trump’s tariff orders and “deals” into law becomes their main future vulnerability. If tariffs remain politically unpopular, Trump’s successor will face growing pressure to rescind them, no matter the party that wins.

From the EU’s perspective, these scenarios amount to a surprisingly short timeframe. Trump’s tariffs could be stricken down in court in a matter of months, or they could collide with mounting political opposition in 1.5 to 3.5 years.

Under these conditions, the advantage goes to the side with greater patience. Risky strategies such as the EU’s retaliatory ACI, or retaliatory tariffs in general, become less appealing if you know there’s a good chance that Trump will be stripped of his claimed tariff powers in the near future. It may mean enduring a little short-term pain from accepting the higher tariffs of a Trump “deal,” but in the long run, all of Trump’s negotiating cards have an expiration date. 

America is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic that broke out in 2020. Not only was it one of the most deadly health incidents in our history, but the strategies imposed by central planners to contain its spread also inflicted countless costs on everything from the economy and education to social life itself. Stephen Macedo, an author of a recent book evaluating the pandemic’s aftermath, joins Law & Liberty contributing editor G. Patrick Lynch to discuss the price of the pandemic on this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Related Links

In Covid’s Wake by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
Liberalism vs. Scientism, a book review by Mary Carmen Mead
The Pandemic in Hindsight by Law & Liberty‘s Editors (March forum)

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

G. Patrick Lynch (00:39):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m G. Patrick Lynch, a senior fellow at Liberty Fund and a contributing editor to Law & Liberty. And for this episode, I’m filling in for James Patterson. Today we are joined by Stephen Macedo, who is the Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality. We will be discussing his latest book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, co-authored with his Princeton colleague Frances Lee. Macedo and Lee have appeared in many major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and The Hill, to discuss the book, which has been lauded for its critical review of the political and policy responses to the pandemic. Steve, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Stephen Macedo (01:36):

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

G. Patrick Lynch (01:37):

Well, it’s great to have you here. As I mentioned to you before we got started, I think this is a tremendous book and I congratulate you and your co-author, Professor Lee, on it. I want to begin by saying, I know for many of us, looking back on the pandemic is personally difficult because of the challenges we all faced, particularly those of us who lost loved ones. And yet in my view, this book is immensely important because it serves as a sort of a truth commission almost on the Covid response by the government, and it reveals a lot of unpleasant truths about how poorly the public sector performed. The title of your book suggests that the government failed the test of Covid. As a professor, would you have given the government an F for its response on Covid?

Stephen Macedo (02:18):

Well, thank you for the introduction first of all. I haven’t really sat down to think about that. And I think I would say that actually the scope of the focus of the book is a bit wider than just the government, though public health officials and others obviously played a very important role in a way, the focus of the book is on what we call the” truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy,” journalism, science, public health included in that of course, and universities more broadly. And while it’s true that public officials did, I think in many cases pass the buck and say “follow the science” in a way to avoid taking responsibility for hard decisions themselves, it’s also the case that these other institutions did not ask hard questions and didn’t play their role as well as they should have under the influence, I think, of the polarized environment in which we live, a kind of epistemic tribalism that so deeply affects our politics.

(03:20):

So we do look back on the record and try to be as accurate as we can. It’s really only the beginning of a reckoning because there’s so much we don’t understand still. I think about what happened and what the results of the policies may have been, but it’s our best shot at doing a first take, fair mindedly, on what happened. And we do emphasize the shortcomings. Part of it is that there were a bunch of pre-Covid pandemic planning documents, which looked at these non-pharmaceutical measures going back to 2005, 2006, and they were skeptical, let’s put it that way. They emphasized the weak evidentiary basis for a lot of those measures that were imposed. And they emphasized the importance of being frank with the public about the weak evidentiary basis and the certainty of costs, considerable costs from imposing these measures.

G. Patrick Lynch (04:18):

I’m glad you raised that because I think that was one of the most eye-opening parts of the book. I think if you asked the average citizen, if they knew that, in fact, all the pre-pandemic planning had shown that there was skepticism about many of the measures that were pursued, they would be surprised. And I certainly was surprised. Can you explain to our listeners exactly why policy officials in most of these major health organizations in the public health field generally advocated for abandoning most of this planning? What happened? What shifted in their thinking?

Stephen Macedo (04:47):

Well, let me say a word about those things first. It is remarkable that the planning documents went back early to 2005, 2006. George W. Bush read John Barry’s book on the great influenza of 1918, and he initiated these planning processes. There was always a national security component as well, having to do with bioweapons, but he was concerned about another pandemic. There were mathematical modelers who were optimistic about the effectiveness of these measures, very optimistic. And they wound up playing a leading role as it turned out in shaping some of the discourse. But going back to that era, scientific officials who looked at this, including the Institute of Medicine, as it was called back then, which has issued a report on these measures and said that they found the evidence unconvincing and that there was a lot of uncertainty around these measures. And anyway, in 2019, Johns Hopkins did one of these surveys on all of these non-pharmaceutical measures, social distancing, mask-wearing, school closures, border closures, and so on.

(05:49):

And emphasized just as you said, the weak basis. And the World Health Organization did one that came out in November 2019. And among the things that said there, again emphasizing uncertainty, weak evidence, was that there were certain measures that were not recommended under any circumstances, including border closures, quarantine of individuals who had been exposed, and contact tracing, and those were not recommended under any circumstances according to the WHO. And those were all implemented in short order during Covid. I think what happened and what shifted the discourse was partly that the World Health Organization sent a team to China in late January 2020 to survey their response. And that team came back after spending about seven or eight days in China in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and proclaimed that the Chinese had solved the problem, that they had defeated the virus, and that every government in the world should follow the Chinese strategy of suppressing the virus, locking down–something that’s never really been attempted in human history before.

