Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

When I was in middle school, I remember gathering wood each spring with my friends. The task grew into a passion or even a competition, as we raced to collect more. Did someone you know have a crate they were ready to part with for a good cause? What about a broken dining room chair? Why not clean out the loose sticks from the park on the other side of town? 

No, we were not Dickensian orphans desperate to heat our homes. Our quest was more pyromaniac in nature: We were stocking up for a special bonfire—Lag Ba’Omer, celebrated in May. The holiday’s origins are obscure, and there are several different stories connected with it. In modern Israel, where I spent my late elementary and middle school years, however, it has a special significance, as a celebration of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Wait, you might say, this is awkward. Bar Kokhba, the enigmatic messianic figure, did lead a revolt against the Roman Empire in AD 132–136, but it failed. He and his men were defeated utterly, with devastating consequences for the Jews. In addition to the high cost in human life, the Roman Emperor Hadrian punished the Jews by wiping off the map the very name of their land, changing Judea to Syria Palaestina, and paving the way to the modern name of “Palestine.” Hardly cause for celebration, right?

And yet, in his new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, military historian Barry Strauss does find things to admire. His researched yet highly readable account covers the three major revolts of the Jews against Rome, but also explains the long-term significance of these revolts (and the Jews’ military losses) for the present. At a basic level, “This is a tale of empire and resistance. It is also a story of resilience, an intangible but essential factor. Resilience refers to the strength of a society’s sense of its national identity and values. A resilient society has the will to withstand defeat and to recover from it. That, in turn, requires a certain culture, leadership, and institutions. … Ancient Jewry is one of history’s great examples of how a people can lose on the battlefield and yet prevail.” 

The modern Israeli celebration of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, the final one in Strauss’s narrative, makes a lot more sense in this larger context. Sometimes a military loss leads to long-term victory through forging a stronger sense of national identity.

Ironically, the Romans knew this as well. Resilience, after all, was their theme song too. In 280–275 BC, for instance, the Romans fought King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who joined forces with Greek city-states in southern Italy to challenge Rome. Pyrrhus won two major battles, but at such extreme cost as to give rise to the expression “Pyrrhic victory.” As the biographer Plutarch reports, Pyrrhus remarked that another victory of that sort would finish him off. Why? Because the Romans’ losses had no effect on their willingness to keep going. Time and again in early Roman history, we hear of devastating losses like these. And every time, the Romans simply raised a new army and kept fighting—eventually winning the war. But with the Jews, more than any other people under Roman control, the Romans seem to have met their match—at least, when it comes to resilience.

Strauss structures the book around the story of three major revolts of the Jews against Rome: the Great Revolt that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70; the Diaspora Revolt in AD 116–117; and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in AD 132–136. While the focus is on the Jews and the Romans, the third wheel accompanying this awkward “date” is Parthia, the major empire to the east, which has been a thorn in Rome’s side since at least the defeat of Crassus and his army at Carrhae in 53 BC. Parthia was just as interested in expanding westwards as Rome was in expanding eastward. It also had a significant Jewish population and was practically next door to Judea. “Empires do not have friends; they have interests,” Strauss observes. This applies to both Parthia’s and Rome’s interest in Judea. Had Parthia taken over Judea, this could have become a base for taking over other portions of the Roman Empire.

Strauss opens his narrative with some important background on the history of Judea under Rome. This matters because “Judea had been in Rome’s orbit for 225 years when it rebelled in 66. Rome couldn’t tolerate humiliation in an established part of the empire like Judea.” This leads to the key question: why would “an established part of the empire” rebel? 

When it comes to the Great Revolt, historians have, in a way, struck gold. Of particular significance is the Jewish historian Josephus. A Jewish leader in the revolt early on, he then defected to Rome and ingratiated himself into Roman citizenship and the patronage of the Flavian dynasty, although still retaining his Jewish faith. Following the precept of “write what you know,” Josephus proceeded to spend the rest of his life writing about Jewish history. And in his history of the revolt, The Jewish War, he argued that the vast majority of the Jews had no desire to revolt from Rome. The war—and the devastation that followed because of it—was all the fault of a few radicals. 

But, Strauss notes, Josephus had goals of his own in blaming just a few individuals for the war. Other sources suggest, rather, that Judea was a powder keg waiting to blow up for a while. Indeed, there were several close calls earlier—murmurs of revolts nearly averted. There were many reasons for this tension—for instance, no one likes living under occupation. But the most important reason has to do with the Jews’ religious differences from other residents of the empire. Because the monotheistic Jews considered God their king, no other authority could supersede him. Yet the Romans required emperor worship as part of their polytheistic state religion. Most of the time, the Jews got exemptions, but occasional crackdowns threatened their ability to practice their religion faithfully. In such an environment, all that was needed for a full-blown war was the right conditions. And so, “the outbreak of war in 66, disastrous for Judea and destabilizing for Rome, demonstrates the absence on both sides of what is essential for peace: statesmanship. Hope, fear, and wishful thinking, all replaced realism.” 

Josephus’ view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, with the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance. 

Nero, the emperor when the war broke out, was known for many things. Statesmanship is not one of them. But Nero inadvertently paved the way for the establishment of the next imperial dynasty, the Flavians, by appointing the elderly statesman and seasoned general, Vespasian, to subdue this revolt. Nero’s reasoning? Vespasian was of too low a birth to be a candidate for power. Therefore, he could be trusted to not take advantage of access to multiple legions during this war to do something bigger, like make an imperial bid. 

The history of the tail end of the decade proves Nero wrong. The revolt of Vindex in Germany in AD 68 was just the first in a series of revolts across the empire and indirectly precipitated Nero’s suicide. (Vindex has also yielded top-notch modern Roman historian jokes about “windexing” Nero out of power.) In the empire-wide chaos that was AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian rightly decided that he could make a successful bid after all. Leaving his son Titus to manage the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian departed Judea for Italy. Just three years after Nero appointed him to lead the Roman forces in suppressing the Jewish Revolt, Vespasian was emperor. Having a military commander for a son proved to be key for his ability to subdue a rebellious province and defeat another imperial contender all at the same time.

Throughout this revolt, the best documented of the three in this book, Strauss provides the play-by-play reports of military action that armchair military historians love. But I appreciated even more his interest in humanizing the various actors through trying to understand their motives. Who was Josephus? Who was Vespasian? Who was Titus? How and why did they do what they did? We get to know them at least a little bit in the process. 

Adding further depth to the story Strauss tells, reminding us of the complexities of history, lesser-known figures come out of the historical shadows—like Helena, a queen from Adiabene on the edge of Parthia, who converted to Judaism a generation before the revolt, and whose descendants supported the Jews in the war. And then there is another Jew in Roman service, in addition to Josephus—one Tiberius Julius Alexander, who was Titus’s chief of staff during the war. What must it have felt like for him to serve the Roman commander in defeating his own people? He was, in fact, not the only one.

Then there were the ordinary residents of Jerusalem, who were sold into slavery afterwards. Strauss brings up the story of one young woman, whose tombstone yields details about her life: Claudia Aster (perhaps her Jewish name was Esther) was enslaved in Jerusalem and taken to Italy. The man who bought her freed her and married her. It is he who set up the tomb, mourning the death of his wife, aged just 25. Was she captured as a child, or was the capture close to her time of death? We don’t know. But we see how some of the captives, at least, were incorporated into Roman society. Such was the Roman way. 

But this was not the end of the revolt—or its mystique. The siege of the Jewish rebels’ final stronghold at Masada, once Herod’s luxury refuge castle-cum-palace, did not conclude until AD 74, another four years after the fall of Jerusalem. Yet again, we have every reason to question Josephus’s account: was this operation quite so spectacular and heroic as he recounts? In this case, it’s not the winners who tell history, but the losers: “Josephus makes Masada into a parable. He pits Jewish love of freedom—romantic, foolish, doomed, but noble—versus Roman power—brutal, relentless, irresistible, and yet ungrudging in its admiration of courage, even on the part of its enemies.” This view of Masada became the bedrock of modern Zionism, the mystique of the tragic loss continuing to be held up as a model of bravery and perseverance—national resilience against all odds. 

Strauss devotes nine chapters to the Great Revolt, supplying the context and then detailing the war. The other two revolts receive only a single chapter each. The reason is familiar to historians of ancient history—it has to do with the nature of evidence available. We simply do not know nearly as much about either the Diaspora Revolt or the revolt of Bar Kokhba. Neither had a Josephus to document it. We are, as a result, at the mercy of archaeology and occasional references from other writers—although in the case of Bar Kokhba’s revolt, a few letters from the man himself have survived. 

Still, the mere existence of these two revolts after Rome’s crushing defeat of the Jews in the first one says something in and of itself. “The Diaspora Revolt (AD 115–116) demonstrates the enduring military traditions of the Jewish people, even without a state of their own.” So does the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which also shows the Jews’ mastery of guerrilla warfare—the one type of warfare the Roman legions had a difficult time countering. The legions were just too well-trained and used to fighting in formation. 

Nevertheless, the Romans eventually prevailed, and following the crushing defeats in three successive revolts, the Jews finally learned the lesson: “war was not the proper means to ensure national survival.” Instead, the answer was spiritual. In this way, Strauss notes, the revolts and their consequences inspired the rise of Rabbinic Judaism, a Judaism that did not rely on the Temple for spiritual access to God. This period of successive Jewish revolts also saw the solidification of the split between Judaism and Christianity. Military events, after all, have ramifications beyond simply geopolitical. 

Nearly two millennia later, we see the continued resilience of the Jewish people—and continued testing of that resilience by Israel’s modern neighbors. True, Strauss notes, we should not underestimate the horrors of antisemitism, both historical and more recent. And yet, the same resilience is now on display in the nation of Israel, into whose stories of patriotism the revolts against Rome have been woven—cue my middle school Lag Ba’Omer celebrations. 

And yet, there’s a warning here as well. Patriotism’s relationship to history is bound to be complicated. Good historians take what seems simple and straightforward and make those straight paths crooked—and, as a result, more factually accurate. Strauss is a skilled guide to these crooked paths in all their complexities. 

It is an honor to respond to my colleague Philip Wallach’s comprehensive and depressingly persuasive overview of the self-inflicted irrelevance of Congress. As any reader of his essential 2023 book Why Congress will attest, Wallach is among the nation’s leading scholars of the legislative branch. My own perceptions of the institution’s contemporary strengths and weaknesses have been so thoroughly shaped by his analyses that I am inclined to simply nod in agreement as I read his essay.

Rather than quibble, then, I would propose a friendly amendment to his assessment, offered in an effort to understand the causes and motives behind the peculiar self-effacement he describes. It is, after all, a phenomenon in need of several layers of explanation. Why would ambitious politicians undermine their own power?

Part of the answer surely lies in the evolution of our political culture in the direction of rhetorical performance art rather than substantive legislative action. A more performative politics almost necessarily advantages the president, who, as a lone figure, is simply better able to carefully stage his actions and manage his brand, and better positioned to draw the attention of the nation. Legislators thus increasingly come to understand themselves as supporting actors in a fundamentally presidential drama, and to behave accordingly.

