Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

On February 7, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado offered the following advice on X: “Dear Speaker Johnson, Simply pass every executive order President Trump has signed, and you will go down as the greatest Speaker in American history.” Consider also the words of a more senior legislator, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Tom Cole, in response to being asked whether it is up to Congress to decide whether the foreign aid agency, USAID, ought to be shut down. “Well, yeah,” Cole answered, “but Congress doesn’t always do its job. When Congress doesn’t do its job, I’m not going to be mad at an executive [branch] that’s trying to save money.”

Legislators have responded to the whirlwind of activity in the first half-year of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration with an overwhelming sense of passivity. Trump’s Democratic opponents, who find themselves narrowly in the minority in both the House of Representatives and Senate, have done little to slow things down, even if they’ve offered record-long speeches in both chambers. Republicans, meanwhile, have made supporting the president their top priority, acquiescing to his initiatives even when they seem to directly impinge on the legislature’s constitutional prerogatives.

Americans can be forgiven for thinking Congress has become about as useful as a human appendix—prone to inflammation and perhaps best removed entirely.

Because Congress’s marginalization has proceeded so relentlessly in the twenty-first century, its irrelevance is now probably overestimated by most casual observers of American politics. We should avoid getting carried away. We have not become an autocracy. Legislators retain influence that often expresses itself informally; the president is not free to disregard their priorities. The text of the US Code still matters—very much—and so the people who have the power to rewrite it remain potent and sometimes necessary. The saga of “Trump’s” big, beautiful bill—H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation omnibus signed into law by the president on July 4—is one of factional strife and accommodation that played out almost entirely in the legislature, although Trump’s whipping was certainly crucial to securing final passage.

We should dispassionately take stock of Congress’s current position on foreign and domestic policy, on taxing and spending, and on the deeper question of what role our elected representatives play in our Constitutional system. We will see our lawmakers choosing acquiescence repeatedly, because it is a winning strategy for them in the context of a thoroughly nationalized, thoroughly apocalypticized political environment. If we are careful, we will discern limits to their passivity, though the precise boundaries remain quite murky, as much to the participants as to outside observers. What we will not see is any obvious reason to expect this dynamic to reverse itself in the immediate future. If there are heroes of a legislative revival already on the scene, they have concealed themselves quite masterfully. Congress may well transform itself—its current leader-dominant structure is a historical anomaly—but it will take some kind of shock (bigger than Trump himself) to begin that process.

Second Fiddle on Foreign Affairs

The world stage has been unusually eventful during this first stretch of the second Trump administration, such that the president has been forced to deal with one exigency after another. He has done so on his own terms, with very little pressure from his copartisans who control Congress. Plenty of Republican legislators view NATO and the Russia-Ukraine War quite differently from the chief executive, and they have taken part in ongoing debates, both intramural and public, about America’s proper stance. But formally, Congress has simply steered clear of the issue, in stark contrast to a bipartisan coalition’s funding of Ukraine in 2024.

Meanwhile, Trump initiated two significant offensives. Responding to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, he ordered an air campaign in Yemen, only to end it with a negotiated ceasefire six weeks later. The next month, after Israel unexpectedly bombed Iran to disable its nuclear weapons program, Trump committed American air power to that cause, dropping enormous bunker-buster bombs on three sites in a single hour. The administration essentially ignored Congress as it made these decisions and troubled itself very little as to legal justifications; in both cases, it asserted that the president’s commander-in-chief and foreign relations powers under Article II of the Constitution were sufficient. Trump’s Democratic critics in Congress expressed outrage; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, declared that “the President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers,” endangering the nation and warranting impeachment. Although Trump disavowed any desire to continue hostilities with Iran and indeed helped broker a ceasefire between the Islamic Republic and Israel, Senate Democrats nevertheless pushed forward with a resolution demanding a termination of hostilities (which Republicans successfully bottled up).

Legislators have also been bystanders when the administration’s legal basis for action is dubious—and even when Congress’s own core constitutional powers seem to be in jeopardy.

There is something perfunctory and even farcical about Democrats’ insistence that these sorts of decisions ought to go through Congress in the first instance. Although Trump’s second administration is admittedly unusual in the extent of its willingness to act without even informally consulting Congress, also-ran status for legislators has become the default on foreign affairs over the last several presidential administrations, including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Congress has not passed (or repealed) an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) since 2002; it has not formally declared war since 1942. Legislators have frequently carped about executive bellicosity, and sometimes one chamber or the other has even expressed its official disapproval or tried to cut off funds, but mostly they have underlined their impotence. (Even when bipartisan majorities voted to disapprove any further hostilities with Iran after Trump’s targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, it was unclear this would have any effect; in any case, Trump vetoed the resolution.)

Given how badly things went when Obama sought an AUMF related to Syria in 2013, and how relatively smoothly Trump’s limited engagements have gone, presidential predominance in foreign affairs may be fairly regarded as a comfortable and sensible habit.

Nor does this predominance equate to limitless discretion. If a president were to undertake a protracted “boots on the ground” military engagement, he would be extremely unwise to exclude Congress from his planning efforts. Congress has a great deal to say about the shape and size of the armed forces that the president has at his disposal; those legislators who build their careers around the respected Armed Services committees, many of whom are military veterans, are anything but passive on questions of weapons programs, military bases, and overall fiscal commitment. Moreover, when there is a strong bipartisan consensus in Congress, lawmakers show more ability to steer presidential conduct. Trump has indicated his desire to exit NATO, an alliance he sees as outdated and dysfunctional. Congress has taken steps to make that much more difficult, passing a funding limitation in their FY2020 NDAA and an explicit requirement for congressional approval in the FY2024 NDAA. Those actions might not be foolproof, but they do change the costs for the president in ways likely to matter.

Overall, Congress is decidedly a second-tier actor in foreign affairs today. But that is not a terrible embarrassment to the institution; indeed, it is a familiar situation throughout American history.

Ceding Domestic Policy Predominance

By contrast, legislators have historically been the premier deciders of “major questions” in the domestic sphere for most of American history. They have always existed in a complicated relationship with the “legislator-in-chief” as well as the organs of policy implementation. Roughly speaking, presidential leadership must usually tee up an issue for major legislation, but it is lawmakers who must, in driving it through to passage, decide the major contours of the law with due consideration to all the interests involved. They can manage this balancing, which is messy work, far better than any of the various experts retained in the executive agencies. (That’s politics, in a non-pejorative sense.) By contrast, the experts and permanent civil servants are better suited to settle the administrative details of policies in action. Legislators leave them plenty of questions to answer, sometimes intentionally and sometimes because of limited foresight.

This process has looked rather different in the 2020s, and especially in 2025. Most often, the script is now: the president sets the agenda, often with reference to a campaign promise. Allied partisan legislators loudly announce: We would love to deliver with legislation, but unfortunately our awful opponents make it impossible, and so we will root for the president to figure it out. Then the president rolls out an elaborate new policy, based on whatever old statute is handy, complete with a signing ceremony for the associated executive order, standing in where a new landmark law might once have been. Then, agency officials try to implement the policy while it is litigated, often all the way up to the Supreme Court. A non-exhaustive list of policies that have developed this way in the previous three presidencies: Obama’s DACA, net neutrality, aggressive expansion of Title IX, and Clean Power Plan; Trump 45’s regulatory rollback, off-budget border wall construction, steel tariffs, and overhaul of asylum policy; Biden’s COVID eviction moratorium, COVID vaccine mandate, and student loan relief.

As I explain in a recent article in National Affairs, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tried to push back against the bad-faith legal interpretations that power this Congress-circumventing path. But Republican legislators, for all their celebration of the repeal of Chevron deference, seem inclined to take their turn on the ride. Because nearly all their legislative efforts were devoted to a single reconciliation bill (about which, more below) and because they have eschewed nearly all bipartisan coalition-building in 2025, they have most often been content to root for executive action. Sometimes this makes perfect sense: when Trump reverses Democratic executive actions, new statutes are often unnecessary, as in the administration’s vigorous reorientation of Title IX and equal protection laws.

But legislators have also been bystanders when the administration’s legal basis for action is dubious—and even when Congress’s own core constitutional powers seem to be in jeopardy. This was most immediately apparent with the efforts of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body conjured into existence without the slightest hint of legislative involvement and claiming powers to close departments and terminate programs that Congress has not given even to the president since the 1980s. Far from questioning the parameters of this strange creation, Republican members of Congress fell all over themselves to join a DOGE Caucus which pledged itself to efficiency and promised to legislate in tandem with Musk’s efforts. Nothing of the sort ever happened. Instead, even as they hailed Musk’s declarations that some federal spending programs were utterly corrupt and devoid of value, they renewed the previous fiscal year’s appropriations without alteration, including handing a new year of funding over to USAID even as they cheered its apparent demise.

There are, remarkably, two even more striking illustrations of congressional acquiescence to presidential dominance. The first involves a law that Congress passed, with strong bipartisan support, in April 2024, requiring the social media app TikTok to either separate itself entirely from Chinese ownership or be banned from popular app stores (most importantly, Apple’s and Google’s). Legislators showed some surprising dexterity in getting that law passed, and the Supreme Court upheld its validity in January 2025. But TikTok had a secret weapon: over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump became convinced that it was a political asset for him, and so as president, he has simply declined to enforce the law. On the first day of his second term, he announced a delay in enforcement because the statute allowed for a single 90-day postponement of enforcement if a divestment deal was in the process of being consummated; one could argue (rather weakly) that this was lawful, notwithstanding the nonexistence of any imminent deal. Trump then announced a second delay in April and a third in June. His attorney general told Apple and Google that national security considerations would guarantee nonenforcement. In other words, the law was not really the law. GOP members of Congress who championed the TikTok law have offered barely a peep of protest, let alone an effective strategy to stop the president’s infidelity.

Broad presidential claims of national security are also central to a far more consequential set of policies: historically high tariffs on goods from countries all around the world, which Trump justifies with reference to the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), a statute that has never previously been invoked to justify tariffs. What is the emergency Trump is responding to? A persistent trade deficit. And what sort of rates does this allow the president to set? Any he sees fit, with unlimited changes at his discretion. (Recently, he announced a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, a country with which the United States has a persistent trade surplus.) This interpretation would seem to imply that, when it passed IEEPA in 1977, Congress gave away the first of its constitutionally enumerated powers, “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” A few Republican members have publicly chastised these actions; many more who disapprove (both on legal and policy grounds) have held their tongues, hoping that courts will invalidate Trump’s actions and thus make an open confrontation with the White House unnecessary.

Congress’s ceding of authority could go quite a lot further yet. There are some indications that the Trump administration will withhold appropriated funds from many programs, probably avoiding a straightforward impoundment fight by leaning on the technique of “pocket rescissions.” Some members of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) are encouraging this strategy, seeing it as a way of securing some fiscal discipline. If this strategy works (and it may well meet resistance), it would imply a presidential power of the purse fundamentally stronger than Congress’s. It would become possible—and perhaps politically convenient—to rely on autopilot spending laws from Congress while executive branch officials make the real funding decisions. As Chairman Cole’s quote above suggests, Republican legislators aren’t going to complain too much if all that’s at stake is saving a bit of money. But once the principle is established, it’s easy to imagine Congress losing its relevance entirely.

Partisan Lawmaking as Compensation

If Republican lawmakers are not particularly enthusiastic about many of the second Trump administration’s actions, what is their compensation for all this conflict-avoidance? By downplaying disagreements on most issues, they kept the team together to pass one big bill—which they called, unbelievably, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This is a serious accomplishment, not to be shrugged off lightly. It makes historically unprecedented investments (totaling $170 billion!) in border security; rewrites the tax code; puts some limitations on Medicaid and food stamp eligibility; turns American energy policy in conservative directions; and makes significant investments in military defense ($150 billion).

Getting the law across the finish line without a single Democratic vote was not easy work. Republicans’ majorities in both chambers are slim and members disagree about plenty. Several GOP factions credibly threatened to derail the law, including New York and California members seeking higher deductibility for state and local taxes; those concerned that Medicaid cuts might alienate their working-class supporters; and fiscal conservatives who wished for larger spending cuts. Republican leaders in both chambers figured out how to placate just enough members from each of these groups to secure passage, getting a crucial assist in the last stages from President Trump, who made it clear to potential holdouts that they would incur his wrath.

