Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

It has been 10 years since AMC’s Mad Men ended. As the show finished its retelling of the upheavals of the 1960s, the real America was entering a decade of similar convulsions over race, sex, demography, and economics. Now, after our own age of rage, we can better appreciate the traditional view of society that lay beneath Mad Men’s whiskey- and cigarette-infused glamour. The fictional experiences of the men and women of ad agency Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price, not only serve judgment on the excesses of the ‘60s, but also help explain a likely conservative turn in American social and political trends in the decade ahead. A story about the Age of Aquarius may explain the beginning of the end of the Great Awokening.

Mad Men began its story at the end of what many once idealized as the post-World War II Golden Age, with its cultural and social certainty, long-defined genders and gender roles, and a feeling of common national purpose. Those verities were to be flayed, strip by strip, throughout the series’ seven seasons, as it tackled conformity, sexism, and race relations. Mad Men ended its tale in the early 1970s, at the beginning of post-modern America, a country socially freer and more equal, yet also more lost and lacking in identity, community, and confidence. The show exposed traditional values as hypocritical, outdated, and even immoral—until they ultimately were vindicated by the series’ conclusion.

Like most of current American popular culture, Mad Men largely ignored organized religion, and a subplot that could have explored the decline of faith was dropped early in the second season. Also uneven were the show’s attempts to deal directly with prejudice, whether antisemitism or race relations and the civil rights movement, its transient Jewish and Black characters seemingly pushed to the center of the stage for a few moments.

Mad Men’s focus was the WASP world entering its death throes in the 1960s. From that perspective, it is the cinematic counterpart to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, his classic study of the changes in White America from 1960 to 2010. The show delivered its ostensible message about the hypocrisy of middle-class White American life in the very first episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Urbane, handsome New York advertising executive Don Draper spends his evening drinking with his youthful subordinates and having intimate relations with a young woman. He then quietly enters a suburban home late at night and sits in his sleeping children’s dark bedroom while his wife, her face encased in shadows, stands silently in the lighted doorway, the two of them isolated physically and emotionally from each other.

Mad Men may have been at its most poignant in these early seasons, in its elegiac depiction of late-1950s/early-1960s suburbia. While the series meant to peel away the veneer of false utopia attached post facto to American suburban life—White, privileged, family-centered—at the same time it fed back into every sense of loss, whether actual or imagined, by those who currently live in the real world birthed during the era Mad Men fictionally portrayed.

For that reason, the saddest character in the series was not the hopelessly lost Don Draper, but his picture-perfect first wife, Betty, whose tragic arc in many ways seems truest to the show’s sub rosa message about the world that has passed. Long after their split and the collapse of their supposedly perfect life, the specter of what Don lost when Betty divorced him for his serial infidelities haunts him (and us) throughout the rest of the series.

A child of privilege and a former model, Betty appears to have won life’s lottery. She entertains perfectly and is the envy of her circle of suburban friends and her husband’s co-workers. She lives the life of mid-century leisure that we are to assume most women aspired to, but only a small fraction attained. Yet we come to see that she is emotionally stunted, betrayed by her husband, callous towards her children, and in almost every way unsatisfied. Even her own remarriage, to a man more successful and prominent than Don, seems less a vindication of her worth than a desperate attempt to recapture what she lost when she defended her honor by finally kicking Don out of the house.

If the Drapers’ hometown of Ossining, New York, is cynically portrayed as a suburban Eden hiding serpents and trees of forbidden knowledge, then Don and Betty’s split throws them both out of the Garden. Unlike their Biblical forebears, however, they are condemned to wander separately, alone even when they have found new mates. Don’s pathetic wistfulness, when he visits his children in Betty’s new home late in the series, is a visceral reminder that he chose a path that destroyed the happiness they all could have had. During these scenes, one cannot avoid remembering Don’s piercing speech from the first season, during his ad pitch to Kodak executives for their new Carousel slide projector. As joyous scenes from his own family’s past flash on the projector screen, Don both sells to his clients and relives for himself a hopeful and innocent life that is fast disintegrating in his turbulent present, yearning for a return to “a place where we know we are loved.” 

It is that remembrance which makes Don and Betty’s last phone call to each other, near the very end of the series, so heartrending. Few television shows have so starkly portrayed the pain of divorce and its effects on all involved. Unable to get over their disagreements even so many years later, Don and Betty nonetheless seem haunted by the harsh finality that what they had will never be recovered. Both suffer the almost unbearable pain of confronting their past’s aborted future as an alternate reality they let slip out of their hands. In that brief phone conversation, the ghosts of what that life could have been swirl about them both, etched vividly in a piece of acting by both leads that cannot be overpraised.

By then, Betty has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, a mordant twist by the show’s writers, who showered us with innumerable smoking scenes throughout the series. Indeed, Betty was rarely seen without a cigarette, her ethereal looks and perfectly coiffed hair often wreathed in smoke. Cancer is the cruelest blow for Betty, a horrid, slow wasting of the beauty that defined her. And her demise is the more brutal, for she has just begun, after so many years wandering in her own personal purgatory, to climb up from the depths of the meaninglessness of her life by enrolling in college. She is fated not to finish the degree that will give her a sense of her own individuality, but she has seen across the river to a land where she knows that life has promise and meaning and is thus in her own way saved.

Betty lives her final days on her own terms. We last see her sitting in her usual poised style at her kitchen table, serenely smoking the cigarettes that have already killed her, while her once-estranged daughter Sally takes up the household chores at the sink. Even the farewell letter she pens to her daughter, giving precise instructions for how her body is to be prepared for her funeral, is at once unbearably heartbreaking and an affirmation of her spirit.

Compared to Betty’s journey, Don’s odyssey is far more ambiguous. The moral questions at the center of Mad Men become clear through the character of Don Draper. As a Madison Avenue man, Draper is possessed of uncommon excellence, a full development of the social “virtue” that brings success in the cutthroat professional world he inhabits. Yet as a private man, Don lacks all real virtue, his life being bereft of any excellence as a husband, father, or friend. An aristocrat at the advertising storyboards, he is spiritually and emotionally a beggar amidst the plenty of post-war upper-middle-class life. He is one of T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men, stuffed men,” between whose idea and reality falls the shadow.

Don’s alienation from those around him grows throughout the series, leading to two failed marriages. We learn early on why Don is so isolated, for he is, above all, alienated from himself. He is a man living a lie at the very core of his being, having taken the name and identity of a fellow soldier who was killed during the Korean War due to Don’s own battlefield carelessness. Yet the adoption of a false identity was the only way for an orphaned child of a drunk and a prostitute to escape the claws of the Depression-era life that held him until he shipped out for Korea. The lie at the center of his life unravels his first family and prevents him from developing true bonds with his children, Sally and Bobby.

The only one who truly understands and loves Don is, ironically, the widow of the man whose identity he stole, Anna Draper. Don has set her up in a home in the idyllic southern California of the early 1960s, and it is only when he visits her, in their platonic love, that he goes by his real name and can be his true self, Dick Whitman. And when Anna dies, Don is left truly alone in the world.

In less-skilled hands, Don’s story would be simple melodrama, but both series creator Matthew Weiner and actor John Hamm breathe despairing life into Don. By bringing together two such lost souls in Don and Betty, Mad Men delivers an unsparing portrait of our modern existential crisis.

As the story arc comes to its close, Weiner and the writers reveal, perhaps unwittingly, the conservative ethos underlying the series. Don’s second marriage, to the winsome, honest, and ambitious Megan, collapses through his jealousy and (again) infidelity. He then believes he has fallen in love with Diane, a waitress who has run away from her family and now him. In chasing after her, Don finds her former husband, living with a new family in a nondescript, middle-class suburb in the Midwest. Diane’s former husband is portrayed as a prickly, repressed, provincial man, all due to his openly expressed and deeply-held religious beliefs. Yet he immediately discerns Don’s lame ruse to find Diane and drives him from the house. Don flees, discovering that this anonymous, unremarkable, unaccomplished Midwesterner is far more real and stable than he, the entirely false Manhattanite. Whereas Don’s interior is nothing but a jumble of untamed lusts, corruption, and lies, this God-fearing man possesses not only a solid core but the insight into human nature that Don so tragically lacks.

That lesson is reinforced in the series finale, when Pete Campbell, Don’s younger colleague, makes a traditional, life-affirming decision. Pete was introduced in the series’ first episode as a wealthy, callow youth willing to do anything to climb the corporate ladder. He follows Don’s path into infidelity and a broken marriage, even moving to California to live a carefree life. Yet Pete matures over time in a way that Don seems desperate to do but cannot. Pete ultimately reconciles with his estranged wife and flees from Manhattan, where his family has lived for generations, to Kansas City, bringing wife and daughter in tow. Pete has learned that he is incomplete without his wife and that both California and New York City are irredeemable, filled with temptation and immorality. When Pete and his family board their private jet (he is the jet company’s new president) for their new life in the Midwest, what could have come across as a brief, hackneyed scene instead exudes optimism that Pete will honor his second chance.

In very different ways, Betty Draper and Pete Campbell have matured and found fulfilment, one through tragedy, the other through rediscovering the permanent things. Other characters, too, grow during the series, like Joan, the sexpot secretary-turned-businesswoman, and Peggy, who starts out as a mousy secretary and finally breaks the advertising world’s glass ceiling.

Don, however, remains a lost soul. It is perhaps no surprise that he finds himself, at the very end of his journey through Mad Men, at the famed Esalen Institute, in California’s Big Sur. Esalen represents the culmination of America’s journey through the 1960s. From the man in the gray flannel suit, Don has become an avatar of the new consciousness, seemingly making his traumatic emotional breakthrough.

The enigmatic final scene of Don, the very last in the whole series, was as controversial as the first. As he sits above the sun-washed cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, blissfully listening with closed eyes to the chime of the morning meditation bell, Don’s face breaks into a wide, satisfied grin. Has he at last found inner peace and the stability that has so long eluded him? Or, has Draper figured out a way to salvage the wreckage of his career and return to the top of the advertising mountain? The immediate transition from the grinning Don to the iconic 1973 Coca-Cola commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” all but demands the latter interpretation. Yet I had become so invested in, if repelled by his character, that I wanted to believe that Don, too, had found happiness, and that the Coke ad was a brilliant means of playing on the viewing audience’s nostalgia for a seemingly less cynical time when such corny, new age optimism still was fresh. Regardless of whether he has repaired his emotional wounds or simply ensured corporate immortality, the fact remains that we leave Don Draper as we found him at the beginning of the 1960s—alone.

