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In the past, Walter Lippmann was virtually a household name. Today, it is the rare household that knows him. Some people may associate him with the phrase “American century.” But it was Henry Luce, the media magnate, who said that the twentieth century would be “the American century.” (That was in 1941.) So why the association with Lippmann? In 1980, Ronald Steel published his biography Walter Lippmann and the American Century.

What Lippmann is responsible for is the common understanding of the word “stereotype.” He took the term from the printing trade. (The word “cliché” also comes from that trade.) Also, Lippmann popularized the term “cold war” to describe the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II. In 1947, he published his book The Cold War.

Steel’s biography won every award under the sun, with the exception of the Pulitzer. It won the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, etc. In a new biography of his own, Tom Arnold-Forster calls Steel’s book “classic” and says that it is “still indispensable.” So why the new biography? In his subtitle, Arnold-Forster identifies his book as “an intellectual biography.” He will concentrate on Lippmann’s writing and ideas, not his life per se—although Lippmann’s life was certainly consumed by writing and ideas.

Walter Lippmann was a New Yorker, born in 1889. His family was German-Jewish and well-off. Lippmann entered Harvard at 16 and graduated in three years. He stayed on for a fourth, to assist Professor George Santayana. Arnold-Forster quotes a freshman essay titled “Who I Am and Why I Came to Harvard.” Young Lippmann wrote, “I have always taken a deep interest in the great issues of the day.” He always would.

It is interesting to know that this young man—whose name would become a byword for journalism, of the most exalted kind—failed to land a spot on the undergraduate newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. It could not have helped to be Jewish, as Ronald Steel notes in his book.

In the first sentence of his own book, Arnold-Forster says, “Few writers had more influence on American politics in the twentieth century than Walter Lippmann.” That is a normal sentence—hedging, cautious, unobjectionable—that any of us might have written. But consider: Did any writer have more influence on the politics of the previous century? H. L. Mencken? William F. Buckley Jr.? Who? An equally safe sentence, I think, would be, “Few writers had as much influence on American politics …”

When Lippmann died in 1974, the Crimson’s obituary said that he was widely regarded as “the dean of 20th-century American journalism.” He had a career “that saw him attain almost the status of an oracle in the course of publishing over 4,000 columns.”

In a somewhat mystical but apt sentence, Arnold-Forster says that Lippmann “has an omnipresence but is hard to place.” He goes on to say that Lippmann “appears in so many contexts and moments that he can seem chronically peripatetic and inconsistent, always changing his mind, moving on elsewhere and everywhere.”

Several years ago, I heard Richard Brookhiser, the journalist and historian, make a point: The word “day” is embedded in “journalism” (jour). In a sense, “daily journalism” is a redundancy. (So is “daily diary,” in light of día.) You take note of what seems most important or truest on that day. As the times shift, you may well too, while retaining a general outlook.

“For all of his networked globetrotting,” writes Arnold-Forster, “Lippmann spent most of his days sitting at his desk, reading a book or writing a column.” I think of what George F. Will, the veteran columnist, told me in a podcast last year: “If someone said, ‘What do you do, Mr. Will?,’ I’d say, ‘I’m a writer,’ but actually I’m a reader. I have to read four or five hours a day—journalism, books, etc.—to get the material.”

Walter Lippmann worked “at the intersection of daily news and democratic theory,” says Arnold-Forster. “He was not a system-building philosopher, nor an ur-liberal archetype, but a political writer engaged in controversies with his contemporaries.” This makes me think of Bill Buckley’s habitual title for a speech. He was often booked far in advance. The title of his speech was “Reflections on Current Contentions,” allowing him to talk about whatever was in the air.

Arnold-Forster says that Lippmann’s career was “a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics.” So was Buckley’s; so has Will’s been. You can find inconsistencies in the writings of all of these men, and certainly different emphases, depending on the day, or the era. This is only natural.

Walter Lippmann believed that good journalism was essential to liberal democracy. Bad journalism went hand in hand with bad politics and bad government.

Lippmann had a huge audience, with his syndicated newspaper column, and various articles in Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, Reader’s Digest, etc. His books were available through the Book-of-the-Month Club. This landscape was described, and scorned, as “middlebrow.” Where I sit, however, that landscape seems to me of a higher brow: serious, decent. Enviably so.

I got a kick out of a tidbit in Arnold-Forster’s book, and you may, too. In the 1960s, Lippmann began appearing on CBS television for annual interviews. He had a proviso, though: no ads for dog food or deodorant. Such ads, apparently, were gauche. (In her 1997 autobiography, Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, would write that Lippmann was “very intelligent” but also “a prima donna.”)

What was Lippmann, politically? Arnold-Forster writes that his subject “took the well-trodden path from young liberal socialist to old conservative liberal.” Arnold-Forster’s final chapter is titled “American Conservative Liberal.” Nehru, speaking in his country’s parliament, called Lippmann “an American conservative liberal.” (It says something about Lippmann’s importance that the prime minister of India was engaging with him.)

In a 1955 book—The Public Philosophy—Lippmann “suggested that liberalism had lost touch with ‘man’s fallen nature.’” (I have quoted Arnold-Forster, quoting Lippmann.) That is, of course, a common conservative critique of a liberalism of a certain kind.

When it came to foreign affairs, Lippmann was—depending on the day, depending on the emphasis—an “internationalist,” a “realist,” an “interventionist,” a “non-interventionist.” In other words, he was not a dope. Nor was he a dogmatist. By and large, he dealt with the world as it was, and the world was messy, as usual.

It was communism and fascism, writes Arnold-Forster, that pushed Lippmann into constitutionalism—that landed him on constitutionalism as the guardian of liberty. Here is a healthy passage from the new biography:

He argued in 1934 that, both in Russia and in Germany, the rulers of the state were “subject to no law. There are no customs, contracts, constitutions, or ancient usages which limit them.” He claimed in contrast that law ruled in America, where the Constitution was “undoubtedly the greatest attempt ever made consciously by men to render popular rule safe for the nation as a whole, the local community, and the individual.” Celebrations of the American Constitution became routine aspects of Lippmann’s political writing in the 1930s. What he wanted to construct were clear divisions between rule-of-law liberalism and lawless totalitarianism.

Some of this biography seems ripped from today’s headlines, as issues perdue. What is the interest of the United States in the security of Europe? How to contain, or counter, the expansionists in the Kremlin? On the domestic front, what are the limits of free speech, if there are any? Are there “real Americans” and a “real America,” as opposed to false ones?

Arnold-Forster writes that, after the 1960 presidential election, in which Kennedy beat Nixon by a hair, “Lippmann stressed that democratic life depended on accepting election results.” In 1968, that overheated year, Lippmann himself wrote, “We are suffering not from communism and radicalism but from nihilism.” In 1971, Lippmann worried about extreme polarization: “a party system in which the two parties were diametrically opposed.” You could even get a “civil war.”

If you will indulge a self-reference, I wrote, some years ago, a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the pleasures of writing this history is that it allowed you, or me, to survey the twentieth century. A biography of Lippmann allows you to do the same (to a large degree). Tom Arnold-Forster has done very well with his.

I have complaints, of course. He paints Bill Buckley as a McCarthyite, a racist, and an illiberal. (Let me disclose that WFB was a beloved friend of mine.) Left and Right like to do this: freeze Bill in the early stages of his career, not allowing for the last 40 years of his busy, evolving, magnificent life. At the same time, Arnold-Forster quotes Noam Chomsky uncritically. Of the many questions one could ask, here’s one: Who was wiser about the Khmer Rouge? Buckley or Chomsky?

Nevertheless, this new biography is a pleasure for anyone interested in—well, just about anything, where politics and history are concerned.

Walter Lippmann believed that good journalism—sound journalism, honest journalism—was essential to liberal democracy. Bad journalism went hand in hand with bad politics and bad government. Talking about journalists, Lippmann said, “We do what every sovereign citizen is supposed to do but has not the time or the interest to do.” And “that is no mean calling.”

What is the future of DEI? Does it have at least some laudable goals, and are there better ways to achieve them? What do the American people really want when it comes to tolerance, inclusion, and discrimination law? The Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen discusses all these questions and more with host James Patterson in this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Related Links

“Fight Bias and Legalize Meritocracy,” by Robert VerBruggen

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

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

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. Our guest today is Mr. Robert VerBruggen. He is a fellow at Manhattan Institute, where he provides policy research, writes for City Journal, and contributes to special projects and initiatives in the president’s office. And he has served as a deputy managing editor at National Review, managing editor at the American Conservative, and editor at RealClear Policy. And finally, as an assistant book editor at the Washington Times, he publishes on a number of issues and was the 2005 winner of the Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Award. That’s great. And today we’ll be talking about his study at Manhattan Institute titled, “Fight Bias and Legalized Meritocracy, A Unifying Vision for Anti-Discrimination Law.” Mr. VerBruggen, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Robert VerBruggen (01:38):

Great to be here.

James Patterson (01:39):

Let me give you two accounts of DEI and you tell me where they go wrong and maybe what half-truths they get. So the first is that DEI, which for those six or seven people listening to this podcast who don’t know, stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, is mandatory for all hiring practices because of the permanently structured white supremacy in American institutions. And without it, we would experience the same levels of discrimination found, say in Jim Crow America. That’s the first version of the story, usually understood to be on the left. And the second version of the story is that DEI policies are a form of counter-discrimination designed to elevate minorities, otherwise incapable of achieving excellence in a competitive environment, and thereby exposing people to all kinds of forms of incompetence. These are the two extremes. It’s more of the right-wing extreme, and your study seems to say, look, let’s take this much more seriously and look at the evidence. What does the evidence tell us about these two positions?

Robert VerBruggen (02:54):

Well, sure, I think the beautiful and ugly thing about the term DEI is that it’s very vague. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think some people really do mean it just to refer to the concept of being open to people, being inclusive, being willing to hire and consider candidates from all different walks of life, and making efforts to make sure that you’re not overlooking people because of where they come from or who they are. And that’s, of course, entirely laudable, but I think it’s also a euphemism for, as you might say, counter-discrimination, reverse discrimination, whatever you want to call that, discrimination against sort of overrepresented groups or higher performing groups in an effort to hit the correct numbers that you think that a company or a student body should have. And I think that that’s where it runs into problems legally. I think there’s been a lot that’s been going on under the banner of DEI that has always been illegal, and I think that there’s a lot of gray area as well that as what the Trump administration is doing plays out. And as courts hear more of these cases, I think we’re going to have to resolve a lot of that gray area in terms of what exactly is allowed and what is not allowed in these sorts of areas.

James Patterson (04:06):

So where does the term DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, come from? Does it have the same provenance as something like affirmative action? Does it grow out of affirmative action, or is it its own thing?

Robert VerBruggen (04:19):

I mean, I think it’s largely used in the same context as affirmative action. We talk about DEI and wokeness. These are sort of new terms or they’re new debates that we’re having, but in a lot of ways, they really just echo the debates about racial preferences and affirmative action that we’ve been having for 50 years or more. So I think in a lot of ways, they refer to ways of trying to diversify a company or a student body typically by taking race into account. And that’s also a problem that we have with the term affirmative action. The original use of it is just take affirmative action to make sure that you’re being fair and not discriminating by race. And it ends up being a euphemism for discriminating by race to get the numbers that you’re trying to get. And I think it’s a similar sort of thing with DEI where it’s just vague enough that a lot of people hear it and think, oh, that sounds nice, but it also turns out to be sort of a cover for some discriminatory and often illegal behavior.

James Patterson (05:07):

So the policy of DEI, at least as I understand it, is kind of a strange thing to emerge, given that as you put in your study, it actually has its origins originally in an attempt to establish a colorblind law. So how is it that we go from the colorblind objectives of, say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into at least as it’s been abused, a DEI that creates preferences almost to the point of quotas?

Robert VerBruggen (05:45):

Yeah. What the original civil rights laws reflected was sort of a consensus in America at that time that things had gone very, very badly under Jim Crow and it was not fair for African Americans to be treated the way they’re being treated and to basically ban discrimination by race. And these were written in very colorblind terms, and it was not only discrimination against certain groups was illegal, and it was okay to discriminate against other groups. It was just colorblind language that said, you’re not allowed to discriminate. But there’s always been a vocal minority in the US, and this is a debate that plenty of other countries have, as well, something Thomas Sowell has written a lot about, there’s always the vocal minority that says, no, we should be making more affirmative efforts. We should be discriminating in favor of the population that’s been discriminated against in the past. And that has very rarely actually been written into the law. It’s been very rare that Congress has put colorblind language into the statute books, but what’s been more common to happen is that courts and executive agencies blur the lines of the law and open the door that you see that with affirmative action in higher education. You see that with affirmative action plans in hiring where essentially courts and executive agencies blessed behavior that was pretty clearly not supposed to be happening under the Civil Rights Act.

James Patterson (07:01):

So let’s look at some of those laws, or at least what we might consider the sort of the big moments in anti-discrimination. What are they, and maybe how did judicial rulings or bureaucratic enforcement change?

Robert VerBruggen (07:20):

One of the bigger examples is affirmative action in higher education. The text of the Civil Rights Act says basically you’re not allowed to be denied participation in something that’s funded by the government, which is pretty much all colleges, public and private, on the basis of race. A couple decades or a decade and a half or so later, the Bakke decision comes along and says, well, you can consider race as one factor among many to get the educational benefits of diversity despite the very clear language of the statute that’s on the books. And also the constitutional issue of, especially for public colleges, denying equal protection under the law. It basically says it’s okay to do that. In employment law, you have a few different developments. One is the Griggs decision, which says that the original law had basically said you’re not allowed to intentionally make a test to give to your employees that’s designed to discriminate to weed out certain racial groups.