(06:55):

And when you read that report from the World Health Organization, a joint mission that included half Chinese participants, half non-Chinese participants, only a couple of Americans were involved in that, it reads like an award citation, as we say in the book, it’s just uncritically endorses the strategy. So that played a major role. And then there were a couple of other things too. A bombshell report came out of Imperial College London on March 16, which had very impressive graphs. The lead there was Neil M. Ferguson, who’s another mathematical modeler who had been involved in the original 2005, 2006 projections. He said that if we didn’t impose this whole suite of measures, this “Report Nine” from Imperial College said that if we didn’t impose this whole suite of measures by the end of August 2020, we’d have 2.2 million dead Americans. So that report, which was finalized and published on March 16, the Trump administration had gotten an advanced copy of it, that was shown to Donald Trump on March 16.

(07:58):

And later that day, he had a news conference where it was recommended that places with infections spreading should close bars and close other places and impose lockdowns. By that time, schools had already closed across substantial parts of the country. But so those two things were important, and there were other projections that were made. 3.4 percent death rate was projected by the head of the World Health Organization in, I think it was February, or maybe it was early March. So there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of uncertainty of course, and the original lockdowns were very widespread across the country and across Europe. But I think what’s in a way most important is that the European–well, some countries never closed their schools at all. I don’t think Iceland ever closed at schools. Sweden never closed them for kids under 16. And the Western European countries in general, France and Germany and other places in Europe, reopened their schools at the end of April and May.

(09:03):

And it was clear, by the middle of May certainly, that schools were not spreaders of Covid and that teachers were not at great risk. And the European health ministers met education ministers, excuse me, met I think it was around May 10 or something, and issued a statement of the education ministers from around Europe saying that it was safe to reopen schools. So there was a lack of learning, especially in Democratic states, which closed down faster and stayed closed much longer than Republican states. It was a partisan pandemic, as we say in one of our chapters, that there was a striking partisan divide on the stringency of all of these measures with democratic states imposing school closures much longer. Republican states were generally reopening their schools in the fall of 2020. Many Democratic school districts were closed through almost the entire 2021 school year. California closed right through March. So the discourse, the narrative, became very rigid and intolerant of dissent. So I would say that a big part of the book focuses on the shortcomings of public deliberation and kind of intolerance of dissent, forgetting the fundamental principles of science and, in a way, classical liberalism: To be open to dissent, to allow criticism, to welcome criticism, and to not close off disagreement prematurely.

(10:37):

I think one thing that happened, we found is that, about April 2020, once the lockdown strategy had been adopted in, of course, many parts of the country, but there’s the sense of a war mentality that arose. We see this in a report that came out of the Safra Center at Harvard that was endorsed by the Rockefeller Foundation and other foundations including the Niskanen Center, and indeed the American Enterprise Institute put out a Covid planning document or policy statement around that time, April, May 2020, which also endorsed the lockdown strategies to some considerable degree descent, became that this is our chosen strategy and dissent was unwelcome, that we were on a war footing and we needed the equivalent of national unity in the face of a war, in this case, a war on Covid. So as in previous wars, we cracked down on dissent, and that was the big problem. Mistakes get made, but we should have been more open to dissent and disagreement and more ready, prepared to learn over the course of 2020, especially over the summer.

G. Patrick Lynch (11:52):

So this is one of the questions I wanted to ask you, because I think the emphasis on deliberation, discourse, and exchange of ideas is one of the strengths of the book. You mentioned, for example, the Great Barrington Declaration in the book and talk about it in a way that I think is probably the fairest and most honest assessment of it that I’ve seen because it was such a polarizing document when it first came out. And you also mentioned the example of Sweden. Before we get into the sort of who was right question, can we talk a little bit about the importance of deliberation during these times of crises? I guess I was struck by, on the one hand, the hopefulness that y’all place in the importance of having that deliberation discourse during a crisis, during this war language. But is that too much to ask of democracy? Is it too difficult to believe that during a crisis we can tolerate and have that kind of discourse and exchange? And I think this is obviously critical, looking back on Covid, and potentially even more important for looking forward to whatever the next problem’s going to be.

Stephen Macedo (12:53):

Yeah, well, it is a very reasonable question, and I don’t have a particularly good answer for it. One thing I would say is that other democracies did a better job. There was more open debate, I think, in the UK, there’s a very good book by Mark Woolhouse called The Year the World Went Mad. He’s obviously very critical of the lockdown strategies, as you can tell from the title of the book, though he supported the first lockdown, though in retrospect, he doesn’t think it did much good because these lockdowns tend to be imposed after the viruses, the horses out of the barn. So the lockdowns tend to get imposed, late viruses tend to come in waves. So oftentimes the rates of infection will drop at some point after, and people assume that’s because of the interventions, but it just turns out there’s not a lot of great evidence for that.

(13:39):

But they did learn more over the summer in the UK. There was more open debate there. And in Germany and France, I think. So the US is especially polarized by Western standards, and this is a dispiriting picture, a window into the state of our highly polarized political discourse. So I wouldn’t hazard guesses about how well we’ll do in the future, but we do need to think about this. And part of what happened, I think, is, as you’ll recall, 2020 was an election year. Donald Trump was on the ballot. He was associated with the “Let’s reopen the economy as fast as we can” sort of approach. He also, of course, referred to the virus as the “China virus” and so on, kind of unhelpfully actually. But suggesting that the virus might have leaked from the lab was always a plausible hypothesis, which again, should have been entertained and was not particularly, and still not being properly entertained, I think, in the US more so than in Europe.

(14:37):

So I think that was part of it. And of course finally there is some reckoning going on on other issues on this too, that if Donald Trump said it, that must be the opposite of the truth. And that was one thing to say we should not take him particularly seriously on these particular matters, but it’s another thing to assume that the truth is the opposite of what he says. That was a silly approach as well. But deliberation is important. It proceeded better in other places. We should have paid more attention to the pre-Covid pandemic planning documents. And there were voices. I mean, it’s not as though no one pointed these things out. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown, wrote some very good pieces pointing out the cost of school closures and the safety of reopening them. Graham Allison, who is scholar in crisis decision making, going back to the Kennedy administration, he’s a very senior scholar at Harvard.

