Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

As I began to write this, the US Treasury had just announced the publication of the 2025 Social Security and Medicare Trustees reports. The reports unsurprisingly bring more bad news, highlighting James Capretta’s point that “the economic risks are real and rising with each passing year.” The latest reports show that the combined Social Security Old Age and Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds will only be able to pay full benefits until 2034, one year earlier than reported last year. Meanwhile, Medicare Hospital Insurance (also known as Medicare Part A) is projected to pay full benefits only until 2033, which means funds are now expected to run out three years earlier than previously projected.

This dire state of Social Security and Medicare highlights the need for both forums such as these and for a plan of action. I concur with Capretta’s lead essay that “reforms that involve continuity and gradual change” will be far more palatable to policymakers and voters than radical changes. I cannot, however, turn away those “sharp departures” from our present situation. Being familiar with Capretta’s great contributions to the subject of entitlement reform, I’m sure he would agree that “no singular way forward” includes wrestling with the larger ideas and offering “sharp departures” from the status quo when the situation calls for it. We must be alert to opportunities and have the discernment to know when and how to apply and blend those ideas.

Those of us advocating for entitlement reform cannot lose sight of why entitlement reform is important: sound reforms make it easier for Americans to find work, keep their hard-earned money, and remove barriers to quality care. 

While it is helpful to focus on what can be feasibly achieved in the realm of policy, we cannot ignore those guiding principles and models. F. A. Hayek wrote that those guiding models will come across as entirely out of reach or unfeasible. Being unable to achieve the ideal policy scenario, however, does not mean we should stop at what can be feasibly achieved. By holding our situation up against our principles and ideal models, we hold ourselves accountable. When we realize we are not living up to those ideas, we are stirred to make what feasible improvements we can to slowly move toward those ideals.

Gradualism in Practice

Capretta’s policy insight shines through here, noting that “sharp departures” from current programs (despite having merit) are more likely to be dismissed and ignored. He offers several notable adjustments to Social Security and Medicare.

He notes that “nothing should be considered off the table.” For Social Security, Capretta suggests tax increases, means testing, and raising the retirement age for future retirees as possible strategies. For Medicare, the more complicated of the two, a workable reform plan could involve tax and premium adjustments on the revenue side, with adjustments to inflation indexing on the spending side.

While these adjustments offer gradual change within the status quo, reformers must be prepared for opposition. Even the most modest changes can come under fire as an attack on retirees. Take, for example, the Medicaid reforms in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act to reduce future Medicaid spending to $880 billion by 2035. Michael F. Cannon notes that, if this reduction were successful, “the program’s annual growth rate would merely fall from 4.5 percent to 3 percent.” Despite a mere reduction in growth (in other words, Medicaid spending will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace), opponents of the spending reduction have come out in full force, opposing the reforms.

Capretta also offers regulatory reforms as a means of improving competition in the health insurance market. He discusses the possibility of standardizing insurance offerings and clinical requirements, and revising rules in Medicare, Medicaid, and the commercial market to encourage consumers to choose lower-priced offerings. These reforms may gain more traction, especially when presented as mechanisms to increase access to care and options for care. One obstacle, however, may be the concentrated interests that benefit from maintaining the status quo. As the logic of collective action shows, those concentrated interests, whether they are insurance companies, healthcare providers, or Medicaid recipients themselves, form a relatively small, motivated, and homogenous group with strong interests in preserving and expanding Medicaid. Those shared goals make organizing easier and reduce the risk of free riding, whereas the broader population of taxpayers has more diffuse and less coordinated interests. Elected officials will cater to these smaller groups’ demands in the hopes that doing so will get them reelected.

No society that sees state-controlled healthcare and interventionism as desirable will embrace sound healthcare reform.

Capretta’s proposed solutions are within reach, but they will still face opposition, especially from those who benefit from the status quo. This is why we cannot abandon those core principles and ideal models.

Another potential fix not mentioned in Capretta’s lead essay would be closing the Medicaid provider tax loophole.

The Medicaid provider tax is used by states to maximize Medicaid spending paid by federal taxpayers. As Brian Blase and Niklas Kleinworth found, state governments use taxes on insurance companies that participate in Medicaid managed care and then use the money raised by provider taxes to claim additional federal reimbursement, which is then returned to those same providers with added supplemental payments. 

Now that provider tax reform has been solidified into law and there is a proposed federal rule set to strengthen those restrictions, slowing unsustainable Medicaid spending and broader Medicaid reform feel within reach. To that extent, those reforms must also grapple with the same problems caused by the logic of collective action that I mentioned previously. Once again we must reserve some of our capabilities toward winning the battle of ideas.

The Trust Fund Illusion

In terms of changing those tacit ideas about entitlements, I offer one point of contention with Capretta: we cannot concede the truth regarding the nature of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. While he wrote in a 2023 article that the trust funds were created to ensure long-term financing, it is necessary to clarify what that assurance entails. That assurance is backed by the promise of tax increases, spending cuts, and taking on additional debt, not any prefunded assets. The federal government admitted so in its FY 2000 financial report:

These balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures—but only in a bookkeeping sense. … They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury, that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.

Social Security and Medicare accounts, unlike an Individual Retirement Account or a Health Savings Account, are simply records of tax payments and contain no funds. That assurance is promised through future taxes, debt, and/or cuts to other federal programs.

As my colleague David Rose notes, this does not necessarily make Social Security a Ponzi Scheme, but in some cases, it makes the situation worse than a Ponzi scheme. Rose comments, “Even though a trust fund was built up to deal with this baby boomer problem, it is filled with special securities that must be presented to the Treasury for redemption, which the Treasury can only do by issuing new debt dollar for dollar.” Social Security and Medicare are not voluntary programs (unlike a Ponzi Scheme). Over the lifetime of these programs, politicians eager to secure votes supported changes that increased benefits to current voters at the expense of long-term program viability and broader fiscal solvency.

Many Americans mistakenly picture the money they are paying into these programs through payroll taxes being held in an account tied to their Social Security number. Instead, their payroll taxes are being used to fund benefit payments for today’s retirees, while their benefits will be paid for by future workers, many of whom have yet to be born. When discussing the program’s financing, the American people are at least owed the truth.

What Ideas Will Be Lying Around?

To reform entitlements, we must change hearts and minds. Here, Hayek is again helpful. As he notes in the Constitution of Liberty (and a major focus in The Essential Hayek), the “state of opinion” that determines how policymakers make decisions comes about from ideas that have slowly germinated across society. “New ideas,” Hayek wrote, “start among a few and gradually spread until they become the possession of a majority who know little of their origin.” No society that sees state-controlled healthcare and interventionism as desirable will embrace sound healthcare reform. In Capitalism and Freedom, however, Milton Friedman noted that real change is only produced in the event of a crisis and that change will “depend on the ideas that are lying around.” We will need both the ideal models based in principle as well as the more practical solutions, such as the ones Capretta offers in the lead essay, lying around when the entitlement crisis begins. Ultimately, it will be up to us to discern when and how to apply both types of ideas by remaining vigilant and alert to opportunities.

For nearly 60 years, Alan Dershowitz has enjoyed a remarkable career as a law professor and practicing criminal defense lawyer. In 1962, he graduated first in his class at Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, he joined the Harvard Law School faculty, where he was granted tenure in 1967 at age 28, becoming the youngest full professor in the school’s history at that time. Dershowitz taught at Harvard for 50 years, writing dozens of books and countless articles, while simultaneously becoming a leading criminal defense lawyer in many high-profile cases, including the O. J. Simpson trial.

A lifelong civil libertarian and a political liberal, Dershowitz confounded his colleagues in 2020 when he joined the defense team for President Trump in his impeachment trial before the US Senate, which resulted in an acquittal. Dershowitz complains that his tony neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard, his longtime summer retreat, have shunned him since he began to defend Trump. Dershowitz is also an outspoken champion of Israel and a supporter of Zionism. In 2024, Dershowitz announced that he had departed the Democratic Party due to his disgust with what he considered the anti-Jewish tone of the Democratic National Convention.

Now 86, Dershowitz stays busy with television appearances, scholarship, and writing. He remains one of the most impressive legal minds of his generation. When I heard that Dershowitz had just written a book that he describes as his “magnum opus,” I was eager to read it. The Preventive State—a term that Dershowitz coined in the 1960s—refers to governmental policies designed to prevent serious harm before it occurs. Dershowitz wrote his student note at Yale on the punishment of inchoate crimes—unsuccessful attempts to cause harm—and early in his career, explored the involuntary commitment of individuals suffering from mental illness, ostensibly to protect themselves or the public.

In The Preventive State, Dershowitz returns to these themes, but expands the issues to include a host of modern-day threats: crime, domestic terrorism, nuclear proliferation, environmental hazards, infectious diseases, gun violence, offensive speech, hostile military action, and more. Technology has enhanced both the potential for causing serious harm and the presumed ability to predict such harm before it occurs. Dershowitz endeavors to synthesize an overarching “jurisprudential framework” for addressing the prevention of serious harms while preserving essential liberties. Realizing that “prediction will never be perfect,” Dershowitz concedes that “this book will necessarily be a work in progress,” and that constructing a “holistic” framework to deal with a “quickly developing and constantly changing phenomenon is a daunting task.” That is an understatement.

How successfully does Dershowitz make his case in a slim book (less than 200 pages of text)? In his foreword, retired Justice Stephen Breyer concludes that “Dershowitz makes his case,” but other readers may find the one-size-fits-all approach to be simplistic and unworkable. In all of the situations Dershowitz addresses, the magnitude of the threatened harm must be balanced against the predictive accuracy of the preventive measure. When the government attempts to prevent future harm, Dershowitz posits that there are only four possible outcomes: an accurate prediction of harm and a successful prevention of it (what he terms a true positive); an accurate assessment that there is no threatened harm, with no preventive action (a true negative); and the more problematic scenarios of a predicted harm that would not materialize with or without preventive measures (a false positive); and the failure to predict a harm that could have been prevented with appropriate action (a false negative). The former (“true”) outcomes are beneficial to society, while the latter (“false”) outcomes are harmful.

False positives run the risk of infringing essential liberties with no corresponding benefit to society. Dershowitz cites the compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and other genetically unfit individuals—upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927) during the heyday of the eugenics movement—as the classic example of a false positive. He comments that “Buck v. Bell will be remembered by history as among the handful of the worst Supreme Court decisions, though authored by one of the greatest jurists (Holmes) and joined by some of our most distinguished justices (Brandeis, Taft, and Stone).”

There is no substitute for acting in good faith and with common sense—both of which have been lacking in recent years.