(08:15):

But you’re protected if you want to use tests to find the best employees. And the Griggs decision comes along and says, actually, if the test has a disparate impact, we’re going to hold you to a higher standard. We’re going to make you basically presumptively liable for discrimination for using that test unless you can defend it in court with pretty stringent rules and also with affirmative action. In private employment, you have the Weber and Johnson decisions which say, okay, if you’re a private company and you think you have a traditionally segregated job line, you can take race into account. If you have an affirmative action plan documenting what you’re doing, you can have an affirmative action plan to take race into account to some limited extent. And these are all things that are just not in the statutes. These are things that courts later kind of allowed out of the sympathy, frankly, with that vocal minority that wanted to do something that hadn’t been enacted in law.

James Patterson (09:11):

Yeah, there was a kind of optimism during the 1960s that with correct legislation and maybe with some kind of federal assistance, there would be a rapid evening out of outcomes. And when these don’t surface, there’s increasingly a justification for interventions that come from the courts. The one that seems to be most important, at least in beginning the process, is the Griggs decision in disparate impact. What does that mean?

Robert VerBruggen (09:46):

Basically, disparate impact means that in the case of an employment test (which is just kind of the textbook example of disparate impact, though the ruling applies to other selection mechanisms too) if you give people a test for the job and one racial group passes it at a significantly higher rate than another racial group that is presumed to be discriminatory, and the employer then has the burden of defending the test, showing that it’s adequately job related, showing that it’s validated. And there’s a whole very technical process that tends to play out in those kinds of cases called a Battle of the Experts, where each side hires testing experts to defend and criticize the test at a very technical level. So it basically says that if you’re going to use tests that have any kind of disparity, they have to be very rigorously vetted, and if you get challenged on them, the judge has to agree with you that they’re appropriate for the job.

James Patterson (10:37):

And the report on the area of employment, it says by the end of the 1970s, the Supreme Court had thrown out a requirement that Alabama prison guards be at least 5’2″ and 120 pounds, and yet allowed women to be outright excluded from certain roles in maximum security prisons owing to sexual assault fears. In the same decade an appeals court threw out a company’s categorical policy of refusing to hire those with criminal records. But the Supreme Court allowed New York’s transit system to refuse to hire addicts on methadone treatment without making case-by-case distinctions among applicants and job roles. The evaluation of written tests came to involve fact-intensive nitpicking of exactly what skills a test measured. I don’t know about you, if I were five one and 115 pounds, I would definitely not apply for a job as a prison guard, but what explains this battle of the experts? There’s a real aversion to being hauled into court and suddenly having to hire a firm or keep on staff a certain amount of legal expertise.

Robert VerBruggen (11:46):

Exactly. It’s not just, you can’t just say, okay, look, I’m using this test in good faith. There’s no evidence that I chose it to a certain racial impact. If you look at the test, I can explain to you why the questions on the test relate to things that I want my employees to know. It’s this really intensive process that stems from the EEOC putting out, they’re called the uniform guidelines. It’s a really long document on testing procedures that does not have the force of law, but that courts have really looked to over the years, and it’s just sort of an additional layer of requirement on employers that want to use tests. So when you use a test, you’re taking the risk of being held into court, and even if it’s a good test, you’re going to have to defend it. You’re going to have to go through the expense of defending it, and you’re going to have to hope that the legal process ultimately agrees with you that the test is a good one. So it’s basically an additional layer of risk that people take on when they try to screen their employees.

James Patterson (12:40):

We have a pretty lengthy history in the United States of what’s called redlining, which were efforts of cities or planners somehow to create housing arrangements in cities that would keep African-Americans out of certain neighborhoods. Do we find DEI as a policy impacting this sort of thing and has it been successful?

Robert VerBruggen (13:04):

Yeah, I mean, I went into the history of housing discrimination a little bit in the report. That’s an area where there’s been, I think, a lot of progress in a lot of different ways. One exception is that real estate agents do in more recent papers, still seem to just steer people to kind of like neighborhoods. And it not clear the extent to which that is because they’re trying to preserve discrimination, which I think is probably not a major motive these days, or if they’ve come to realize that if you have a majority white neighborhood, a majority black neighborhood, people of that race are going to be more likely to rent there. But that is illegal. You’re not allowed to steer people. So yeah, I think that’s an ongoing concern that there has been discrimination in real estate. There are laws to prevent that I think are good laws. And I think there are still, I think the audit studies do show that there are certain ways that those are still being violated, but there’s also been immense progress. There’s been a pretty big drop in a lot of kinds of bad behavior, like telling people that homes or apartments aren’t available when they are, that sort of thing.

James Patterson (14:01):

Earlier you mentioned the Bakke decision and its impact on higher education. Bakke comes down in 1978. What is this case and to what extent is it still controlling on issues of admissions to higher educational institutions?

Robert VerBruggen (14:19):

Sure. Yeah. I guess I forgot to finish my thought. It was the beginning of a very wishy-washy period in jurisprudence over the affirmative action issue. So it was basically, well, you can kind of do it, but you can’t have a quota. You can consider it to increase diversity, but you can’t do it, for example, in the name of social justice. It has to be that you’re trying to get the educational benefits of diversity. And then of course, as the Supreme Court turned back to the right, over the past few years we’ve had the SFFA decision that essentially overruled it without quite coming out and saying that it was overruling. It said that, no, you don’t get this extra sort of broad discretion to discriminate by race just because you’re a college.

James Patterson (15:03):

Great. And an area that, I guess, doesn’t occur to me that often because I’m not in this world, but there’s a fair amount of discrimination or history of discrimination in government contracting. And so maybe explain to an audience that may not know much about this, why this matters and what happened with it.

Robert VerBruggen (15:27):

Sure. Yeah. I mean, over the past 50 years or so, there’s been a number of developments under Nixon going back to Nixon and the Philadelphia plan and a little bit even before that where basically you had an executive order urging sort of diversity in government contracting and especially trying to ensure that African-Americans have equal access to those jobs. But it bled over into basically pretty intensive pressure on government contractors to balance their workforce in that way. And in one of the big developments of the Trump administration is that he rescinded the executive order from the Johnson administration that undergirds a lot of that. So we will see kind of going forward how well that works and how much that kind of trickles down to other layers of government because it’s not just the federal government that does this with government contracting.

James Patterson (16:17):

Yeah, and each of these stories has, I mean, there’s little distinctions and differences in them but they each seem to have the same sort of narrative, which is in the beginning there’s just reprehensible amounts of racial discrimination, especially targeted at black Americans. And then there are interventions in the law attempting to establish colorblindness. There is not the same degree of evening out that everyone had anticipated, and there’s still, less and less so, but there remains entrenched opposition to the law, that justifies greater interventions that haven’t really been repealed except maybe in the case of higher education in the SFFA case you mentioned earlier. But all the same remain sort of around and justifying increasing interventions despite the fact that the motivation of discrimination isn’t really around anymore. And this gets us to a section of the report called “Bigotry Falls, Disparities Persist.” So what are these disparities persisting, and what significance should we attribute then to failures of policy?

Robert VerBruggen (17:29):

Sure. I mean, one of the things I show is that if you look at surveys of whites asking things like, would you object if a relative of yours married someone from a different race? Do you think that people have a right to segregated neighborhoods? Would you vote for a black president if your party nominated one? When those sorts of questions that get at basically, are you a racist? You see a very steep drop off going back to the 1970s. So you’ve had, at least in terms of people being openly willing to admit to a survey taker that they’re racist, you’ve had a pretty drastic change in white attitudes essentially. And you have also seen some other things like audit studies showing that discrimination in places like the labor market may have fallen off as well, but you still see very deep inequalities in terms of things like school outcomes and things like wages, especially the male wage gap is very significant as I talk about in the report.

(18:28):

And that’s been just extremely frustrating. I think for everybody that was hoping for these things to improve and for America to take steps forward from its past that we haven’t seen these concrete outcomes equalize nearly as much as we wanted to. And I think what you see when you dig into the data, which I do a bit in that section and into the studies that have been done on it, is that the effect of intentional discrimination may not be gone, but it’s lessened over the past since the 1950s, 1960s. But instead, you still have these academic gaps and you also have, for example, in the labor market, you have the labor market putting a lot more value on education and skills where those gaps are still quite severe. So I think that there’s a really important discussion to be had around yes, continuing to fight the discrimination that still exists. And I have a section on audit studies in the report that goes into that. I do think that there is some level of discrimination that still happens in places like the labor market and the housing market, but I think we also need to work on things like human capital, making sure that education is sound from the early years and also that people have access to opportunity to apply the skills that they’re able to develop.

James Patterson (19:41):

Yeah, this section of the report really gets into some pretty technical data that you do a very good job of explaining for people that maybe aren’t as fluent in “statisticalese.” That’s not something some of us have to do in our daily jobs. What are some of the limitations of these studies? I see here, for example, formally studying the links among race cognitive skills, educational attainment and income has proved surprisingly difficult owing to certain patterns in the data and technical limitations. Maybe say more about what the problem is there.

Robert VerBruggen (20:22):

Sure. I mean, well, one interesting thing is that there’ve been some studies where you want to statistically control for things like test scores, you want to statistically control for educational attainment. And one of the weirder things is that because there’s such a big test score gap, African-Americans with a given test score actually get more education than whites with that same test score. So basically the test score gap is bigger than the educational gap in that sense. So you get very different results depending on whether you control for one or both. And there’s been a lot of debate in the literature about that. And one of the odder things is that in some analyses, you actually reduce the wage gap more if you just control for test scores as opposed to controlling for test scores and education level. So it’s a sort of conundrum of, okay, what is this actually telling us? How are we supposed to interpret this?

James Patterson (21:10):

And in some of these studies, I’m saying this almost as though I know this for certain, but maybe I should pose it as a question, but in some cases you’re dealing with sample sizes that are sufficiently small that where you control for population, you might end up with pretty few cases making it hard to make inferences. Is that a problem?

Robert VerBruggen (21:28):

It depends what dataset you’re using. If you’re using census data, those data tend to be really big. There are also some longitudinal studies like the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that’s much smaller. You’re going to have sample sizes in a few thousand depending on how you strain out the cases you don’t want to analyze or which variables you’re looking at. But yeah, sample size can be an issue in some of these studies more than others.

James Patterson (21:52):

Well, that’s good to know that a lot of it’s done by census. This isn’t an area where I do any kind of empirical work, so I need to defer to the expert here. One of the things that emerges as a prominent study in this section is one where Patrick Klein and two authors send out 83,000 fake applications to jobs across the country offered by 108 major employers and check to see which received responses. This is a pretty incredible amount of work. Tell me about the results of the surveys and what bearing they have on the sort of broader discussion of DEI today.

Robert VerBruggen (22:33):

Sure. I mean, one thing I’ve been writing about for a while and pressuring people on the left to think more about is this sort of study, it’s called an audit study. The idea is that you send out otherwise similar applicants to do things like apply for jobs. What they did in this study is they sent out, you said 83,000 fake applications, and basically looked to see if the application had a stereotypically white or black name, did that affect whether you got a call back? And I’ve got the numbers here, about 25 percent of the white applicants were contacted within 30 days versus 23 percent of black applicants. So you have, it’s sort of an interesting disparity because on the one hand, it doesn’t sound that big, 23 versus 25. Basically, if you send out a hundred applications, it’s only a difference of two applications getting a response, but that’s basically a 10 percent gap for every 10 successful applications, you’re only getting nine if you’re from the disfavored racial group.

(23:31):

And of course, because this is just one aspect of the hiring process, it raises the question of, okay, if they’re discriminating at this level, what else is going on elsewhere in that process? And I think it’s important to note that when I say that I’m skeptical of DEI, I’m skeptical of reverse discrimination, that doesn’t mean we should lose sight of the fact that regular old discrimination is still a factor and it still matters and it’s still something that we do need to enforce and think about.

James Patterson (24:03):

Yeah, that’s right. There is this sort of persistence in this study to refuse to go to one of these chief narratives, but to stick with the data. That’s what makes it so valuable. I skipped over something I meant to ask you about, which is that there’s been this, especially on the right, some amount of discussion about the impact of family formation on success rates, especially for black men. What if any kind of impact could policy have on those kinds of outcomes?

Robert VerBruggen (24:36):

Yeah, that is kind of the million-dollar question. I’ve been thinking about family policy for a long time. I think there are certain things on the margins that matter. There are, for example, safety net programs that discourage marriage by taking benefits away when somebody gets married, things like that. I think that’s really important. That’s something we should be thinking about. But when you have a gap as big as the gap that we see in family formation in married parenthood, is any realistic government policy going to close that gap completely? I don’t know that it can. And of course, we’ve seen over the past 50 years, what started out with the Moynihan report is a crisis that was focused among black Americans. Instead of closing the gap and fixing it, it’s gotten worse over the years until fairly recently. And also, white illegitimacy rates have gone up, too. So that doesn’t seem to be something that we’re actually making too much progress on.

James Patterson (25:30):

So I wanted to ask you about this one last issue before moving on to the legal landscape, and I’m very curious about this because it’s one that I’ve heard people complain about when describing discrimination, which is the issue of stereotypically black names. Is this still in the Kline study?

Robert VerBruggen (25:52):

Sure, yeah. Yeah. That’s something that they address. They find that the particular name didn’t seem to make too much of a difference beyond the race of it. But there is a lot of research, and I do discuss this a bit in the report, suggesting that different names have different class connotations in addition to having different racial connotations. So there is that question about how much are you measuring class versus measuring race? One of the interesting things I found when I started to dig into this and that I mentioned in the report is a study finding that when there was a survey study about these class connotations and a fair number of people who had stereotyped a black name as being poor, when asked why they did that, they said, well, I know that there’s this income cap and it’s a black name, so I assume they were poor for that reason. So it’s not as clear cut as I think some of the critics resorting to that argument would like it to be. And also, I’m just not sure how good we should feel about it if employers discriminate against blacks but also discriminate against poor white people. It’s certainly worth teasing out the extent to which that’s what’s going on, but I’m not really sure that that’s anything good if that is what’s going on.

James Patterson (27:00):

Right, right. It’s one of these factors that–and I’m going to have a baby soon–it’s one of these things where you don’t realize that the name might actually affect trajectory, but apparently that is an issue now that I have to consider. So when we get to the changing legal landscape, you make a very important distinction between constitutional and statutory precedents, which are more important for DEI issues today.

