How do you define great leadership? 

The capacity of an individual who can bend reality to his or her purposes for the good. Transformational leadership is essentially a human undertaking. There are perils and promises, and it's always contingent. But, in the end, great leaders leave the nation and the world in a stronger, more enduring, and more charitable place than when they began.  

How have the presidents and leaders you’ve studied developed their vision? What animated it?

Character is destiny, as the Greeks taught us. They were, as Tennyson put it when he wrote Ulysses, part of all that they’ve met. When they come to that point of crisis, they are bringing to bear everything they’ve experienced, everything they’ve read, everything they’ve learned, everything they haven’t learned. 

 I do believe leaders bring all of their experiences to bear in different moments that could go either way. And I use the word "crisis" advisedly in the Greek sense, as a moment of decision.

All of that vision starts way before the moment?

Totally. 

You have written: “History tells us that presidents who focus on our hopes rather than our fears, who talk about growth not stasis, who open doors instead of building walls are the ones who we look back on most fondly and leave significant legacies.” Talking again about vision, where have those presidents gotten their vision? 

For all his faults, Thomas Jefferson understood that the story of the age was the shift in authority from hereditary and ecclesiastical establishments to individual determination. Andrew Jackson, for all his faults, believed in individual agency. He believed in the democratic possibilities of the country because he had benefited from them. He had risen from the lowest ranks of white society to the pinnacle of power and wanted to ensure that that path was open to others. His definition of “others” was terribly limited, but we are in a constitutional experiment and a journey toward a more perfect union, not a perfect one. 

George Herbert Walker Bush understood that he was fortunate to have been born in this country, to the family and the place where he began his life, and he wanted to encourage the virtues that had made his world so congenial. He understood as well that absolutes were largely to be avoided. He was a man of moderate temperament and believed that politics at their best were temperamentally moderate as well. 

Leaders in any field obviously need a set of values. To what extent should those values be timeless? To what extent should they reflect the age? 

The enduring values are universal. The rub is how far do we apply those? 

My view of every great American leader and every great chapter of American life is that we are best judged on the extent to which we more broadly interpret the Jeffersonian assertion of human equality. The eras we emulate and commemorate are not the eras where we have constricted our understanding of who belongs in the country, but when we’ve widened it. 

That’s not a partisan point – it’s a historical one. I think that is the animating American value. Each of the leaders I mentioned, for all their flaws and all the things they got wrong, were essentially devoted to continuing the journey toward a more perfect union. 

Hope seems to figure prominently in your writings about leaders. How do they convey hope without sounding hollow, especially in times of darkness or crisis? 

There are two competing human impulses. One is the fear of losing what we love and the other is the hope for a better day. They're far more closely linked than we might think.

It's the job of a leader to emphasize that hope is in fact the antidote to fear. It’s not simply an emotion; it’s not simply a passing thing. It is an animating value.

If you don’t have hope, most of the democratic experiment is to fall apart, because why do we pay taxes, why do we invest, why do we educate, why do we try to help those less fortunate than ourselves? We do so not just because of a charitable impulse, but because we hope that the country will rise; that our interest will be protected if we plan for tomorrow and don’t simply worship yesterday. 

There’s an existential element about hope. Why delay one’s own gratifications, why save money, why invest in the future if you don’t hope that tomorrow can be better than today? 

That's a wonderfully American way of looking at it.

How has defeat made some of the leaders you’ve written about better leaders? 

Almost everybody who has ultimately gone on to great national leadership has had some kind of early defeat or mid-life turning point. FDR had polio. Jefferson lost his wife. Ronald Reagan lost the presidency twice before he won it, and he had a very rough personal and professional life when he was about 40. It was very hard to find jobs, his marriage was falling apart, and he really had to find himself. 

Bill Clinton lost the governorship after one term and had been beaten in a House race. George W. Bush losing (a Texas congressional race) in 1978 was hugely important; it taught him how to campaign. And George H. W. Bush lost Senate races in 1964 and 1970 and a presidential race in 1980.

The other great example is Winston Churchill, who lost almost everything until he was 65, and then got one thing right. Defeat is a painful yet necessary classroom for leaders who go on to larger stages. 

You’ve said that presidents have to build their support and not just live off existing support. To what extent must they pay attention to public opinion, even court it?

It’s vital. This is FDR’s great line about if you get too far out ahead of the people and turn around, you’ll find that no one is there. This is the perennial balancing act of leaders. To what extent do you give the people what they want, and to what extent do you try to tell them what they want and teach them what they want?  

