Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

The sheer horror and bleakness of trench warfare is unrivalled. The humanitarian toll of the First World War, which began in August 111 years ago, is staggering, with 10 million military deaths, close to 7 million civilian deaths, and 21 million military personnel wounded. On July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme saw the deadliest day in British military history to date, with 57,000 casualties, including 19,240 dead. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission files reveal that 526,816 British and Commonwealth soldiers of WWI have no known resting place. Tragically, 338,955 have never been buried, and 187,861 have unidentified graves. It is hard to fathom the scale of devastation and brutality that could render half a million families bereaved without even a tangible location in which to mourn their dearly departed. How did half a million men die in service of their country, with no known final resting place? What spurred the idea of a single tomb to commemorate these men? 

These are the questions John Nichol endeavors to answer in his new book The Unknown Warrior: A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance. The bestselling author weaves archival research, diaries, and interviews with descendants and military experts to present a moving historical account that both haunts and edifies. A veteran who served in the Royal Air Force for fifteen years, Nichol is all too familiar with the complexities and camaraderie of war. He was taken prisoner in the Gulf War, and his highly publicized captivity became one of the most enduring images of the conflict. In this new book, Nichol quantum leaps between the past and the present to commemorate the fallen. 

At High Wood

If one single moment was emblematic of the loss of the Great War, it was surely there on the first day at the Somme, “when thousands of young men leapt gamely from their trenches, only to discover that woolen uniforms offer precious little protection against machine-gun bullets.” It was a cruel day in which one man was killed every 4.4 seconds. Two weeks later, a combined British-Indian force armed with lances charged into the jaws of a heavily armed, fortified German position equipped with machine guns. The writer explains that early in the Somme, the Allies had developed a strategy referred to as “creeping barrage.” A wall of exploding shells which moved slowly over enemy positions as infantry followed closely behind, with the hope being that any remaining enemy combatants would be forced to stay under cover as Allied soldiers advanced upon them. 

Nichol offers glimpses of the lives of some of the fallen. Bert Bradley with his pipe, young Alec Reader awaiting his release papers, and Sidney Wheater, the hockey player from Scarborough, all died at High Wood. A few hours later, Raymond Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, was shot while leading his men in an attack. In Ginchy, Harry Farlam from Derbyshire, who was so proud to be a Corporal, was killed the next day. Nichol cites the Duke of Wellington’s 1815 remark after Waterloo, “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” At High Wood today, it is estimated that 8,000 nameless soldiers from both sides still lie under the soil. “Many of the dead, never recovered and offered a permanent place to rest, still lie in the earth beneath my feet. So many Unknown Warriors. So many ghosts.”

Chaplain David Railton carried his personal Union Jack on the battlefield in France, taking great care of it. “The flag was a stirring symbol of home, of ‘Dear Old England’, as he put it. It brought a flash of colour to the muted greys and khakis of their dun-coloured surroundings. And it was a Christian symbol, too: a blood-red cross which offered, perhaps, the possibility of resurrection for those upon whom it was softly laid.” When a fresh corpse was deposited, the Padre would cover it with his flag and say a few prayers. He would do his best to identify the body and make a note of the burial location. By November 1916, the combined casualties of the British Empire, the French, and the Germans were in excess of one million, and many families had no closure. 

Fabian Ware, a newspaper editor and educator, thought deeply about the fate of the unidentified dead and their resting places in France. With colleagues, he started an operation comprising sixteen ambulances, a field hospital, touring cars, well-crafted crosses with inscriptions, and tarred bases to prevent rotting. Called the “Graves Registration Commission” (GRC), they were officially recognized by the War Office. Ware worked to establish general principles for burying and memorializing the dead after the war, and what followed was the establishment of the Imperial War Graves Commission, with the Prince of Wales as its president. Writer Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his eighteen-year-old son John in the Battle of Loos in 1915, was appointed literary advisor. It was Kipling who coined the majority of the phrases carved in cemeteries and gardens, and the phrase that is on the white headstones of all the Unknown Warriors: “A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.” Famed architect Sir Edwin Lutyens would design a majority of war memorials, including the Cenotaph. 

The Chosen One 

Railton understood the nation needed closure, healing, and a symbol to represent the devastating loss. Only 32 out of 16,000 British villages had all their men return alive from the war. He proposed that an unknown warrior be interred at Westminster Abbey, and wrote to its dean, the Right Reverend Bishop Ryle. The dean had the ear of both the King and the Prime Minister, and if anyone could get this sanctioned, it was he. Ryle replied three days later: “The suggestion of commemorating the Unknown Dead has indeed been made in different quarters. But your suggestion strikes me as the best I have received. If I could obtain the War Office permission, I think I could carry out the rest of the proposal—the interment, etc. And the idea occurs to me that it would be appropriate as a wonderful way of commemorating the Armistice.” 

Grieving mothers needed to believe the Unknown Warrior could be their precious son; widows had to hope he could be their beloved husband; and children had to be given faith that he could be their dear father. Thus, it was essential that the identity of the chosen Warrior remain unknown. All involved were sworn to secrecy and given specific instructions for the selection process. Four bodies were to be chosen. The whereabouts of the three “unused” bodies were to be sacrosanct. The body had to be a British soldier chosen from each of the big battle areas: Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. The bodies were to be brought to the headquarters at St Pol and placed in the Chapel on November 8, 1920. The parties bringing the bodies were to swiftly return to their areas. The final chosen Warrior would lie in a sixteenth-century-inspired English oak casket.

The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword.

The final chosen Warrior was transported by ambulance to Boulogne on the coast under military escort, along with six barrels of French soil. Soldiers, both British and French, and a plethora of photographers lined the roads approaching the port, eager to see the Unknown Warrior’s cortège. Nichol explains, “A bearer party of British and dominion soldiers was waiting to carry the Union Jack-wrapped coffin up to the Château’s library. The men had been carefully selected to represent all branches of the army: the Royal Army Service Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Garrison Artillery, the Australian Light Horse, the Canadian Infantry, the 21st London Regiment, the Machine Gun Corps and the Royal Army Medical Corps.”

That night would be the only time in which the Warrior was not under the protection of British troops. The “poilus” from the French 8th Regiment were chosen to guard him, in recognition of their valor in battle and as recent recipients of the Légion d’Honneur en masse. “At 10:30AM, all the bells of Boulogne began to toll, and after a blazing salute from the trumpets of the French cavalry, the great bass drums of the massed band began to thump out the sombre rhythm of Chopin’s marche funèbre (funeral march).” France had lost 1.3 million men in the war, and Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, well understood the intense human suffering. He unexpectedly travelled to the procession on his own volition and marched alongside General Macdonogh behind the Unknown Warrior. The Warrior set sail on the HMS Verdun, finally on his way home. He arrived on British soil to the chords of “Land of Hope and Glory,” then travelled by train to London Victoria’s station and onwards to his final resting place at Westminster. The French Unknown Warrior would begin his journey to Paris, where he was honored the following day as his brother-in-arms was being interred. 

A Place of Remembrance 

The Unknown Warrior’s parade began at Victoria Station, passed Constitution Hill and The Mall, stopped at the unveiling of the Cenotaph, and moved onwards to the abbey, where 20,000 applications had been received for around 1,600 places. Newspapers had come across the plea of a young boy who ended his letter with, “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.” A sentiment shared by many. Thanks to Queen Mary, wife of King George V, some places had been reserved for widows who joined dignitaries from across the Empire, including many Victoria Cross recipients, bestowing a very different honor as the Warrior’s peers. The Warrior would not be weaponless in the afterlife and was interred with an iron shield and Charles ffoulkes’ crusader’s sword. A writer for the Yorkshire Post captured the nation’s mood, “But never have I known any feeling comparable to that of today as I gazed on the flag-covered coffin that enshrined the sublime anonymity of a fallen soldier, from that to the simple but all-moving symbolism of the Cenotaph, and from both to the living, palpitating, pathetic multitude of mothers and wives stricken by the fell blow of war in these recent years. ” 

In the present, Nichol admires the ornate Unknown Warrior’s American Congressional Medal of Honor, affixed to a pillar near the Warrior’s tomb. It is embossed with the single word “VALOR.” More than 60 countries now have their own tomb for their own valiant unknown. Nichol shares that he and fellow Gulf War POWs gather every year on the anniversary of their release. They observe a moment’s silence before dinner and toast to absent friends who did not come home. 

Nichol speaks of the similarities between Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s final journey and that of the Unknown Warrior. The nation mourned for both, with a deep and profound sorrow permeating all quarters. Pride was also thematic in both, “Pride in Her Majesty’s life and her legacy; pride in our Armed Forces and the role they played; pride, above all, in the feeling of what it is to be British.” After laying flowers at Buckingham Palace, I too was a proud Brit who undertook the arduous lying-in-state pilgrimage to pay respects to our Late Queen. It was the mother of all British queues, thirteen hours of walking through the bitter London cold beside the River Thames. We diligently journeyed past iconic landmarks, eventually reaching the Palace of Westminster at 2am. 

Yet as Nichol states, differences exist, too. “Instead of the crown, orb and sceptre lay the workaday steel helmet, webbing and bayonet of a soldier.” Her Majesty was by no means anonymous. With the Warrior, he was everyone, yet no one, yet someone. As written in a personal narrative after the Warrior’s funeral, “The most terrible words in all writing used to be There they crucified Him. But there is a sadder sentence now—I know not where they have laid Him. Surely ‘missing’ is the cruelest word in the language.” The Unknown Warrior was someone’s missing—and there were hundreds of thousands like him. 

I have worn a poppy to remember the fallen and their sacrifices every November since primary school. Blazer or Cashmere coat, made of paper or enamel, ‘tis there on my lapel. It is a reminder to myself and others of what John McCrae so poignantly wrote in the first stanza of his poem, which inspired the symbol: 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

There are rows upon rows of those who loved and were loved. Who, like us, indeed felt dawn and beheld a sunset glow. The century has turned, man’s propensity for conflict has not abated, and peace still comes at a cost. As the passage of time takes us further away from the Great War, Nichol reminds us of our duty to remember—lest we forget.

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) loom large in conservative thinking about poverty and related ills. It’s widely believed that we could restore social health by reining in big government and expanding private religious programs. George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism laid out the standard expansion plan. It called for giving religious nonprofits a better shot at government contracts. That framework has also been endorsed by Donald Trump. In a February 2025 executive order, Trump stated, “The executive branch wants faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship, to the fullest extent permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, programs, and other Federal funding opportunities.” In other words, the plan is to slot FBOs into the NGO state. This merits rethinking.

America’s welfare state relies on a vast network of private nonprofit contractors to enact social policy. From one perspective, that model seems conducive to building a larger FBO sector. From another, it seems designed to tempt FBOs into overlooking how reliance on public financing makes it harder for a program to keep the faith. Temptation is a concept to which one would expect FBO champions, of all people, to appreciate. Ill-advised expansions threaten FBOs’ integrity as religious organizations offering a meaningful alternative to the social services status quo.

Setting FBOs up for success means creating programs that outperform government in boosting school performance, sobriety and employment, and/or that which promote values to which government programs are indifferent or hostile. Without a strong sense of FBOs’ distinctive virtues and the distinctive pressures they face in a secularized culture, policymakers who encourage expansion are setting faith-based leaders up for failure.

Even the most casual reader of Scripture will find his attention constantly drawn to the poorest of the poor, the miserable, the chronically ill and disabled, convicts, and others living openly sinful lives. Out of such stones cast away (Acts 4:8-12), the church will be built. Scripture shows not only Jesus’ sympathy for the wretched of the earth but his extensive personal contact with them. That example instructs that, as Pope Benedict XVI once explained to Peter Seewald, “Giving can never mean primarily giving money … you must give of yourselves.” This notion of giving of yourself is distinctive to modern faith-based organizations, which stretch thin resources through marshalling volunteer labor.

Those without any personal contact with the poor are susceptible to panaceas and utilitarian theories, such as “effective altruism,” that fetishize efficiency. Mother Teresa took constant heat from critics for failing to operate on sound business principles. Straightforward redistribution with minimal overhead will often appear as the most efficient anti-poverty policy. But redistribution will never enact the kind of behavioral change so obviously necessary to anyone who has witnessed firsthand low-income dysfunction. Giving of yourself is also less individualistic than giving of your resources. Paying taxes that go towards Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc., is part of a social contract—a deal made between the free, rights-bearing individual and the government. A redistribution-centered policy promotes a sterile, transactional conception of social work that will always seem unsatisfying to those most moved to heal society.

More than secular programs, FBOs tend to care about behavioral transformation. Aiming for behavioral transformation can yield high failure rates, but that may be defensible. Graduation from a treatment program that everyone graduates from sends a weaker message than graduation from one that most people fail out of. Conservatives sometimes argue that FBOs’ excellence consists in their ability to outperform the secular welfare state. But it may be more accurate to say that their performance can’t be compared, as they often embrace standards of success that are both different from, and higher than, secular programs’ standards.

Those concerned about anti-Christian bias often frame the FBO question as a religious liberty matter. That framing only clarifies whether religious groups can contract with government. It’s less helpful in determining whether they should. In general, an organization spiritually motivated to serve the poor may take public money to do so, as long as it doesn’t discriminate based on sect and doesn’t use taxpayer dollars to evangelize. But evangelism is precisely how FBOs reach some people failed by secular programs. Take addicts. People in recovery often fail to stick the landing because they lack something or someone to recover for. Family and friends can serve that purpose, but addicts often lack healthy social ties. Indeed, one of the standard best practices of recovery is to avoid the “people, places, and things” associated with one’s old, using ways. Building new relationships—a new life, really—takes time, leaving the typical man in recovery feeling that the only person he has to recover for is himself, which is a lonely state of affairs. But religion is always there—to provide structure, guidance, and cause for persisting in one’s sobriety. If recovery is like conversion, maybe it should be conversion.

Evangelistic work is tough sledding with poor people leading complex lives. All at the same time, they’re trying to get their kids out of foster care, obtain their high school equivalency and some form of professional certification, maintain sobriety, and secure reliable transportation and stable housing. Amidst such chaos, it’s tempting to conclude that evangelization needs to wait. On the other hand, that waiting can wind up taking forever. A crisis can present special evangelical potential. People in recovery often testify that they became sober the same day that they became a Christian and that, moreover, they’d never have made it without their faith. Reflecting on testimonies like that will naturally lead to further reflections on whether similarly situated individuals are positively harmed when social programs eschew evangelizing.

Trust can’t take root amidst fears that the next presidential administration will renege on the deal. As the old saying has it, “with government shekels come government shackles.”

The orthodox tend to bristle when religion is pitched as a life hack for staying sober. But the argument is more dialectical than utilitarian. A recovering addict will be a better Christian if he’s sober. Further, good works have a strong evangelistic upside. In The Rise of Christianity (1996), sociologist Rodney Stark credits first-century health and human service ministries with the early church’s survival. He quotes Tertullian: “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’” Performing good works obviously holds evangelistic potential for the performers, too. Chuck Colson, Watergate con and founder of Prison Fellowship, once wrote: “The richest spiritual experiences I have known have not been in vaulted cathedrals surrounded by stained-glass windows but in the filthiest prison cells. Christians will miss the greatest blessings if they isolate themselves from the reality of the world in which God lives.”

Secularizing pressures, in the world of twenty-first-century social services, are unrelenting. One pressure point is staff. Should an organization desire to integrate Christian teaching throughout its work, success will depend on what kind of personnel they can hire in an age of diminished church attendance. In 2023, the bishop of Toronto gave an interview to The Pillar in which he lamented the impracticality of finding 40,000 teachers who are “fervently Catholic” to staff the parochial education system he oversees. Should religious charter schools get off the ground, they would in short order face a similarly impossible dilemma. The big organizations (Catholic Charities; Lutheran Services in America) are those most functionally indistinguishable from the secular welfare state. That may be due not only to compromised leadership but staffing exigencies.