Robert VerBruggen (27:32):

I think they’re equally important because I think we have an equal protection clause in the Constitution that’s been hugely important in a lot of these issues. The SFFA decision and the Bakke decision relied on equal protection despite the fact that the statute actually has much clearer language. The Bakke decision basically just assumed that the statute was meant to put into effect the equal protection clause despite the fact that it used completely different language. And the SFFA decision said, well, okay then, I guess we’ll decide this one on the equal protection clause. But the reason that I think that distinction is so important is that several of the originalist, or right-leaning, or however you want to put it, judges on the court are extremely reluctant to mess with statutory precedent. They have this sort of assumption or theory where if the Supreme Court screws up a statute, Congress can just pass it and fix it.

(28:24):

Whereas if the Supreme Court messes up the Constitution, it’s much, much harder to pass a constitutional amendment. That’s true as far as it goes, but I’m not really a fan of that way of thinking. I don’t think that the justices adhering to that are going to listen to this podcast and change their mind because of me, but I’m doing what I can on that. I think the problem is that passing a law through Congress requires both houses of Congress and the President all to agree to the same thing. And in the Senate, you might even need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. So if Congress comes to a specific compromise and then the Supreme Court misinterprets that and says it means something else, they might not have the votes to turn that back to what the original compromise was. If any one of those decision makers either doesn’t think it’s worth the effort to put into changing the law or actually prefers that one because this was a compromise, if one part of that compromise actually prefers what the Supreme Court says to what they actually agreed to, they have no incentive to change that back.

(29:20):

So I think this sort of super deference to statutory precedents is a problem, but it’s just sort of a reality of the court that when you’re trying to overcome bad statutory precedents made in the past over issues like employment, affirmative action, you’re going to face a little more of an uphill climb than you do with something like SFFA where you can make your case to the originalist judges and they’re going to take the issue on and come to the conclusion they think is right without being excessively deferential to what was said incorrectly in the past.

James Patterson (29:53):

And I hope the listeners will forgive my academic bias here, but I have to ask just for my own sake. You have here some language here, it says, early signs indicate mixed compliance with the SFFA decision. The first class was admitted after the ruling revealed the kind of substantial demographic changes that one might’ve expected at others, there was virtually no change. Do you think we’re going to have to see more judicial interventions in the future?

Robert VerBruggen (30:28):

Yeah, I think it is actually very difficult to understand what’s going on in a lot of these schools. Basically, the Supreme Court said that you can’t use race as a factor. It didn’t say that you have to remove race from your admissions process and leave everything else exactly the same. Obviously if you were using race heavily before and you stopped using it, you’re going to see a big demographic change. But the more you change other things, the more you might be able to mitigate that demographic change. And the courts seem inclined to let people do that sort of thing, even if they are doing it for the specific purpose of preserving some kind of diversity. Even some of the briefs in the SFFA case from the plaintiffs were basically arguing that schools could preserve their diversity by moving to things like class-based affirmative action and things like that.

(31:11):

So I think it’s going to be very difficult to figure out which ones of these are doing things that are permissible and which one of these are basically still considering race even though told not to. And also where the courts are going to draw the line between what’s permissible and what’s not, because I think there’s a big gray area of policies that colleges may adopt specifically for the racial effects that probably would not be allowed in other contexts. For example, if you were trying to discriminate against black people or Hispanics, I don’t think that kind of thing would be allowed, to deliberately design your process to minimize their presence. But I think that the courts do seem pretty deferential to saying, hey, colleges, you can do things like class-based affirmative action. You can tweak those preferences with diversity in mind a bit. You just can’t use race directly. And I think finding out where to draw that line is going to be an interesting battle in the years to come.

James Patterson (32:06):

Yeah, that is, and I’m sure it’s going to be difficult to make everyone happy with any kind of result. There are some smaller programs you mentioned here and you highlight a COVID-era program targeting debt relief to black farmers and how it was replaced by a sort of thinly veiled, maybe more constitutionally compliant version. Is this a regular event in legislation where there are these handouts based around identity

Robert VerBruggen (32:40):

That has been much more unusual. As I lay out kind of earlier in the report, to me, the main thrust of the history is that Congress passes colorblind laws, and then the courts go back on it. Here, you had something that was kind of interestingly the reverse. You had big democratic majorities, and you had this sort of racial justice moment where people were very inclined to accept that sort of thing, so that Congress actually passed it and the Supreme Court rejected it, and then Congress tweaked it up a bit more. So I feel like that was part of the DEI fervor that we saw circa 2020, whether that’s over for good or whether we’ll see it again is an open question.

James Patterson (33:19):

Yeah. I have to wonder how many people were actually able to benefit from that. It’s a strange program, but I guess you never know what’s going to be in the law until you pass it. As a famous former speaker…

Robert VerBruggen (33:31):

You’ve got to pass it to know what’s in it.

James Patterson (33:36):

One of the worst things ever uttered about Congress. Also true, unfortunately, in many cases. In the midst of all of this, you reach a pretty poignant passage here. You say, “a backlash against double standards is a natural reaction, and racial favoritism raises additional issues as the nation diversifies and the horrors of the past decades recede. It’s one thing to grant preferences or special protections to black workers who attended segregated schools as children. It’s another to grant preferences to Hispanics over Asians for the foreseeable future, merely because the latter tend to perform better academically and economically. So while an identitarian equity-seeking approach has certainly shown itself to be a political possibility, it has proved neither popular nor desirable as an actual solution to the country’s racial problems.” Is this sort of where you land, or do you think this is where you think America’s landed?

Robert VerBruggen (34:38):

I think it’s both. I think any realistic solution going forward has to take public opinion into account. Even if I were to disagree with public opinion, I just think, you’re going to have all these people of different races living together and competing with each other for jobs and slots and colleges. You’re going to need a regime that has popular support, I think. So I think policy views need to be informed by public opinion to some extent in that regard. And I think the reality is that Americans never really made their peace with race-conscious policies. Even in some of the surveys, there does tend to be a racial gap, but even black support for a lot of these policies falls below 50 percent. So it’s a matter of, I think Americans generally want fair processes and equal opportunity and a fair chance to compete. They don’t want a thumb on the scale in terms of race. And I think public policy is going to have to sort of confront that reality and readjust, especially as we become more diverse. And as I said in that passage, as the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow fade into the past as we continue forward as a nation.

James Patterson (35:48):

Yeah, and in some ways there has to be some amount of time passing. We have a black justice on the Supreme Court who endured that life. He’s now 80, Justice Thomas. I’m reminded in that passage of something. I taught for a year as a visiting professor at Hampden-Sydney College. It’s a small men’s college in Central Virginia, and there was a generation of some white, some black men who were more or less illiterate because of massive resistance, in which they shut down the schools. They had illiterate parents, and so they were at that formative age when they would’ve learned to read at school, but never did.

Robert VerBruggen (36:32):

Yeah. It is a thing where each generation that passes, hopefully, those things go further into the past and are replaced by the better times that we’ve had more recently in that regard. So yeah, it’s one thing in 1970. It’s another thing in 1995. It’s another thing today, and it’ll be another thing 25 years from now, and my hope is that we will learn to find ways of focusing on concrete disadvantage and making sure that everybody has opportunity and everybody has a good education, and then letting people compete from there.

James Patterson (37:03):

So we’ve covered the courts a lot, but there’s a section on the future of DEI both in how the executive and the judicial branches will approach it. So maybe say a few things about what those predictions are.

Robert VerBruggen (37:19):

Sure. Well, essentially, what we’ve been seeing even since this report came out is obviously a huge push from the Trump administration. There’s obviously a very big Democratic Republican divide over this that we’ve seen in previous administrations, including the previous Trump administration. But this seems to me to be at an entirely different level. I mentioned that he rescinded the affirmative action and government contracting executive order. He’s reoriented the civil rights enforcement agencies so that they’re not relying on disparate impact theories anymore. He has started to take seriously reverse discrimination. It’s never actually been legal to put a job posting up that says you don’t want any white people to apply for it. But we’ve seen that, especially in colleges, that sort of thing. There’s a lot of things that have just been flagrantly illegal that they’re finally going after. And my hope is that this is going to be an even-handed enforcement effort.

(38:12):

If you look at the EEOC’s press releases on the cases that they’re talking about, there is still a mix of traditional civil rights enforcement, where you might have a case where black or Hispanic workers are being mistreated or being harassed at work, and they’re pursuing that still. I think that’s fantastic and it’s good, and also enforcing it even handedly, and obviously getting a lot more news coverage for going after DEI practices. So the executive branches have just seen this enormous reversal. I don’t know how much of that will last over the long run. Certainly, if a Democratic president is elected next, that’s all going to go out the window. I don’t know if that is going to create a precedent, kind of a standard for future Republicans to live up to or not.

James Patterson (38:56):

So in an area where you talk about the possibility of a grand bargain in Congress, which is interesting. I am happy to hear people still take Congress seriously as a source for changes. That was probably my favorite part of this was oh, Congress. But yeah, they can actually pass laws, not just make hits on cable news. So you say that the compromise could be, and there’s more to it than this, but the central nature of the compromise is effectively jettisoning disparate impact as a way of solving the problems created by the left, and in order to ameliorate the jettisoning of it, the government funding studies that would actually attempt to measure real discriminatory practices. And then throwing the book at those firms. Who are the buyers for this? Who are the people who might want this kind of law?

Robert VerBruggen (39:59):

Well, I mean, I think most people want an even-handed enforcement of anti-discrimination law. I think most people would think it’s unfair to say, you gave people a test and some people failed it more than others, so therefore we’re going to drag you into court and make you miserable. I think a lot of people would also think it’s unfair for there to be genuine discrimination where people are being rejected because of their race. I think that people who genuinely believe in colorblindness, I would say, are the buyers of that policy. And I would hope that it would be a little bit of a left-right compromise where the left gives up kind of this DEI approach to the issue that I think they’re paying some prices for in terms of public opinion anyhow, but the right admits, oh hey, there is still some discrimination out there. Why don’t we make more of an effort to address that? Why don’t we try to study it in a rigorous way and work with firms or sue firms as needed if they’re rejecting applicants because of their race?

James Patterson (40:53):

You’ve run into a problem, not you specifically, I’m sorry, Americans run into a problem where the two parties have to negotiate within their coalitions in their extremes. And on the right, you have people who are still racialists, right? And they’re self-discrediting in some degree, but still they manage to be a problem for people who want to take this on. And if you’re like me, and unfortunately, too online, you see a lot of their nonsense. But the left has more of an issue here because their more radical fringe, or their more radical advocates, are people who are, in some cases, actually employed as people in DEI organizations or activist groups. And so their checks are cashed on the basis of implementing these policies, whether it be for private firms that have brought in DEI executives or work as consultants. So this is essentially a hard sell for them, right?

Robert VerBruggen (41:57):

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the idea I put forth in the report is the centers of the two parties come together and pass a bipartisan bill, whereas increasingly what we’ve been seeing is that you have some fringe elements in both parties and increasing polarization among the electorate at large. So instead of passing a bipartisan bill, you wait until you have a trifecta and do what you can then. And I don’t think that’s a healthy way of making policy. And I think you’re obviously right if you look at that and say, that’s never going to happen because of this polarization and this refusal to deal with the center, I think. But yeah, I mean, I felt like it was helpful to at least outline in the report what it would look like if Congress did something that was consistent with public opinion, in my opinion, a fair policy.

James Patterson (42:44):

Oh, I didn’t mean to criticize you. I was, like I said, I was happy about it. I was just worried that it’s hard enough to make radical fringes of whatever side you’re on compliant, but when they’re paid not to be compliant, it’s even harder. So just as a final question here, how hard is it to make this very data-driven, complicated argument to people that are accustomed to dealing with DEI as either a term meant to imply an elevated racial consciousness or a form of racial favoritism?

Robert VerBruggen (43:25):

Yeah, I think one of the things I did in the report is try not to get too wrapped up in the term DEI. I mean, I certainly use it in the report. I don’t think you can talk about these issues without doing it. But honestly, after I work at the Manhattan Institute, we do a lot of work on DEI. And nonetheless, I still have trouble telling you exactly what it means, because as I said before, it means different things to different people. What I tried to do in this report is kind of connect the current DEI discussion, wokeness discussion, to all of these policy developments and all of these debates we’ve been having since the 1960s to some extent even before. And to talk about how anti-discrimination laws evolved and how it might move forward in a way that’s productive and that could gain the consent of the American people.

James Patterson (44:12):

So again, this study, “Fight Bias and Legalize Meritocracy: A Unifying Vision for Antidiscrimination Law.” Its author is our guest today, Robert VerBruggen of the Manhattan Institute. I hope everyone moves over there to take a look. We barely scratched the surface in terms of the material he covers, really, in 20 pages. I don’t think I could have done it. So thank you so much for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Robert VerBruggen:

Thank you for having me.

James Patterson:

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

Zohran Mamdani, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist, set off a flurry of commentary after upsetting Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral race. He may be the beginning of a wave of radical socialist sentiment. While a certain amount of political physics seems to be at work, with the Trump-MAGA vibe-shift setting off an opposite reaction, we should look deeper at why there seems to be so much energy behind collectivism on both sides of the political aisle. Collectivism is a kind of “political junk food” that people crave in periods when they are particularly hungry for community and solidarity.

Collectivism means socializing things through force, rather than through voluntary community. Collectivism demands forced redistribution of wealth and uses this or that version of the “common” interest to undermine individual ownership, choice, and rights. In housing policy, collectivism takes the form of subsidizing home ownership through the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It also looks like NIMBYism preventing housing and land development for the sake of the “community.” 

It can give rise to specific policies; with Mamdani, for instance, it means explicit rent control. The public school system, especially its school lunch and after-school programs, forces everyone to contribute financially to feed and teach some people’s (the “community’s”) kids. And our national entitlement programs—Social Security and Medicare—require everyone to participate and, supposedly, benefit everyone.