The OBBBA will undoubtedly live on in the public’s consciousness as Trump’s law, but scores of Republican members can justly take credit for shaping this legislation. As a budget reconciliation law, the OBBBA was crafted by many committees, and its final shape was the result of a complicated process of factional accommodation. Passing this law was a major partisan victory, as were the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Affordable Care Act of 2010, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. One-party legislation, most often possible through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process, has become the main event of twenty-first-century legislating.

We are short on members with the courage (foolhardiness?) to risk their careers and partisan good standing to force the institution to operate differently.

That is bad news for the country, because it promotes zero-sum thinking and cuts out the kind of broad coalition-building needed if policy investments are to endure for generations. The giveaways necessary to get partisan allies to hold their nose and vote yes are often appallingly corrupt. There is little room for public reasoning in a process that will terminate in the question of: “Are you with us or against us?” We get negotiations but not much serious deliberation; there are lots of people keeping track of whose ox is being gored, but not so many worrying about writing good law. These laws reverse each other as each side tries to serve its core constituents, enshrine all manner of pandering policies, and (not coincidentally) blow up America’s budget deficit.

Members know how this process will play out, and plenty of them don’t like it, but they nevertheless play along. (Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the only dissidents in action as well as word, offers Massie’s Law: “Where N = number of Republicans required to stop a bad bill, number of Republicans voting Nay = N-1.”) Members of the HFC, in particular, understood (as early as December) that even a two-bill strategy would create more room for maneuver, while a one-bill strategy would preclude their taking a stand. Though they threatened and grumbled to no end, they nevertheless gave their votes at every procedural crossroads, including final passage of a Senate-reworked bill they claimed was a degradation of the House’s version.

Do Legislators Want More?

The HFC members get a great deal of (well-deserved) grief for their hypocrisy, but their ultimate willingness to play along does not distinguish them from their colleagues in the slightest. Members see themselves as loyal team players; they don’t fundamentally object to an institution set up to facilitate politics as a partisan contact sport; and most of them don’t acutely feel the loss of any more searching deliberation, which has been receding into historical memory for some time now.

In the concluding chapters of my 2023 book, Why Congress, I envisioned three scenarios for Congress’s future: decrepitude, rubber stamp, and revival. Republicans’ unwillingness to pick fights with Trump leads many people to the conclusion that legislators are choosing the second option: a rubber stamp. The truth is, however, Congress hasn’t done the work to make itself fit that role. A rubber stamp isn’t supposed to make itself scarce; it’s supposed to make itself available for the decision-maker’s use, without complication. It’s possible that, if either party won huge congressional majorities and the White House, Congress would move decisively in that direction. But that scenario itself seems remote, since both of America’s political parties seem unwilling to transform themselves into big-tent governing parties. In the deferential treatment of Trump’s cabinet appointments and the (bipartisan) willingness to turn budget reconciliation into an ever-expanding loophole to evade the Senate filibuster, one can certainly make out some signs of this inclination. (Attempts to limit the powers of federal district court judges to block executive actions would also fit the mold, but they seem not to have traction in the Senate.)

But congressional Republicans have not come anywhere close to heeding Rep. Boebert’s above-quoted exhortation to take all of Trump’s executive orders and write them into the statute-books. Perhaps because those votes would be too close for comfort, they mostly absent themselves as a body and use their platforms as individual members to broadcast their support for the administration. For many members, this media-oriented role is no kind of disappointment. It lets them build personal brands that may retain value after leaving office. And if they get on the right television shows, they may well catch the president’s attention and find direct influence through him. Other members who dislike this dynamic and wish to engage in more constructive policymaking often simply leave Congress.

Decrepitude, then, remains the path of least resistance for the institution that is supposed to be the beating heart of American self-government. Perhaps that is inevitable in a historical moment when more Americans see their political adversaries as actual enemies unworthy of being political bedfellows on any cause. Why should one seek to persuade and accommodate people who wish to destroy one’s whole way of life? If we do not believe in reasoning together, there is no need for Congress to mount a comeback as an institution.

Taking this course comes with very serious downsides, to put it mildly. As bad as some observers may have felt that Congress’s public deliberation was, policymaking-by-social-media is much, much worse. Having to hash out major decisions publicly has an unmistakable disciplining effect. A Congress intent on enacting industrial policy would never simply leave us with tariff rates that can bounce around at the president’s whim. A Congress determined to relieve some Americans’ student loan burdens would never have given so much to high earners free of economic distress. Relatively functional bipartisan processes have continued to prevail both for annual appropriations and national defense authorizations in recent years. If we imagine each of the thousands of decisions in those packages turned into a chance for presidential grandstanding, much mischief and bungling will result. In other words, if you think congressional decision-making is bad, wait until you get a load of post-congressional decision-making. It won’t be any technocratic paradise.

What would it take to push Congress toward revival? Some shock to the system, big enough to make members prioritize politically cross-cutting policies rather than partisan loyalty. Trump’s emergence turned out not to be big enough, nor was COVID-19. Maybe a shooting war with Russia or China? Perhaps if artificial intelligence transforms the economy so rapidly as to spike unemployment? Maybe a presidential term could go so badly as to make a political break inevitable, thereby opening a window for institutional reform? Who knows, maybe Elon Musk’s America Party will somehow change everything?

The challenge in imagining plausible scenarios is that, over the last decade, members of Congress have shown themselves quite able to redefine their own commitments to fit their team’s political needs. Our contemporary party system has, so far, bent rather than breaking a la 1910. Even the unprecedented un-gaveling of a Speaker of the House in October 2023 seems to have left little impression. Trump’s exit from the scene might scramble existing battle lines, but my guess is that something more than the turning of political pages is needed. We have no shortage of prescriptions for congressional revitalization. What we are short on is members with the courage (foolhardiness?) to risk their careers and partisan good standing to force the institution to operate differently—together with the perspicacity to understand how such a change would play out and why it would matter. “Once one dismisses the best of all possible worlds, one finds that this is the best of all possible worlds.” Q.E.D.

With a nod to Maimonides, Harvard Law’s Benjamin Eidelson and University of Virginia’s Deborah Hellman have published a draft article offering a “Guide to the Perplexed” regarding “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Title VI.” That law is the Civil Rights Act provision authorizing private litigants and the federal government to sue universities for discrimination. Whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism—always, never, theoretically but not practically, or some other relationship—dominates the discourse about campus demonstrations because it is generally thought that the latter but not the former implicates Title VI. Mere anti-Zionism is allegedly acceptable political discourse while antisemitism is bigotry. Accordingly, anti-Zionist campus demonstrations are sacrosanct free speech unless they “cross the line” into prohibited discriminatory harassment based on national origin.

The authors aim to show that it’s far more complicated. Antisemitism litigation against universities “face[s] formidable hurdles” first and foremost because civil rights law—at least on its face—only prohibits certain forms of antisemitism. It’s perplexing indeed.

Perplexing but moot, that is. Discrimination against Israeli nationals is prohibited under Title VI. No one disputes that, and that is all the government would have to show in order to strip a university of federal support. The hoopla over Eidelson’s and Hellman’s article, though, is about its analysis of contemporary anti-Zionism, and whether it fits into the narrow categories of antisemitism prohibited under civil rights law.

It is shocking that it is not obvious to the authors (and presumably their editors and readers) that contemporary anti-Zionism fits to a tee their description of what would qualify as prohibited national-origin discrimination. Yet it does not occur to them to make the argument that beneath the surface of anti-Zionist rhetoric is a movement with a philosophy predicated on certain discriminatory ideas about the nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. If two highly educated and thoughtful professors suffer from such a blind spot, the error is not really theirs.

Culturally, we have clearly focused on parsing phrases like “globalize the Intifada” at the expense of actually understanding the logic of contemporary anti-Zionist fervor. Forget particular chants and theoretical rhetoric, though: What are anti-Israel activists conveying to an objective listener at an irreducible level? What do they want, and why?

Destroying Israel is nothing short of an obsession among a cohort of young progressives. Yet it’s not always clear why students destroy their own library while disrupting exam prep in service of the anti-Israel cause and no other. Graduates don’t lie to administrators about the content of their valedictory addresses for the looming climate catastrophe. Nobody pours cement down Columbia’s toilets in protest of welfare cuts. Nor is it always clear why anyone off campus ought to care about what appears to be a he-said-they-said of offense-taking. Maybe these are just college kids taking offense at their subjective interpretations of arguably hurtful words, with “discriminatory harassment” serving as an anti-speech cudgel. But the anti-Israel movement has a philosophy whose substantive content doesn’t just put to rest Eidelson’s and Hellman’s challenge; it helps answer all those questions.

Eidelson’s and Hellman’s main contribution to the discourse is arguing that it is not clear that Title VI applies to all forms of antisemitism. Rather, “Title VI recognizes Jewishness only as a racial or ancestral category.” In other words, antisemitism with a religious inflection (“Christ-killer!”), that which taps into derogatory stereotypes (“cheap Jew!”), or devoid of content aside from hostility (“shut up, Jew”) may not count. But holding an event closed to “Ashkenazim,” Jews of European descent, would be a Title VI violation.

The authors think that whether garden-variety campus anti-Zionism implicates ancestral Jewishness is a difficult question. They identify some narrow circumstances in which anti-Zionism could manifest in racial or ancestral terms:

The most we can usefully say is that anti-Zionist acts of exclusion or “shunning” on campus could add up to a racially hostile environment if, but only if, they amount to severe and pervasive harassment even once the set of relevant instances is restricted to those in which (a) an intent to exclude students of Jewish ancestry motivates the exclusion, or (b) it is a student’s perceived Jewish ancestry that grounds an inference about their views regarding Israel. Exclusion of Zionists per se would not suffice.

There is a (c) that can be hard to see, but not because it is well-hidden; only because (and this is the scandal) we are not used to talking about what anti-Zionism is. Contemporary anti-Zionism, the view that the Jewish state of Israel should one way or another cease to exist, in all but the rarest of circumstances takes a form that denigrates Jews on the basis of their shared heritage. More specifically, it necessarily entails telling Jews that their shared heritage is a lie propagated for nefarious purposes but belied by the color of their skin. Today’s anti-Zionism relies on a perception about a Jew’s ancestry—that it is fraudulently concocted—combined with an observation about Jewish racial characteristics.

How such discrimination manifests, and its glaring ancestral-racial qualities, is clear, objective, and inescapable. My own experience as a “visible Jew” illustrates just how.

Students at Columbia, Harvard, and other elite schools set up encampments in violation of school rules, break into buildings, and deploy any number of other unpopular tactics because they are not trying to persuade.

When I was a law student living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I would take the subway to NYU Law’s downtown campus every weekday. Dozens of times over those three years, vagrant straphangers who saw my yarmulke would stand over me and preach—rant is the better word—to the rest of the car about who I really was and the perfidies my people had committed against theirs. These representatives of Black Hebrew Israelites or similar groups announced that white-looking Jews like me are not the real Jews. Rather, Ashkenazi Jews are white usurpers, enslavers, interlopers who lie about their heritage to garner sympathy and extract land and resources from indigenous peoples. We pretend to be heirs to the ancient Israelites, when the real inheritors of the land, tradition, and honor of that people are people of color who pretend-Jews like me oppress to complete our Big Lie. My ancestors apparently did this to black people worldwide. And Jews like me were still fraudsters and poseurs today.

This is easily recognizable as a kind of discrimination based on my ethnic heritage, real and perceived. It directly implicates my lineage as an Ashkenazi Jew by denying that I am descended from Levantine Israelites, singling me out for derision on that basis. It denies Jews the right to self-define as an ethno-religious group. My harassers preferred a conspiracy theory that underscores the Jews’ profound evil. They tell me that I am a fraud and a phony for claiming to be Jewish (real ancestry) while being white (perceived ancestry).

Yet, as I have quipped ever since, I would get off the subway, arrive at NYU Law, and promptly hear the same accusations, only leveled in more sophisticated language. Campus anti-Israel activism is now overwhelmingly “decolonial,” reliant on the claim that Jews are not the rightful sovereigns over Palestine because they are not indigenous. It is therefore eliminationist; the proper outcome is for the colonizers to get out, like the French in Algeria.