False negatives are equally consequential. What if the US government had been able to predict—and prevent—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or 9/11, or Soviet espionage to steal classified information relating to the atomic bomb, or the use of federal funds by the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses? While we’re at it, what if the government had been able to anticipate—and prevent—the assassination of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, or John Brown’s attempted insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, or President Obama’s disastrous 2016 nuclear deal with Iran? Historians could play this counter-factual parlor game endlessly—and some do. My point is that for every lamentable false positive in our history, we can find an equally lamentable false negative.

Hindsight is 20/20, but we must resist the false allure of omniscience. We don’t have a crystal ball to divine the future. Contra Dershowitz, there is no “science of prediction.” Humans are fallible and their predictions (and actions) are often mistaken. The history books are full of such mistakes; this will never change. It is easy to condemn decisions such as Buck v. Bell (decided by an 8-to-1 vote with no dissenting opinion) and Korematsu (decided by a 6-to-3 vote in a decision authored by the progressive Justice Hugo Black) after the fact, but one must acknowledge that when it comes to lawmaking and judicial review, contemporary circumstances—the zeitgeist—matter more than abstract theory.

Dershowitz grants as much, quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s aphorism from The Common Law that “the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.” Holmes’s pragmatism is also evident in his quip that “hard cases make bad law.” Dershowitz concurs, recognizing that “in a democracy the ultimate policy choices—often tragic choices among evils—must be made by its citizens.” As Dershowitz notes, during wartime, many nations (not just our own) have preemptively detained those perceived to be disloyal or dangerous, in the interest of national security.

Dershowitz’s formalistic typology categorizes all potential outcomes into one of four conceptual boxes. The difficulty lies in applying the rigid matrix to real-life situations. Here, Dershowitz’s model offers little practical utility. When it comes to assessing risks of catastrophic harm, and analyzing the risk of false positives (weighed against the risk of inaction—or false negatives), factual distinctions are critically important.

The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII is not the same as evaluating public health measures during COVID, or responding to the perceived threat of “climate change.” Preventing a mass-casualty terrorist incident is not the same as “stop and frisk” tactics by police officers walking their beat, or issuing a prior restraint on the press. Restricting speech to avoid perceived “harm” is different than so-called “red flag” laws denying citizens their Second Amendment rights, or waterboarding suspected terrorists to prevent catastrophic harm.

In short, the myriad situations Dershowitz tries to analyze under the same rubric—cash bail pending trial, censoring “harmful” speech, surveillance (or even torture) of suspected terrorists, preventive warfare, mandatory vaccines, red flag laws, etc.—warrant separate scrutiny depending on the facts. Dershowitz admits that “so much properly depends on the values at stake—on the content of the costs and benefits, the substance of what is being regulated, and the identity of those on whom the costs are imposed and the benefits realized.” This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of an overarching “jurisprudential framework.”

Yes, all preventive measures should be scrutinized objectively and dispassionately (or pursuant to a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” as Dershowitz would have it), the basis for “predictions” of future harm must be compelling (and honestly rendered), and due consideration has to be given to the risk of both false positives and false negatives. But in the final analysis, there is no substitute for acting in good faith and with common sense—both of which have been lacking in recent years. Government policy toward the COVID pandemic and national intelligence abuses (e.g., the Russian collusion hoax) are just two examples.

Toward the end of the book, after a great deal of window-dressing, Dershowitz reveals the heart of his proposed jurisprudential framework: “procedural protections required for preventive state interventions,” consisting of a sliding scale for the requisite level of proof, depending on the length of involuntary confinement, and leaving aside forms of government authority other than confinement. When the government seeks to institutionalize an individual for a year or more, whether the proceeding is civil, criminal, medical, or administrative, Dershowitz’s proposed standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Shorter periods of confinement warrant a lower standard, so that one to ten days of incarceration can be justified by “probable cause” or a “preponderance of the evidence.” Proposed intermediate standards for other durations of detention include “clear and convincing evidence” and “proof by heavy preponderance.”

Dershowitz’s framework presumably anticipates an adversarial proceeding before an impartial judicial officer, because he specifies the procedural protections that various lengths of confinement would entail. Ninety days or more would require a full panoply of due process rights, including the right to counsel, discovery, cross-examination, exclusion of hearsay, and “scrupulous” appellate review. This strikes me as unworkable. A contested adjudicatory hearing with discovery and appellate review could take months or even years. How is such an unwieldy process going to enable the prevention of imminent threatened harm?

Coercive preventive measures not involving confinement (censorship, surveillance, suspension of Second Amendment rights, and many others addressed by Dershowitz earlier in the book) are inexplicably left out of this procedure-oriented jurisprudential framework. Instead, for non-custodial government interventions, he proposes a “proper balance” between expected “false positives” and “false negatives.” Dershowitz dubs this mathematical relationship—reduced to a ratio—a “framework for mistake preferences.” He cites as a benchmark the maxim that “it is better that ten guilty be wrongfully acquitted than even one innocent be wrongly convicted.” He suggests that “comparable numbers can be assigned to other preventive intrusions, such as shooting of fleeing suspects, government mandated censorship, vaccination … and red flag laws.”

I try to picture in my head the image of a policeman in hot pursuit of an armed suspect at night, simultaneously weighing the risks of a false positive versus a false negative and mentally calculating the appropriate ratio. This proposal is absurdly—even laughably—unrealistic, which Dershowitz seems to admit when he states, “It would be more vexing to try to come up with numbers for steps taken to prevent climate change, preventive military actions, or other macro measures.” Another understatement.

While unsatisfying as a comprehensive theory, The Preventive State is still a well-written book loaded (some would say padded) with interesting nuggets and personal asides. For example, we learn that when Richard Lawrence attempted to assassinate President Andrew Jackson in 1835, failing only because both of his loaded pistols misfired, Lawrence could only be charged with a misdemeanor because, at the time, a felony required the infliction of actual harm. Miraculously, Jackson was unharmed. Accordingly, Lawrence’s bail was set at $1,500, which—fortunately—the defendant was unable to post. The federal prosecutor was Francis Scott Key, author of the lyrics to what became our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The test for a reviewer is “Did you like the book?” Despite my reservations, I did.

At trial, Key did not actively oppose Lawrence’s assertion of the insanity defense; the jury took only five minutes to find that Lawrence was insane. Key’s trial strategy was not motivated by compassion, but pragmatism. He realized that Lawrence would likely be incarcerated far longer as a madman than as a culpable criminal. In fact, Lawrence died while in confinement at what is now St. Elizabeths Hospital, decades later in 1861. (Ironically, President Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was also housed at St. Elizabeths following his 1982 acquittal by reason of insanity, until his eventual release in 2018.)

Dershowitz engagingly chronicles other presidential assassinations—both attempted and successful—to illustrate the great importance of false negatives. His point is that English common law, which influenced our early legal system, was based on punishment for actual, rather than threatened harms. American criminal codes have moved away from this limited scope and now prohibit “inchoate” crimes such as “attempts,” “conspiracies,” and so forth.

Dershowitz is a longtime opponent of the cash bail system (as well as capital punishment). His anecdote-laden treatment of these subjects, as well as sentencing and “preventive detention,” is basic and slightly off-topic. He favors electronic monitoring of criminal defendants (in the form of ankle bracelets) prior to trial in lieu of incarceration. Dershowitz’s enthusiasm for the Bill of Rights apparently does not include the Second Amendment; his chapter on gun violence drips with disdain for the private ownership of firearms.

Extending his analysis to foreign affairs, and to emphasize the importance of government surveillance, Dershowitz observes that

Israel’s failure to know about and prevent the massacres of October 7 may go down in history as among the most inexplicable intelligence failures by a nation that spent billions of dollars on information gathering.

On the topic of terrorism, Dershowitz is surprisingly receptive to the efficacy of torture in some situations. He notes that “the evidence clearly shows” that torture has produced “actionable intelligence that may save lives,” citing several historical examples. In his previous writings, Dershowitz has proposed judicial warrant procedures (to be granted only by the Chief Justice of the United States) for non-lethal interrogation techniques in extreme cases when circumstances justify the intrusion.

The Preventive State is more like a detailed seminar discussion guide than a formidable legal scholar’s “magnum opus.” The book is a mixture of war stories and dusted-off lecture notes relating to criminology, criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy. Throughout The Preventive State, Dershowitz refers to Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Sigmund Freud, social Darwinism, and even military history and the Torah. At times, Dershowitz drifts off into asides about “inequality,” the derivation of rights (which he posits are not endowed by our creator), and the elusive nature of utopian solutions. George Floyd, “climate change,” and Dershowitz’s gallbladder surgery all make an appearance. In a self-referential fashion, Dershowitz cites and quotes from some of his previous books and articles. At age 86, this prolific scholar is entitled to a victory lap (or two).

The test for a reviewer is “Did you like the book?” Despite my reservations, I did. Even if the proffered “jurisprudential framework” is unconvincing, Dershowitz makes a thoughtful and erudite plea for future leaders to avoid “striking the balance too much on the side of security and too little in favor of liberty.” 

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

– Flannery O’Connor

Halfway through The Habit of Being, the tome of Flannery O’Connor’s collected letters, there is a cryptic sentence offered to O’Connor’s friend and professor, William Sessions. It is made more brilliant in that it was an off-handed postscript:

P. S. She is full of Theory. The Theories are worse than the Furies. 

Though we don’t know to whom O’Connor was referring, we are abundantly clear how she feels about her.

Now, for those unfamiliar with Greek and Roman mythology, the Furies were three sister goddesses who dwelled in the Underworld until summoned for vengeance. They were Alecto (endless anger), Megaera (jealous rage), and Tisiphone (vengeful destruction). Born out of the blood spilled from the titan son Cronus’ vicious castration of his own father, they hectored and harried, tortured and tormented those who violated a moral precept or legal code, especially those pertaining to offending the gods or family honor. Most famously, Orestes, who avenged the murder of his father Agamemnon by killing his own mother Clytemnestra, was relentlessly pursued in his unatoned guilt by the hellish Furies. 

The Theories to which O’Connor is referring, however, are the fashionable literary postulates that distract from the story and wallow its readers in abstraction. After reading an outlandish interpretation of her short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor fumed,

The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology. … Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

Crestfallen at the state of the academy and the stunted students they were teaching, O’Connor mourned, “My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.”

Like the Furies of Greek and Roman literature, the Theories are everywhere. Now understand, observing the way the world conducts itself and then framing a theory around that which is witnessed is a normal way to operate. We would be lost if we navigated the world with forever-new particulars unaided by overarching themes and a guiding sense of cause and effect. But it is the worship of Theory and its zealous misapplication that O’Connor most vigorously rejects.