(15:35):

He put out a statement right around the time that Harvard Saffer Center put out its statement, and this is I think in April, maybe late April 2020. And Alison said, look, we need a wider conversation and wider deliberation here. We need a Team B, we need devil’s advocates. We’re doubling down on the strategy and we’re not sure that it’s the right strategy. It’s going to be costly, he pointed out, and we need to reexamine our assumptions and widen the discussion beyond epidemiologists and public health experts, and have a wider conversation. And he was exactly right, surely on that score, but from what I can tell, his statement was completely ignored. So there were people calling for wider dissent, and there were others. Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair wrote some good pieces as well. So there were a few voices out there, but these issues were not discussed adequately for sure.

(16:35):

And then the Great Barrington Declaration–well, let me just say one other thing. When the lockdowns were imposed in March, there were dissenters. Michael Osterholm, who’s one of the leading epidemiologists scientists in the world at the Mayo Clinic University of Minnesota. He warned in mid-March 2020 that these lockdown measures were unlikely to succeed, that they would be extremely costly, that the best strategy was probably protecting the vulnerable from Covid and allowing most people to go about their business, and recognizing that there was a huge age gradient in vulnerability here. Young people were relatively at low risk. They could acquire herd immunity from getting infected and recovering. He pointed all this out in March. David Katz from Yale did. Tom Frieden, former CDC director, again, pointed out the cost of schools back in March 2020. And then those voices tended to become silent. And when we got to October and the Great Barrington Declaration was published, they were saying essentially the same things–Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, they were essentially saying essentially the same things that were said back in March by Michael Osterholm and Tom Frieden and David Katz at Yale and Justin Leslie from Johns Hopkins. But they were greeted, as people know, with great intolerance. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH then, called them “fringe epidemiologists, dangerous, they’re going to kill people.” By that time, schools had reopened in Europe and reopened for months. Schools had been open for Republican states since August. So I think when it comes to school closures, I think people are starting to recognize that that was kind of egregious, the extent to which we didn’t learn from other places about the relative safety of reopening schools. And so I do think that while the Great Barrington people were wrong about some things for sure, they speculated about the virus having traversed society in a much more widespread way over the summer.

(18:37):

And in the fall, there were some projections about the virus being already on its way out over the summer. I think it was what Sunetra Gupta said, and Bhattacharya has gotten a lot of flack for a Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote with, I think it was Eran Bendavid, in I think it was April 2020, March or April 2020, suggesting that Covid might lead to as few as 20 to 40, 60,000 deaths. That was the low range of his speculation at that point. The main point of that op-ed and of his work in the spring of 2020 was trying to do studies of the population to see how many people had antibodies or other evidence of having had Covid infections. We knew how many people were getting seriously ill from Covid, but we didn’t know how many people had contracted the virus and not gotten seriously ill because the symptoms are much the same as the flu or cold or other symptoms.

(19:35):

And many people had mild symptoms. So he was really in that op-ed emphasizing the importance of doing these seroprevalence studies in the community to try to figure out the actual mortality rate, which was not as low as he speculated. But there have been viruses in the past that have more or less just disappeared: Swine flu in 1976, we had a mass vaccination program for that, and it never materialized. So he wasn’t completely off base when it comes to the evidence of previous flus. But in any case, his main point was that we needed to do these seroprevalence studies, and he tried to do them in California on a shoe string, but the CDC should have been doing them and wasn’t doing them at the time. So I think the Great Barrington folks were hardly infallible. And Bhattacharya has admitted himself that he made mistakes, everyone did. But I think they were calling for a wider discussion of the cost of these measures. And certainly in retrospect, they were correct about a number of things, including the need for a wider discussion. And going forward, we should at least take seriously respectable dissenters as they certainly were.

G. Patrick Lynch (20:51):

So you mentioned Emily Oster and Graham Allison. It’s interesting. Those were two people I wanted to sort introduce in the conversation because Emily Oster’s work was to try to figure out, she was trying to collect data on schools and just take a look at the trade-offs, and to raise that trade-off question. One of the interesting things for me, reading this boo,k was learning about what worked and what didn’t. You’ve got an entire chapter dedicated to taking a look at the US through the lens of federalism to try to see if a lot of these NPIs were effective. And can you walk our listeners through sort of a general overview of those results so that you can at least share with them what y’all’s view is on the effectiveness of the NPIs compared to vaccines, compared to some of the other measures that were

Stephen Macedo (21:35):

Pursued? Yeah, yeah. My coauthor, Frances Lee, who’s an excellent empirical scholar, very broad intellect, but she really knows her empirics as well. She did a 50-state study of the United States based on CDC data from across the 50 states, looking at Covid mortality from the period from the beginning of the pandemic through the availability of vaccines. And it’s not the best data in the world, it’s state by state, but it’s the best we can do. Other scholars have done this work. Thomas Bollyky also did a state-by-state study using somewhat different data. He came to the same results. But what it shows is that the states divided very sharply in terms of the stringency of these Covid interventions, school closures, masking, social distancing, business closures, restrictions on social gatherings, and so on, with Democratic states imposing much lengthier stay-at-home orders compared to Republican states.

(22:33):

It’s really a very strong partisan relationship, very strikingly so. And there was also a partisan relationship on vaccine uptake with Democratic states people getting vaccinated at a much greater rate than in Republican states. And what the data that we have shows on mortality in the 50 states is that there was no relationship between the imposition of these non-pharmaceutical interventions, the school closures, the masking, the social distancing requirements, stay-at-home orders, and so on. And Oxford has this index of nine of these measures, and they’ve rated governments around the world on the stringency of their interventions, and we have our own data on school closures and so on. No relationship between the stringency or length of these restrictions and Covid mortality. The partisan divergence on mortality begins after vaccines are available. So the evidence shows that the evidence that we have provides evidence for the effectiveness of vaccinations at curbing mortality, the rate of death correcting for age and percentage, uninsured and percentage urban, correcting for a whole bunch of other confounding variables.