Downstream of personnel concerns are those of leadership transition. Many FBOs are now led by a founder or CEO who took charge two to three decades ago and is now personally out of step with the twenty-first century’s more casually secular standards. What happens when that person dies or steps down? At bare minimum, a faith-based leader should be a churchgoer. Diminished church attendance, societywide, means that the pool of potential faith-based leaders is smaller than it was thirty years ago. In principle, leadership transition creates the opportunity for revival. And yet, in my years of experience interviewing and meeting with faith-based groups, mainly homeless service providers, I have found revival to be rare. Many new leaders come in promising continuity with their predecessors in terms of religious intensity. Many come in promising fiscal discipline, a sharper focus on “outcomes,” an expanded donor base, and enticing capital improvements. It doesn’t happen very much that a new leader comes in promising spiritual renewal and pretty much just that.

The compassionate conservative theory of FBOs was premised on pluralism, in both the social services and American religious life. Earlier in the twentieth century, it had been maintained that, without strict church-state separation, the Protestant majority would exercise unjust dominion. Religious pluralism dissipated those fears. Parallel to that, as a legacy of the Great Society’s insistence on “community action,” America adopted a highly decentralized, “nonprofit industrial complex” style approach to fighting poverty. President Bush was impressed by sociological studies directed by Catholic political scientist John Dilulio that had documented that low-income neighborhoods were dense with scrappy Christian groups doing vital work in youth mentoring, child welfare, crime prevention, and addiction. These groups were seen as being discriminated against by government funding norms, forcing them to, as Bush put it in a July 1999 campaign speech, “make bricks without straw.”

Compassionate conservatism lost support after 9/11, when Bush’s attention shifted towards foreign policy. But not everyone was sad to see it fade. Author Marvin Olasky said that “compassionate conservatism mutated into a program to help local groups apply for money in Washington and learn how to work the bureaucracy.” There is indeed an essential grubbiness associated with the scramble for government contracts that carries great reputational risks for the faith-based sector. But the deeper problem is that pushing more FBOs into a reliance on government funding will give government leverage over them. Risks associated with that leverage have intensified in the era of “pen and phone” policymaking, which President Obama developed and his successors have continued. Any faith-based leader interested in contracting with government must be able to trust that he will not thereby sacrifice his organization’s integrity. That trust can’t take root amidst fears that the next presidential administration will renege on the deal. As the old saying has it, “with government shekels come government shackles.”

The steelman case for taking public money stems from need. It seems to be the case that private resources available to an FBO don’t grow at the same rate as the need in its host community grows. Many charitable organizations are philanthropically tapped out in their community; others could raise more private resources, but only via conforming to big philanthropy’s dubious whims. What faith-based social services guru Robert Lupton calls “toxic charity” possesses no moral superiority over mediocre government programs. Staying small is a recipe for barebones service offerings, which some FBOs might be content with, but many won’t. The hardest cases’ complex needs (“comorbidity”) necessitate an equally complex array of services. A modest-sized FBO may not be in a position to hire its own master’s level social worker, psychiatrist, clinical psychologists, nurse practitioners, job training and educational specialists. If you lead a good social program (who would want to lead a bad one?), it’s natural to want to help more people, or at least do a better job helping those to whom you’re already committed.

The best approach to expansion uses partnerships with government agencies as opposed to direct funding. Partnerships can facilitate access to more specialized services. In the best kind of partnership, government effectively makes an in-kind donation to an FBO. A shelter for single men hosts onsite detox services from an outside healthcare provider. The best partnerships are settled on the faith-based provider’s terms, not the government’s. A useful model is the San Antonio-based Haven for Hope, which boasts dozens of partnerships with government and other outside service providers. The federal government could play a role by urging more states and counties to, in exchange for funding, articulate how they’re actively exploring partnering with faith-based providers.

But proceed with caution. In rightwing circles, “O’Sullivan’s Law” stipulates that institutions that are not identifiably conservative become liberal over time. Consult, for example, the sad history of Catholic colleges (at least one of which currently offers a certificate in “Cannabis Studies”). Sullivan’s law most certainly applies to faith-based social service providers. Government funding can easily catalyze organizational drift from offering a distinct choice against the secular welfare state into serving as an echo of it.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, has received extraordinary attention in recent weeks, and for good reason. It is meticulously researched, tells an important story, and contains vignettes that will shock even the most cynical readers. It is also adroitly written. Although all readers know how the story ends, the authors created a genuine page turner. 

The book has a narrow focus, providing details about Joe Biden’s inner circle, as well as information about other top Democratic politicians and donors. It rarely expands outward to provide greater political or historical context. It nonetheless raises important questions that I hope all Americans with an interest in well-ordered politics and policymaking will ponder in the years ahead. Our increasingly dysfunctional Executive Branch suggests something has gone wrong with our constitutional order, requiring prudent reforms.

Original Sin is a rare work of political non-fiction that people across the partisan divide can enjoy, though for different reasons. Despondent progressives, looking for someone to blame for President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, can now point to some key figures who ensured that the Democratic Party would be in disarray in the months leading up to Election Day. Republican readers can relive the Schadenfreude of watching their opponents flame out. Even Biden loyalists should appreciate the sympathy the authors show the president, both for his sad decline and the heartbreaking personal losses he suffered over the previous decade, especially the death of one son and the legal and personal troubles of another. President Biden is presented as a tragic figure, not a villain.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, the Biden Administration’s “original sin” was the choice to run for a second term, despite clear signs of the president’s decline. Conservative pundits had been noting this for years, yet the president’s allies and, less forgivably, much of the mainstream media, denied that there was a problem. In a different era, other Democrats might have been more persistent in their efforts to determine whether Biden remained fit for the job, but because of their concern that another Trump presidency would end democracy in America, any criticism of the president was considered unseemly or even dangerous. Biden, after all, had defeated Trump once before. Could they be sure that another Democrat would have similar success?

Biden had previously declared that he intended to be a bridge to the Democratic Party’s future. When running in 2020, he telegraphed that he intended to defeat Trump, serve one term, and turn over the party’s reins to a younger standard-bearer. However, there was no mechanism in place to make him keep his word. His performance during his first years in office was, to most Democratic voters, acceptable. The Democratic Party’s presidential primary elections were perfunctory, at best. Insiders who witnessed Biden’s decline firsthand had few incentives to go public with their concerns. They feared being labelled as traitors, giving aid to Trump. Thus, most remained silent until Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024 made his growing challenges undeniable.

Biden’s eventual withdrawal from the race scarcely improved the Democrats’ chances. There was no time at that point to hold a competitive primary election. Furthermore, failing to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris risked alienating key demographic groups in the party, even if she was an uninspiring candidate. Despite being nominated without much of a fight, she was in a difficult situation. She had spent months insisting the president was in perfect health. In accepting his departure and taking his place at the top of the ticket, was she acknowledging her own dishonesty about Biden’s cognitive decline? She wanted to present herself as an agent of change, but she had difficulty articulating how, if at all, her priorities would differ from Biden’s. She had little choice but to run as a quasi-incumbent, stuck with the baggage of her predecessor, with an unclear vision.

The book drives home that the problems of the modern presidency cannot be entirely blamed on Trump and his allies. Depending on one’s political allegiances, it is either vindicating or alarming that we saw many of the same pathologies during both administrations. To support their president, but perhaps more importantly to defeat his opponent, Democrats were willing to lie, to bite their tongues, to abandon principles, and ultimately act in ways that proved counterproductive to their own cause. Biden himself engaged in some of the same practices for which he and other Democrats had justifiably criticized Trump, most notably a penchant for nepotism and the baffling decision to keep classified documents unsecured in his personal residence.

The authors make a strong case that, at least when it came to foreign policy, Biden proved up to the task. Whatever one thinks about his approach to NATO and Ukraine, he was intensely focused and pursued his agenda with skill—at least for the first few years of his presidency, before his decline became more noticeable. With a limited amount of energy to spend, however, he gave less attention to many domestic affairs. The authors suggest, for instance, that Biden was largely asleep at the wheel when it came to immigration policy, letting more progressive young staffers make unpopular policy decisions that Biden himself would have likely opposed if he were paying more attention. His perceived weakness on the border proved to be a political gift to his Republican opponents.

I have previously warned conservatives that the right’s declining human capital, as measured by voting patterns among the highly educated, will create inevitable problems. It was thus interesting to learn that the Biden White House, despite having a large talent pool to draw from, was not exactly brimming with great minds. For instance, we learn that certain Biden aides did not know the difference between astronomy and astrology. The Biden Administration was also circled by its share of grifting consultants, demanding extraordinary sums far outweighing any value they might provide.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency.

As a conservative critic of the Republican Party’s populist turn, convinced it has resulted in great mischief and damage to our political institutions, it was a strange relief to see that many of the problems I see in the contemporary GOP are also found among their opponents. This is not based on a desire to engage in “whataboutism”—the effort to deflect criticism by pointing out the other side’s failings. Rather, seeing similar issues emerge across the partisan divide indicates we suffer from systematic problems, and this knowledge will assist us as we seek to diagnose their causes and consider potential solutions.

The authors offer few suggestions about how we can avoid similar issues in the future. They suggest that presidents need to be more forthcoming about the state of their health, including their mental capacity. It would be straightforward to legally require presidents to take regular physical and mental exams, with the results provided to the public. This strikes me as reasonable, though I doubt we will see such a development during the current administration. 

I am insufficiently naïve to believe that as a nation we can reach a bipartisan consensus on many major issues at the present time. I nonetheless hope that more people across the political spectrum will conclude that the role of the presidency in American politics has changed for the worse, becoming a hindrance to functional politics. All of politics now revolves around presidential elections. Members of the president’s party in Congress now fall in line behind the president’s agenda, becoming mere auxiliaries of the White House. Members of the opposing party seek to block that agenda, and they look for any reason (justified or not) to hinder presidents with a deluge of investigations and impeachment threats. Those members who would follow their own judgment and principles, rather than toe the party line, determined by the president, are viewed as turncoats. Members no longer seem interested in safeguarding their own institution’s prerogatives, unless it is to score ephemeral partisan points.

The presidency will always remain the ultimate prize in American politics. This was the case even when the office was considerably less powerful. It should not be the only office that interests us, however. Not so long ago, conservatives argued that Congress, not the presidency, should be the most powerful and important branch of the federal government. It may be time to revisit their arguments. The late conservative scholars James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall, reasonably considered two of the conservative movement’s sharpest minds, argued persuasively that Congress was intended to be the most important branch of the federal government, and its diminishing influence represented a major problem.

Burnham argued in his 1959 book, Congress and the American Tradition, that maintaining freedom requires strong checks and balances, but also a strong legislative branch. This would keep power sufficiently diffuse and keep tyrannical impulses at bay. However, as the ideology he called “democratism” has increased in strength, it has resulted in the nation’s greater insistence that policy reflect a mythical general will. This ideology loathes intermediary institutions that can block the people’s desires. A presidential election, according to this thinking, represents a national mandate for the winner, and pushback from other branches or levels of government is viewed as a betrayal of democracy. The result is popular support for an accumulation of presidential power. Perhaps ironically, in the name of perfecting democracy, the public is clamoring for a Caesar.

For Burnham, the transition toward executive supremacy was an existential danger to liberty. It is notable that, as an uncompromising Cold Warrior, Burnham understood the importance of a strong executive, but he also recognized its dangers. Unfortunately, much of the right today seems to wholeheartedly embrace executive power as the only solution to the problems they perceive with American governance. Burnham has received renewed attention from the intellectual right in recent years, largely because of his realistic approach to political power, both at home and abroad. I hope that more of his contemporary admirers will revisit his arguments on this question.

Kendall, for his part, also believed in the importance of a strong legislative branch, and warned against allowing other branches to usurp its powers. He argued that there are always two majorities in America: the presidential majority and the congressional majority. The presidential majority, being national in its scope, is perceived to represent the popular will of the nation. It prefers fast action, it is dismissive of deliberation, and it is inclined to demagoguery. The congressional majority, in contrast, better represents the nation’s diverse interests, makes decisions after lengthy debate, and ultimately provides a more accurate reflection of the people’s will. Kendall’s thought, I should note, has also received renewed interest from conservatives, in part because, of all the major post-war conservative intellectuals, Kendall is one of the very few who could be plausibly described as a populist. Unlike other conservatives of his day, he never exhibited anti-majoritarian views. He sincerely believed in majority rule, but he argued that the legislative branch was the best institution for discerning and implementing the majority’s will.

I am not suggesting that a rebalancing of power that weakens the executive branch will prove to be a panacea to the kinds of problems presented in Original Sin. Congress, of course, has its own gerontocracy problem, especially the Senate. However, Congress will never be so completely dominated by one person, and it would not long allow a senile member to maintain one of the more important positions of leadership. We could furthermore also start demanding that members of Congress also submit to annual health exams and publish the results. If this proves insufficient to drive out incompetent members, changes to the current seniority system that benefit long-term incumbents may be worth considering. In any case, it is time for members of Congress to claw back much of the authority they have given to the presidency, which alone would lower the stakes of presidential elections. A more independent legislative branch, less fixated on helping or hurting the president, would also be less apt to reward politicians according to their talents as sycophants or thoughtless obstructionists.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency. Partisan vitriol and polarization are not going away anytime soon, but I hope good-faith observers of American politics will recognize that neither side of the divide has a monopoly on shameful behavior, and the rot is deeper than a few vain political leaders. The cult of the presidency has become a hindrance to responsible government, regardless of which party occupies the Oval Office.

Every right is a liability. A pension, a healthcare benefit, a tax deduction—even the right to private property—derives its validity from being legally enshrined in one form or another. Yet beneath this legal articulation lies a fiscal reality. Protecting and enforcing each of these rights requires a financial commitment that the state must honor through lawful public means: transparent and lawful taxation, properly allocated budgets, and reliably managed currency.

Trouble begins when the state reaches the limits of its financial capacity. At that point, it can no longer fulfill its fiscal commitments within the boundaries of law. Instead, it begins to meet them at the margins of legality—through improvisation, manipulation, and disguised extraction. The result is not just economic degradation. It is the erosion of the rule of law.

This raises the question of what, exactly, the rule of law demands. Legal theorists have offered a range of answers, often speaking of it in idealized terms. Some define it procedurally: the rule of law requires general, prospective, stable, and publicly known laws. Others adopt more substantive definitions, encompassing rights to property, equality before the law, or access to justice. Some go further still, suggesting that the rule of law must include expansive claims to social and economic justice—redistribution, affirmative rights to housing and employment, environmental equity, and so on.

But these accounts share a common limitation: they treat the rule of law as a purely ideal concept. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it creates a risk—we focus so much on what the law should be that we overlook what it needs to function. The result is a vision of legality disconnected from the practical realities that sustain it.

This means that the rule of law is not simply an independent variable in the architecture of the modern state; it is also a dependent one. Lawyers—inveterate normativists that we are—tend to fixate on what the law ought to be, losing sight of the material and institutional conditions it requires to function. But the rule of law does not arise from legal principles or political will alone. It relies on underlying material and institutional conditions—especially the state’s ability to remain fiscally solvent.

When that solvency erodes, the machinery of legality begins to stall. Rights go unenforced, procedures become empty rituals, and the state operates increasingly by discretion rather than by law. When the state nears the outer limits of its fiscal capacity, the consequences are stark. The state then turns to functional substitutes for taxation: methods of financing public obligations without formal tax increases or budgetary debates. Chief among them is inflation.

History is full of episodes where state insolvency did not merely erode legal order—it obliterated it.

Inflation is a tax by other means. It transfers wealth from savers to the state, from the private sector to the public ledger, without a single vote being cast. It erodes the real value of nominal public liabilities—such as pensions, social benefits, and government debt—diluting what the state owes its citizens. It also distorts private obligations, quietly rewriting contracts and undermining expectations. But that is a separate concern. What matters here is that inflation operates as a form of unlegislated taxation, bypassing the formal procedures and public accountability that define democratic legality.