The Theories, it turns out, don’t reckon with pesky nuances like human free will and brokenness, biological facts and political realities.

Forever, there has been a drunkenness on Theory. The dreamy sophists in ancient times, the haughty thinkers during the Enlightenment, and the siloed experts in the modern age have crafted baffling theories unchastened by nature and untethered from reality. Shortly after the scientific method was devised, it was radicalized by those who felt that everything was subject to it, and anything that fell outside the ambit of the scientific method was either poppycock or irrelevant. 

A perfect example of such obeisance to the Theories was a debate that pitted the starry-eyed scientism of Harvard professor Steven Pinker against the philosophic sure-footedness of literary critic Leon Wieseltier. The topic? The proposed role of science in “purifying” the humanities. Responding to all the “wondrous means” by which science can technically deconstruct (and yet somehow augment) literature, Wieseltier sighed,

How art works is not the most penetrating question that can be asked about it. Many years ago I attended a lecture by Roman Jakobson on patterns of consonant placement in Baudelaire’s “Le Chat,” and it was the least enlightening discussion of a poem I ever heard. “Behavioral genetics can update folk theories of parental influence with discoveries about the effects of genes, peers, and chance, which have profound implications for the interpretation of biography and memoir.” Profound? I think not. Whatever its genetic roots, a man’s experience of his father is his experience of his father, and the representation of that relationship in a biography or a memoir demands empathy and probity more than a hunt for phenotypes.

Exuberant acolytes of the Theories get it all wrong. Before an architect draws up his plans, he must survey the ground. Someone once observed that Adam Smith drew up The Wealth of Nations after witnessing the bartering in the local market, whereas Karl Marx crafted the Communist Manifesto in the isolated, smothering stacks of the British Library. Paradoxically, originators and adherents of the Theories (who boast their inveterate rootedness in science) have a tendency to lazy credulity. Not understanding the square peg of human nature, they force it violently through the round hole of the Theory. 

Certain modern activists latch onto arcane theories surrounding race and gender, economics, and political philosophy. Fueled with righteous indignation, ivory-tower intellectualism, and oversimplification, they lash out at the way things are and impatiently insist upon the way things ought to be. After all, it feels good to be right—to know how to fix something reinforces our sense of value in a world of ineptitude. And it feels good to be angry, fired with passion so as to live a meaningful life. But, as O’Connor would warn, “Conviction, without experience makes for harshness.” The results are not only destructive, but ineffective. The Theories, it turns out, don’t reckon with pesky nuances like human free will and brokenness, biological facts, and political realities. And yet, when these Theories inevitably fail in their real-world application, activists refuse to learn and, instead, double down on their implementation. We have repeatedly been told that Communism, for example, “works.” It only needs a “proper application.” The natural consequence of such thinking is smoldering ash instead of exuberant life. 

Reductionist, de-contextualized, and warped out of all proportion, the Theories curiously cause people to stop thinking. “Studies show” and “research claims,” “the experts agree” and “science insists,” are the openings to most sentences from the Theories. And yet, the true thinker counters with “What studies?” and “What quality?” and “Who was studied?” and “Toward what end?” Even more importantly, healthy skeptics (not vain contrarians) of the Theories ceaselessly ask how the Theories comport with one’s experience and insight, intuition and common sense. The ultimate purifier of the Theories is the inexhaustible question, “Does this make sense?”

The Theories, like the Furies, are unrelenting. They are like a swarm of bees. A casual perusal of the news will inform you that “What you see isn’t, in fact, what is! Listen to our [fill-in-the-blank] theory!” Political theories and social theories, medical theories and philosophical theories, religious theories and literary theories inundate us. Some of them are good. Many of them are just plain awful.

In a 1961 interview with Esquire magazine, William F. Buckley Jr. famously admitted, “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” That’s because Harvard is plagued by the Theories. 

Are you?

On June 5, 2025, the Supreme Court decided Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, a case about judicial standards for determining whether employment discrimination occurred, which favored or disadvantaged persons of different genders. What implications, if any, does this unanimous decision have for the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement?

DEI’s Momentum and Judicial Pushback

Central to the DEI agenda is the imperative to classify all persons under its control into racial, ethnic, or gender categories. These persons do not need to assent to their classifications. Indeed, they may find their most important identities elsewhere in religion, politics, social class, occupations, family structures, etc. No matter, the DEI bureaucracy will not classify them in those categories because the movement’s endgame is to divide groups into those underrepresented and, by logic, overrepresented. Doing so makes it easier to assert that the former are oppressed and the latter oppressors. No identification of current specific discrimination is necessary before DEI-based preferences are employed.

The DEI movement had, until recently, enormous success. Campuses, corporations, media, professional associations, foundations, art institutions, sports teams, and many other private groups subscribed to the DEI ideology and backed up that adherence with substantial funding and compulsory hiring practices. Dissenting from DEI could be professional suicide in many areas of American life.

DEI’s ultimate victory appeared when President Joe Biden signed, on his first day in office, an executive order titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Because of these orders, federal funding in many agencies, even for scientific research awards, suddenly became contingent on incorporating DEI goals.

Particularly affected were the expansive new federal Covid relief programs. Although it was obvious that all Americans could be infected during the pandemic, federal agencies used DEI concepts to distribute funds. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) declared that the Biden-Harris Administration was committed “to equity across the Department by removing systematic barriers and building a workforce more representative of America.” In 2021, the USDA would forgive 13,000 to 15,000 loans to non-white food producers at a potential cost of up to $4 billion. A subsequent USDA program excluded white farmers from disaster relief funds.

Some states began to follow “equity” redistribution efforts. In Minnesota, for example, Governor Tim Walz signed a law in May 2023 providing state grants to help “emerging” farmers make down payments to buy land. A wide range of persons were prioritized for the limited state appropriations available, unless they were able-bodied, heterosexual white men.

Furthermore, the racial and ethnic categories commonly used in DEI programs were “imprecise,” “overbroad,” and “arbitrary.”

As these DEI programs were embedded so widely in both the public and private sectors, at first, it seemed nothing could stop them. Then, conservative ligating agencies began court challenges. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Southeastern Legal Foundation won cases against USDA preferences in five federal district court cases all over the country. (Wynn v. Vilsack, Faust v. Vilsack, Miller v. Vilsack, Holman v. Vilsack, and Strickland v. Vilsack).

A powerful new anti-DEI judicial standard was articulated in another 2021 case (Vitolo v. Guzman), instigated by WILL, which ended the restaurant relief policy of deprioritizing white male owners. The Sixth Circuit held:

The government has a compelling interest in remedying past discrimination only when three criteria are met.

First, the policy must target a specific episode of past discrimination.

Second, there must be evidence of intentional discrimination in the past. Statistical disparities don’t cut it, although they may be used as evidence to establish intentional discrimination.

Third. The government must have had a hand in the past discrimination, it now seeks to remedy.

In 2024, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) challenged Minnesota’s land distribution race and sex priorities on equal protection grounds. Before a judicial decision could be reached, Governor Waltz quickly signed legislation removing the racial and sexual priorities.

All over the country, state requirements that their professional licensing boards reserve seats for women and minorities have been abandoned after litigation began. Race-based scholarships have been found illegal on dozens of campuses and organizations, such as the American Association of University Women, the American Chemical Society, Southwest Airlines, and McDonald’s, have altered them to become race-neutral. 

Of great consequence, decades-old federal preferential programs have not survived federal district court scrutiny in a flurry of decisions. The 8(a) program’s racial procurement preferences ended in 2023 when the Center for Individual Rights won in Ultima Service. Corporation v. US Departmentt of Agriculture. The Minority Business Development Administration gave up excluding white owned businesses from its services after the 2023 Nuziard v. Minority Business Development Agency decision. The Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program is now subject to a 2025 proposed consent decree between the Department of Justice and WILL that will end preferences for minority and women-owned firms competing for federal transportation grants for highways, airports, and seaports across the country. Significantly, none of the Covid-era or subsequent preferential business decisions were appealed by the Biden Department of Justice.

The most important rebuke to racial preferences ostensibly used to promote diversity was the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina (SFFA). The Court found that public and private campus use of such admission preferences violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Civil Rights Act’s Title VI, because “race may never be used as a ‘negative’ and … may not operate as a stereotype.” Furthermore, the racial and ethnic categories commonly used in DEI programs were “imprecise,” “overbroad,” and “arbitrary.”

Unusual Facts Create Rare Judicial Unanimity in Ames

Given the already emerging judicial opposition to racial classifications and preferences since 2021 in a variety of courts in multiple contexts, what impact will Ames have on the DEI movement? Like many Supreme Court decisions, Ames can be read very narrowly. The case specifically involved a judicial test developed after the Court’s 1973 McDonnell Douglas Corporation v. Green decision. How should courts consider employment discrimination claims when there were no clear-cut discriminatory rules involved, only contentious claims of discriminatory treatment? Marlean Ames had worked for the Ohio Youth Services agency since 2004 and was eventually promoted to program administrator. In 2019, she applied for a new upgraded management position, but her supervisors rejected her bid and then demoted her, resulting in a significant pay cut. There could be many reasons for that action, but the fact was that Ames was a heterosexual woman, and the promotion went to a lesbian, and her old job was awarded to a gay man. Sorting out the motives involved to see whether a Title VII violation had occurred would be complicated. The District Court and later the Sixth Circuit ruled in summary judgment that Ames did not even make a prima facie showing of discrimination. As a member of a majority group, she had an “additional burden” of not possessing the “background circumstances” which those courts and in four other circuits around the country thought were necessary to weigh the particular evidence. Those “circumstances” meant that it would only be a “rare employer” that would discriminate against members of a majority group, a perfect DEI sort of analysis. 

Justice Gorsuch, however, said during oral argument that the Supreme Court was in “radical agreement.” The background circumstances rule was struck down 9-0, and the case remanded for further consideration. So, did Ames resolve any broader questions? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the nine-page Court opinion stating that Title VII’s text “draws no distinction between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs. The provision focuses on individuals rather than groups.” Contrary to DEI theory, Congress had established the same protection for every individual without regard to the individual’s membership in a minority or majority group.

The Court’s affirmation that persons identified as part of a “majority” or a ” minority” group have the same civil rights is a very powerful simple rule that will eventually have an enormous impact.