My classmates who claim that Israel, alone among the nations of the world, should be dismantled and replaced with a sovereign representing a different ethnic group constitute one kind of singling out. But there was quite another beneath the surface. Israel had to be eliminated, not reformed or compromised with, because it displaced a native population with an exclusive claim to the land. My fellow Jews were aghast. How can educated people say that Jews have no claim to that territory? Education is little defense against just-so conspiracy theories: Sure, ancient Jews lived there before Christian and Muslim Arabs did; but today’s Jews are not the same group, which we know because Jews are white. The position that distinguishes the anti-Zionists from the mere Israel-critics is thus predicated on a profound act of ethnic prejudice: claiming that the Jews who are currently sovereign in Israel are not who they claim to be. In other words, that Ashkenazi Jews (who make up a minority of Israel’s population and only part of its governing coalition) have manipulated, faked, or otherwise fabricated their ethnic heritage in order to steal land from Arabs. It’s subway-rant stuff.

Every time Israel is referred to as “settler-colonial,” the logic of the subway rant is baked in. It simply does not compute without the premise that today’s Jews are not who they claim. When student activists claim that a Jewish state in the Levant is unacceptable because it displaces the true indigenous people with white Europeans—precisely, if not explicitly, the most common form of anti-Zionism today—Jews are being told that they are not who they claim they are. It is per se discriminatory, against Israelis and Jews, on the basis of their real and perceived ethnic heritage, a conspiracy theory like nearly every form of antisemitism.

Seeing that does not require searching for ill motives or intent. It just requires thinking about the ideas being expressed rather than just the words. In other words, we should apply civil rights law to objective discrimination rather than merely explicit discrimination. Our legal standards should take anti-Zionism seriously on its own terms. If civil rights law cannot account for objective but thinly hidden forms of precisely the discriminatory harassment it exists to prevent due to a euphemism loophole that allows favored causes to avoid consequences for advancing a discriminatory movement, then it is not clear what benefit there is to a massive civil-rights enforcement apparatus and expensive campus compliance regimes. 

Once we focus on its objective and unavoidable positions, some apparent mysteries about the campus anti-Israel movement seem much less perplexing. Those who take it on do not think they are participating in a garden-variety political dispute. They are not trying to persuade their fellow students, or anyone else, of the rightness of their position. Nor could they, though they often recur to defensible arguments about Israel’s war conduct, treatment of Palestinians, or other governance issues. Those arguments are not the point, and the tenor of the “debate” over the Middle East would be entirely different if it were; the point is for someone other than Jews to be sovereign over the land that now constitutes Israel. And that is not the kind of position ripe to be advanced through reasoned argument. It can only be accomplished by intimidation, coercion, and misdirection.

Students at Columbia, Harvard, and other elite schools set up encampments in violation of school rules, break into buildings, and deploy any number of other unpopular tactics because they are not trying to persuade. Ask any radical campus group and they will tell you: they are following the lead of the “resistance,” Iran and its terrorist proxies, to make support for Israel anathema among the next generation of Americans. Apparently, Hamas made a habit of telling Israeli hostages the same.

Campus militants make little effort to hide the discriminatory logic of their cause. They count on academics and judges not seeing it for what it really is: A vile antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jews faking their heritage in order to steal from oppressed indigenous people. That is not just a flagrant Title VI violation. It’s an embarrassment to our institutions of higher learning, which have refused even to understand what the demonstrators stand for, and to our nation.

What makes a great superhero film?

It’s the billion-dollar question that largely keeps Hollywood afloat. While big budgets, A-list casts, and over-the-top CGI explosions land butts in seats, that still doesn’t answer the question—because the precondition to any worthwhile superhero film is crafting a hero who is himself great.

Simply put, the greatest heroes know who they are. They know their strengths, as well as their weaknesses; they have principles they believe in, and evils they reject. These take concrete forms beyond vague feelings and emotions. And heroes have the courage of conviction to stand by their choices without equivocation or today’s all-too-common irony. For nearly a century, Superman has been the quintessential hero in this mold, but the latest installment in the franchise, simply Superman, devolves so far from the ideal that our hero, like the country he’s meant to serve, seems to have forgotten his legacy entirely.

There’s little need for a thorough plot summary; you already know it well enough. Superman, played by a fresh-faced but ultimately bland David Corenswet, navigates his dual identity as a Kryptonian and human while working as a reporter for the Daily Planet. He faces public backlash after intervening to stop a war, which his perennial nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) capitalizes on to take him out for good. With the help of Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and a clown car of other “metahumans,” Superman battles to restore his image, defeat Luthor, and save Metropolis.

There’s nothing wrong with the story, per se; it’s a classic Superman arc. And yet, every aspect of it seems designed to fit on a Prius bumper sticker: be kind, end war, diversity is our strength. It’s all there, and it’s almost entirely meaningless.

Luthor is a cut-out for the progressive establishment’s greatest foes: he colludes with the fictional “Boravia,” a composite country clearly based on a mix of Russia and Israel. Its leader could be Ben-Gurion’s twin, who lives in a presidential palace a la Putin, and invades the neighboring country of ambiguously ethnic desert tribes in a war of aggression.

In the media, we have a Daily Planet that’s filled with good people who are nevertheless constrained by rigid institutional objectivity. Lois is frustrated because she knows Boravia is bad, but she can’t prove it, so she can’t print it—the progressive refrain endlessly leveled against more centrist fellow travellers. It doesn’t help that, with wavy black hair and a boho-chic aesthetic, she’s styled after former WaPo princess, Taylor Lorez.

Yet it’s Superman himself who faces the real injustice.

When the world first met Superman as America struggled against the Nazis, his belief in “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” actually meant something, a credo of universal appeal that nevertheless belonged to a particular time and place. Over the decades, the “American Way” evolved to a “Better Tomorrow” and then “Peace for all Mankind,” before settling into its final form, “the Human Way,” in the latest installment. With each step away from a concrete tradition, Superman has fallen further into the vague do-gooderism that drives our politics and culture today.

Corenswet’s Superman wants to be human, to assimilate into and be accepted by Earth’s culture, but has no concept of what that means beyond being a generally nice guy. He wants to have “faith in humanity,” but cannot articulate what’s good about humanity beyond people generally being nice back. But if being kind doesn’t even set him apart, what’s really Super about him at all? He wants earnestly to “do good”—no one can question that, even in this installment—but his actions are driven by knee-jerk emotions without any regard for second-order impact. Is single-handedly stopping a war in a far-off land necessarily “good”? Real geopolitical decisions aren’t that straightforward, and nearly always come with collateral damage—despite the film’s attempt at wishing them away. It’s not ultimately an effort to deconstruct Superman, as many on the cultural right feared it would be, but an exercise in bland delusion.

The film frames this faux-humanitarianism as a rebellious posture against a cynical world. Superman and Lois repeatedly discuss their shared love of punk rock in what becomes a ham-fisted metaphor for being the outcast, underdog, and rebel.“ Maybe that’s the real punk rock,” Superman responds, when Lois questions his boundless love for humanity.

Although this is certainly not an outcast view, it becomes impossible not to see oneself as such when the only solution to the evils of the world is all-encompassing human empathy. It’s a zero-sum game, after all; kindness to one can, and often does, harm another, as Superman learns the hard way. But like the progressive bureaucrat who whines about the raw might of right-wing populism or the six-figure DEI officer who still sees endless oppression, Superman will always feel trounced by his unachievable goal. And that makes him the cynic.

More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), Superman represents America coming into its own.

So the characters fall into another characteristic of the leftist yuppie class, a ubiquitous irony, snark, and pathological unwillingness to take anything or anyone seriously. “Do you think this is going well?” Lois asks Superman as she repeatedly presses him in an interview about his actions in Boravia—obviously implying it’s not. “Well, I think I’m doing a good job,” he retorts with an inflection right out of vaudeville. The interview devolves into pure marital bickering, a tiresome beat of snarky one-liners each rebuked by the next as soon as it lands, until Superman explodes. “People were going to die!” he screams, but even his moral outrage feels contrived, like a politician grandstanding for the camera. The viewer senses an implicit wink and a nod. It’s all a performance.

This comes part and parcel with a lack of real belief; scroll through any social media feed, where validation is fleeting and judgment severe, and you’ll see this rudderless cynicism on full display. There is a palpable fear of being proven wrong, regarded as foolish, or both, if you ever take yourself seriously enough to care about something in an age when nothing is sacred. Yet “doing good” requires sticking to something, a mix of guiding interests and principles. Superman has none, so it’s no surprise that everything in his world is one big joke. The biggest problem with Superman, which often makes it hard to watch, is that not a single one of them lands.

As we reach the climax, and Lois rushes off to rescue Superman with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the filmmakers still couldn’t resist deflating the stakes with a painful joke about a garage door opening too slowly. Even Redditors didn’t like it, precisely the cringe-humor demographic seemingly targeted. 

It’s this incoherent mix of earnest but ineffective altruism, along with a defensive irony, that drives the film, and indeed American culture today. This is a modern phenomenon insofar as it pervades American life, a shallow sensibility certainly detached from the historic “American way.” However, it’s exactly what director James Gunn wants you to believe “the American story” is.

“People did value kindness in the past. That was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn’t necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn’t about anything other than that,” Gunn explained in an interview.

Gunn is categorically wrong: while kindness can be, and often is, an American value, it takes anchored values to understand what “kindness” even is in the first place. Letting in infinite migrants might be kind in the abstract, but is it kind to those who are exploited in the journey north, the local communities and economies they disrupt, or the legacy of generations of Americans who fought and died for the legal right to call themselves American citizens? Beyond the quickest hit of moral satisfaction, there’s no way to truly judge without a basis in core principles. Yet Corenswet’s Superman would simply let them all in, bypassing both tradition and any deeper concept of kindness with the common modern snark: How does this affect you, bigot?

Historically, Superman has been a stand-in for America itself at a time when Americans had a firm belief that their nation stood for something noble and worth preserving. More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), he represents America coming into its own, a mature nation’s confidence in its strength and goodness, and a measured assessment of what responsibility that entailed. “Truth” and “justice” were built around a common culture, one we felt worth defending. No one could understand, let alone anticipate, these concepts being sneeringly reframed as a cover for power politics, as the mainstream leftist understanding goes today. “The American Way” was a distinct way of life—the continuance of Anglo traditions in legal order, personal liberty, and limited government. The average American may not have been able to articulate this, but he nevertheless understood it intuitively, especially in contrast to the arbitrary totalitarianism dually embodied in fascism and communism. And he knew his personal fate and legacy depended on fighting for it. Did America fight the Nazis out of kindness? No, the kind route would always lead to pacifism; we did it instead out of a noble mix of interest and principle, with an achievable, self-serious goal in mind. When filtered through core principles, America rejected unanchored kindness, and instead pursued something much greater.

The story of American heroism is one of unwavering belief in our own particular power for good, and the decline in heroes today is less a rejection of heroism than it is an erosion of belief altogether. Like Superman, we still want to think of ourselves as the good guy. We just no longer have any idea what that means.

The contemporary Marvel malaise is not so much driven by politics or the left’s conscious effort to subvert culture and history, as the right-wing criticism typically goes. Rather, it comes from a cynical fog drawing culture to the path of least resistance, culminating in an art form that no longer serves as art, even politicized art, but simply as a mass commodity. Heroes fight for nothing, represent nothing, they’re merely a replaceable widget; any “good guy” will do.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth, an author unique in American letters for the attraction she exerts. Her life was cut short by disease, and she wrote only two novels and two collections of short stories—yet she has a reputation among American writers of the twentieth century. Further, she was Southern, and her stories tend to be about the South, but she is nevertheless beloved in both the North and the West. Stranger still, she is a Catholic with a reputation among the new, post-Protestant Americans.

O’Connor is so widely beloved because there is something about storytelling that makes us think she may know us better than we know ourselves. Her context is the American context—the great transformations of the continental democracy in the post-war era. Despite the vastness of those themes, she looks at major social movements from a certain distance which, paradoxically, encourages her readers to enter into the intimacy of her characters—to search their hearts, in a way that’s only possible in times of great changes, when our hopes and fears become unsettled.