But another crucial part of the story, as Wallach suggests, has to do with the excessive centralization of power within Congress. That dynamic has left most members with too little legislative work to do, and put most of the agenda-setting authority in the hands of a few party leaders who tend to be closely aligned with presidents of their own party or implacably opposed to presidents of the other party. This has focused Congress’s attention on the presidency and has created less room for interesting differences to emerge within both parties. That in turn makes it difficult for strange-bedfellow coalitions to form in ways that might facilitate legislative negotiation both within and across party lines.

That such centralization has happened is beyond dispute. But that it should have led to a weakening of Congress in the inter-branch struggle for power is actually profoundly ironic, since the centralization of power in the hands of congressional leaders has generally been pursued with the intent of strengthening Congress and its members, not weakening them. A better grasp of why a more consolidated Congress has become a weaker Congress could teach us a lot about this constitutional moment.

The modern push for centralization began in earnest in the House of Representatives in the mid-1970s. It was driven in large part by a perception among younger and more progressive Democrats that their policy agendas were routinely thwarted by the power of committee chairmen—who were generally older and more conservative Southern Democrats. Congressional politics meant intra-Democratic Party politics back then, about halfway through what would ultimately be a four-decade stretch of Democratic dominance of the institution. The majority party in Congress felt itself stymied (and therefore also weakened in its struggle against a Republican president) by its own internal diversity.

In an effort to better distribute power in the institution and empower the increasingly dominant progressive wing of their party, congressional Democrats pushed to reduce the power of committee leaders in favor of party leaders in Congress. And this centralization of power (along with the consolidation of the budget process, which the same Democratic majority pursued at the same time) was also viewed as a way to concentrate and increase Congress’s power in relation to the executive.

That trend toward centralization, pursued with both of those aims in mind, advanced gradually over the subsequent two decades but was then supercharged by the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. In an effort to strengthen the position of a Republican Congress against a Democratic president, the Gingrich Republicans sought to empower the Speaker of the House to more effectively wield their coalition at will and so command a power center that could compete with the president’s control of the executive branch. For this purpose, committees were further weakened, and party leaders came to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over the legislative process and the policy agenda of Congress. As had happened two decades earlier under Democratic control, these changes began in the House and then the Senate embraced them too, if a little more modestly.

The same dynamic was pressed even further in congresses under the control of both parties over the past 25 years. By now, members have come to think of the sheer managerial dominance of party leaders in Congress as a natural feature of the institution. But in historical perspective, it is actually quite unusual. And it has badly deformed Congress’s understanding of its own role.

That deformation has led to what now looks like an intentional weakening of the institution by its members. But that is as much an effect as a cause of Congress’s modern travails. The centralization and consolidation of the institution were intended to strengthen it, and even to give the average member more power (since party leaders are accountable to their broader memberships, while committee chairs are focused on narrower interests). But it has done the opposite, because it was rooted in an error about the fundamental purpose of our national legislature.

That error is a function of a progressive conception of Congress, which argues that Congress’s core purpose is ultimately to advance major legislation in pursuit of a coherent policy agenda on behalf of the majority party. This is not a crazy notion, but it reflects an incomplete understanding of the goals of our system of government.

Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary.

If Congress’s purpose were merely to advance major legislation, it would be reasonable to attribute its problems to its radical inefficiency. Bills move too slowly, too many of them never reach the finish line, and the process of legislation is just too chaotic and unfocused. If that were the source of Congress’s weakness, then centralizing the institution might be a reasonable solution. By giving party leaders more power, reformers could improve the efficiency of the institution and get more done. Such a view would see the reforms of the past half-century as justified, and call for more moves in the same direction—perhaps eliminating the filibuster, or further consolidating the budget process in the hands of party leaders.

But the fact that changes in this direction have only made Congress weaker should cause reformers to reconsider their premises. And that fact is hard to dispute. Centralizing power in the hands of party leaders has left most members with little to do (sending them in search of cameras and social-media followers), and has driven Congress to view itself as structurally ancillary to the presidency. In other words, it has had exactly the opposite effect that the reformers sought when this trend toward centralization began.

The same is true of the modern budget process. The mechanisms intended to allow Congress to consolidate its strength in opposition to the president are now routinely used to render Congress a mere facilitator of the president’s agenda. This is particularly evident in the uses of budget-reconciliation bills, which have come to be understood as a way for a president to achieve key goals when his party has only narrow majorities in Congress—a repurposing that would have seemed utterly bizarre to the authors of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Why have reforms of Congress achieved the opposite of their intended aims for decades? Because Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation. It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines. This is what the institution exists to do, and it is why the legislative branch is meant to be the focal point of political action in a system intended to sustain the political life of a vast, immensely diverse democracy.

Congress is intentionally inefficient so that getting anything done will require relatively broad majorities, which can only be achieved through negotiation across factional divisions. The system is intended to restrain narrow majorities, to maximize the legitimacy of legislative outcomes. But reformers who value efficiency above legitimacy have undermined the institution’s capacity to achieve its core purpose—they have tried to make bargaining less necessary, and in the process, they have led members to think of themselves as less necessary.

The failure to facilitate negotiation and bargaining is a key reason why Congress so rarely passes major legislation now. But that is one symptom of the underlying problem; it is not the heart of the matter. The weakening of rank-and-file members of Congress is another symptom of the same failure to facilitate negotiated accommodations. And so is the weakening of Congress in its struggles for power with presidents.

Properly understood, Congress’s strength, and the strength of each of its members, is a function of the institution’s plurality and internal diversity, and of its capacity to facilitate broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains. By losing sight of that source of its power and pursuing mere efficiency instead, Congress has lost the bulk of that power (without actually gaining much efficiency). And by continuing to misdiagnose its shortcomings, Congress now actively surrenders its power on purpose, and increasingly falls into what Wallach aptly describes as “an overwhelming sense of passivity.”

An unintentional loss of congressional power thus preceded the willful surrender of congressional power that we now see. In essence, reforms of Congress over the past half-century have operated on the premise that members are the problem and leaders are the solution. This has led members to recoil from power, and since congressional leaders are actually answerable to members and their priorities, that has, in turn, led Congress as a whole to recoil from power. Addressing this problem would require re-empowering the middle layers of Congress, and especially the committees. Reformers would have to recreate the possibility of members wielding power in order to reawaken the desire for it.

This suggests that any revival of the legislative branch would require members to become reacquainted with the sources of Congress’s strength, and therefore with the core purpose of the institution. Congress is a venue for negotiated legislative accommodations. Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making such accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary. Fifty years of reforms have fallen on the wrong side of that line.

The sorry state of the legislative branch, which Wallach so ably describes, is therefore intentional only in part. Ironically, Congress became weaker partly through reforms aimed at making it stronger. Those efforts backfired so badly because they were rooted in a misunderstanding of the fundamental purpose of the institution. Recovering a proper understanding of that purpose is key to Congress’s future.

It is an honor to respond to my colleague Philip Wallach’s comprehensive and depressingly persuasive overview of the self-inflicted irrelevance of Congress. As any reader of his essential 2023 book Why Congress will attest, Wallach is among the nation’s leading scholars of the legislative branch. My own perceptions of the institution’s contemporary strengths and weaknesses have been so thoroughly shaped by his analyses that I am inclined to simply nod in agreement as I read his essay.

Rather than quibble, then, I would propose a friendly amendment to his assessment, offered in an effort to understand the causes and motives behind the peculiar self-effacement he describes. It is, after all, a phenomenon in need of several layers of explanation. Why would ambitious politicians undermine their own power?

Part of the answer surely lies in the evolution of our political culture in the direction of rhetorical performance art rather than substantive legislative action. A more performative politics almost necessarily advantages the president, who, as a lone figure, is simply better able to carefully stage his actions and manage his brand, and better positioned to draw the attention of the nation. Legislators thus increasingly come to understand themselves as supporting actors in a fundamentally presidential drama, and to behave accordingly.

But another crucial part of the story, as Wallach suggests, has to do with the excessive centralization of power within Congress. That dynamic has left most members with too little legislative work to do, and put most of the agenda-setting authority in the hands of a few party leaders who tend to be closely aligned with presidents of their own party or implacably opposed to presidents of the other party. This has focused Congress’s attention on the presidency and has created less room for interesting differences to emerge within both parties. That in turn makes it difficult for strange-bedfellow coalitions to form in ways that might facilitate legislative negotiation both within and across party lines.

That such centralization has happened is beyond dispute. But that it should have led to a weakening of Congress in the inter-branch struggle for power is actually profoundly ironic, since the centralization of power in the hands of congressional leaders has generally been pursued with the intent of strengthening Congress and its members, not weakening them. A better grasp of why a more consolidated Congress has become a weaker Congress could teach us a lot about this constitutional moment.

The modern push for centralization began in earnest in the House of Representatives in the mid-1970s. It was driven in large part by a perception among younger and more progressive Democrats that their policy agendas were routinely thwarted by the power of committee chairmen—who were generally older and more conservative Southern Democrats. Congressional politics meant intra-Democratic Party politics back then, about halfway through what would ultimately be a four-decade stretch of Democratic dominance of the institution. The majority party in Congress felt itself stymied (and therefore also weakened in its struggle against a Republican president) by its own internal diversity.

In an effort to better distribute power in the institution and empower the increasingly dominant progressive wing of their party, congressional Democrats pushed to reduce the power of committee leaders in favor of party leaders in Congress. And this centralization of power (along with the consolidation of the budget process, which the same Democratic majority pursued at the same time) was also viewed as a way to concentrate and increase Congress’s power in relation to the executive.

That trend toward centralization, pursued with both of those aims in mind, advanced gradually over the subsequent two decades but was then supercharged by the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. In an effort to strengthen the position of a Republican Congress against a Democratic president, the Gingrich Republicans sought to empower the Speaker of the House to more effectively wield their coalition at will and so command a power center that could compete with the president’s control of the executive branch. For this purpose, committees were further weakened, and party leaders came to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over the legislative process and the policy agenda of Congress. As had happened two decades earlier under Democratic control, these changes began in the House and then the Senate embraced them too, if a little more modestly.

The same dynamic was pressed even further in congresses under the control of both parties over the past 25 years. By now, members have come to think of the sheer managerial dominance of party leaders in Congress as a natural feature of the institution. But in historical perspective, it is actually quite unusual. And it has badly deformed Congress’s understanding of its own role.

That deformation has led to what now looks like an intentional weakening of the institution by its members. But that is as much an effect as a cause of Congress’s modern travails. The centralization and consolidation of the institution were intended to strengthen it, and even to give the average member more power (since party leaders are accountable to their broader memberships, while committee chairs are focused on narrower interests). But it has done the opposite, because it was rooted in an error about the fundamental purpose of our national legislature.

That error is a function of a progressive conception of Congress, which argues that Congress’s core purpose is ultimately to advance major legislation in pursuit of a coherent policy agenda on behalf of the majority party. This is not a crazy notion, but it reflects an incomplete understanding of the goals of our system of government.

Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary.

If Congress’s purpose were merely to advance major legislation, it would be reasonable to attribute its problems to its radical inefficiency. Bills move too slowly, too many of them never reach the finish line, and the process of legislation is just too chaotic and unfocused. If that were the source of Congress’s weakness, then centralizing the institution might be a reasonable solution. By giving party leaders more power, reformers could improve the efficiency of the institution and get more done. Such a view would see the reforms of the past half-century as justified, and call for more moves in the same direction—perhaps eliminating the filibuster, or further consolidating the budget process in the hands of party leaders.