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, concurred and took on the larger question of the legitimacy of making legally relevant group distinctions. That issue had decided the fate of group preferences in the lower courts in Vitolo, Ultima, Mid-America, and Nuziard. Citing SFFA. The concurring Justices reiterated that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Title VII cannot be applied differently to individuals depending on their assigned group membership. Furthermore, they challenged the whole concept of “majority” and “minority” groups. Women, they pointed out, are a statistical majority nationally, but a minority in some occupations and a majority in others. Racial groups may be minorities nationally, but may predominate in many localities. Further, racial categories are frequently overbroad because “American families have become increasingly multicultural and attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time.” They declared: “Thankfully today’s decision obviates the need for courts to engage in the ‘Sordid business of divvying us up by race or any other protected trait.’” Finally, citing from an America First Legal Foundation brief, the justices found that the “background circumstances” rule was “nonsensical” because “a number of this Nation’s largest and most prestigious employers have overtly discriminated against those they deem members of so-called majority groups. American employers have long been ‘obsessed’ with ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ initiatives and affirmative action plans.”

The Trump Administration’s three major anti-DEI executive orders (“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferences,” January 20, 2025; “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” January 21, 2025; and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” January 29, 2025) not only revoked old DEI policies, but commanded specific disabling actions by the federal bureaucracy. These initiatives may not survive another administration, but it is highly unlikely that the text of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act’s Titles VI, VII, and IX will change. Hundreds of DEI-based group preferences still exist in governmental and private programs all over the country. Federal courts, however, have established multiple precedents that all individuals are entitled to equal protection and that the group-based preferences on which DEI depends are illegal. The Ames decision is another important plank in that Constitutional foundation.

Since Ames is a very new decision, it has not yet been cited by other courts or other rule-making bodies. It is consistent, however, with the direction lower courts have been going since 2021 in striking down preferential programs. Furthermore, it is a unanimous SCOTUS decision, written by Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown, the most likely justice on the Court to dissent on civil rights issues. The Court’s affirmation that persons identified as part of a “majority” or a ” minority” group have the same civil rights is a very powerful, simple rule that will eventually have an enormous impact in a variety of settings and will undermine the group-based premises of all DEI programs.

Winston Churchill reflected that “no part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening.” A century later, the origins of the First World War should still interest us for what they reveal about the causes of great power conflict. An underappreciated insight from the Great War is that anxieties incited by imbalances among “rising” and “ruling” powers—popularized by Graham Allison as the “Thucydides Trap”—can overcome the stabilizing influence of shared interests, institutions, and ideologies. Too often depicted as an ideological clash of democracies against dictatorships, the Great War was in fact fought between liberal states with similar societies, interwoven interests, and cooperative habits. It was fratricide, not kulturkampf. Today, the example of the Great War should discourage us from reducing Sino-American tensions to ideological differences or assessing common interests and cooperation as a means of insurance against war. In 1914, a close-knit community of states succumbed to the anxieties that provoked a great power war. Washington and Beijing today have an even narrower margin to avoid Armageddon.

What Caused the Great War?

Graham Allison’s Destined for War examines (among other cases) prewar Anglo-German relations through the “Thucydides Trap,” a prism derived from the ancient Athenian’s dictum that “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” Allison subscribes to Thucydides’s judgement that fear, honor, and interest drive political action. His analysis suggests fear is an especially salient motive in fin de siècle geopolitics. He contends Germany “rose further to threaten British industrial and naval supremacy,” bringing disquiet to Whitehall. He cites British unease that the growing German navy seemed intended for, in the Admiralty’s assessment, “war with us.” In turn, he situates Germany in a worrisome position between an aggressive Russia and an anxious Britain. Specialists on the outbreak of the war, like David Herrmann, Christopher Clark, and T. G. Otte support Allison’s attention to fear, examining how fear of the future and fear of losing allies drove Europe towards conflict.

Allison omits ideology from his analysis, the most commonly invoked cause of the Great War, even by those who waged it. In 1913, General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War asserted Germany had been “robbed” of its natural boundaries, had a duty to “check the onrush of Slavism,” and that “war is a biological necessity.” David Lloyd George pronounced in 1914 that Britain fought to rescue Europe from “the straight road to barbarism” presented by “the Prussian military caste.” In 1917, Woodrow Wilson branded the Central Powers “autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.” Since then, Barbara Tuchman has portrayed Wilhelmine Germany as infatuated with militarism. Fritz Fischer and A. J. P. Taylor made the Great War the culmination of Germany’s nineteenth-century Sonderweg from liberalism to authoritarianism. Robert Kagan attributes Germany’s encirclement “solely” to its domineering Weltmacht, or pursuit of world power. Ideology also matters to scholars sympathetic to Germany. Whitehall Germanophobes for Christopher Clark, Tsarist grandiosity for Sean McMeekin, and death-obsessed modernism for Modris Ekstein shadow the road to war.

The World of Yesterday

In truth, however, pre-war Europe’s ideological differences were modest. Excepting republican France, fin de siècle Europe’s great powers were governed by combinations of crowned heads, elected legislatures, and written constitutions. Britain and Germany particularly resembled this norm—and one another. Kaiser Wilhelm was “Cousin Willy” to King George and doted on by his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Germany’s Reichstag and Britain’s parliament were elected on broad franchises. German ministers were not legislatively accountable like British ones, but both needed legislative assent to borrow, raise, and spend money. Independent judiciaries administered law in both. The 2.5 million union members in Germany and 2.2 million in Britain were easily the continent’s largest labor movements. Traditional elite vestiges, like the Prussian Landtag or the British Quarter Sessions and House of Lords, attracted resentment but, apart from the Lords, avoided reform. Social detente was attempted to ameliorate class conflict. Otto von Bismarck’s “Practical Christianity” established the world’s first social welfare regime and inspired the British Liberals’ “People’s Budget.” Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s (unsuccessful) Prussian Landtag reform aimed to mollify labor. More effectively, the British Liberals partnered with the fledgling Labor Party in the 1906 election.

“Nationalism” did not prevent continuous Anglo-German governmental consultation on security questions like warship construction. Anglo-German naval officers often fraternized at festivals like “Kiel Week.” Moreover, when war came, it was greeted with ambivalence. Most British unions reacted with an “industrial truce,” while Prime Minister H. H. Asquith secured parliamentary support for war only by dividing his Liberal Party. In Germany, unions held massive anti-war demonstrations before heeding Kaiser Wilhelm’s plea for inter-class Burgfrieden to defend Germany against reactionary Russia. Rather than reflect a cleavage between democratic and autocratic societies, Germany and Britain were comparable ones with similar concerns and interests. 

Fear encouraged the great powers to risk war in the present rather than risk a worse power balance subsequently.

What is more, pre-war Europe was cooperatively integrating. The overlapping interests of European finance actuated Norman Angell’s 1912 claim that “commercial interdependence” would “create a consciousness which must make for more efficient human cooperation, a better human society.” International agreements coordinated maritime law, telegraphy, railroads, postal services, and tariffs. Summits at the Hague regulated warfare in 1899 and 1907. International Protestant denominations convened a World Missionary Conference in 1910. Socialists had been gathering in the International since 1864. This international culture encouraged compromise during disturbances like the Boxer Rebellion, the Moroccan Crisis, and the Balkan Wars. Peace activists like Bertha von Suttner celebrated pacificism’s movement “from the hands of the so-called Apostles into the hands of the powerful and into the minds of the awakening democracy.” Not only “could Europe act together,” reflects historian John Keegan, it could “also think and feel together” through its cosmopolitan elite, middle-class pursuits like foreign tourism, and working-class socialist internationalism.

The Great War helped to rupture common bonds and stoke ideological animosity. Yet these are its consequences, not its causes. Anxieties over power imbalances drove Europe to war. Fears were inflamed by Germany’s rise, Britain’s decline, Germany’s sense of encirclement, and common dread of isolation during crisis. Every European power in 1914 worried that their strength would decline, and their counterparts’ increase in the future. Fear encouraged the great powers to risk war in the present rather than risk a worse power balance subsequently. Conflict occurred despite comity and commonality. 

Today’s World—and Its Risks

Americans have persistently understood and responded to the challenge posed by China’s rise in ideological terms. Many have looked to economic, social, and political convergence to soothe Sino-American tensions. Bill Clinton declared that “the best path of advancing freedom in China is for the United States to intensify and broaden its engagement.” George W. Bush predicted: “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.” In 2013, Nicholas Kristof decided Xi Jinping would “spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well.” Five years later, Mike Pence beseeched the CCP to “return to the spirit of reform and opening” so that Sino-American “prosperity and security grow together, not apart” once more.

Detractors of engagement with China also prioritize ideology. Andrei Lungu links CCP hostility to the United States to its 2013 “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” naming democratic “universalism” an existential threat. To Joseph Torigian, Xi believes in “continuous self-revolution” to avert liberalization. Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher advocate defining Sino-American relations as a “new cold war” because the old Cold War models how to “achieve victory without war” against a “capable, belligerent, Leninist regime.” Departing from Pence, Mike Pompeo in 2020 declared: “America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries.” Xi’s “bankrupt totalitarian ideology … informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism.” Invoking Richard Nixon’s words in 1967, Pompeo concluded, “the world cannot be safe until China changes.”

Shared values do not obviate clashing interests.

The problem with prioritizing ideology is not that sanguine hopes for engagement have been proven groundless. More problematic is conflating ideological antipathy as a driver of war. Ideological animosities compound the risks of war, and ideological mobilizations often sustain warring nations. Yet the Great War’s example underscores that anxieties induced by power imbalances are weightier drivers of war than ideology. Unless tempered by attention to these anxieties, expectations that “changing” China will make the world safe could prove just as groundless as engagement’s gauziest hopes. Sino-American war would be a serious risk even if China’s leaders commemorated Liu Xiaobo rather than Mao in Tiananmen Square.

Shared values do not obviate clashing interests. Britain and Germany could both submit to liberal governance at home and clash over what Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow termed Germany’s “place in the sun,” Britain’s desired naval preeminence, and their common concern in July 1914 not to lose allies by balking at conflict. Ideological hostility did not incite these clashes; security expectations commensurate with their power did. Autocratic or otherwise, China is likely to take positions on its borders, political economy, global military presence, and a litany of other areas conflicting with American positions. American naval navigation in the South China Sea, American leadership in new technologies, American influence at global institutions, and in the Indo-Pacific would produce friction with any Chinese regime. 

Nor do shared values remove fear. German liberals looked to Westminster’s example, but feared the Royal Navy’s threat to their commerce. Lloyd George and Churchill’s admiration for German social welfarism did not dispel the specter of Germany conquering France. Even if future Chinese statesmen respect the Gettysburg Address, American partners in East Asia will face a nearby superpower capable of threatening their security or detaching them from Washington. And will China feel any safer athwart American allies than Germany felt flanked by Britain’s Franco-Russian friends? Future compromises could depend on both states accepting less than what they perceive as necessary to their security. In such circumstances, both could imagine conflict in the present as less perilous than a weakened position in future crises.