A decade after that last scene, after a similar period of social and political upheaval, an audience in 2025 is likely more attuned than Mad Men’s original viewers to the knowledge that even if Don believes he has found a new, truly worthwhile path, Esalen and all the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s were illusory Edens, and that those who succumbed to their embrace would move on, always dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Unlike the renewed family man Pete or the dying but certain Betty, Don seems fated to continue his wanderings, unable to grasp the simple yet profound truths that give meaning to life and which demand both discipline and sacrifice to something greater than oneself. 

One may have hope that Americans have learned this hard lesson. False utopias, radicalized mob violence, and the denial of nature and reality all have darkened our national horizon in recent years. A turning away, back to something more grounded and tested, seems to have started. The morality of Mad Men illuminates this laudable trend and may even help strengthen its fragile roots.

Few debates matter more to the West’s future than the widening divide between left and right over the simple act of having children. Inside an April pronatalism conference in Austin, the roster stretched from the more traditionalist Catherine Pakaluk to libertarian Bryan Caplan. Outside, left-wing protesters branded the gathering “neo-Nazi.” The answer to the question of whether children are worth having will shape everything from fiscal policy to cultural identity. The roots of the quarrel are worth tracing.

That even childbirth now falls under the old slogan “the personal is the political” may shock. Yet it follows naturally from each camp’s bundle of larger ideological commitments. For conservatives, increasing fertility in the West is part of the defense of its civilization. Europeans and other groups that were at its heart are no longer reproducing themselves. Across the OECD, the total-fertility rate has slid to 1.5 children per woman; in Italy and Spain, it hovers near 1.2, and even in the United States, the latest CDC release puts the rate at just 1.63—far below the 2.1 replacement benchmark. For many conservatives, every newborn is a vote that the West remains worth inheriting.

The religious right also has theological reasons for favoring procreation. The Abrahamic religions share the injunction to be fruitful and multiply. All greatly value motherhood. The most iconic image in Western art—the Madonna with Jesus—is an encomium to the pairing of woman and child. Bearing children affirms the belief that God made a good world. We may fall short of that promise, but the act itself testifies to the cardinal virtue of hope.

Natalism also gains support from the right’s rawer political calculations. The crisis of fertility among its native populations contributes to the graying of population and the reduction of its workforce. Yet all Western democracies have pay-as-you-go social security systems dependent on a high ratio of workers to retirees. These brute facts create a fiscal dilemma. Across Europe, leaders duck pension reform but recognize that raising already high taxes would strangle growth. In the United States, leaders likewise dodge entitlement reform and propose hiking taxes only for the top 2 percent. Soaking the rich will not put much of a dent in our record peacetime debt. The obvious solution is to increase the worker-to-retiree ratio by making the population younger. Conservatives would rather accomplish that through increasing birth rates rather than massive increases in immigration. The latter is thought to threaten the distinctive national cultures they value and destabilize politics.

The left does not share these positive reasons for supporting fertility. It does not think Western civilization is one that necessarily should be continued, and is generally indifferent to religion. But the left has other reasons of its own to resist natalism.

One is feminism. Many feminists have persistently argued that social structures keep women from being equal to men in achievement—in the arts, in the sciences, and in business. One of the greatest impediments is the family structure where women undertake more unpaid labor than men, particularly in raising children. Increasing child-care subsidies and supporting early education might look like a fix. Yet nations that lavish money on day care still see women falling behind men in pay and prestige. Once they have children, most women still want to spend more time nurturing than men. Thus, the only way to prevent women from becoming parental specialists is not to become parents.

Another reason that some on the left are not enthusiastic about bringing children into the world is the environment. More people create more pollution and burden the Earth’s biosphere. In some more radical views, new generations are likely to be despoilers of the natural wonders of the earth that need preservation.

If low fertility is causing a fiscal and economic crisis, in the West, the left’s solution is to fling open the borders to more migration. The left believes that foreigners have as much right to enjoy the higher living standards in the West as those who already live there. Indeed, among some more radical voices, they may often have a greater moral claim, because their poverty is caused by the West’s colonialism. The left welcomes the multicultural transformation of the West that great inflows will bring. “Diversity is our strength” is its mantra.

To be fair, the left is no monolith; plenty of progressives still toast big families. Yet, as with transgender orthodoxy and erasure of national borders, it is the activist vanguard that writes the party script. Their chill toward procreation flows from faculty lounges to platform planks, then filters down to voters who sense disdain. Elite ideas tug Democrats leftward long before the rank-and-file notices

It might be argued that what is really depressing fertility is not ideology but economics. Housing costs, student-debt burdens, and delayed marriage no doubt matter. But citizens of the West, including the young, are far wealthier and live far more comfortably than in past eras, where fertility rates were much higher. Medical assistance, like IVF, increases the effective reproductive span of women. But Sweden and Hungary show that baby bonuses and family leave pad wallets, not bassinets. Values and culture, not subsidies, rock the cradle.

The contest over childbearing carves a deep rift in today’s political landscape. The left-radical position is likely to damage their party’s political standing. The impulse to have children is deeply ingrained; indeed, from an evolutionary perspective, children are the goal of human life. It is true that contraception has cut the close link between sex and reproduction, but human nature prompts the desire for children in ways other than through sexual desire. Children are cute, and there are few other ways most of us can leave an enduring mark on the world. Thus, this latest left position is going against the human grain.

Moreover, the ideological reasons for skepticism about bringing children into the world may be seen by many as the reductio ad absurdum of left positions. If feminism means that women must avoid having children from being beguiled into an unequal relation with men, feminism then demands that women give up a great source of human fulfillment to be true feminists. If environmentalism opposes the propagation of humanity, such environmentalism seems to prefer the rest of the natural world to the one animal that can see it whole. Treating immigration as a stand-in for native births slips into oikophobia—those who, in Gilbert & Sullivan’s jab, “praise, with enthusiastic tone … every country but their own.”

History, however, shows that creeds hostile to the cradle soon confront their own demographic sunset. The Shakers—an eighteenth and nineteenth millenarian sect who enjoined celibacy on their adherents—are unsurprisingly no longer around. While children do not directly inherit their parents’ political beliefs, there is a correlation in the ideology between parent and child. A growing distaste for having children on the left will, other things equal, push the nation toward the right.

In terms of contemporary politics, the stance against children is sure to continue to push the so-called “normies” (this generation’s echo of the “silent majority” of the 1960s) away from the left. The “normies” now shaping American elections are the large, loosely organized bloc of middle-of-the-road voters—disproportionately non-college, suburban or ex-urban, and culturally conventional—who recoil from both progressive identity politics and hard-right theatrics. Their irritation with the left concerning issues such as transgender athletics or “defund the police” policies stems from a mix of practical worries (fairness in sport and public safety), moral intuitions grounded in mainstream religious or communal norms, and a perception that progressive elites impose niche values without democratic consent. Outnumbering the zealots on both flanks, normies now choose who governs in close races.

Few positions will rile normies more than contempt for the desire to have children. Enthusiasm for having children has been a widespread and religious cultural norm for virtually all of human history. Skepticism of having children is the paradigm niche issue pressed by certain elites. A preference for immigrants over native children is an extreme version of open borders that normies also reject.

It is true that some of the pronatalism of the right may also be off-putting. Some celebrity advocates for more children hardly model the stable families most parents envision. Even the very name “natalism” can alienate ordinary people because it appears to create an odd term for something that comes naturally. Even so, the quirks of the famous and a pompous Latinate label will offend less than open hostility to child-baring.

Whatever one thinks of baby bonuses or child tax credits as policy matters, the fertility fight lays bare the deepest fault line in modern politics. The left, increasingly doubtful about the worth of the West, treats birth as a lifestyle choice to sometimes be discouraged. The right regards it as constitutive of human flourishing. The quarrel over the cradle is thus no social-policy sideshow. It is the distilled essence of two rival creeds. Tell me where an ideology stands on the need for babies, and I can tell you where it will stand on much else.

In 1927, the most successful attorney in Silesia published a book on conservatism that he knew would be immediately forgotten. Georg Quabbe informed his readers in the introduction that “conservative writings of some length” shared the fate of Johannes Brahms’s Wiegenlied. That lullaby was sung everywhere—except at cradles. Likewise, conservative books were read by some, “but not by conservatives or by those who might become conservatives.” He was right. Conservatives—specifically, members of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) at the time—did not read his book, and if they did, they did not understand it. Quabbe’s book, with its strange title Tar a Ri, is now as forgotten as its author. It is indeed a German peculiarity that books on conservatism, as Quabbe understood it, are rarely read—or even written.

This partly explains the current state of conservatism in Germany, which is marked not only by the intellectual poverty of public debate but also by the absence of a conservative party worthy of the name. American conservatives who believe that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has filled this void are mistaken, as they misjudge the party’s character by interpreting it merely as another variant of so-called right-wing populism. But the ideologues of that party look back to the antiliberal conservatism of the Weimar Republic, represented by the Völkisch movement, the so-called Conservative Revolution, and the national revolutionaries. They do not aim to reform liberalism as the foundation of German democracy; rather, they seek to abolish it entirely and dream of an illiberal democracy. The most prominent representatives of these tendencies are Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD parliamentary group in the Thuringian Landtag (state parliament), and Maximilian Krah, the party’s lead candidate for the 2024 European elections. When Krah told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in May 2024 that the SS was not a comprehensive criminal organization, Marine Le Pen felt compelled to distance herself from Krah and the AfD. Krah was elected to the Bundestag in 2025. In addition, AfD members have close ties to the Kremlin.

On the other hand, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), abandoned conservatism long ago. If the CDU ever had a conservative core, it was ordoliberalism—the German variant of liberal conservatism, or conservative liberalism—similar in many ways to American fusionism, though more open to government intervention. After World War II, its advocates included intellectual giants such as Wilhelm Röpke and the first federal economics minister Ludwig Erhard, the architects of the country’s miraculous economic recovery. Today, though, ordoliberalism in Germany is in poor shape, largely due to Angela Merkel’s tenure, during which the party’s liberal conservatives often felt politically exiled. But the most serious blow came only recently. In March 2025, Friedrich Merz, who has led the CDU since 2022, accepted nearly all of the Social Democrats’ demands in order to secure his election as federal chancellor. He agreed to an investment package worth 500 billion euros, to be implemented through a so-called special fund—that is, by circumventing the constitutional debt limit. Merz wanted to pass a much-needed 500 billion euro package for defense investments, but the SPD only wanted to accept it in combination with the infrastructure package. So the CDU leader agreed. One could say that he had no other choice. But to pass both packages, the CDU/CSU and SPD needed a two-thirds majority, which they no longer had in the newly elected Bundestag. They therefore rushed the package through the outgoing Bundestag, with support from the Greens, before the new parliament convened—in other words, with a majority that, in effect, no longer existed.