The legacy of entitlement programs from FDR to LBJ has been largely framed in terms of charity, solidarity, and community. Many people on the left, and even some on the right, laud these programs for creating a social safety net and for contributing to the fabric of society. Some have hailed these collectivist programs for reducing poverty. 

But collectivism is not charity. Nor does it generate true solidarity. Nor does it constitute civil society. It pretends to be and to do all these things. Collectivism wears the mask of charity and camaraderie. Though collectivism always brings tragedy, pointing out past failures doesn’t fully unmask it. It continues to capture people’s imaginations because it feeds their desire to belong and to participate in community. Like a pastry or a box of french fries, it seems particularly appealing when citizens are ravenously hungry, though those may really be the moments when solid sustenance is most sorely needed.

Aristotle argued that human beings are political animals. We are social creatures that must live in communities. And as rational creatures, we must engage in governance and participation in those communities. Tocqueville noted how the genius of the United States was its unleashing of voluntary associations for any and every problem and goal. Robert Nisbet famously argued in Quest for Community that Americans’ ability to form new voluntary associations as old ones became obsolete has been severely hampered by the rapid growth in the size and scope of government.

Collectivism is junk food for the body politic and for civil society. It superficially and temporarily addresses issues of belonging and participation. In collectivism, we have an unhealthy civic diet. Instead of the leafy greens, lean proteins, and healthy fats of civic associations, under collectivism, the body politic feeds on the hydrogenated oils and sugary starches of forced socialization. We’ve replaced a largely (classical) Mediterranean diet with the modern American diet. 

Collectivism also masquerades as the means to living justly and generously. After all, are we not a noble and generous society because we spend billions of dollars to care for poor children with school lunches and the SNAP programs, to care for poor adults through welfare, to care for the sick through Medicaid, and to care for the elderly through social security and Medicare? Are we not “just” when we ensure every kid gets an education, or when we create government programs to “right” past racial or socioeconomic discrimination? 

The people campaigning and voting for Zohran Mamdani certainly believed they were advancing justice and generosity by backing a candidate who promised greater collectivism. For them, participation in political action to advance government social programs fulfills their obligation and desire to do something good for others and to belong to a “community.” Yet the collectivist policies proposed by Mamdani are deeply coercive and will undermine the health of civil society.

Getting rid of collectivist junk food is a start, but we also must reintroduce healthy food to the body politick again.

Consider again the young college graduates who drove Mamdani’s radical candidacy to electoral success. They engaged, for a time, in political advocacy. But what do they do after the sugar rush fades? Do they return to building their families? Most are not married, and those who are likely don’t have children. Do they return to building up their churches, synagogues, or mosques? Most are not part of these institutions. We can be forgiven for wondering whether they engage in real civic associations at all.

Collectivism also seems to answer many people’s cultural insecurities. On the political left, many wealthy, educated people feel deeply uneasy about their success and blessings, which they label “privilege.” And others, who have not done so well economically and are saddled with five, sometimes six, figure debt from their college years, resent the hand they were dealt and how they have played it. Collective government programs of welfare, redistribution, and rent control look like appealing solutions.

The political right has different cultural insecurities. Many worry about declining labor force participation among working-age men, about the opioid crisis, about falling birth rates and falling family formation, about declining manufacturing employment, and about reduced national defense capabilities. They suggest a naïve free trade, free market, and limited government philosophy allowed corporations to wipe out communities and their corresponding civic institutions, especially in middle America.

Collectivist policies seem to soothe these anxieties: restrictions on international trade, promotion of labor unions, large government spending programs, modifications to the tax code to engineer social results—all have been advocated by Republican officials over the last few years. Collectivist “solutions” also exist to address more general anxieties about corporate “bigness” and “foreign” competition.

Finally, collectivism is difficult to combat and to reverse because it builds a self-reinforcing cronyism around itself. As ever greater sums of tax dollars are used to fund collectivist endeavors, more people, companies, and industries stand to lose from reform and reduction of government spending. The outcry over DOGE when federal funds were frozen revealed just how extensively federal dollars reach into society—seemingly everywhere. 

Special interest lobbyists and everyday Americans are not likely to let their taxpayer-funded livelihood disappear without a fight. So what can advocates of freedom and civil society do to combat collectivism?

We can work to build private institutions that promote belonging, participation, and meaning. Religion remains the essential bulwark of civil society. Voluntarily associating with others to worship God and to do His will has animated many of the greatest and most widespread acts of charity and civilization-building. There are many hopeful signs on the religious front from rising church attendance among young men to a leveling off of the growth in “Nones.”

There has also been a sea change in the legal landscape for the free exercise of religion. People of faith can increasingly bring their religious beliefs and commitments into the public square. What’s more, the explosion of school choice programs across the country has broken the collectivist government school monopoly, thereby creating more space for educational innovation and decentralized voluntary institution-building.

We should relearn and reinvigorate the American penchant for forming voluntary associations. Conservatives ought to direct more of their attention to local politics rather than national politics. People have to choose to go to city council, school board, and county commissioner meetings. They have to be willing to join commissions and committees. This requires effort, thought, and deliberation. It can’t be done while binge-watching Netflix or taking long vacations. 

And, of course, combating collectivism involves kindly but firmly calling out collectivists’ misappropriation of justice, charity, and solidarity. Language matters, and we should not cede words to be redefined or allow people to throw inaccurate labels on things. We should make the case that collectivism replaces healthy voluntary association with unhealthy coercive socialization.

Finally, we can all practice cultivating wisdom and self-governance in our lives. Rightly ordered souls contribute to rightly ordered families, which contribute to rightly ordered societies. Getting rid of collectivist junk food is a start, but we also must reintroduce healthy food to the body politick again. And we need to train ourselves and others to find such food appetizing. 

That is the surest way to keep collectivism at bay.

The meaning of American conservatism is perhaps more hotly contested today than at any other point in the movement’s history. In his book, Religious Liberty: A Conservative Primer, John Wilsey argues on behalf of what he calls “aspirational conservatism”—an approach that stresses an allegiance to the permanent things over and against populist rage and postliberal ideology. For this symposium, Wilsey presents his case for aspirational conservatism in a new essay, and two Law & Liberty contributors review his book.

Why would anyone, of any age, want to be a conservative? When I was a younger man, my thoughts were mostly preoccupied with the future. I was a cash-poor Christian school teacher right out of college, and I thought about how my career would advance. I was a single man when I graduated from college, and I looked forward to meeting a girl who would become my wife. I thought about fatherhood, what it would be like to own a home, and all the sorts of things people think about when they first get started in life. Why would young people be attracted to conservatism?

Now that I am in my fifties, I think more about the past. Since I likely have more days behind me in this life than ahead of me, what is the use of aiming for lofty goals in my family or in my career? My children are wonderful, and they are on the cusp of leaving home and starting their own families and careers. I have reached all of my career goals, and have no further professional ambitions, other than to finish my teaching and writing career with dignity. If statistics have any reliability as a guide, I have maybe thirty more years of life left. When I am gone, the vicissitudes of life will no longer be my problem. Why care about conservatism?

Maybe I’d want to be a conservative because I want to see my political party in power. Or maybe I want to win arguments on social media, and my conservative politics can help me own the libs. Or perhaps I can only be happy when I’m miserable, particularly when things change. Apparently the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel is making some changes to their restaurant ambiance, decluttering and brightening up the dining rooms with white paint. Horrors!

What is the point of conservatism? Is conservatism only relevant for politics and partisanship? Is it only the neighborhood crank, the peevish uncle, or the lunatic on Facebook that has an interest in being a conservative? Or is being a conservative like being a traditionalist, resisting change for no better reason than, “we’ve always done it this way”?

In other words, can we think of any good reason to be a conservative other than politics, culture wars, or traditionalism?

Of course we can! When conservatism is only about tradition for tradition’s sake, maintaining the status quo, or fleeting partisan power mongering, it is repellent, not attractive; it is boorish, not classy; and it is misanthropic, not humanistic. In my recent book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, I attempt to lay out an alternative vision.

American conservatism is as old as the Republic, and that conservatism has always been far upstream of politics. Politics is important to conservatives, but cultivating the permanent things—the good, the true, and the beautiful—is of primary importance. Conservatism is a temperament, a disposition, an attitude that looks to conserve those things in humanity that make life worth living.

I also think of conservatism as aspirational. Conservatives do not value the permanent things like Aesop’s dog in the manger, or as a miser who stuffs a hoard of cash in the mattress. We seek the conservation of the permanent things for the sake of the freedom and flourishing of individuals, societies, and the nation. Aspirational conservatism aims for an ever-higher destiny for persons, guided by the best of American tradition, while always acknowledging human limitations, the inevitability of change, and the ubiquity of imperfection. In this way, conservatism was made for man, not man for conservatism.

Aspirational conservatism is a standpoint looking up to the eternal, behind to the past, around about in the present, and ahead to the future.

The best way to explain aspirational conservatism is to point to concrete examples, rather than rely on the theoretical or the abstract. The best man, the greatest man, I have ever known in my life is my grandfather. Jasper N. Dorsey (1913–90) was a husband, father, and grandfather, an Army officer in World War II, and a loyal citizen of his home state of Georgia. His career began in 1936 after graduation from the University of Georgia: he climbed telephone poles for the phone company, earning twenty-two dollars a week. He retired from AT&T in 1978 as CEO of all operations in Georgia. He spent his last years, 1978 to 1990, as a syndicated columnist for forty newspapers across Georgia. We called him “Papa.”

Papa was a devoted Christian, a conservative of the William F. Buckley school, and an indefatigable optimist. His optimism was not of the overbearing or annoying sort, nor was it based in naiveté. Papa came of age in the depression. He worked his way through college by finding employment at a rock quarry, loading rocks on wagons. His hands were so rough, he said, he could strike a match on his palm to light a cigarette. As a college senior in 1935, he came close to death from malaria; he and my grandmother lost their firstborn baby days after his birth; and they lost their twenty-one-year-old son, who died in a car accident driving home in a rainstorm.

Nevertheless, Papa was full of joie de vivre. He loved animals—dogs, cats, pigs, and mules. He loved food. He relished feasting on tomatoes, cucumbers, collard greens, turnip greens, okra, radishes, sweet potatoes, and all kinds of vegetables. He loved the thrill of bird hunting, loved the Georgia Bulldogs, loved Coca-Cola, loved his native town of Marietta. He loved his wife of fifty-one years, his daughter (my mother), and my brother and me. He read history, literature, and political philosophy, and especially enjoyed the ancient Greeks and Romans. His columns sparkled with his wit and eloquence on all these subjects, including politics and economics.

In his weekly columns, Papa overflowed with gratitude for people he loved and admired, places he’d had the opportunity to visit, and the inestimable pleasures of reading good books. “The best memories,” he wrote in 1985, “are often the simple things that are beyond price; a letter of encouragement, a book earned as a reward, a note of thanks for a small kindness, praise for an early achievement, or an award of recognition which required self-denial and hard effort.”

He loved books like no one person I have ever known. I have many of Papa’s books, and the notations in his old books are a lasting and living connection I have with him, even though he is gone. “With the marvelous world of books,” he wrote, “we own the magic carpet. We can visit all the ancient, exotic seas and shores. And everyone can go—rich and poor alike. As a child I was greatly blessed by my initiation into the world of books. With them, there is no boredom or monotony. The world is before you.”

Papa loved animals, and wrote about them in his columns. He wrote about the dog they owned when they bought their first house in 1947. He was a German Shepherd named Booger, who quickly “took possession of us and the neighborhood.” Booger was a fine guard dog against magazine salesmen and mailmen, and was always accompanied by a big Doberman, whom Papa called Booger’s “assistant dog.” “These two dogs loved children and neighbors but terrified deliverymen and peddlers.” He also wrote about a cat they named Mama. After acquiring Mama in 1968, she delivered thirty-four kittens by 1971! They brought a Schnauzer dog named Jackson into the home to keep Mama company, and she “raised him like a kitten.” Mama disappeared for over two weeks at one point, and we all thought she was dead. She limped back home having been run over by a car, but the vet fixed her up, and she lived till the ripe old age of fifteen, “doing all the cat work on a large lot, and without any help at all, except from her dog.” Papa closed that column with these memorable words: “If people ask for divine guidance, work real hard and are lucky, they can be as good as dogs and cats.”

To close the year 1986, Papa wrote his audience a benediction as they looked forward to a new year. His words summed up his whole personality and his love of life. He wrote,

I wish you old friends and new, to share your pleasures, to rejoice with you in your triumphs and to stand with you when life knocks you down. Friends to lift the ache of loneliness and dull the edge of grief; friends who’ll listen to your stories with a smile and laugh at your jokes, even when they aren’t funny.

I wish you a mind unafraid of mental adventure, a mind tickled by curiosity and awed by the wonder of small things; a heart that trusts beyond reason, even when faith is assailed by overwhelming odds.

I wish you work to do that has meaning and value both to you and others, work that challenges and inspires and offers the unique human thrill of accomplishment beyond expectation.

I wish you an abiding sense of humor, the power to see the ridiculous in life and in oneself, to be entertained rather than shamed by it. And the mysterious, wonderful ability to make others laugh.

I wish you a consuming desire for justice tempered by mercy, a sense of responsibility leavened by lightheartedness, the grace to forgive without rancor and the humility to be forgiven without resentment.

I wish you the capacity to see beauty not only in grandeur in great mountains, in great symphonies, but in small things in unexpected places, to hear music in common sounds, to see art in common sights and to retain forever a zesty appetite for the hors d’oeuvres of life; the stranger’s smile, the meaningful touch, the lingering sound, the scent of nostalgia, the piquant flavors of the stew of existence.

I wish you a new year filled with accomplishment, good health, and the warm relationships that so often come to those who embrace life instead of rejecting it.

Auntie Mame said it: Life is a banquet, and some poor fools insist on starving to death. God bless you and keep you in the hollow of His hand.