Another insight from the Great War is to qualify our confidence in mutually self-interested cooperation. Lyle Goldstein advocates “cooperation spirals” between China and the United States. From modest confidence-building measures, Goldstein imagines these spirals culminating in agreements on issues like Taiwan. Recently, William Hurst and Peter Trubowitz proposed Sino-American military dialogue and a “code of conduct” in the South China Sea. Common interest in stability and measures to sustain it do not guarantee peace. Few states benefited more from the status quo than Britain and Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm’s tears, Moltke’s nervous collapse, and Edward Grey’s foreboding over “the lamps going out in Europe” suggest Anglo-German leaders apprehended war’s disasters. Europe’s great powers maintained many “cooperation spirals.” Britain and Germany compromised over Morocco in 1905 and 1911 and persistently discussed naval armaments. They even refrained from blows in a Bosnian crisis in 1908.

Ideological comity, shared interests, and cooperative habits are likelier to alleviate than exacerbate great power tensions. There is certainly no question that a less odious regime than the CCP would benefit China’s people. Yet heeding the example of 1914, we should not assume ideological rivalry primarily drives the risks of Sino-American war. Nor should we look to cooperative habits as insurance against conflict. Europe’s great powers were more ideologically aligned, institutionally integrated, and cooperative than China and the United States could become in the foreseeable future. Allison’s warning that power imbalances inflame anxieties, which cause wars, means catastrophe is never distant. Lacking Europe’s safeguards before 1914, catastrophe is potentially quite close today.

Andrew Doyle is a satirist and comedian, but also a serious writer, with a doctorate in Renaissance literature. His most famous creation, a stroke almost of genius, is the character of Titania McGrath, a young female woke fanatic who ascribes all the ills of the world, and many others besides, to the patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, sexism, capitalism, etc. Titania is a self-righteous, humourless, intolerant, ignorant know-all, whose opinions are uttered with ironclad self-confidence. It was so brilliantly done, and unfortunately so plausible, that at first some people wondered whether Titania McGrath was a real person.

I regret to say that this present book is not wholly satisfactory. It is too long and unfocused. The problem begins with the title and the sub-title: is the end of woke here and now, to come, or already complete? If the culture war went too far, how far was far enough, and who declared it in the first place? Answers to these questions are not forthcoming. 

Those who are woke or anti-anti-woke claim that in essence wokeism was always a phantasm of the political right, that it never really existed, that it was a straw man conjured up by conservatives to reverse the social changes principally associated with the 1960s: but this is rather as if communists or anti-anti-communists were to claim that communism had never existed.

Wokeism is, of course, somewhat diffuse, but that does not prove its non-existence. A cloud exists, even if it cannot be precisely delimited, and the absence of precise delimitation is no reason for not referring to it. There may be no logical connection between climate catastrophism, for example, and the theory of gender, which denies the biological reality of sexual dimorphism, but it is a sociological fact that certain logically disconnected beliefs nevertheless tend to cluster together. It is not surprising that Greta Thunberg went straight from climate change activist to pro-Palestinianism, the main connection between these causes being that of her psychological need.

Doyle provides a succinct characterization of woke ideology. It is, he says, “An ideology underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is produced in the context of linguistic and cultural frameworks, that knowledge is a construct of power wielded oppressively through language, and therefore censorship and other authoritarian measures are necessary to reshape society.”

This reshaping is, of course, to be carried out in the name of social justice, but entails the wielding of great, unopposed, and even totalitarian power by those who consider themselves enlightened—namely, the woke.

There is no central committee, or Lenin, of wokeism. It spreads not by overall design, but like an epidemic disease. Universities are foci of infection, and just as epidemics spare certain parts of the population, relatively speaking, so wokeism is like the measles of the educated. It is precisely because there are now so many of them that it affects every level from subeditor to government minister. 

It is an awkward fact, seldom acknowledged, that the great majority of great art, including literature, has been produced under conditions of censorship. 

Doyle is convinced that wokeism is in its death throes. He might be right, but I am not convinced. The whirligig of time brings in his revenges, and no political victory is final. Certainly, the election of Donald Trump was a severe blow to wokeism, but he will not be president forever, and if his presidency should end in disaster, whether caused by him or not, a president of a very different stripe might be elected. If so, some form of wokeism might be resuscitated (we have already seen Zohran Mamdani chosen as Democratic candidate for the mayoralty of New York). Like the reports of Mark Twain’s death, those of the death of wokeism might well be exaggerated—albeit Mark Twain did eventually die. 

The author does not explain why he thinks that wokeism is in its last throes, other than the election of Trump. Is it collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and is it its evident intellectual absurdities that will bury it?

An important question that the author does not address is whether wokeism has advanced as far as it has because of the opportunism or careerism of its supporters, or because of their true beliefs. Are the woke cynics or true believers? The two possibilities are not absolutely opposed because even opportunists may come truly to believe whatever doctrine suits their career. Most people, after all, are not out-and-out scoundrels, and few openly pursue their own interests by the conscious propagation of lies. Thus, they come in time to see the lies necessary for their personal advancement as abstract truths. 

I suspect also that we have raised a generation of educated people who believe that any difference in outcomes between identifiable groups of people can only be accounted for by prejudice and illicit discrimination. If they believe this, they will remain susceptible to the siren song of wokeism for years to come. Thus, any dismantling of the bureaucratic apparatus inspired by absurd doctrines might prove only temporary.

There is much in this book about the arcana of the disputes between feminists and the transsexual lobby, and between the latter and homosexuals, which I think will not interest most readers. What future generations (if there are any) will make of the energy expended on questions raised by transsexualism in societies that face so many serious threats, economic, political, and strategic, I hesitate to predict. Perhaps the expenditure of such energy is best thought of as a displacement activity, like that of a mouse that washes its paws when confronted by a cat. We create problems for ourselves in order to avoid other problems. 

Certainly, it is more difficult to avoid wokeness than might at first appear. The woke ideology, or sensibility, is inherently polarising and easily calls forth a mirror image of itself. The French television satirist, Cyril Hanouna, who has made a career of mocking woke sentiments, and who is therefore as dependent on the continuation of wokeism as Ibram X. Kendi, said, “I will defend all that is anti-woke,” as if any counterclaim to a false claim must therefore itself be true. And there is a temptation to respond to the 1619 Project by the elaboration of an official history equal and opposite to it, with an equal desire that it should be imposed. 

There is a certain lack of subtlety in the author’s argumentation. In a chapter titled Strangled Muses, he says that woke censorship has strangled artistic expression, or at least crowded out all that is not woke, and I am in sympathy with this view. It is certainly true that publishers, for example, seem to demand wokeness even, or perhaps especially, for books for young children. The curators of museums now badger visitors with woke sentiments, and drag them into the labels of exhibits, bleeding, kicking, and screaming, as it were. On a recent visit to the British Museum, I noticed the gay pride, not the British, flag fluttering from the flagpole. Homosexuality has become a love that dare not dare not speak its name. 

Woke censorship strangles art in a peculiarly unpleasant and dangerous way, like North Korea’s, for it not only proscribes, it prescribes.

But it does not follow from the fact that woke censorship strangles artistic expression that all censorship does so. On the contrary, it is an awkward fact, seldom acknowledged, that the great majority of great art, including literature, has been produced under conditions of censorship. This does not by itself justify censorship, of course, for freedom is for freedom’s sake, not for great art’s sake. The end of society as a whole, moreover, is not only to produce great art.

But it is true that woke censorship strangles art in a peculiarly unpleasant and dangerous way, like North Korea’s, for it not only proscribes, it prescribes. Prescriptive censorship—the demand not only that some things must not be said, but that some things must be said—is the worst kind of censorship known. It leads not only to tedium, but to a sense of violence being done to one’s mind, because the things that must be said, and cannot be denied, are usually gross and obvious falsehoods. To be forced to accept and repeat falsehoods is worse than being merely prohibited from saying something. 

This brings us to the question, also not discussed in this book, though obviously germane to it, of self-censorship. The anti-woke now talk of self-censorship as if it were self-evidently undesirable. The most minimal reflection will, or should, demonstrate that this is not so (here I assume that other people’s minds are like mine). It is perfectly obvious that one should not always say the first thing that comes into one’s head—the world is not a psychoanalyst’s couch—and that there are many times when certain truths should not be uttered. The way to be a bore, said Voltaire, is to say everything; the way to be a boor is to say the first thing that comes into one’s head. Nor does it follow from the fact that one is permitted to say x that one should say x, or that it is wrong to refrain from saying x. 

There are difficult questions concerning publicly funded cultural institutions, which are subject to capture by woke ideology, that this book passes by. Of course, a purist might say that there should be no such institutions, that all should be privately funded, but this seems to me a counsel of ideology rather than of perfection. Besides, there will always be public monuments. 

There is the problem, however, that the very rich of today, for one reason or another, do not appear to have the discrimination necessary to create worthwhile cultural institutions (I speak gross modo). But who, on the other hand, is to decide what is to be publicly subsidised, and on what grounds? Is it to be by show of hands and popularity, in which case the lowest common denominator will usually win? Or is it to be by direction of the cognoscenti, a knowledgeable elite that sets itself up in distinction to the hoi polloi, that as we have seen, is susceptible to extreme ideological capture? 

The greatest harm done by wokeism is its destruction of cultural unselfconsciousness and its transformation of so many of us into ideologists or counter-ideologists. Henry Clay Frick, for example, did not have to agonise over what great art was, or under what conditions it was produced; he collected it, to the great benefit of New Yorkers and others. And this was true, pace the multiculturalists who complain of Eurocentrism, of the collectors of non-European art.

The author is not over-optimistic about a post-woke world. He says, “A happy ending is out of the question, but perhaps we might settle for a tolerable one”: that is to say, a world in which ignorant (and ideologised) armies do not clash by night.

Death came to Edgar Allan Poe much as it had to the doomed characters who haunted his tales of the grotesque: strangely, symbolically, and shrouded in ambiguity. It is fitting that we should begin there, in that Baltimore setting where the mystery still clings like fog to the facts. “The subject [of Poe’s death] is famously fraught,” writes Richard Kopley. Within that careful academic phrase lies the whole terrible admission of our inability to grasp the ultimate meaning of a man who lived always at the edge of meaning itself.

Kopley, distinguished professor emeritus at Penn State DuBois, has given us Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, a monumental biography spanning 714 pages, nearly a quarter of them devoted to endnotes, as if even these might contain buried clues. The final details, however, are as enigmatic and horrible as Poe’s greatest stories.