This was a procedure that, while legal under the Basic Law, clearly violated the spirit of parliamentary government. Merz may have marked the beginning of the end of a long narrative that could rightly be called “The Strange Death of Conservative Germany”—a story that began a few years after the founding of the Empire by Otto von Bismarck in 1871, when conservatism was overtaken by ethnic nationalism and antisemitism. It reached its climax in January 1933, when the DNVP helped bring Hitler to the chancellorship. For this reason, after 1945, it became difficult for conservatives to openly identify as such. Christian Democrats who considered themselves conservatives avoided invoking German traditions and instead looked to the British Conservative Party as their model.

Today, that is no longer enough. Given the challenge posed by the AfD, which presents itself as a nationalist party, moderate conservatives must reconnect with their own past. Conservatism in Germany needs a fresh start—one that looks back to the period before 1933. The radicalization of most conservatives during the Empire and the Weimar Republic does not mean that there was no liberal conservative tradition in the country. On the contrary, it was vibrant throughout the nineteenth century and remained the position of a strong minority even after 1871.

This moderate conservative tradition was primarily Prussian, and the image of Prussia as a purely militaristic state is a gross oversimplification. The historian Heinrich von Sybel—who understood Edmund Burke better than any other German scholar of the nineteenth century and described himself as a “conservative Whig”—wrote in 1866 that during the first 150 years of its existence, from 1701 to 1851, the Prussian state had been at war for only 25 years. In contrast, France, Russia, and Austria had each already reached that number by 1789, counting from 1714. He also noted that, in 1866, Prussia had far more elements of self-government—he deliberately used the English word—than most observers realized.

Sybel was a National Liberal who placed his hopes in the founding of a German nation-state under Prussian leadership—one that would be constitutional and liberal. But even Prussian conservatives did not wholly reject the principles of liberalism; it was largely a matter of degree. Moreover, the common portrayal of Prussian conservatism as the anti-intellectual ideology of the Junker aristocracy is overly simplistic. As publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler wrote in 1960, nineteenth-century German conservatism—from Friedrich Gentz to Friedrich Julius Stahl—was “a product of urban cosmopolitanism.”

Friedrich Julius Stahl, who had been a professor of legal philosophy, constitutional law, and canon law at the University of Berlin since 1840, became the most important conservative thinker in Germany after the failed revolution of 1848, and the only one to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for conservatism. He was elected to the Prussian Herrenhaus (House of Lords) in 1849 and was appointed by the king as a lifetime member in 1854. Stahl was an influential, though not a great, politician. As leader of the Conservative Party in the Herrenhaus, he defended the Prussian constitution, enacted by the king in 1850, while acting as a staunch opponent of liberalism and all forms of political change. In practice, he was more of a standpatter than a visionary conservative. His true significance lay in his role as a political thinker.

Stahl’s thought must be understood as a response to the ongoing conflict between reaction and revolution that had shaped the German states since 1830. He sought to develop a living conservatism that could transcend this antagonism through the establishment of a “real constitutional monarchy.” Born into a Jewish family in southern Germany in 1806, Stahl converted to Lutheranism in 1819. He offered a conservative conception of the Rechtsstaat (rule of law), defined by the tension between the “moral kingdom” of God and the secular world—a world in which the free individual must act autonomously. This secular world needs a framework, which Stahls calls the “state.” The state is the secular reflection of the “moral kingdom,” in which man must act independently but in accordance with the norms of the “moral kingdom,” i.e., with Christian values. For Stahl, history is shaped by human agency, but informed by divine law. By his action, man cannot progress towards the end of history, because this end would be the “moral kingdom,” which is God’s domain alone. Stahl believed that the Reformation’s great contribution was to affirm individual responsibility within history. For this reason, he opposed all forms of theocratic doctrine, including those found today in Catholic neo-integralism.

In practice, this doctrine led to a real constitutional monarchy as the embodiment of the Rechtsstaat: the monarch was the source and center of power, but he was also bound by the law like any other citizen and had to accept limitations on his authority by an elected parliament with budgetary control. This doctrine had greater practical impact than the ideas of most other conservative thinkers in Europe. Bismarck, perhaps unconsciously, followed Stahl’s model when drafting the constitution of the North German Confederation in 1867—a constitution that became the framework of the German Empire four years later.

Although Stahl’s doctrine cannot be directly applied to a liberal democracy, its central concept—the “moral kingdom,“ which grants freedom by anchoring it in a higher moral order—remains relevant for conservatives today. Stahl spoke of “freedom in obedience,“ but one could also call it “freedom in order,“ which requires the autonomous but responsible individual, without whom a constitutional government cannot work. Stahl’s “freedom in obedience” can be seen as the Prussian version of the “moral, manly, regulated liberty” praised by Burke. Above all, it is important to remember that Stahl was by no means an opponent of freedom or any kind of progress. In his view, the revolutionaries of his time were right to demand freedom’s advance, but they lacked a true understanding of what freedom meant. In this sense, Stahl’s political thought can still offer insight in an age marked by extreme liberalism.

Unfortunately, his teachings faded into obscurity during the German Empire. Two main factors contributed to this: first, the growing radicalization of conservatism, and second, Stahl’s Jewish origins. Though he had converted to Protestantism, the rapid rise of racial antisemitism during this period deeply affected German conservatism. That the greatest conservative thinker in Prussia had been born Jewish made him unacceptable to most conservatives of the time.

There were, of course, exceptions. Unlike the German Conservative Party, the smaller Free Conservative Party in Prussia—later known in the Empire as the Reichspartei—was never affected by antisemitism. Together with the National Liberal Party, it formed part of a liberal-conservative spectrum. It remained a minority current, but it did exist.

In 1912, the journalist Adolf Grabowsky joined the Free Conservative Party to promote his concept of Kulturkonservatismus (Cultural Conservatism) in the journal The New Germany. Like Stahl, Grabowsky was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, and he sought to convince German conservatives that antisemitism was their original sin. “Judaism—or more precisely: German Jewry,” he wrote, “is an intimate part of German culture.” He accused the antisemites of driving Jews into radicalism—into the arms of left-liberalism and social democracy—through their “insane agitation.”

Grabowsky’s greatest achievement, however, was to argue that the idea of progress should not be ceded to the political left—whether to the left-liberal Fortschrittler (progressives) or the Social Democrats: “Conservatism is not—this cannot be emphasized loudly enough—identical with regression, not identical with the negation of progress. On the contrary: conservatism, because it is an aristocratic worldview that clears the way for the fittest, is identical with progress and the ever-increasing elevation of life.”

After Germany’s defeat in World War I, this form of liberal conservatism found little space in the Weimar Republic—if anywhere, it survived in the national-liberal German People’s Party (DVP). The more explicitly conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), by contrast, became increasingly radical until it ultimately transformed into a fully-fledged Völkisch nationalist party. Intellectual conservatism during this period was largely the domain of the heterogeneous and radical currents associated with the Conservative Revolution. It is telling that one of its leading figures, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, declared in his infamous 1923 book The Third Reich that Stahl was not “the founder, but the destroyer of conservatism in Germany.” Moeller found “liberal traits” throughout Stahl’s thinking—and this was not meant as praise. He pointed, for example, to Stahl’s “predilection for English constitutionalism” and to “the notions of progress into which he involuntarily falls.”

There were few moderate conservatives at the time who recognized Stahl’s greatness. One of them was the Austrian Peter Drucker, who had studied law in Germany and was working for a newspaper in Frankfurt am Main during the final years of the Weimar Republic. The son of Jewish parents who had converted to Lutheranism, Drucker was already convinced by 1932 that he would not be able to remain in Germany if Hitler came to power. As he later recounted, in order to “make sure that I could not waver and stay,” he decided to write a book about Stahl—one that would make it impossible for him to have any association with National Socialism.

This pamphlet presented Stahl as the conservative thinker to read in order to overcome the crisis of the time. The mere fact that Stahl had been born Jewish made this argument provocative enough, but Drucker went further. He insisted that “the conservative theory of the state must affirm the state because and insofar as it represents an obligation,” but it must also “prevent the state from becoming the only obligation, from becoming the ‘total state.’” Every form of power, he argued, was “evil and demoralizing, destructive,” if it was “not bound to a divine, immutable order,” if it was not “bound to God’s plan for the world.”

After Hitler’s rise to power, Drucker emigrated—first to Britain and later to the United States, where he became an influential economist. His book on Stahl was among those burned publicly by the National Socialists on May 10, 1933.

Another thinker who took Stahl seriously was the aforementioned Georg Quabbe, arguably the only moderate intellectual conservative of the Weimar Republic. Born in 1887 to a tradesman’s family in Breslau, he studied law and became a successful attorney. Originally a member of the DNVP, he resigned from the party in 1930 in protest against its growing radicalization under Alfred Hugenberg. He then joined the People’s Conservative Association, a splinter group composed of relatively moderate—though not necessarily liberal—conservatives.

Following his first book, Tar a Ri, Quabbe published a second in early 1933 titled The Last Reich: Nature and Development of Utopia, which could be read as a veiled critique of National Socialism. Both works were later banned by the Nazis. When the Rotary Club of Breslau suggested in 1936 that its Jewish members resign, Quabbe, though Protestant, left in solidarity. During the war, he hid Jews in his home. After the war, in 1946, he became the first Attorney General of the State of Hesse and presided over the first legal proceedings against National Socialist criminals.

The title of Tar a Ri already hinted at his commitment to a liberal conservatism. Tar a Ri means “Come, O King” in Irish, and Quabbe claimed that this phrase was the origin of the word “Tory.” In fact, he presented himself as a great admirer of Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli (“the most ingenious conservative of all time”), and Sir Robert Peel (“one of the noblest representatives of our disposition”). He firmly rejected antisemitism, the Völkisch movement, and what he called “extreme conservatism.” He denied that conservatism was a strict ideology, instead defining it as a disposition always in tension with its opposite: the progressive disposition. Though he described himself as a “progressive conservative,” embraced parliamentary government, and accepted constitutional liberalism, he remained what Germans call a Vernunftrepublikaner—a republican by reason, rather than conviction.