The questions O’Connor’s approach makes her readers ask may even help lead us to self-knowledge. Of the Catholic readers, one would have to ask: Why do they like O’Connor’s black comedy so much? Of the Northern readers, one would ask: Why do they like the social observation of the very stratified class society of the South so much? More broadly, of the post-Protestant audience, one has to ask: Why do they wish to see the conjunction of violence and grace that marks her storytelling?

Two of her stories help us begin to answer that question. The title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge, O’Connor’s second collection of short stories published in 1965, the year after her death, is one example of her distinctive style. Julian, our protagonist, is a restive college graduate of no particular ability—and an aspiring writer who does not write—living somewhere in the South with his mother. He resents everything about her, partly because she’s frivolous, partly because he owes her so much and believes he will never be able to repay her, and partly because of her apparent racism.

Julian is what his mother wanted him to be: handsome, college educated, a young man with a future. He believes himself to be her martyr, nonetheless, and believes he made something of himself despite her. The irony, of course, is that he is unable to truly do anything in the world. Julian may be considered an apostate—he despises the genteel world in which he was raised and desperately wants to have success as a liberal in the form of intellectual applause and the moral approval of black people, of whom he really knows nothing. Despite these revolutionary visions, there is something strangely innocent about Julian.

One night, taking his mother to her exercise class, he decides to humiliate her on the bus, for her condescending, grandmotherly behavior to a small black boy who wants her attention. He gets his wish. In the midst of their funny and annoying little family drama, there is a moment where their disagreement turns theoretical and raises the question: What does it mean to be human? Julian believes mind is what matters, his mother believes it’s the heart. He’s a liberal—mind could possibly bring us all together, overcome race differences, for example, in the way math can overcome any political difference—mind can make us one. She’s all about class, since heart or character is determined by upbringing.

The story suggests that there’s much to each argument and also that each is, in a specific way, wrong. Your upbringing can’t be who you are, or else there would never be misunderstandings between parents and children who are brought up well, much less the drama of Julian and his mom. She must mean she wishes people had more heart. But also, mind, which separates the smart and the stupid, cannot be the answer as to why Julian ostentatiously prefers black strangers to his mother. Moreover, he can’t quite see that his insistence on mind should lead him either to self-knowledge or to theoretical science—either way, it wouldn’t sustain his self-pity or moralism. But instead of distancing himself from his own passions, he’s just trying to break his mother’s heart. Since Julian’s family is falling apart and America is changing, these questions that seem to threaten to pull the human being apart cannot be avoided. The things we used to take for granted are now painful rather than reassuring.

I take the title “Everything that Rises Must Converge” to be an ironic reference to a phrase by the heretical Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In the story, people converge in their fallenness—Julian, his nameless mother, etc.—and the idealism of rising above the human condition is a matter of cruelty rather than wisdom, since it does not involve rising above oneself but rising above others, who must be lowered. Even rising to achieve equality—a black lady with the same hat as a white lady, or sitting in the same seats—involves too much anger.

O’Connor wrote stories about guilt and grace, whose protagonists are losers busy politicizing their pathologies. That’s also the story of youth revolutionary movements since the ’60s.

O’Connor’s story reveals the fundamental tension at the core of civil rights. The ‘60s may have seemed to the world a period of moral triumph, in both iconic protests and landmark legislation, but the heady atmosphere of the time also led to a kind of moral collapse through division, fear, and hatreds, which ultimately produced race riots. If civil rights are strictly a matter of law concerning public things, they must involve the privatization of opinion. In Julian’s liberal utopia, people have to stop noticing things which, if said aloud, would lead to conflict. Accommodation would be difficult, unsatisfying to everyone, and there’d be no special virtue in being in favor of civil rights. To achieve that special importance, to embody a moral ideal, one would have to think of civil rights as a judgment of private opinions and private associations, too, done in full view of the public, with the instruments of the state, since it would require proving who is of pure heart and who is a racist and then acting on that proof in order to prove that moral superiority makes a difference in ordinary life. Everyone would end up looking racist, as in the story.

In their small way, O’Connor’s characters show us the American drama. In a middle-class society, parents want a better life for their children, but that requires social reform as well as educational reform. For kids to rise above their parents is also for the young to end up judging, and perhaps even damning the old. College kids are almost inevitably revolutionaries. Progress makes ingrates. The black family in the story is no exception. The mother may wish to proudly separate herself from whites whom she suspects, but her kid, precisely because America is a free country, just wants to attract the old white lady’s attention. That boy, precisely because the old white lady likes him, is breaking his own mother’s heart.

Whereas social revolution through a transformation of racial attitudes is the problem in “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in “The Enduring Chill,” from the same volume, religion is the problem. The protagonist is again a fatherless college boy, Asbury, who returns to the South from New York to his mother, whom he also loathes because she has sacrificed to make something of him. He is deluded about being an artist, but he has failed to write a play he started. Asbury is too weak, too soft to be a revolutionary; although softness has given him sufficient cruelty. Instead, he wishes to have a religious revelation and to die a meaningful death of a mysterious disease—and part of the meaning would be punishment for his mother.

Asbury destroys his writings in advance of his anticipated death and writes his mother a deathbed letter, blaming her for his lack of talent—she treated him like a slave, he went to New York to liberate himself, only to find himself useless. Asbury’s ingratitude is the cornerstone of his liberation. To defy his mother, who likes books like Gone with the Wind, Asbury persuades the black workers in her dairy to join him in revolutionary solidarity by, for example, smoking over the milk or drinking it raw. They do not like him, but they accept a cigarette.

Instead of putting any trust in the local country doctor, Asbury prefers to talk to a priest, a Jesuit preferably—an intellectual. He would like to rival Christ as a “dying god.” It would also give him pleasure because it would humiliate his Protestant mother’s prejudices. The scene, however, turns comic: the no-nonsense priest tells him to pray and tries to catechize him while scolding him for his ignorance, laziness, and carelessness of his near and dear. For once, we see something of a man. Asbury is a momma’s boy who despises his successful late father as a stupid Southerner. Asbury was not brought up by a demanding authority and therefore has no strength of character.

The oddity of the story is that in his foolishness, in playing with death, in turning from the religion of art to religion, Asbury has made two mistakes he cannot take back. He has shown that he is more foolish than the uneducated people who care for him, like his mother and doctor. At the moment, he has committed to live out the remainder of his life with his family, and, too, he has opened himself up to reflection on mortality. He is, like so many young people today, touchy, irritable, and oversensitive. Another way of putting that is, needy. If he cannot have a father, perhaps he can turn to the Father in heaven.

O’Connor wrote stories about guilt and grace, whose protagonists are losers busy politicizing their pathologies. That’s also the story of youth revolutionary movements since the ’60s. O’Connor shows why that collegiate class’s liberalism must fail—it will not lead to a real education or work, but instead encourage a kind of casual cruelty. The young are too inexperienced and irresponsible in our educational system; their ability to read and write confuses them about where they stand to adults, and at the same time tempts them with ideology, which can offer them the victories their sensitivity demands.

Ordinary life in a liberal society can be quite boring, which encourages extreme alternatives, not least because, in being unknown, their dangers can be attractive rather than fearful. Moreover, liberalism itself can be heightened to a demand to tyrannize on principle, attempting, so to speak, to turn all life into a college education where you have to prove you’re able to make the grade. Yet people cannot but fail to rise to the heights of humanity, so Progress is a cruel thing.

O’Connor does us a great favor in making such comedy out of the inner lives of young men who are not particularly impressive, because that’s the middle-class condition which higher education cannot eradicate. There may be a kind of mercy in her interest, her invasion of privacy, if you will, her attempt to know them better than they or their parents know them. We have to take seriously what’s obviously mad about the young, or how are they to become sane? Having gone this far down the liberal path of higher education, we must do it well or come to grief. So we must plunge into the depths of the soul; O’Connor can be a help in this adventure.

We are now months into the second Trump presidency, one that is markedly different, with significant changes not only from how past Republican presidents have governed, but also from Trump’s first term. Trump’s first administration enacted sweeping tax cuts built on growth ideas that had been circulated and refined for decades in conservative circles. There was also a significant deregulatory component to this agenda. Tariffs were imposed on Chinese goods, but they were not applied globally. Today, things have changed, and in some cases, remarkably. There has been no shortage of justifications and defenses for the new policy changes, many of which the readers of Law & Liberty can no doubt recite on demand.

It is essential to consider the arguments of policy scholars who are advocating for a shift to a conservatism that advocates for government intervention. The New Conservatives, a book recently published by American Compass, the think tank headed by political economist and lawyer Oren Cass, comprises previously published essays by its scholars, with the lion’s share written by Cass. The book is decidedly protectionist, pro-industrial policy, pro-labor union, pro-family policy, and proposes a more robust alliance between Silicon Valley and the government. The message is clear: entitlements shouldn’t be cut, nor should current tax rates on any labor or activity be reduced. In fact, Cass has indicated that he favors increasing taxes on wealthy Americans.

Central ideas these “new conservatives” share guide the essays in the inevitable direction of greater government involvement in almost every policy area. Most importantly, they argue we shouldn’t focus on the consumer but on the worker, especially workers engaged in the manufacturing sector. From this shift in focus from the sovereignty of the consumer to the sovereignty of the worker emerges a policy platform that launches America into the throes of a conservative social democracy, twenty-first-century style. An increased focus on the family in the form of transfer payments also joins the focus on the worker.

We live in the shade of a false account of trade and economics, Cass says. The free trade period in American life is largely an aberration, a detour from the real American success story of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, who championed the “American System” of tariffs, industrial policy, and internal improvements. This system launched the young nation into the roaring success it achieved by the beginning of the twentieth century. In short, young America greatly benefited from a protectionist American economy, and it should become so again under the circumstances we now inhabit. Cass further contends that economic luminaries David Ricardo and Adam Smith recognized the necessity of “bounded” economic markets that concentrated on the domestic front. Trade that moved beyond borders needed to be balanced and limited to goods for goods. Yet much of this account conflicts with economist Douglas Irwin’s magisterial history of American trade policy, Clashing Over Commerce, which surveys trade policy throughout America’s history and concludes that the country has alternated among revenue, restriction, and reciprocity as bases for trade policy. We have reentered a period of renewed trade restrictions. And we will learn its errors again, Irwin warns.

Building on his crabbed historical account of free trade, Cass announces in the book’s opening, “This is what elite failure looks like.” And he is here to lead us to a better tomorrow, one focused on manufacturing, with stronger worker policies, better supported families, improved economic security, along with growth and stability. We need it, according to Cass, because the underlying premise is that America, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is in a dire state that has been worsening for decades. The only way out is a revival of economic policies closely associated with past episodes of American progressivism. As Cass states:

An important point of departure for the new conservative thinking is a turn away from a single-minded focus on maximizing consumption, which has traditionally been the focus of economists and policymakers. People are workers as well as consumers, and their own health, the health of their families and communities, and ultimately the security and the prosperity of the nation depend as much on what they contribute through their production as on what they enjoy in consumption.

The focus on consumption and on what consumers want, in Cass’s mind, is a shortcut, allowing us to look away from the harrowing plight of the American worker.

We should ask why we focus on consumption in the first place, though. Has it been a false understanding of economists? Or is it a giant capitalist macroaggression against the American worker? Younger New Right acolytes have said outright to me that the focus on consumption is a hedonistic plot, evidence of a decadent society.

Why do we work? We indeed find meaning and frustration in our work, fellowship, and rivalries, as well as opportunities and disappointments. But through all of that, we work to consume because we need to consume; that is, we must satisfy our needs and wants, and through work, we acquire the means to engage in exchanges with others. Economically speaking, that is the point of work. Would you continue to do your job if your wages were cut by 10 percent, 15 percent, or entirely? No. You’d look for other work.

Our problems in education, family, patriotism, and work rates are undeniable, and many of them the New Right identifies correctly, but rooting them primarily in an economy built on the betrayal and deceit of hard-working Americans is simply false.