We tend to remember the presidents who reach beyond their base of support. That doesn’t mean they reach into totally unformed realms of public opinion. Take, for instance, President Truman on civil rights and President Johnson on civil rights. They were border state and southern state senators, and it would not have been surprising if they had sided with that part of the party. In fact, they reached out to the northeastern liberals at that point in the Democratic Party.  

Ronald Reagan, the great cold warrior, terrified the right wing. They thought they had invested so many years in this guy and then he seemed to be falling in love with Mikhail Gorbachev. He was right, but he reached beyond the people that brought him to the party.  

I think George W. Bush would tell you that he wishes he had succeeded in that process on immigration.  

It's less about forming public opinion and more about uniting the inevitable factions in the country. We should not overly sentimentalize the past and pretend that all these leaders had this 80 percent country. They didn’t. FDR had to fight for Social Security. Ronald Reagan did, in fact, think that Medicare was socialized medicine. 

Things we look back on as these Mount Everest of consensus were almost never Mount Everest of consensus to the guys who were first climbing them. 

How, then, do leaders reach those with whom they might disagree? Do they first have to have enough trust with their own supporters to be able to reach out? Or do they have to have enough risk-taking in them to reach out?

You've got to be firm and at least confident enough that your core supporters, even if they’re not with you on this particular thing, aren’t going to throw you overboard entirely. And you have to have the courage to realize that sometimes you govern, not for the next five minutes or five weeks or even five years, but for the next five decades. 

Part of the calculus of building coalitions where you are disappointing or irritating your supporters and trying to enlist people who are skeptical of you is the oil portrait test. Which is, what do you want us to think about you when we look at your oil portrait?

When you look at Harry Truman now, when you look at Lyndon Johnson now, when you look at Ronald Reagan now, you tend to remember things about them that were not about their base, but how they challenged their base. Reagan and the Soviets. Johnson and civil rights. Truman and integrating the military. Lincoln in his first inaugural saying that slave owners had nothing to fear from him where it existed. But by the fall of 1862 and early 1863, he reached beyond that. 

One of the great characteristics of leadership is the capacity to learn and grow while in power and on the job. There’s very little harder than that because of the demands of command, but Abraham Lincoln learned and changed. John Kennedy learned and changed. 

We have to try as citizens to create enough space and oxygen for the people in charge of our affairs to actually think about things and not kill them just because they changed their minds. 

Reprinted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield from Listening to Leaders: Values, Empathy, Humility, and Relationships, edited by William McKenzie (copyright 2019) 

In this Listening to Leaders conversation, Sorrell explains the importance of vision and values in effective leadership. That includes in his own school’s work, where a premium is placed on servant leadership. 

How do you define great leadership? 

Great leadership is the ability to speak to the needs of the people you lead in a way that demonstrates character, compassion, vision, discipline, toughness, vulnerability, and love. If these qualities seem to contradict each other, it is because they represent the tensions that exist within all leaders at any given time. Quality leaders, those who might be considered “great,” are those who are able to balance these demands. 

How did you create priorities as you went about redirecting Paul Quinn? You once said "We just blew it up and rebuilt it." 

I thought that the first place we should start was improving the finances and economic model of the institution. If our foundation was flawed, meaning the economic model, our transformation would not have been sustainable. Now that we have fixed the economic model, we have turned our attention to improving academics and we are attacking that area with a missionary’s zeal. 

How critical is timing in leadership? You have talked about a sense of urgency when you first got to Paul Quinn. 

Timing is incredibly important but not in a way that one might expect. It's important to understand when to use what. Someone else could have had this job, implemented many of the things that I’ve done, but not experienced the success that we’ve had. Not because they weren’t talented. But simply because they may have emphasized different things at different times.  

Some of it too is good fortune. The darkest day for us was in early fall 2009. We were teetering on the edge of the precipice. We were down to less than 200 students. We were holding on to our accreditation by virtue of an injunction that could have gone away at any moment. No one really believed that we could succeed, in part because no one had ever seen anyone succeed under such dramatically harsh circumstances. 

I looked around and said “Let's push all the cards in the middle of the table and go for it." There was no reason to believe that was the best strategy. You can reach moments when you’re so far down, what do you have left to lose? You might as well get up or go down swinging. And that is what we did. 

Another part of what has made us successful was our ability to understand how and when to tell our story. This included telling that story in a way others had not done before. We understood the importance of doing so to our transformation. We just fundamentally believed that as long as other folks were defining our experience in their words, we would never fully be successful.  

But then what? What two or three things were particularly effective in turning Paul Quinn around? 