His monarchism, however, was largely theoretical—more of an attitude than a political program. At the end of Tar a Ri, he concedes: “The call for the king is nothing more than a signal to gather a defeated army, and at the end of this book I find myself wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to shout ‘Come, O wise man,’ since kings are so easy to find and come so much faster.” Why was this “wise man”—a new Burke—needed? To resist the reality that “humanity as a whole has taken on the progressive sign today.” The “eternal pendulum law of world history,” Quabbe argues, requires a balance between the conservative and progressive tendencies of human nature.

Quabbe was a critical conservative friend of constitutional liberalism. He understood its flaws and its constant vulnerability to sliding into extreme progressivism. Thinkers like him, Grabowsky, and Stahl can serve as valuable guides in today’s Germany, where the twin dangers of “illiberal democracy” and “undemocratic liberalism” threaten the political balance as everywhere across the West. Tar a Ri, it seems, is a book for our time.

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

To understand the crisis in American higher education, it is necessary to hold two thoughts at once. American higher education remains the envy of the world, with seven of its universities in the top 10 of Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. Yet the behavior on many campuses has caused public confidence in higher education to plummet. With a recent drop of 21 percentage points, only 36 percent now express a lot of confidence, while 32 percent have little or no confidence. Among those dissatisfied with higher education, politicization stands as a major cause of their dismay. Significantly, though, the public does not seem happy about the attacks on higher education coming from the administration, with only 27 percent approving. Those mixed messages may be the fingerpost for finding a solution.

Harvard has been among the worst offenders, with cancellations, shout-downs, disruptive encampments, and egregious antisemitic conduct. It makes a poor example of an innocent victim of unjust governmental persecution, as shown below. But whose interests are served if the cancellation of a $60 million federal contract and nearly $3 billion in grants and revocation of tax-exempt status cripple one of our country’s great research hubs? While the government is rightly concerned about apparent civil rights violations, discrimination, and campus behavior that violates the law, the treatment Harvard is receiving from the Trump administration is neither measured nor reasonable nor, according to many legal scholars across the ideological spectrum, within statutory authority. Yet worse is the federal government’s apparent willingness to accept the damage being done to American scientific progress. The administration’s indiscriminate cuts have impeded research to combat tuberculosis, HIV, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.  

The administration needs to take stock of the perilous precedent of intrusion beyond statutory authority into higher education governance. The federal government’s shot over the bow, so to speak, can be a catalyst for an overdue course correction. But putting that cannonball through the hull, while at the same time exceeding legal authority, would be an incalculable act of harm to the nation.

Harvard, however, must be honest about its failings, ready to apply remedies, and be energetic in its implementation. It is fair to start with recent items from Harvard’s rap sheet. On December 5, 2024, then Harvard president Claudine Gay notoriously tried to hide behind the pretext of “context” when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules against bullying and harassment. Less well known, but highly illuminating, is her silence, not long after the October 7 terrorist massacre, as a mob on Harvard Yard surrounded a student wearing a kippah, blocking his path and shouting “shame.” It does not speak well for Harvard that one of the perpetrators, whom the Suffolk County Court punished for misdemeanor assault, received, one year later, a $65,000 stipend from the Harvard Law Review for work “in the public interest.” The other convicted student was selected as a class marshal by his graduating class at the Divinity School. Harvard’s secretive governing board, the Harvard Corporation, stuck by President Gay, even as evidence of her serial plagiarism mounted, until the scandal ultimately forced their hand. She returned to the faculty with compensation of approximately $900,000.

President Gay’s failures are only part of a tawdry history of professional and ethical failures at Harvard.

On June 29, 2023, the same day that the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard that race-based admissions violate the US Constitution and that Harvard was out of compliance with the law, Harvard declared, “We will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values”—that is, Harvard would find ways to use race as a factor in admissions. A previously optional prompt for application essays became mandatory: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?” Harvard appeared ready to use this question to find demographic information about applicants.

Harvard has had scant place for those who dissent from its progressive policies. Seventy-seven percent of the faculty now self-report as liberal or very liberal, and only 3 percent as conservative: The maintenance of its monoculture has been willful, and its treatment of those who violate it is brutal. In 2019, Harvard removed Professor of Law Ronald Sullivan and his wife from their positions as faculty deans of Winthrop House after it came to light that he served, as lawyers are wont to do, on the legal defense team of someone accused of a heinous crime—in his case, Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, who had enjoyed a distinguished teaching career, was shunned and ostracized when a student director of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) found her insistence that male and female are valid scientific terms “transphobic,” even though Dr. Hooven had unequivocally confirmed her support for transgender rights. The dean of arts and sciences at that time was Claudine Gay. Neither Dr. Gay nor anyone in Dr. Hooven’s department came to her aid, and no graduate student would work with her once she was labeled with the scarlet letter of transgressing DEI standards. Economist Roland Fryer’s meticulous research showed that blacks were not more likely than whites to be the victims of police shootings—although blacks were more likely than whites to be subject to unwarranted police stops. This was heresy for the woke. It was not long before Harvard took its revenge under the pretext of punishing Professor Fryer for jokes told by and to colleagues in his laboratory. The Office for Dispute Resolution had recommended “workplace sensitivity training” to resolve the contretemps. But with Dean Claudine Gay as a key participant in the final adjudication by a panel of tenured faculty, the recommendation of the Office for Dispute Resolution rose to a two-year suspension without pay and the permanent shuttering of his laboratory.

Then came October 7, 2023. The next day, while Israel reeled from the immensity of the Hamas assault, 34 Harvard student groups celebrated Hamas and blamed Israel for the terrorist attack it suffered. President Gay needed three days to condemn the atrocity and distance Harvard’s leadership position from the student groups. How serious was Harvard about restoring order after the campus was overtaken by encampments that interfered with classes and co-curricular activities? When students occupied a building on campus, the deans brought them burritos and Twizzlers. On May 10, acting on his threat to the students occupying Harvard Yard, interim president Alan Garber put 20 students on “involuntary leave” after they refused his attempt to negotiate an end to the encampment. Four days later, he reversed that decision when the protesters agreed to disperse.

Harvard’s report on antisemitism, released on April 29, is searing. For example, it reproduces a graphic used in four sections of a required Harvard Graduate School of Education course. The “Pyramid of White Supremacy” places the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League in the category of offenses just below hate crimes. There is significant evidence of anti-Israel dogma appearing in official Harvard classes. Harvard’s decision to release the antisemitism report simultaneously with its report on anti-Muslim bias sends a strong signal that Harvard is still incapable of addressing directly and purposefully the increasing campus antisemitism that then president Lawrence Summers identified and decried already in 2002.    

Harvard’s other self-inflicted wounds can only serve to offend the sensibilities of the public. Harvard’s “Red Book,” General Education in a Free Society, written in the spirit of the West’s emergence from World War I, called for learning “the general art of the free man and the citizen” and suggested a course called “Western Thought and Institutions.” Now what stands is a tepid requirement with a menu of some 20 courses, including “Ethics of Climate Change.” By 1975, even students majoring in history faced no requirement for a course on the history of our nation in the curriculum for the major.

Enumerating the sins of Harvard is not difficult, and Harvard will need to be more transparent and specific than it has been about the way it will measure the effectiveness of its reforms. Moving forward will not be easy, and if it is to happen, both Harvard and the Trump administration will need to adjust their positions and their rhetoric. There is every reason to do so.

Harvard can justifiably remind the nation of the breakthroughs, especially in health sciences, that its partnership with the federal government has yielded. In 2014, with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Harvard’s Douglas Melton generated functional human pancreatic insulin-producing cells from stem cells, putting us on the way to a type 1 diabetes cure. In 2024, Harvard’s Gary Ruvkun, funded by NIH, was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of microRNA (miRNA). The discovery underpins therapies for cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, strokes, alcoholism, and obesity. The list of federally funded grants to Harvard that help us live longer and better is very long.

A wholesale assault on university-level research signaled in the freezing of grants to Harvard will be catastrophic for the well-being of America. Harvard has begun layoffs. Speaking of freezing, biodata from 350,000 individuals, representing 45 years of research, are in jeopardy of loss without funding to maintain the massive freezers that store them. The samples have led to the discovery of the dangers of trans fats, the link between obesity and breast cancer, and that between cigarette smoking and coronary disease. Ongoing research into the early detection and treatment of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) under government contract with Harvard Medical School is under work stop.  

Other nations are hungry to gain a share of America’s global leadership in science and medicine. Americans have won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine than any other nation can boast. But according to a survey conducted by Nature, of the 1,600 scientists polled, 75 percent are considering leaving the country. The process of luring our scientists abroad has, in fact, started. France’s Centrale Supelac has allocated 3 million euros to finance research projects that were cut in the US. Aix-Marseille Université announced it is accepting applications for its Safe Place for Science program. It will support about 15 American scientists and appears to have received over 150 applications. The title of a May 2025 article in the Financial Times, “UK steps up efforts to woo scientists fleeing the US,” says it all.

Another potential victim in this contretemps is the law. The haste to punish Harvard, and other elite institutions, must end. Process matters. Title VI, which prohibits discrimination, has clear procedures for investigation and sanction (42 U.S.C. § 2000d). Revocation of Harvard’s tax-exempt status based on the factually very different 1983 Supreme Court case Bob Jones University v. United States is unlikely to survive legal challenge, but the specter of weaponizing the IRS should strike alarm across the political spectrum. A weaponized IRS will be an equal opportunity tool for future presidents to abuse, as if the matter of Lois Lerner was not sufficient warning. As Justice William Rehnquist noted in his dissent in Bob Jones University v. United States, the IRS must not arrogate to itself the making of policy that is the prerogative and responsibility of Congress. Muse on Cicero’s words, “It is impossible for a state without law to use its faculties. … We are slaves to the law, so that we can be free” (“Pro Cluentio,” 146).

What, then, is the way forward?

On April 11, 2025, the General Services Administration, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services sent a five-page letter to President Garber with the administration’s demands. Many of the demands are straightforward and reasonable, such as procedures to curtail disruption and deplatforming, a policy to control the wearing of masks, better student disciplinary codes, merit-based hiring and admissions, monitoring of donations from overseas, and ending DEI. Others, like the demand for changes in governance procedures, submission of admissions and hiring data to the federal government, and hiring a “critical mass” (unspecified) of new faculty to achieve intellectual diversity in each department, along with the admission of a “critical mass of students,” suggest a dangerous agenda of governmental control.