But the fact that changes in this direction have only made Congress weaker should cause reformers to reconsider their premises. And that fact is hard to dispute. Centralizing power in the hands of party leaders has left most members with little to do (sending them in search of cameras and social-media followers), and has driven Congress to view itself as structurally ancillary to the presidency. In other words, it has had exactly the opposite effect that the reformers sought when this trend toward centralization began.

The same is true of the modern budget process. The mechanisms intended to allow Congress to consolidate its strength in opposition to the president are now routinely used to render Congress a mere facilitator of the president’s agenda. This is particularly evident in the uses of budget-reconciliation bills, which have come to be understood as a way for a president to achieve key goals when his party has only narrow majorities in Congress—a repurposing that would have seemed utterly bizarre to the authors of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Why have reforms of Congress achieved the opposite of their intended aims for decades? Because Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation. It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines. This is what the institution exists to do, and it is why the legislative branch is meant to be the focal point of political action in a system intended to sustain the political life of a vast, immensely diverse democracy.

Congress is intentionally inefficient so that getting anything done will require relatively broad majorities, which can only be achieved through negotiation across factional divisions. The system is intended to restrain narrow majorities, to maximize the legitimacy of legislative outcomes. But reformers who value efficiency above legitimacy have undermined the institution’s capacity to achieve its core purpose—they have tried to make bargaining less necessary, and in the process, they have led members to think of themselves as less necessary.

The failure to facilitate negotiation and bargaining is a key reason why Congress so rarely passes major legislation now. But that is one symptom of the underlying problem; it is not the heart of the matter. The weakening of rank-and-file members of Congress is another symptom of the same failure to facilitate negotiated accommodations. And so is the weakening of Congress in its struggles for power with presidents.

Properly understood, Congress’s strength, and the strength of each of its members, is a function of the institution’s plurality and internal diversity, and of its capacity to facilitate broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains. By losing sight of that source of its power and pursuing mere efficiency instead, Congress has lost the bulk of that power (without actually gaining much efficiency). And by continuing to misdiagnose its shortcomings, Congress now actively surrenders its power on purpose, and increasingly falls into what Wallach aptly describes as “an overwhelming sense of passivity.”

An unintentional loss of congressional power thus preceded the willful surrender of congressional power that we now see. In essence, reforms of Congress over the past half-century have operated on the premise that members are the problem and leaders are the solution. This has led members to recoil from power, and since congressional leaders are actually answerable to members and their priorities, that has, in turn, led Congress as a whole to recoil from power. Addressing this problem would require re-empowering the middle layers of Congress, and especially the committees. Reformers would have to recreate the possibility of members wielding power in order to reawaken the desire for it.

This suggests that any revival of the legislative branch would require members to become reacquainted with the sources of Congress’s strength, and therefore with the core purpose of the institution. Congress is a venue for negotiated legislative accommodations. Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making such accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary. Fifty years of reforms have fallen on the wrong side of that line.

The sorry state of the legislative branch, which Wallach so ably describes, is therefore intentional only in part. Ironically, Congress became weaker partly through reforms aimed at making it stronger. Those efforts backfired so badly because they were rooted in a misunderstanding of the fundamental purpose of the institution. Recovering a proper understanding of that purpose is key to Congress’s future.

A confident, hegemonic republic somehow begins to careen into chaos and civil strife. Its ruling class has been steadily concentrating the republic’s immense wealth in its own hands, ignoring the growing precarity of the less well-off. As instability rises, this class, which had also largely monopolized political offices, begins to lose credibility in the eyes of the rest of the populace. Demagogues, arising out of the ruling class but exploiting the popular hatred against it, flourish. At the same time, political corruption runs rampant, and political trials become frequent. Yet they often prove to be more a vehicle for entertainment or vindictive score-settling than a forum for justice. Transitions of power become fraught, irregular, and marked by violence. The dangerous logic of one-upmanship means that violations of laws and norms by one side all but guarantee worse violations by opponents when the political tides inevitably turn.

This is how Josiah Osgood depicts the last decades of the Roman Republic, clearly suggesting many worrying parallels between it and the contemporary American one. In his Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, he uses the rhetorical career of Rome’s greatest orator and philosopher-statesman, Cicero, to illustrate Rome’s collapse into civil war and tyranny. Rising from obscure birth to the consulship on the strength of his rhetorical skills and political acumen, Cicero also witnessed the final fall of republican liberty and fell himself in the rampant extrajudicial killings that marked it. His severed head, displayed on the rostra from which he had so often held crowds spellbound with his speeches, was a fitting signal that in Rome the era of rule by law and persuasion had been replaced by the rule of force.

Though much of the book is focused on illuminating the way late republican trials worked and the art by which speakers like Cicero could move audiences, Osgood also attempts to diagnose the causes of the republican order’s collapse. As the subtitle of the book subtly implies, he correlates Cicero’s ascent with Rome’s descent. Osgood is not heavy-handed about this: he does not assign Cicero a great deal of personal blame for Rome’s fall, and he even depicts the statesman in a semi-sympathetic light. But he does suggest that Cicero resisted the reforms that were needed to address Rome’s economic divide. Worse still from Osgood’s point of view is that, despite Cicero’s general principle of opposing political violence, he appears to have endorsed extrajudicial killings when the outcome suited his desires. To Osgood, this makes Cicero complicit in—and emblematic of—the blindness and hypocrisy of Roman elites.

Written in an accessible manner of a good storyteller, the book is an easy and engaging read. Bearing the marks of its origin as a set of true-crime stories of ancient Rome, almost every chapter of the book focuses on a different trial in which Cicero was involved. Osgood relates the salacious details that emerge in these trials—affairs, poisonings, bribery, treachery—with evident gusto. But he also uses these elements as jumping-off points to inform the reader about Roman history, institutions, and famous personalities. For anyone wishing for an easy but also informative and engaging introduction to the world of the late Roman Republic, this book would be excellent.

It appears less aimed at scholars, who would learn less from Osgood’s accessible presentation, and into whose controversies he rarely wades. Osgood’s diagnoses of the causes of Rome’s fall, summarized in the first paragraph of this review, largely tread well-worn ground. A partial exception to this is his focus on the wild nature of Roman trials and the Roman court system more generally. His narrative illustrates compellingly the ways in which Roman trials violate what we would today consider basic legal principles: flagrant appeals to emotion, nasty character attacks, outrageous counter-accusations to deflect blame—all often without the slightest shred of what a modern court would consider reasonable evidence. Lawless Republic shows how Cicero himself was a master of many of these tactics.

Expanding beyond biography, though, Osgood often points to these trials as both indicators and indirect causes of Rome’s decline, painting a picture of institutions fraying and collapsing. He also frequently calls attention to the more structural injustice inherent in them: the privileging of elite testimony over that of commoners and Romans generally over foreigners, the treatment of women and slaves, and how these trials often exonerated those obviously guilty of great cruelty and corruption.

Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior.

Osgood certainly has a point. Rome’s trial norms would never pass modern muster, and Rome’s treatment of those outside the circle of elite male citizens is morally unjustifiable. But he also somewhat downplays how, from a world-historical perspective, the Roman trial system was a tremendous achievement for justice and liberty. After all, the principles of a fair criminal trial are not self-evident, and the Romans made great strides in developing what we would today call due process. For instance, the Romans held sacrosanct the idea that no Roman citizen should be put to death without a jury trial and an appeal to the people (provocatio). Roman trials had (admittedly flawed) rules of evidence and procedure. And although Rome’s oppression of those subjugated to it is appalling, one looks in vain for another ancient empire that established a court specifically to try those of its own ruling class who had mistreated its subject peoples. Indeed, one would find few modern examples of such consideration of foreigners’ interests, either. But that is exactly what the Roman extortion court—flawed as it was—did. Cicero’s successful prosecution of Verres in that court showed that at least sometimes, Rome would do justice by her subjects.

This is no small thing. Rome is perhaps the first great polity in world history to systematically attempt to restrain its own abuse of power—both of its elites against its ordinary people, and of the political community as a whole over others. The attempts at self-restraint were clumsy, inconsistent, hypocritical, and ultimately failed. But that Rome even tried distinguishes it from most historical analogues. Cicero himself would contribute to this project of self-restraint, articulating a theory of just warfare to limit the use of force, refusing the numerous opportunities to unjustly enrich himself when governing Rome’s provinces, and condemning unconstitutional concentrations of power at peril of his life.

The spirit of self-restraint, however imperfect in the Roman case, would be a good model for emulation in a modern hegemonic republic. This is especially so if Cicero’s own diagnosis of Rome’s decline is to carry any weight with us today. According to him, Romans began to lose their freedom as soon as Rome stopped upholding the principles of freedom and justice with others. In On Duties, Cicero contrasted the contemporary period of corruption and self-interested rapacity with a time when Rome functioned as “protectorate of the world,” when “the Roman people maintained itself by acts of service, and wars were waged for the sake of allies or for the safety of our realm[,] … the ends of which were marked by clemency.” To Cicero, it was no accident that the Roman toleration of injustice toward others ultimately culminated in injustice at home—no band of robbers can help but eventually start robbing each other.

Osgood shows how the waning Roman Republic was also marked by what some today decry as “lawfare”—the use of courts and criminal trials to attack political opponents. He seems somewhat to disapprove of Cicero’s participation in this culture of lawfare, yet he also shows compellingly that Rome was experiencing profound political corruption very recognizable to modern eyes: bribery, extortion, cover-ups, attempts to interfere with elections, violent resistance to transfers of political power, and more. Osgood also decries Cicero’s other, less frequent reaction to this: reluctant endorsement of political violence ostensibly to halt other political violence or to overthrow a tyrant. But as he himself notes, increasing violence brings one ever closer to a Hobbesian state of nature. So, what is one to do when peaceful political processes give way to armed mobs roaming the streets? Without trials or violence, one’s only recourse would seem to be surrender.

In fact, we might say that Osgood’s narrative and the history of the late Roman Republic illustrate that, as long as republican politics is going to produce conflict that extends beyond the ballot box and senatorial debate, it is far better that it be lawfare than actual warfare. What seems to have eroded the stability of Rome’s institutions is not so much that its elites were subject to politically motivated trials, but that they so frequently evaded justice nonetheless. Consuls could sell Rome’s foreign policy to bribe-bearing potentates from abroad, candidates for office could stir up mobs to obstruct election results, and tribunes could exercise their vetoes to protect obvious wrongdoers. The immunity to prosecution afforded by holding public office made gaining office a near-necessity for crooked elites, for which they might kill. And this security could in turn be compounded by using that office, once won, to enrich friends, rig juries, and otherwise ensure that even when a term of office expires, their corruption and malfeasance could go unpunished.

Osgood’s book is timely and very persuasively illustrates the way violations of political norms and principles of justice form a vicious cycle. When one candidate disburses a few bribes to win office, it justifies and incentivizes the next to offer bigger ones. When one candidate resorts to political violence and retribution against enemies, it only ensures that when his opponents gain power, they will do the same and worse. The book stands as a warning against that kind of tit-for-tat politics, and the tu quoque reasoning that so often justifies it.