Inflation is only one such tactic. Depending on the seriousness of the fiscal shortfall—and on the government’s ability or willingness to reduce spending—insolvent states may also freeze bank accounts, convert savings into low-yield bonds, impose retroactive taxes, or use regulatory takings to confiscate private assets. They may declare emergencies to bypass legislative procedures, defer payments, or devalue the currency overnight.

These are not routine exercises of administrative discretion within a stable legal framework; they are extraordinary responses to fiscal breakdown. I witnessed some of these measures firsthand growing up in Brazil during a period of fiscal distress and hyperinflation (which at one point reached 6,000% annually), when emergency decrees, account freezes, payment moratoria, and index manipulation became part of everyday life. While such actions were typically carried out under color of law, they blurred the line between legality and expediency. What unites them is the substitution of legal rule with administrative discretion—a shift that tends to gradually undermine the rule of law.

History is full of episodes where state insolvency did not merely erode legal order—it obliterated it. Ancient Rome offers a distant, but instructive, illustration. While the Roman Empire lacked a modern legal order, it depended on legal and monetary institutions to maintain stability. In the third century, mounting military expenditures, administrative burdens, and declining revenues led emperors to reduce the precious metal content of coins. But debasement meant to stretch limited fiscal resources unleashed high inflation. Faced with growing instability, Emperor Diocletian issued the 301 AD Edict on Maximum Prices. The law fixed prices under penalty of death; yet it proved unenforceable, drove commerce underground, and contributed to a broader erosion of confidence in imperial institutions, paving the way for the mounting civil strife that followed.

Many centuries later, Weimar Germany offered a modern counterpart: a constitutional state undone in no small part by fiscal collapse. Hyperinflation in the early 1920s wiped out savings, shattered public trust, and made a mockery of legal and contractual commitments. In response, German jurists developed the theory of Wegfall der Geschäftsgrundlage—the disappearance of the basis of the transaction—as a way for courts to adjust debts and obligations no longer tenable in nominal terms. In the chaos that followed, the door was opened to the demise of democratic institutions and the rise of political forces we now recall with unease and revulsion.

Argentina offers a more recent example. In the early 2000s, confronted with a collapse in public finances and an inability to meet its obligations, the government faced a deep fiscal and financial crisis. It responded by freezing bank accounts and soon after forcibly converting dollar-denominated deposits into devalued pesos—an emergency measure that wiped out household savings and shattered financial expectations. In the years that followed, the state manipulated inflation statistics, seized pension funds, rewrote private contracts by decree, and expropriated private assets, all under the banner of expediency. These were not merely improvised policy responses; they marked a deeper unraveling of legal certainty. As the state’s solvency eroded, so too did the rule of law.

Brazil tells a parallel story. There, fiscal fragility has repeatedly corroded the reliability of legal protections. In the 1980s, facing acute budgetary strain and hyperinflation, the government relied on monetary restatement mechanisms, wage and price controls, and complex indexation formulas to reallocate resources outside the formal budget process. These tools not only altered private contracts but also allowed the state to quietly redefine its own obligations—delaying, diluting, or reshaping payments it was otherwise bound to make. The pattern continued into the early 1990s, when President Collor—the first democratically elected leader in decades—abruptly froze personal checking accounts of individuals and companies in a desperate attempt to reduce liquidity and contain inflation. The move upended financial expectations and triggered a wave of litigation that dragged on for more than twenty years. Although the severity of these interventions has diminished, the underlying dynamic of fiscal weakness compromising legal certainty remains visible in Brazil to this day.

Law continues to be cited, but no longer constrains. Its forms persist, but its substance erodes.

Even the United States is not immune. In 1933, amid collapsing revenues and rising debt burdens, President Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard, nullified gold clauses in public and private contracts, and required citizens to exchange their gold holdings with the Treasury under threat of severe criminal penalties, including prison. These extraordinary measures sharply reduced the real value of federal obligations and triggered a constitutional showdown. In the 1935 Gold Clause Cases, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld Roosevelt’s actions, even as it acknowledged the threat they posed to the sanctity of contractual commitments. A generation later, in 1971, President Nixon, facing mounting balance-of-payments pressures and eroding confidence among foreign central banks, suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, severing the last external check on US monetary expansion. From that moment on, fiscal and monetary restraint would rely almost entirely on domestic institutions: rules, norms, and political self-restraint.

But as expenditures grew and deficits deepened, those internal constraints began to erode. Over the past two decades, the Federal Reserve has purchased trillions in Treasury securities—especially in response to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic—effectively financing deficits without direct legislative approval. These measures, while technically legal, bypass the deliberative rigors of the budget process. Informal workarounds like these have increasingly displaced formal fiscal governance. The result is a slow but significant institutional drift, and one that blurs the line between emergency response and permanent exception—a quiet slide toward rule without accountability.

This pattern is not merely a matter of economic policy. It reveals something deeper: the contingent nature of legality itself. The monetary constitution—the framework of rules and norms that governs how money is created, valued, and managed—serves as a backbone of the broader legal order. When fiscal pressures grow too great and those rules give way, legality begins to unravel. Law continues to be cited, but no longer constrains. Its forms persist, but its substance erodes. What remains is a hollowed-out shell: the rule of law in appearance, but not in effect.

To preserve the rule of law, we must stop treating it as an autonomous force, detached from material realities. Legal constraints depend on solvency. No constitutional text or institutional reform can substitute for the fiscal capacity that makes law enforceable. The rule of law may restrain the state—but only if the state can afford to be restrained.

Ever since President Trump launched his protectionist tariff agenda at the outset of his administration, economists have offered a common plea to other countries: do not retaliate. This wisdom must often contest with the impulsive political pressures of trade wars, and yet it is the soundest economic path. Politicians often believe that retaliatory tariffs place a burden on the foreign country that picked the fight. Retaliatory tariffs tax your own population by burdening them with higher prices and fewer consumer choices. The actual result, however, is akin to imposing a blockade on your own ports to spite an adversary who chose to do the same to their ports. This strategy seldom ends the trade war though, because the bulk of the resulting economic pain is self-inflicted.

Trump’s early targets largely ignored the counsel of economists to forego retaliation. Canada, then in the midst of an election campaign, imposed countervailing duties on American goods as its Liberal government sought to project an image of strength in the face of international bullying. Trump responded by doubling down. The situation with China rapidly devolved into a retaliatory standoff with threatened US rates on Chinese imports reaching 145 percent, and China’s countermeasures increasing to 125 percent. Both sides de-escalated from this brink in May, but only partially. The US now imposes a 30 percent tariff on most Chinese imports, whereas China now taxes American goods at 10 percent—substantial hikes over the single-digit rates that prevailed in the 2010s.

Until last week, it appeared that the 27-member European Union was about to join the retaliatory trade war. With Trump threatening a 30 percent tariff on European goods, EU leaders floated the idea of invoking their “Anti-Coercion Instrument” (ACI)—an aggressive suite of retaliatory tariffs, export and import controls on the US, intellectual property restrictions, and limitations on American investors in Europe. Suddenly, on July 28, Trump appeared to pull a rabbit out of his hat by announcing a sweeping trade deal. According to the White House announcement, the EU would accept a 15 percent US tariff on European goods, or half the threatened rate, but also significantly higher than the average 1.47 percent duty that existed before Trump started his trade war. Pre-Trump EU rates on American goods were even lower, sitting at about 1.35 percent before Trump’s term, but the White House now claims that Europe will further reduce these mostly vestigial levies on a small number of products.

The US-EU announcement sent shockwaves around the political press. Trump declared “victory” over the Europeans. French officials raged at the outcome, calling on Brussels to reverse course and deploy the retaliatory ACI. Other European leaders seemed resigned to the fate of accepting higher American taxes on their exports, calling it the least-bad outcome. On the American side of the debate, some tariff-skeptics reacted with surprise, even suggesting that Trump’s tactics had upended conventional wisdom about trade wars. Oren Cass, the protectionist lawyer who runs the “New Right” think tank American Compass, appeared to be confused by the development even as he celebrated. Cass declared on a podcast that the EU’s unexpected turn away from retaliation somehow disproved all of the economists who had been pleading with the EU to resist retaliation.

Surprisingly few commentators have paused to examine the underlying strategy that led to the US-EU tariff de-escalation. Almost all sides of the debate have accordingly missed a subtler lesson, one related to legal and institutional dynamics at play.

Before digging deeper, it warrants mention that the EU “trade deal,” like the others that Trump has announced to date, is not a conventional trade agreement between nations. Neither Congress nor its European counterpart has voted on the specific terms, which may not even exist beyond the verbal pledges that Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made in a meeting on the day of the announcement. There are no publicly available documents containing the text of this “deal” or any other that Trump claims to have secured. Trump and his counterparts have not even formally signed anything that would legally bind them to their terms. The EU deal is at best a framework of loose commitments that may or may not be formalized at some future date.

And therein lies the key to understanding why some nations have opted against a retaliatory strategy. The tariff agenda sits on an extremely shaky legal and political foundation. Tariffs remain unpopular in the United States, with recent polling showing that American voters oppose them at a margin of almost 2-to-1. The EU and other countries might accordingly believe that their best strategy is to wait Trump out until a future election outcome reverses his trade war.

More importantly, Trump has eschewed even conventional US tariff statutes when implementing his current measures. Up until this spring, most US tariffs followed the procedures laid out in obscure federal statutes: the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the Trade Act of 1974, and a handful of other measures. These laws contain clauses that allow the president to impose temporary tariffs on specific goods or countries if certain stipulations are met, such as a national security need, or evidence that another country has been “dumping” goods into the United States or trying to injure its industries. 

The rationales behind these clauses are often politicized, but they nonetheless contain specific statutory requirements to invoke. Usually, that means the White House must formally investigate whether the conditions have been met and submit its findings to a regulatory review process. Congress also has formal oversight powers to review any tariffs enacted under these clauses, and may vote to reverse the president’s decision. Most presidents have made periodic use of these clauses to impose limited tariff measures, including Trump’s tariffs on China from his first term. But all of these measures have taken place under relatively strict statutory processes and review requirements.

Not so with Trump’s current round of tariffs, which are far more expansive than anything he attempted in his first term. Instead of using the aforementioned trade statutes, Trump has claimed the power to impose tariffs by unilateral executive order under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. By using IEEPA, Trump believes he can enact new tariffs for almost any reason he wants. He has accordingly set new tariff rates by posting letters to foreign leaders on Truth Social, or by announcing the terms of an “deal” that he made in an informal conversation with a foreign head of state.

The biggest risk to Trump right now is that the appellate and Supreme Courts both strike down his IEEPA tariff orders, and with them every “deal” he has secured to date.

There’s a huge constitutional problem with Trump’s use of IEEPA, though. This statute does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. It does not even contain the word “tariff” or any of its common synonyms. Trump has merely inferred that he has this power through a tendentious interpretation of IEEPA’s “emergency” provisions.

Trump’s use of IEEPA now faces a serious challenge in the federal court system. Earlier this year, the US Court of International Trade ruled that Trump misused IEEPA. The ruling is under a procedural pause as the case makes its way through the federal appellate system, but the clock is ticking. A federal appellate court will likely rule on the case in August, which in turn will probably fast-track it to the Supreme Court in its next term. If the courts continue to rule against Trump, his entire tariff agenda—including every single “deal” made under his IEEPA orders—could be voided in an instant.

Although Trump is fighting to have the trade court’s ruling overturned, the underlying legal issues present a tough sell for the White House’s lawyers. In addition to Trump’s strained interpretation of the IEEPA statute, he faces a constitutional obstacle. Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide tariffs and tariff rates under its tax and commerce powers. 

Previous court rulings have upheld laws wherein Congress authorized the president to modify tariff rates under certain conditions, such as the aforementioned Trade Acts of 1962 and 1974. But they’ve never authorized the president to simply set the rates himself for any reason he wants. The long-established “nondelegation doctrine” requires Congress to set an “intelligible principle” for the executive branch to exercise a delegated power, and the parallel “major questions doctrine” bars executive branch agencies from deciding policy questions of great economic and political significance on their own without express congressional authorization. The Court of International Trade cited both doctrines in its determination that Trump abused IEEPA to impose tariffs. A majority of justices on the current US Supreme Court have also ruled against the executive branch in cases involving similar questions, such as West Virginia v. EPA in 2022 and in their rulings against President Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive federal student loans without congressional authorization (a detailed explanation of these legal arguments may be found in the amicus briefs filed in relation to the case).

Returning to the international arena, Trump may be playing with fewer cards than he realizes when he attempts to negotiate tariff deals. The EU and other governments know that time is on their side with both the tariff lawsuits and the US political climate. And that recognition changes the dynamics of their strategies by shifting them away from retaliation. Consider the possible scenarios.

The biggest risk to Trump right now is that the appellate and Supreme Courts both strike down his IEEPA tariff orders, and with them every “deal” he has secured to date. Courtroom outcomes are never guaranteed, and they tend to operate on the judges’ own schedules, but this outcome could conceivably occur in a matter of months. If that’s the case, then the EU has every incentive to take the 15 percent tariff “deal” and just wait it out until the courts make their determination.

Suppose that the Supreme Court punts on the case for procedural reasons, or finds a rationale for upholding the tariff policies. Even in this scenario, waiting may still be the more prudent strategy for the EU and other trading partners abroad. They may be banking on Trump losing one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms, as often happens to the incumbent president’s party. If the Democrats regain the majority, they will almost certainly remove a procedural rule that Republican Speaker Mike Johnson imposed back in April to prevent floor challenges to Trump’s IEEPA tariffs (Johnson adopted this rule because he currently lacks the votes to defeat a direct challenge if a handful of free-trade Republicans break ranks and vote with the Democrats). An opposition Congress would make it more difficult for Trump to enact tariffs by executive decree, thereby limiting his ability to use them as leverage for his “deals.”

A third scenario could play out in the 2028 election, where both political parties will be nominating new candidates due to Trump’s term limits. On the unlikely chance that the current IEEPA tariffs are still in place in 2028, their survival into the next administration would come down to a simple pen stroke. Since Trump enacted his tariffs by unilateral executive order, they could also be rescinded by any future president at will. Here, the absence of any codification of Trump’s tariff orders and “deals” into law becomes their main future vulnerability. If tariffs remain politically unpopular, Trump’s successor will face growing pressure to rescind them, no matter the party that wins.

From the EU’s perspective, these scenarios amount to a surprisingly short timeframe. Trump’s tariffs could be stricken down in court in a matter of months, or they could collide with mounting political opposition in 1.5 to 3.5 years.

Under these conditions, the advantage goes to the side with greater patience. Risky strategies such as the EU’s retaliatory ACI, or retaliatory tariffs in general, become less appealing if you know there’s a good chance that Trump will be stripped of his claimed tariff powers in the near future. It may mean enduring a little short-term pain from accepting the higher tariffs of a Trump “deal,” but in the long run, all of Trump’s negotiating cards have an expiration date. 

America is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic that broke out in 2020. Not only was it one of the most deadly health incidents in our history, but the strategies imposed by central planners to contain its spread also inflicted countless costs on everything from the economy and education to social life itself. Stephen Macedo, an author of a recent book evaluating the pandemic’s aftermath, joins Law & Liberty contributing editor G. Patrick Lynch to discuss the price of the pandemic on this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Related Links

In Covid’s Wake by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
Liberalism vs. Scientism, a book review by Mary Carmen Mead
The Pandemic in Hindsight by Law & Liberty‘s Editors (March forum)

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

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

G. Patrick Lynch (00:39):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m G. Patrick Lynch, a senior fellow at Liberty Fund and a contributing editor to Law & Liberty. And for this episode, I’m filling in for James Patterson. Today we are joined by Stephen Macedo, who is the Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality. We will be discussing his latest book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, co-authored with his Princeton colleague Frances Lee. Macedo and Lee have appeared in many major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and The Hill, to discuss the book, which has been lauded for its critical review of the political and policy responses to the pandemic. Steve, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Stephen Macedo (01:36):

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

G. Patrick Lynch (01:37):

Well, it’s great to have you here. As I mentioned to you before we got started, I think this is a tremendous book and I congratulate you and your co-author, Professor Lee, on it. I want to begin by saying, I know for many of us, looking back on the pandemic is personally difficult because of the challenges we all faced, particularly those of us who lost loved ones. And yet in my view, this book is immensely important because it serves as a sort of a truth commission almost on the Covid response by the government, and it reveals a lot of unpleasant truths about how poorly the public sector performed. The title of your book suggests that the government failed the test of Covid. As a professor, would you have given the government an F for its response on Covid?