There is room for productive negotiation. There are even issues outside the April 11 letter that could meaningfully be addressed. Indirect cost rates that universities add to the cost of implementing a federal grant for their administrative expenses deserve scrutiny and transparency. (Harvard charges 69 percent on top of the project cost.)

For Harvard not to comply with the administration’s call for a policy curtailing the wearing of masks to conceal identity is senseless. All colleges and universities will benefit from a policy that forbids the wearing of facial coverings on campus, except for medical or religious reasons, and mask-wearers should always be ready to present ID to campus officers when asked. Such a policy has been implemented at three Virginia public universities (the University of Virginia, James Madison University, and Virginia Commonwealth University). Columbia University has signaled its intent to comply. Tighter policies to stop disruptions and student misbehavior are eminent common sense.

Moreover, a campus nearly devoid of faculty identifying as libertarian or conservative is prima facie evidence of ideological discrimination. Harvard will need more than verbal assurance of meritocratic hiring practices to convince anyone of its newly asserted ethic, though there are less intrusive ways to do this than the precipitous hiring demanded by the federal government.

Attempts to evade the Supreme Court ruling ending race-based admissions are unconscionable. At the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, the co-defendant in SFFA v. Harvard, the board of trustees resolved not only to ensure scrupulous observance of the decision but to extend race-blind practices to hiring and contracting. Nothing like that came from Harvard. Governing boards that, for good reason, do not want Leviathan’s intrusion into their campuses need to ensure fair admissions, fair hiring, and freedom from discrimination. This is their moment for strong, principled institutional governance. There are powerful figures within the Harvard community who understand this and are speaking out forcefully and eloquently.

But it must be said out loud: Limited government is a core value within the American concept of liberty, especially for classical liberals and conservatives. It is reasonable and wholesome in a free society for private institutions to challenge governmental fiat and intrusion into their operations. It behooves the Trump administration to respect such boundaries.

Holding two thoughts at once and recognizing complexity in crafting policy has not been a virtue demonstrated by either the Trump administration or by elite universities. It is time for that to change. 

Political theory that becomes unmoored from political reality creates a dangerous disconnect—one that undermines the fundamental purpose of governance itself: human flourishing. This core truth has repeatedly emerged throughout American constitutional history. The Articles of Confederation, while theoretically sound in their protection of state sovereignty and checks against centralized power, ultimately failed in practice, proving inadequate for addressing the commercial, security, and unity challenges of the early republic. Similarly, the original constitutional provision for state legislatures to elect senators—a system designed to protect federalism and ensure deliberative selection—eventually collapsed under the weight of practical concerns about corruption, deadlock, and democratic representation.

Rogers’s defense of the unitary executive theory would benefit from greater consideration of its practical fit with the underlying purpose of our constitutional order. While intellectually rigorous and grounded in constitutional text and history, it risks becoming another case of constitutional theory that floats above the turbulent waters of actual governance. The daily evidence of administrative turbulence, limited accountability, and expansive uses of executive power contradicts the neat theoretical constructs that unitary executive proponents advance. Rogers himself seems to acknowledge this disconnect by explicitly limiting his analysis to descriptive rather than normative claims.

However, this separation between constitutional description and normative evaluation creates a fundamental problem. Any enduring analysis of the unitary executive must engage with how this structure functions amid contemporary political dynamics—the intense polarization, the weakening of institutional norms, the collapse of congressional oversight capacity, and the increasing concentration of power in the presidency. A constitutional theory that cannot account for these realities may confine its utility to academic discourse.

The fundamental test of any governance structure must be its capacity to advance human flourishing—to create conditions where citizens can lead secure, meaningful, and self-directed lives. By avoiding engagement with how the unitary executive theory operates within our current political landscape, Rogers sidesteps the most crucial question: Rogers sidesteps the most crucial question: Does this constitutional understanding actually serve the interests of the people? Without addressing this question, even the most elegant constitutional theory remains incomplete at best and potentially harmful at worst, perpetuating structures that may undermine the very liberties the Constitution was designed to protect.

The Unitary Executive in Practice

Two key aspects of Rogers’s defense of the unitary executive lack sufficient grounding in the political reality of today. First, he contends that a unitary executive fosters accountability. Second, he contends that this conception of executive power aligns with a robust system of checks and balances. When considered in light of the current political moment, neither rests on sturdy ground. 

On accountability, the sort of accountability hoped for by Rogers under a unitary executive does not materialize when subjected to empirical scrutiny of electoral outcomes and political discourse. Ironically, the very concern that Hamilton expressed about a plural executive, which Rogers paraphrases as allowing “blame shifting” and confounding “the ability of voters to hold executives responsible for administration,”—has manifested in a different form under the unitary model.

This manifestation takes the form of what might be called a “unitary dividend”—a phenomenon that parallels the concept of a “liar’s dividend” in public discourse. Just as the liar’s dividend allows those with a tendency toward dishonesty to strategically leverage their mendacity by selectively claiming what they meant what they said, the “unitary dividend” enables administrations to expand executive authority to its furthest boundaries when politically advantageous, while strategically disclaiming responsibility when those same powers produce unfavorable outcomes. Recent administrations—both Biden’s and Trump’s first and second terms—have repeatedly leveraged this dividend, exercising extraordinary executive authority on certain issues while simultaneously arguing that other governmental actors bear the constitutional responsibility when their initiatives falter. The result is a fog of accountability that leaves the public uncertain where to direct their democratic judgment. Though the Biden administration never explicitly embraced Rogers’s conception of the unitary executive—defined as the “president [having] authority to direct all parts of the executive branch”—its operational approach often reflected precisely this understanding.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a compelling case study of this unitary dividend in action under the Biden administration. President Biden exercised sweeping executive authority by instructing Anthony Fauci and other officials to implement what many considered an expansive and intrusive federal pandemic response, including the suspension and termination of federal employees who failed to comply with Fauci’s directives. Yet when politically expedient, the administration redirected blame toward various external actors—social media platforms, vaccine-resistant citizens, and perhaps most significantly, Congress. This strategic oscillation between asserting maximal executive authority and deflecting responsibility created precisely the accountability confusion that proponents of the unitary executive theory, including Hamilton, had hoped to prevent.

Similarly, despite asserting significant authority in directing the nation’s foreign policy apparatus, President Trump frequently redirected responsibility toward Congress when confronting unfavorable geopolitical developments. In 2017, congressional actions became the administration’s preferred explanation for heightened tensions with Russia, despite the executive branch’s constitutional primacy in foreign affairs. More recently, Trump has partially attributed ongoing trade volatility with China to Congress’s passage of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, creating a narrative of divided responsibility that obscures the administration’s own policy choices. This pattern of selective accountability coexists with the administration’s willingness to exercise far-reaching foreign policy authority that sometimes operates at the boundaries of established legal and political norms.

This historical pattern reveals a misalignment between the theoretical accountability promised by unitary executive and the lived reality of our democratic system. Rogers, like many constitutional scholars, works from an idealized conception of voter capacity that assumes citizens possess sufficient information, political knowledge, and civic motivation to first identify the responsible governmental actors and then translate that assessment into electoral consequences. The empirical record tells a different story—one where voters consistently support parties that have implemented unpopular or even demonstrably harmful policies, where complex lines of authority remain obscured, and where the theoretical clarity of the unitary executive dissolves into the murky waters of modern media strategy and political messaging.

In short, the promise of democratic accountability through a unitary executive faces significant challenges in today’s political environment. A strong executive with centralized authority may paradoxically dilute accountability by creating a system where responsibility is more difficult to pin down. When executive power is concentrated in a single figure with broad authority and minimal means of accountability outside of the extreme of impeachment, the public may lack an effective means to evaluate the complex chain of decisions and delegations that occur within the executive branch. The tendency of recent administrations to develop and execute sophisticated media strategies may also shift narratives of responsibility away from the administration.

Checks and Balances

This lack of clear accountability invites a broader constitutional concern: How do our traditional checks and balances respond to emerging power vacuums and institutional ambiguity? The systems of checks and balances envisioned by Rogers assumes that Congress and the courts act in defense of their respective institutional powers, thereby counteracting the fervent expression of executive power involved with the unitary executive. Political reality suggests otherwise. A unitary executive is not necessarily in conflict with a system of checks and balances. A Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.-type analysis makes this clear. The first bucket involves each of the three branches fully and vigorously using their respective powers. In this case, checks and balances are firmly in place. The second bucket occurs when the executive operates under the unitary executive theory, yet only one other branch takes the equivalent approach. Here, the system of checks and balances may not immediately or adequately prevent an executive from exceeding their authority. But, on the whole, the system works as intended. Finally, on the third bucket, an executive operates to the full bounds of the unitary executive theory while the other two branches evidence deferential tendencies to the executive. This scenario raises significant concerns as to the viability and sufficiency of the system of checks and balances. We may find ourselves here now, facing a governance landscape in which the legislature hesitates, the courts retreat, and the executive assumes expansive authority over technologies shaping the public sphere.

The current political reality reveals a Congress increasingly controlled by members more loyal to party than to institutional prerogatives. Congressional representatives often demonstrate greater allegiance to a president of their own party than to Congress as an institution, rendering legislative checks ineffective. When public confidence in political institutions erodes, as multiple polling sources indicate is occurring, traditional checks and balances may no longer function as intended.

Similarly, the judicial branch, particularly the Supreme Court, has demonstrated a complex relationship with executive power. While sometimes providing checks on executive overreach, the Court has also shown deference to presidential authority in key areas like national security and immigration. The current 6-3 conservative majority on the Court may further complicate this dynamic, potentially showing greater deference to certain uses of executive power while restricting others based on ideological rather than constitutional considerations.

Though the occurrence of this third bucket may seem like an anomaly, it warrants further and more frank analysis by Rogers.

Effective Governance and the Unitary Executive

The primary blind spot in Rogers’s piece rests with his selection of constitutional principles to defend the unitary executive; he omits effective governance. In my own work on the right to effective governance, I argue that “early Americans shared a belief that the underlying purpose of the government was to advance the well-being of the governed.” That belief informed the decision to abandon the flawed Articles of Confederation and adopt a structure more aligned with the social, economic, and political realities of the day. Rogers failed to explore whether a unitary executive, in practice, has advanced the general welfare. As an aside, effective governance need not and should not have a partisan valence—it merely refers to the capacity of the government to address the essential purposes for having a central authority, such as coordinated international and economic policy, provision of national defense, protection against invasions of fundamental rights, and the like.