We built our transformation on a core set of values. When I arrived, the institution was being, in my opinion, unfaithful to its stated mission of creating servant leaders. There was an abundance of evidence that not enough people were living up to this mission. So I said, “We’re going to embrace a core set of shared values.” 

I’m a big-city kid who was born and raised in Chicago, so I have a healthy dose of cynicism in my DNA. The idea that anyone could just start talking about values and it would work seemed corny to me. But at the time, we really didn’t have anything else to hold onto. So I sat down and started thinking about my life and the values that I had been given by my family, church, and schools.

Our values begin with our “Four L’s of Quinnite Leadership.” My parents taught me that people should leave places better than they found them. So, that naturally became a place for us to start – we will commit to leaving places better than we found them. 

Next, I remembered that I took a  world history class as a freshman in high school at St. Ignatius College Prep where we learned about Renaissance Men - people who accomplished so much in their era that they created legacies that withstood the test of time. At 13, I thought, “It would be really cool to be a Renaissance Man.” Moving quickly past the fact that I clearly was delusional at 13 to start thinking of myself as somebody that history would remember. That class and the idea of being historically memorable, of creating a legacy, became our second core value - to live a life that matters.

I also am horribly impatient. I don’t like to be told I have to wait my turn, I never did. That became, lead from wherever you are. 

The last value ties into the fact that I went to a Jesuit prep school. The Jesuits believe in the common good. They believe in being men and women for others. So the last “L” became “love something greater than yourself.” 

Our institutional ethos comes courtesy of my time in sports. As someone who played competitive sports from the time that I was six-years old through college, I have always understood the power of shared sacrifices in the pursuit of a common goal. After some group think with a trusted staff member, the idea of shared sacrifices in the pursuit of common goals became “WE over Me” - the needs of a community supersede the wants of an individual.

We took our character test of “choosing the harder right over the easier wrong” from the “Emperor’s Handbook” by Marcus Aurelius.

Then we needed to define servant leadership. I thought, “Let’s go with the three-E’s of leadership.”

One, ethical leadership. You must be a person of high moral character. Two, educational leadership. One must be intelligent and a willing learner in order to live up to the ideals of servant leadership. Lastly, economic leadership. In under-resourced communities, no one really talks about entrepreneurship and economic self-determination in an empowering way. We wanted to use servant-leadership to change that. 

Armed with those values, and we turned them into slogans in order to make them accessible, we then went forward.

It also helped that from the outset, we made decisions that were winners – even if we were winning in really unlikely ways. For example, our decision to implement a dress code garnered national and international press coverage. We were covered in the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, etc. That was the first success the school had under my tenure. 

Then with every victory, large and small, we would tell the story. Even when we would experience setbacks, we could articulate the path forward. That’s how we did it.

You said you were an impatient person. But some of the changes you made needed time. How do you balance impatience with patience?

My wife will tell you that I will wait and wait for the moment to strike. In many respects, that is my preferred methodology. It’s a bit of a contradiction, because I want to win now. 

My relationship with patience is a modification of the Stockdale Paradox described in the book Good to Great. Admiral Stockdale was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton. The Stockdale Paradox essentially states that you always must be brutally honest about your actual condition, while maintaining faith that you will ultimately prevail. I fundamentally believe that we will always win, even if it means losing a few battles to win the war.

What was hard for some people to understand is this was never solely about turning around Paul Quinn. I knew we’d turn around Paul Quinn. This is about remaking higher education. This is about remaking the inner-cities around an idea of what higher education can do for them. We want to use education, and the relationship with job creation and wealth creation, to end poverty. 

People who live in poverty, they don’t have the luxury of time. Every day you live in poverty is horrific. I never lived in poverty, didn’t grow up in poverty, I don’t want my children to experience it, but I experience it every single day through the eyes and lives of my students.

Poverty robs you of the ability to dream in full color, to just live a life with dignity. Each day that you see that, it should infuriate you. It should cause you to want to act with an aggressiveness and an assertiveness that makes some others uncomfortable. In a country with this much wealth, no one should live in poverty.  Ever.  

Reprinted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield from Listening to Leaders: Values, Empathy, Humility, and Relationships, edited by William McKenzie (copyright 2019) 

How do you define great leadership?  

Great leadership pursues things that are of value to people individually and at large. It has to reflect positive values.

The values don’t have to be everybody’s values; everyone is slightly different. But they have to be grounded in values that have a generally positive intent. They are concerned about something bigger than the leader. They need to be focused on producing an outcome that makes things better. 

To what extent should values be timeless? To what extent should they reflect the age?  