The purpose of an economy is to meet the needs of consumers, since consumption is the ultimate reason why we work. Conclusions follow this truth. One is that consumers don’t have the responsibility to keep certain workers employed. The producer must serve the consumer. Should we be required to buy things that are redundant or that we don’t need or want, to keep existing businesses alive? That is the absurd logic of Cass’s inversion of the consumption-production relationship. Moreover, feeding, housing, and clothing one’s family are essential expenses. How is making these consumption expenses more expensive pro-family?

We are all consumers, and redefining the economy around manufacturing workers inevitably leads to a cronyism framework in which the government supports special interests. In serving the consumer, by contrast, we best unlock the dynamism and creativity that crowns a market economy. Consumer choices determine which products or economic actions will best locate our comparative advantage and which will not. Through this process of discovery, investors gain a better understanding of where to invest, workers learn where to work, and producers determine the resources they need to bring goods and services to the market. How does the process appear when we focus on workers and government policies that attempt to engineer wages and economic sectors, while inherently favoring some sectors over others? What knowledge is relied upon? Where does it come from? How will it be deployed? Who are the decision makers? But rather than one more Massachusetts liberal or DC economic nationalist attempting to run our lives, the better part of wisdom remains the singular standard of consumer choice and how this choice is calculated, which inherently relies on core economic concepts that will always shape economic reasoning and best conduce to an economy of plenty.

Oren Cass is not alone in his nearly apocalyptic view of the economy’s plight and the workers within it. He is joined in this perspective by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, author of Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The original subtitle of Roberts’ book was “Burning Down Washington to Save America.” The image on the cover was a match being struck. But that subtitle and image were swapped out in the summer of 2024 because of their association with violence. There was an attempted assassination of Trump, and Roberts had also called during that summer for “a second American revolution.” The book’s publication was then delayed to the fall after the Trump campaign distanced itself from both Heritage and Roberts amidst the Project 2025 meshugas. But it’s the original presentation that seems more fitting for a book whose animating insight comes from the mouth of fictional sociopathic assassin, Anton Chigurh, from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Before killing another assassin, Chigurh asks him of his “rule in life,” and “if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” To Roberts, this is the question to be asked of conservatives.

In the following paragraph, Roberts explains that Chigurh’s question bears immediate relevance, “After all, if what the old conservative coalition understood to be its foundational principles [it’s rule in life] led us to this—the total domination of the Uniparty [i.e., the conglomeration of Republicans and Democrats], the demise of the American working class, and the erosion of the institutions that defined American life—of what use are those principles?” And what were those “foundational principles” of conservatism that ruined the working class and destroyed American institutions, Roberts asks. “The old conservative movement held that if you just got government out of the way, the free market, civil society, individual liberty, the nuclear family, and more would take care of themselves.”

What Roberts really describes is a caricature of libertarianism. Few conservatives of any kind will recognize themselves in it, of course. But then again, populists are more interested in caricatures than reality. And Roberts doesn’t stop there; there’s more: “a conservative movement that limits itself to this stale program is cosigning the Uniparty’s euthanasia of the American nation.” Roberts then refers to conservatives who disagree with his categorical dismissal of their position as “wax-museum conservatives” who “don’t know what time it is.” They are at a “dead-end” because “their principles presume that a healthy American society exists.” They continue to listen to “the abstract economic pronouncements of some long-dead Austrian aristocrat.” That childish insult is hurled at Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich von Hayek, one of the foremost economic, institutional, and legal thinkers of the twentieth century. Such immature attempts to marginalize thoughtful people and institutions, many of whom agree with the author on issues more than they disagree, fill the book’s pages. But that’s strange when you consider the federal government never really shrank such that conservatives could pronounce that American society was “healthy.”

Today’s conservatives in Washington stand on the shoulders of ideas, research, and statesmanship that took decades to build. They would do well to improve it, not denigrate it.

For Roberts as for Cass, economic reasoning does not possess universal qualities. It’s time-bound, historical, and embedded in circumstances. In many respects, their position reproduces that of the nineteenth-century German Historical School in its debates with the nascent Austrian Economics School. German historical thinkers relied on inductive reasoning, data, and historical episodes, reasoning from a constellation of facts to various social and national purposes for the economy. They castigated the Austrians for relying on methods of economic inquiry that were predicated on subjective individual knowledge regarding value and prices. There were universal economic principles, the Austrians demonstrated, rooted in economic truths knowable by reason, such as marginal utility, scarcity, price theory, comparative advantage, and opportunity costs; the disregard of these principles leads to economic decay as much as it leads to state aggrandizement. Yet, Roberts correctly concludes that housing prices are too high, and, in substantial part, this owes to government intervention. But he fails to draw the necessary conclusion that increasing supply in this consumption good relies on the economic principles mentioned above, principles that are operative throughout the whole economy.

As most readers are aware, one of Hayek’s key principles is that the human person best acquires knowledge through local interactions and exchanges with others. The knowledge possessed by investors, workers, consumers, and managers is accumulated through pieces of information, which actors use in the economy in their own inherently self-interested ways. It’s a key principle that spells the ultimate self-defeating nature of centralizing economic activity in political institutions. Both Roberts and Cass, though, have tied themselves to the mast of reindustrialization and increasing manufacturing jobs. And that requires industrial policy, which means the federal government, in this context, will engage in policy choices on behalf of one economic sector to boost employment within it, which inherently will come at the expense of other workers in other economic sectors. Contemporary American historicists will also lose the reincarnation of this debate just as their German intellectual forebearers did, regardless of the short-term political opportunism currently carrying them. The “abstract economic pronouncements” of a certain Austrian aristocrat are inconvenient truths for those favoring various types of government control over the economy.

We are all consumers, and redefining the economy around manufacturing workers inevitably leads to a cronyism framework in which the government supports special interests.

One is fully entitled to one’s own rhetoric, if not hyperbole, but economic truths are stubborn things. Conservatism in the postwar conservative period did not proceed on the premise that American society is fundamentally healthy, as Roberts states. The principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are fundamentally good, and there was always an assumption, as noted by Willmoore Kendall, that enough Americans still lived the American tradition of freedom “in their hips.” At the same time, there was also tremendous fomentation from progressive sources. The conservative movement itself came together, grew together, because of the New Deal Revolution of 1932, the new constitution declared by the Supreme Court in 1937, the soft-pedaling of communism in the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of anti-religious forces in the 1950s and 1960s, the augmentation of the welfare state in the Great Society, the marginalization of family and motherhood in the sexual revolution, and the liberal defeatism of the 1970s. Conservatives have always been at war with progressives.

We should consider another set of economic truths. Did the working class meet its demise at the hands of free trade, NAFTA, and the WTO as Cass and Roberts insist? No. As AEI economist Michael Strain and investor Clifford Asness observe: “The wages of nonsupervisory workers—roughly the bottom 80 percent of workers by pay, including manufacturing workers and service-sector workers who are not managers—have grown by around 60 percent over the past two generations. Over the past three decades, inflation-adjusted wages for typical workers have grown by 44 percent.”

Strain and Asness cite a different finding on overall wealth accumulation, observing that data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) notes that “families in the 51st to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution had an average wealth of $1.3 million in 2022, the most recent year data are available. That’s up from around $500,000 in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.”

What about those with low incomes, Strain and Asness inquire? “The CBO’s income data show that inflation-adjusted post-tax-and-transfer income for the bottom 20 percent of households more than doubled from 1990 to 2021.” And “these families saw their average real wealth triple from 1990 to 2022.” Poverty rates have declined using the government’s official measure from above 20 percent in 1960 to 11 percent today. The standard is relative, so some poverty will always be found.

What about the boys down at the plant? Are we overlooking them?

In their famous paper describing the “China Shock,” David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson observed a 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, concluding that imports from China resulted in a 21 percent decline in manufacturing employment, or a net loss of 2.4 million jobs. Numerous scholars have since questioned these findings of such job losses, reducing the number by half or even more. We should note the number of jobs created in America by imports, which economists also point to in evaluating China Shock. I don’t diminish job losses or the psychological toll they exert. It is a natural part of any freely functioning economy, however, and an inherent aspect of capitalism and America’s economic history. Six million jobs were also created during this same period in other sectors of the economy. Economist Jeremy Horpedahl has recently tested the jobs and incomes of the 10 cities most negatively affected by the China Shock. His findings indicate that most of them currently boast more jobs than they did in 2001. Moreover, these same cities have higher real wages for workers at every income level. Amidst the current push for reindustrializing America, we might wonder who will fill the already 450,000 open manufacturing jobs? Declinist narrative and DC opportunity mill meet economic reality.

In meeting the needs of consumers, the American manufacturing sector has increased productivity since 1994, the year NAFTA was implemented, by between 70-80 percent. As George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux has noted in this space, “the productivity of American manufacturing workers steadily increased from the end of WWII until 2012; it neither stopped nor even slowed when America’s run of annual trade deficits started in 1976.” This productivity increase came at a time when this same sector began to shed jobs in earnest towards the end of the 1970s. This would be evidence of a robust sector, and yet virtually every Western country has watched its manufacturing sector decline during this period. America differs in that its manufacturing sector’s productivity is almost unmatched. Besides, as Harvard Kennedy School, NBER, and Peterson Institute economist Robert Lawrence has noted, productivity growth is the “dominant force behind the declining share of employment in manufacturing in the United States and other industrial economies.”

We can quibble with why manufacturing productivity has not continued to increase since 2012, but we might consider consumers again, who, as they grow richer and live in more prosperous economies, choose to devote fewer resources to manufacturing goods. America is now a service-based economy, and if we are going to speak the language of trade deficit and surplus, it’s one in which we have a definite surplus. One can feel the collective shudder from the economic nationalists, but these are facts that can only be changed with economically suboptimal government interventions.

With data like this, Americans should wonder why they are consistently being misled by leaders on the populist left and right. Such doomsaying about the demise of the working class and the decline of the industrial heartland serves as a dangerous introduction to a politics of grievance, providing a powerful platform to those pushing these views. Our problems in education, family, patriotism, and work rates are undeniable, and many of them Roberts identifies correctly, but rooting them primarily in an economy built on the betrayal and deceit of hard-working Americans is simply false.

Moreover, the attribution of blame to the conservative movement as it existed before Trump famously came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy is another falsehood. There were certainly problems, when are there not? But the ideas that drove Trump’s first term to success were built on decades of right-of-center policy work, and it’s that first term that voters approved of in the 2024 election and want to see re-created in his second term. The notion that one can seemingly reinvent American conservatism from scratch, as if 70 years of history can be dismissed or disregarded, underscores the surreal nature of the project, one that views history more like Thomas Paine rather than Edmund Burke.

Today’s conservatives in Washington stand on the shoulders of ideas, research, and statesmanship that took decades to build. They would do well to improve it, not denigrate it. Besides, the economic populist program that Roberts and Cass endorse is not endorsed by most GOP voters, who continue to want traditional objectives of economic growth, limited and competent government, low crime, lower prices, and economic opportunity, plus an end to the ideological revolutionary nostrums of the Left. No significant constituency has emerged in favor of the tariffs. If tariffs, industrial policy, labor union alliances, progressive antitrust, a family policy welfare state, and other left-of-the-right populist notions prevent these voters from getting what they want and they return Democrats to power, then we will ask, “If following your economic populist program led to this, of what use was the program?”

Who bears the primary responsibility for shaping a child’s moral imagination: the state or their parents? Last term, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court answered with uncommon clarity in cases where the parents’ religion is at stake: when public schools press lessons that undermine the faith of young pupils, parents may halt participation. The decision matters on three planes. 

Doctrinally, it may signal a weakening of Employment Division v. Smith’s constraint on free exercise claims. Sociologically, it highlights the conflict that arises when government curricula collide with the religious sentiment of a substantial portion of the population, in this case shaped by the Abrahamic code. Politically, by giving religious families an opt-out from religiously burdensome curricula, it may paradoxically shore up public education against the voucher and homeschooling movements that demand a complete exit from government schools.

Mahmoud v. Taylor arose from the school district of Montgomery County, Maryland, which created an “inclusive” English language curriculum for students from kindergarten to fifth grade. In this curriculum, the students read or had read to them several books that many parents believed celebrated same-sex marriage and gender transitions. Initially, the county gave notice of the classes in which these materials would be used and permitted parents to opt out without their children incurring unexcused absences. But the county then changed course and required attendance. A coalition of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim parents sued, contending that the Court’s imposition of this curriculum violated their free exercise rights to bring up children in their faith.