Poe died on October 7, 1840, at forty years old, that fatal age when a man’s devils either claim him or release their hold forever. On September 26, he had parted company with two fellow writers, John M. Daniel and John R. Thompson, reportedly in “high spirits.” At half past nine that evening, he encountered Dr. John F. Carter; then he dined with relations who claimed he was sober when midnight struck, and he took his leave. Next, the steamboat at four in the morning carried him into the void.

“At this point, on board the vessel,” Kopley says, “Poe needed someone with him—a friend and protector, someone who would watch out for him. He should not have been alone.” But alone he was, just as in many ways he had ever been. “We lose sight of Poe for several days,” Kopley writes. “There is uncertainty; there is mystery.” Poe, in his last hours, lived out the genre he had perfected, stepping across that threshold between the teller and the told.

What followed seems like a collaboration between Poe and his inner demons. Kopley’s chronology staggers under the weight of conflicting testimonies, but a recognizable plot emerges: On October 3, witnesses beheld a man stupefied and struggling, stripped of his clothes like the victim of theft, semiconscious and delirious. The hospital received him in the grip of apparent mania. Tranquilized, he surfaced briefly into consciousness only to speak incoherently to his doctor, his mind already half-departed. The vigil lasted four days, his condition spiraling downward until October 7 brought his last words: “Lord help my poor soul.”

Here, Kopley offers his most penetrating observation: “For years, Poe had integrated his life in his work—perhaps now, at the end, Poe was integrating his work in his life.” This is a creative way of saying what every astute reader of Poe already knows: that the boundary between the man and his creations had long since dissolved, that he had written himself into existence as surely as he had written his characters, and that his demise was simply the conclusive revision of a text he had been composing his entire career.

Poe represents a peculiar Southern type who wears the mask of gentility while something altogether more desperate writhes beneath: Andrew Jackson with his dueling pistols, Jesse James with his bank robberies that were somehow rituals of honor, Doc Holliday coughing blood into his cards, Faulkner drowning his demons in bourbon and prose, Walker Percy stalking purpose through the ruins of Christendom. These figures carried a distinct burden: the knowledge that civilization is a thin veneer, that beneath the courtly manners and code of honor lies an abyss that no amount of breeding can fill. They were refined men who peered into the darkness and found it looking back at them.

Poe’s origins, however, were far from privileged, despite the education he would later receive. Born in Boston to thespian parents—his mother a gifted actress, his father considerably less talented—Poe was orphaned at the age of three. He was subsequently raised by John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant who provided him with a gentleman’s education but never legally adopted him.

The horrible chaos that pulses through Poe’s work demanded of him the most laborious plotting and organization; they are creatures of deliberate design even as they mime disorder.

Poe’s academic promise was evident during his time at the University of Virginia, where he distinguished himself scholastically. However, financial troubles—stemming from his complicated relationship with his foster father—forced him to leave before completing his studies. The boy who had been raised in comfort but never security found himself back in Boston, the city of his birth and first exile, enlisting in the Army while his pen began to earn modest victories. Even then, as success beckoned however faintly, his relationship with Allan crumbled, one of many such collapses that would define his life.

For a man who passed away at forty, there is much to recount: the War of 1812, which impacted his early years, and the development of a young republic as he shaped his own identity. But the essential pattern was established early and never varied: death as his constant companion, loss as his most faithful muse. The toll call reads like a sad litany: not merely his parents in those first difficult years, but Jane Stanard, the young woman who awakened his poetic sensibilities, and then his older brother William, claimed by the same consumption that had taken his mother. But it was the passing of Virginia Clemm Poe that broke something in him beyond repair.

She had been both his wife and first cousin. Kopley highlights the much-discussed, troubling detail: “The printed document for the marriage bond stated that the bride was twenty-one years old, but she was actually thirteen.” Poe himself was twenty-six. For just over a decade, they lived as man and wife, until tuberculosis claimed her, too. After Virginia’s death, his drinking grew worse, his melancholy deepened, and the genius who had written so eloquently of premature burial began to live as if he had been buried alive himself.

We may think we know Poe from our schooldays. We can recall, if not recite, “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells.” We remember the fiction that made us shiver: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Yet Kopley’s book inspired this reviewer to return to these familiar texts with adult eyes, and the shock of recognition was profound. What seemed merely odd during my youth appeared far more disturbing to the middle-aged me: the work of a suffering mind that had stared too long into the fundamental dread of existence and found there not chaos but a sickening order, not meaninglessness but a meaning too precise and pitiless to bear.

This claim may appear at odds with an earlier statement, since describing a sickening order and a meaning too precise and pitiless to bear seems to conflict with the claim that civilization is only a thin veneer concealing an abyss no breeding can fill. One vision presents the universe as grimly systematic, bound by terrifying determinism; the other suggests chaos, the void, nothingness itself. Yet in Poe, these are not opposites but twins, for the abyss reveals itself as sickening order, and both chaos and cruel systems alike serve as wellsprings of dread. The horrible chaos that pulses through Poe’s work demanded of him the most laborious plotting and organization; they are creatures of deliberate design even as they mime disorder.

Take Poe’s “The Visionary,” which Kopley dubs “a rich tale, comprising two sections.” Here, Poe shows civilization as a mask of elegance and ritual stretched thin over the abyss of despair and doom. The Marchesa Bianca (so named in the original version of the story) moves through Venetian nobility with grace, but her beauty and station are veils drawn over quiet suffering, emotional burial, and death’s approach. Her bond with the mysterious rescuer (aesthete and fatalist) unfolds not in open speech but through silent signs, missed moments, and a final meeting as formal as it is fatal.

The adorned setting—palaces, canals, ornaments—only deepens the mockery of human artifice before a universe ruled by merciless precision. The rescuer’s death by poison is no random despair but a calculated surrender to a fate he has long foreseen. His meeting with the Marchesa bears the weight of tragic inevitability, doomed not by chance but by the very architecture of Poe’s world, one where beauty, longing, and death are chained by inescapable, pitiless order. Beneath culture’s illusion lies decay’s certainty. The story thus works a double horror: civilization as brittle pretense, and the universe as a stage whose script was written before the curtain rose.

Kopley’s research is formidable. He’s assembled a vast chorus of primary sources, weaving quotations in and out of his narrative with such relentless thoroughness that his own voice sometimes disappears entirely beneath the accumulated testimony of witnesses, critics, and correspondents. His is scholarship by accretion, truth by documentary saturation, as if the sheer weight of evidence might pin down a man who spent his life eluding definition.

Yet perhaps this method is fitting for Poe, who was always more echo than substance, more shadow than flesh—a riddle best understood through the voices of others, the traces he left in letters and reviews, as well as the memories of those who knew him briefly and incompletely.

Do people have a moral obligation to obey the law simply because it is the law? If you come to a red light and have a clear view in all directions with no cars in sight, do you have a moral obligation to stop? 

Questions like this have long divided philosophers of law. In The Nature of Law: Authority, Obligation, and the Common Good, Daniel Mark defends the traditional natural law position that law’s connection to the common good generates a defeasible moral obligation to obey the law. The book is divided into five chapters. The first two criticize H. L. A. Hart’s rule-based, positivist theory of law. The third criticizes Joseph Raz’s influential positivist account of law’s authority. The fourth chapter is the heart of the book: it presents Mark’s preferred brand of natural law theory, which holds that law is a set of commands oriented to the common good, and explains why this theory implies the existence of a defeasible moral obligation to obey the law. The fifth and final chapter addresses questions about the relationship between Mark’s theory of law and democratic systems of government. 

The most interesting and successful parts of the book are where Mark works out the kind of relationship between law and the common good that, assuming it exists, would be capable of generating a moral obligation to obey the law. As Mark points out, if it were the orientation to the common good at the level of the individual law that generated the obligation, then it would be hard to see how this obligation could be an obligation to obey, that is, to comply with the law just because it is the law. The fact that the action required by law is in service of the common good would do all the work in generating the moral obligation to perform the action. The fact that the law requires the action would be redundant. 

Mark’s solution is to ground the moral obligation to comply with each individual law in the orientation of the legal system as a whole to the common good. Because the system-level orientation to the common good can remain intact even if some individual laws are unjust, it can generate a moral obligation to obey even those laws, an obligation that would not exist but for the fact that they are laws.

The focus on the system-level orientation to the common good is among the book’s most valuable insights. Not only does it explain how there could be a moral obligation to obey the law just because it is the law, but it also provides Mark with an elegant account of the morality of revolution: generally, revolution becomes morally permissible once injustice has become so pervasive as to compromise the orientation of the system as a whole to the common good. It also provides Mark with an intuitive explanation for why it is generally appropriate for those engaged in civil disobedience to submit to the punishment prescribed by law for their actions. Civil disobedience is morally permissible when the defeasible moral obligation to obey an individual law is defeated by countervailing considerations. Yet even then, it is plausible that the defeasible moral obligation to comply with the law’s provision of punishment for violating the law remains undefeated. 

However, we encounter a complication here. It is one thing to work out what kind of relationship between law and the common good would be capable of generating a moral obligation to obey the law. It is another thing to show that law actually has this relationship to the common good. Even if a system’s general orientation to the common good generates a moral obligation to obey its rules, one might still ask whether only systems generally oriented to the common good count as legal systems. If not, then there may not be a moral obligation to obey all laws, only an obligation to obey those that are part of a system generally oriented to the common good.

Despite relying heavily on the work of John Finnis throughout the book, Mark has surprisingly little to say about Finnis’s influential argument that at least all central cases of law have the kind of orientation to the common good that generates a moral obligation to obey. Also conspicuously absent from the book is meaningful engagement with the work on this subject by prominent natural law theorists since Finnis, most notably Mark Murphy. 

The closest Mark comes to defending the natural law view that only systems oriented to the common good count as legal systems is in his criticism of Hart’s positivist alternative. Mark reads Hart as (perhaps inconsistently) recognizing that a system does not count as a legal system unless its subjects feel that they ought to follow the system’s rules. But Mark argues that Hart’s theory “gets in the way of any coherent account” of why people feel that way. Hart conceives of law as consisting of “rules based in social practice”—what people do “around here”—and “on a moment’s reflection, any person can see that the fact that we happen to do things a certain way around here … never [generates] an obligation to obey the law just because it is the law.” Absent some basis for thinking that people should obey the law, it is hard to explain people’s feeling that they should obey the law.

I am not sure how much damage this criticism inflicts on Hart’s theory. Hart could, if he liked, help himself to Mark’s account of why there is an obligation to obey all rules of a system oriented to the common good, to explain why the subjects of such a system feel that they ought to obey the law. This is consistent with the claim that a system that was not oriented to the common good but where people, for whatever reason, nonetheless felt that they ought to follow the rules would also constitute a legal system. Hart need not maintain that such a system is probable and thus does not owe us an account of why people might feel that way. Mark never claims that there would be anything counterintuitive about identifying such a system as a legal system and even appears to concede that one’s intuition might align with the positivist on this point.