Effective governance requires systems that can respond to complex challenges with appropriate speed, expertise, and democratic input. The unitary executive theory, while appealing in its theoretical clarity, may actually impede these goals in practice. As evidenced by recurring administrative failures across administrations of both parties, concentrating decision-making power in a single executive has not demonstrably improved government performance on some of the aforementioned basic aspects of effective governance.

The structural flaws of a unitary executive reveal themselves in systematic governance breakdowns that go beyond individual leadership qualities. When presidential authority dominates the executive branch, we often witness the deterioration of institutional expertise as career officials with specialized knowledge depart amid shifting political winds. The centralization of decision-making authority creates bottlenecks that prevent nimble responses to emerging challenges, as evidenced by the sluggish adaptation to numerous crises over the past two decades. Perhaps most concerning is the policy whiplash that occurs when each new administration reorients entire agencies around presidential priorities rather than enduring public needs—a phenomenon we’ve seen play out dramatically across trade policy, healthcare implementation, and immigration enforcement.

Consider the cascading failures we’ve witnessed in critical infrastructure oversight. The Federal Aviation Administration’s delayed response to alarming air traffic controller shortages exemplifies how centralized control can impair timely action. Despite years of internal warnings from technical experts, political appointees delayed implementing recommended staffing reforms. This pattern repeated itself with the East Palestine train derailment, where regulatory capture and centralized decision-making diluted safety standards that independent regulators had long advocated. These weren’t failures of individual leadership but predictable outcomes of a governance model that subordinates expertise to hierarchical control. More generally, a massive reduction in executive branch staff does not bode well for the ability of the federal government to efficiently and sufficiently respond to threats to public well-being. As Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, relayed to The New York Times: 

The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment headcount, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service.

Similarly, troubling patterns emerge in how executive agencies handle fundamental rights. The due process failures in immigration proceedings stem directly from the executive branch’s ability to reshape entire enforcement apparatuses without meaningful checks. When presidents can unilaterally reconstruct agency priorities—as we’ve seen with abrupt shifts in enforcement targeting, detention policies, and asylum procedures—the consistent application of law gives way to political expediency. These compromises of fundamental rights aren’t bugs but features of a system that concentrates too much authority in a single elected official with incentives that often diverge from safeguarding individual liberties.

What these cases highlight is that the unitary executive theory fails to address a fundamental requirement of democratic governance: institutional capacity to deliver results that serve the public good while protecting core rights. A governance model focused solely on hierarchical control without equal attention to expertise, deliberation, and institutional knowledge may consolidate authority without improving outcomes. Historical experience suggests that effective governance emerges not from concentration of power but from thoughtfully designed systems that balance democratic accountability with professional expertise, rapid response capabilities with careful deliberation, and centralized coordination with distributed implementation.

Conclusion

Rogers’s exploration of the unitary executive makes valuable contributions to our understanding of constitutional design. However, its disconnect from contemporary political reality undermines its practical relevance. A more balanced approach would recognize that effective democratic governance requires not just clear lines of authority, but also robust institutional capacity, appropriate checks on power, and mechanisms to ensure that democratic accountability genuinely functions.

These are trying times for higher education, and for more than temporary partisan reasons. Future demographic trends will exacerbate declining enrollment numbers. Facing budgetary shortfalls, colleges must cancel burdensome academic and athletic programs. Growing numbers of institutions will fail altogether, inflicting economic tragedy on the local communities that rely on them. There are no painless choices here; there will be losers in this readjustment process. But two new books present impending crises, new technology, and shifting consumer demand as opportunities for innovative reform.

Their provocative titles notwithstanding, Richard K. Vedder’s Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education and Kathleen deLaski’s Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter both articulate largely optimistic visions for higher education’s long-overdue course correction. Neither work will appeal deeply to readers who revere America’s traditional liberal arts undergraduate curriculum. Yet thoughtful and generous reading of both suggests creative and perhaps necessary means to harmonize new realities with an ancient heritage.

Russell Kirk once professed certainty that “if all schools, colleges, and universities were abolished tomorrow,” the young would nevertheless “find lucrative employment, and means would exist, or be developed, of training them for … work.” According to Kirk, the college exists not for vocational training per se, but for “liberal education,” which “defends order against disorder” by “cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination.” If pursued in this spirit, such education conduces to “order in the republic.” But much as lab-produced substitutes are an ineffectual mockery of real food, liberal education’s ancillary blessings cannot be reductively pursued as ends in themselves.

Even two generations ago, few Americans concurred with Kirk’s noble ideal. Today, six decades after Clark Kerr coined the term “modern multiversity” for their often conflicting array of interests, research universities are less coherent than ever. Kerr famously quipped at a meeting of Cal Berkeley’s faculty in 1957 that the major administrative challenges to the university were to “provide parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.” For the typical large “R1,” this may be as complete a mission statement as possible. It is certainly the most honest. Even at many putative liberal arts colleges, the increasingly vocational focus of undergraduate education contributes to this confusion as both cause and effect. The three most common reasons given for college attendance in a recent New America survey—all with response rates above ninety percent—were “improve employment opportunities,” “make more money,” and “get a good job.” This is the consensus understanding of higher education’s purpose. But it may have been so for longer than we imagine.

Clayton Sedwick Cooper wrote Why Go To College? in 1912, spawning a subgenre now large enough to fill a library by itself. Cooper recounts the scene at an Ivy League graduation of a couple whose “homely” clothes, “deeply lined” faces, and “hard, calloused hands” identified them as farmers, watching with pride as their son led in the senior class. He imagined them “dedicating their lives to the task of giving [this] boy the advantages … they must have felt would separate him forever from their humble life.” Such scenes are a commonplace of American life. Attend any college’s commencement exercises; the families cheering loudest when their student’s name is read will be the spiritual descendants of those Yankee agrarians. Kirk’s noble admonition notwithstanding, America’s colleges have always served partly as entryways to its professional class. That is an essential function in a socially diverse, egalitarian republic. At any rate, people understand it as such—and in a democratic society, the people will have their way. Liberal education and vocational training must coexist somehow.

Richard Vedder, emeritus professor of economic history at Ohio University, has long been among higher education’s foremost conservative critics. He is not, though, a wanton agent of chaos. Let Colleges Fail is less a celebratory paean to higher education’s imminent disintegration than a call for its renewal. Vedder does consider the possible value of “creative destruction” in higher education, noting that publicly subsidized colleges and universities “lack strong incentives to improve outcomes,” reduce overheads and prices. “Though we may mourn the loss of [individual] schools,” he writes, “we should accept and even rejoice in more closing in the years ahead as resources shift away from” failing institutions toward “educationally stronger ones.” In this vein, the book retreads some familiar ground on higher education’s excesses, abuses, and inefficiencies, though often with characteristically insightful data analysis. 

Vedder suggests many reforms, ranging in scale and consequence from minor and benign to the most sweepingly ambitious. “Reform efforts must … reduce market ignorance in higher education,” he writes. Other merchants, such as “big-box stores,” do not advertise one price, then charge each customer unique and undisclosed discounted prices—why should colleges be permitted to do so? Such commonsense proposals would meet little popular resistance, at least in principle. More controversial, perhaps, would be his scheme for voucher-style tuition aid, “converting subsidies given to schools to payments made to students’ directly.” Then there are Vedder’s most original suggestions, such as halving tuition costs by moving the academic year to three fifteen-week semesters, eliminating summer vacation, and condensing the bachelor’s degree into three years. In this plan, faculty base pay is increased, but large lecture sections are tripled in size, the number of tenured instructors is reduced, and faculty pay is moved to a sliding scale pegged to student enrollment in their courses. Pray for the poor dean who is tasked with presenting this plan at the next faculty meeting!

Vedder’s timeliest proposals are for the restructuring of research universities. Private companies that grow unwieldy, he writes, “are constantly spinning off operations that do not fit well with their core activities—shouldn’t universities do the same?” Do teaching hospitals, vocational schools, advanced research labs, and professional football teams still belong under the same institutional umbrella? Could inefficient, high-cost dormitories and dining halls be replaced with private boarding houses or similar free-market arrangements? Can independent laboratories not turn research grants into knowledge as well or better without campus bureaucracy? Wherever possible, Vedder urges institutions to shed distracting encumbrances to their core purpose of educating students.

Kathleen deLaski’s book, though, suggests that even this foundational mission may undergo revolutionary transformation in the near future. Who Needs College Anymore? explores the possibilities for education at the dawn of what she terms the “skills-first age,” in which the bachelor’s degree will no longer serve as the primary signifier of employability. Her book is a surprisingly engaging tour of the present state and likely direction of “the alternative credentials market.” Central to deLaski’s narrative is the “micro-credential,” a trendy catch-all term for industry-certified short-term training programs. Many, such as intensive “bootcamps” to learn software coding languages, offer direct, non-degree paths into remunerative careers. But such credentials and the traditional campus are not exclusive models. Some institutions—the 250,000-student University of Texas system, for example—subcontract third-party providers to give students access to thousands of skills-based credential courses alongside their degree curriculum.

Two institutions that embedded “alternative credential” programs within their curriculum at their inception offer particularly illustrative models. Chartered in 1997, Western Governors University pioneered “competency-based” curricula, in which students “move through [self-guided] online course material” without any real-time instruction, then take assessments “to demonstrate mastery.” Chartered in 1912, Northeastern University in Boston was an even earlier pioneer. From the beginning, its undergraduate curriculum has required completion of a months-long off-campus work experience placement. Students are prepared for professional work environments with a mandatory general education course covering resume curation, interview etiquette, and the like. In both examples, once-uniquely innovative ideas are now commonplace in higher education. All major accreditors permit credit-bearing off-campus apprenticeships and competency-based curricula. In the same way, deLaski believes, “as less expensive alternate pathways become clearer and surer,” traditional bachelor’s degrees “will seem impractical for a new majority of learners.” But she asks, “Why does the degree have to be the only product colleges sell?” Campuses offer many advantages that could help savvy institutions adjust to a changing education landscape. deLaski suggests various means for higher-education institutions to offer non-degree credentials within, alongside, or as alternatives to their existing programs. In short, “the degree may be in trouble, but colleges can survive.”