The Supreme Court decision to uphold the parents’ free exercise claims rested on two doctrinal steps. First, Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, held that requiring children to attend lessons using these materials created “a real threat of undermining the religious beliefs of children” and thus burdened the parents’ free exercise rights. Second, the Court held that the neutrality of a law mandating curricula for all students did not insulate it from the strict scrutiny applicable to laws that burden religious exercise. While Employment Division v. Smith generally protected such neutral laws from free exercise challenge, the burden of this law was of the same type in the Yoder case, where the Court had upheld the Amish’s right to opt-out of a neutral legal requirement mandating high school education for fear that such instruction would distance their children from their parents’ religious beliefs and practices.

Both the doctrinal steps broke important new ground. First, in finding that material in a curriculum created a burden on free exercise rights, the court suggested that these readings could prove psychologically coercive to young children. Thus, as my friend Mark Movsesian observed in a recent podcast, Justice Alito applied an idea from Establishment Clause cases like Lee v. Weisman in which the Court previously held that government religious speech could be coercive in the context of a captive audience. This holding means that secular government speech can, in some contexts, provide the threshold for a free exercise violation.

And as the dissent notes, the scope of this holding will raise questions going forward for public schools. For instance, could a parent who professes a creationist creed opt out of a biology class in which evolution is taught? The theory for such a plaintiff parent under Mahmoud is that this curriculum would burden his free exercise rights. But the difference might well be that a high school student could be expected to treat the lesson as a scientific claim, which he could accept for purposes of the class but not otherwise. The burden on religious exercise is more questionable than in the case of a young child who would have trouble making such distinctions.

By giving religious families an opt-out from religiously burdensome curricula, Mahmoud v. Taylor may paradoxically shore up public education against the school choice movement.

Moreover, the compelling interest argument to meet strict scrutiny would also be stronger. Modern biology depends on the concept of evolution. English language instruction hardly depends on reading celebrations of same-sex marriage or gender transition. The problem here is that Montgomery County is going out of its way to morally indoctrinate children. Justice Thomas captures this aspect of the case when he observes that sex education is not a traditional curriculum in public schools. Thus, underlying the scope of Mahmoud’s holding may be an implicit history and tradition premise that has underpinned much of the recent Court’s constitutional analysis—in this case, the history and tradition of public education.

The Court’s circumscription of the scope of Smith’s famous neutrality holding may also have long-run implications. The Court was not clear about the exact nature of the burden on religious exercise that escapes the analysis of Smith. But Justice Alito did not rely on a fundamental due process right of parents to bring up their children—the so-called hybrid rights justification for Yoder’s application of strict scrutiny despite the law’s neutrality. Still, it is best to understand the exception to Smith as connected to children. Unlike adults, children cannot be expected to understand concepts like the neutrality of laws and thus may well feel the expression of neutral laws as offensive or undermining of their religion.

The Court’s treatment of Smith may also help set the stage for its overruling. When the Court considers overruling a case, it weighs whether the case’s holding has proved clear and workable. By widening an exception to Smith and not rooting it in a separate constitutional right, Alito, an avowed opponent of Smith, may hope to undermine its future viability.

This case also underscores the fault line that opens when governments promote a moral framework that opposes the religiously based morality of a majority or even a substantial minority of its people. The Abrahamic religions have been united for hundreds of years in teaching that the sexes are binary and that marriage is only between opposite sexes. It is true that some mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish congregations have recently jettisoned these positions, but these denominations remain a distinct and shrinking minority among these religions.

The social stakes of this case are thus higher than Yoder. The Amish are a tiny sect. Moreover, their almost complete rejection of modern life is likely to attract only a small band of adherents. In contrast, religions with traditional moral values remain a salient social and political force in America.

Nevertheless, same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. And progressives have assaulted binary gender categories. Given the liberal elites that exercise substantial control over education in much of the country, it is hardly a surprise that school curricula will often be designed to celebrate conduct and practices anathema to traditional religion. Literature for young children is usually celebratory. No one could read the books in this case without coming away thinking that same-sex marriage and gender transitions are good things. The teacher’s manual, suggesting that the instructor call out as “hurtful” the claim that a boy cannot become a girl, is designed to shut down religious and moral objections and assure civic conformity. The very decision to put these books in English language learning for young children is an attempt to make this perspective on sexual morality a seamless part of their upbringing, not a question that raises moral challenges.

The dissenters’ claims that these books are just factual depictions without normative resonance can be charitably described as playing economically with the truth. But they are nevertheless revealing. They do not wish to admit that creating a citizenry comfortable with same-sex marriage and gender transition is the point of the curriculum, because that seems like indoctrination. But such indoctrination is a logical demand of today’s progressive morality. To be sure, in a liberal society, it might seem possible to legalize same-sex marriage and even gender transitions, and yet at the same time not try to tamp down on strong criticism of these practices. But progressivism asserts that because such practices constitute identity, any such critique is incompatible with allowing such citizens to flourish. Hence, such moral opposition must be driven out of social discourse.

More generally, it is hard for those who see collective action as the way to bend history towards justice to permit pockets of what are regarded as reaction, even if they flow directly from traditional religious teaching. The same concern makes progressives leery of state support for private education, particularly of a religious nature. Opt-out authority in parents similarly creates a sphere of private authority within public education. It was Rousseau, whose political theories inspired liberals, progressives, and radicals, who attacked private education because it would simply transmit to the children the “prejudices” of their families. For him, education by the state is necessary to guarantee the primacy of the general will of democracy. Not surprisingly, praise of the democratic process by which local school curricula are established is a centerpiece of the dissenting opinion.

Given the Court’s constitutional authorization of school vouchers and the rise of homeschooling, progressives should be more grateful for this decision than their commentary has so far let on. Public school curricula for young and impressionable children hostile to traditional Abrahamic religions are recruiting sergeants for more school choice. And even when that movement is not successful in a particular state or locality, such curricula will encourage more homeschooling—the total opt-out option. Both results or worse for the progressive cause because they will allow students to be strengthened in what progressives would regard as prejudice and what conservatives regard as the well-formed traditions of centuries of religious teaching.

At the Founding, the state could leave religious morality largely alone because public, indeed elite, moral vocabulary aligned with that of most churches. Today, such alignment has diminished, and the government increasingly uses its classrooms to reshape the moral culture. But Mahmoud reminds us that the Constitution still grants parents the first claim on their children’s religious formation. When state instruction turns to dogma, the Constitution assigns parents the last word—and the right to withdraw.

Reforming the federal government’s largest entitlement programs is an imposing political project that will require those with shared concerns to work together on a common plan of action. The essays published in response to my original submission in this symposium, “The Path to Entitlement Reform,” are fine examples of constructive perspectives that should inform the development of a broader consensus on how to proceed.

The three essays, from Sita Slavov, Joel Griffith, and Thomas Savidge, differed in terms of emphases and focus, but each of the authors expressed, in their own ways, that entitlement reform needs to be tethered to values and principles if it is to be successful. It is not enough to enact any changes whatsoever so long as the fiscal math improves. What is done matters immensely too, especially from the perspective of ensuring the federal government plays an appropriate, and not a disproportionate, role in American life.

First Principles

As Slavov noted, entitlement reform can be based on either explicit or implicit values. For some, the purpose might be to pay for an even more generous social welfare system with higher levels of taxation. The goal would be less income inequality, even if that might lead to slower overall income growth for future generations. For others, the aim might be to shrink the state so as to maximize the space for individuals to plan their own lives and take responsibility for their welfare.

Then there is the critical question of intergenerational equity. Slavov stresses that continued borrowing to finance consumption beyond what today’s voters are willing to pay for with taxes should be seen for what it is: a failing that violates the core value of justice. What is borrowed today lessens economic opportunities for future generations. Trust funds and other budget rules can help institutionalize the principle that today’s voters should not be free to impose excessive and avoidable costs on future taxpayers.

Griffith took up the cause of the young from a different perspective. His focus is on giving today’s workers more agency when planning their financial lives by personalizing Social Security through investment accounts. Such a reform would create a direct link between earnings and wealth accumulation for retirement, and would give millions of workers with modest incomes access for the first time to the higher returns available from equity investments and corporate bonds. 

The unstated but important values underlying the recommendations in my essay are close to what Savidge urges as a benchmark for measuring progress. For a century, defenders of a properly conceived liberalism have struggled to hold back the powerful political impulse to hand ever more power to the state in the name of economic security. It is the reason Social Security and Medicare are much larger today than when they were first conceived. The starting point for entitlement reform should be a reassertion of a sound perspective on the proper role of the state in public life, which can then inform whether gradual reforms would move in the right direction, or not. Simply raising taxes to whatever level is necessary to pay for untargeted and inefficient programs is not the answer. The recommendations in my essay were aimed at reducing the cost burden of entitlements to a level that would be tolerable, in part by prioritizing assistance for the lowest-income households.

Savidge hints at another important factor, which is prudence when weighing options. Some half-measures are better than others. For instance, it might be acceptable to agree to a payroll tax increase as part of a larger Social Security reform plan if the other provisions create the needed stability and financial space for individuals to better plan for their retirements using their own savings and resources. On the other hand, it should never be acceptable to entirely foreclose certain pathways that facilitate individual agency, even if doing so might improve the fiscal outlook.

Trust Funds

Savidge also raises a question about the value of referencing trust funds when pursuing entitlement reforms. As he notes, federal trust funds for Social Security and Medicare do not hold invested financial assets in the same way private trusts do. Rather, these trust funds are accounting devices created to provide information to elected leaders. Their purpose is to track income and outgo across multiple decades with the intention of ensuring that dedicated tax receipts roughly match spending over time. When the trust funds are projected to become depleted, as is now the expectation for both Social Security and Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) in the 2030s, the issuance of the annual trustees reports puts Congress on official notice that corrective reforms are needed to restore balance.

Reforms which restrain future spending and provide additional space for individual responsibility and initiative should be seen as progress, even if these reforms seem to fall short of a full transformation of what now exists.

In my original essay, I argued that the trust fund construct could be used to advance needed reforms because they are familiar and accepted by both Congress and the electorate as appropriate devices for disciplining program spending. While it would be better if elected leaders acted more promptly on the warnings from the Social Security and Medicare trustees, history shows that it is not easy to ignore warnings of trust fund insolvency indefinitely. In 1983 for Social Security, and in 1997 for Medicare, Congress approved significant program changes with the express intention of preventing the relevant trust funds from becoming fully depleted of reserves. 

Trust funds are admittedly imperfect tools for restraining entitlement spending, but they are the tools now available, enjoy a degree of public support, and are far better than no tools at all.

Avoiding a Crisis, or Planning for It

Savidge’s perspective is informed by an expectation that nothing of consequence will change absent a crisis, and that when the inevitable crisis arrives, new possibilities for reform will emerge that otherwise would not be available while voters are protective of the status quo. He recommends working on principled but practical plans that can be picked up when the time is right.

It is an important perspective, but it implies that those who share his dedication to free markets and limited government will have leverage when the fateful day arrives. It is not obvious that this will be the case. It would seem at least possible that the political storm that a debt-induced economic calamity might unleash could precipitate a renewed push for even more forceful state intervention in the economy, with deficits and debt addressed via inflation and high taxes rather than reforms. There are certainly examples of such turns from history (see Argentina, pre-2023).

Moreover, a crisis does not yet seem entirely unavoidable. There are, of course, many indications that the nation’s political processes have been struggling in recent years, but that does not mean nothing will ever happen without a clear rupture forcing elected leaders to take action. For instance, it is still possible that the expected depletion of trust fund reserves in Social Security will induce Congress to take up legislation bringing expected spending in line with revenue in the coming decades. Such a measure need not be disruptive to current beneficiaries or involve precipitous tax hikes, which means it might be possible for it to pass even during a period of relative economic stability. The recommendations offered in my essay were based on the assumption that proceeding with such reforms as soon as possible would be preferable to waiting for an unpredictable crisis to upend the status quo.