If Mark wanted to ground the principle of legality in the relationship between law and moral obligation, then he would need to insist on a (defeasible) moral obligation to do whatever the law permits.

Of course, Hart might prefer not to adopt Mark’s account wholesale. Hart does not actually claim that a legal system exists only if all or even most of the system’s subjects feel that they ought to obey the law; all he says is that a legal system exists only if the system’s officials treat its secondary rules of recognition, change, and adjudication as standards of official behavior. And the hypothesis of a moral obligation to obey the law is not the only possible explanation for why a system’s officials treat its secondary rules as standards of official behavior. Alternative explanations include a sense of role morality and social pressure. Hart would likely adopt a liberal attitude toward the range of possible explanations for officials’ attitudes toward the law rather than insist on a single explanation applicable to all legal systems. At any rate, the point is that Hart could, without compromising his positivism, agree that people in legal systems oriented to the common good feel that they ought to obey the law and adopt Mark’s explanation for why. This shows that even if that explanation is correct, it does not follow that we should accept the natural law claim that only systems oriented to the common good are legal systems. 

Mark also criticizes Hart’s treatment of trials of Nazi officials in postwar Germany. Hart recognizes that these trials were fraught, even if plausibly justified, because they involved punishing defendants for acts that were legal when they were committed. According to Mark, this makes sense only on the assumption that there is a (defeasible) moral obligation to obey the law, such that the defendants were punished for something that they had a (defeasible) moral obligation to do. Predictably, Mark argues that the problem with the trials is solvable because the defendants’ defeasible moral obligation to obey the law was, in fact, defeated. But Mark maintains that we cannot even understand the problem to be solved unless we recognize a defeasible moral obligation to obey the law.

Mark appears to slide here from legally permitted to legally required. I do not know whether every act for which the defendants in these trials were prosecuted was not only permitted but required by Nazi law, but it is notable that Hart sets up the problem as one of whether “to punish those who did evil things when they were permitted by evil rules then in force” (emphasis added). And Hart seems right to set up the problem this way. As Hart notes, the venerable principle of legality—nulla poena sin lege—prohibits the state from punishing people for acts that were legally permissible when performed. The problem with the trials was that they appeared to violate this principle. 

This suggests that it is Mark, not Hart, who “misidentifies the nub of the problem.” The alleged (defeasible) moral obligation to do whatever the law requires has nothing to do with the principle of legality, which prohibits punishment not just for acts that the law required but for any act that the law permitted. If Mark wanted to ground the principle of legality in the relationship between law and moral obligation, then he would need to insist on a (defeasible) moral obligation to do whatever the law permits. And surely Mark would not want to go that far. 

Mark’s final major criticism of Hart is that Hart is wrong to reject the model of law as a collection of commands. According to Hart, some legal rules are a poor fit for the command model because they confer powers rather than impose duties. Legal rules defining how a legislature can enact new laws or how parties can form a valid contract are not naturally understood as commands to legislators or to potential parties to a contract. On Hart’s view, such rules confer powers rather than impose duties. But Mark argues that power-conferring rules can generally be understood as conditional commands. On this view, rules defining how a legislature can enact new laws are conditional commands instructing legislators that they must proceed in a certain way if they wish to enact a new law, and rules defining how parties can form a contract are conditional commands instructing parties that they must proceed in a certain way if they wish to form a contract. 

Mark’s argument here appears to trade on an ambiguity in the modal force of “must.” The construal of power-conferring rules as tantamount to a conditional requirement of the form, “if you wish to do X, then you must do Y,” is plausible if the modal force of “must” is metaphysical. Given that the relevant legal rule empowers the legislature to create law (only) by means of a certain procedure, it is impossible for the legislature to enact law in any other way: that is the sense in which legislators “must” proceed in a certain way if they wish to enact a new law. So too when parties wish to form a contract. The relevant power-conferring rule specifies the (only) way to do it, making it impossible to form a contract otherwise; that is the sense in which parties “must” proceed in a certain way if they wish to form a contract.

But if Mark is to reduce power-conferring rules to duty-imposing rules, then he needs the modal force of “must” to be normative—more specifically, legal. And the construal of power-conferring rules as conditional requirements of the form “if you wish to do X, then you must do Y” is less plausible if the modal force of “must” is legal. It is not as if Congress could enact a statute without regard to bicameralism or presentment, but is prohibited by law from doing so. Absent bicameralism and presentment, there is no statute. Similarly, it is not as if you and I could form a contract lacking consideration but are prohibited by law from doing so. Absent consideration, there is no contract. 

I have focused on Mark’s engagement with Hart because Mark rightly identifies Hart’s theory as the leading positivist competitor to the kind of natural law theory that Mark defends. But even if I am right that Mark’s criticisms of Hart are ultimately unsuccessful, these shortcomings should not overshadow the book’s important contributions to understanding what the grounds of a moral obligation to obey the law must be if indeed such an obligation exists. Nor do they undermine the basis that Mark provides for thinking that in a legal system such as ours in the United States, which does seem to be generally (albeit imperfectly) oriented to the common good, citizens have a defeasible moral obligation to obey the law. In addition, the book features much more of interest than can be covered here, including extended discussions of Raz’s theory of authority and Carl Schmitt’s political theory. Anyone interested in the philosophy of law, especially those interested in questions of political obligation, will enjoy this book and find in it—to quote Mark—plenty of fodder for “discussion and, better yet, disagreement.”

On June 14, protesters gathered in cities across the country under a bold banner: “No Kings.” They marched again under that same cry two weeks later, and rallied again in some cities on July 4. The slogan is intended as a rebuke to what they perceive as a creeping authoritarianism in American politics, particularly directed at President Trump, whose critics accuse him of cultivating a “regal presidency.” Whatever the merits of those charges may be, the imagery accompanying these protests—mannequin heads in French wigs, toy guillotines, and revolutionary theater—evokes not America in 1776, but France in 1793.

It’s powerful symbolism, but the progressive Left has chosen the wrong revolution to celebrate. On July 4, 1776, America did indeed declare, in effect, “No Kings.” But the revolution that followed lacked the radical aims of the later Jacobins. Our Founders were altogether more restrained and philosophical, and therefore their project has been far more enduring. They may have fought a war to defend their rights, but unlike the French Revolution, they never let loose violence and terror, which upended the social order altogether.

In part, the Founders’ moderation was a consequence of their deep-rootedness in the political thought of John Locke. The Englishman, writing almost a century before the American Revolution, held that the government’s sole purpose is to protect pre-existing natural rights: life, liberty, and property. When the government fails to do so, citizens have not only the right but the duty to withdraw their consent. The Declaration of Independence echoes this logic precisely: governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and when they become destructive of those rights, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

That is a protest against tyranny—but a protest grounded in order and principle, not chaos.

The current “No Kings” movement borrows more heavily from the French model than Anglo-American sources. In their Revolution, sovereignty was not a means of protecting rights, but of redefining them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the “general will” replaced individual conscience with collective conformity. The result, infamously, was not ordered liberty but the Reign of Terror—the new regime devoured its own children in the name of the people. Under Maximilien Robespierre, the “general will” justified mass executions of anyone who disagreed, often without trial.

John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau both began with the premise that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but their paths diverged sharply from there. Locke believed that individuals possess natural rights—life, liberty, and property—that exist prior to government and must be protected by it. Rousseau, by contrast, held that rights are shaped and defined by the collective, and that true freedom comes only through submission to the “general will.” Where Locke saw the social contract as a safeguard for individual liberty, Rousseau saw it as a tool to forge civic unity, even at the expense of dissent. The result was two starkly different visions of freedom: one rooted in restraint, the other in control.

We still see echoes of this divergence in American politics today. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked, “I believe in our collective conscience. So, I don’t have any master plan, but I believe that the people will show me the way.” That sentiment may sound democratic in passing, but it reflects the Rousseauian idea that legitimacy flows not from principle or process, but from the mood of the crowd. Liberty is not secured by intuition or collective conscience—laws, institutions, and limits on power secure it. Unlike Rousseau and his statist heirs, our Founders understood that freedom cannot simply be redefined by a simple majority.

America’s revolution was different because it did not just reject kings—it also rejected mobs. It chose a structure of liberty, not a spectacle of rage.

Today’s protestors may not call for literal guillotines, but their chosen symbols suggest a comfort with revolutionary excess. A movement claiming to resist authoritarianism ought to look more carefully in the mirror. In recent years, many of the same voices decrying executive power as “anti-democratic” had little objection when left-of-center Presidents Obama and Biden stretched that power in service of their own goals. The issue seems less about defending democracy than about discrediting any outcome or leader they happen to dislike. And that’s precisely the kind of arbitrary rule the American founders revolted against.

This is not to say that concern over concentrated executive power is unfounded. Conservatives raised similar alarms during the Obama years, just as progressives now object to Trump’s rhetoric. But what’s missing in today’s movement is consistency and humility.

In his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public, former CIA analyst Martin Gurri describes the rise of “Homo informaticus,” a hyper-connected citizenry whose first reflex is to negate. Armed with smartphones and social platforms, the public now wields a decentralized “no-power” that can topple reputations or derail policy within hours. Yet the angered mob rarely coalesces around durable, constructive programs. “Any untoward event,” Gurri warns, “can draw a networked public into the streets, calling for blood.”

The “No Kings” rallies exemplify that pattern: they film toy guillotines, place guillotines on signs and shirts, and lampoon an imperial presidency but offer no better architecture to replace it. In other words, twenty-first-century mobs achieve Rousseau’s instantaneous unanimity without enduring Rousseau’s committees of public safety; they magnify grievance while remaining institutionally weightless. Unless channeled by structural guardrails—such as the ballots, bicameralism, and federalism prized by our Madisonian system—this digital negation risks repeating the French cycle of demolition without design.

History offers a cautionary preview: two late-eighteenth-century revolutions unleashed popular fury, yet only one translated it into lasting liberty. The American Revolution, though born of conflict, was fundamentally constructive. It produced a written constitution, institutional checks and balances, and a governing structure designed to preserve liberty by limiting power. The French Revolution, by contrast, tore down institutions without building durable replacements. In place of monarchy, it elevated committees, cults, and mobs—all in the name of virtue and the people. The American Founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to establish a republic of laws. The Jacobins demanded blood to purify a society of enemies. One gave rise to ordered liberty. The other ended in the guillotine.

The genius of the American Revolution is that it said “No Kings” and “No Committees of Public Safety.” It distrusted concentrated power of every kind, placing checks and balances between the branches of government, and between the government and the people. That is why July 4 celebrates not just rebellion, but constitutionalism—a nation of laws, not of men.