Moreover, Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior. The power of rhetoric and demagoguery in any popular republic should give us reason to doubt that elections will serve as a sufficient check on elite misbehavior. We should count ourselves lucky to have a more developed and thick set of judicial norms and procedures than did Rome. We should zealously and scrupulously protect and revere these rules. They have a chance to save us from Rome’s fate.

A broad respect for the rule of law means that it is less likely (though not impossible) for an innocent politician to be convicted in a proper trial. And for this reason, we should perhaps be less squeamish about the idea of subjecting our political leaders to them when evidence of corruption or political misbehavior arises. To try a popular leader for political crimes may be dangerously destabilizing. But as the example of Rome shows, to allow popular leaders to get away with political crimes is in the long run far more dangerous.

A confident, hegemonic republic somehow begins to careen into chaos and civil strife. Its ruling class has been steadily concentrating the republic’s immense wealth in its own hands, ignoring the growing precarity of the less well-off. As instability rises, this class, which had also largely monopolized political offices, begins to lose credibility in the eyes of the rest of the populace. Demagogues, arising out of the ruling class but exploiting the popular hatred against it, flourish. At the same time, political corruption runs rampant, and political trials become frequent. Yet they often prove to be more a vehicle for entertainment or vindictive score-settling than a forum for justice. Transitions of power become fraught, irregular, and marked by violence. The dangerous logic of one-upmanship means that violations of laws and norms by one side all but guarantee worse violations by opponents when the political tides inevitably turn.

This is how Josiah Osgood depicts the last decades of the Roman Republic, clearly suggesting many worrying parallels between it and the contemporary American one. In his Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, he uses the rhetorical career of Rome’s greatest orator and philosopher-statesman, Cicero, to illustrate Rome’s collapse into civil war and tyranny. Rising from obscure birth to the consulship on the strength of his rhetorical skills and political acumen, Cicero also witnessed the final fall of republican liberty and fell himself in the rampant extrajudicial killings that marked it. His severed head, displayed on the rostra from which he had so often held crowds spellbound with his speeches, was a fitting signal that in Rome the era of rule by law and persuasion had been replaced by the rule of force.

Though much of the book is focused on illuminating the way late republican trials worked and the art by which speakers like Cicero could move audiences, Osgood also attempts to diagnose the causes of the republican order’s collapse. As the subtitle of the book subtly implies, he correlates Cicero’s ascent with Rome’s descent. Osgood is not heavy-handed about this: he does not assign Cicero a great deal of personal blame for Rome’s fall, and he even depicts the statesman in a semi-sympathetic light. But he does suggest that Cicero resisted the reforms that were needed to address Rome’s economic divide. Worse still from Osgood’s point of view is that, despite Cicero’s general principle of opposing political violence, he appears to have endorsed extrajudicial killings when the outcome suited his desires. To Osgood, this makes Cicero complicit in—and emblematic of—the blindness and hypocrisy of Roman elites.

Written in an accessible manner of a good storyteller, the book is an easy and engaging read. Bearing the marks of its origin as a set of true-crime stories of ancient Rome, almost every chapter of the book focuses on a different trial in which Cicero was involved. Osgood relates the salacious details that emerge in these trials—affairs, poisonings, bribery, treachery—with evident gusto. But he also uses these elements as jumping-off points to inform the reader about Roman history, institutions, and famous personalities. For anyone wishing for an easy but also informative and engaging introduction to the world of the late Roman Republic, this book would be excellent.

It appears less aimed at scholars, who would learn less from Osgood’s accessible presentation, and into whose controversies he rarely wades. Osgood’s diagnoses of the causes of Rome’s fall, summarized in the first paragraph of this review, largely tread well-worn ground. A partial exception to this is his focus on the wild nature of Roman trials and the Roman court system more generally. His narrative illustrates compellingly the ways in which Roman trials violate what we would today consider basic legal principles: flagrant appeals to emotion, nasty character attacks, outrageous counter-accusations to deflect blame—all often without the slightest shred of what a modern court would consider reasonable evidence. Lawless Republic shows how Cicero himself was a master of many of these tactics.

Expanding beyond biography, though, Osgood often points to these trials as both indicators and indirect causes of Rome’s decline, painting a picture of institutions fraying and collapsing. He also frequently calls attention to the more structural injustice inherent in them: the privileging of elite testimony over that of commoners and Romans generally over foreigners, the treatment of women and slaves, and how these trials often exonerated those obviously guilty of great cruelty and corruption.

Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior.

Osgood certainly has a point. Rome’s trial norms would never pass modern muster, and Rome’s treatment of those outside the circle of elite male citizens is morally unjustifiable. But he also somewhat downplays how, from a world-historical perspective, the Roman trial system was a tremendous achievement for justice and liberty. After all, the principles of a fair criminal trial are not self-evident, and the Romans made great strides in developing what we would today call due process. For instance, the Romans held sacrosanct the idea that no Roman citizen should be put to death without a jury trial and an appeal to the people (provocatio). Roman trials had (admittedly flawed) rules of evidence and procedure. And although Rome’s oppression of those subjugated to it is appalling, one looks in vain for another ancient empire that established a court specifically to try those of its own ruling class who had mistreated its subject peoples. Indeed, one would find few modern examples of such consideration of foreigners’ interests, either. But that is exactly what the Roman extortion court—flawed as it was—did. Cicero’s successful prosecution of Verres in that court showed that at least sometimes, Rome would do justice by her subjects.

This is no small thing. Rome is perhaps the first great polity in world history to systematically attempt to restrain its own abuse of power—both of its elites against its ordinary people, and of the political community as a whole over others. The attempts at self-restraint were clumsy, inconsistent, hypocritical, and ultimately failed. But that Rome even tried distinguishes it from most historical analogues. Cicero himself would contribute to this project of self-restraint, articulating a theory of just warfare to limit the use of force, refusing the numerous opportunities to unjustly enrich himself when governing Rome’s provinces, and condemning unconstitutional concentrations of power at peril of his life.

The spirit of self-restraint, however imperfect in the Roman case, would be a good model for emulation in a modern hegemonic republic. This is especially so if Cicero’s own diagnosis of Rome’s decline is to carry any weight with us today. According to him, Romans began to lose their freedom as soon as Rome stopped upholding the principles of freedom and justice with others. In On Duties, Cicero contrasted the contemporary period of corruption and self-interested rapacity with a time when Rome functioned as “protectorate of the world,” when “the Roman people maintained itself by acts of service, and wars were waged for the sake of allies or for the safety of our realm[,] … the ends of which were marked by clemency.” To Cicero, it was no accident that the Roman toleration of injustice toward others ultimately culminated in injustice at home—no band of robbers can help but eventually start robbing each other.

Osgood shows how the waning Roman Republic was also marked by what some today decry as “lawfare”—the use of courts and criminal trials to attack political opponents. He seems somewhat to disapprove of Cicero’s participation in this culture of lawfare, yet he also shows compellingly that Rome was experiencing profound political corruption very recognizable to modern eyes: bribery, extortion, cover-ups, attempts to interfere with elections, violent resistance to transfers of political power, and more. Osgood also decries Cicero’s other, less frequent reaction to this: reluctant endorsement of political violence ostensibly to halt other political violence or to overthrow a tyrant. But as he himself notes, increasing violence brings one ever closer to a Hobbesian state of nature. So, what is one to do when peaceful political processes give way to armed mobs roaming the streets? Without trials or violence, one’s only recourse would seem to be surrender.

In fact, we might say that Osgood’s narrative and the history of the late Roman Republic illustrate that, as long as republican politics is going to produce conflict that extends beyond the ballot box and senatorial debate, it is far better that it be lawfare than actual warfare. What seems to have eroded the stability of Rome’s institutions is not so much that its elites were subject to politically motivated trials, but that they so frequently evaded justice nonetheless. Consuls could sell Rome’s foreign policy to bribe-bearing potentates from abroad, candidates for office could stir up mobs to obstruct election results, and tribunes could exercise their vetoes to protect obvious wrongdoers. The immunity to prosecution afforded by holding public office made gaining office a near-necessity for crooked elites, for which they might kill. And this security could in turn be compounded by using that office, once won, to enrich friends, rig juries, and otherwise ensure that even when a term of office expires, their corruption and malfeasance could go unpunished.

Osgood’s book is timely and very persuasively illustrates the way violations of political norms and principles of justice form a vicious cycle. When one candidate disburses a few bribes to win office, it justifies and incentivizes the next to offer bigger ones. When one candidate resorts to political violence and retribution against enemies, it only ensures that when his opponents gain power, they will do the same and worse. The book stands as a warning against that kind of tit-for-tat politics, and the tu quoque reasoning that so often justifies it.

Moreover, Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior. The power of rhetoric and demagoguery in any popular republic should give us reason to doubt that elections will serve as a sufficient check on elite misbehavior. We should count ourselves lucky to have a more developed and thick set of judicial norms and procedures than did Rome. We should zealously and scrupulously protect and revere these rules. They have a chance to save us from Rome’s fate.

A broad respect for the rule of law means that it is less likely (though not impossible) for an innocent politician to be convicted in a proper trial. And for this reason, we should perhaps be less squeamish about the idea of subjecting our political leaders to them when evidence of corruption or political misbehavior arises. To try a popular leader for political crimes may be dangerously destabilizing. But as the example of Rome shows, to allow popular leaders to get away with political crimes is in the long run far more dangerous.

Thomas More was a “failure,” but one worthy of emulation—even or perhaps especially today, five centuries later. So declares Joanne Paul, in a preface to her engaging and exquisitely researched biography, Thomas More: A Life.

But a failure how? More rose from modest origins to become Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. In Samuel Johnson’s judgment, he was “the person of greatest virtue these [British] isles ever produced.” He would posthumously become a Catholic saint, not to mention the hero of a play and a movie (A Man for All Seasons) that won the Oscar for Best Picture. How then was he a “failure”?

More lived through a fulcrum period in Western history when the Christendom of the previous thousand years was disintegrating and the modern secular state was beginning to emerge. This was a transformation that More anticipated with dread, and he dedicated his enormous talents and the best years of his life—indeed his life itself, which he eventually sacrificed on a scaffold—to resisting it.

But his resistance would “come to nothing,” Paul explains. “It is difficult to point to any event or moment in Tudor history and claim that it would have been vastly different without his intervention.”

Even so, Paul sees in More’s failure something admirable and ominously timely. “Tyrants, it will not surprise you to learn, still exist. Those who are willing to destroy anyone who stands in opposition to their will—a will driven by self-interest, pride and desperate paranoia—rule today as they did 500 years ago.” And More’s “willingness to stand firm and speak truth to an overwhelming power is as relevant in today’s world as it was to that of Henry VIII.”

Not everyone has admired More, of course. He has been depicted (in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, for instance, or in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels) as a shriveled-up, mean-spirited inquisitor. Paul herself does not overtly take sides in these interpretive contests. She mostly follows the literary strategy of “show, don’t tell,” rarely offering her own speculations or judgments about More’s decisions and deeds (except in the preface and the epilogue, where she briefly steps outside her scholarly persona).

Her descriptions themselves are superbly textured. Much of the book reads almost as if Paul had followed More around with a video camera, deftly recording (with all the sights, sounds, even smells) the events, discussions, and disputes through which his life unfolded. How were the chambers decorated? Who was there, and how were they dressed? Who spoke first, who responded, what exactly did they say? The detail is remarkable—I often found myself wondering, “How does she know all this stuff?”—and it helps bring More’s world to life.