Other Perspectives

The US has an ideologically diverse population, but it is important to recognize that the main entitlement programs were put into federal law during periods when the Democratic Party was ascendant. In 1935 and again in 1965, Congress was run by large Democratic majorities, which created the conditions conducive for ambitious program expansions.

Moreover, every high-income democracy has put in place similarly expansive social welfare programs. The US is in some ways an outlier in that it is the only major advanced economy that has not adopted a fully nationalized version of health insurance enrollment. Some countries, such as Germany, allow private entities to operate in the health sector, but they do so with more restrictions than is the case in the US.

When considering this history, it is reasonable to assume that it will be very challenging for a political movement to aggressively alter the direction of federal entitlements if the party that largely created what now exists opposes the reforms. It is not that such a turn is inconceivable, but it would certainly represent one of the more consequential political developments in US history if indeed it did occur.

Some recent history confirms the uphill battle that proactive politicians face when advancing reforms that break with the traditional designs of the existing programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush proposed to offer workers a voluntary personal account which would partially displace the existing Social Security benefit formula. If it had been adopted, millions of modest wage workers would be enjoying a higher level of income in retirement than they currently do under the current program. Despite the plan’s many advantages, the administration found it impossible to get traction to advance it in a GOP-controlled Congress, or even get it a fair hearing.

If the assumption that major reform is likely to require some level of bipartisan cooperation is correct, the implication is that those pushing for reforms will find themselves negotiating changes with counterparts who have entirely different objectives in mind. It was in this context that the recommendations offered in my original essay were made.

That does not mean capitulation to the status quo (with higher taxes) is inevitable. Rather, it means that reforms which restrain future spending and provide additional space for individual responsibility and initiative should be seen as progress, even if these reforms seem to fall short of a full transformation of what now exists. Today’s programs are not so big as to suffocate what is still a largely dynamic US economy. Further restraint on the government’s largest programs will help ensure that remains the case.

In Abundance, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson clearly state their thesis in the introduction: “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it.” And that’s the problem. Their thesis doesn’t make sense because they fail to consistently define the word that appears three times in that statement: “we.”

Klein and Thompson see their book as a missive to the American left and an antidote to the “degrowth” ideology that has taken hold in parts of it. Their vision for “abundance liberalism” is more about a shift in focus and emphasis than an entire ideological overhaul for the left. It has spurred debate within the left about whether it presents an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes that cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election or is merely a “neoliberal” wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It is neither. People who are more favorable to free markets may be tempted to applaud left-wing authors, conceding that government isn’t always the answer, but Klein and Thompson still don’t understand the role of individualism and markets in creating the abundance they desire.

“We” is the main character of Abundance. Klein and Thompson must use the word hundreds of times in the book, as it often appears multiple times per page. By the end of a book, the reader should be able to confidently say who the main character is, but I have no such confidence. The end result is that the book isn’t about anyone, so it isn’t telling anyone to do anything.

The most obvious antecedent of “we” would be the book’s two authors. But try to put that into their thesis statement: “To have the future that Klein and Thompson want, Klein and Thompson need to build and invent more of what Klein and Thompson need.” That’s sort of true as a mantra of self-help, but the book isn’t about Klein and Thompson trying to improve their own lives.

Sometimes when writers use “we,” they intend to include the reader as well. Let’s give that a try: “To have the future that Klein, Thompson, and I want, Klein, Thompson, and I need to build and invent more of what Klein, Thompson, and I need.” That doesn’t make sense, either. I don’t necessarily want the same future that they want, and even if I did, we don’t need the same things, and I don’t know them and can’t work together with them to build or invent anything.

Maybe I’m being too literalistic. Maybe they mean Americans in general. Okay, let’s substitute that in: “To have the future Americans want, Americans need to build and invent more of what Americans need.” At one level, this is a truism. At another level, it runs into the same problem as before: 340 million people don’t want the same things, need the same things, or all work together to build or invent anything.

One of the more damaging habits in policy writing is to use “we” to mean “the government.” E.g., “We invaded Iraq,” “We need to stop taxing imports,” “We should restrict immigration.” This usage has a sort of nobility in its democratic aspirations and is excusable in casual speech. But it leads to all sorts of analytical errors in serious writing by treating the government as something that naturally works in the public interest.

The habit is nonetheless common, so maybe Klein and Thompson are exhibiting it. Let’s see: “To have the future the government wants, the government needs to build and invent more of what the government needs.” Definitely not. The government is not the primary builder or inventor of the stuff people use every day and never has been. This would also be a straightforward totalitarian vision for society, and that’s not what Klein and Thompson want.

Klein and Thompson do write that their intended audience is American liberals, of which they are two. So maybe that’s the “we” they have in mind. “To build the future American liberals want, American liberals need to build and invent more of what American liberals need.” That doesn’t work, either. They write about energy production, healthcare, transportation, housing, and other things that affect all people regardless of ideology. They aren’t arguing for some kind of American liberal secessionist movement.

The unavoidable conclusion is that “we” in Klein and Thompson’s thesis statement must refer to different people in each of its three instances. As far as I can tell, the most accurate rendering of it based on the rest of the book is: “To have the future Klein and Thompson want, other people need to build and invent more of what Americans need,” with the added stipulation that “what Americans need” is defined as “what Klein and Thompson want.”

They are clear about what they want. Their vision of the future involves a lot of green energy, mass transit, housing construction, and research and development investment. They want vertical farming, lab-grown meat, automated technology, and supersonic airplanes.

Some of this vision sounds attractive to me. Some of it does not. That’s fine, and it’s true of all visions of the future. But they assert that this vision is the future that “we” want. I should be included in “we,” but I am not.

The second “we” is about building and inventing. Klein and Thompson are writers. They don’t build or invent things. I’m a writer, too, so this isn’t about me either. Lots of people have jobs where they don’t build or invent anything. And millions of Americans don’t have jobs at all (children and retired people being the two largest segments of that category).

Commitment to the rule of law and to markets requires comfort with outcomes that one might disagree with.

This is the most nonsensical “we” because it can’t include the people who wrote the word or many of the people who will read it. It refers to other people, in whom Klein and Thompson are disappointed.

For example, they notice the paradox between the advances in technology and the decline in construction productivity over the past several decades. They write, “You’d think we could build so much more, so much faster, for so much less money, than in the past. But we can’t. Or, at least, we don’t.”

Personally, I don’t think Klein or Thompson or I or most people could build more efficiently, because most people don’t work in construction. Notice what they did, though. By using “we,” it now becomes your problem that construction productivity has declined. Then, the switch from “can’t” to “don’t” implies that this is some choice that everyone made that everyone should just get together and reverse, and then construction productivity would rise again.

That’s not how politics works, and it’s not how life works. If I become less productive in my job, there are any number of different reasons that could happen. Maybe I just get lazy. Maybe there are other things happening in my life that distract me. Maybe my boss is a jerk, and I lose motivation. Maybe a new government policy inhibits me from working as efficiently as I could. Maybe it’s all of those things at the same time.

But it’s not everyone’s fault if I become less productive, even if the reasons are related to other people. If I go about trying to solve my slacking by looking for a root cause in the way that other people are thinking about my job, I’m not going to be very successful.

That’s basically the approach Klein and Thompson recommend. “A lens is what we have sought to offer here,” they write. “There are rhymes that we have found across these challenges, echoes across these problems, but they are not unified enough to yield a single set of answers.” (Here, “we” actually does refer to the authors.)

They’re right that there is not a single set of answers, and they have won praise for their rejection of the leftist “degrowth” movement that sees economic advance as a problem. But I expect a little bit more from policy writers than merely being against poverty. And it’s clear that Klein and Thompson don’t understand how abundance happens.

Individuals are the ultimate decision-makers in a society. They are naturally part of groups (families) and often choose to organize themselves into other groups (corporations, governments, religious institutions, etc.) in ways that are healthy and beneficial. But individuals in the end have to choose to show up to work, use their brains to come up with new ideas, and persuade others that those ideas are worth developing.

One reliable way to get other people to do things for you is to allow them to make money from doing it. And there is already a mechanism by which that happens: markets. People get paid for coming up with good ideas and providing goods and services that make other people’s lives better. The development and expansion of markets around the world have delivered more abundance than thousands of years’ worth of human thought possible.

One reason markets work is that they do not need there to be “a single set of answers.” They work with decentralized information spread throughout society that is possessed and used by different individuals. That information condenses into a price, which is a signal to others that informs their decisions. They allow for the appearance of top-down coordination where none exists, and they perform better than attempts at top-down coordination because they incorporate information that top-down planners cannot access.

The answer Klein and Thompson are yearning for is markets. But they are respected American liberals, and respected American liberals can’t run around referencing Adam Smith or F. A. Hayek or Milton Friedman. So they’re just lost, aimlessly writing about stuff they want other people to do for them.

Because they lack the acknowledgement of the power of markets, though, there is a dangerous element behind what they’re saying that they don’t seem to recognize. The other reliable way to get other people to do things for you is to force them to with the threat of punishment. That’s what governments do.

In some cases, this method is justified. In most of the cases Klein and Thompson are considering, it is not. The government should not force people to build solar panels or farm a certain way, or eat certain foods. But Klein and Thompson have a very specific idea of the future that involves certain choices being made in those areas. So how are they going to get other people to do it?

The reader gets a taste toward the middle of the book. They bemoan that “liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than outcomes, that it seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.” All those pesky rules are getting in the way of what “we” want.

It is not a coincidence that one of the twentieth century’s great theorists of markets, Hayek, was also one of its great theorists on the rule of law. The concepts are connected and mutually reinforce each other. Commitment to the rule of law and markets requires comfort with outcomes that one might disagree with.

Klein and Thompson don’t seem comfortable with that. What is supposed to be a fresh take on policy issues winds up simply being an answer to one of the oldest questions in politics: How do we (the good guys) get them (the bad guys) out of the way so that we (the good guys) can do good things? Their answer to those who disagree: Lie back and think of abundance.

The Constitution’s Framers believed that a government of separated powers was least likely to threaten the liberties of the people. Accordingly, the government they created was a tripartite structure—a bicameral legislature (a Senate and House of Representatives) to make the laws, a president to enforce or execute the laws, and a judicial system headed by a Supreme Court to interpret the laws.

Initially, Congress was expected to be the most important of the three powers, and for that reason, the Framers focused most of their attention on the legislative powers of Congress, providing specific powers and imposing specific restrictions on the two legislative bodies, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The presidency and the judiciary, on the other hand, received much less attention, and their authorities were described, respectively, simply as “executive Power” for the president and “judicial Power” for the court system. Although the president has some additional important authorities, such as the appointment of other government officials, these generally require the consent of the Senate. The only other executive powers of wide-ranging significance are his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the statement that “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Over time, however, the Supreme Court has substantially enhanced the authority of the president, well beyond what the Framers seem to have intended. Most recently, this was made clear in a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in 2000, called Seila Law v. CFPB. Supreme Court decisions specifically on the president’s powers are extremely rare—perhaps a dozen over the last 250 years. Seila Law is one of those cases. There, the Court allowed the president to take control of an independent regulatory agency created by Congress and known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Court’s holding was bolstered by this language:

The Framers deemed an energetic executive essential to “the protection of the community against foreign attacks,” “the steady administration of the laws,” the “protection of property,” and “the security of liberty.” Accordingly … they gave the Executive the “decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch” that characterize the proceedings of one man.

This is entirely accurate. The Framers certainly wanted a president who could act with dispatch and protect the country in time of war. In Seila Law, however, the Court went well beyond this wholly acceptable description of the president’s powers:

Unique in our constitutional structure—the Framers made the president the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government. Only the president (along with the Vice president) is elected by the entire Nation. …

The resulting constitutional strategy is straightforward: divide power everywhere except for the presidency, and render the president directly accountable to the people through regular elections. In that scheme, individual executive officials will still wield significant authority, but that authority remains subject to the control of the elected president.

This description of the president’s powers justified extraordinary executive powers for a majority of the Court, but it goes too far. The presidency is not the most democratic and politically accountable official in government. Congress is at least as accountable, and far more representative of the American people as a whole. The president isn’t even elected directly by the people; he is elected through an Electoral College system, and in fifteen cases since 1844—including 1992,1996, and 2024—the College has elected a president who had not received a majority of the popular vote.