Papa was a great humanist, but his humanism was tempered by his strong belief in the reality of human sin and fallenness. He was a critic of anti-human ideologies and practices, such as abortion, the sexual revolution, corruption in government, disarmament in the face of the Soviet threat, and the trivialization of education. He could mock shady politicians with an acid wit, like when he wrote of the liberal Georgia senator Wyche Fowler that “he has all the qualities of a dog, except loyalty.” He was committed to the American tradition of self-government and individual liberty, to religious freedom and freedom of religious expression in the public square, and was a great defender of the unborn.

What is the point of being a conservative? Being a conservative means that, like Papa, you aspire to a greater destiny as a human person. Aspirational conservatism is looking to the best of American tradition in the interest of improvement as individuals, as families, as societies, and as a nation. Aspirational conservatism is not utopian, because it is realistic about human limitations. But limitations are not constraining, they are liberating. Freedom, for instance, is made true by the constraints provided by just law and order. Limitation of resources teaches us the value of patience, thrift, and stewardship for the benefit of ourselves and of those who would come after us. And limitation of mortality helps us remember that we will not live forever, so we must make the most of the opportunities we have before us in the present. We can then do what we love, but also come to love the things we have to do. Therein is the key to contentment in a life of limitations.

Americans have always been a people of aspiration. Christians are also people of aspiration. Christ commanded us to be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). We all know what it means to strive for improvement in our physical, moral, and spiritual lives. To be an aspirational conservative is to heed the call of Jewel the Unicorn in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle: “Come farther up, come farther in!”

My grandfather was the best and greatest man I have ever had the pleasure and privilege of knowing. If I could be half the man he was, I would consider my life a success. For my whole life, his life legacy has been goals for me to strive to attain, like a high peak on the horizon to navigate to, to scale and climb, and perhaps one day, to reach the summit. Though dead, he still speaks to me, and I aspire to model him, to steward his legacy, and to hand his legacy down to my children. They never knew him, and yet, I hope their lives are animated by his voice and example so that they may benefit from his generous, wise, and hopeful spirit.

Aspirational conservatism is a standpoint looking up to the eternal, behind to the past, around about in the present, and ahead to the future. Such a standpoint is not merely to enjoy the scenery, although the scenery is breathtaking. We are informed by such a standpoint as we seek for, find, and cultivate the good and the freedom of the human person.

The American Right seems intent on proving John Stuart Mill’s infamous remark that “conservatives are the stupid party.” Not only is the populist movement in Washington foundering because of infighting and general boorishness, its intellectual equivalent in the so-called “postliberal” movement also seems to be descending into anger and what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures.” Neither force seems to be the engine of cultural renewal that they promised to be.

John Wilsey’s new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, offers a beautiful alternative: a vision to which conservatives might genuinely aspire. At the very outset of the short treatise, he turns to the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville. And rightly so—with the possible exceptions of Publius and Abraham Lincoln, no other political thinker has more fully understood the deepest meaning of America. Wilsey highlights especially his contention that our civilization is the result of a productive tension between two spirits: the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.

At present, both of these spirits are at great risk of vanishing altogether. Religion has been in decline for quite some time, and what Robert Nisbet called the “omnicompetent state” continues to grow unabated. Wilsey’s book, however, is useful precisely because it can help us understand the civilizational resources we still possess. In this slim volume, he teaches us that we cannot conserve Permanent Things such as religion or liberty by seizing power or imposing our will on either our friends or our enemies—rather, their preservation depends above all on love.

Wilsey’s treatment of Tocqueville’s “two spirits” put me in mind of something similar that the Frenchman’s great mentor, Edmund Burke, once wrote. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Irishman too claimed that “all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.” To his conservative mind, it was the gentleman who could defend liberty by embodying everything that was best about his society.

For Burke, the gentleman enjoys a kind of “exalted freedom” through the cultivation of the moral imagination. The Western literary and philosophic tradition furnishes his mind and heart with certain chivalric concepts, perhaps most poetically described as the “unbought grace of life,” according to which he can govern himself. The French Revolution was dangerous insofar as it sought to banish this chivalry from public life and extinguish the glory of Europe. Burke hoped instead that the rule of the best men could be united with an elevation of sentiment which could prevent abuses of power.

Although to American ears this defense of the gentleman may sound hopelessly aristocratic, there was in fact something deeply democratic about Burke’s vision. “Without force, or opposition,” Burke wrote, the spirit of chivalry “subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.” The generous aristocracy Burke and his followers prized was founded, as a matter of fact, on the Christian doctrine of universal equality before God.

Wilsey’s own term for this way of life is “aspirational conservatism.” He holds—rightly—that this kind of vision can “defend the best of the American character” because it can help us see the fundamental harmony between religion and liberty. But it is unfortunately manifest that there is very little aspirational about the entity we call the “conservative movement” today. Despite their leaders’ endless claims that we are on the precipice of a “new golden age,” the dominant factions have proved time and time again that they are incapable of conserving anything at all. As Wilsey puts it, “The rightism of contemporary times is populist, obsessed with politics, and fueled by social-media-inspired outrage in a similar style as their leftist counterparts.” Reactionary rage is no substitute for genuine cultural renewal.

Secular ideologues have sought to degrade our perception of the divine, but the structure of American freedom itself revolts against their efforts.

Wilsey’s finest explication of this problem with contemporary rightism is his critique of Stephen Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism. Although he concedes Wolfe and other Christian nationalists are right to perceive growing forces of tyranny and immortality, he also explains that their attempt to construct an ideology to fight it is misguided at best. Whereas aspirational conservatives seek to preserve and enjoy the Western heritage, Christian nationalists and other right-wing ideologues instrumentalize and weaponize it.

At one point, Wilsey quotes Wolfe’s precise definition of Christian nationalism: “a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.” These kinds of hyper-logical systems emerging right-wing ideologues construct tend to reduce religion into a mere weapon to beat back modernity. Theirs is a deeply rationalistic approach to politics, which undermines sentiments at the heart of the institutions they claim to be defending.

And that is precisely why Wilsey criticizes it. Rather than upholding the aspirational conservatism at the heart of American civilization, Wolfe and others attempting to create a rightist ideology embrace the same kind of totalitarian impulses that our country stood against in the twentieth century. They may profess to love “the nation” as an abstract category, but they are hardly patriots who love our republic’s particular history or principles—that kind of love is too complicated to withstand their totalizing vision. Christian nationalists have far more in common with philodoxers and ideologues such as Hegel and Marx than statesmen and philosophers such as Lincoln or Plato. As Wilsey writes, “There is not much daylight between Wolfe’s counterrevolutionary method of statecraft and leftist revolutionary models.”

The errors of ideology also explain why the contemporary right has become so vulgar and ungentlemanly. Content to play in the realm of what Richard Weaver called “god-terms and devil-terms,” they utterly lack the virtue of humility Burke saw as essential to civilized life. Their demagoguery may, on occasion, secure them a little temporary power in elections—but it does not inspire the genuine conversion of the heart needed to turn enemies into friends for the sake of the common good. Hyper-rationalized moralism cannot maintain what Lincoln described as “our bonds of affection” or restore “the better angels of our nature” he spoke about so eloquently—nor revive a sense of our common nationhood. Look no further than the faction’s behavior on social media; rather than persuading anyone of the goodness of their vision, they spend their time typing away at insults and ephemeral arguments no one can win. In short, the ideologues of the right have destined themselves to play the role of not-so-beautiful losers in American politics.

What is most necessary in this hour of decline, then, is a conservatism that can help citizens aspire to be gentlemen again. At its best, the twentieth-century movement achieved this. William F. Buckley Jr.’s courtly social graces on Firing Line captivated audiences and inspired imitators. Russell Kirk’s romanticism cast a spell over the minds and hearts across Middle America—including Ronald Reagan’s. The genuine renewal these figures promoted is possible again, and it is to Wilsey’s great credit that his book draws our attention back to this prospect.

In good Burkean fashion, imagination is the heart of Wilsey’s conservative project. Citing the example of George Washington—America’s finest gentleman-statesman—he argues that we need to find better ways of “catechizing” citizens and statesmen alike. The General was able to achieve all he did because he was “formed by books” of the Western canon that taught him something about “the relationship of the eternal to the temporal.” He came to inwardly possess a series of images that informed the sense of the Good Life that guided his political action. Aspirational conservatism seeks to remind the people of these “internal philosophical foundations,” rather than promote “an external pragmatism” which values power above all else.

Throughout the book, Wilsey looks to the oft-neglected Peter Viereck as an exemplar of this aspirational conservatism. Unlike the activists who would largely determine the direction of the postwar Republican party, Viereck was a historian and poet—a man of letters first and foremost. He wrote to move his readers’ hearts. Aspiring to be a gentleman in the Burkean sense of the term, Viereck understood his own conservatism not as a tool to win elections but rather as a way of life. In this sense, we might encourage young people to look to thinkers like Viereck as models to imitate.

Viereck was also, admittedly, an eccentric. He rarely showed up to teach his classes on time, wore a scarf year-round, and could be prickly in ways that made him difficult to work with. But Wilsey sees this strangeness as an important aspect of aspirational conservatism:

[Viereck’s] eccentricities, bizarre as they were, reflected the emphasis he placed on the individual personality over mindless conformity, which is deeply important to the conservative disposition. In our own culture, which is too often obsessed with mindless conformity, a professor like Viereck probably would just be fired, and that would be that. Our times are blander and our skies greyer in the absence of such eccentric geniuses, people of personality. Alas we are the poorer.

Aspirational conservatism, then, aims at redeeming personality from the prevailing culture of dehumanization. Its goals are bigger than politics, even a politics of freedom. In Reflections, for example, Burke acknowledged that “liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind,” but he also warned that he could not judge it a good if it were “stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” We must, therefore, place the first emphasis on preserving a culture of elevation.

That is not to say, however, that Viereck entirely avoided politics in his own day, or that aspirational conservatives should avoid it altogether now. Wilsey explains that his political engagement was largely a “fight for a private life.” He wanted to contend against the choking consumerism of a godless culture and the despotism of the total state, to create a space in which human beings had the liberty to flourish according to their created purpose. For the aspirational conservative, politics is not merely a contest for power but rather a contest for dignity.

Religious Freedom is a serious work of scholarship from a true gentleman—something our movement sorely needs in such desiccated times.

The Southern agrarian M. E. Bradford once articulated this well in an essay of his own on the Duke of Wellington as “The Last Great Englishman.” Like Washington, the Anglo-Irish soldier consciously shaped his life according to a gentleman’s perception of the Permanent Things. “Indeed, because he was an antique Englishman, because Napoleon and imperialism hidden under rhetoric offended his inmost self,” Bradford wrote, “Wellington was able to recognize his campaigns as ‘war to the knife’ and therefore, with grace and quietude, to communicate his own inflexible view of their desperate significance to the men who marched beneath his banner.” When freedom is at stake and dignity is on the line, the gentleman is willing to fight.

This is perhaps why conservatives have seen the most success in recent years fighting for religious liberty. Secular liberalism poses genuine threats to our natural right to worship freely—the most overt recent example, of course, being the government-mandated shutdown of churches during the coronavirus pandemic. The good news, of course, is that the foundations of the American political tradition are strong enough to resist those threats. As Wilsey puts it, “We support the separation of church and state, not because we want to empower the state against the church or redefine religious liberty as a tame and lifeless ‘freedom of worship,’ but for the sake of free religious exercise resulting in the security of liberty for all.” In recent years, at least, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld Americans’ First Amendment rights against the most aggressive abuses, and public opinion generally opposes them as well. Even the pandemic-era restrictions were widely opposed and eventually rolled back. Whatever extremisms lurk in the background of American politics, the foundational principle of religious liberty remains strong.

To put it another way, recent victories on these issues prove that aspirational conservatism just works. Unlike the brittle electoral wins and media bluster of populism, these are concrete successes conservatives can fully celebrate. This realistic politics of freedom—not the rationalistic politics of authoritarianism that too many on the right now embrace—provides the space aspirational conservatives need to go about the business of cultural renewal. It enables us to reform institutions that are straying from their missions or build new ones altogether.

But in a larger sense, as I believe Wilsey would acknowledge, conservative victories against secularism in these religious liberty issues have a metaphysical import. As he puts it towards the end of the book, “the consciousness of God is vital to human nature.” Secular ideologues have sought to degrade our perception of the divine, but the structure of American freedom itself revolts against their efforts. “In a democracy where equality of conditions is the norm, religion is necessary to liberty because it reminds citizens that they are not laws unto themselves,” Wilsey writes, summarizing the central insight of Democracy in America. “Put simply, Tocqueville found that the consciousness of God and the recognition of human fallibility and limitations contributed to ordered liberty by restraining political passions.”

As conservatives continue the fight for religious liberty, and for the life of the republic, we would do well to look to John Wilsey and Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer as a model. This is a serious work of scholarship from a true gentleman—something our movement sorely needs in such desiccated times.

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at a panel on the book during the 2025 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters.

In Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor John Wilsey calls for harmony between religion and (political) liberty in America. “Harmony” implies the possibility of dissonance, a clashing relationship he assigns to religious postliberalism. If we are to infer a connection in Wilsey’s subtitle, however, what then is the relationship of religious liberty to conservatism? Since freedom for freedom’s sake is not the aim of conservatism, what is being conserved, and to what end? If, as Wilsey asserts, “Protestantism was essential to the ideas of the Founding” then must Protestantism in America be conserved? What else must be conserved?

Wilsey’s introduction has its own religious quality. It is a stirring jeremiad about “Americanness” illustrated by intentional and optimistic purpose in the character of Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, and Clare Boothe Luce, for example. Wilsey defends what he calls “evolutionary, dispositional, humanistic, and aspirational conservatism” against identity politics, right or left, and hyperindividualism. Wilsey summons us to save young people filled with anxiety and despair by revitalizing American values and inoculating them against the pessimism of postliberalism. We can, he says, use conservatism to preserve classical liberalism.

