Day: June 26, 2025

It is always rather thrilling to be around for the birth of a new movement. To watch a fresh crop of intellectual leaders emerge, the publication of exciting new ideas, and the creation of institutions designed to make the movement’s vision a reality. The preceding decades have witnessed a steady stream of newly minted schools of thought. Some of these—such as national conservatism and integralism—have gained a great deal of public attention. Others have flown a bit more under the radar. Perhaps none more than the movement to revive classical architecture.

Spearheaded by the National Civic Art Society, this movement aims to upend the contemporary architectural landscape by waging total war on modernism. Their greatest achievement to date has been to convince the Trump administration to issue a blanket ban on the construction of any federal building that is not in the neoclassical style. As is too often the case with new intellectual movements, groups like the National Civic Art Society apprehend a genuine problem—the simple ugliness of most public buildings—but their solution is reactionary and reveals a shockingly superficial understanding of art.

The classical architecture movement locates the fountain of all artistic darkness in a little-known set of federal regulations called “the guiding principles for federal architecture.” Drafted in the early sixties by the future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan while he worked as an assistant to the Secretary of Labor, the report states, in short, that the government should pay significant attention to the architecture of the buildings it commissions—constructing interesting, beautiful buildings that reflect both our democratic nation and the very best of contemporary architecture. Almost no one protests that buildings should be beautiful rather than bland, but the advocates of classical architecture reject, in principle, Moynihan’s idea that public buildings should be constructed in the very best examples of contemporary architecture.

To understand the federal architecture guidelines as an uncritical, unthoughtful attack upon traditional buildings is a grave mistake. Moynihan did not hate classical architecture, nor was Moynihan uncritical of some modernist buildings that failed to live up to his aesthetic standards. When the Hart Senate Office Building was unveiled in 1981, Senator Moynihan cheekily proposed: “Whereas in the fall of 1980 the frame of the new Senate Office Building was covered with plastic sheathing in order that construction might continue during winter months; and Whereas the plastic cover has now been removed revealing, as feared, a building whose banality is exceeded only by its expense; and Whereas even in a democracy there are things it is well the people do not know about their government: Now, therefore, be it resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that the plastic cover be put back.”

Moynihan did not see the guidelines as an attempt to quash classical architecture—as some of its opponents argue—but as an attempt to bolster and expand the offerings of American civilization. As others have eloquently articulated, Moynihan believed that a nation incapable of advancing in architecture was a nation in decline. Put another way, the only reason to continually reuse the same model for buildings without any alterations is if we are incapable of producing anything new. This does not mean that traditional architecture is bad or should never be used. But it does mean that America should be making its own contributions to architectural history and building upon the past rather than just repeating it. As an example of the wonders America has already produced, Moynihan would point to such achievements as prairie style architecture and the invention of skyscrapers.

There is a great deal of truth to Moynihan’s sentiments. Architectural puritans who prefer a strict adherence to pre-modern buildings neglect the beauty of many more contemporary structures. They also display a frightening inability to appreciate America’s many unique contributions to the world of art. The Empire State Building, Falling Water, and the US Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel—these are our Westminster Abbey, Versailles, and St. Peter’s Basilica. They enliven the world of art and give America a place of its own in the pantheon of great civilizations.

Yet the critics of the guiding principles of federal architecture are not entirely wrong. Though modern architecture is not inherently bad, it is also not inherently good. Nor should we build all new government buildings in a modernist style just to promote contemporary design. Instead, we should set out clear standards for what makes a building truly beautiful. For some, buildings being new and breaking with the past is the whole point of a building. These designers artfully construct great concrete slabs that do not look so much like architecture as some sort of post-apocalyptic bunker. Such structures break every pattern and taste and are no more worthy of artistic glory than a toilet placed on a pedestal in an art gallery.

However, this does not mean that advocates of classical architecture offer a robust aesthetic alternative to modernism for the sake of modernism. For many devotees of classical architecture, the key to a good building is simple—it is traditional. Slap some ionic columns on a noble Roman edifice or some stained glass on a great stone cathedral, and you have a beautiful building. Like most simplistic formulas, this is simply wrong. To see and understand the true heart of good architecture, traditionalists would do well to turn to the ideas of the greatest American architect of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Born in 1867 and living through most of the following century, Wright is responsible for many of America’s greatest modern architectural marvels. In addition to his practical output, Wright was a serious writer and thinker. His writings reflect an appreciation not just for the practice of architecture but its theory—chiefly, what is the purpose of a building? Wright provided a two-part answer to this question. First, a building must be useful. At first blush, this may sound a touch utilitarian, but there is a simple truth to it: a house is meant to be lived in, an office is made for working, and an art gallery is designed to look at art. These structures must be constructed in such a way as to make possible and even enjoyable the activities they contain.