It was an earthy world, but also a sacramental world, with constant connections to transcendence. Paul thus tells us about the numerous religious festivals, processions, feasts, and ceremonies in their splendid particularities: the candles, the vestments, the liturgies, the music, the bells. These things constituted the consecrated world that More attempted desperately but unsuccessfully to preserve.

But of course, that world was not all candles and festivals; it was a scene of pervasive violence and political peril as well. As an infant, More was nurtured within a morning’s walk of the murderous doings by which Richard III seized power. As an adult, More lived through a series of foreign wars and, even more ominously, internal political developments whereby Henry VIII consolidated despotic power while dispatching into exile or to execution those who stood in his way. “These matters be King’s games,” More observed, “as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds.”

But More was not a mere spectator of these “stage plays”; he was a central player. This role was the result of a portentous choice—a choice that in one form or another many confront again today. In a political world fraught with danger, corruption, and outright wickedness, should a person attempt to retain his purity by remaining politically detached? Or should he immerse himself in the world, perhaps even compromising himself, in an effort to guide political matters in a satisfactory direction?

More’s friend Erasmus, the renowned humanist scholar, implored him to stay clear of kings’ affairs, to continue in the scholarly and literary work reflected in More’s classic Utopia. But More made a different choice, guided by St. John Chrysostom’s counsel to pursue a life “busy among cities.” And thus he rose from lawyer and local lecturer on St. Augustine to undersheriff of London, thence to foreign diplomat, to member and later speaker of the House of Commons, to close friend and counselor to the king, to Lord Chancellor.

It was in his last years, however, that More’s character—both his admirable qualities and what at least from a contemporary perspective may seem his more censurable tendencies—manifested themselves most starkly. Two developments dominated these last years: the effort in England to suppress the spread of Protestantism, and the tumultuous and transformative doings that surrounded Henry’s campaign to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to consummate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More participated vigorously in the first of these developments. He tried desperately to avoid involvement in the second. And in each instance, he failed.

As king’s councilor and especially as Lord Chancellor, More energetically opposed the introduction of Lutheranism into England. He wrote treatises denouncing Luther and his ideas. He vigorously enforced laws prohibiting the importation or possession of Lutheran writings. He imprisoned and interrogated suspected Protestants, sometimes at his own home. And when the suspects persisted in their heresies (as he believed), More sometimes had them burned at the stake.

More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Such actions provoked both defenses and fierce criticisms at the time, and of course, they are even more disturbing to contemporary liberal sensibilities. Critical biographer Richard Marius discerned in More’s actions a deep anger and almost depravity of character. Hilary Mantel described him as a “blood-soaked hypocrite.” Defenders have argued, conversely, that More was only enforcing the laws; that the number of Protestants condemned to death under his administration was small compared to the number of Catholics who would be executed under Thomas Cromwell, More’s successor as Henry’s right-hand man; and that More’s world was not one that had embraced the precepts of a John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

Paul describes the measures More took, and she reports More’s own explanations. Severe measures were necessary, he argued, to protect innocent believers and indeed the kingdom from a deadly theological contagion that would undermine civilization itself. Such discipline was also often the best remedy, he said, for the wayward heretics themselves (for whose welfare More always professed concern).

Were these defenses sincere, and did they justify More’s actions? As usual, Paul tells us what More did and said but offers no “innocent or guilty” verdict of her own.

As for “the king’s Great Matter”—namely, his desire to separate from Catherine and to marry Anne—it was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s failure to achieve papal approval for the annulment that led to his downfall and to More’s appointment to replace him as Lord Chancellor. In accepting the appointment, More obtained Henry’s permission to follow his conscience. But as the controversy escalated and as Henry’s obsession intensified, it became impossible to remain detached. More seems to have cooperated as much as he could. At one point, he appeared before both Houses of Parliament and made the king’s case in lawyer-like fashion, presenting the supporting arguments and evidence without purporting to give his personal views.

And when this was not enough, More resigned the office, hoping to live out his life in private with his family and his books. But it was too late for that.

As it became clear that the pope would not grant the annulment, Henry concluded that the only way to end his marriage was to separate from the Roman Church. To that end, the king and his men employed various barely or not quite legal means to intimidate the English clergy into submission. They revived and expanded an old legal theory of “praemunire,” which forbade appeals to Rome, in order to indict the entire clergy for illegality and disloyalty. When the prelates failed to act on a proposal to make Henry head of the church, the king’s men invoked an old legal maxim treating silence as equivalent to assent. Parliament was induced to amend the definition of treason so that any criticism of the king would now qualify as treasonous if done “maliciously” (a term that, as More anticipated, turned out to mean pretty much whatever the king and the judges wanted it to mean). The law was being cynically used—and abused—to achieve whatever those in power wanted.

And then new laws were passed requiring all English subjects to take an oath affirming the validity of the annulment, the succession of Anne as queen, and, by clear implication, the elevation of the king to be head of the church. More’s refusal to take this oath led to his imprisonment in the Tower of London for fifteen months and, eventually, his trial and execution. Both the king’s men and More’s friends and family pleaded with him to take the oath, as nearly everyone in the kingdom (including his family) had done. He was repeatedly assured, even on the day of his trial, that if he would simply affirm the words of the oath, he would be restored to his freedom and his family. Yet he refused, saying simply that he could not act against his conscience.

Whether he was justified in this refusal was and is debatable, but his courage through the whole affair is unmistakable. Paul relates all of the pertinent developments in riveting detail: the legal maneuvering, the confrontations with Cromwell and others, the earnest conversations with and letters to More’s family. She does so again with little commentary, but it is impossible not to discern the integrity and depth of More’s character through these excruciating events.

Paul reports More’s famous declaration at the scaffold that he was the king’s good servant but God’s first: “As he went to his death, however, More could comfort himself with the assurance that he had lived his life—and given his life—in service of those things he held most dear.”

So, yes, he had lived and given his life in service of those precious things, but he had not managed to preserve them. In an epilogue, Paul portrays the transformed, disenchanted world that was to follow, employing her principle of “show, don’t tell.” Chapter one of the book relates how More was born just after the celebration of Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and it describes the “thousands of small flickering lights” as the “people of London—young and old, male and female, rich and poor—processed through the winding streets” of the city. A century later, the epilogue reports, “no candles were carried by Londoners through their city” for Candlemas. The Tudor revolution had banished the celebration.

More’s efforts had failed. But Paul suggests that they nonetheless had their value, and that they are relevant still:

Those, like Thomas More, who stand up to these men [of power] and remind them of higher principles, deeper truths, greater duties, must be remembered for their efforts, even when they come to nothing. … They are the figures who inspire us when a great booming voice from above tells us we must obey, must submit, and a voice deep within us responds, no matter how quietly, “No.”

I rejoiced when I heard that my children’s school had canceled their weekly library hour. I’m sorry. I know how that sounds. Truly, I am a bibliophile; my kids have been surrounded by piles of books, quite literally from conception. I’ve devoted countless hours to reading to them. But for years, I ground my teeth at any mention of the school library.

On one level, my angst stemmed from niggling practical problems. I hated the mad hunts on library day for random books I had never heard of until we were about to be late for school. I scowled at the new entries on our school bill when we couldn’t find them. It just felt like a massive headache we didn’t need. One could argue, with some justice, that I should lament my own organizational failures instead of resenting hapless librarians. Here’s the harsh truth, though. No book the kids brought home ever became a family favorite. And shared libraries (both public and school) are becoming obsolete. 

It’s not just libraries. In the shadow of advancing technology, many things that have contributed enormously to our civilization are passing away. I’m not exactly celebrating here; in many ways, it’s quite terrifying. But as a parent, it feels self-indulgent to marinate in nostalgia. My kids are going to live in this world regardless of how I feel about it. I’d rather help them figure it out than just close my eyes and pray.

As a conservative, I have a natural suspicion of techno-optimists. Large language models are the big newcomer, and they do raise many new concerns. Everyone appreciates this in the abstract, but talking with fellow conservatives (both older and younger), I don’t always find it easy to make common cause. Many seem inclined to shun AI and other new technologies, to “just say no” or at least encourage everyone to use them as little as possible. I understand, but to me that feels like dereliction, a refusal to face up to the task at hand.

I suspect the difference in perspective stems partly from the age and interests of my kids. Four of my five sons are now in the tween-and-teen range, with a wide range of interests that can obviously be advanced through the use of technology. Older adults can default to a “personally I’d rather not” stance, while parents of young kids often warm to the “Tech Exit” strategy, reasonably believing that young children don’t need screen-based entertainment and are better off in the sandbox. That’s fine, but with older kids, the conundrums get harder. If my children just wanted to rot their brains with first-person shooters, that would be an easy call, but if you have raised your kids to be curious and inventive, they’re likely to want to use technological tools to advance healthy and meaningful pursuits. Parents still have the authority to ban the bots, but the bar on adequate justifications rises considerably. 

It’s chilling indeed to imagine a dystopian future in which people cocoon themselves in a virtual world of pleasantly pliant AIs, like a softly lit hall of mirrors.

The problem calls for careful consideration. Let us return for a blissful moment to the library. Libraries were always my happy place in childhood, and as a university student, I loved studying in the stacks. Some years ago, though, I had an eye-opening experience when I tried to make An Event out of a public library trip in early summer, helping my kids choose summer reading books. I wanted to show them how much fun it could be to browse the stacks and explore their interests and hobbies. But as we ran searches and scoured shelves, I realized I was inadvertently teaching them something else. It didn’t make a lick of sense to explore their interests at the library. Classics are cheap to buy, and for specific interests or hobbies, the library’s offerings were dated and limited in scope. We could have spent the whole afternoon hunting, and come away with far less useful material than my phone would furnish in 45 seconds. That was before large language models existed. 

On hearing this story, some people reflexively start looking “laterally” for adequate reasons to keep the libraries even though they are (by today’s new standards) both inefficient and comparatively ineffective at fulfilling the library’s original defining purpose. Perhaps we should value libraries for the human element: librarians, other patrons, public story hours. We might cherish the experience of walking through book-lined stacks, basking in the delightful smell of old pages. Perhaps the inefficiency itself should be seen as a positive good, since knowledge is more treasured when we have to work for it. 

I am not entirely unmoved by these arguments, especially because I do think that indexes, card catalogs, reading rooms, due dates, and the stacks themselves did much to enrich my own young life. But realistically, people rarely keep doing things in antiquated ways for the sake of the lateral goods. Sometimes it’s positively irrational to do that. Practical reason moves us to prioritize our actual goals over diffuse fringe benefits.

Libraries are just the start, of course. The range of things that you or your kids might want to learn from AI or other new technologies is simply enormous, and in many cases, newfangled methods will offer clear and commanding advantages over more traditional methods. 

As it happens, my sons moved into adolescence at just the moment when large language models were descending upon the world, which honestly felt like a bait-and-switch. I had spent years bracing myself for fraught discussions about social media, data theft, pornography, online gambling, scrolling addiction, video game addiction, cancel culture, and online predators. Those conversations happened, but they weren’t particularly hard. My kids (the older ones at least) already know quite a lot about those issues, but they haven’t asked for social media accounts or personal devices; they don’t even seem to want them. It helps, no doubt, that they attend a K12 parochial school where few kids have those things. It helps that they stepped into adolescence a few years after the “anxious generation” went into a tailspin, giving them (and their parents) the chance to learn from past mistakes. But whatever the reasons, they know that the virtual world can be dangerous and bruising, and show little enthusiasm for flinging themselves into that fray.