Stephen Macedo (02:18):

Well, thank you for the introduction first of all. I haven’t really sat down to think about that. And I think I would say that actually the scope of the focus of the book is a bit wider than just the government, though public health officials and others obviously played a very important role in a way, the focus of the book is on what we call the” truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy,” journalism, science, public health included in that of course, and universities more broadly. And while it’s true that public officials did, I think in many cases pass the buck and say “follow the science” in a way to avoid taking responsibility for hard decisions themselves, it’s also the case that these other institutions did not ask hard questions and didn’t play their role as well as they should have under the influence, I think, of the polarized environment in which we live, a kind of epistemic tribalism that so deeply affects our politics.

(03:20):

So we do look back on the record and try to be as accurate as we can. It’s really only the beginning of a reckoning because there’s so much we don’t understand still. I think about what happened and what the results of the policies may have been, but it’s our best shot at doing a first take, fair mindedly, on what happened. And we do emphasize the shortcomings. Part of it is that there were a bunch of pre-Covid pandemic planning documents, which looked at these non-pharmaceutical measures going back to 2005, 2006, and they were skeptical, let’s put it that way. They emphasized the weak evidentiary basis for a lot of those measures that were imposed. And they emphasized the importance of being frank with the public about the weak evidentiary basis and the certainty of costs, considerable costs from imposing these measures.

G. Patrick Lynch (04:18):

I’m glad you raised that because I think that was one of the most eye-opening parts of the book. I think if you asked the average citizen, if they knew that, in fact, all the pre-pandemic planning had shown that there was skepticism about many of the measures that were pursued, they would be surprised. And I certainly was surprised. Can you explain to our listeners exactly why policy officials in most of these major health organizations in the public health field generally advocated for abandoning most of this planning? What happened? What shifted in their thinking?

Stephen Macedo (04:47):

Well, let me say a word about those things first. It is remarkable that the planning documents went back early to 2005, 2006. George W. Bush read John Barry’s book on the great influenza of 1918, and he initiated these planning processes. There was always a national security component as well, having to do with bioweapons, but he was concerned about another pandemic. There were mathematical modelers who were optimistic about the effectiveness of these measures, very optimistic. And they wound up playing a leading role as it turned out in shaping some of the discourse. But going back to that era, scientific officials who looked at this, including the Institute of Medicine, as it was called back then, which has issued a report on these measures and said that they found the evidence unconvincing and that there was a lot of uncertainty around these measures. And anyway, in 2019, Johns Hopkins did one of these surveys on all of these non-pharmaceutical measures, social distancing, mask-wearing, school closures, border closures, and so on.

(05:49):

And emphasized just as you said, the weak basis. And the World Health Organization did one that came out in November 2019. And among the things that said there, again emphasizing uncertainty, weak evidence, was that there were certain measures that were not recommended under any circumstances, including border closures, quarantine of individuals who had been exposed, and contact tracing, and those were not recommended under any circumstances according to the WHO. And those were all implemented in short order during Covid. I think what happened and what shifted the discourse was partly that the World Health Organization sent a team to China in late January 2020 to survey their response. And that team came back after spending about seven or eight days in China in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and proclaimed that the Chinese had solved the problem, that they had defeated the virus, and that every government in the world should follow the Chinese strategy of suppressing the virus, locking down–something that’s never really been attempted in human history before.

(06:55):

And when you read that report from the World Health Organization, a joint mission that included half Chinese participants, half non-Chinese participants, only a couple of Americans were involved in that, it reads like an award citation, as we say in the book, it’s just uncritically endorses the strategy. So that played a major role. And then there were a couple of other things too. A bombshell report came out of Imperial College London on March 16, which had very impressive graphs. The lead there was Neil M. Ferguson, who’s another mathematical modeler who had been involved in the original 2005, 2006 projections. He said that if we didn’t impose this whole suite of measures, this “Report Nine” from Imperial College said that if we didn’t impose this whole suite of measures by the end of August 2020, we’d have 2.2 million dead Americans. So that report, which was finalized and published on March 16, the Trump administration had gotten an advanced copy of it, that was shown to Donald Trump on March 16.

(07:58):

And later that day, he had a news conference where it was recommended that places with infections spreading should close bars and close other places and impose lockdowns. By that time, schools had already closed across substantial parts of the country. But so those two things were important, and there were other projections that were made. 3.4 percent death rate was projected by the head of the World Health Organization in, I think it was February, or maybe it was early March. So there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of uncertainty of course, and the original lockdowns were very widespread across the country and across Europe. But I think what’s in a way most important is that the European–well, some countries never closed their schools at all. I don’t think Iceland ever closed at schools. Sweden never closed them for kids under 16. And the Western European countries in general, France and Germany and other places in Europe, reopened their schools at the end of April and May.

(09:03):

And it was clear, by the middle of May certainly, that schools were not spreaders of Covid and that teachers were not at great risk. And the European health ministers met education ministers, excuse me, met I think it was around May 10 or something, and issued a statement of the education ministers from around Europe saying that it was safe to reopen schools. So there was a lack of learning, especially in Democratic states, which closed down faster and stayed closed much longer than Republican states. It was a partisan pandemic, as we say in one of our chapters, that there was a striking partisan divide on the stringency of all of these measures with democratic states imposing school closures much longer. Republican states were generally reopening their schools in the fall of 2020. Many Democratic school districts were closed through almost the entire 2021 school year. California closed right through March. So the discourse, the narrative, became very rigid and intolerant of dissent. So I would say that a big part of the book focuses on the shortcomings of public deliberation and kind of intolerance of dissent, forgetting the fundamental principles of science and, in a way, classical liberalism: To be open to dissent, to allow criticism, to welcome criticism, and to not close off disagreement prematurely.

(10:37):

I think one thing that happened, we found is that, about April 2020, once the lockdown strategy had been adopted in, of course, many parts of the country, but there’s the sense of a war mentality that arose. We see this in a report that came out of the Safra Center at Harvard that was endorsed by the Rockefeller Foundation and other foundations including the Niskanen Center, and indeed the American Enterprise Institute put out a Covid planning document or policy statement around that time, April, May 2020, which also endorsed the lockdown strategies to some considerable degree descent, became that this is our chosen strategy and dissent was unwelcome, that we were on a war footing and we needed the equivalent of national unity in the face of a war, in this case, a war on Covid. So as in previous wars, we cracked down on dissent, and that was the big problem. Mistakes get made, but we should have been more open to dissent and disagreement and more ready, prepared to learn over the course of 2020, especially over the summer.

G. Patrick Lynch (11:52):

So this is one of the questions I wanted to ask you, because I think the emphasis on deliberation, discourse, and exchange of ideas is one of the strengths of the book. You mentioned, for example, the Great Barrington Declaration in the book and talk about it in a way that I think is probably the fairest and most honest assessment of it that I’ve seen because it was such a polarizing document when it first came out. And you also mentioned the example of Sweden. Before we get into the sort of who was right question, can we talk a little bit about the importance of deliberation during these times of crises? I guess I was struck by, on the one hand, the hopefulness that y’all place in the importance of having that deliberation discourse during a crisis, during this war language. But is that too much to ask of democracy? Is it too difficult to believe that during a crisis we can tolerate and have that kind of discourse and exchange? And I think this is obviously critical, looking back on Covid, and potentially even more important for looking forward to whatever the next problem’s going to be.

Stephen Macedo (12:53):

Yeah, well, it is a very reasonable question, and I don’t have a particularly good answer for it. One thing I would say is that other democracies did a better job. There was more open debate, I think, in the UK, there’s a very good book by Mark Woolhouse called The Year the World Went Mad. He’s obviously very critical of the lockdown strategies, as you can tell from the title of the book, though he supported the first lockdown, though in retrospect, he doesn’t think it did much good because these lockdowns tend to be imposed after the viruses, the horses out of the barn. So the lockdowns tend to get imposed, late viruses tend to come in waves. So oftentimes the rates of infection will drop at some point after, and people assume that’s because of the interventions, but it just turns out there’s not a lot of great evidence for that.

(13:39):

But they did learn more over the summer in the UK. There was more open debate there. And in Germany and France, I think. So the US is especially polarized by Western standards, and this is a dispiriting picture, a window into the state of our highly polarized political discourse. So I wouldn’t hazard guesses about how well we’ll do in the future, but we do need to think about this. And part of what happened, I think, is, as you’ll recall, 2020 was an election year. Donald Trump was on the ballot. He was associated with the “Let’s reopen the economy as fast as we can” sort of approach. He also, of course, referred to the virus as the “China virus” and so on, kind of unhelpfully actually. But suggesting that the virus might have leaked from the lab was always a plausible hypothesis, which again, should have been entertained and was not particularly, and still not being properly entertained, I think, in the US more so than in Europe.

(14:37):

So I think that was part of it. And of course finally there is some reckoning going on on other issues on this too, that if Donald Trump said it, that must be the opposite of the truth. And that was one thing to say we should not take him particularly seriously on these particular matters, but it’s another thing to assume that the truth is the opposite of what he says. That was a silly approach as well. But deliberation is important. It proceeded better in other places. We should have paid more attention to the pre-Covid pandemic planning documents. And there were voices. I mean, it’s not as though no one pointed these things out. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown, wrote some very good pieces pointing out the cost of school closures and the safety of reopening them. Graham Allison, who is scholar in crisis decision making, going back to the Kennedy administration, he’s a very senior scholar at Harvard.

(15:35):

He put out a statement right around the time that Harvard Saffer Center put out its statement, and this is I think in April, maybe late April 2020. And Alison said, look, we need a wider conversation and wider deliberation here. We need a Team B, we need devil’s advocates. We’re doubling down on the strategy and we’re not sure that it’s the right strategy. It’s going to be costly, he pointed out, and we need to reexamine our assumptions and widen the discussion beyond epidemiologists and public health experts, and have a wider conversation. And he was exactly right, surely on that score, but from what I can tell, his statement was completely ignored. So there were people calling for wider dissent, and there were others. Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair wrote some good pieces as well. So there were a few voices out there, but these issues were not discussed adequately for sure.

(16:35):

And then the Great Barrington Declaration–well, let me just say one other thing. When the lockdowns were imposed in March, there were dissenters. Michael Osterholm, who’s one of the leading epidemiologists scientists in the world at the Mayo Clinic University of Minnesota. He warned in mid-March 2020 that these lockdown measures were unlikely to succeed, that they would be extremely costly, that the best strategy was probably protecting the vulnerable from Covid and allowing most people to go about their business, and recognizing that there was a huge age gradient in vulnerability here. Young people were relatively at low risk. They could acquire herd immunity from getting infected and recovering. He pointed all this out in March. David Katz from Yale did. Tom Frieden, former CDC director, again, pointed out the cost of schools back in March 2020. And then those voices tended to become silent. And when we got to October and the Great Barrington Declaration was published, they were saying essentially the same things–Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, they were essentially saying essentially the same things that were said back in March by Michael Osterholm and Tom Frieden and David Katz at Yale and Justin Leslie from Johns Hopkins. But they were greeted, as people know, with great intolerance. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH then, called them “fringe epidemiologists, dangerous, they’re going to kill people.” By that time, schools had reopened in Europe and reopened for months. Schools had been open for Republican states since August. So I think when it comes to school closures, I think people are starting to recognize that that was kind of egregious, the extent to which we didn’t learn from other places about the relative safety of reopening schools. And so I do think that while the Great Barrington people were wrong about some things for sure, they speculated about the virus having traversed society in a much more widespread way over the summer.

(18:37):

And in the fall, there were some projections about the virus being already on its way out over the summer. I think it was what Sunetra Gupta said, and Bhattacharya has gotten a lot of flack for a Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote with, I think it was Eran Bendavid, in I think it was April 2020, March or April 2020, suggesting that Covid might lead to as few as 20 to 40, 60,000 deaths. That was the low range of his speculation at that point. The main point of that op-ed and of his work in the spring of 2020 was trying to do studies of the population to see how many people had antibodies or other evidence of having had Covid infections. We knew how many people were getting seriously ill from Covid, but we didn’t know how many people had contracted the virus and not gotten seriously ill because the symptoms are much the same as the flu or cold or other symptoms.

(19:35):

And many people had mild symptoms. So he was really in that op-ed emphasizing the importance of doing these seroprevalence studies in the community to try to figure out the actual mortality rate, which was not as low as he speculated. But there have been viruses in the past that have more or less just disappeared: Swine flu in 1976, we had a mass vaccination program for that, and it never materialized. So he wasn’t completely off base when it comes to the evidence of previous flus. But in any case, his main point was that we needed to do these seroprevalence studies, and he tried to do them in California on a shoe string, but the CDC should have been doing them and wasn’t doing them at the time. So I think the Great Barrington folks were hardly infallible. And Bhattacharya has admitted himself that he made mistakes, everyone did. But I think they were calling for a wider discussion of the cost of these measures. And certainly in retrospect, they were correct about a number of things, including the need for a wider discussion. And going forward, we should at least take seriously respectable dissenters as they certainly were.

G. Patrick Lynch (20:51):

So you mentioned Emily Oster and Graham Allison. It’s interesting. Those were two people I wanted to sort introduce in the conversation because Emily Oster’s work was to try to figure out, she was trying to collect data on schools and just take a look at the trade-offs, and to raise that trade-off question. One of the interesting things for me, reading this boo,k was learning about what worked and what didn’t. You’ve got an entire chapter dedicated to taking a look at the US through the lens of federalism to try to see if a lot of these NPIs were effective. And can you walk our listeners through sort of a general overview of those results so that you can at least share with them what y’all’s view is on the effectiveness of the NPIs compared to vaccines, compared to some of the other measures that were

Stephen Macedo (21:35):

Pursued? Yeah, yeah. My coauthor, Frances Lee, who’s an excellent empirical scholar, very broad intellect, but she really knows her empirics as well. She did a 50-state study of the United States based on CDC data from across the 50 states, looking at Covid mortality from the period from the beginning of the pandemic through the availability of vaccines. And it’s not the best data in the world, it’s state by state, but it’s the best we can do. Other scholars have done this work. Thomas Bollyky also did a state-by-state study using somewhat different data. He came to the same results. But what it shows is that the states divided very sharply in terms of the stringency of these Covid interventions, school closures, masking, social distancing, business closures, restrictions on social gatherings, and so on, with Democratic states imposing much lengthier stay-at-home orders compared to Republican states.

(22:33):

It’s really a very strong partisan relationship, very strikingly so. And there was also a partisan relationship on vaccine uptake with Democratic states people getting vaccinated at a much greater rate than in Republican states. And what the data that we have shows on mortality in the 50 states is that there was no relationship between the imposition of these non-pharmaceutical interventions, the school closures, the masking, the social distancing requirements, stay-at-home orders, and so on. And Oxford has this index of nine of these measures, and they’ve rated governments around the world on the stringency of their interventions, and we have our own data on school closures and so on. No relationship between the stringency or length of these restrictions and Covid mortality. The partisan divergence on mortality begins after vaccines are available. So the evidence shows that the evidence that we have provides evidence for the effectiveness of vaccinations at curbing mortality, the rate of death correcting for age and percentage, uninsured and percentage urban, correcting for a whole bunch of other confounding variables.