(23:46):

The evidence shows that the rate of mortality did go up in Republican states by about a third higher than Democratic states after vaccination, but not before. So we simply have an absence of evidence for the effectiveness of the NPIs on mortality. There is some evidence that they reduce transmission, but not enough or in the right places to affect mortality. We just had a piece published in the Boston Review Forum, and there were four critics there, three of whom focus on this issue, expressing doubt about our findings, but they all emphasized transmission reductions. None of them present any evidence suggesting that there was mortality reduction. And it’s just not clear that these costly measures were worth it if we didn’t reduce mortality and serious illness. Now, there’s another study in Europe, 29 states of Europe by Pizzato et al from the University of Milan, came out in 2024.

(24:43):

It’s excess mortality data across all the states of Europe with a 10 year prior to Covid baseline. So what they did is they looked at the mortality rates across Europe and the 10 years prior to Covid, they adjust for demographic changes over that course of that time and under Covid and look at the excess mortality post-Covid just to see that that’s considered the best measure because when it comes to recording Covid deaths, countries have done it very differently. In Norway, for example, in order to be recorded as a Covid death, it had to be certified by the medical examiner. In Sweden, if you died with Covid, it was counted as a Covid death. So countries had different methodologies for counting their Covid deaths, but if you focus on excess mortality, that’s considered the better study. And what this study by Pizzato et al show, is that Sweden had the best outcomes across the pandemic in the entire 29 states of Europe.

(25:36):

They did have a bit higher earlier on in the first few months. There may have been various reasons for that. They had had a mild flu season the year before, maybe even the two years before as compared with Norway and some other countries which had harder flu seasons. So there were more people alive who were very vulnerable to respiratory infections. But by the spring of 2020, they were doing better than their Nordic neighbors and other European countries. And over the three years of the pandemic, they had the best outcome in Europe according to Pizatto et al. And again, they find no relationship, and they expressed surprise about this and the article, no relationship between the more stringent NPIs and lower mortality across Europe. So the evidence is fairly considerable, and it just means, as my co-author says, and in the language of social science, we cannot reject the null hypothesis, which is we just can’t reject the proposition. The evidence does not allow us to reject the proposition that these non-pharmaceutical interventions, costly as they were not just economically, but in terms of our lives, socially, family relations and so on, social relations. We just can’t show that they had any significant effect. So that’s what the data shows.

G. Patrick Lynch (26:49):

Steve, where did discussions about trade-offs go exactly? Because you guys have a great citation about a survey of economists who were asked whether or not they supported the lockdowns despite all the costs. And something like, I believe the site was something like 80 percent of them said, no, the lockdowns are worth it. And these are economists who were supposed to be talking about trade-offs. And y’all point out throughout the book that there was no consideration or at least very little consideration, except for some dissenting voices to the notion that the costs here were significant, there were things that had to be included in the policy discussion. What happened to alternative voices? What happened to these kinds of discussions? And can you talk a little bit about some of the suppression stories that you tell in this book about the government and certainly leaders in public health and leaders in social media and their inability to maintain the kind of liberal values that you think are very important?

Stephen Macedo (27:40):

Yes. Well, I think the discussion of cost was simply in a way bypassed. There was a lot of rhetoric about, oh, the kids will recover. The kids are fine, the kids will be resilient. We do think there was a class bias issue here. The policies were being made by, and of course, the educated elites who staff elite journalism and universities and science, our members, in effect of what we could call the laptop class. We were able to work at home on our computers, being better off. Our kids were relatively well-positioned to be able to study. I mean, it was hard on them, of course. And I don’t think enough attention was paid to the fact that one third of American workers had to keep working right through the pandemic to keep our electricity on and the internet running and the lights on and the fire department and the police department and food service, food preparation and so on and so forth.

(28:34):

So a third of workers had to keep going to work, their kids had to be taken care of, somehow had to do online schooling, and so on, under much more adverse conditions. So there was definitely a class component to this, I think. So that was part of it for sure. Somehow, the cost issue got bypassed. Fear gripped people, the fear of death, dying a suffocating death from Covid. And it was a bad pandemic. We shouldn’t discount that. It was the worst pandemic in a century. But we do find that among journalists and public officials who–take Andrew Cuomo for example, we quote him in the book, he had those news conferences every day, and he won a special Emmy Award for his news conferences. He was seen as the “Un-Trump” during 2020 under Covid. And he constantly said, “I’ll do everything we can to reduce the spread of the virus, and if everything we do saves just one life, it will be worth it” without giving any attention to the other side of the ledger.

(29:36):

So it was like doing cost-benefit analysis with no attention to the costs at all. And there’s actually have a quote from him in the book saying something like having to stay home and keeping your kids out of school very bad, but not death, domestic violence on the increase, very bad, not death. And he goes through this whole series of things. The only thing that they focused on was reducing deaths from this disease. Francis Collins has said subsequently in a really quite amazing online discussion he had in July, 2023, that the way he put it there was that the public health mindset is to focus only on reducing deaths from disease and not to focus on anything else, including keeping kids out of school for so long that there’ll be lifelong detriments that they never will recover from. And of course, bad health outcomes associated with postponing hospital visits, doctor visits, bankruptcies can have very bad psychological and health impacts for those involved owning their own businesses and so on.