Wilsey then moves to his main argument with a short and sometimes playful introduction of conservatism. His argument centers on his experience beginning in the 1960s, when conservatism was a respectable intellectual and political movement. For Wilsey, conservatism is Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan. For his students, it is “conspiracy theories, defeatism, MAGA, the MyPillow guy, covfefe, Jerry Fallwell Jr., or kitschy Christian nationalism[,] … trivial, doleful, desperate, weak, and lacking intellectual rigor, imaginative clarity, or depth of character.” Conservativism should be “inspiring, animating, and life-giving.” What is needed, he argues, is a new conservative ethos inspiring us to “reach far beyond our own temporal existence.” This new conservatism is what he calls “aspirational conservatism,” a pre-political temperament, attitude, and way of life. It aims at a higher moral destiny guided by permanent things, tradition, and just order while reckoning with a sinful human condition. The first exemplar of Wilsey’s aspirational postwar conservatism is Russell Kirk.

While Kirk is likely familiar to most readers, Wilsey’s second exemplar is probably not: Peter Viereck, a poet and historian who taught at Mt. Holyoke College. Wilsey laments that Viereck “has largely been forgotten by many conservative scholars.” Viereck abandoned them first, however. He identified as a conservative in the 1950s but soon disassociated from the movement.

Unfortunately, Wilsey’s summary of Viereck’s dissatisfaction with other conservatives—Kirk, Frank Meyer, or William F. Buckley, for example—is too simple. For example, to say that Viereck’s “negative review” of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale “won him exactly zero points with Buckley” or that Meyer valued “dogmatic purity,” provides no real insight. Given that Wilsey’s project includes criticizing contemporary conservatism, what can we learn from Viereck’s critique of his own contemporaries?

Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence.

Though Wilsey doesn’t mention it, Viereck accused his contemporaries of playing favorites. One of those favorites, Viereck lamented, was Manchester liberalism (i.e., free trade), so one wonders if he would approve of Wilsey’s defense of classical liberalism or a marketplace of religions. Viereck is certainly a safer fit for Wilsey insofar as Viereck opposed nationalism, but Wilsey does not marshal Viereck’s arguments against it so much as his opposition to “Ottantotts,” which Viereck characterized as reactionary utopians relying on obscurantist nostalgia. Ottantottism, Wilsey believes, now characterizes much of contemporary conservative thought and action.

Wilsey’s third exemplar isn’t a person but what he calls the “Black conservative tradition,” exemplified by Thomas Sowell, Robert Woodson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Star Parker, for example. Though white and black conservatism “grew from different fields and soils,” Wilsey argues, “and should be considered distinct one from another,” there remains essential agreement and compatibility between them. What distinguishes black conservatism is that it was born resisting the unjust political status of blacks and therefore had to focus on reclaiming lost freedoms and directing individual achievement away from government redress. Central to this effort, Wilsey says, is the black church encouraging educational and economic community and opportunity. This discussion of black conservatism is worthy, albeit missing a nod to Shelby and Eli Steele. One wonders, however, whether in the spirit of religious liberty, Wilsey considers the Nation of Islam equally capable as the black church to empower.

Successive chapters on aspirational conservatism’s use of imagination, nationality, ordered liberty, history, and religious liberty are a combination of polemic, admonishment, encouragement, and biography. Wilsey argues that conservatism has traded both the “interior life” and pure religion for power politics. To counter this, Wilsey calls the reader to solutions including Great Books, stories of great Americans, and knowledge of transcendence. He argues that imagination and history are necessary not only for a correct conscience but also for both nationality and ordered liberty.

Imagination and history join to create nationality, which he says must be “re-created” every generation through ritual, symbolic practices, and civil religion rather than relying on presumed “facts” of nationality—the worst case being appeals to blood and soil. The latter refers to the worst impulses of postliberals. Fine enough, but what to do with (for example) Kirk’s argument that without British culture (including laws, faith, and institutions) America would have no culture at all? Kirk didn’t consider that culture a re-creation but a patrimony. It would be silly to assert, as some postliberals might, that only British people (whatever that means) may preserve British culture. But neither can it be re-created at will. Two centuries of British colonial rule in India barely eked out an establishment of British cultural institutions there. The Anglo-Afghan wars and our own War on Terror did nothing to create nationality. Culture includes abstractions and organic particulars. It can’t be bred into perpetuity, as postliberals would have it, but neither is it simply re-created. Both solutions are too simple.

Wilsey’s discussion of religion is likewise too simple. For example, he argues that one need not be a Christian to be an aspirational conservative—but it helps. Imagination is, as Wilsey defines it, not the creation of fictions but the perception of truth. God, he argues, is the compass for such a pursuit. But his argument suggests that this is so because God enables a transcendent consciousness not unlike being out in nature. So long as we acknowledge transcendent truth, then, do we even need existing religious traditions? After all, Wilsey says, “None of us can escape the consciousness of God—even atheists.” Why not then passively possess it as an atheist might, so long as one acknowledges a world beyond our senses?

Wilsey certainly encourages religion as a route to the natural (and moral) law. He also prefers that religion not be distracted by politics. These are not easily disentangled, however. In America, which Wilsey says had its identity and purpose shaped by Protestantism, was the deeply religious character of the struggle for American independence, abolition, or the civil rights and pro-life movements, then the co-opting of purer religion? Or were they a reflection of religion’s moral law, rightly working itself out in politics? As popular movements, did they appeal to consciences formed by a specific religious tradition? Or by walks in the woods? Was the reference to God in these appeals simply a foundation for transcendent truth, or did the mention of God summon hearers to personal moral accountability to a Divine Person who will judge them for moral lapses?

Wilsey also argues that religious liberty promotes religiosity through competition, but did the longstanding Christian America that Wilsey compliments as helpful for national identity and purpose exist because it simply beat out all competitors on its merits? Or is it more correct to say that it encultured millions of Americans because it enjoyed a monopoly on public institutions that were anything but secular, neutral, or remotely “competitive” until relatively recently? To argue that (Protestant) Christianity succeeded in America for centuries thanks to a truly free marketplace of religious ideas is akin to claiming that Americans chose cars, especially with combustion engines, because they are so obviously superior to bikes, public transit, or electric cars—ignoring the advantage gained from infrastructure and geography.

What may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful?

A few other blind spots and ambiguities are evident in Wilsey’s discussion of religious liberty. Like many others, his picture of America’s religiosity (because of its religious freedom) is juxtaposed against a relatively irreligious Europe. The argument here is not unlike juxtaposing bright capitalist South Korea alongside dark communist North Korea. There must be an explanation for these otherwise similar places being so dissimilar, right? Wilsey, like others, asserts that it is religious liberty. However, while it is true that Europe does have a few taxpayer-funded religious establishments, these establishments are almost entirely superficial and exist alongside extensive religious freedom, not unlike America’s. In short, neither religious freedom nor religious establishment is a believable explanatory variable.

Furthermore, how irreligious is Europe in fact? If religiosity is defined by belief in a higher being (the essential aid to truth, Wilsey argues) or identification with a religious tradition, Europe is surprisingly pious. Finally, if religious liberty is so important for deep religiosity, why is it that religiosity in America has decreased while religious freedom has increased over the last half-century? Why isn’t this more extensive religious freedom bolstering religiosity? Can it be instead that the relatively high religiosity of recent memory, the experience of Silents, Boomers, or Gen X, is owed not so much to religious freedom but to a more pronounced and discernible generational public piety fading ever since SCOTUS encouraged greater neutrality and secularity? See, for example, Aaron Renn’s thesis about a growing “negative world” for Christianity in America.

Finally, Wilsey’s arguments are tidier if one stays in a Western context. India and Lebanon have no established religion. Both are more pluralistic and religious than America, but they are also more syncretistic and given to religious violence. Why? Indonesia has a state religion, which should make them irreligious according to Wilsey’s reasoning, but its people are deeply religious. Furthermore, would all the faiths practiced in these countries sustain the ethos and institutions Wilsey appreciates in America? In the American case, Wilsey is presuming upon a particular kind of religious freedom, birthed under particular cultural (and theological) circumstances, in a certain organic and historical context—a context much richer than simply having God in one’s consciousness.

Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence. Wilsey is concerned with America’s declining role in the world, the rise of populism, a loss of support for American ideals and institutions, the decline of popular media, and the rise of social media. His students would identify problems like economic disruption, a widening wealth gap, and the perceived failure of American ideals and institutions. They would praise the variety of popular and social media.

Wilsey says that he does not intend the book to be a “Get off my lawn” moment, but are the younger generation’s concerns owed simply to an impoverished inner life and populist inclinations? Can conservatism adapt to these more emotional and alienated times? Is it as rational as Wilsey suggests? Or can it be more dispositional, as Michael Oakeshott suggested? For example, Wilsey dismisses epic poetry to make sense of the past because it is not “verifiable through evidence.” But his examples of the earliest historical research, Herodotus and Thucydides, did not presume to provide just evidence. They reflected sentiment. Even our contemporary Great Books movement, including classical education, assigns Homer next to Herodotus without hesitation because both reveal permanent things.

And even more to the point, what may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful? John Adams, for example, had a rich inner life, but his vision was enabled by men and women who were arguably populists in their time. If conservatism aspires to be more than a vision, especially in a marketplace of visions, these challenges must be taken seriously.

The following is based on a keynote address delivered by the author to the biennial meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association on March 27, 2025.

It is not a coincidence that the emptiness and aridity of so much of our era’s cultural and intellectual life comes at a moment when the arts and practices of conversation have become all but extinct. To be sure, people have not stopped talking to one another, even if they now often mistake an exchange of text messages, sent and received hunched over a tiny screen, as “talking,” and seem to prefer restaurants in which attempts at conversation end up like the discourse of platoon sergeants, shouted over the dining room’s racket. But a copious volume of words being exchanged does not translate into that thing called conversation. Particularly in an era in which openness and candor, even between friends, can prove to be dangerous in the long run.

A great deal has been said and written of late about free speech: whether it is even possible, whether it has intrinsic limits, whether it is inherently biased for or against certain groups, or whether it might be more injurious than beneficial to the well-being of a community. These questions all deserve airing. But I think most of us would agree that a greater degree of commitment to freedom of speech on our campuses and in our public life would be a salutary improvement over the walking-on-eggshells environment that we’ve had to endure for far too many years.

But what would be far better is a commitment to the kind of mutuality and breadth that the term “free conversation” implies. Particularly if Michael Oakeshott is right that conversation, as opposed to mere utterance, is such an important feature of our very humanity.

Oakeshott’s Conversation

So much of what Oakeshott valued is prefigured and modeled by that uniquely human activity, which he perhaps most famously referred to as “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” It is in conversation that “thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another,” without a “symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials.” And perhaps most remarkably, even audaciously, he contended that “it is the ability to participate in conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.”

What might we learn from him today, to help us in the work of restoring and reorienting ourselves?

Well, first of all, we can learn that what he called “the conversation of mankind” in his great essay on the voice of poetry is not merely a transitional state to which we have to accommodate ourselves temporarily, until a fuller consensus about all things, presumably grounded in science, can be arrived at. No, it is the human condition, at least the condition of civilized men and women. Our participation in that conversation is an end in itself, not the means to some other end, and not an activity incidental to our human nature, let alone as a reluctant and provisional accommodation to an imperfect world.

There is a paradox here. Our participation in a common life is what makes it possible for us to converse, while our differences are what make our conversations worth having. And it is by its nature something that requires a certain freedom and spontaneity to thrive. (Hence the term “free conversation” is a redundancy.) It is, as Oakeshott says in the “Voice” essay, and in other places as well, “not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit.”

The concept of “conversation” and its central place in the life of civilized human beings suggest to me some practical considerations that can be drawn from Oakeshott for the betterment of American life. And that is the way that conversation implies the central importance of proper scale in healthy human associations. A fully reciprocal conversation implies a certain propinquity and stability, and containment, rather like the hortus conclusus, the garden enclosed, of medieval lore. It fits well with Oakeshott’s emphasis on the local, which would be those kinds of communities whose scale can accommodate the possibility of conversation, and whose stability with reference to “place” makes those conversations rooted and distinctive. (The very etymology of the word, conversation, goes back to the Latin conversari, “to live with, and keep company with.”) In other words, the voice of Oakeshott ought to pull us back toward a renewed emphasis upon Burkean themes of local patriotism, as opposed to national and universalistic sources of identity, and toward the preservation of smaller-scale and local forms of association.

So that is one possible gift of Oakeshott’s emphasis upon the centrality of conversation. Let me mention another, which follows logically, and is, I think absolutely central to Oakeshott. And that is a release from the burden of purposefulness, from “the rage to reform,” as Oakeshott calls it, the burden that the predominance of the rationalist disposition, and of the enterprise associations through which it is expressed, including the regulatory state, imposes upon us. This release would be akin to the idea of the “usefulness of uselessness” or to the interesting parallel that has been drawn between Oakeshott’s insights and Johan Huizinga’s portrait of homo ludens, of man’s capacity for play as one of the necessary conditions for the development of human culture.

Oakestott warned, “a university will have ceased to exist” when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.”

I would put it even more strongly, that there is something barbarous and inhuman about a mode of existence in which one never allows oneself to repose in satisfaction and gratitude for what one has, or for the things one has been given by and in and through the conditions of one’s mere existence, but must ceaselessly seek to innovate, to grade it, evaluate it, improve it, reform it, remake it, perfect it. A philosophy that fails to resist that relentlessly instrumentalizing tendency is all too likely to succumb to it in one way or another, perhaps by emphasizing the degree to which the person is or can be self-made, thereby allowing the supposed primacy of the will to tyrannize over all other aspects of existence. Think of William Ernest Henley’s triumphant proclamation: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” The greatest of Rationalism’s illusions is precisely this illusion of mastery, an illusion whose rabid and single-minded pursuit is unable to produce either success or happiness. How much more humane is Oakeshott’s untriumphant but sweet description of poetry’s power to release us, and enchant us, with “a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.” A release from the burden of purposefulness.