(23:46):

The evidence shows that the rate of mortality did go up in Republican states by about a third higher than Democratic states after vaccination, but not before. So we simply have an absence of evidence for the effectiveness of the NPIs on mortality. There is some evidence that they reduce transmission, but not enough or in the right places to affect mortality. We just had a piece published in the Boston Review Forum, and there were four critics there, three of whom focus on this issue, expressing doubt about our findings, but they all emphasized transmission reductions. None of them present any evidence suggesting that there was mortality reduction. And it’s just not clear that these costly measures were worth it if we didn’t reduce mortality and serious illness. Now, there’s another study in Europe, 29 states of Europe by Pizzato et al from the University of Milan, came out in 2024.

(24:43):

It’s excess mortality data across all the states of Europe with a 10 year prior to Covid baseline. So what they did is they looked at the mortality rates across Europe and the 10 years prior to Covid, they adjust for demographic changes over that course of that time and under Covid and look at the excess mortality post-Covid just to see that that’s considered the best measure because when it comes to recording Covid deaths, countries have done it very differently. In Norway, for example, in order to be recorded as a Covid death, it had to be certified by the medical examiner. In Sweden, if you died with Covid, it was counted as a Covid death. So countries had different methodologies for counting their Covid deaths, but if you focus on excess mortality, that’s considered the better study. And what this study by Pizzato et al show, is that Sweden had the best outcomes across the pandemic in the entire 29 states of Europe.

(25:36):

They did have a bit higher earlier on in the first few months. There may have been various reasons for that. They had had a mild flu season the year before, maybe even the two years before as compared with Norway and some other countries which had harder flu seasons. So there were more people alive who were very vulnerable to respiratory infections. But by the spring of 2020, they were doing better than their Nordic neighbors and other European countries. And over the three years of the pandemic, they had the best outcome in Europe according to Pizatto et al. And again, they find no relationship, and they expressed surprise about this and the article, no relationship between the more stringent NPIs and lower mortality across Europe. So the evidence is fairly considerable, and it just means, as my co-author says, and in the language of social science, we cannot reject the null hypothesis, which is we just can’t reject the proposition. The evidence does not allow us to reject the proposition that these non-pharmaceutical interventions, costly as they were not just economically, but in terms of our lives, socially, family relations and so on, social relations. We just can’t show that they had any significant effect. So that’s what the data shows.

G. Patrick Lynch (26:49):

Steve, where did discussions about trade-offs go exactly? Because you guys have a great citation about a survey of economists who were asked whether or not they supported the lockdowns despite all the costs. And something like, I believe the site was something like 80 percent of them said, no, the lockdowns are worth it. And these are economists who were supposed to be talking about trade-offs. And y’all point out throughout the book that there was no consideration or at least very little consideration, except for some dissenting voices to the notion that the costs here were significant, there were things that had to be included in the policy discussion. What happened to alternative voices? What happened to these kinds of discussions? And can you talk a little bit about some of the suppression stories that you tell in this book about the government and certainly leaders in public health and leaders in social media and their inability to maintain the kind of liberal values that you think are very important?

Stephen Macedo (27:40):

Yes. Well, I think the discussion of cost was simply in a way bypassed. There was a lot of rhetoric about, oh, the kids will recover. The kids are fine, the kids will be resilient. We do think there was a class bias issue here. The policies were being made by, and of course, the educated elites who staff elite journalism and universities and science, our members, in effect of what we could call the laptop class. We were able to work at home on our computers, being better off. Our kids were relatively well-positioned to be able to study. I mean, it was hard on them, of course. And I don’t think enough attention was paid to the fact that one third of American workers had to keep working right through the pandemic to keep our electricity on and the internet running and the lights on and the fire department and the police department and food service, food preparation and so on and so forth.

(28:34):

So a third of workers had to keep going to work, their kids had to be taken care of, somehow had to do online schooling, and so on, under much more adverse conditions. So there was definitely a class component to this, I think. So that was part of it for sure. Somehow, the cost issue got bypassed. Fear gripped people, the fear of death, dying a suffocating death from Covid. And it was a bad pandemic. We shouldn’t discount that. It was the worst pandemic in a century. But we do find that among journalists and public officials who–take Andrew Cuomo for example, we quote him in the book, he had those news conferences every day, and he won a special Emmy Award for his news conferences. He was seen as the “Un-Trump” during 2020 under Covid. And he constantly said, “I’ll do everything we can to reduce the spread of the virus, and if everything we do saves just one life, it will be worth it” without giving any attention to the other side of the ledger.

(29:36):

So it was like doing cost-benefit analysis with no attention to the costs at all. And there’s actually have a quote from him in the book saying something like having to stay home and keeping your kids out of school very bad, but not death, domestic violence on the increase, very bad, not death. And he goes through this whole series of things. The only thing that they focused on was reducing deaths from this disease. Francis Collins has said subsequently in a really quite amazing online discussion he had in July, 2023, that the way he put it there was that the public health mindset is to focus only on reducing deaths from disease and not to focus on anything else, including keeping kids out of school for so long that there’ll be lifelong detriments that they never will recover from. And of course, bad health outcomes associated with postponing hospital visits, doctor visits, bankruptcies can have very bad psychological and health impacts for those involved owning their own businesses and so on.

(30:40):

So there were going to be deaths on the other side, but no attention was paid to them. And the news media also played a role. They constantly asked why more wasn’t being done. We have quotations from journalists questioning governors and so on saying, and the President, “Is any attention being given to a national lockdown such as being imposed in the state of New York?” and so on. So there was an attention to this. I would recommend one other book by the way, which came out a bit after ours called An Abundance of Caution by David Zweig, which focuses on school issues. And it has many parallels to our book. It’s a terrific book. We think very highly of it. And Frances and I, and it’s well researched, and he really also shows how biased the media was that the percentage of negative coverage of news concerning Covid was overwhelming in the United States as compared with Europe.

(31:32):

So, for instance, he talks about a specific CDC report that came out in April, I think it was April 8, 2020, a month and a half into the pandemic. And it contained various pieces of information, including that children were at very low risk from Covid, but that African Americans and men were at greater risk than women and non-African Americans. The media reported widely on the negative information about men and African Americans being at greater risk, but they didn’t report the positive information about kids being at very low risk, the bad news predominated. And there was a narrative that took hold. It was a partisan narrative. It had to do with partisanship in part, and people weren’t willing to question the narrative. And we moralized the disagreement, questioning what was considered to be the science, not “following the science” was considered morally reprehensible. Masks, of course, became a very visible symbol of this.

(32:34):

The evidence around masking was extremely weak, and people shifted their positions this promiscuously, as did Dr. Fauci. I mean, he was asked in 2019, a few months before the pandemic with no sign of the Covid on the horizon by an interview, what should I do in the event of another pandemic? Should I wear a mask? Dr. Fauci immediately interrupts the interviewer and says, “No, no, no, avoid the paranoid stuff. Just keep yourself healthy, get a good night’s sleep, don’t drink too much, get some exercise, and so on.” And a few weeks later, he’s for not recommending masks, then recommending masks, and so on. And he still says now that they work, but now he says that it had to be an N95, which was not, of course, what was required at the time. And then there were warring op-eds in The New York Times by my colleague, Zeynep Tufekci,

(33:19):

“The science is clear that masks work.” And Bret Stephens, “No, the science is not clear. Well, I think Bret Stephens was closer to the truth there, and the evidence is still lacking for the effectiveness of masks against aerosolized viruses, such as this was. And I think we knew that quite early on. So yeah, the narrative took hold and it still exists, I think, around some of these measures. We’re having some more open discussion, the school closures, the cost of the school closures for kids, I think that’s just too dramatic to ignore. But the origins of the virus issue remains kind of a mystery. Nature magazine, the public-facing magazine of Nature, the science journal, a very prestigious journal, published an article in February 2025 saying, “There’s more and more evidence to support the natural origins theory of Covid in a Pangolin or a raccoon dog from the market.”

(34:15):

I just don’t think that’s the case. There is, it remains debated among scientists, but there’s not growing evidence for that. Only a month later, the French Academy of Science, or maybe it’s the French Academy of Medicine, voted 97 percent to 3 percent in favor of the proposition that the virus likely emerged from the lab. And there is quite a lot of evidence. I think it’s more likely than not that it emerged from the lab, but we’re not having a serious discussion of that. And it’s not just a matter of historical reckoning. Did the worst virus in a century, was it manipulated through research funded in part, funded adjacently, at least by the US government in a lab that involved collaboration between American scientists and Chinese scientists? I mean, my God, we’re not investigating that. But the most important part of it perhaps, is that the research still goes on, that we’re still doing this gain of function of research on coronaviruses and other viruses, and it remains dangerous.

(35:14):

So that I just find shocking as well that we’ve not had more public engagement on that issue. Where’s 60 Minutes when you need them looking into these matters? So there is a question, what mistakes did we make? What should we have done? We don’t really try to answer that question. We’re not epidemiologists. But what was the discussion like as you asked? Did science function the way it should function? Did research function the way it should function? Did journalism function the way it should function? Were skeptical questions asked to authorities? And unfortunately, we find that these institutions did not function as well as they should have. And the skepticism that is normal on the part of these institutions towards public institutions, public measures, public policies, where social scientists routinely question whether any policy actually works. That was sorely lacking around this one.

(36:16):

And we still are surprised. So you asked about restrictions on speech and so on. It did become clear. The evidence presented in the Missouri v. Biden case which became Murthy v. Missouri on appeal, that the Biden administration was suppressing social media posts against US policy during Covid, ample evidence of that, threatening the social media companies with the loss of Section 230 protections against liability, which would’ve bankrupt the companies and put them out of business. And intense pressure was brought to bear because we have the emails now, it was subpoenaed through the records. And this was all being done in secret, suppressing arguments and evidence against government policy and boosting government messaging. And we don’t know actually of a single law school conference on those issues. I don’t think the ACLU filed a brief in that case. So it’s kind of amazing that these matters are not being adequately looked into even now.

(37:18):

And there is concern about misinformation and disinformation on the internet for sure. We’ve always had misinformation and disinformation. Maybe it’s worse now than it used to be, legitimate reason for discussion. But I don’t find myself feeling highly confident about trusting the government to become the censor here. So that record as well is quite important and quite impressive. We talked to a scholar who also edits an education journal, and he wrote a piece in March or April 2020, pointing out the cost of school closures, drawing out evidence from previous teacher strikes and blizzards where schools were closed even for just a couple of weeks or a few weeks, and pointing out based on that evidence, how much learning loss would take place and so on. And he was saying to us that as far as he could know, that that was immediately suppressed. And his journal more or less disappeared from the internet once he published that article. So that’s anecdotal, but we have ample evidence that that sort of thing was happening partly on the initiative of the social media companies themselves, but then certainly with administration involvement under President Biden, which they renounced it. And so when it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court didn’t consider merits because the policy had been revoked, but it certainly is a matter of concern. Free speech was one of the casualties of Covid it seems, or at least unbiased representation of different points of view on the internet.

G. Patrick Lynch (38:52):

So two quick questions to finish up. Number one, you talked about the chapter in which you all summarized the cost. Can you briefly walk our listeners through some of the costs of the pandemic as you all measure it?

Stephen Macedo (39:02):

Yeah, this will be brief. We have a whole chapter on that. And again, my colleague took the lead on that and did a wonderful job. Well, there are the fiscal costs for one thing, the 2020 Covid relief effort was as much as a percentage of GDP corrected historically as the entire New Deal and the 2009 financial rescue package put together. So 2020 was a huge fiscal cost. We have graphs there showing that. And then in 2021, we did essentially the whole New Deal over again as a percentage of GDP, as the equivalent of percentage of GDP. So the fiscal cost and the debt burden that we passed on to future generations is itself quite significant. And it also means that the country is in a weaker position when it comes to trying to respond in a fiscal way to a future recession.

(39:54):

Learning losses have been profound. I believe it’s the case that chronic absenteeism is up one-third from before the pandemic. Losses of learning test scores and so on have been very considerable and have been especially bad among poorer kids, low-income kids, and minority kids, just as predicted. So the learning losses and the lifelong detriments to education are profound. Associated with the loss of jobs and schooling, the crime rate went up in many cities, the biggest year-on-year increase in crime in recorded history, I believe. At first, that was associated with the George Floyd protests. But recent research now shows that they pre-date that the crime surge is associated with the Covid lockdown measures and business closures, not the George Floyd protest. They may have contributed a bit later on. Again, business losses and healthcare losses in terms of postponed doctor’s visits, medical interventions, cancer screenings, and so on, depression, higher rates of depression, drug abuse, and so on, including the populations, not themselves significantly affected by Covid. And greater isolation. Church attendance has, I believe, never returned to pre-Covid levels, business closures in many cities.

(41:20):

If you go to Washington, DC, the city is still never fully recovered from Covid, nor is San Francisco. So there have been many losses of businesses in inner city areas that have permanently, or at least over the long term, reshaped many cities, and the feelings of depression and isolation and loss of social connection, and so on. So the cost themselves have been quite considerable, and we’re still trying to figure them out. I think our chapter is a kind of first take survey on that, but there’s no question that the costs are very considerable, and for many people will be lifelong. And just as the pre-Covid pandemic plan said, they seem to have hit poor and minority families and children, and people more severely than the better off.

G. Patrick Lynch (42:10):

I want to finish with one final question. One of the big takeaways for me of this book was that humility is something that we could use a lot more of, certainly in public life, but also in politics. Because I was stunned at how policymakers and politicians were either afraid to say or didn’t feel comfortable saying, We don’t know. We don’t know exactly what the trade-offs are. We don’t know exactly what works and what doesn’t work. We’re going to try things. We’re going to try to move forward with them. And I guess I wonder a little bit, a big part of the project that you all are pursuing is this focus on democratic institutions and elites and other policymakers and folks in academia and media, their inability to accept humility. Is an ability to accept humility one of the goals of this book? Is it something you guys thought about and talked about as you were composing it? Because it seems to me my big takeaway is we need to be a lot more humble the next time we face something like this to understand what we don’t know before we start acting on the things that we think we know.

Stephen Macedo (43:13):

I think that’s exactly right. I think you’ve captured it exactly. There’s no question that those pre-Covid pandemic plans that I mentioned, which are quite remarkable to go back and read, and we survey them in our chapter…

G. Patrick Lynch (43:24):

That was an eye-opening way to start the book.

Stephen Macedo (43:26):

It’s just astonishing. I was sort of amazed when I came across them and even this Institute of Medicine letter from 2005 warning that public officials will be apt to exaggerate the certainty of these measures working and to implement them to show that they were in charge to show that they had things under control for political reasons, in other words, not because of the sound science behind them. So I think you’re exactly right. And I think part of this is a public health thing that the messaging from public health officials and public officials associated with pandemic planning probably had to do with behavioral change, trying to get people to change their behavior. Francis Collins says this, we quote this in the book that we were trying to get people to change their behavior, in case what we were recommending was right, but they weren’t sure it was right.

(44:16):

And he admits again in the July 2023 message he gave, that we should have been more frank about that. And we lost a lot of trust because we were not frank, that we weren’t sure about the things that we were recommending. So I think that’s a big part of it, is that public health officials need to realize that they are responsible for telling the public the truth. They have not been authorized to not share the truth with us. And the way that Paul Offit, who’s a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, puts it, is they need to commit themselves to truth-telling with nuance. If there’s uncertainty communicated, if there is some evidence of adverse incidents associated with a vaccine, even if they’re quite minor, don’t cover it up, allow it, and recognize the limits of the evidence. And that’s going to be the only way to restore trust is to be frank with the public, because the public has access to many sources of information and many dissenting voices.

(45:08):

And I think honesty and humility are two virtues that need to be rediscovered in the wake of Covid. We just need to be honest about the limits of the evidence. People figure these things out. They were told about the vaccination. So if you get vaccinated, you’ll be a dead end to the virus. You will not transmit the virus to others was what was being suggested. We did not have evidence of that. Transmissibility was not an endpoint in the vaccine trials, so that should not have been claimed. And once people found that, well, even if they got vaccinated, they could still get Covid, get milder, somewhat severe disease, but not life-threatening disease nearly at the same rates. Nevertheless, they felt they had been misled. So I think you’re exactly right. We need to be much clearer about the limits of our knowledge. It’s not a comfortable thing to hear in a pandemic that we don’t know exactly what to do.