(30:40):

So there were going to be deaths on the other side, but no attention was paid to them. And the news media also played a role. They constantly asked why more wasn’t being done. We have quotations from journalists questioning governors and so on saying, and the President, “Is any attention being given to a national lockdown such as being imposed in the state of New York?” and so on. So there was an attention to this. I would recommend one other book by the way, which came out a bit after ours called An Abundance of Caution by David Zweig, which focuses on school issues. And it has many parallels to our book. It’s a terrific book. We think very highly of it. And Frances and I, and it’s well researched, and he really also shows how biased the media was that the percentage of negative coverage of news concerning Covid was overwhelming in the United States as compared with Europe.

(31:32):

So, for instance, he talks about a specific CDC report that came out in April, I think it was April 8, 2020, a month and a half into the pandemic. And it contained various pieces of information, including that children were at very low risk from Covid, but that African Americans and men were at greater risk than women and non-African Americans. The media reported widely on the negative information about men and African Americans being at greater risk, but they didn’t report the positive information about kids being at very low risk, the bad news predominated. And there was a narrative that took hold. It was a partisan narrative. It had to do with partisanship in part, and people weren’t willing to question the narrative. And we moralized the disagreement, questioning what was considered to be the science, not “following the science” was considered morally reprehensible. Masks, of course, became a very visible symbol of this.

(32:34):

The evidence around masking was extremely weak, and people shifted their positions this promiscuously, as did Dr. Fauci. I mean, he was asked in 2019, a few months before the pandemic with no sign of the Covid on the horizon by an interview, what should I do in the event of another pandemic? Should I wear a mask? Dr. Fauci immediately interrupts the interviewer and says, “No, no, no, avoid the paranoid stuff. Just keep yourself healthy, get a good night’s sleep, don’t drink too much, get some exercise, and so on.” And a few weeks later, he’s for not recommending masks, then recommending masks, and so on. And he still says now that they work, but now he says that it had to be an N95, which was not, of course, what was required at the time. And then there were warring op-eds in The New York Times by my colleague, Zeynep Tufekci,

(33:19):

“The science is clear that masks work.” And Bret Stephens, “No, the science is not clear. Well, I think Bret Stephens was closer to the truth there, and the evidence is still lacking for the effectiveness of masks against aerosolized viruses, such as this was. And I think we knew that quite early on. So yeah, the narrative took hold and it still exists, I think, around some of these measures. We’re having some more open discussion, the school closures, the cost of the school closures for kids, I think that’s just too dramatic to ignore. But the origins of the virus issue remains kind of a mystery. Nature magazine, the public-facing magazine of Nature, the science journal, a very prestigious journal, published an article in February 2025 saying, “There’s more and more evidence to support the natural origins theory of Covid in a Pangolin or a raccoon dog from the market.”

(34:15):

I just don’t think that’s the case. There is, it remains debated among scientists, but there’s not growing evidence for that. Only a month later, the French Academy of Science, or maybe it’s the French Academy of Medicine, voted 97 percent to 3 percent in favor of the proposition that the virus likely emerged from the lab. And there is quite a lot of evidence. I think it’s more likely than not that it emerged from the lab, but we’re not having a serious discussion of that. And it’s not just a matter of historical reckoning. Did the worst virus in a century, was it manipulated through research funded in part, funded adjacently, at least by the US government in a lab that involved collaboration between American scientists and Chinese scientists? I mean, my God, we’re not investigating that. But the most important part of it perhaps, is that the research still goes on, that we’re still doing this gain of function of research on coronaviruses and other viruses, and it remains dangerous.

(35:14):

So that I just find shocking as well that we’ve not had more public engagement on that issue. Where’s 60 Minutes when you need them looking into these matters? So there is a question, what mistakes did we make? What should we have done? We don’t really try to answer that question. We’re not epidemiologists. But what was the discussion like as you asked? Did science function the way it should function? Did research function the way it should function? Did journalism function the way it should function? Were skeptical questions asked to authorities? And unfortunately, we find that these institutions did not function as well as they should have. And the skepticism that is normal on the part of these institutions towards public institutions, public measures, public policies, where social scientists routinely question whether any policy actually works. That was sorely lacking around this one.

(36:16):

And we still are surprised. So you asked about restrictions on speech and so on. It did become clear. The evidence presented in the Missouri v. Biden case which became Murthy v. Missouri on appeal, that the Biden administration was suppressing social media posts against US policy during Covid, ample evidence of that, threatening the social media companies with the loss of Section 230 protections against liability, which would’ve bankrupt the companies and put them out of business. And intense pressure was brought to bear because we have the emails now, it was subpoenaed through the records. And this was all being done in secret, suppressing arguments and evidence against government policy and boosting government messaging. And we don’t know actually of a single law school conference on those issues. I don’t think the ACLU filed a brief in that case. So it’s kind of amazing that these matters are not being adequately looked into even now.

(37:18):

And there is concern about misinformation and disinformation on the internet for sure. We’ve always had misinformation and disinformation. Maybe it’s worse now than it used to be, legitimate reason for discussion. But I don’t find myself feeling highly confident about trusting the government to become the censor here. So that record as well is quite important and quite impressive. We talked to a scholar who also edits an education journal, and he wrote a piece in March or April 2020, pointing out the cost of school closures, drawing out evidence from previous teacher strikes and blizzards where schools were closed even for just a couple of weeks or a few weeks, and pointing out based on that evidence, how much learning loss would take place and so on. And he was saying to us that as far as he could know, that that was immediately suppressed. And his journal more or less disappeared from the internet once he published that article. So that’s anecdotal, but we have ample evidence that that sort of thing was happening partly on the initiative of the social media companies themselves, but then certainly with administration involvement under President Biden, which they renounced it. And so when it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court didn’t consider merits because the policy had been revoked, but it certainly is a matter of concern. Free speech was one of the casualties of Covid it seems, or at least unbiased representation of different points of view on the internet.