The Court’s reading of the Framers’ intentions suggests that the Framers wanted the president, acting unilaterally, to use his presidential powers as though he were a tribune of the people, not just as the official responsible for enforcing or executing the laws. But this idea cannot be found in the accounts of how the Constitutional Convention created the presidency.

The delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention did not think they were creating a president who would rule a civil society.

A delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which drew up what is now the US Constitution, would find it remarkable that today’s president might have such authority. That delegate would remember that there was no consensus on the nature of the presidency—or even whether to have a president who was a single individual rather than an executive council—until the very end of the convention.

Then, something called the “Committee on Postponed Parts” was charged with considering all the issues that hadn’t been resolved during the three months the delegates had been debating the Constitution. One of those unresolved issues was the presidency. The delegates generally believed that a chief executive was necessary to enforce or execute the laws, but many of them were wary of a single person elected by the people. They feared “an elected monarch.” The major counter-proposals were an executive council and a single person elected by Congress instead of popularly.

The committee reported on September 7, a few days before the convention’s adjournment, proposing that the president would be a single person, not a council; elected by the people, indirectly through an electoral college; with a four-year term and the possibility of re-election. The Committee’s decision became the Convention’s decision, probably because the debate process had simply run out of time. But compared to Congress, the president still had only the authority to execute the laws, to be the commander in chief in wartime, and to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Congress itself had eighteen specific powers, such as laying taxes, coining and borrowing money, declaring war, and raising and supporting armies.

James Madison’s extensive notes on the Convention’s proceedings also do not support the Supreme Court’s view of the presidency as an inherently powerful figure described in the Seila Law decision. Certainly, it was necessary to have someone to execute and enforce laws, and a single person would be better for the “activity, secrecy and dispatch” that the Court cited. But there is nothing at all in Madison’s notes, or the newspaper articles known as the Federalist Papers—written largely by Madison and Alexander Hamilton—to the effect that the presidency was an inherently powerful figure because he was in the Court’s view “the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government” or “directly accountable to the people.”

No, the president had an important job—to execute the laws made by Congress and interpreted by the judiciary—but not to unilaterally govern the country.

Thus, as James Madison, writing as Publius, wrote in Federalist #70:

Those politicians and statesmen who have been the most celebrated for the soundness of their principles, and for the justness of their views, have declared in favour of a single executive, and a numerous legislature. They have, with great propriety, considered energy as the most necessary qualification of the former, and have regarded this as most applicable to power in a single hand; while they have, with equal propriety, considered the latter as best adapted to deliberation and wisdom, and best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people, and to secure their privileges and interests.

The Supreme Court’s view in Seila Law is the very opposite of this. It sees the presidency best positioned to conciliate the confidence of the people and to secure their privileges and interests. This runs counter to the underlying theory of the separation of powers—expressed by Madison—which sees the president as an expeditious actor, but Congress as the entity to address the privileges and interests of the people.

Some may argue that the United States, having risen to the top among all the democratically elected nations of the world, should be led by a powerful president who is no longer burdened by waiting for a contentious Congress to make up its collective mind. This view is certainly the result of the many wars of the twentieth century and the dangers of today’s world. The president, as commander-in-chief, might be best suited for these challenges. But the delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention did not think they were creating a president who would rule a civil society.

Liberal education is in a state of perpetual crisis. Over the past two years, the University of Tulsa’s Honors Director, Jennifer Frey, built a program where students read “thousands of pages of difficult material every semester” and participated in “small, Socratic seminars” marked by vigorous and civil debates about ideas. But in a recent New York Times editorial, Frey recounts how the newly installed provost decided that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” To save money, distinctive programs were cut, staff eliminated, and a new mandate―increased class sizes―was issued. However, this shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Before Frey’s arrival, Jacob Howland described how the new university’s board of trustees were business people first, educators second. The lesson learnt here is that who is in charge is as important as who is in the classroom.

Before I discuss university governance and the possibility of reviving liberal education, it would be helpful first to survey the landscape of American higher education. Besides its number (nearly 4,000 universities and colleges) and diversity (private, public, regional, etc.), what makes the American system of higher education unique is the different purposes and values that its array of institutions offers. Some are comprehensive; others are narrow; some are religious; others are civic-minded. This assortment of university missions―and not just generous federal funding―made American higher education “the envy of the world.” What created that envy was a diverse educational marketplace able to cater to the various needs of a continental nation.

What is troubling is the trend that this diversity in university missions is being homogenized into a singular purpose: pre-professional training. The latest manifestation is the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and pre-professional studies (e.g., business, nursing). At the same time, humanities majors have declined by almost a third between 2012 and 2022, with no bottom in sight. Social science majors also have dropped. How did we get here? What are the consequences? And what are the possible remedies?

Authority, Data, and Equality

The factors often cited for the rise of pre-professional training in American higher education are the declines in government funding and high-school student demographics, the increased costs of college tuition and student debt, and the politicization of the humanities and social sciences. Fewer resources and greater costs have led both universities and students to seek a more career-aligned education at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. But there are three additional factors that have played a role that are often neglected. They are authority, data, and equality.

The first is authority: who has the power to recognize the legitimacy of an institution of higher education? To answer this, we must look briefly at the history of accreditation. Starting in the late nineteenth century, accreditation was established to ensure the academic quality of colleges and ease student transfer between schools. Over time, specialized accreditation bodies (e.g., law, medicine) and regional organizations (e.g., the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities) emerged and conferred the authority to recognize legitimate colleges and universities.

It wasn’t until 1952 that the federal government became involved with accreditation with the passage of the G.I. Bill for Korean War veterans. The bill was limited to students enrolled at accredited institutions and designated a peer review process as the basis for evaluating institutional quality. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the non-governmental Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) were authorized to recognize reputable accrediting bodies. That is, neither the federal government nor CHEA accredits individual institutions, but published a list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies. Without the imprimatur of that list, federal student loans were not eligible to colleges and universities. While there are some exceptions, American universities and colleges need access to those student loans in order to stay financially afloat.

The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

This traditional division of supervising higher education―the federal government monitors issues of financial support and access, accreditors examine educational quality, and states focus on consumer protection―was changed in the 1960s and 1970s with the federal and state governments relinquishing their responsibilities to accreditors. With access and consumer protection incorporated into their mission, accreditation bodies now monitor schools so that all students and groups have equal access to education and that universities demonstrate students are learning (assessment).

These two responsibilities are amenable to metrics of quantification. For example, access is determined by such metrics as how many students receive financial support, graduate, and become employed afterwards. Assessment likewise has been transformed from qualitative peer reviews and self-studies to numerical data that correlates with student learning objectives. Universities are accountable to these metrics, with poorer outcomes interpreted as a sign of failure rather than a baseline from which the institution should improve.

Accreditors, therefore, not only have appropriated more power but have channeled that power into the currency of quantifiable data. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with relying upon data to make evaluations about academic quality. However, the data accumulated for these evaluations are divorced from educational achievement, e.g., looking at post-graduate salaries rather than foreign language passage rates. Academic quality, consequently, is defined by these metrics and misses not only educational learning but also evaluations of students’ character and the interiority of their lives. Such currency flattens educational distinctions, nuances, and idiosyncrasies, the hallmarks not only of the humanities and social sciences but more broadly of liberal education. By contrast, STEM and pre-professional studies align well with quantifiable metrics because of the nature of how they structure and disseminate knowledge.

This support of the datafication of the university is, in turn, a manifestation of the American value of democratic equality. Data, as the numerical assignment and valuing of reality, has the illusion of being objective and transparent. It is therefore a valuable commodity by which accreditors, administrators, teachers, and students evaluate themselves. Those experiences, activities, and moments not amenable to the pre-set standardized categories of evaluations are ignored.

The power of data resides in its apparent objectivity, an attractiveness that is especially appealing in democratic societies where, according to Tocqueville, individuals believe that everyone has an equal right to understand reality for him- or herself. In democratic societies, everyone relies upon his or her own judgment to make decisions and reduces everything to its practical or utilitarian value: to “accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better.” But because everyone is equal, no one is certain that his or her judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus dominated by easily quantified data.

Data, consequently, is the crystallization of democratic judgment because nobody can challenge it: it is objective, transparent, and universally accessible. When universities apply data appropriately―such as student retention and graduation―schools can learn where they fall short and remedy it. The problem today is that universities only use data to measure against standards that seem objective, like post-graduate salaries. This, in turn, replaces the diverse and competitive market of American higher educational missions with the monopoly of pre-professional training. The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

Beyond the Mandarin Class

Given this landscape of American higher education, those who seek leadership roles must follow this path of numerical counting―a path antithetical to liberal education. Values like wonder, discovery, and purpose are resistant to meaningful quantification. The result is an administrative class and leadership that think, speak, and decide on data alone.

When higher education is publicly discussed, it is often characterized in terms of ideological, cultural, and curriculum battles between left and right. What is missing in this conversation is the need to address how administrators and board members understand higher education and how it is manifested in the missions of their schools. The concerns of finances, as expressed in data, are critical for the health of the university, but even more so is the question of values and purpose. The datafication of the university can’t answer these questions. Only humans can.

The first step that schools can take to promote a diverse and competitive market of higher education is to provide instruction to board members about the history of education and the institution that they are leading. One of the oddities of American higher education is that board members often lack an understanding of the history and purpose of education, even that of the institution they lead. As a result, these members approach the university from their own perspectives, which are usually from a business mindset since many are asked to serve in part because of their financial contributions and their professional networks. To introduce these members to the history and purpose of education would expose them to a different set of values that can’t be captured by data.

Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting.

The second step is for faculty to reassert their roles as administrators. While there are circumstances when it makes sense to bring in an administrative leader from outside the institution, it is frequently better for the university that faculty be promoted as administrators within―and then only for a limited period before they rotate back into faculty. One of the results of this faculty responsibility is that university culture benefits in terms of institutional memory and a sense of continuity and community. Administrators have a stake in the long-term health of their institution and are perceived by faculty as part of the university rather than apart from it. Again, another oddity of American higher education is that more than 80 percent of college presidents are external hires compared to 30 percent of CEOs of major corporations. The consequence is that a president upsets the university applecart in pursuit of new metrics of success, only to depart soon after for the next gig, leaving faculty and staff resigned to the next experiment of another incoming leader.

The third step is for the school as a whole to determine its mission: what are its values and educational purpose? This is not just faculty and administrators but includes students, staff, alumni, and other stakeholders. Then the school must ask itself how they―from board member to president to student to staff―hold themselves accountable and evaluate success? For now, quantifiable metrics will be required, especially for accreditation reports, but these are not the only ways to determine accountability and success. For instance, qualitative methods exist to evaluate leadership accountability and student success. And even more meaningful are the relationships that are sustained between alumni and the university, faculty and students, staff and administrators. While these relationships cannot be measured, they can be articulated and provide purpose for people and the institution they serve.

The fourth step would be to provide alternative methodologies for how accreditation bodies and governments evaluate schools. As stated previously, there is a value in data to evaluate universities, but it should be one among many tools. Higher education leadership and public pressure can nudge governments and accreditation bodies to be more open to non-numerical assessment. But more importantly, scholars and educators need to devise different methodologies and practices to evaluate academic quality and standards for their institutions. These could include entrance and exit examinations, qualitative assessment, and student portfolios.

The fifth and final step is to articulate and demonstrate the value of the type of education one’s institution offers. This particularly applies to those colleges whose mission is liberal education. Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting. They must find ways to blend the old and the new―the perennial principles of liberal education with the current circumstances of today―to promote liberal education’s promise that in studying it one becomes authentically human.

The challenges that American higher educational institutions confront are myriad, from a loss of public trust to government funding cuts to declining student enrollment. But what is neglected in this conversation is the loss of mission diversity―of values and purposes―that traditionally has characterized the marketplace of American higher education. It is this diversity that has served this vast continental country well.

The repurposing of the University of Tulsa’s Honor Program is representative of a troubling homogenization trend in American universities. Liberal education colleges and programs are its most recent casualties, but if this trend continues unabated, the variety in American higher education will disappear. To prevent this from transpiring, American higher education leaders need to think and rethink their institutions’ values and purpose and discover new ways to make the old seemingly new.