(45:58):

We’re not sure, or maybe this is worth trying even though it’s going to be costly and there’s some evidence for it. But I think that that’s absolutely necessary: frankness and truth-telling. And those are supposed to be, again, the fundamental virtues of science and universities, university researchers, and journalism. So I agree. I think that that’s exactly right. And that’s something we found throughout, that there was an inadequate commitment to frankness, humility, and also being willing to say things that might seem to be critical of your own side in a partisan way, things that might be at odds with the narrative that’s favored by your side and the partisan struggle. I think people need to rise above. Scientists, journalists, academics need to do more to realize the importance of rising above partisanship.

G. Patrick Lynch (46:55):

And on that hopefully positive note, we will conclude. Steve, I’d like to thank you very much for being on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Stephen Macedo (47:01):

Today. Thank you very much. I enjoyed the conversation.

James Patterson (47:05):

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

Freedom of speech is in a bad place. The modern, young identitarian left appears to have given up on it, regarding it as a dinosaur, of value only to bigots, billionaires, and kleptocrats. Elements of the political right regard it as little more than a political football, to be kicked about in the culture wars as a weapon in the war on woke. The former are more interested in cancelling speakers who offend them than in engaging them in debate and seeking to defeat them in argument. The latter take an extremist approach to free speech (as long as it is speech they agree with), holding that anything goes in an unlicensed, unregulated marketplace of ideas.

Both are profoundly wrong and are doing immense damage to the once-cherished ideal of free speech. To help rescue free speech from the cesspit of the culture wars, there are two places we can look: to the past and to the world elsewhere. If free speech is in the deepest trouble in the United States, is it quite as bad elsewhere in the Anglosphere and is it in a better place beyond the English-speaking world? And if free speech is in trouble now, how did we get here? Was it always thus, or was a wrong turn taken at some point on the West’s journey from the eras of heresy and treason, sedition and blasphemy (all of which were crimes capable of being committed by words alone)? These are among the questions Fara Dabhoiwala asks in his new book, What is Free Speech? A historian now at Princeton who has formerly worked in Oxford and elsewhere, Dabhoiwala is well placed to address them.

What Dabhoiwala gets right is his framing: the way he sets up the problem is excellent, and the book’s introduction and opening two chapters are its strongest sections. He is right that free speech “has always been a weaponized mantra,” that understanding free speech “is also, always, about uncovering the unequal distribution of power,” that free speech has often been regarded as dangerous not only for its power to “unsettle orthodoxy” but also by reason of its being “perpetually manipulated by the powerful.” He is right that “wherever one looks, liberty of speech was never a stable concept.” He is right that, in the history of human development, it is a recent idea and that for most of recorded history it was simply “unthinkable”—not even “intelligible” as a concept. He is also right that, in the English-speaking world, Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1721–23) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) did more than any other works to articulate, celebrate, and popularize notions of free speech.

Or, at least, he is very nearly right about that. To these twin canonical texts, I would add a third, John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), the importance of which Dabhoiwala downplays. Milton’s great essay, for all its partisanship and other flaws, remains the most powerful tract in our language against pre-publication censorship. It is curious that Dabhoiwala should undervalue it, for Milton’s argument actually accords with the conclusion in What is Free Speech?, where the interests of the audience are privileged as much as the interests of the speaker. Milton was fundamentally opposed to censorship, not because it diminishes the rights of the author (or printer or publisher), but because it infantilizes the rights of all of us as readers to choose for ourselves what we should read. Dabhoiwala would agree with that, and his argument in the closing section of his book would have been all the stronger had he harnessed Milton in its support.

Cato’s Letters and On Liberty are far from perfect accounts of free speech. There is a marked naivete about Trenchard and Gordon’s blithe assumption that the truth will always and inevitably emerge if only “all opinions are equally indulged and all parties equally allowed to speak their minds.” And there is a notorious silence—or gap—in Mill’s “harm principle” owing to his refusal to define what a harm is when it comes to what he called “the liberty of thought and discussion.” Is hate speech harmful? Is offensiveness a harm that can justify the curtailment of speech? Is misinformation? Mill answers none of these questions. Dabhoiwala devotes much of his book to challenging Cato’s and Mill’s arguments for free speech.

Free speech does not empower us all equally, but its absence empowers only the censors, whatever garb they clothe themselves in.

Neither Cato’s Letters nor On Liberty should be regarded as sacred texts. Neither is above criticism. Some of Dabhoiwala’s critique is astutely judged, particularly of Trenchard and Gordon’s failure to see how cut-throat competition amongst newspapers and problems of media partisanship undermine several of their arguments for a free press. But Dabhoiwala sets out not to rescue Cato and Mill from their mistakes and oversights, but instead to trash them. That approach is as baffling as it is bizarre.

Trenchard and Gordon were writing in the 1720s avowedly about political speech. In that era, the polis was composed entirely of men. Cato has nothing to say about women’s right to free speech. Does that undermine any aspect of Trenchard and Gordon’s arguments against the official abuse of laws of sedition and libel? Mill worked for the East India Company. His focus in On Liberty is on the liberty of thought and discussion in England, not in India. Does that undermine any aspect of its argument? Dabhoiwala seems to think so. Yet, in whose interests is it to draw our attention to Mill’s early work as a civil servant in the East India Company but not to his pioneering campaign later in life as a Member of Parliament in striving to bring Eyre to justice for the racist atrocities he committed as Governor in Jamaica? All his life, Mill campaigned for women’s rights. Why fail to mention this when so much scorn has been poured on Trenchard and Gordon’s failure to accommodate women’s free speech in their account? We all know what gesture politics is. There is such a thing as gesture history, too. Much of Dabhoiwala’s account reads more as a history against free speech than as a history of free speech.

Speech and Truth

The reason for this is that Dabhoiwala appears to crave not free speech as much as true speech. Throughout his accounts of Cato and Mill, he is captivated above all by their assertions about truth. He is right that what they have to say about truth can be unpersuasive. Free speech has not acted as a guarantor of truth, and Cato was wrong to suggest that it would. Mill, however, did not repeat that mistake. His argument was that free speech was needed in order to enable us to seek the truth, not that free speech would necessarily ensure that the true would drown out the false. (In this regard, Mill’s position was closer to Milton’s than it was to Cato’s.) Mill did not regard any argument from truth as his most important contention for free speech. At the core of his vision for liberty of thought and discussion lay his notion of individual human flourishing. We can grow and develop, and our judgement can be valued, Mill argued, only when we are exposed to that which we do not already know—to new facts, to divergent opinions, and to novel interpretations. That is not only a much stronger argument for free speech than any that relies on truth, but it is also an argument for genuinely free speech and not an argument only for true speech.

The best argument for free speech, however, is to imagine a world without it. We do not have to imagine very hard. Radicals and revolutionaries of many stripes have been so convinced that they are right and everyone else wrong that they have readily grabbed and grasped at the levers of control over discussion. Robespierre did it. So too did Lenin. Neither was very concerned with freedom. Both were very concerned with what they thought was true. And, as Dabhoiwala observes, we know how that story ends. The privileging of true speech over free speech has been tried. It was tried by the medieval church in the age of heresy. It was tried by pre-Enlightenment governments in the age of sedition. It was tried by the totalitarian regime of the socialist Soviet Union. It has been tried and, repeatedly, it has failed.

One of the greatest strengths of Dabhoiwala’s book is his insistence that free speech regimes distribute power unequally. Media moguls, press barons, and the owners of social media platforms wield immense power over their viewers, readers, and users. But when we imagine (or recall) a world without free speech, we conjure a world where the church, the state, or the vigilante goons who wish only to cancel and destroy that with which they disagree run riot. Free speech does not empower us all equally, but its absence empowers only the censors, whatever garb they clothe themselves in, whether they be priests, inquisitors, ministers, or culture warriors.

Free speech needs to be rescued from the culture wars, not condemned, its pioneers pilloried for having failed to prevent them.

What then must we do? If America is drowning in lies, if social media is awash with torrents of misinformation, how might we work our way out of the abyss without giving up on the great liberal values of freedom and autonomy in thought and discussion? There is an answer. In a word, it is balance. Free speech is of immense value. But it is only one value in a pantheon of principles. Dignity is also of value, as are accuracy, honesty, impartiality, decency, personal privacy, and a whole constellation of matters which may sometimes clash and come into conflict with freedom of speech. Social life, political life, and the pursuit of happiness depend on the liberty of speech being balanced with other public goods such as these. Everywhere this is understood, even in the United States.

American Exceptionalism

It is often claimed, including by Dabhoiwala, that American exceptionalism privileges free speech as an absolute, as a card that trumps all competing values and principles. Yet this is not quite so. It is true that in the modern United States, aspects of free speech are more heavily protected than is the case in Canada, Britain, or Europe. But this is not true for all speech and even in the US, there are some forms of speech that are not legally protected at all, such as obscenity, child pornography, defamatory speech, and fighting words. Moreover, the over-protection of speech is a recent development in American jurisprudence—it dates only from the 1960s. Many plausible interpretations of the First Amendment are available, which are far less militant—far more balanced—than the one which is usually preferred by a majority of today’s Supreme Court justices. Care should be taken, though, not to exaggerate the extent of the differences between American and (say) British or European jurisprudence on free speech. For sure, there are legislative restrictions on speech which are nowadays ruled unconstitutional in the US, which would be lawful in Britain or Europe—restrictions on campaign expenditure or on hate speech, for example. But there are also many more cases where a balance is struck between speech and some countervailing interest, such as security (think of the recent TikTok case) or dignity (think of Virginia v. Black, upholding the criminalization of cross-burning). Free speech is a powerful right in US constitutional law, and there are instances, particularly in the last twenty or so years, of it being militantly enforced, but even in America, even today, it is very far from being an absolute.

Once we accept that free speech is a value which must be balanced against others (as Dabhoiwala does and as I would agree), we have to start thinking hard about who should undertake the balancing exercise and how they might achieve it. This is precisely the difficult, often laboriously detailed work that Dabhoiwala acknowledges needs to be undertaken. Yet he disdains from doing it himself. Others, thankfully, are working on it. European human rights law, for example, has developed over more than fifty years a sophisticated account of how freedom of expression must be balanced in a proportionate manner against other competing rights and interests. It is a pity Dabhoiwala has nothing to say about this.

Or take another example. Britain’s Online Safety Act, passed by the UK Parliament in 2023, is one of the world’s leading legislative attempts to bring a degree of regulation to the Internet—particularly to search engines and to social media platforms—with a view to making it a safer space, especially for children. The legislation runs to hundreds of pages. It took over four and a half years to enact. It will be enforced by a statutory regulator, Ofcom, which has already published thousands of pages of guidance and consultation documentation on the Act’s implementation. It is an enormous enterprise. It makes an avowed attempt to balance freedom of online expression against the harms that speech can cause, particularly speech with the speed and reach of which social media boasts. It is both vital and painstaking work. Yet it merits a mere seven and a half lines in Dabhoiwala’s more than 400-page book. In the European Union, a Digital Services Act is doing similar work to the UK’s Online Safety Act. Dabhoiwala gives that legislation a bare paragraph.

These are striking omissions, not least because the ways in which European human rights law and British and European online safety legislation seek to balance free speech against other values are deeply contested and highly controversial. My point is not that they necessarily get the balance right, but that they are, at the least, well-meaning attempts to achieve in practice what Dabhoiwala rightly says needs to be striven for, which is why it is so mystifying that he seems so uninterested in them.

If you want to get serious about how free speech is going to operate in the online ecosystem, if you want to understand how this once beautiful but apparently now merely “dangerous idea” can help to guide us through the myriad difficulties and challenges of Internet regulation, if you are worried about how we should respond to the bilge of misinformation online, you are asking the right questions about free speech. But if you seek insights into what the answers might be, What is Free Speech? is not going to help you. Free speech needs to be rescued from the culture wars, not condemned, its pioneers pilloried for having failed to prevent them.

On February 7, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado offered the following advice on X: “Dear Speaker Johnson, Simply pass every executive order President Trump has signed, and you will go down as the greatest Speaker in American history.” Consider also the words of a more senior legislator, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Tom Cole, in response to being asked whether it is up to Congress to decide whether the foreign aid agency, USAID, ought to be shut down. “Well, yeah,” Cole answered, “but Congress doesn’t always do its job. When Congress doesn’t do its job, I’m not going to be mad at an executive [branch] that’s trying to save money.”

Legislators have responded to the whirlwind of activity in the first half-year of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration with an overwhelming sense of passivity. Trump’s Democratic opponents, who find themselves narrowly in the minority in both the House of Representatives and Senate, have done little to slow things down, even if they’ve offered record-long speeches in both chambers. Republicans, meanwhile, have made supporting the president their top priority, acquiescing to his initiatives even when they seem to directly impinge on the legislature’s constitutional prerogatives.

Americans can be forgiven for thinking Congress has become about as useful as a human appendix—prone to inflammation and perhaps best removed entirely.

Because Congress’s marginalization has proceeded so relentlessly in the twenty-first century, its irrelevance is now probably overestimated by most casual observers of American politics. We should avoid getting carried away. We have not become an autocracy. Legislators retain influence that often expresses itself informally; the president is not free to disregard their priorities. The text of the US Code still matters—very much—and so the people who have the power to rewrite it remain potent and sometimes necessary. The saga of “Trump’s” big, beautiful bill—H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation omnibus signed into law by the president on July 4—is one of factional strife and accommodation that played out almost entirely in the legislature, although Trump’s whipping was certainly crucial to securing final passage.

We should dispassionately take stock of Congress’s current position on foreign and domestic policy, on taxing and spending, and on the deeper question of what role our elected representatives play in our Constitutional system. We will see our lawmakers choosing acquiescence repeatedly, because it is a winning strategy for them in the context of a thoroughly nationalized, thoroughly apocalypticized political environment. If we are careful, we will discern limits to their passivity, though the precise boundaries remain quite murky, as much to the participants as to outside observers. What we will not see is any obvious reason to expect this dynamic to reverse itself in the immediate future. If there are heroes of a legislative revival already on the scene, they have concealed themselves quite masterfully. Congress may well transform itself—its current leader-dominant structure is a historical anomaly—but it will take some kind of shock (bigger than Trump himself) to begin that process.

Second Fiddle on Foreign Affairs

The world stage has been unusually eventful during this first stretch of the second Trump administration, such that the president has been forced to deal with one exigency after another. He has done so on his own terms, with very little pressure from his copartisans who control Congress. Plenty of Republican legislators view NATO and the Russia-Ukraine War quite differently from the chief executive, and they have taken part in ongoing debates, both intramural and public, about America’s proper stance. But formally, Congress has simply steered clear of the issue, in stark contrast to a bipartisan coalition’s funding of Ukraine in 2024.

Meanwhile, Trump initiated two significant offensives. Responding to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, he ordered an air campaign in Yemen, only to end it with a negotiated ceasefire six weeks later. The next month, after Israel unexpectedly bombed Iran to disable its nuclear weapons program, Trump committed American air power to that cause, dropping enormous bunker-buster bombs on three sites in a single hour. The administration essentially ignored Congress as it made these decisions and troubled itself very little as to legal justifications; in both cases, it asserted that the president’s commander-in-chief and foreign relations powers under Article II of the Constitution were sufficient. Trump’s Democratic critics in Congress expressed outrage; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, declared that “the President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers,” endangering the nation and warranting impeachment. Although Trump disavowed any desire to continue hostilities with Iran and indeed helped broker a ceasefire between the Islamic Republic and Israel, Senate Democrats nevertheless pushed forward with a resolution demanding a termination of hostilities (which Republicans successfully bottled up).

Legislators have also been bystanders when the administration’s legal basis for action is dubious—and even when Congress’s own core constitutional powers seem to be in jeopardy.