This would be cold comfort to Russell Kirk. But consumer-driven schemes for vocational training may not be incompatible with a liberal education intended, as Kirk wrote, to cultivate “the person’s intellect and [moral] imagination, for the person’s own sake.” A few institutions already offer suggestive examples for combining the two. Affectionately known as “Hard Work U,” Missouri’s College of the Ozarks’ work-study model enables every student to gain in-house job skills and graduate debt-free. Its robust general education curriculum includes required two-part course sequences in Christian Worldview, American history and civics, and Western Civilization. Another intriguing example is LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas—a private, religious, four-year vocational college. Typical major programs include various branches of engineering, computer science, nursing, and business. But since 2015, LeTourneau’s Honors College has offered an excellent slate of liberal arts courses. Roughly five percent of students complete the full nineteen-credit concentration, but a greater number take a few honors courses as electives.

These are rare and modest examples. But if technological change and consumer demand augur seismic change for higher education, they may hold out hope to those who cherish the old liberal education. Market forces, legislatures, or both may, as Vedder recommends, require large public universities to reorganize, shedding non-core functions and renewing their focus on undergraduate education. We should hope so. Selective liberal arts colleges may continue more or less unchanged. But what of non-elite smaller institutions lacking the mysterious appeal of “prestige” or the security of large endowments? Imagine a struggling four-year, private institution with low admissions standards, reliant on athletics and vocational majors to drive recruitment. In a world of readily accessible, rapidly adaptive short-term credential programs, why enroll in a four-year vocational degree whose curriculum is updated rarely and belatedly? Such programs may appear increasingly cumbersome and costly, chiefly benefiting their tenured faculty. Suppose this college abandoned the bachelor’s degree and replaced its numerous putatively pre-professional and vocational major programs with a single liberal arts associates degree. Imagine a three-year program, the first two years devoted primarily to a “great books” curriculum alongside some foundational vocational training and summer internship options. In year three, the focus shifts primarily to job-specific training gained through the latest micro-credential courses, perhaps taken online or through intensive “bootcamps” off-campus. Students would receive guidance from a corps of counselors with up-to-date training in the “alternate credentials market”—a much expanded role for the “drop-in” career centers presently an afterthought on many campuses. In less time and with lower cost than the current bachelor’s degree, graduates of such a college might attain a “skills-based, job-ready” resume while also forming their minds and imaginations in a college-level liberal arts core curriculum.

This may be a fanciful hope. But if Kathleen deLaski is correct, new technology and probable consumer demands will permit such ambitious reimagination of college education very soon. How many administrators have the vision and courage to try such things? Richard Vedder suggests they may have no choice.

Can print newspapers be saved? The total estimated print circulation of US newspapers peaked in the early 1990s, and has been declining ever since. Circulation is now below what it was before World War II.

Many celebrate the demise of the newspaper industry, especially given that digitally-based news (including via social media) provides such a low-cost, diverse alternative to an industry whose reputation has been shattered by the almost comical narrowness of its longstanding liberal bias. Yet as much as I share that frustration with so-obviously partisan reporters claiming to be the disinterested guardians of American democracy, something integral to the health of our republic has been lost as print newspapers arriving daily on the doorstep become an endangered species. As Alexis de Tocqueville declared in Democracy in America about print media and the American people: “The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united.” Without newspapers, will, as we’re warned, “democracy die in darkness”?

As a native Northern Virginian, I grew up reading the Washington Post in print—as its old (less savior-complex-sounding) slogan went: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.” My grade-school interest in the comics and sports sections—especially learning to decipher baseball box scores—in time matured into reading most of the newspaper every morning, a tradition I have maintained even while most other members of my millennial generation have dispensed with print media (and their expensive subscriptions). Though I am frustrated daily by the editorial decision-making of even the Post’s news desk, in fifteen minutes or less, I can gain a remarkably broad knowledge of the day’s international, national, and local news.

Much of the benefit is easier to perceive when compared to the digital media that has largely replaced print newspapers. In comparison to many of their digital brethren (though thankfully not this one), print stories and op-eds aren’t broken up every couple of paragraphs with distracting advertisements or eye candy. Moreover, whereas the newspaper is a single thing unto itself, one’s smartphone or laptop presents a constant, difficult-to-resist temptation towards the infinite scroll of social media or following countless Wikipedia threads or curious Google searches, which is the case even when reading excellent online long-form journalism.

Though it’s true that podcasts, social media, and Substack blogs offer a more intellectually diverse information ecosphere than the staid predictability of the Washington Post or The New York Times, research indicates that consuming information via print results in far better comprehension. And to get one’s news primarily from social media (as many Americans now do) risks becoming overly-reliant on an often simplistic, emotive, and stove-piped form of discourse that is inimical to the kind of extended, thoughtful debate required for republican government. In our increasingly anonymous and atomized world, digital partisan echo chambers reduce our exposure to people (and ideas) different from our own, even though such persons may literally live next door to us.

As Tocqueville observed, the influence of the press in early American life was immense. “It is the power which impels the circulation of political life through all the districts of that vast territory. Its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs, and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public opinion,” wrote the French aristocrat. Even when newspapers were demonstrably partisan, as they typically were until journalistic objectivity became part of the professional brand beginning in the 1890s, their role was to both inform readers and bring them into conversation with their political representatives.

Despite his disdain for American journalists who could be “crude” and “artless,” Tocqueville recognized that a vibrant, independent press served as an important “ingredient of liberty” and even sustainer of civilization, because it was not beholden to elite bases of power. “In America there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper.” That, of course, is no longer true—the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are owned by billionaires, while the largest print dailies represent little more than the opinions of the “American aristocracy.” Over the last generation, many modestly profitable family newspapers have sold out to larger, publicly-traded corporations in the search for higher quarterly revenues, destroying many multi-generational local and municipal newspapers.

Robert D. Putnam famously catalogued the effects of this crisis in his now classic Bowling Alone. His research found that Americans who regularly read newspapers were more knowledgeable about current events, had higher membership and participation rates in local civic associations, volunteered more frequently, had higher voter turnout rates, and trusted their neighbors more than Americans whose sole source of news was television. Since then, further research has linked the closure of newspapers to declines in civic engagement, increases in government waste, and more intense political polarization. As local news dies off, Americans pay more attention to national politics, reducing competition in local campaigns.

American journalists are well aware of (and bemoan) this frightening trend and its effect on the health of our polity. Yet attempts to restore record-low trust in the fourth estate have been risible. After the November election, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the paper’s opinion section would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” as if valorizing these principles would somehow persuade millions of disenchanted Americans of the Post’s editorial integrity. Since then, though, there has been little appreciable change in how the newspaper covers the issues of the day.

That every section of the prominent American dailies features content within a scarcely-hidden liberal bias is suggestive that the ideological rot of our nation’s media industry is deep indeed, beginning with the training they receive in journalism schools. Journalists working even the domestic news or sports desks have been trained to look for stories that will further particular narratives about race, sex, gender, social class, and religion. One looks in vain, for example, for straight news stories from the Post or the Times sympathetic to religious conservatives.

Nevertheless, I know I am not the only one who yearns for a newspaper delivered daily to my driveway, one I may not always agree with, but which provides a significant chunk of information required to be an informed citizen in a free republic. The popularity of Walter Kirn’s County Highway, a 20-page broadsheet published six times per year, born during covid lockdowns and serving as a “hand-made alternative to the undifferentiated blob of electronic ‘content’ that you scroll through every morning,” suggests I am not alone. Yet as impressive as that broadsheet may be, its infrequency can only make it a competitor with magazines such as The Atlantic or Harper’s rather than a replacement for outlets that inform us daily.

Admittedly, it would require an incredible amount of creativity (and financing) to replace America’s dying print media industry, including both local media to report on the news citizens require to make informed decisions on local politics, but also ones that can appeal to a broad cross-section of our diverse nation. The Wall Street Journal is too urbane and elite to fill that role; the New York Post, despite some periodic strong reporting and opining, remains too much of a tabloid (and, like the Journal, is too focused on one part of the country).

It’s possible that those colleges and universities with a strong sense of the founding principles of our nation, such as Hillsdale College, which currently offers a minor in journalism, could offer journalism majors with the hope of restoring a profession that, since our nation’s founding, has been integral to republican self-government. It’s difficult, however, to imagine this being done at a sufficient scale to combat or replace legacy print media. Nor does it seem likely that investors could be persuaded to corral enough conservative journalistic talent to form competitors and replacements to dying papers.

Perhaps, then, what is most realistic for now is for Americans to fashion personal, bespoke means of consuming information that, as much as possible, incorporates the traditional benefits of paper-reading while resisting the worst tendencies of the digital age. One such way to do this is to subscribe to veritable print publications which, though they are not dailies (or even weeklies), still provide a means of reading long-form journalism and essays without the distractions of the Internet. Another is to be intentional about reading local online sources, whether it be the “local” section of larger papers, or the websites of those smaller local papers that remain. Setting careful guardrails around our consumption of social media, as Clement Harrold recently urged at First Things, would also be beneficial to the health of our republic.

There are even bipartisan legislative proposals to provide tax credits for those who subscribe to local news sources as a means of supporting outlets not as beholden to the partisanship of corporate legacy media. None of these, I acknowledge, is a particularly satisfactory replacement for what has been lost, given the decline and increasing irrelevance of print journalism.

For now, I remain one of an increasingly small percentage of Americans who still shell out hundreds of dollars a year for a print subscription to my hometown paper, willing to put up with its pervasive bias, in part, out of a (perhaps naive) desire of teaching my children how to read the news in print and a nostalgic pleasure in reading the comics and sports with them. The framers of our Constitution so valued the press that they included its protection in the First Amendment. If America is to uphold a tradition that predates our very founding—and avoid a future world of news that is entirely screen-dependent—we have our work cut out for us.

History will harshly judge the United States’ prolonged vacillation over whether to honor the Fourteenth Amendment’s command of color-blindness by government actors in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, with the Supreme Court earning much of the blame. Brown vindicated Justice Harlan’s lonely dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which proclaimed that “our Constitution is color-blind.” Yet, it took the Justices 45 years, from Bakke in 1978 to SFFA v. Harvard in 2023, to reject the erroneous notion that racial discrimination in pursuit of “diversity” is acceptable under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal civil rights laws. Granting “preferences” to favored racial groups is invidious discrimination—and therefore unconstitutional.