The second key purpose of a building is to be beautiful. This is a harder criterion to understand since the exact meaning of the word beauty is hotly contested. Wright uses this deep philosophical question to advocate for what he calls organic architecture. For Wright, the chief component of human-produced beauty is that it reflects nature. In other words, no human is capable of creating something beautiful that purposefully diverges from the world around it. Just as importantly, a building should not only complement the environment in which it is built, but the various components of the building must flow seamlessly into one another. Though perhaps unintentionally, Wright provides the firm foundation necessary to condemn modern buildings that seek purposefully to contrast with their surroundings or to be in some way unsettling.

The idea of organic architecture led Wright to invent the Prairie School of architecture. A style characterized by open floor plans, large glass windows overlooking natural landscapes, and the use of organic materials in construction. Though these concepts have impacted all of modern American architecture in tremendous ways—almost no newly constructed home has a closed floor plan—the guiding principles of prairie architecture can easily be applied as a standard for all good architecture, not just more modern work.

To prove this point, let’s take the example of one of America’s great traditional architects, Thomas Jefferson. Though better known as a politician and thinker, Jefferson-designed buildings are scattered across the rolling hills of Central Virginia. The most famous examples of his work are his private residence, Monticello, the University of Virginia, and the state capital of Virginia. All of Jefferson’s designs meet Wright’s criteria for good architecture, even if they are stylistically quite different from the Prairie School. Jefferson built his noble edifices with a clear purpose in mind that altered every aspect of their construction. For Jefferson, a university must have certain features conducive to learning, just as a home must have stylistic additions that provide comfort. In addition, Jefferson worked hard to blend his preference for Palladian architecture with the local material of brick. This helped ensure that his buildings blended seamlessly into the surrounding community. Likewise, Jefferson sought always to make sure that his buildings took into account the natural environment around them, adding to a landscape rather than disrupting it.

Though Frank Lloyd Wright and Thomas Jefferson designed entirely different sorts of buildings, they both met the principles of organic architecture. Thus, their buildings are both beautiful and worthy of adulation and repetition in American public architecture. However, the advocates of classical architecture are not wrong to notice that something has gone wrong with American public architecture. Many of our buildings are ugly, and the government seems to be building such structures with increasing frequency.

The mistake of the classical architecture movement is to think that many of our public buildings are ugly simply because they are modern. This is not the case. They are ugly because they are inorganic, because they purposefully clash with their immediate surroundings, and consist of elements almost designed to disrupt the flow of a room. Quite often, this ugliness is intentional, as with many contemporary forms of art, some architects have lost sight of the truth that a building is supposed to be beautiful. Instead, they argue that art should “disrupt” and “unsettle” the comfortable bourgeois lives of those who view it.

More often though, contemporary public buildings are not intentionally ugly. They are ugly because they are the product of a fast, lazy society that prioritizes speed and utility over beauty. Blockish heaps of glass and concrete are not often the products of prominent modern architects like Frank Gehry and I. M. Pei—they are produced by public officials’ desire to prioritize every aspect of a building over its aesthetics. Thus, much of the problem with modern architecture today stems from the malaise that has gripped the whole culture of the West. The proper response is not to paper over our problem, to force the construction of nice buildings using misguided approaches to architecture.

Instead, we must give a new generation the inspiration to construct beautiful buildings in whatever style moves their heart. The architectural theories of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Frank Lloyd Wright give us some idea of how such a revival can be brought about. Though innovation for the sake of innovation must always be discouraged, there is nothing wrong—and perhaps something very noble—about striving to forge a civilization that builds upon the artistic glories of the past. But, as Wright shows, such advancement must always be organic. New styles and modern buildings must strive to blend with the world around them rather than disrupt creation. Above all, we must revive a sense of the great and the magnificent. In the end, it is this alone that can save us from the mundane visual world we now inhabit.

The recent rupture between Donald Trump and Elon Musk occasioned dark chuckling in many corners. Nearly everyone saw this coming. Both men are used to running the show. Neither plays well with others. But the Trump-Musk fracture was more overdetermined than most realize. The personality conflicts mask deeper ideological tensions with implications beyond two oversized egos.