G. Patrick Lynch (38:52):

So two quick questions to finish up. Number one, you talked about the chapter in which you all summarized the cost. Can you briefly walk our listeners through some of the costs of the pandemic as you all measure it?

Stephen Macedo (39:02):

Yeah, this will be brief. We have a whole chapter on that. And again, my colleague took the lead on that and did a wonderful job. Well, there are the fiscal costs for one thing, the 2020 Covid relief effort was as much as a percentage of GDP corrected historically as the entire New Deal and the 2009 financial rescue package put together. So 2020 was a huge fiscal cost. We have graphs there showing that. And then in 2021, we did essentially the whole New Deal over again as a percentage of GDP, as the equivalent of percentage of GDP. So the fiscal cost and the debt burden that we passed on to future generations is itself quite significant. And it also means that the country is in a weaker position when it comes to trying to respond in a fiscal way to a future recession.

(39:54):

Learning losses have been profound. I believe it’s the case that chronic absenteeism is up one-third from before the pandemic. Losses of learning test scores and so on have been very considerable and have been especially bad among poorer kids, low-income kids, and minority kids, just as predicted. So the learning losses and the lifelong detriments to education are profound. Associated with the loss of jobs and schooling, the crime rate went up in many cities, the biggest year-on-year increase in crime in recorded history, I believe. At first, that was associated with the George Floyd protests. But recent research now shows that they pre-date that the crime surge is associated with the Covid lockdown measures and business closures, not the George Floyd protest. They may have contributed a bit later on. Again, business losses and healthcare losses in terms of postponed doctor’s visits, medical interventions, cancer screenings, and so on, depression, higher rates of depression, drug abuse, and so on, including the populations, not themselves significantly affected by Covid. And greater isolation. Church attendance has, I believe, never returned to pre-Covid levels, business closures in many cities.

(41:20):

If you go to Washington, DC, the city is still never fully recovered from Covid, nor is San Francisco. So there have been many losses of businesses in inner city areas that have permanently, or at least over the long term, reshaped many cities, and the feelings of depression and isolation and loss of social connection, and so on. So the cost themselves have been quite considerable, and we’re still trying to figure them out. I think our chapter is a kind of first take survey on that, but there’s no question that the costs are very considerable, and for many people will be lifelong. And just as the pre-Covid pandemic plan said, they seem to have hit poor and minority families and children, and people more severely than the better off.

G. Patrick Lynch (42:10):

I want to finish with one final question. One of the big takeaways for me of this book was that humility is something that we could use a lot more of, certainly in public life, but also in politics. Because I was stunned at how policymakers and politicians were either afraid to say or didn’t feel comfortable saying, We don’t know. We don’t know exactly what the trade-offs are. We don’t know exactly what works and what doesn’t work. We’re going to try things. We’re going to try to move forward with them. And I guess I wonder a little bit, a big part of the project that you all are pursuing is this focus on democratic institutions and elites and other policymakers and folks in academia and media, their inability to accept humility. Is an ability to accept humility one of the goals of this book? Is it something you guys thought about and talked about as you were composing it? Because it seems to me my big takeaway is we need to be a lot more humble the next time we face something like this to understand what we don’t know before we start acting on the things that we think we know.

Stephen Macedo (43:13):

I think that’s exactly right. I think you’ve captured it exactly. There’s no question that those pre-Covid pandemic plans that I mentioned, which are quite remarkable to go back and read, and we survey them in our chapter…

G. Patrick Lynch (43:24):

That was an eye-opening way to start the book.

Stephen Macedo (43:26):

It’s just astonishing. I was sort of amazed when I came across them and even this Institute of Medicine letter from 2005 warning that public officials will be apt to exaggerate the certainty of these measures working and to implement them to show that they were in charge to show that they had things under control for political reasons, in other words, not because of the sound science behind them. So I think you’re exactly right. And I think part of this is a public health thing that the messaging from public health officials and public officials associated with pandemic planning probably had to do with behavioral change, trying to get people to change their behavior. Francis Collins says this, we quote this in the book that we were trying to get people to change their behavior, in case what we were recommending was right, but they weren’t sure it was right.

(44:16):

And he admits again in the July 2023 message he gave, that we should have been more frank about that. And we lost a lot of trust because we were not frank, that we weren’t sure about the things that we were recommending. So I think that’s a big part of it, is that public health officials need to realize that they are responsible for telling the public the truth. They have not been authorized to not share the truth with us. And the way that Paul Offit, who’s a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, puts it, is they need to commit themselves to truth-telling with nuance. If there’s uncertainty communicated, if there is some evidence of adverse incidents associated with a vaccine, even if they’re quite minor, don’t cover it up, allow it, and recognize the limits of the evidence. And that’s going to be the only way to restore trust is to be frank with the public, because the public has access to many sources of information and many dissenting voices.

(45:08):

And I think honesty and humility are two virtues that need to be rediscovered in the wake of Covid. We just need to be honest about the limits of the evidence. People figure these things out. They were told about the vaccination. So if you get vaccinated, you’ll be a dead end to the virus. You will not transmit the virus to others was what was being suggested. We did not have evidence of that. Transmissibility was not an endpoint in the vaccine trials, so that should not have been claimed. And once people found that, well, even if they got vaccinated, they could still get Covid, get milder, somewhat severe disease, but not life-threatening disease nearly at the same rates. Nevertheless, they felt they had been misled. So I think you’re exactly right. We need to be much clearer about the limits of our knowledge. It’s not a comfortable thing to hear in a pandemic that we don’t know exactly what to do.

(45:58):

We’re not sure, or maybe this is worth trying even though it’s going to be costly and there’s some evidence for it. But I think that that’s absolutely necessary: frankness and truth-telling. And those are supposed to be, again, the fundamental virtues of science and universities, university researchers, and journalism. So I agree. I think that that’s exactly right. And that’s something we found throughout, that there was an inadequate commitment to frankness, humility, and also being willing to say things that might seem to be critical of your own side in a partisan way, things that might be at odds with the narrative that’s favored by your side and the partisan struggle. I think people need to rise above. Scientists, journalists, academics need to do more to realize the importance of rising above partisanship.