The hand-wringing and indecision reflected in Bakke, Grutter, Fisher I, and Fisher II are an embarrassment to the High Court, which finally reached the right result in the Harvard case. The Supreme Court’s earlier endorsement of the dubious “disparate impact” theory (concocted out of whole cloth by the EEOC in a clear misreading of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) remains uncorrected. Statistical imbalances are not the same as intentional discrimination, and it is ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Title VII explicitly declined to impose racial quotas. Section 703(j) of Title VII specifically states that employers are not required to grant preferential treatment to any individual to correct statistical imbalances in the workforce, and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, the Senate floor leader for Title VII, famously promised to eat the pages from the statute if Title VII were shown to authorize preferential treatment for any group. Like many promises made in Washington, DC, this one was never carried out.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley’s excellent new book, The Affirmative Action Myth, is a thorough and balanced post-mortem of the Court’s bungled jurisprudence. The Affirmative Action Myth is really two books in one, as evidenced by the subtitle Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, because Riley argues that “affirmative action” (which he correctly points out is “synonymous with racial favoritism”) and other progressive innovations created in the name of “civil rights” have actually harmed blacks more than helping them. Decades of black upward mobility were upended by quota-driven affirmative action and welfare programs since the 1970s.

Thus, racial preferences are both improper and unnecessary. “The main purpose of this book,” Riley states, “is to explain how affirmative action has failed.” Riley deftly weaves together an accessible account of the Court’s tortuous decision-making and the failure of racial preferences to improve the status of affirmative action’s intended beneficiaries. He even digresses briefly into the Court’s dreadful busing decisions, using Lino Graglia’s aptly-titled book Disaster by Decree as a guide. As Riley proves, liberal largesse has made things worse for the black community. The Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence was infected by the same ideological flaw that has hijacked the civil rights movement in America. He cogently explains that the continued advancement of the black community in America will be hampered until that error is recognized and rejected.

Like many aspects of the Great Society’s social engineering programs, and their successors, affirmative action was well-intended. Beneficent motives, however, do not assure good results; as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Affirmative action and other civil rights policies have been disastrous for blacks. The welfare state undermined the black middle class by encouraging fathers to abandon their families, incentivizing black women to have children out of wedlock, and resulting in the proliferation of single-parent households led by females. Family instability and, in particular, fatherless homes are strongly correlated with violent crime rates and other social pathologies.

As Riley demonstrates, all of this was a reversal of positive economic and educational trends experienced by black people between 1940 and 1960. Black Americans were making remarkable gains even under “peak Jim Crow.” Riley doesn’t claim that racism didn’t (or doesn’t) exist, only that the legacy of LBJ’s welfare programs and the advent of affirmative action has had detrimental effects on blacks that are often overlooked in lieu of continued reliance on tired canards such as “systemic racism” and the presumed debility among blacks caused by the institution of slavery (which ended 160 years ago).

As it is practiced today, “civil rights” is an industry in which many activists, scholars, bureaucrats, journalists, and organizations have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of black victimization and helplessness. Riley argues (with extensive supporting footnotes) that “blacks have made faster progress when color blindness has been the policy objective.” Allowing equal treatment to be replaced by a regime of “oppression pedagogy” and identity politics, Riley suggests, is “one of our greatest tragedies.” Racial preferences “have been a hindrance rather than a boon for blacks,” he contends.

Riley makes a persuasive case. He reprises the work done by scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Robert Woodson, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, and Wilfred Reilly; as he notes, much of the research on this topic by center-right figures tends to be done by black academics, possibly due to white scholars’ well-founded fear of repercussions. (If you doubt this, recall the pariah treatment accorded Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Ilya Shapiro, and others who refused to genuflect to the prevailing orthodoxy.) Riley also draws upon the work of Stephan and Abigal Thernstrom, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., and many others. Readers may be familiar with some of this work, but Riley usefully summarizes it and supplements it with census data, lesser-known academic studies, and historical and biographical profiles such as Hidden Figures, the book and movie about pioneering black mathematicians who helped NASA’s space program in the 1960s. 

Riley devotes a compelling chapter to debunking the efficacy of affirmative action, but his critique is not limited to the harmful consequences of racial preferences in higher education—in the form of the “mismatch” phenomenon and otherwise. Riley contends, “One tragic legacy of the affirmative action era is that the number of black college graduates is almost certainly lower today than it would have been without racial preferences that mismatch students with schools for diversity purposes.” Riley nimbly tackles the whole array of liberal shibboleths on race: critical race theory (and its leading proponents), reparations, the false narrative of the 1619 Project, “mass incarceration,” DEI, redlining, and more.

What these topics have in common is that they share the premise—one that Riley debunks as a myth—that blacks are helpless victims of an oppressively racist system and cannot improve their status without special preferences and favored treatment. A more descriptive (but less catchy) title for the book would be “The Racial Victimization Myth,” because Riley explores the many facets of the false race narrative peddled by the Left.

The patronizing paternalism of the prevailing narrative harms blacks, Riley argues, because it instills a mentality of victimhood that fuels grievance and undermines effort and personal responsibility on the part of blacks. If the game is rigged due to “white supremacy,” and if “systemic racism” determines one’s fate, why bother to work hard, exercise self-restraint, adopt good habits (in the form of so-called “bourgeois values”), and so forth? This theme resonates powerfully throughout the book. History teaches that the path to upward mobility for minorities is assimilation into the mainstream culture, and the rigors and discipline of competition—the bedrock of meritocracy—foster a culture of striving instead of excuses, resentment, and despair. Treating black people as helpless victims discourages them from devoting themselves to achieving success through self-improvement.

One of Riley’s most effective rhetorical devices is the juxtaposition of attitudes about black self-reliance and personal responsibility from earlier eras and the contrived ideology of “anti-racism,” as exemplified by the writings of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo. Proponents of critical race theory (which Riley says “amounts to little more than a fancy justification for racial favoritism”) embrace what Riley calls “racial essentialism”: the notion that “anti-black bias in America is systemic … and must be eliminated root and branch before any significant narrowing of racial disparities can take place.” Not only is this premise contradicted by the well-documented progress blacks made in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, even under Jim Crow, it is also contrary to the sentiments expressed by early civil rights leaders such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Malcolm X, all of whom emphasized the importance of self-reliance, hard work, and individual responsibility as indispensable to upward mobility. Riley notes that “Coates is waiting on white people to rescue black people. [Frederick] Douglass understood that black people must save themselves.”

Advocates of this concept, once dubbed the “politics of respectability,” called upon black Americans to adopt constructive manners, morals, and attitudes to achieve social and economic advancement, even in the face of discrimination. Other minority ethnic and racial groups, including Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish immigrants, overcame prejudice in America by adopting productive cultural habits—assimilation, in other words. Riley points out that this approach is anathema to modern-day civil rights activists, who scorn respectability politics as “ineffective and a waste of time. Studious black youngsters and other black people who adopt middle-class speech, dress, and behavior are accused of racial betrayal, or ‘acting white.’”

Critical race theory holds that “racism is mainly if not entirely to blame for black-white gaps in everything from income to incarceration to standardized test scores.” Riley strongly disagrees. Absolving blacks of any responsibility for improving their status in American society conveniently blames “white supremacy” for every aspect of dysfunctional black culture and encourages blacks to be dependent on favors bestowed by the welfare state. Riley states that affirmative action creates the “impression that black people are charity cases dependent on government programs.” Opponents of affirmative action and statist policies sometimes compare the retrogression of black advancement since the Great Society to a “return to the plantation.”

Even mild suggestions for black self-improvement by sympathetic figures such as Barack Obama are rebuked by ideologues as “blaming the victim” and “talking down to black people.” Riley laments that “discouraging acculturation and assimilation in the name of racial solidarity is self-defeating.” The rejection of individual responsibility and the tendency to blame “whiteness” for all racial disparities have sabotaged the upward mobility and progress that blacks enjoyed before the civil rights era. Liberals understandably don’t want to acknowledge the body of data that Riley convincingly marshals. Hard work, thrift, sobriety, respect for authority, the nuclear family, recognizing the importance of education, and deferring gratification are not manifestations of white supremacy, but essential ingredients for success.

It is truly astounding to see how condescending leftist intellectuals deny black people any moral agency, and encourage them to wallow in grievance and victimhood. Riley observes that “black politicians and activists have a vested interest in a narrative that accentuates black suffering.” Victims require saviors, and those promising to deliver salvation are often rewarded with status, money, and influence.

The Supreme Court, left-wing scholars, and self-interested activists are not the only villains in The Affirmative Action Myth. Riley exposes the activist role of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in “turn[ing] Title VII on its head,” and points out that presidents from both political parties have muddied the waters by issuing executive orders mandating quotas (as Lyndon Johnson did with federal contractors in Executive Order 11246) or supporting the expansion of the Great Society welfare programs (as Richard Nixon did). There are few “heroes” in Riley’s account, although Justice Clarence Thomas—a longtime critic of affirmative action—comes close.

Riley does not deny the existence of racism in America, but he insists that it doesn’t explain the disparities within the black community (such as West Indian blacks versus African-American blacks) or the retrogression since the 1960s: “The elimination of white racism, however desirable then and now, is not a prerequisite for black socio-economic advancement.”

Riley’s sobering concluding chapter is chock-full of hard truths—and not for the faint of heart:

One reason antisocial behaviors [in black populations] became more common in the post-1960s era is because they became more tolerated and more lavishly subsidized by the government. … Low-income blacks began to adopt counterproductive attitudes and habits that previous generations had rejected and strived to eradicate. Even more tragically, academics began to intellectualize this degeneracy instead of calling it out for what it is.

Providing grisly details, Riley condemns the hip-hop culture and gangsta rap: “Too many young people have come to equate self-destructive behavior with black authenticity.” Put in economic terms, “government programs are no substitute for the development of human capital.”

Sadly, despite the proven failure of the victimization narrative, and its baleful consequences so readily apparent in our inner cities, the proponents of this model “have perhaps never been more celebrated in the academy and the media than they are today.” Affirmative action has never enjoyed popular support, and has now been declared unconstitutional and illegal. That it still carries sway in the influential spheres of academia and the media, Riley laments, “ought to be of deep concern to anyone who cares about the future of the black underclass.” Indeed.

The Affirmative Action Myth is a timely and well-written book that contains an abundance of common sense, solid arguments, and carefully researched historical data. One can only hope that it is widely read and provokes a long-overdue change in direction in the area of civil rights and race relations. Sixty years of failed policies are enough.

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

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