There are some timeless values. They are about integrity, which is honesty and consistency wrapped together. You have a desire to produce a good outcome, something that is generally positive.

Beyond that, there is an awful lot of contextual reality to everyone’s times. A great leader in one era has to be viewed in the context of how they were raised, the values they were given, and the factors impacting them.  

It is unfair to put a 21st century lens on everyone we look at before today. But it’s incorrect to say that certain things done in certain eras are okay just because they aren’t being done right now.  

You wrote the book Team of Teams. What should leaders look for in choosing a team? 

The first thing is there has to be a purpose for the team. And that purpose has to be understood across the team. If everyone has a different purpose, it’s difficult to stay aligned.

The other thing is that you should not go out and get the 10 best people in the world — the smartest, the most talented — and think you have the best team. You should be looking for the team that can mesh together, a team that can work together. 

The "dream team" concept, where all the best talent means you automatically have the best team, has been disproven over and over. Armies, sports teams, and political movements have proven that people committing themselves to a cause as well as to each other leads them to operate effectively. The greatest weakness in most organizations is the inability to operate together effectively.  

How do you view the meshing of diverse capabilities and perspectives, like the coalition approach that Leonidas used in defending Sparta, versus having a naturally cohesive force?  

The military takes people from across society and puts them through what the Army calls "soldierization." It cuts their hair, puts them in uniform, goes by rank, and gives them common ways to talk. That is all designed to bring people into a common values set, a common lexicon, and things that will make them work together better.  

The strength of that is you get predictability. You can become very efficient and do a lot of things by committing people to a common cause. 

The danger, and it doesn’t always happen, is that you lose diversity. In the best case, you take the diversity of people and give them common things, such as a mission, a values set, and a uniform, but you retain the diversity of talent, background, and experience — all the things that enrich the team. 

The military is constantly trying to find that balance. One of the things that is so powerful about a mass military is you automatically get diversity. That is very positive. 

The danger of a professional military is you attract the kind of people that want a certain thing. Maybe not intentionally, but you’re apt to automatically limit your diversity. You start thinking the same way, talking the same way. You have very similar values. That weakens you an awful lot. 

We are waking up to, or re-awakening to, diversity. It is utterly essential. 

You mentioned during a Bush Institute presentation that most good leaders go to where work is being done. How did you come to that conclusion?

We find that good leaders go to where things are happening because that’s where they can make the biggest contribution. They get to influence the situation. And they are able to understand and empathize with the people involved on a much greater level.  

You can judge wars, sports teams, or anything from afar. And you can ask, "Why can’t those people figure this out?" Really good leaders have the ability to get there and understand a situation, but that doesn’t mean they have to stay there all the time. If they’re so close to it, they often can’t do the larger effort that they have to do. 

In my new book, Leaders: Myth and Reality, we talk about one of Martin Luther King's greatest challenges was multiple places always needed him. When young African-American men were doing lunch counter sit-ins in Atlanta, protesting and getting arrested, they came to Dr. King and told him they needed him with them. The profiles of their actions would get raised if he got arrested with them. 

Part of him wanted to be there and get arrested. But he knew that if he got arrested, he couldn't do the bigger part of his job. He couldn't earn the speaking fees that the movement needed to help fund it. He had to strike this hellish balance.

Most leaders run into that challenge. They may not face the same level of passion, but it is a problem knowing how close to get and when to be far enough away to maintain your perspective and ability to act freely.

How did you do that in your own leadership?

We were doing raids every night when I was in command in Afghanistan. I figured out I needed to go out on a combat raid about once a week. I had to do that to first understand what was happening on the ground.

We were watching the raids from full-motion video from Predators and what not, but that creates an allusion. You start to think you understand what is happening on the ground better than you actually do. Going out about once a week would remind me how the situation was on the ground and what we were doing. 

The force also liked the idea that I’d share some of the danger. I was not doing anything dramatic, but I was showing by my presence that I would be there if it goes bad. I had to do that often enough that people knew it was real, that it wasn’t a stunt. I also didn’t go so often that people thought I was a shooter, when in fact I wasn’t.

You also have emphasized that leadership has to be humble, collaborative, and a flexible endeavor. What does that mean in practice, and how do you teach that?  

I am not sure how you teach humility. The first thing about humility is realizing that you are not as in control of things as you may pretend you are. 

When I started writing my memoirs in the fall of 2010, I had this view of what I had done in my life because I had been there. When I got to the Iraq and Afghanistan part, I had this view that I’d given an order or guidance and there had been activities and an outcome. I started to assume that my decision was the reason for the outcome.