Here’s what they do want. They want AI to analyze their last chess game, so they can understand why the opening they just used didn’t work. They want it to generate a map of the travels of T. E. Lawrence, to facilitate their ongoing debate about his strategy as presented in Lawrence of Arabia. They want to know what Jane Austen means when she says that Mr. Darcy has “considerable patronage in the church” not enjoyed by his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. They want an explanation of SpaceX’s latest projects, and its relationship to the US Space Force. They want to know which hard baits are most effective for going after walleye in southern Minnesota in high summer. They want to create a board game that models market growth in the early industrial era more accurately than Brass Birmingham. Once AI has helped them to develop some rules, they can be found drawing up plans for 3-D printed pieces to help them play test their game. That’s just a small sample from the past couple of weeks. It’s a bit exhausting, honestly. Hey kids, how about a nice video game?

There’s a sense of being flanked. Not only did we (my husband and I) not prepare for this sort of campaign, we actively paved the way to it by encouraging our kids to be intellectually curious, creative, and resourceful in pursuing personal interests. All my lessons in reading and understanding a text now bolster their case for using AI to look up literary references. All my lectures about mindless scrolling and “snackable” feeds come back to haunt me when they rightly observe that they won’t need to bump around the Internet gleaning snippets of information if I just permit Gemini to give them a quick response. Large language models can be wrong sometimes, and they know that. But if one only wants fishing tips, or fodder for casual dinner-table debates, aren’t they reliable enough? 

It feels obtuse to spurn such a valuable tool. High-handed lectures on alienation just sound silly when you’re standing in a Walmart aisle trying to select appropriate fishing equipment. Why not just take out your phone and get the needed information? But it’s all quite discombobulating: even as I smile and my children’s enthusiasms, taking a genuine maternal pride in that relentless curiosity, there’s that voice in the other ear whispering, “So, you signed your family up to be guinea pigs for the next technological revolution. What could go wrong?”

Some of the risks are obvious. I know all about student cheating, of course, and the nightmare it’s causing for universities. I fully agree that students must read, write, and articulate ideas if they are to develop their rational faculties. But those aren’t the problems that top my list, because the young people that most concern me are not particularly averse to reading, writing, or articulating ideas. 

Syntheses can be transformative, in a good way. But when is synthesis enhancing our capacity to think, and when is it undermining it?

On a very different front, I am deeply concerned by the things I read about chatbots being used for a simulacrum of love and friendship. Already there are tragic stories about ChatGPT ushering mentally fragile people further along the path to insanity, but as sad as those cases are, I’m even more concerned about the ways in which pseudo-intimacy with machines could erode people’s ability to navigate real human relationships. Truthfully, flesh-and-blood humans can be a real pain sometimes, and when they are, you’re not allowed to switch them off and go about your life. On the other hand, real people can love you, as an algorithm cannot. It’s chilling indeed to imagine a dystopian future in which people cocoon themselves in a virtual world of pleasantly pliant AIs, like a softly lit hall of mirrors. When it comes to chatbot intimacy, “just say no” certainly is my best advice, to my children or anyone else.

But when LLMs are used as tutors and sources of information, the questions get much harder. Here too, there are painful losses on the horizon. The decaying libraries may be the harbinger of worse things to come: crumbling universities, soulless novels, faltering minds, and imaginations. A host of questions arises here about how models should be trained, and by whom. But none of that changes the fact that AI tools, right here and now, can do much to enhance our knowledge. As a great thinker once noted, all men by nature desire to know. Can we “just say no” to the desire to know?

It’s something of a cliche by now that it’s bad to “let AI think for you.” I don’t per se disagree, but the relationship between AI and “thinking” is not straightforward, however. The transformative power of the large language model lies in its tremendous capacity for synthesis. Synthesis can be a very important exercise of human rationality, which the LLM can potentially short-circuit, and yet there’s clearly nothing new about relying on outside sources for synthesis. The OED, in its day, represented a new and powerful synthesis. Atlases are a kind of synthesis. The periodic table of elements is a synthesis of another sort. Syntheses can be transformative, in a good way, and in an unimaginably complex world, we clearly need them. But when is synthesis enhancing our capacity to think, and when is it undermining it? Unclear.

Further, it’s a familiar truth that distraction has been one of the most problematic side effects of social media, smartphones, and other recent technological advances, in part because they placed an enormous amount of data at our fingertips but forced us to do some work to marshal different tidbits and synthesize them. Large language models can do much to remedy that problem, renewing our capacity to focus. What if AI could actually lessen people’s absorption in the virtual world? It’s a possibility we should at least consider. 

Honest skeptics need to acknowledge this much at least: if we refuse to use LLMs, or prohibit them for our kids, genuinely valuable opportunities will be lost. Ancient Greek tutors exist in this world, but not many, and not at a price I could afford. Chess grand masters could provide the high-level analysis young chess nerds want, but they’re unlikely to return our phone call. Answers may vary, but it’s simply a fact that AI is forcing us to confront “how should we live now” questions in a new way. In my mind’s eye, I’m suddenly back in that public library, struggling to explain why we should check out a fraying, dated book on a subject that a new YouTube video could cover in a fraction of the time. Again, I’m floundering.

In the end though, there is this. The questions of this moment are difficult. It’s not right to leave the young and inexperienced to wrestle with them alone. The world has changed, with unclear implications, but at least if we live it out with our kids, we have some opportunity to offer guidance.

As I worked on this column, I could hear my husband and boys downstairs, working on a project of their own. They’re renovating our home library. The old shelves were overflowing, so my husband is surrounding the room with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves. We still love books, you see. Some beautiful things may survive this moment of transition, but if we truly want to save them, we’ll need to be both prudent and circumspect. No one ever saved civilization by suppressing the desire to learn.

Ten years ago on this site, I documented the rise of America’s most prominent socialist, Bernie Sanders, from his surprising victory in a mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont, to becoming a member of the House of Representatives, then the US Senate, and now a leading national left-wing politician. I called his version of socialism “genteel” and asked if it really had any relationship with the hard-edged revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America who wanted to confront the owners of capital, take control of industries, and fight for unions and working people.

Whether they are consciously copying Sanders’ footsteps to becoming the leading advocate for overthrowing America’s “oppressive” capitalist system or not, we now have three individuals who either call or align themselves with socialism serving as mayor or in a very strong position to become mayor of large American cities. Like Sanders, these individuals espouse some very left-wing policies. But can someone serving as a mayor, even the mayor of America’s largest city, really pursue “socialism”? Can local politics ever be socialist?

Chicago’s Brandon Johnson won the general election just two years ago, and now in New York City, Zohran Mamdani is the winner of the Democratic primary, which will likely give him the keys to Gracie Mansion. Then just last week in a very surprising outcome in Minneapolis, another socialist, Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic party at a convention, rejecting the incumbent Jacob Frey because he failed to support a resolution calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas conflict last year and not supporting policies such as carbon taxes and rent control. Arguing, correctly, that they don’t work.

Socialism has been growing in popularity and favorability among the two groups that carried Mamdani to victory in New York—Democrats in general and young people in particular. The day after his stunning victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that it was an army of young volunteers who helped organize his campaign and push him over the finish line, convincingly defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Socialism has steadily become more popular among young people and the left in recent years. A Pew poll from 2022 showed 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable impression of socialism, and that a majority of Americans aged 18–29 preferred socialism to capitalism. Drilling further into the data, the poll found that young Democrats in particular were predisposed towards socialism because it would redistribute wealth and use state power to provide a plethora of various services and other “freebies.”

Mamdani’s bread and butter policies were chosen to appeal to younger left-leaning voters in New York, specifically rent control, subsidized public transportation, government grocery stores, and other superficially appealing (and ultimately disastrous) proposals. Fateh has a similar vision for Minneapolis.

Part of the problem is that for a long time, there was at least one party that staked out a fairly consistent position in favor of less government and more markets, in its rhetoric. That was the Republican Party, coming out of the roots of the Goldwater Revolution through the Reagan presidency up through the end of George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House. The party of the “right” was fairly consistent in at least talking about capitalism and limited government positively. But the GOP now supports tariffs, economic planning, and huge domestic spending programs, alongside strengthening the military. That shift allows Democrats to move further left on a wide range of issues, and the election of these two individuals offers a glimpse of one potential future of American national politics.

Leaving aside national politics, an interesting question remains: Why are we seeing socialism become popular at the local level, particularly in these three cities? First, in the case of New York and Minneapolis, these candidates were successful through unconventional electoral processes—ranked-order voting in Mamdani’s case and a nomination by a local party in Fateh’s. Second, all three of these candidates have won in very blue cities in which socialism is more favorably viewed, but none with the support of blue-collar voters. In Chicago, Johnson was the former head of the teachers’ union, which is one of the most politically powerful organizations in the state. In New York, Mamdani won with support from the “a little rich” boroughs of Brooklyn and other areas filled with highly educated elite voters who believe they are the underpaid relative to their fellow elites on Wall Street and in tech. Resentment by them fueled his victory while working-class voters in the Bronx and Staten Island rejected his calls for government grocery stores, housing the homeless in subway stations, and rent control. Fateh won the support of hard-left party delegates in a city that was the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

There is one more key reason why socialism is becoming more popular among heavily blue cities, and Fateh mentions it prominently on his campaign page when he begins his “Vision” by noting that the White House is occupied by Donald Trump. Of course, this is in conjunction with Trump’s policies. He says he wants to create a Minneapolis that is “the last line of defense” against President Trump and what he calls his “posse of unelected billionaires” in a nod to Elon Musk. I would wager that Mamdani enjoys a similar tailwind in this election. It’s also worth noting that Sanders was elected mayor in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was to begin his first term in office. Coincidence?

Expecting the mayors of their cities to lead the resistance, though, is naive. It’s like signing a punter to solve a football team’s passing game. Mayors have limited powers to take on the national government and a responsibility to handle local policy challenges, not to issue proclamations in support of Middle Eastern policies.

Will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.”

Any thoughtful citizen needs to see what this posse of soon-to-be-elected, self-proclaimed socialists is selling. They have little managerial experience; they are rehashing failed policies that will simply lead to a larger public sector that none of these cities can afford. What’s more, increasing public sector spending in many of the areas they are suggesting has never been effective at addressing the problems these individuals are claiming to solve. That is why blue cities have been losing population and Democrats are bleeding blue-collar support in metropolitan areas.

So, will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.” Historically, socialists have advocated for the abolition of privately held property that would be replaced by collective ownership and central control of the distribution of goods through central planning rather than markets. This has led to decreases in inequality, basically by making everyone tremendously poorer, for example, in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Modern advocates for socialism promote it as a much milder version of the Soviet communist model, but the principles share a lot of similarities. Consider Mamdani’s calls for the abolition of privately owned housing and government provision of retail food. Those are steps towards intervention in two critical areas of daily life. Of course, he lacks the power to confiscate people’s homes and build large public housing projects on 5th Avenue. So can a mayor really be a socialist?