G. Patrick Lynch (46:55):

And on that hopefully positive note, we will conclude. Steve, I’d like to thank you very much for being on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Stephen Macedo (47:01):

Today. Thank you very much. I enjoyed the conversation.

James Patterson (47:05):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.

Freedom of speech is in a bad place. The modern, young identitarian left appears to have given up on it, regarding it as a dinosaur, of value only to bigots, billionaires, and kleptocrats. Elements of the political right regard it as little more than a political football, to be kicked about in the culture wars as a weapon in the war on woke. The former are more interested in cancelling speakers who offend them than in engaging them in debate and seeking to defeat them in argument. The latter take an extremist approach to free speech (as long as it is speech they agree with), holding that anything goes in an unlicensed, unregulated marketplace of ideas.

Both are profoundly wrong and are doing immense damage to the once-cherished ideal of free speech. To help rescue free speech from the cesspit of the culture wars, there are two places we can look: to the past and to the world elsewhere. If free speech is in the deepest trouble in the United States, is it quite as bad elsewhere in the Anglosphere and is it in a better place beyond the English-speaking world? And if free speech is in trouble now, how did we get here? Was it always thus, or was a wrong turn taken at some point on the West’s journey from the eras of heresy and treason, sedition and blasphemy (all of which were crimes capable of being committed by words alone)? These are among the questions Fara Dabhoiwala asks in his new book, What is Free Speech? A historian now at Princeton who has formerly worked in Oxford and elsewhere, Dabhoiwala is well placed to address them.

What Dabhoiwala gets right is his framing: the way he sets up the problem is excellent, and the book’s introduction and opening two chapters are its strongest sections. He is right that free speech “has always been a weaponized mantra,” that understanding free speech “is also, always, about uncovering the unequal distribution of power,” that free speech has often been regarded as dangerous not only for its power to “unsettle orthodoxy” but also by reason of its being “perpetually manipulated by the powerful.” He is right that “wherever one looks, liberty of speech was never a stable concept.” He is right that, in the history of human development, it is a recent idea and that for most of recorded history it was simply “unthinkable”—not even “intelligible” as a concept. He is also right that, in the English-speaking world, Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1721–23) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) did more than any other works to articulate, celebrate, and popularize notions of free speech.

Or, at least, he is very nearly right about that. To these twin canonical texts, I would add a third, John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), the importance of which Dabhoiwala downplays. Milton’s great essay, for all its partisanship and other flaws, remains the most powerful tract in our language against pre-publication censorship. It is curious that Dabhoiwala should undervalue it, for Milton’s argument actually accords with the conclusion in What is Free Speech?, where the interests of the audience are privileged as much as the interests of the speaker. Milton was fundamentally opposed to censorship, not because it diminishes the rights of the author (or printer or publisher), but because it infantilizes the rights of all of us as readers to choose for ourselves what we should read. Dabhoiwala would agree with that, and his argument in the closing section of his book would have been all the stronger had he harnessed Milton in its support.

Cato’s Letters and On Liberty are far from perfect accounts of free speech. There is a marked naivete about Trenchard and Gordon’s blithe assumption that the truth will always and inevitably emerge if only “all opinions are equally indulged and all parties equally allowed to speak their minds.” And there is a notorious silence—or gap—in Mill’s “harm principle” owing to his refusal to define what a harm is when it comes to what he called “the liberty of thought and discussion.” Is hate speech harmful? Is offensiveness a harm that can justify the curtailment of speech? Is misinformation? Mill answers none of these questions. Dabhoiwala devotes much of his book to challenging Cato’s and Mill’s arguments for free speech.

Free speech does not empower us all equally, but its absence empowers only the censors, whatever garb they clothe themselves in.

Neither Cato’s Letters nor On Liberty should be regarded as sacred texts. Neither is above criticism. Some of Dabhoiwala’s critique is astutely judged, particularly of Trenchard and Gordon’s failure to see how cut-throat competition amongst newspapers and problems of media partisanship undermine several of their arguments for a free press. But Dabhoiwala sets out not to rescue Cato and Mill from their mistakes and oversights, but instead to trash them. That approach is as baffling as it is bizarre.

Trenchard and Gordon were writing in the 1720s avowedly about political speech. In that era, the polis was composed entirely of men. Cato has nothing to say about women’s right to free speech. Does that undermine any aspect of Trenchard and Gordon’s arguments against the official abuse of laws of sedition and libel? Mill worked for the East India Company. His focus in On Liberty is on the liberty of thought and discussion in England, not in India. Does that undermine any aspect of its argument? Dabhoiwala seems to think so. Yet, in whose interests is it to draw our attention to Mill’s early work as a civil servant in the East India Company but not to his pioneering campaign later in life as a Member of Parliament in striving to bring Eyre to justice for the racist atrocities he committed as Governor in Jamaica? All his life, Mill campaigned for women’s rights. Why fail to mention this when so much scorn has been poured on Trenchard and Gordon’s failure to accommodate women’s free speech in their account? We all know what gesture politics is. There is such a thing as gesture history, too. Much of Dabhoiwala’s account reads more as a history against free speech than as a history of free speech.

Speech and Truth

The reason for this is that Dabhoiwala appears to crave not free speech as much as true speech. Throughout his accounts of Cato and Mill, he is captivated above all by their assertions about truth. He is right that what they have to say about truth can be unpersuasive. Free speech has not acted as a guarantor of truth, and Cato was wrong to suggest that it would. Mill, however, did not repeat that mistake. His argument was that free speech was needed in order to enable us to seek the truth, not that free speech would necessarily ensure that the true would drown out the false. (In this regard, Mill’s position was closer to Milton’s than it was to Cato’s.) Mill did not regard any argument from truth as his most important contention for free speech. At the core of his vision for liberty of thought and discussion lay his notion of individual human flourishing. We can grow and develop, and our judgement can be valued, Mill argued, only when we are exposed to that which we do not already know—to new facts, to divergent opinions, and to novel interpretations. That is not only a much stronger argument for free speech than any that relies on truth, but it is also an argument for genuinely free speech and not an argument only for true speech.