As we did interviews to get more background information, we found there were a thousand things that happened that actually determined what occurred. They could have been for the positive or the negative, but I didn’t know about them.

This made me more humble about what I had done and what I had not done. It reminded me that it’s really not you. You’re a factor, but you’re not the factor.

The ability to be humble opens your mind up. It allows you to be empathetic with your people. Not sympathetic, because you don’t have to agree with people or what they do. But you have to be able to see things from their side of the table. 

Whether it’s your own followers, or someone you’re opposed to, you often find they are as rational as you are, maybe more so. And they are trying as hard as you. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give guidance or correct mistakes. It means you don’t start out with an assumption that everyone is clueless until they get your guidance. 

The best way to learn this is get in as a leader and get muddy. You also need feedback loops from people who work for you or alongside you that constantly give you the broader view, the reminder of where you’re wrong. I don’t want to undermine the leader’s confidence, because a leader has to have confidence. But the leadership should never stray into hubris.

You’ve written about organizations only needing a critical mass to change course. How do leaders create or facilitate the creation of a critical mass? 

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this but I don’t claim to have the right answer. We believe that in the average organization, you need about 10 percent of the people who are actually pushing things in the direction you want to go. But it can’t just be the 10 percent. You've got to find people who have influence.  

The work charts of an organization will give you a sense of some things, but it will not identify your primary influencers. We started doing this with al-Qaeda in Iraq when we we’re trying to understand them. We realized that when we organized them on our slide, and then tried to fight that organization, they had never gotten that slide and didn’t recognize that organization. I should have sent it to them actually.  

We found that was not the way they operated. Then you think about your own organizations and say, "Who really makes things happen? Who do you listen to, who do you go to?" The answer is usually different from the line-and-block chart. We started looking hard inside organizations to find the influencers. We did surveys and interviews, and they uncovered that pretty effectively. 

What is the role of defeat in learning great leadership? We think of great leaders being victorious, but do defeats teach you just as much? 

Defeats teach you a lot more. When we win, we can assume we just had our act together. 

An organization and individuals need to realistically look at why they got defeated, and yet not start to think of themselves as permanent losers. You see some cases in business of people who’ve gone bankrupt, but they come back again. It is a very maturing exercise.  

I’d almost rather see someone who has been scuffed up a little in life and knows that, than I would someone who plays in the game and their uniform never got dirty. 

Reprinted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield from Listening to Leaders: Values, Empathy, Humility, and Relationships, edited by William McKenzie (copyright 2019) 

We have all seen the difference between great leaders in action and others that we would consider just average in terms of leadership. What sets them apart? Each of the people interviewed in this section weighs in on this question. A common theme among all of them is that great leaders have a set of values and an optimistic vision for the future.

Great leaders pursue things that are of value and are concerned about something bigger than themselves. General Stanley McChrystal states that “great leadership is also leadership that is good…it pursues things that are of value to people individually and at large.” People need to — and want to — see the “why” behind the vision. They want to know what’s driving a leader towards their goals. 

That’s where positive values come in. Michael Sorrell, who serves as president of Paul Quinn College, had a unique chance to establish the values of vision for the college. When he began at the then-struggling college over a decade ago, he said the institution didn’t really have a set of values or a well-defined mission. He had the chance to define those values and outline a vision for the college, and a sense of something larger than the individual now pervades the culture of Paul Quinn College. Sorrell talks about “WE over me” as the ethos for the college.

Where do these values come from? Values are not something that are developed once a person is in a leadership position. They start early in life and continue to build throughout life’s learnings and experiences. President Bush says his childhood in Midland, Texas, his family, and his religion have been key ingredients in the development of his values. For Michael Sorrell, his values came from his interests he had developed and studied, and he says that “I had a lifetime of ideas sitting on a shelf, waiting for the proper venue to implement them.” Jon Meacham says it well: “When [leaders] come to that point of crisis, they are bringing to bear everything they’ve experienced, everything they’ve read, everything they’ve learned, everything they haven’t learned.”

Several of these interviews outline the importance of optimism as part of a leader’s values and vision. As we face a world that is constantly in transition, with new technologies, methods of communication, and ever-evolving economies, the optimistic vision that our leaders possess becomes more important. Great leaders believe people deserve to flourish, and they believe they can help them achieve that. 

This optimistic vision also aids in building the team of people needed to execute on that vision. A leader who has a clear set of values — and outlines those values and his or her vision — is better able to build a great team around them. Those values and vision give the team a sense of purpose and unity. President Bush understood this as he set the course for his team at the White House. As he said in his interview, “If the culture’s based on larger concepts, then it is much easier to build a team of people who are headed in the same direction.”