There is something perfunctory and even farcical about Democrats’ insistence that these sorts of decisions ought to go through Congress in the first instance. Although Trump’s second administration is admittedly unusual in the extent of its willingness to act without even informally consulting Congress, also-ran status for legislators has become the default on foreign affairs over the last several presidential administrations, including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Congress has not passed (or repealed) an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) since 2002; it has not formally declared war since 1942. Legislators have frequently carped about executive bellicosity, and sometimes one chamber or the other has even expressed its official disapproval or tried to cut off funds, but mostly they have underlined their impotence. (Even when bipartisan majorities voted to disapprove any further hostilities with Iran after Trump’s targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, it was unclear this would have any effect; in any case, Trump vetoed the resolution.)

Given how badly things went when Obama sought an AUMF related to Syria in 2013, and how relatively smoothly Trump’s limited engagements have gone, presidential predominance in foreign affairs may be fairly regarded as a comfortable and sensible habit.

Nor does this predominance equate to limitless discretion. If a president were to undertake a protracted “boots on the ground” military engagement, he would be extremely unwise to exclude Congress from his planning efforts. Congress has a great deal to say about the shape and size of the armed forces that the president has at his disposal; those legislators who build their careers around the respected Armed Services committees, many of whom are military veterans, are anything but passive on questions of weapons programs, military bases, and overall fiscal commitment. Moreover, when there is a strong bipartisan consensus in Congress, lawmakers show more ability to steer presidential conduct. Trump has indicated his desire to exit NATO, an alliance he sees as outdated and dysfunctional. Congress has taken steps to make that much more difficult, passing a funding limitation in their FY2020 NDAA and an explicit requirement for congressional approval in the FY2024 NDAA. Those actions might not be foolproof, but they do change the costs for the president in ways likely to matter.

Overall, Congress is decidedly a second-tier actor in foreign affairs today. But that is not a terrible embarrassment to the institution; indeed, it is a familiar situation throughout American history.

Ceding Domestic Policy Predominance

By contrast, legislators have historically been the premier deciders of “major questions” in the domestic sphere for most of American history. They have always existed in a complicated relationship with the “legislator-in-chief” as well as the organs of policy implementation. Roughly speaking, presidential leadership must usually tee up an issue for major legislation, but it is lawmakers who must, in driving it through to passage, decide the major contours of the law with due consideration to all the interests involved. They can manage this balancing, which is messy work, far better than any of the various experts retained in the executive agencies. (That’s politics, in a non-pejorative sense.) By contrast, the experts and permanent civil servants are better suited to settle the administrative details of policies in action. Legislators leave them plenty of questions to answer, sometimes intentionally and sometimes because of limited foresight.

This process has looked rather different in the 2020s, and especially in 2025. Most often, the script is now: the president sets the agenda, often with reference to a campaign promise. Allied partisan legislators loudly announce: We would love to deliver with legislation, but unfortunately our awful opponents make it impossible, and so we will root for the president to figure it out. Then the president rolls out an elaborate new policy, based on whatever old statute is handy, complete with a signing ceremony for the associated executive order, standing in where a new landmark law might once have been. Then, agency officials try to implement the policy while it is litigated, often all the way up to the Supreme Court. A non-exhaustive list of policies that have developed this way in the previous three presidencies: Obama’s DACA, net neutrality, aggressive expansion of Title IX, and Clean Power Plan; Trump 45’s regulatory rollback, off-budget border wall construction, steel tariffs, and overhaul of asylum policy; Biden’s COVID eviction moratorium, COVID vaccine mandate, and student loan relief.

As I explain in a recent article in National Affairs, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tried to push back against the bad-faith legal interpretations that power this Congress-circumventing path. But Republican legislators, for all their celebration of the repeal of Chevron deference, seem inclined to take their turn on the ride. Because nearly all their legislative efforts were devoted to a single reconciliation bill (about which, more below) and because they have eschewed nearly all bipartisan coalition-building in 2025, they have most often been content to root for executive action. Sometimes this makes perfect sense: when Trump reverses Democratic executive actions, new statutes are often unnecessary, as in the administration’s vigorous reorientation of Title IX and equal protection laws.

But legislators have also been bystanders when the administration’s legal basis for action is dubious—and even when Congress’s own core constitutional powers seem to be in jeopardy. This was most immediately apparent with the efforts of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body conjured into existence without the slightest hint of legislative involvement and claiming powers to close departments and terminate programs that Congress has not given even to the president since the 1980s. Far from questioning the parameters of this strange creation, Republican members of Congress fell all over themselves to join a DOGE Caucus which pledged itself to efficiency and promised to legislate in tandem with Musk’s efforts. Nothing of the sort ever happened. Instead, even as they hailed Musk’s declarations that some federal spending programs were utterly corrupt and devoid of value, they renewed the previous fiscal year’s appropriations without alteration, including handing a new year of funding over to USAID even as they cheered its apparent demise.

There are, remarkably, two even more striking illustrations of congressional acquiescence to presidential dominance. The first involves a law that Congress passed, with strong bipartisan support, in April 2024, requiring the social media app TikTok to either separate itself entirely from Chinese ownership or be banned from popular app stores (most importantly, Apple’s and Google’s). Legislators showed some surprising dexterity in getting that law passed, and the Supreme Court upheld its validity in January 2025. But TikTok had a secret weapon: over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump became convinced that it was a political asset for him, and so as president, he has simply declined to enforce the law. On the first day of his second term, he announced a delay in enforcement because the statute allowed for a single 90-day postponement of enforcement if a divestment deal was in the process of being consummated; one could argue (rather weakly) that this was lawful, notwithstanding the nonexistence of any imminent deal. Trump then announced a second delay in April and a third in June. His attorney general told Apple and Google that national security considerations would guarantee nonenforcement. In other words, the law was not really the law. GOP members of Congress who championed the TikTok law have offered barely a peep of protest, let alone an effective strategy to stop the president’s infidelity.

Broad presidential claims of national security are also central to a far more consequential set of policies: historically high tariffs on goods from countries all around the world, which Trump justifies with reference to the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), a statute that has never previously been invoked to justify tariffs. What is the emergency Trump is responding to? A persistent trade deficit. And what sort of rates does this allow the president to set? Any he sees fit, with unlimited changes at his discretion. (Recently, he announced a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, a country with which the United States has a persistent trade surplus.) This interpretation would seem to imply that, when it passed IEEPA in 1977, Congress gave away the first of its constitutionally enumerated powers, “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” A few Republican members have publicly chastised these actions; many more who disapprove (both on legal and policy grounds) have held their tongues, hoping that courts will invalidate Trump’s actions and thus make an open confrontation with the White House unnecessary.

Congress’s ceding of authority could go quite a lot further yet. There are some indications that the Trump administration will withhold appropriated funds from many programs, probably avoiding a straightforward impoundment fight by leaning on the technique of “pocket rescissions.” Some members of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) are encouraging this strategy, seeing it as a way of securing some fiscal discipline. If this strategy works (and it may well meet resistance), it would imply a presidential power of the purse fundamentally stronger than Congress’s. It would become possible—and perhaps politically convenient—to rely on autopilot spending laws from Congress while executive branch officials make the real funding decisions. As Chairman Cole’s quote above suggests, Republican legislators aren’t going to complain too much if all that’s at stake is saving a bit of money. But once the principle is established, it’s easy to imagine Congress losing its relevance entirely.

Partisan Lawmaking as Compensation

If Republican lawmakers are not particularly enthusiastic about many of the second Trump administration’s actions, what is their compensation for all this conflict-avoidance? By downplaying disagreements on most issues, they kept the team together to pass one big bill—which they called, unbelievably, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This is a serious accomplishment, not to be shrugged off lightly. It makes historically unprecedented investments (totaling $170 billion!) in border security; rewrites the tax code; puts some limitations on Medicaid and food stamp eligibility; turns American energy policy in conservative directions; and makes significant investments in military defense ($150 billion).

Getting the law across the finish line without a single Democratic vote was not easy work. Republicans’ majorities in both chambers are slim and members disagree about plenty. Several GOP factions credibly threatened to derail the law, including New York and California members seeking higher deductibility for state and local taxes; those concerned that Medicaid cuts might alienate their working-class supporters; and fiscal conservatives who wished for larger spending cuts. Republican leaders in both chambers figured out how to placate just enough members from each of these groups to secure passage, getting a crucial assist in the last stages from President Trump, who made it clear to potential holdouts that they would incur his wrath.

The OBBBA will undoubtedly live on in the public’s consciousness as Trump’s law, but scores of Republican members can justly take credit for shaping this legislation. As a budget reconciliation law, the OBBBA was crafted by many committees, and its final shape was the result of a complicated process of factional accommodation. Passing this law was a major partisan victory, as were the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Affordable Care Act of 2010, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. One-party legislation, most often possible through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process, has become the main event of twenty-first-century legislating.

We are short on members with the courage (foolhardiness?) to risk their careers and partisan good standing to force the institution to operate differently.

That is bad news for the country, because it promotes zero-sum thinking and cuts out the kind of broad coalition-building needed if policy investments are to endure for generations. The giveaways necessary to get partisan allies to hold their nose and vote yes are often appallingly corrupt. There is little room for public reasoning in a process that will terminate in the question of: “Are you with us or against us?” We get negotiations but not much serious deliberation; there are lots of people keeping track of whose ox is being gored, but not so many worrying about writing good law. These laws reverse each other as each side tries to serve its core constituents, enshrine all manner of pandering policies, and (not coincidentally) blow up America’s budget deficit.

Members know how this process will play out, and plenty of them don’t like it, but they nevertheless play along. (Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the only dissidents in action as well as word, offers Massie’s Law: “Where N = number of Republicans required to stop a bad bill, number of Republicans voting Nay = N-1.”) Members of the HFC, in particular, understood (as early as December) that even a two-bill strategy would create more room for maneuver, while a one-bill strategy would preclude their taking a stand. Though they threatened and grumbled to no end, they nevertheless gave their votes at every procedural crossroads, including final passage of a Senate-reworked bill they claimed was a degradation of the House’s version.

Do Legislators Want More?

The HFC members get a great deal of (well-deserved) grief for their hypocrisy, but their ultimate willingness to play along does not distinguish them from their colleagues in the slightest. Members see themselves as loyal team players; they don’t fundamentally object to an institution set up to facilitate politics as a partisan contact sport; and most of them don’t acutely feel the loss of any more searching deliberation, which has been receding into historical memory for some time now.

In the concluding chapters of my 2023 book, Why Congress, I envisioned three scenarios for Congress’s future: decrepitude, rubber stamp, and revival. Republicans’ unwillingness to pick fights with Trump leads many people to the conclusion that legislators are choosing the second option: a rubber stamp. The truth is, however, Congress hasn’t done the work to make itself fit that role. A rubber stamp isn’t supposed to make itself scarce; it’s supposed to make itself available for the decision-maker’s use, without complication. It’s possible that, if either party won huge congressional majorities and the White House, Congress would move decisively in that direction. But that scenario itself seems remote, since both of America’s political parties seem unwilling to transform themselves into big-tent governing parties. In the deferential treatment of Trump’s cabinet appointments and the (bipartisan) willingness to turn budget reconciliation into an ever-expanding loophole to evade the Senate filibuster, one can certainly make out some signs of this inclination. (Attempts to limit the powers of federal district court judges to block executive actions would also fit the mold, but they seem not to have traction in the Senate.)

But congressional Republicans have not come anywhere close to heeding Rep. Boebert’s above-quoted exhortation to take all of Trump’s executive orders and write them into the statute-books. Perhaps because those votes would be too close for comfort, they mostly absent themselves as a body and use their platforms as individual members to broadcast their support for the administration. For many members, this media-oriented role is no kind of disappointment. It lets them build personal brands that may retain value after leaving office. And if they get on the right television shows, they may well catch the president’s attention and find direct influence through him. Other members who dislike this dynamic and wish to engage in more constructive policymaking often simply leave Congress.

Decrepitude, then, remains the path of least resistance for the institution that is supposed to be the beating heart of American self-government. Perhaps that is inevitable in a historical moment when more Americans see their political adversaries as actual enemies unworthy of being political bedfellows on any cause. Why should one seek to persuade and accommodate people who wish to destroy one’s whole way of life? If we do not believe in reasoning together, there is no need for Congress to mount a comeback as an institution.

Taking this course comes with very serious downsides, to put it mildly. As bad as some observers may have felt that Congress’s public deliberation was, policymaking-by-social-media is much, much worse. Having to hash out major decisions publicly has an unmistakable disciplining effect. A Congress intent on enacting industrial policy would never simply leave us with tariff rates that can bounce around at the president’s whim. A Congress determined to relieve some Americans’ student loan burdens would never have given so much to high earners free of economic distress. Relatively functional bipartisan processes have continued to prevail both for annual appropriations and national defense authorizations in recent years. If we imagine each of the thousands of decisions in those packages turned into a chance for presidential grandstanding, much mischief and bungling will result. In other words, if you think congressional decision-making is bad, wait until you get a load of post-congressional decision-making. It won’t be any technocratic paradise.

What would it take to push Congress toward revival? Some shock to the system, big enough to make members prioritize politically cross-cutting policies rather than partisan loyalty. Trump’s emergence turned out not to be big enough, nor was COVID-19. Maybe a shooting war with Russia or China? Perhaps if artificial intelligence transforms the economy so rapidly as to spike unemployment? Maybe a presidential term could go so badly as to make a political break inevitable, thereby opening a window for institutional reform? Who knows, maybe Elon Musk’s America Party will somehow change everything?

The challenge in imagining plausible scenarios is that, over the last decade, members of Congress have shown themselves quite able to redefine their own commitments to fit their team’s political needs. Our contemporary party system has, so far, bent rather than breaking a la 1910. Even the unprecedented un-gaveling of a Speaker of the House in October 2023 seems to have left little impression. Trump’s exit from the scene might scramble existing battle lines, but my guess is that something more than the turning of political pages is needed. We have no shortage of prescriptions for congressional revitalization. What we are short on is members with the courage (foolhardiness?) to risk their careers and partisan good standing to force the institution to operate differently—together with the perspicacity to understand how such a change would play out and why it would matter. “Once one dismisses the best of all possible worlds, one finds that this is the best of all possible worlds.” Q.E.D.

With a nod to Maimonides, Harvard Law’s Benjamin Eidelson and University of Virginia’s Deborah Hellman have published a draft article offering a “Guide to the Perplexed” regarding “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Title VI.” That law is the Civil Rights Act provision authorizing private litigants and the federal government to sue universities for discrimination. Whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism—always, never, theoretically but not practically, or some other relationship—dominates the discourse about campus demonstrations because it is generally thought that the latter but not the former implicates Title VI. Mere anti-Zionism is allegedly acceptable political discourse while antisemitism is bigotry. Accordingly, anti-Zionist campus demonstrations are sacrosanct free speech unless they “cross the line” into prohibited discriminatory harassment based on national origin.

The authors aim to show that it’s far more complicated. Antisemitism litigation against universities “face[s] formidable hurdles” first and foremost because civil rights law—at least on its face—only prohibits certain forms of antisemitism. It’s perplexing indeed.

Perplexing but moot, that is. Discrimination against Israeli nationals is prohibited under Title VI. No one disputes that, and that is all the government would have to show in order to strip a university of federal support. The hoopla over Eidelson’s and Hellman’s article, though, is about its analysis of contemporary anti-Zionism, and whether it fits into the narrow categories of antisemitism prohibited under civil rights law.

It is shocking that it is not obvious to the authors (and presumably their editors and readers) that contemporary anti-Zionism fits to a tee their description of what would qualify as prohibited national-origin discrimination. Yet it does not occur to them to make the argument that beneath the surface of anti-Zionist rhetoric is a movement with a philosophy predicated on certain discriminatory ideas about the nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. If two highly educated and thoughtful professors suffer from such a blind spot, the error is not really theirs.