The founders of the Bloomington School of political economy, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent, were always reluctant to describe local politics using sharp divisions between “markets” and “government.” They correctly recognized that the market is an institution that needs some third party to maintain property rights and enforce contracts. Governments need some form of wealth creation to pay for services. They argued that neither can exist in a vacuum without the other.

Rather, cities and localities offer different bundles of services, with individuals exercising choice to decide how those services are provided. Take something simple like trash collection. A city can hire a bunch of full-time employees and equipment, then build its own landfills to handle trash removal and waste disposal fully publicly. Or they could work with private sector providers to pick up trash, contract out with private landfills, and deposit the garbage with them. Most city services can now be provided by private companies, and most cities use some mix of public and private. Here in Indianapolis, the parking meters are run by a private company. Education is moving towards a mix of public and private.

And as the Ostroms correctly noted, it is mayors and city councils who decide how those services are provided. All three of the socialist-ish mayoral candidates seem to be in agreement with the broad principle that more public provision of things is good. For example, Johnson in Chicago is fighting to curtail school choice and protect public teachers’ pensions and salaries, which may be a principled belief, but it also satisfies his strongest group of supporters. Mamdani’s goals of rent control and “free” public transit, along with curtailing police power, might also be principled but satisfy his core supporters. But none of those are necessarily “socialist”. In fact, it looks quite a bit more like a lot of urban governance during the 1960s and ’70s—a period of notoriously poor performance by most major American cities.

That period of failed governance included what became known as “white flight,” when large numbers of city dwellers fled to the suburbs when faced with unsatisfactory governance. Exit is always an option for citizens when it comes to localities. To pay for these “socialist” policies, taxes will increase on “the rich,” who will undoubtedly flee the city to avoid those higher tax rates. At this moment, both Chicago and New York are in tenuous fiscal positions because of unfunded pension funds for government employees. While Minneapolis is in a somewhat better position, it also has approximately $100 million in debt from such pension commitments to government workers.

While the music of the 1960s and 70s is something to enjoy, its urban governance, bankrupt cities, crime-ridden streets, and poor public services are not. And no matter what label you put on them, they will not bring the workers’ paradise socialism promises.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

The ongoing clash of the titans, President Trump and Elon Musk, is bringing into high relief the question of whether even the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth can stand up to vast private wealth allied to the power of advanced technology. Can mere political power—the checks and balances of constitutional government—ever hope to control the apparently limitless ability of technology billionaires to alter everyone’s lives? Will Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, having created entirely new digital societies, succeed in making themselves the gatekeepers of those societies? Will the new subjects of the new generation of tech builders get a democratic veto on the future being planned for us? Or will we wake up one day to be notified that installation of a brain-machine interface (BMI) is a “required update,” without which we will be unable to make a phone call or access our investment account? Will space travel soon require no government authorization, and colonies on the Moon or Mars be founded, not by NASA, but by the wealthy few who dominate aerospace technology?

We live in revolutionary times because technology is transforming every aspect of our lives—including not only how we work, but also how we connect with each other and find a sense of meaning. Tech founders and venture capitalists—the creators of artificial intelligence, space technologies, social media, cloud, and data platforms—are becoming global power players, whose tools are not just products, but networks that influence how societies function, how people think, how wars are fought, and how peace is made.

As in the socialist revolutions of the last century, the common people have yet to be consulted about these drastic alterations to our way of life, these new directions being set for our future. Socialists justified the lack of democratic accountability by claiming that the proletariat clung to the past owing to “false consciousness.” They could not be expected to discern the Shining Path that lay ahead, so they would have to be driven along it by force. Similarly, the tech titans of today assume that the vast multitude of tech users, many wedded to outmoded ways of life, will resist but will ultimately accept a future in which tech will give them unimaginable wealth and freedom. For now, they will have to be subject to tyrannous updates. Only Elon Musk, with over 222 million followers on his X account, seems concerned about legitimizing this tech future by founding an “America Party.” How successful his latest venture will be remains to be seen.

For now, the gap between Silicon Valley’s mindset and the rest of humanity is widening. The venture capitalists who invest in the most disruptive technologies tend to be techno-optimists like Marc Andreesen or transhumanists like Peter Thiel. All our personal and social problems, such men believe, are now capable of technological solutions. Human beings no longer have to be satisfied with the traditional limits of human nature or the vagaries of democratic politics.

Many tech entrepreneurs, understandably, are done with waiting for government to solve our problems. Elon Musk believed DOGE could save us from catastrophic levels of public debt, but the politicians wrecked his beautiful dream. Why waste any more time in Washington, DC, when the real solutions will be found through disruptive tech such as generative AI or new space technologies? Why rely on faulty human intelligence when we can create a superintelligent and invisible god in the cloud that can govern us, perhaps via BMI implants, far better than we govern ourselves?

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the rest of us could do with a little less disruption as we struggle to come to grips with the tech revolution. We are having breakdowns from all these breakthroughs. We worry that the tech billionaires are more interested in their own success, measured in dollars, than in our welfare. We are alarmed when the logic of finance drives venture capitalists to prefer dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military applications. Military tech cries out to be used, which means war. As Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon’s chief diplomat, once remarked, the only thing you can’t do with bayonets is to sit on them.

What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin.

Private adventurers getting out in front of public authorities are, to be sure, nothing new in Western history. The Dutch and British empires were launched by entrepreneurs who left the political constraints of their home countries to make fortunes in foreign lands. In time, their governments found it necessary to deploy ever more military power to protect their new overseas interests. Presently, they found themselves with empires. As the historian John Robert Seeley wrote of the British Empire in 1883, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” In North America, the restless expansion of British and French colonists ended up triggering the French and Indian Wars, an extension of the European Seven Years’ War that neither the British nor the French governments welcomed. Unplanned imperial overstretch nearly bankrupted both colonial powers, creating the preconditions for two revolutions, the American and the French.

The ambition to transcend the limits of human nature is also nothing new. In the 1660s, shortly after the formation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Robert Boyle jotted down what many scholars have seen as the Society’s to-do list. This was inspired by his mentor Francis Bacon, who wanted to reorient the sciences to more practical aims, principally “the relief of man’s estate.” More than a few items in this list sound strangely familiar:

• The Prolongation of Life.
• The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
• The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed.
• The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
• Potent Drugs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.

Some items would be described today as dual-use technologies:

• The making Armor light and extremely hard.
• A Ship to saile with All Winds, and A Ship not to be Sunk.

It wasn’t called the Royal Society for nothing. Kings and princes had been sponsoring new technologies since Prince Henry the Navigator developed a new naval vessel, the caravel, to explore commercial opportunities on the coasts of Africa. Scientific advances in Renaissance Europe from the beginning were linked with military competition between rival powers.

Entrepreneurs seeking to escape the constraints of government, then, are nothing new. Inventors have been trying to transcend the limits of human nature for centuries. Dual-use technologies are as old as warfare itself. What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin. Never before have the masters of technology had such power at a time when the public has so little trust in traditional institutions. Will the tech titans soon become the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, as Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said of poets? And if so, what can we do about it?

There have been other times in history when ruling institutions were weak and distrusted, and powerful individuals, lacking political legitimacy, have stepped into their place. Another great poet, Francesco Petrarch, spotted the problem in the fourteenth century, following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the discrediting of the Papacy’s moral authority—the two great universal institutions of the Middle Ages. He came up with a solution that sparked the Italian Renaissance, among the most glorious periods of cultural achievement in the Western tradition. For Petrarch, the problems of his day could be solved by a revival of ancient virtue, meaning the lost moral, intellectual, and spiritual excellence of the ancient world. Educating the new leaders of Europe in the classics, he believed, would bring about a general reformation of society and political life. Could a similar strategy be used today?

A decade or so back, tech entrepreneurs started organizing themselves to promote what they called “Peace Tech.” The idea was not to ease consciences by investing in progressive causes, like ESG investing. Rather, venture capitalists would incubate startups that would create “dual use” innovations of a different kind. These technologies, sometimes called “triple use”, included peace as a third pillar. They aimed to build a movement of tech entrepreneurs, coders, developers, and investors committed to using technology to save lives, predict conflict, mitigate violence, mediate tensions, and support post-conflict recovery.

There are all too many reasons to fear political capture of initiatives like Peace Tech, but perhaps a similar model could be used to launch a Petrarchan reform among the new generation of tech entrepreneurs. The Renaissance revival of ancient virtue succeeded by convincing the most prestigious leaders of Renaissance Italy that they could only bring order to the chaos of the times by creating a new class of men and women. This new elite would dedicate itself to moral and intellectual excellence. The governments of that time suffered from a deficit of legitimacy, but virtue—supreme competence, wisdom, and firm moral grounding—could build a legitimacy of its own. The peoples under their rule would willingly accept effective leaders who showed care for people of all classes as well as loving custodianship of sound Western traditions inherited from the past.

A true aristocracy of virtue in tech, or even a few individuals with humanistic leadership skills of an exceptional order, could alter the worldview of the new technocracy, and place technological advance in the service of humanity and the common good—rather than the other way around. In the Renaissance, some powerful but illegitimate rulers like Lorenzo de’Medici sought the good of their peoples without sharing power with them. By contrast, the Founding Fathers, many of them virtuous men trained in the classics, took the European tradition of aristocratic republics and made it more responsive to the will of the people. As is written in the Book of Wisdom, “A multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world.”

Despite being written 180 years ago, Richard Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser, speaks to contested aspects of freedom in modern-day life. It reflects the earlier conception of freedom that historian Sophia Rosenfeld documents in her new book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Heinrich Tannhäuser moves from license to liberty in the opera. The opera illustrates Rosenfeld’s argument that freedom traditionally meant freedom from bondage to disordered desire; it distinguished between liberty and licentiousness. This, in contrast to the dramatic twentieth-century inversion, in which moral license, rather than being an antonym of freedom, becomes a synonym for freedom.

Contrary to the way the opera’s drama is typically framed today, as revolving around Tannhäuser’s choice between profane and sacred love, the first words Henrich utters—even the first notes of the overture—make clear that Tannhäuser seeks the freedom of beatitude. In Act 1, Heinrich, enslaved by his sexual passion to the goddess Venus—today we would call Heinrich a sex addict—describes the opera’s dramatic trajectory (translation by Burton Fisher),

If I remain with you, I can only be a slave.
It is freedom that I long for: freedom, freedom, for which I thirst;
I will struggle and fight,
even if destruction and death await me:
therefore I must flee your kingdom.
Oh queen, goddess, let me go!

The drama in Tannhäuser does not revolve around a never-ending dialectical struggle between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, tempting though it may be to frame the drama as a choice for Heinrich between Venus (Dionysiac) and the chaste Elisabeth (Apolline).

From beginning to end, albeit with fits and starts, the opera revolves around Heinrich’s pilgrimage to free himself from his bondage, his addiction, as he seeks to attain the beatific vision. Ultimately, however, only death can free him from his bondage. It is not the death of romantic extinction, however, it is a death unto life. The dramatic movement arises from how those around him, his ostensible friends and allies, hinder and divert him from his pilgrimage, and from how others help him to free himself, even at great cost to themselves.

The opera challenges modern conceptions of what freedom is and provides a dramatic, and moving, display of what it takes to be freed from bondage to sin.