Values and vision are also important because great leaders are defined by the unexpected, not the expected. Leaders need to have the right structures and processes in place, and the right goals for the organization. But what really tests their leadership is when the unexpected happens. President Bush discusses facing the unexpected with the surge in Iraq and the financial crisis, which tested his leadership more than policy issues that he campaigned on. During those difficult times, his longstanding values and his optimism were more important than ever. 

In his interview, President Bush talks about how the situation was getting worse on the ground in Iraq in his second term. While Congress had been supportive of the war in Iraq at the start, politics around the war were getting more and more difficult and support was waning. The politically palatable and expedient thing to do might have been to keep with the current strategy or bring troops home, but that risked potential defeat.

Instead, President Bush relied on his vision of “an ally in the war on terrorism and an example of a functioning democracy in the Middle East.” He believed so strongly in the importance of this vision and in being successful that he made the decision to send a surge of forces to Iraq, despite the reluctance he faced from Congress and from the military itself. His core set of beliefs enabled him to make a difficult decision despite the political headwinds, and that decision led to success on the ground as we look back on it after more than 10 years.

That example speaks to the importance of vision and values as underlying elements of great leadership. Vaclav Havel, in a speech delivered almost 25 years ago, spoke of the task of creating a new model of coexistence after the collapse of colonial hegemony and the fall of communism. He said that while many believe this task can be accomplished through the invention of new organizational structures, “such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.” The leaders interviewed in this series share that belief and help us understand why it matters to them.

Holly Kuzmich is executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and senior vice president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

Reprinted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield from Listening to Leaders: Values, Empathy, Humility, and Relationships, edited by William McKenzie (copyright 2019). 

How do you define great leadership?

I define a great leader as someone who has vision, someone who knows where they want to go, and someone who will be able to define a set of principles that will enable a more successful journey.

A leader is optimistic and believes that the vision and the principles will lead to a better tomorrow. A leader also is someone who understands how to assemble a great team of people to achieve the vision. Someone who can laugh, someone who shares credit and who takes blame.

There is a lot in there about values and vision. Where do leaders get those? Where did they come from in your case?

I think it comes from how you were raised. In my case, it came from where I was raised — in Midland, Texas. And I believe that one learns values through family and religion.

I don’t think leadership can be taught. But I think leadership comes in all different forms and one can gain leadership traits. They can gain the ability to lead through experience.

You mentioned optimism. We know the world can be a challenging place, even dark at times. How do leaders speak about hope and optimism with authenticity in moments like that?

The question is, are you an authentically optimistic person? I believe I am and I believe I am because of my religion. I believe religion, in my case Christianity, provides hope even in the darkest moments. I also was raised by optimistic people. Over time I came to realize how fortunate I was to have been raised by whom I was raised and where I was raised.

Keeping life in perspective is very important to keeping an optimistic view. That means recognizing everybody has problems, and a lot of people have bigger problems than me. And it means recognizing that every country’s got problems, and there are a lot with bigger problems than we have in America

It seems like a lot of leadership is relational. Is knowing how to read people something that somebody can acquire or is that just innate?

To a certain extent, it’s innate. But it’s not so much how to read people, it is how to relate to people, how to listen to people, and how to care about people.

To be a people person, you really have to be interested in somebody, and you have to care about their plight and feelings. That’s a very important part of leadership. A leader understands that other people matter more than he or she does.

Another key trait to leadership is understanding the importance of culture, and that a culture has got to revolve around something other than a person. If a culture is based on a personality, then that culture will fail because all people are infallible. If the culture’s based upon larger concepts, then it is much easier to build a team of people who are headed in the same direction.

How do leaders apply these skills in the international arena where people come from different backgrounds and cultures?

First, you’ve got to understand that there are universal values. One such value is that freedom is a universal thought. In other words, it’s not America’s gift. It is inherent in every soul. That thought was very controversial when I was president, but what would have made it more controversial would have been to equivocate on it

Fortunately, there are historical examples of the universality of freedom, and that freedom leads to peace. Japan and Germany after World War II are examples. The fact that democracies don’t war with each other is another example.

By applying universal thought in a complex international world, you’re able to find common ground. Again, not every leader agreed. But ultimately that’s where the world will head with the proper leadership. 

Secondly, like anything else, spending time with these leaders and getting to know leaders and listening to them is important. An ironic friendship I had was with (then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro) Koizumi. The reason we became friends is because we spent a lot of time talking about our lives and common interests. I listened to his view of the history of Japan and where he wanted to take his nation. If you listen to the person and take time to engage with them, you find common ground.