Culturally, we have clearly focused on parsing phrases like “globalize the Intifada” at the expense of actually understanding the logic of contemporary anti-Zionist fervor. Forget particular chants and theoretical rhetoric, though: What are anti-Israel activists conveying to an objective listener at an irreducible level? What do they want, and why?

Destroying Israel is nothing short of an obsession among a cohort of young progressives. Yet it’s not always clear why students destroy their own library while disrupting exam prep in service of the anti-Israel cause and no other. Graduates don’t lie to administrators about the content of their valedictory addresses for the looming climate catastrophe. Nobody pours cement down Columbia’s toilets in protest of welfare cuts. Nor is it always clear why anyone off campus ought to care about what appears to be a he-said-they-said of offense-taking. Maybe these are just college kids taking offense at their subjective interpretations of arguably hurtful words, with “discriminatory harassment” serving as an anti-speech cudgel. But the anti-Israel movement has a philosophy whose substantive content doesn’t just put to rest Eidelson’s and Hellman’s challenge; it helps answer all those questions.

Eidelson’s and Hellman’s main contribution to the discourse is arguing that it is not clear that Title VI applies to all forms of antisemitism. Rather, “Title VI recognizes Jewishness only as a racial or ancestral category.” In other words, antisemitism with a religious inflection (“Christ-killer!”), that which taps into derogatory stereotypes (“cheap Jew!”), or devoid of content aside from hostility (“shut up, Jew”) may not count. But holding an event closed to “Ashkenazim,” Jews of European descent, would be a Title VI violation.

The authors think that whether garden-variety campus anti-Zionism implicates ancestral Jewishness is a difficult question. They identify some narrow circumstances in which anti-Zionism could manifest in racial or ancestral terms:

The most we can usefully say is that anti-Zionist acts of exclusion or “shunning” on campus could add up to a racially hostile environment if, but only if, they amount to severe and pervasive harassment even once the set of relevant instances is restricted to those in which (a) an intent to exclude students of Jewish ancestry motivates the exclusion, or (b) it is a student’s perceived Jewish ancestry that grounds an inference about their views regarding Israel. Exclusion of Zionists per se would not suffice.

There is a (c) that can be hard to see, but not because it is well-hidden; only because (and this is the scandal) we are not used to talking about what anti-Zionism is. Contemporary anti-Zionism, the view that the Jewish state of Israel should one way or another cease to exist, in all but the rarest of circumstances takes a form that denigrates Jews on the basis of their shared heritage. More specifically, it necessarily entails telling Jews that their shared heritage is a lie propagated for nefarious purposes but belied by the color of their skin. Today’s anti-Zionism relies on a perception about a Jew’s ancestry—that it is fraudulently concocted—combined with an observation about Jewish racial characteristics.

How such discrimination manifests, and its glaring ancestral-racial qualities, is clear, objective, and inescapable. My own experience as a “visible Jew” illustrates just how.

Students at Columbia, Harvard, and other elite schools set up encampments in violation of school rules, break into buildings, and deploy any number of other unpopular tactics because they are not trying to persuade.

When I was a law student living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I would take the subway to NYU Law’s downtown campus every weekday. Dozens of times over those three years, vagrant straphangers who saw my yarmulke would stand over me and preach—rant is the better word—to the rest of the car about who I really was and the perfidies my people had committed against theirs. These representatives of Black Hebrew Israelites or similar groups announced that white-looking Jews like me are not the real Jews. Rather, Ashkenazi Jews are white usurpers, enslavers, interlopers who lie about their heritage to garner sympathy and extract land and resources from indigenous peoples. We pretend to be heirs to the ancient Israelites, when the real inheritors of the land, tradition, and honor of that people are people of color who pretend-Jews like me oppress to complete our Big Lie. My ancestors apparently did this to black people worldwide. And Jews like me were still fraudsters and poseurs today.

This is easily recognizable as a kind of discrimination based on my ethnic heritage, real and perceived. It directly implicates my lineage as an Ashkenazi Jew by denying that I am descended from Levantine Israelites, singling me out for derision on that basis. It denies Jews the right to self-define as an ethno-religious group. My harassers preferred a conspiracy theory that underscores the Jews’ profound evil. They tell me that I am a fraud and a phony for claiming to be Jewish (real ancestry) while being white (perceived ancestry).

Yet, as I have quipped ever since, I would get off the subway, arrive at NYU Law, and promptly hear the same accusations, only leveled in more sophisticated language. Campus anti-Israel activism is now overwhelmingly “decolonial,” reliant on the claim that Jews are not the rightful sovereigns over Palestine because they are not indigenous. It is therefore eliminationist; the proper outcome is for the colonizers to get out, like the French in Algeria.

My classmates who claim that Israel, alone among the nations of the world, should be dismantled and replaced with a sovereign representing a different ethnic group constitute one kind of singling out. But there was quite another beneath the surface. Israel had to be eliminated, not reformed or compromised with, because it displaced a native population with an exclusive claim to the land. My fellow Jews were aghast. How can educated people say that Jews have no claim to that territory? Education is little defense against just-so conspiracy theories: Sure, ancient Jews lived there before Christian and Muslim Arabs did; but today’s Jews are not the same group, which we know because Jews are white. The position that distinguishes the anti-Zionists from the mere Israel-critics is thus predicated on a profound act of ethnic prejudice: claiming that the Jews who are currently sovereign in Israel are not who they claim to be. In other words, that Ashkenazi Jews (who make up a minority of Israel’s population and only part of its governing coalition) have manipulated, faked, or otherwise fabricated their ethnic heritage in order to steal land from Arabs. It’s subway-rant stuff.

Every time Israel is referred to as “settler-colonial,” the logic of the subway rant is baked in. It simply does not compute without the premise that today’s Jews are not who they claim. When student activists claim that a Jewish state in the Levant is unacceptable because it displaces the true indigenous people with white Europeans—precisely, if not explicitly, the most common form of anti-Zionism today—Jews are being told that they are not who they claim they are. It is per se discriminatory, against Israelis and Jews, on the basis of their real and perceived ethnic heritage, a conspiracy theory like nearly every form of antisemitism.

Seeing that does not require searching for ill motives or intent. It just requires thinking about the ideas being expressed rather than just the words. In other words, we should apply civil rights law to objective discrimination rather than merely explicit discrimination. Our legal standards should take anti-Zionism seriously on its own terms. If civil rights law cannot account for objective but thinly hidden forms of precisely the discriminatory harassment it exists to prevent due to a euphemism loophole that allows favored causes to avoid consequences for advancing a discriminatory movement, then it is not clear what benefit there is to a massive civil-rights enforcement apparatus and expensive campus compliance regimes. 

Once we focus on its objective and unavoidable positions, some apparent mysteries about the campus anti-Israel movement seem much less perplexing. Those who take it on do not think they are participating in a garden-variety political dispute. They are not trying to persuade their fellow students, or anyone else, of the rightness of their position. Nor could they, though they often recur to defensible arguments about Israel’s war conduct, treatment of Palestinians, or other governance issues. Those arguments are not the point, and the tenor of the “debate” over the Middle East would be entirely different if it were; the point is for someone other than Jews to be sovereign over the land that now constitutes Israel. And that is not the kind of position ripe to be advanced through reasoned argument. It can only be accomplished by intimidation, coercion, and misdirection.

Students at Columbia, Harvard, and other elite schools set up encampments in violation of school rules, break into buildings, and deploy any number of other unpopular tactics because they are not trying to persuade. Ask any radical campus group and they will tell you: they are following the lead of the “resistance,” Iran and its terrorist proxies, to make support for Israel anathema among the next generation of Americans. Apparently, Hamas made a habit of telling Israeli hostages the same.

Campus militants make little effort to hide the discriminatory logic of their cause. They count on academics and judges not seeing it for what it really is: A vile antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jews faking their heritage in order to steal from oppressed indigenous people. That is not just a flagrant Title VI violation. It’s an embarrassment to our institutions of higher learning, which have refused even to understand what the demonstrators stand for, and to our nation.

What makes a great superhero film?

It’s the billion-dollar question that largely keeps Hollywood afloat. While big budgets, A-list casts, and over-the-top CGI explosions land butts in seats, that still doesn’t answer the question—because the precondition to any worthwhile superhero film is crafting a hero who is himself great.

Simply put, the greatest heroes know who they are. They know their strengths, as well as their weaknesses; they have principles they believe in, and evils they reject. These take concrete forms beyond vague feelings and emotions. And heroes have the courage of conviction to stand by their choices without equivocation or today’s all-too-common irony. For nearly a century, Superman has been the quintessential hero in this mold, but the latest installment in the franchise, simply Superman, devolves so far from the ideal that our hero, like the country he’s meant to serve, seems to have forgotten his legacy entirely.

There’s little need for a thorough plot summary; you already know it well enough. Superman, played by a fresh-faced but ultimately bland David Corenswet, navigates his dual identity as a Kryptonian and human while working as a reporter for the Daily Planet. He faces public backlash after intervening to stop a war, which his perennial nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) capitalizes on to take him out for good. With the help of Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and a clown car of other “metahumans,” Superman battles to restore his image, defeat Luthor, and save Metropolis.

There’s nothing wrong with the story, per se; it’s a classic Superman arc. And yet, every aspect of it seems designed to fit on a Prius bumper sticker: be kind, end war, diversity is our strength. It’s all there, and it’s almost entirely meaningless.

Luthor is a cut-out for the progressive establishment’s greatest foes: he colludes with the fictional “Boravia,” a composite country clearly based on a mix of Russia and Israel. Its leader could be Ben-Gurion’s twin, who lives in a presidential palace a la Putin, and invades the neighboring country of ambiguously ethnic desert tribes in a war of aggression.

In the media, we have a Daily Planet that’s filled with good people who are nevertheless constrained by rigid institutional objectivity. Lois is frustrated because she knows Boravia is bad, but she can’t prove it, so she can’t print it—the progressive refrain endlessly leveled against more centrist fellow travellers. It doesn’t help that, with wavy black hair and a boho-chic aesthetic, she’s styled after former WaPo princess, Taylor Lorez.

Yet it’s Superman himself who faces the real injustice.

When the world first met Superman as America struggled against the Nazis, his belief in “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” actually meant something, a credo of universal appeal that nevertheless belonged to a particular time and place. Over the decades, the “American Way” evolved to a “Better Tomorrow” and then “Peace for all Mankind,” before settling into its final form, “the Human Way,” in the latest installment. With each step away from a concrete tradition, Superman has fallen further into the vague do-gooderism that drives our politics and culture today.

Corenswet’s Superman wants to be human, to assimilate into and be accepted by Earth’s culture, but has no concept of what that means beyond being a generally nice guy. He wants to have “faith in humanity,” but cannot articulate what’s good about humanity beyond people generally being nice back. But if being kind doesn’t even set him apart, what’s really Super about him at all? He wants earnestly to “do good”—no one can question that, even in this installment—but his actions are driven by knee-jerk emotions without any regard for second-order impact. Is single-handedly stopping a war in a far-off land necessarily “good”? Real geopolitical decisions aren’t that straightforward, and nearly always come with collateral damage—despite the film’s attempt at wishing them away. It’s not ultimately an effort to deconstruct Superman, as many on the cultural right feared it would be, but an exercise in bland delusion.

The film frames this faux-humanitarianism as a rebellious posture against a cynical world. Superman and Lois repeatedly discuss their shared love of punk rock in what becomes a ham-fisted metaphor for being the outcast, underdog, and rebel.“ Maybe that’s the real punk rock,” Superman responds, when Lois questions his boundless love for humanity.

Although this is certainly not an outcast view, it becomes impossible not to see oneself as such when the only solution to the evils of the world is all-encompassing human empathy. It’s a zero-sum game, after all; kindness to one can, and often does, harm another, as Superman learns the hard way. But like the progressive bureaucrat who whines about the raw might of right-wing populism or the six-figure DEI officer who still sees endless oppression, Superman will always feel trounced by his unachievable goal. And that makes him the cynic.

More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), Superman represents America coming into its own.

So the characters fall into another characteristic of the leftist yuppie class, a ubiquitous irony, snark, and pathological unwillingness to take anything or anyone seriously. “Do you think this is going well?” Lois asks Superman as she repeatedly presses him in an interview about his actions in Boravia—obviously implying it’s not. “Well, I think I’m doing a good job,” he retorts with an inflection right out of vaudeville. The interview devolves into pure marital bickering, a tiresome beat of snarky one-liners each rebuked by the next as soon as it lands, until Superman explodes. “People were going to die!” he screams, but even his moral outrage feels contrived, like a politician grandstanding for the camera. The viewer senses an implicit wink and a nod. It’s all a performance.

This comes part and parcel with a lack of real belief; scroll through any social media feed, where validation is fleeting and judgment severe, and you’ll see this rudderless cynicism on full display. There is a palpable fear of being proven wrong, regarded as foolish, or both, if you ever take yourself seriously enough to care about something in an age when nothing is sacred. Yet “doing good” requires sticking to something, a mix of guiding interests and principles. Superman has none, so it’s no surprise that everything in his world is one big joke. The biggest problem with Superman, which often makes it hard to watch, is that not a single one of them lands.

As we reach the climax, and Lois rushes off to rescue Superman with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the filmmakers still couldn’t resist deflating the stakes with a painful joke about a garage door opening too slowly. Even Redditors didn’t like it, precisely the cringe-humor demographic seemingly targeted. 

It’s this incoherent mix of earnest but ineffective altruism, along with a defensive irony, that drives the film, and indeed American culture today. This is a modern phenomenon insofar as it pervades American life, a shallow sensibility certainly detached from the historic “American way.” However, it’s exactly what director James Gunn wants you to believe “the American story” is.

“People did value kindness in the past. That was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn’t necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn’t about anything other than that,” Gunn explained in an interview.

Gunn is categorically wrong: while kindness can be, and often is, an American value, it takes anchored values to understand what “kindness” even is in the first place. Letting in infinite migrants might be kind in the abstract, but is it kind to those who are exploited in the journey north, the local communities and economies they disrupt, or the legacy of generations of Americans who fought and died for the legal right to call themselves American citizens? Beyond the quickest hit of moral satisfaction, there’s no way to truly judge without a basis in core principles. Yet Corenswet’s Superman would simply let them all in, bypassing both tradition and any deeper concept of kindness with the common modern snark: How does this affect you, bigot?

Historically, Superman has been a stand-in for America itself at a time when Americans had a firm belief that their nation stood for something noble and worth preserving. More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), he represents America coming into its own, a mature nation’s confidence in its strength and goodness, and a measured assessment of what responsibility that entailed. “Truth” and “justice” were built around a common culture, one we felt worth defending. No one could understand, let alone anticipate, these concepts being sneeringly reframed as a cover for power politics, as the mainstream leftist understanding goes today. “The American Way” was a distinct way of life—the continuance of Anglo traditions in legal order, personal liberty, and limited government. The average American may not have been able to articulate this, but he nevertheless understood it intuitively, especially in contrast to the arbitrary totalitarianism dually embodied in fascism and communism. And he knew his personal fate and legacy depended on fighting for it. Did America fight the Nazis out of kindness? No, the kind route would always lead to pacifism; we did it instead out of a noble mix of interest and principle, with an achievable, self-serious goal in mind. When filtered through core principles, America rejected unanchored kindness, and instead pursued something much greater.

The story of American heroism is one of unwavering belief in our own particular power for good, and the decline in heroes today is less a rejection of heroism than it is an erosion of belief altogether. Like Superman, we still want to think of ourselves as the good guy. We just no longer have any idea what that means.

The contemporary Marvel malaise is not so much driven by politics or the left’s conscious effort to subvert culture and history, as the right-wing criticism typically goes. Rather, it comes from a cynical fog drawing culture to the path of least resistance, culminating in an art form that no longer serves as art, even politicized art, but simply as a mass commodity. Heroes fight for nothing, represent nothing, they’re merely a replaceable widget; any “good guy” will do.