Speech, Expression, and Conversation

What about a renewed commitment to free speech, in our culture and in our colleges? There I would be a bit more equivocal in my judgment, seeing such freedom as necessary but not sufficient. Necessary, because free speech is one of the chief ways that we test for the truth of our assertions. The most important defenses of free speech have never been the ones that assert that the truth is relative or unknowable or personal or tribal. Instead, they are the ones, such as John Milton’s great Areopagitica, that praise the refining fire of contrary opinions as the best way to complete the incompleteness of our knowledge. If the COVID years taught us anything, they taught us that we cannot allow ourselves to become mindlessly deferential to the putatively superior wisdom of censors and anointed experts to determine the truth for us.

But the restoration of free speech, and of the ethos that supports its flourishing, is not the full cure to what ails undergraduate education in America. Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it is also something more than that. It is a community of shared knowledge and memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present, as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built. Without the prior existence of that accumulated body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. That is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, and forms the basis of a rich and enduring common life.

Oakeshott’s vision of the university as “a place of learning” presumes such commonality as the necessary basis for the proliferation of a multitude of conversations—and the richer the commonality, the deeper and more varied and adventurous the conversations can be. But on the other hand, he warned, “a university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research,” when teaching has become “mere instruction,” and when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.” Is that not where we are now, for the most part … and that only on a good day?

It is here that I must regretfully express a significant disagreement with the Chicago Principles, so named because they were propounded at and promulgated by the University of Chicago, under the courageous leadership of its then-president, the late Robert Zimmer. I honor Dr. Zimmer’s memory and achievement, and I think he did a great deal of good in providing a text that over a hundred institutions have been able to rally around, to reassert the university’s fundamental commitment to free inquiry.

And yet the Chicago Principles leave an important problem unaddressed, and they compound that problem precisely by their failure to address it.

You may recall that the document is called the “Report of the Committee on Free Expression” … not of “Free Speech” (or not, for that matter, of “Freedom of Inquiry” or “Freedom of Conscience”). This is not an unimportant difference, although the text of the report also employs “speech” instead of “expression” in multiple instances, as if there were absolutely no difference between them.

Let me add that the Chicago Principles are not unique in emphasizing “expression” rather than “speech.” The Woodward Report, published in December 1974 by a committee at Yale headed by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward and still one of the best such guides to the virtues of academic freedom, also uses the same language. Its official title is the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale.”

In neither of these two influential documents is attention given to any difference of meaning between “speech” and “expression.”

There are consequences to such semantic slippage, particularly if it is conscious and deliberate. The ultimate justification for free speech is inseparable from the fact that it is speech that we are allowing to be free.

By saying it this way, I mean that speech, discursive language—what the ancient Greeks called logos—has a special dignity. It is the human gift par excellence. It is the medium through which we engage in rational deliberation, the way that we work things out together, solve problems, state and apply moral principles, or principles of action. We use it to map the battle plans that we will employ in the conduct of our lives. It is the means by which we are able to be “political animals” in the way that Aristotle describes us—not just animals that live together, but animals that have the capacity to deliberate together on questions of the common good.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—staged screaming, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, flag-burning, taking a knee—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech.

Animals share with us a capacity for expression of pain and pleasure, but not a capacity for speaking with analytical cogency about those things, holding them out at arm’s length, so to speak; describing them with the requisite precision, making judgments of value among them, and incorporating those judgments into the life of a human community. In fact, Aristotle is saying that it is our capacity for “partnership in these things” that makes a community possible. We might add that it is what makes conversation possible too.

Speech occupies a middle ground between thought and action, a sort of buffer zone in which we can consider, together, with abstract detachment, different courses of action, prior to acting upon one of them. The whole idea of allowing speech to be free depends upon its being securely situated in and mostly confined to this middle transitional zone. (Speech that represents a “clear and present danger” is proscribed precisely because it violates this fundamental understanding.)

We engage in this sort of provisional thinking all the time, as when we deliberate together in considering competing scenarios, whether Plan A is better than Plan B, which plan will have what consequences, and which simulation or imaginative projection is likely to provide us with a more accurate reading of future events, and thus a more effective plan of action. In a truly deliberative environment, individuals collaborate with one another in thinking through their plans, both in constructing them and then in evaluating them, implementing them, and considering together their moral implications. It is the singular virtue of speech that it makes possible such activity in the middle zone between thought and action.

This understanding of speech as a refuge for provisionality and reflection runs in remarkably close parallel to Oakeshott’s beautiful description of the university as a place offering “the gift of an interval,” as he put it in his 1949 essay on “The Universities”: a place in which one could “put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place.” University could be “an interval” in which “a man might refuse to commit himself,” in which he might “taste the mystery” of life “without the necessity of at once seeking a solution” for it. It provides us an opportunity to “practice that suspended judgment of which the ‘neutrality’ of liberalism is so pale a shadow.” And all of this, he concludes, happens not in a vacuum, but “surrounded by all the inherited learning and literature and experience of our civilization.”

Expression, the Opposite of Speech

Expression, however, is something distinct from speech. It is a more or less romantic term, an emotion-laden term, referring to forms of communication that may or may not be verbal, and may or may not be part of a deliberative process. Its romantic quality is reflected in the word’s etymology, deriving from the Latin exprimere, “to press out.”

Expressive liberty tends to be a one-way thing, a monologue, a cry of the heart, like the Sammy Davis Jr. song “I Gotta Be Me,” not a contribution to collective deliberation about truth. We sit back and listen to the monologue, like moviegoers in a darkened theater. We are spectators. The experience can be enthralling, moving, powerful, passionate. Shocking, even. If it is a great work of art we are confronted with, we might be uplifted, or feel our spirit crushed, by what we see. Perhaps our thinking about some social issue or historical personage has changed. If it is inferior art, perhaps not.

But either way, there is no room for us to answer it, to engage it, or to offer an alternative view in counterpoint. Expression qua expression is all about “my voice,” “my truth,” “my narrative”—and it must be heard! And in some sense, it must be deferred to or ignored.

One could write an interesting history of how this blurring of concepts came about in our general culture, how two things that were so clearly distinct a mere century ago have become so conjoined in our thinking as to be indistinguishable. But that is where we are now. “Words are violence!” shouted the student protesters at Middlebury College in 2017, borrowing the words of the novelist Toni Morrison to shout down their campus visitor, the sociologist Charles Murray, and threaten him and his host with violence. As if violence could also be an expressive act, a form of language. Such actions collapse all meaningful distinctions, and undermine the possibility of a college in which speech can serve its highest good, and provide its students with that gift of an interval, in which the high art of conversation can be enjoyed and cultivated.

But often the point of using an expressive gesture or image rather than a verbal declaration is precisely the imprecision that expressive symbolism permits. Words can generally be answered and contested and clarified and amended, in dialogue and conversation and debate with others using words. But the gesture has a powerful finality about it, an unanswerable quality—or it can only be answered by another unanswerable gesture: you insult me, and I insult you back; you block me, and I block you. This is the kind of gestural misanthropy in which our era increasingly specializes. It is not a good model for democratic deliberation, let alone conversation.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—taped-up mouths, armies of Atwood-inspired handmaids, staged screaming, audiences that wheel around and turn their backs on invited speakers or drown them out with chants, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, morons who glue themselves to valuable objects, flag-burning, taking a knee, kick-boxing Congresswomen as performance art—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech. The courts, including the US Supreme Court, have been indulgent in furthering this trend. I could multiply examples or emphasize that this is a practice of all political parties and persuasions, but the point is that we have come to accept passively the notion that these expressive acts are functionally equivalent to more conventional forms of speech.

Learning suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence.

But they are not. In fact, these examples represent the opposite of speech. Rightly understood, speech, logos, always entails the possibility of an answer, of interlocution, of dialogue, of engagement, of argument—in short, of talking back. Or, to put it more optimistically, of conversation. Instead of offering the opportunity for further exchange, such examples seek to foreclose the possibility with utter finality.

When we equate speech with expression, we deny or diminish the unique property of speech: as the medium of deliberation, of the interval, as that middle ground between thought and action, and as the instrument by which we are given an interim space, to seek and test the truth.

A Wild Flower Among the Wheat

Conversation is a term that defines the essential character of our complex and unique civilization, the civilization of the West. I believe it was Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the University of Chicago’s most influential presidents, who popularized the idea that the Western intellectual tradition was best understood as a “great conversation.” It is a way of talking about the West that may sound a bit hackneyed by now. But also may be, like Wagner’s music, better than it sounds.

For one thing, it pays attention to the fact that the thinkers of the past and their accomplishments do not die, but linger on in the present: as exemplars to be emulated, as foils to do battle against, or simply as sources of ideas and metaphors and models, but above all as thinkers who need to be responded to, and can be responded to. In that sense, Plato’s work is as alive today as it has ever been, as much a part of the activity of philosophy, and you can substitute a dozen other names for his, and the statement would be just as true.

But there is a more fundamental way in which the West can be thought of as a long conversation. Its two most important constituent elements are called by the names Athens and Jerusalem, as expressed by the Church father Tertullian, and they were and are rivals. Athens stands for the spirit of free rational inquiry undertaken in a fully intelligible world whose contours and dimensions are fully commensurable with our powers of understanding. Jerusalem stands for the spirit of piety, which concedes the weakness of human understanding and the inadequacy of unaided human nature, and insists that we are utterly reliant for guidance upon the few ways in which God has revealed Himself and His will to us, and that such reliance constitutes a wisdom superior to any ratiocination, since God’s ways are not ours. It is by our faith that we are saved and not by our knowledge; and there is “nothing better than the fear of the Lord … nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord.” 

How to reconcile the two? We haven’t. (Aquinas has perhaps come the closest.) But the conversation between them is in some sense the essential core of Western intellectual history, and the secret of the West’s vitality—a life lived “between two codes.” We would no longer be ourselves, should we become all one or all the other.

I’ve called the relationship a conversation. Some have preferred to call it an antagonism, a great debate, or a warfare between science and religion, or something even more combative or martial. But the proper study of the Western past is more fittingly described by the notion of conversation, as Oakeshott understood conversation: as something that forswears the desire for victory by one side or another, or any similar form of closure, but instead exists for its own sake, recognizing and respecting all the elements in play.

“The pursuit of learning,” he says, is not a race in which the competitors jockey for best place, it is not even an argument or a symposium … we do not ask what it is ‘for’ and we do not judge its excellent by its conclusion” because in fact “it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day.” It thus suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time—an interval—from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence. Call it a foretaste of heaven, or a wild flower planted among the wheat. Or a rose in the cross of the present.

We can only hope that the cultural changes that lie ahead of us may not destroy what is left of this aspect of life in the university and more broadly in the republic of letters. I wish I could be more optimistic about that. But one does what one can, and leaves the odds-making to others.

Why are there so few men in the restaurants, bars, and coffee shops where the women like to recreate? This is the question posed by Rachel Drucker, 54, in the recent New York Times “Modern Love” column, Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. Drucker is a veteran of the 1990s sex positivity who worked for Playboy and its “affiliated hardcore properties,” and has plenty of experiences and exes to her name. She implores men to re-engage women like her as friends and lovers. 

Perhaps the saddest, most evocative lines of her lament are these: “There was a time, not so long ago, when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast. When the act of staying the night didn’t announce a relationship, just a willingness to be human for a few more hours.” 

If we think of sexual mores like a Goldilocks story, Drucker feels that she and her contemporaries came of age when everything was “just right.” The implied interpretation of events goes something like this: In the olden times, a relationship (or, in very olden times, an engagement or even a marriage) was a prerequisite for sharing a bed overnight. Today, with easy access to pornography and male resentment of women’s empowerment, people have lost interest in “be[ing] human.” It’s apparently too much even to ask a man to show up to dinner before asking to come upstairs. 

Where, a bewildered Drucker wonders, did the happy medium of her own experiences go? What happened to the casual sex that nevertheless entailed an intimate decency, which to some extent belied and delimited its “casual” moniker? 

That “happy medium,” however, never existed as such. It was a composite, transitional reality: the lingering fumes of the old rules and mores alongside the lived insistence on no rules or mores at all. So long as traditionalist sexual morality was widely accepted as legitimate, even if not widely practiced, those that flouted its dictates still did so with at least the plausible claim of covert discretion. But when the last fumes of traditionalism died out, the precarious norms Drucker remembers with such fondness disappeared as well. 

Today, in relation to phenomena ranging from sex and dating, to marriage and family formation, to sociality itself, there is an erosion of what so recently felt like unimpeachable standards. Perhaps, it turns out, those fumes of the old ways were responsible for the continuance of our baseline humanity, both personal and societal. Perhaps a post-patriarchal, post-religious, post-institutional world turns out to be a post-human world as well.

Mommy Wars No More

In the season six Sex and the City episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), perpetually single protagonist Carrie Bradshaw is dismayed that someone absconded from a party with her $485 stilettos. She is even more frustrated when the party host, a married mother of three, not only fails to reimburse her for the loss but also “shames” her, calling it “crazy” to spend $485 on designer shoes—ones that, in fact, she used to wear herself before she had what she calls “a real life,” intimating that Carrie’s unmarried, childless existence is less worthy of respect and deference than her own. 

Carrie, fuming, recounts indignantly to her friend Charlotte that she has bought this very friend an engagement gift, a wedding gift, and three baby gifts, not to mention traveling for her wedding. She has spent, in total, “over $2300 celebrating her choices.” Charlotte tries to offer context: “But those were gifts … if you got married, or had a child, she would spend the same on you.” Carrie responds: “And if I don’t ever get married or have a child, then, what, I get Bubkis? … If you are single, after graduation, there isn’t one occasion where people celebrate you. … I’m thrilled to give you gifts, to celebrate your life; I just think it stinks that single people are left out of it.” 

What Carrie fails to recognize is that we give such gifts not to celebrate these individuals’ morally neutral “life choices,” but rather to honor marriage and childbirth as laudable and societally desirable. If they are no longer seen that way, it is only a matter of time before not just the norms of dating (which emerged as a prequel to marriage and family) but also the broader norms of treating other people with reciprocal dignity erode as well. After all, the very notion of giving gifts to celebrate milestones like marriage and childbirth is, at bottom, a statement about our shared investment in the institutions to which we all, whether married or not, owe our societal stability. To personalize this reality in a resentful, individual way, as Carrie does, is to grossly underestimate the fragility of society itself. 