Historian Ronald White said in an interview for this series that leaders need a good sense of timing so they know what to say in a particular moment. How do you learn that?

A lot of it depends on the people you surround yourself with who will make timing recommendations. One of my miscalculations was the timing of whether or not to spend political capital on Social Security or immigration reform after the 2004 election. As I look back on it, I didn’t do a very good job of listening to advisors and moved ahead with Social Security reform. I regret having done that. In retrospect, my moving ahead cost an opportunity, I think, to reform immigration.

How do you develop the sense of knowing when to act and when not to act?

That becomes pretty clear at times. The political process will tell you when you are able to act or not to act. If you’re riding high, obviously it’s easier to act. But if people are getting tired of you, or people sense that you’re a lame duck, then it’s harder to act. You have to accommodate the moment. 

A presidency, by the way, is defined oftentimes by the unexpected. What was expected was that our troops would be funded during the surge, and even though the Congress was against it, we never lost the vote. What was unexpected was the financial meltdown, so the timing of decisions was immediate. We didn’t have any choice. Sometimes you have choices, sometimes you don’t have choices.

You mentioned the surge. Do big decisions like that sometimes have to be visceral in nature? 

That was visceral.

How did you know in your gut that was the right thing to do?

A handful of advisors kept reminding me that things were getting worse, not better. So I said, "Okay, give me options." They presented an option that gave us the best chance of achieving our objective, which was an ally in the war on terrorism and an example of a functioning democracy in the Middle East. There was only one option that enabled us to achieve the goal. 

The visceral nature of the decision was that I refused to abandon a battlefield and those who sacrificed on the battlefield because of the politics that were difficult. The goal was not saving my political skin. The goal was achieving an objective, and, thankfully, it worked.

You were kind of making a call about the surge where you were out there on your own… 

I wasn’t on my own, though. There was a group of insurgents inside the White House, like [then-National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley. And [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen.] Pete Pace had to sell it to reluctant generals. Of course, we had to make a leadership change in order to make it a credible change. [Then-Secretary of Defense] Bob Gates was all on board. 

But there was a lot of reluctance, particularly in the Congress. This is an example where I believed so strongly in the mission and I knew how important it was that I was going to do what it took to win. We made a wise selection in [Gen. David] Petraeus. He had credibility in the Congress, and he could handle it. Gates was the new secretary of defense, and instinctively we wanted to give the secretary of defense some leeway. 

Yeah, it was a tough slog. But we forged ahead.

What is the importance of asking the right questions of your team, and how do you know what to ask? 

Really important. A leader’s got to be able to see the crux of an issue, distill it, and then direct minds toward the solution.

 I don’t know where you learn that. It’s just from experience and understanding the core of an issue. It’s basically to simplify goals. I used to say, there’s so many goals in education, there are no goals. You have to have a few things and focus on them.

A key to success in any organization is to lay out goals that everybody can understand and what we’re going to do to achieve them

What would you say to prospective or current leaders about knowing which decisions to involve yourself in?

In a complex environment, the president has to insist that all big decisions come to his desk, because you don’t want to be surprised. But micromanaging a complex organization is a bad leadership trait.

As president and governor, how much opportunity did you get to look toward the future versus being consumed with the moment?

It is really important to look to the future and to anticipate pending problems. Some of them are obvious. It’s a balance that I thought was pretty easy to achieve. You need to look long-term and be optimistic

Take Social Security. That is an easy problem to see and a hard problem to fix. I thought it was important to explain to the American people that this system is not working.

One runs because one sees the long-term problems and tries to lay a foundation so that they become less of a problem.

Is there a way to build that into a leader’s daily schedule so they can keep looking over the horizon?

No, but you’re there for a reason. The question is, why are you the leader? Are you there for self-aggrandizement, or are you there to promote a better tomorrow? It depends on the motivations. I would hope most leaders want to solve problems. 

Reprinted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield from Listening to Leaders: Values, Empathy, Humility, and Relationships, edited by William McKenzie (copyright 2019). 

Encounter Books

Features:

Naomi Schafer Riley, Wall Street Journal: If you’re old enough to remember the Soviet Union, you’ve probably wondered why so many young people today seem attracted to socialism. One influence is Howard Zinn, who published “A People’s History of the United States” in 1980, the year before the first millennials were born.

The book “continues to be assigned in countless college and high-school courses, but its commercial sales have remained strong as well,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2003, on the occasion of its millionth copy sold. It kept selling after Zinn died in 2010: The Zinn Education Program website now claims more than two million sales.