The right now hosts a strange blend of populism, Catholic postliberalism, and techno-optimism. These elements don’t mix well, as recent tensions in the conservative movement show us. No one embodies this unstable synthesis better than our vice president, one of the most philosophically sophisticated figures to hold the office. Vance’s intellectual journey began long before his political career, and each influence entered his thinking at different times. But the same tensions visible in his thought can be seen in the political right more broadly. The instability of those alliances could have significant implications for the right, and the country.

Rome, Silicon Valley, and Populism

Many years before Elon Musk and Donald Trump united in their brief alliance, the right found a techno-optimist spokesman in Peter Thiel. Thiel publicly criticized political correctness in the ’90s and platformed Ann Coulter in 2010. In 2011, Thiel gave a speech at the Yale Political Union on how “Higher Education is a Bubble,” arguing that chasing prestige would not lead to fulfillment. Talented people should throw themselves into valuable projects that improve the world. In attendance was a young J. D. Vance, who would become a protégé of Thiel’s.

Thiel believes that the forces of creative destruction, if appropriately organized, are on balance a good thing for humanity, and that one can generally count on technological advances to be good for humanity. Disruption creates more than it destroys, progress requires radical acceleration, and talent must flow freely across borders. Stagnation is death. Only technology can solve humanity’s greatest problems.

This brand of techno-populism found a more significant foothold on the right after Thiel supported Donald Trump in 2016 and eventually attracted more support from Musk and others. It tends to be harshly critical of the woke left and favorable to a libertarian approach to technology.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the political right, one finds a very different set of thinkers: Catholic postliberals. They represent a strain of thought that is both new and quite old. The Catholic Church has usually had an antagonistic relationship with liberalism, yet most American Catholics have come to believe that their faith can flourish within a liberal democratic order. But with the legalization of same-sex marriage and the rapid progress of LGBT rights, that belief came under pressure. Catholics had come out of the shadows and had fought to be treated as equals in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and before. Then their views on LGBT issues, however, once more made them beyond the pale of American politics.

Catholic intellectuals have always influenced the American Right, going back to Bill Buckley. These Catholics generally sought reconciliation with the American constitutional order. But a newer generation of Catholic intellectuals has argued that there is something fundamentally wrong with the American liberal order and that it has to be replaced. That viewpoint now has a high-profile spokesman in Vance. Following his conversion to Catholicism in 2019, Vance befriended some of those intellectuals, despite being less skeptical of the American project than they were. These figures today include Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, among others.

Often referred to as Catholic postliberals, they oppose state neutrality in moral and religious matters, favor the common good over a stress on individual rights, and emphasize the primacy of the spiritual in political life. We should not leave the spiritual to private affairs, as it is an inherently public concern.

These two groups seem like unlikely allies, given that one is deeply traditionalist, while the other looks optimistically towards a bright (but radically transformed) future. But they have been brought together to a great extent by populist and nationalist sentiments of the Trumpian right. The convergence can be seen in a particularly interesting way in Vance’s 2020 essay, “How I Joined the Resistance,” in The Lamp, where he declared that he had come to understand the Trump phenomenon. He was very critical of Trump early on, describing him as an opioid, someone who cures the pain of the working class but doesn’t solve it. By the time he penned the essay, Vance had completely changed his tune. He began to give talks such as “The Professors of the Enemy,” which are very anti-elite.

The techno-optimists are elitist; Catholic postliberals are elitist; populists are not elitist. But all three are now recognizable influences on the right, to the point where Vance seems eager to reconcile them in a single view.

Central to populism is the idea that the majority of the population is fundamentally good and their interests conflict with those of a corrupt elite. Populists have stressed nationalism, trade protection, immigration restrictions, and a focus on the struggles of the American working class, particularly in the Rust Belt regions.

Economic Tensions

A populist concern for American workers does not mesh easily with the techno-optimist embrace of disruptive technologies, particularly artificial intelligence.

Vance, for instance, endorses populism and nationalism, which led him to support high domestic wages for American workers. This remains a consistent theme throughout his political awakening, even as his views change on Donald Trump. He argues that we must create high domestic wages for families to maintain stable families and communities. The deindustrialization of the Rust Belt has created many social maladies.