The best argument for free speech, however, is to imagine a world without it. We do not have to imagine very hard. Radicals and revolutionaries of many stripes have been so convinced that they are right and everyone else wrong that they have readily grabbed and grasped at the levers of control over discussion. Robespierre did it. So too did Lenin. Neither was very concerned with freedom. Both were very concerned with what they thought was true. And, as Dabhoiwala observes, we know how that story ends. The privileging of true speech over free speech has been tried. It was tried by the medieval church in the age of heresy. It was tried by pre-Enlightenment governments in the age of sedition. It was tried by the totalitarian regime of the socialist Soviet Union. It has been tried and, repeatedly, it has failed.

One of the greatest strengths of Dabhoiwala’s book is his insistence that free speech regimes distribute power unequally. Media moguls, press barons, and the owners of social media platforms wield immense power over their viewers, readers, and users. But when we imagine (or recall) a world without free speech, we conjure a world where the church, the state, or the vigilante goons who wish only to cancel and destroy that with which they disagree run riot. Free speech does not empower us all equally, but its absence empowers only the censors, whatever garb they clothe themselves in, whether they be priests, inquisitors, ministers, or culture warriors.

Free speech needs to be rescued from the culture wars, not condemned, its pioneers pilloried for having failed to prevent them.

What then must we do? If America is drowning in lies, if social media is awash with torrents of misinformation, how might we work our way out of the abyss without giving up on the great liberal values of freedom and autonomy in thought and discussion? There is an answer. In a word, it is balance. Free speech is of immense value. But it is only one value in a pantheon of principles. Dignity is also of value, as are accuracy, honesty, impartiality, decency, personal privacy, and a whole constellation of matters which may sometimes clash and come into conflict with freedom of speech. Social life, political life, and the pursuit of happiness depend on the liberty of speech being balanced with other public goods such as these. Everywhere this is understood, even in the United States.

American Exceptionalism

It is often claimed, including by Dabhoiwala, that American exceptionalism privileges free speech as an absolute, as a card that trumps all competing values and principles. Yet this is not quite so. It is true that in the modern United States, aspects of free speech are more heavily protected than is the case in Canada, Britain, or Europe. But this is not true for all speech and even in the US, there are some forms of speech that are not legally protected at all, such as obscenity, child pornography, defamatory speech, and fighting words. Moreover, the over-protection of speech is a recent development in American jurisprudence—it dates only from the 1960s. Many plausible interpretations of the First Amendment are available, which are far less militant—far more balanced—than the one which is usually preferred by a majority of today’s Supreme Court justices. Care should be taken, though, not to exaggerate the extent of the differences between American and (say) British or European jurisprudence on free speech. For sure, there are legislative restrictions on speech which are nowadays ruled unconstitutional in the US, which would be lawful in Britain or Europe—restrictions on campaign expenditure or on hate speech, for example. But there are also many more cases where a balance is struck between speech and some countervailing interest, such as security (think of the recent TikTok case) or dignity (think of Virginia v. Black, upholding the criminalization of cross-burning). Free speech is a powerful right in US constitutional law, and there are instances, particularly in the last twenty or so years, of it being militantly enforced, but even in America, even today, it is very far from being an absolute.

Once we accept that free speech is a value which must be balanced against others (as Dabhoiwala does and as I would agree), we have to start thinking hard about who should undertake the balancing exercise and how they might achieve it. This is precisely the difficult, often laboriously detailed work that Dabhoiwala acknowledges needs to be undertaken. Yet he disdains from doing it himself. Others, thankfully, are working on it. European human rights law, for example, has developed over more than fifty years a sophisticated account of how freedom of expression must be balanced in a proportionate manner against other competing rights and interests. It is a pity Dabhoiwala has nothing to say about this.

Or take another example. Britain’s Online Safety Act, passed by the UK Parliament in 2023, is one of the world’s leading legislative attempts to bring a degree of regulation to the Internet—particularly to search engines and to social media platforms—with a view to making it a safer space, especially for children. The legislation runs to hundreds of pages. It took over four and a half years to enact. It will be enforced by a statutory regulator, Ofcom, which has already published thousands of pages of guidance and consultation documentation on the Act’s implementation. It is an enormous enterprise. It makes an avowed attempt to balance freedom of online expression against the harms that speech can cause, particularly speech with the speed and reach of which social media boasts. It is both vital and painstaking work. Yet it merits a mere seven and a half lines in Dabhoiwala’s more than 400-page book. In the European Union, a Digital Services Act is doing similar work to the UK’s Online Safety Act. Dabhoiwala gives that legislation a bare paragraph.

These are striking omissions, not least because the ways in which European human rights law and British and European online safety legislation seek to balance free speech against other values are deeply contested and highly controversial. My point is not that they necessarily get the balance right, but that they are, at the least, well-meaning attempts to achieve in practice what Dabhoiwala rightly says needs to be striven for, which is why it is so mystifying that he seems so uninterested in them.

If you want to get serious about how free speech is going to operate in the online ecosystem, if you want to understand how this once beautiful but apparently now merely “dangerous idea” can help to guide us through the myriad difficulties and challenges of Internet regulation, if you are worried about how we should respond to the bilge of misinformation online, you are asking the right questions about free speech. But if you seek insights into what the answers might be, What is Free Speech? is not going to help you. Free speech needs to be rescued from the culture wars, not condemned, its pioneers pilloried for having failed to prevent them.