Like Carrie, Drucker wanted to be able to break all the old rules—and facilitate others doing so. What she, like many of us, does not understand is this: Discarded norms do not remain forever in their diminished place so that we can continue to break them, secure in the certainty that there will always be something, however remote, to push back upon. On the contrary, mores are difficult to form—but quite easy to break. 

Both the precipitous decline in fertility rates that everyone across the political spectrum now acknowledges as an impending crisis, and the melancholy of straight women who find men receding en masse from shared social and sexual life with actual, living women, can be understood as the unsurprising productions of a society that does not celebrate marriage and family as uniquely important institutions. 

Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

When adulthood was still considered, socially and professionally, to some degree inextricable from romantic partnership—that is, when perpetual singleness still raised eyebrows if not wagged tongues—we had more dates, leading to more marriages and more children. The erstwhile ability of 50-something single women to engage men as dinner companions cannot be separated from that broad social ecology. 

Yes, these one-time norms involved trade-offs. In an era that all but mandated matrimony, single women tended not to have the kinds of stable, well-established lives that today make tying the knot seem, to many, a next-generation Carrie Bradshaw, like a raw deal. Women in earlier eras also, more often than many conservatives want to admit, settled for terrible marriages. No one wants to go back to that. 

Many people, however, like Drucker, harbor great nostalgia for a time when we treated each other with basic decency. What they fail to recognize is that reciprocal decorum is not natural, but socially constructed. The old norms, for all their admitted limitations, institutionalized treating each other better than we default to treating each other without any norms at all. In Drucker’s youth, people largely flouted those old norms de jure while retaining their spirit de facto. While they may have conceived of themselves as rebels who discarded all the old mores, the truth is that they owed everything to the fumes of the very scripts that they saw themselves as having discarded. 

Today, by contrast, we have in fact adopted the nonchalant, “you do you” premise of Carrie’s screed—even while we still purchase (a diminishing number of) wedding presents. One predictable result of this total eradication of erstwhile norms is the dearth of men in the spaces where Drucker and her friends recreate. Another sad consequence is the devolution of our social decency more broadly. 

It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if No One Comes

In a recent essay titled “Go Where You’re Invited,” speaker and author Katherine Martinko highlights a viral video from therapist and author Esther Perel, in which Perel responds with insight to the now near-ubiquitous phenomenon of invitees to a social event canceling at the last minute. Mulling over the endless echoes in the comments on Perel’s video, along with her own experiences being cancelled on, Martinko offers: “It appears we’re living in a time when people don’t hesitate to bail on their friends for reasons that range from justifiable to absurd. This reveals an appalling lack of etiquette that gives zero consideration to what it takes to host an event of any kind.” Indeed, we are; and indeed, it does. 

Socially responsible millennials find it difficult to count on friends showing up to a planned gathering for the same broad reason that our single or divorced aunt can’t get a guy to invite her to dinner: The rules, judgments, and premises that produced the norm—in this case, showing up where you say you will—are long gone. 

Yes, technology has facilitated this decline in erstwhile etiquette. Just like the pill made commitment-free sex a lot less risky at baseline, texting made sending an invitation to a bunch of people much easier. Thus, as Perel points out, the people on the receiving end of an invitation often think they aren’t particularly important or central to the gathering. So, they don’t bother to respond, or they respond but feel no shame about cancelling at the last minute. Additionally, the ubiquity, ease, and breadth of at-home leisure—delivered food, streamed television and movies, and so on—means that going out is no longer necessary for entertainment. 

Nevertheless, the moral, ideological, and psychological aspects of this seismic social shift from a default of conscientiousness to a default of casualness cannot be discounted. 

Not so long ago, we had expectations of friends that reflected a bygone era of formalized, reciprocal sociality. Yes, the calling cards described in Jane Austen novels have been a remnant of the distant past for some time, as have the dance cards that persisted into the early twentieth century. But the commitment, courtesy, and reciprocity that those measures institutionalized persisted until quite recently, even in their absence. 

Of course, there have always been flakes, freeloaders, and idiosyncratic types who do not reliably follow mutually understood social expectations. But when those norms are nonetheless followed by enough people to remain expectations—and when those who don’t follow them as norms therefore pay some price—there remains a shared recognition that others’ time and attention have implicit and agreed-upon value. 

But today, the de facto adherence to the spirit of those old rules around social etiquette has disappeared, just like the rules themselves did a century-plus ago. So, everyone is free to accept the invitation but bail if something better comes along or if she “needs a break.” No one, however, wants to be on the other end of this new normal. 

As our growing crisis of loneliness shows, it simply does not work like that. Wanting to avoid social accountability but have access to social community is the equivalent of working in the porn industry and wondering where all the thoughtful dinner conversationalists went. 

Civilization, and its attendant civilized treatment of one another, it seems, takes a long time to build and no time at all to destroy. 

Many of us mourn the absence of niceties like acknowledging receipt of a gift and thanking the giver, feeling obligated to invite someone to one’s home after being invited to hers, or responding to invitations and then showing up when and where you say you will. But in order to understand the depth and breadth of what’s really going on here—rather than narrowly saying “the individual friend who didn’t thank me is rude” or “the individual guys who aren’t texting me back are jerks”—we have to recognize that these shared expectations of politeness and dignity were never inborn settings, but products of first de jure and then de facto socialization. 

Which is now gone—and by our own hand.

The ubiquitous self-care industry is chock full of reassurance that “it’s okay to say no,” and cautions against reflexively saying yes, and admonitions to “put yourself first.” Now, full disclosure: I would benefit greatly from a modest mindset shift in this direction, and so would many of the other highly attentive, responsible women in my friend set. Yes, many of us, myself included, are eldest daughters, and it shows. And yes, if we did not surge quite so reflexively to familial and communal responsibility, many of us would be healthier and probably also happier. 

Yet most of us operate the way we do because we are aware on some level that we live in a world that has defenestrated the collective institutions, mores, and social graces that once held people together. Those of us who understand this can throw our hands up at the absence of the institutions, mores, and graces that once existed to facilitate and institutionalize treating one another with warmth and dignity—or we can attempt to preserve, revitalize, and embody them. 

We who make the latter choice tend to find one another. And we tend to evince public respect for (even if we don’t privately follow) the rules and norms that undergird those institutions, mores, and graces to which we owe our own and myriad others’ lack of loneliness. 

My advice to Drucker and her friends, if I may be so bold: Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

My hope—and my hunch—is that some dinner invitations from men worth a “yes” won’t be far behind. 

The rise of artificial intelligence is the single most important trend of our time. The changes it will wreak on human life eclipse not only all other contemporary technological developments, but also any since the Industrial Revolution. The new pope recognizes its salience, choosing as his regnal name “Leo XIV,” because just as Leo XIII was confronted with the social change from the Industrial Revolution, he seeks to confront the even more dramatic change from AI.

Breakthroughs happen monthly now. OpenAI’s o3 model recently scored higher than 99.8 percent of competitive programmers—while the same lab’s Sora engine, launched in February and now being integrated into ChatGPT, can already generate minute-long, high-definition video from text. In July, frontier models from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI sat the International Mathematical Olympiad under the same four-and-a-half-hour rules given to the world’s brightest teens, solved five of the six problems, and earned gold medals. In April, a University at Buffalo team unveiled Semantic Clinical AI (SCAI), an architecture that grafts formal medical knowledge onto a large language model. SCAI scored as high as 95 percent on Step 3 of the US Medical Licensing Examination—better than most practicing physicians and ahead of every previous AI benchmark—showing that well-structured retrieval can turn AI into a skilled general diagnostician.

AI’s new methodological phase is the emergence of AI agents, systems that autonomously execute sequences of tasks in pursuit of a goal. This phase is called agentic AI, which builds on Large Language Models (LLMs) that have dominated AI in the last few years. Those LLMs are neural networks that understand the relation of words in text and can use that understanding to generate competent, even expert, answers on every subject.

Agentic AI marries the predictive eloquence of LLM to an institutional framework of memory, goal-seeking, and tool use. No longer confined to completing sentences, the system can now formulate a purpose, decompose it into ordered tasks, engage external software, monitor its own performance, and revise its course when it makes mistakes. In short, where the LLM offers fluent speech, the agentic overlay supplies the infrastructure necessary for transforming mere words into coordinated action. One way of measuring progress in agentic AI is the uninterrupted duration of its competent autonomy at human tasks.

A year ago: a few minutes spent sorting e-mail, drafting a paragraph of code, or a short speech.

Now: twenty to thirty minutes in which Deep Search on ChatGPT and other similar services produces memos on any subject. As Tyler Cowen observes, the answers “wipes [sic] the floor against any humans, pretty much across the board.”

By 2026–27: several hours, during which an agent can redesign a software module, or plan a fortnight of coordination for a business.

As the decade closes: days or even weeks, in which an agent may conceive a research project, run simulations, draft the article, and submit it for peer review.

Because of its current and future power, progress in AI has become a central national concern. For example, AI may offer a solution to the intractable fiscal situation in which the United States finds itself. The United States’ national debt stands at approximately 120 percent of gross domestic product. And it is rising since we are also running an annual deficit of about 6 percent a year. Neither party offers any solution to the problem. The Republican Party just renewed the tax cuts of Trump’s first term and added more without compensating cuts to the budget. When the Democrats were last in power, they added programs and government spending that also added to the budget deficit. Neither party provides plausible reforms to the middle-class entitlements that drive future deficits in an aging population. Both are committed not to raise taxes on any but the top two percent, which is completely insufficient to curb deficits and debt. The result is a sea of red ink as far as an economist can project.

Given the fiscal plight and political constraints, the only solution is sharply increased economic growth. AI provides the most plausible engine for that growth. As a general-purpose technology, like electricity, it can make almost every human enterprise more efficient. In business enterprises, AI can match output to demand in real time and trim the staffing once required to execute routine tasks. In medicine, it can help deliver correct diagnoses faster with fewer people. In my own field of law, it can draft contracts and briefs with human lawyers just doing the work of tweaking and revising.

In geopolitics as well, AI offers both opportunity and danger. If the West wins the AI race, it will be in a better economic and military position, particularly given that the battle will now be fought with AI technology—both to surveil the enemy and to launch attacks and create defensive shields. But if China gains mastery before the United States, it could replace it as the global superpower.

These three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models.

As a result of AI’s centrality, the Trump administration has created “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” encompassing three companion executive orders issued on July 23. Together, they erect a federal legal architecture for artificial intelligence that seeks to secure US primacy by accelerating innovation, expanding infrastructure, and projecting American standards abroad. The plan sets out more than ninety actions, from specific regulatory sandboxes encouraging innovation at the FDA and SEC to a more general revision of federal rules that “unduly burden AI innovation,” all premised on the proposition that prosperity and power in the twenty-first century will flow to the nation that commands the AI frontier.

The plan recognizes that AI will succeed in rapidly increasing economic growth only if it is not stymied by bottlenecks. It has substantial demands for computational infrastructure and the energy needed to power that infrastructure. Indeed, one way to think of AI is that it converts electricity into intelligence without the biological constraints on such conversion in humans. But electricity generation faces regulatory constraints.

As such, the first executive order in Trump’s bundle, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” attacks the bottleneck of the computational power needed for AI. It aims to shave years off construction times for the facilities needed for frontier model training by creating exclusions to environmental regulations for AI infrastructure. Cheaper and faster computing is the indispensable fuel of the AI age. Thus, unclogging permits promises to liberate AI progress.

This executive order aids AI development more by deregulation than subsidization. The promise of AI is so powerful that the efficient capital market ecosystem is sufficient to supply funds. The roadblock is government regulation. Thus, the focus of the executive order is to ease the regulations that may block its smooth development.

The second executive order, “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack,” turns US economic strength outward. A new American AI Exports Program authorizes the Commerce and State Departments to finance and shepherd “full-stack” AI packages, including chips, models, software, and cyber safeguards, to trusted allies. Wiring friendly nations with American technology locks in governance norms, buoyant markets, deepens supply-chain reliance on US firms, and denies strategic rent to adversaries.

Thus, the second order is designed to deploy AI to strengthen our international alliances. For all the talk of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, this executive order at least indicates the administration recognizes the importance of bringing allied nations within the ambit of America’s growing AI technology network. In the Cold War, the United States strengthened and integrated the West in two principal ways. First, it placed much of the West under a US security umbrella through NATO, additional multilateral pacts, and a web of bilateral alliances. Second, it was a principal mover in international trade agreements, like the GATT, which encompassed most Western nations and sought to tie them together economically. But today, the rise of AI makes our AI technological network the essential mechanism of integration and strength. And it is not Russia that is the principal challenger, but China.

As Dario Amodei (creator of the Claude Model) puts it in a memo that preceded the executive order:

a coalition [of liberal democracies integrated thought AI] would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.

The third order safeguards viewpoint neutrality. “Preventing Woke AI” bars federal agencies from procuring language models that embed ideological filters, mandating “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” as procurement conditions.

The aim is to make sure that AI does not compromise epistemic understanding by skewing answers to questions ideologically. There have been instances in which AI models seem to provide politically correct or biased answers. For instance, when asked to show a set of Founding Fathers, Gemini initially assembled a multiracial group of images in an obvious gesture to political correctness. Just as the Data Infrastructure executive order avoids subsidies to AI, this order avoids actual legal orders to the AI companies to be ideologically neutral—a matter fraught with First Amendment concerns. But the order does direct the government not to contract with companies that engage in distortions. The government has a substantial, indeed compelling interest, not to have its work distorted by ideological bias.

Taken together, the three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models the government pays for. If the bet pays off, long after the daily controversies of the Trump administration are forgotten, this set of actions may be remembered as the most important set of executive orders in the history of the American government’s relation with science.