It is fair, even noble, to oppose executive overreach. But the test of a protest movement is not only what it resists, but what it proposes in its place. The founders did not simply reject monarchy; they established a durable republic founded on natural rights and limited government.

If today’s “No Kings” movement wants to honor that legacy, it might revisit the source. Begin not with Rousseau and Robespierre, but with Locke and Madison—men who knew that liberty depends not on “general will,” but on ordered liberty.

The road of history is fraught with political movements driven by passion, unmoored from principle, that tended to crown tyrants. From Alcibiades, the self-serving populist of Athenian democracy, to Napoleon, to Fidel Castro, the crowd’s will has too often paved the road to centralized, unchecked power. America’s revolution was different because it did not just reject kings—it also rejected mobs. It chose a structure of liberty, not a spectacle of rage.

If we are serious about preventing either thrones or mobs, Congress could begin by reclaiming the authorities it has lazily ceded. Require explicit re-authorization of national emergencies after 90 days; regulate trade through Congressional action; mandate legislative approval for any regulation with a multi-billion-dollar impact; tighten the War Powers Resolution to force an up-or-down vote before extended deployments. Such acts would not suffocate executive energy, but they would re-anchor it to popular consent expressed through deliberation rather than acclamation—a thoroughly Locke-and-Madison remedy for twenty-first-century anxieties. That legacy is worth defending—not with guillotines, but with guardrails on governmental power.

Social Security, a bedrock of American retirement security, is in deep trouble. Born during the Great Depression as a way to prevent poverty in old age, the program now consumes 22 percent of the entire federal budget. Social Security’s promises now far exceed its means. 

Without serious reform, this prior pillar of security will continue to transform into a weight holding back future generations from comfortable golden years. If we are to save Social Security—and the American ideals of personal responsibility and limited government—we must act now, and we must act boldly.

The Coming Impasse

Today, Social Security payroll taxes total 12.4 percent, split evenly between employer and employee on income up to $176,100 (as of 2025). The vast majority (close to 75 percent) of this tax funds “old age insurance”; the remainder provides financial support for people with disabilities. For decades, the program took in more than it paid out, with the surplus “saved” in government bonds. But since 2009, that cushion began to disappear, and it has continued to shrink as the population ages and the ratio of current workers to beneficiaries declines. As a result, the “trust fund” is shrinking as the government cashes in the bonds to make up the growing difference between benefits paid and revenue collected. When this trust fund is fully drained, which could happen as soon as 2034, the program will no longer have the resources to provide benefits at current levels. 

At that point, Congress will face grim choices: substantially raise taxes, slash benefits to the bone, or borrow trillions to cover the shortfall. None of these are good options, but unless we act soon, all will become necessary.

When the trust fund is depleted, benefits will have to be cut by roughly 21 percent immediately to bring outlays in line with revenues. Alternatively, payroll taxes could be raised by close to 4 percentage points. In today’s dollars, this could mean a $14,000 annual tax hike for dual-income upper-middle-class families. Benefit cuts or tax hikes are politically difficult. As such, Congress may choose the path of least resistance: even more deficit spending to finance the shortfall between promised benefits and payroll tax revenue. As James Capretta points out in his recent essay, deficit spending is already harming families by “being a drag on economic growth,” even if the public does not yet broadly recognize this harm. Dramatically increasing deficit spending to plug the Social Security funding gap risks higher long-term inflation, lower capital investment, and stagnating economic growth. A once well-intentioned program designed to care for the elderly will have morphed into a monster that devours American prosperity. 

A System Out of Balance

The underlying problem is demographic. At its inception, there were over 150 workers per recipient. Today, that ratio has dropped to about 2.7 to 1—and it’s still falling. This may continue declining to just 1.5 workers per beneficiary in the coming decades. Fertility is down. Longevity is up. These trends appear to be here to stay. In addition, legal immigration of younger workers may mitigate these trends less than in years past. 

What this means in practice is stark: today’s retirees, particularly those who retired in recent decades, are receiving far more in benefits than they ever paid in taxes. But future generations—especially millennials and Gen Z—will almost certainly receive less than they contribute. 

This current generational wealth transfer is already robbing younger workers of the opportunity to build real retirement wealth for themselves. Capretta’s suggestions would help us avoid the future dilemma of choosing between far higher taxes, steep benefit cuts, or massive increases in deficit spending. However, workers will still be diverting a large chunk of every paycheck to a system that denies them the ability to take age-appropriate investment risks that can harness the power of compounded returns. Instead, they are forced to contribute to a system delivering far lower retirement payouts, even before accounting for potential future reductions. This violates American principles that conservatives have long held dear: individual freedom and personal responsibility.

The Chilean Model: A Vision for Reform

Thankfully, a better way demonstrably proven to work exists. 

In the early 1980s, Chile faced a crisis similar to ours: an aging population, an unsustainable pay-as-you-go system, and a future of mounting deficits. But unlike most countries, Chile took bold action. With the guidance of economists like Milton Friedman, they implemented a radical reform: privatization. 

Workers were given the option to leave the old system and invest 10 percent of their wages into individual retirement accounts. Licensed private firms managed these in accordance with government regulations to ensure prudent investment. An additional 3 percent went towards administrative costs and insurance. As a sidenote, the development of passively managed index funds with management fees of under 0.1 percent annually ($10 per $10,000 invested) would enable a reformed US system to avoid much of this overhead.

Delay in reforming Social Security invites draconian choices: higher taxes, spiraling inflation, diminished opportunity.

In Chile, workers owned their accounts and could track their balances. At retirement, they could purchase annuities or make programmed withdrawals. The government guaranteed a minimum benefit for those with insufficient savings, preserving a social safety net. However, for those who work most of their adult lives and must save 10 percent of their wages, sufficient savings are quite easy to achieve.

The results? Over 90 percent of eligible workers have opted into the new system. In the first 25 years, the average real (inflation-adjusted) annual rate of return on these accounts exceeded 10 percent. Over the past 20 years, the real returns averaged near 3.0 percent as restrictions on investing in foreign markets held back returns at a time of slowing Chilean economic growth. Leftist parties rolled back free market policies of prior administrations. 

Chile’s reform involved serious challenges. Transition costs had to be managed, primarily through the issuance of “recognition bonds” and the sale of state assets. But Chile’s success proved the possibility of transforming a broken system into one based on ownership, choice, and fiscal responsibility.

What If Americans Could Opt Out?

Let us consider a hypothetical: Sally graduates from college at 22 and works until 67. She earns the median income for most of her career, about $72,000 annually in today’s dollars. Under current law, she will pay nearly $9,000 a year into Social Security (counting both her share and her employer’s). Her benefit at retirement? Around $2,489 a month.

But what if Sally had been allowed to invest that $9,000 annually in a moderate-risk, inflation-adjusted portfolio earning a very conservative 5 percent real returns? By age 62—seven years before the current full retirement age—she would have over $1 million in today’s dollars. That money could buy an annuity paying over $3,000 a month for life, or she could live off interest and leave the principal to her children. Either way, she retires earlier, earns more, owns her future, and gives the next generation an even better chance to live the American Dream.

This is not fantasy. It’s financial reality—if we just let people control their own money.

A US system modeled on Chile’s could allow younger workers (say, under age 45) to opt out of the current Social Security system. Those who opt out could be required to contribute to a mandatory savings account with automatic enrollment, automatic payroll deductions, and automatically managed investment plans to promote long-term growth. At retirement, part of the account could be annuitized to provide a minimum standard of living, with the remainder available for discretionary use.

Yes, such a reform would temporarily raise short-term deficits. More importantly, it would also halt the growth of unfunded liabilities, now totaling nearly $23 trillion and growing. This unfunded Social Security liability is more than $196,000 per current worker. Privatization would also result in capital accumulation, savings, and investment that fuel economic expansion and productivity growth.

Complementary Reforms

Privatization alone may not be enough. A more comprehensive approach might include additional reforms that reflect modern demographics and fiscal realities.

First, we could gradually raise the age of retirement. When Social Security was created, 65 was near the average life expectancy. In today’s America, 65 is no longer old. Today, Americans live almost two decades past retirement. The last major increase in the retirement age was in 1983. It’s time to raise it again, perhaps to 69, phased in over several years. This reform alone would significantly extend Social Security’s solvency.

Second, we might consider offering voluntary buyouts. A worker could accept a lump-sum payment in exchange for relinquishing future benefits. While this would increase near-term costs, it would drastically reduce long-term liabilities and give individuals the freedom to manage their own retirement savings. As an example, the federal government could offer a buyout of $50,000 to a current worker aged 38 with an attached unfunded liability of $150,000. Of course, safeguards would be needed to ensure that these funds aren’t squandered by the recipient, but the basic principle is sound.

What should we avoid? Several proposals circulating in Washington would move us in the wrong direction.

Means testing based on net worth penalizes responsible savers and undermines the incentive to prepare for retirement. A combination of two specific options suggested by Capretta would morph Social Security into a wealth redistribution program: Increasing the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes and tweaking the benefit calculation to lower the “rate of return” for the “highest tranche of earnings.” Social Security already subjects upper-middle-class workers to more than $21,800 in annual taxes. Those contributing more in Social Security taxes throughout a career already receive less of a “return” on those contributions than lower-income earners. These changes would further sever the historic link between contributions and benefits, morphing Social Security into more of a wealth-redistribution program.

Finally, we must not cut benefits for current retirees or those near retirement. These individuals played by the rules and planned their lives around promised benefits. Punishing them for Congress’s decades of neglect and procrastination is not only politically toxic—it is morally wrong.

The Time to Act Is Now

Delay is the silent enemy of reform. With each year we hesitate, the cost of fixing Social Security climbs higher, the burden on younger generations grows heavier, and the window to harness the miracle of compound growth narrows.

Yet the opportunity remains if we have the courage to seize it. We can still fix Social Security, but only by anchoring reform in enduring American principles: personal responsibility, fiscal stewardship, and the power of individual liberty. We must pivot from dependence to ownership, from bureaucracy to choice, from looming insolvency to lasting sustainability.

The earlier we act, the more we preserve—not just economic solvency, but the promise we make to the future. Delay invites draconian choices: higher taxes, spiraling inflation, diminished opportunity. But timely reform lights the path to greater freedom, broader prosperity, and a government that once again serves rather than smothers.

In 1981, Chile summoned the courage to lead. Four decades later, the United States must rediscover its own resolve. We must reform Social Security not merely to balance ledgers, but to renew the principles at the heart of the American experiment: that the fruits of one’s labor belong not to the state, but to the citizen, and that liberty, not dependency, is the birthright of every American.