The same man, however, was able to give a speech to the EU, attacking them for AI regulation. One would think a MAGA adherent would have worries: this is going to disrupt the whole economy, change everything, automate jobs, and take away employment.

Vance recognized the contradiction when people challenged him and tweeted that he must write up his resolution. He then gave a speech at the American Dynamism Summit, where he attempted to square the circle. He argued that there are ways to organize public policy without regulating AI so that it works to the advantage of American workers. How do we get AI to maintain high domestic wages? It must amplify the productivity of the people using it rather than substituting for them.

Vance also proposes incentivizing tech companies to hire American workers through deregulation and tax breaks. “If you’re trying to employ workers,” he contends, “we’re going to deregulate you, we’re going to cut your taxes. And if you start going overseas, we’re not going to do that.” He favors immigration restrictions so that wages will be bid up instead of letting everyone compete for the same jobs.

This view appeals to many people on the right today. The alliance validates them. Finally, the “smart people” aren’t all on the left. Tech titans join their cause. The right can win via creation and innovation rather than the accumulation of political power. American greatness comes through technological dominance. For those tired of being cast as backward traditionalists, Silicon Valley gives them cultural credibility.

But the tension is plain: techno-optimists embrace creative destruction while populists fear it. The tech right preaches “move fast and break things,” but populists say we must protect what we have. Several concerns emerge. It’s not automatic that more productive firms will pass those gains in productivity to their workers. One factor that passes on those gains arises from competition between firms for labor. However, Nationalist policies might reduce competition for labor by reducing the number of employers. With less competition among employers, wages could lag. This isn’t some trivial possibility given the many foreign multinational companies that come here and compete for American workers.

Moreover, most economists believe that restricting trade and immigration will lower productivity generally. The market dynamics are complicated, and no one knows how they will unfold, but if Vance is correct, it would be a happy coincidence. Concerning AI, the uncertainty increases dramatically. After all, no one knows what this technology can do, how good it will get, or how fast it will improve. It may automate knowledge work, hurting the upper class more than the American poor. But that could easily not occur.

Anthropological Tensions

A second and perhaps more fundamental tension exists at the level of philosophical anthropology—the understanding of human nature itself. Philosophical anthropology is the theory of the human person and the person’s function, the person’s ultimate end.

The philosophical anthropology of Catholicism holds that we are spirit-matter: embodied souls whose aim is to be united with God and other human beings in love forever. We’re incomplete without the spiritual dimension. The assumption is that there is a fixed human nature that tends to manifest itself over time.

People working within the tech sector tend to have wildly different views of humanity, and their techno-optimism is driven by that different philosophical anthropology. A Silicon Valley post-humanist views the person as a digital program. They dream about gaining the ability to upload from one’s body into the cloud.

For any Catholic, the human person is a compound of soul and body, forming a single entity that Aristotle called a hylomorphic unity of soul and body. God created and ordered your spiritual nature, and your biological nature is part of your nature, fixed and immutable. Together, they combine to make a human person.

It would seem obvious that the tech elite hold views of human nature that fundamentally conflict with Catholic teaching. Given these fundamental differences, one would expect postliberals to be wary of unregulated AI. But now, in light of this new landscape, postliberals have grown relatively quiet about the dangers of techno-populism, occasionally even exploring techno-optimist stances themselves.

Deneen, for instance, recently wrote a Substack post where he tried to explore the potential compatibility of MAGA and DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), indicating that in some cases, postliberalism countenances spending cuts, and not in other cases. The broader commitments of postliberals give them every reason to criticize the tech right that pushes these ideas and supports strong regulation of AI. However, this hasn’t happened to anything like the extent one would expect.

Today, a contingent of the right embraces techno-optimism and opposes AI regulation, one of the most significant policy positions in the history of the human race. Yet many of the same people claim to favor the working class and to support policy and political institutions that focus on creating virtuous people and preserving social cohesion. For Vance specifically, it seems like the techno-optimist is in the driver’s seat, while the postliberal has receded. But as recent events have shown, things can change quickly. These new alliances are unstable, incorporating many deeply conflicting influences. Unsurprisingly, we would see some ruptures when the influences genuinely conflict. It is hard to adopt both postliberalism and techno-optimism simultaneously, especially in a populist moment.

The current conflicts are only the beginning. As AI advances, along with social change, the tensions between these camps will only expand. What will the right do? Will it embrace creative destruction, protectionism, or postliberal “First Things”? The right cannot have it all. The synthesis will not hold.