To be sure, I accept that Wagner’s opera embodies and reflects Romantic-era themes. Yet modern commentary often draws too sharp a line between Romanticism and Christianity. Thematic currents certainly existed in Romantic art that reflected heterodox, immanentistic religious sentiments. But there also existed currents in the movement more congenial to Christianity.

One does not stretch to recognize a Christian theme in an opera in which the libretto provides “To Thee do I journey, Lord Jesus Christ, for Thou art the pilgrims’ hope.” And more diffusely, the common German Romantic trope of the redemptive female, I suggest, draws on the Biblical currents of traditional Christendom in which the Church holds a distinctively feminine identity as the bride of Christ.

That said, the opera shouldn’t be baptized; Wagner himself prevents that. Nonetheless, I think we can interrogate the opera for Christian themes, although interrogate it for themes that challenge today’s all-too comfortable Christianity as much as interrogate it for themes that challenge today’s antinomian conception of freedom.

The Chiastic Structure of Tannhäuser

The opera offers a basic chiastic structure.

The chiastic structure highlights three points about the opera. First, the opera is all about Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage toward beatific vision; it is not about a choice between profane and sacred love. This is clear musically as well as textually. The very first notes of the overture are those from the Pilgrims’ Chorus. The very last notes of the opera are those of Pilgrim’s Chorus. (Some versions end with a trebled “hallelujah,” but those are no more than sung exclamation marks.)

There is a musical shift, however, that emphasizes the concluding words of the libretto reporting Tannhäuser’s redemption: In both the overture and when the Chorus is sung by the pilgrims returning from Rome without Tannhäuser, the meter for the Pilgrim’s Chorus is 3/4. In the opera’s concluding use of the Chorus, it is in the measured and emphatic 3/2 meter.

The pilgrims’ leitmotif frames both the start and conclusion of the opera. Doing so musically links Heinrich’s fate with that of the pilgrims returning from Rome when they sing the Chorus at length in Act 3, “I lay my pilgrim’s staff to rest, because, faithful to God, I completed my pilgrimage!”

The music articulates the same outcome for Heinrich, the change in the meter underscoring the dramatic concluding words of the libretto, sung with emphasis by pilgrims and others on stage, “The salvation of grace is the penitents reward, now he [Tannhäuser] attains the peace of the blessed!” This is the end toward which the opera moves from literally the first notes of the overture.

Secondly, when Tannhäuser departs Venusberg, his pilgrimage not only takes him away from Venusberg, it also takes him away from Wartburg, and Elisabeth, as well. This is why the opera does not circle around Heinrich’s choice between Venus and Elisabeth: Heinrich does not leave Venusberg in order to return to Elisabeth and Wartburg. His diversion to Wartburg and Elisabeth represents a relapse; this diversion threatens his soul.

Finally, Elisabeth’s intercession for Heinrich is the pivot around which the chiasm inverts. The pivot, however, reflects a point of discontinuity for Elisabeth, a significant moment of change. Elisabeth was basically a besotted schoolgirl before growing up spiritually in answer to Tannhäuser’s crisis.

At the pivot, Elisabeth recognizes that in returning to Wartburg, Tannhäuser has placed his soul at risk. Contrary to the view that Elisabeth does little more than fulfill the Romantic-era trope of the sacrificial virgin, Elisabeth matures more than any other character during the course of the opera (including Tannhäuser). After the chiastic pivot, she reflects the deep love of Christ for his people, “Greater love has no one than that he lay down his life for his friends.”

The Dramatic Movement in the Opera

Act 1 opens with Tannhäuser, a medieval German minnesinger (akin to a troubadour) in intimate repose with the goddess Venus in her grotto in Venusberg. Satyrs, fauns, naiads, sirens, nymphs, and others cavort around the couple. (Some versions of the opera open with a longer orgiastic ballet.)

Tannhäuser is jarred awake by the “joyous peals” of church bells he hears in a dream. Moved by the beatific call, Tannhäuser presses Venus to release him from his bondage to her. Initially diplomatic in how he frames his request, Tannhäuser praises the goddess before repeatedly asking to be set free. Venus pushes back, declining his request. The disagreement escalates, musically as well as textually.

Tannhäuser comes clean with his change of heart, “Goddess of pleasure and delight, no! Oh, I shall not find peace and repose in your embrace! My salvation lies in Mary!” (Mary is a synecdoche for heaven and God’s presence.)

Venus and Venusberg disappear immediately; Tannhäuser finds himself in front of a shrine to Mary outside of Wartburg.

Before Tannhäuser is able to continue his pilgrimage, however, he meets a group of minnesingers from Wartburg whom he used to know. While acknowledging them, he begs them to allow him to continue his pilgrimage away from Wartburg. Not recognizing the desperate nature of Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage, they press him repeatedly to join them again and return to the castle. Tannhäuser resists each request until Wolfram, a previously close friend, entices Tannhäuser with the prospect of renewing his association with Elisabeth. The temptation proves too much; Tannhäuser capitulates. Now diverted from his pilgrimage, he returns with them to the castle, and to Elisabeth.

In Act 2, the community gathers with the minnesingers to witness their competition over who can improvise the best song. The Landgrave (the aristocratic lord) provides the topic of the competition: the minnesingers must improvise a song describing “the true essence of love.”

The first two minnesingers improvise insipid songs of drippy platitudes; Tannhäuser scorns their songs (as they deserve). But when it comes to Tannhäuser, that his return to Wartburg represents a relapse into bondage becomes clear: he sings a tribute to Venus and profane love.

His song scandalizes the assembly. The other minnesingers, outraged, advocate Tannhäuser’s exile, even death. While Elisabeth is shocked as well, she alone recognizes that Tannhäuser has returned to Wartburg morally wounded and disordered. Elisabeth intercedes for Tannhäuser, saving him from the mob.

This is the pivot in the chiasm.

Elisabeth’s intercession allows Tannhäuser finally to proceed with his pilgrimage, heading to Rome with other pilgrims to receive absolution from the pope.

In the final act, Elisabeth waits for Tannhäuser’s return from Rome. When the other pilgrims return, Tannhäuser is not with them. She recognizes that Tannhäuser is again spiritually lost. In response, Elisabeth fulfills the terms of prayer she made at the chiastic pivot, giving her life that she might draw even nearer to the heavenly altar to continue praying for Tannhäuser. She departs to die.

Tannhäuser subsequently arrives back in Wartburg. He is lost: The pope rejected his plea for forgiveness, telling him that because he had “sojourned in the Venusberg, from now henceforth, you are eternally damned.” The pope tells Tannhäuser that, as his (the pope’s) wooden staff no longer blossoms, “deliverance can never blossom for you.”

Without hope of redemption now, Tannhäuser braces himself to return to Venus. “I have lost my salvation, now let the pleasures of hell be mine.” Venus appears before him to receive him back, “Now be forever mine!” This return is its own judgment for Heinrich.

Before Tannhäuser departs, however, the minnesingers arrive carrying Elisabeth’s corpse. Wolfram tells Tannhäuser, “Your angel prays for you at God’s throne. She has been heard, Heinrich, you are saved!” Tannhäuser collapses before Elisabeth’s body and cries out, “Holy Elisabeth, pray for me!” And dies.

Another set of pilgrims arrives, returning from Rome. They return, however, with news of a miracle: the pope’s staff has blossomed. Heaven has overruled the pope; the miracle shows that redemption has “blossomed afresh” for Tannhäuser, and he has “attained the peace of the blessed.”

Elisabeth’s Maturation in the Opera

Commentary typically portrays Elisabeth as a unidimensional, “saintly” Elisabeth. The Romantic trope of the redemptive woman. Elisabeth does become saintly. But she’s an earthly-minded girl at the start of Act 2.

Elisabeth fell hard for Tannhäuser before he spurned her for Venus. In response to the hurt and embarrassment, Elisabeth petulantly withdrew from the activities at Wartburg. On hearing of Tannhäuser’s return, her heart flutters, “How strongly my heart jumps.” She sings, “I have been awakened to new life.”

When Tannhäuser subsequently sings paeans to Venus at the music competition, Elisabeth is as shocked as the others, perhaps even more so. Critically, however, she recognizes, as the others do not, that Tannhäuser is struggling to break free of spiritual bondage. Helping Tannhäuser break free of this slavery requires her intercession, an intercession requiring not only that she give up her own hopes for happiness with Tannhäuser as a couple, but that she sacrifice her earthly life for his eternal life.

At the chiastic pivot, Elisabeth recognizes that Tannhäuser’s diversion to Wartburg—and to her—meant a spiritual relapse for Tannhäuser, that he is once again in the demon’s thrall. Elisabeth recognizes this, and makes a fateful commitment to exchange her earthly life to secure Tannhäuser’s eternal life:

May the spirit of belief be granted him, just as the Savior once suffered. … Let him journey to Thee, Thou God of clemency and grace. … Forgive him, who has fallen, forgive the guilt of his sin. I will pray for him. May my life be prayer; grant that he may see Thy light, before he is lost in darkness. In joyful fright, let a sacrifice be dedicated to Thee. Take, oh, take my life: I no longer call it mine.

Elisabeth offering her life as a sacrifice likely strikes the ears of most modern American Christians as heterodox. Jesus, after all, is the sacrifice for the sins of people.

But Elisabeth’s offer is not quite as heterodox as it may initially appear. First, Elisabeth herself frames her request in the context of Jesus’s sacrifice, “just as the Savior once suffered.” And recall that Jesus enjoins his followers to “take up their cross,” the instrument of crucifixion, to follow him. Similarly, Peter writes that Jesus’s suffering provides Christians “an example, so that you may follow in his steps.” Paul refers to his suffering “completing what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of the body which is the church.” The Apostle even suggests he would be willing to be accursed so that he might save others.

From beginning to end, albeit with fits and starts, the opera revolves around Heinrich’s pilgrimage to free himself from his bondage, his addiction, as he seeks to attain the beatific vision.

None of this impugns the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Rather, traditional Christian theology makes a distinction between Christ’s unique propitiatory sacrifice and his followers’ “eucharistic sacrifices”—sacrifices of thanksgiving—for God and each other.

As with Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac, sacrifice is a means by which the faithful can turn cheap talk into credible talk. Elisabeth offers her life to God to underscore the earnest authenticity of her prayer for his eternal good.

So, too, Elisabeth’s sacrifice of her life for Tannhäuser is not as alien to traditional Christian beliefs as it may seem at first. Elisabeth’s offer in this opera is not a Romantic gesture to non-being. While not emphasized much today, Christian baptism provides a proleptic death (and resurrection), a death that kills off the sin nature, freeing the person into life. This death liberates from sin.

Elisabeth and Tannhäuser do not look to death as extinction, but as release into the freedom of divine beatitude. Here, too, they reflect a deep Biblical longing. Paul, for example, longs for the beatitude that results from death, for “to depart and be with Christ is very much better.” This is ultimately the hope of liberation for Tannhäuser, why he sings of his death as part of his liberation from Venus.

This liberation is the opera’s story, from the first notes of the overture to the last notes the pilgrims sing. It is the move from licentiousness to the freedom of beatitude. Without suggesting that Wagner intended it to communicate a Christian message, or that it does not have its share of heterodox Romantic moments, the opera challenges modern conceptions of what freedom is, challenges easy-going assumptions among Christians of what it means to love one another, and provides a dramatic, and moving, display of what it takes to be freed from bondage to sin.