Historian Wilfred McClay aspires to be the antidote to Zinn, whom he accuses of “greatly oversimplifying the past and turning American history into a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’ ” Mr. McClay’s counterpoint, which comes out next week, is titled “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.”

He says he doesn’t mean his new book as “some saccharine whitewash of American history.” But he’s seen too many students drawn to Zinn because the standard textbooks are visionless and tedious. “Just as nature abhors a vacuum,” Mr. McClay says, “so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one.”

A lousy story is better than no story at all: “We historians have for years been supplying an account of the American past that is so unedifying and lacking in larger perspective that Zinn’s sweeping melodrama looks good by comparison. Zinn’s success is indicative of our failure. We have to do better.” Read the full article.

Wilfred McClay, FOX News: There is a strong tendency in modern American society to treat patriotism as a dangerous sentiment, a passion to be guarded against. But this is a serious misconception. To begin with, we should acknowledge that there is something natural about patriotism, as an expression of love for what is one’s own, gratitude for what one has been given, and reverence for the sources of one’s being.

These responses are instinctive; they’re grounded in our natures and the basic facts of our birth. Yet their power is no less for that, and they are denied only at great cost.

Another one of the deepest needs of the human soul is a sense of membership, of joy in what we have and hold in common with others. Much of the time, though, the way we Americans talk about ourselves takes us in the opposite direction.

We like to think of the individual person as something that exists prior to all social relations, capable of standing free and alone, able to choose the terms on which he or she makes common cause with others. Even our own battered but still-magnificent Constitution, with its systemic distrust of all concentration of power, assumes that we are fundamentally self-interested creatures. This does capture some part of the truth about us. But only a part.

For among our deepest longings is the desire to belong, and it is an illusion to believe that we can sustain a stable identity in isolation, living apart from the eyes and ears and words of others. Our nation’s particular triumphs, sacrifices, and sufferings — and our memories of those things — draw and hold us together, precisely because they are the sacrifices and sufferings, not of all humanity, but of us alone. In this view, there is no more profoundly American place than Arlington National Cemetery or the Civil War battlegrounds of Antietam and Shiloh. Read the full editorial.

Reviewed:

Bruce P. Frohen, University Bookman: Land of Hope is no mere textbook. It makes available to general readers, as well as college and advanced high school students, a one-volume retelling of “the Great American Story” that is accurate and moving, enlightening and exciting. As McClay observes, stories are the means by which we “speak to the fullness of our humanity” and which we need “to orient ourselves in the world.” And so this book eschews graphs, tables, and lists, instead telling its readers about powerful characters, life-changing events, and long-term developments in America from before its European settlement to the new millennium, all as part of a larger story of hope in ordered liberty and opportunity.

McClay begins with background on both the new and the old worlds, setting the stage, as it were, so that the reader may know the natural and human conditions of the land as well as the character of those who would settle and reshape it into the United States. Covering, in narrative form, the major events, trends, and personalities of our history, it focuses on the formation and development of the “habit of self-government” as developed in the colonies and challenged time and again up to the present day. Settlement, revolution, Civil War, and other great events are put in context, as are cultural and intellectual developments from transcendentalism to immigration, the industrial revolution to the rise of Progressivism.

McClay is engaged in no quixotic attempt to unmake or ignore prevailing theories of American political and social development. Instead, he retells the stories of western expansion, of Indian wars and the institutionalization of slavery, of civil rights struggles, the Depression, and the Cold War in a manner that is fair and even generous to all concerned. (One might quibble that McClay is rather too generous to the tyrant Henry VIII and rather too harsh toward conservative stalwart and failed presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, but overall the tone is just right.) There is no score-settling here, no attempt to put forth any grand ideological vision from either the left or the right. Instead, McClay works to help make citizens in the important sense that to be a member of our self-governing society requires understanding its culture, its good as well as its bad actions, and how they made us what we are as a people. Read the full review.

Howard L. Muncy, Public Discourse: Most Americans will learn only one account of their country’s history during their formative years. It is anyone’s guess which account that may be, but its impact on the general public will be greater than we might want to admit.

In his latest work, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, University of Oklahoma history professor Wilfred McClay offers a new survey of American history. When I was asked to review it, I put myself on guard. I was skeptical that I would find a new and “fair” American history text. Instead, I expected to find yet another work with a political angle, whether sharp or hidden.

Experience has taught me that bias more often enters history textbooks through what their authors omit from the standard account, rather than through any new topics they might add. So, I immediately turned to the chapters that would be most vulnerable to revision.

What I encountered was a rich account of American history that had me rethinking historical events from new perspectives. My skepticism soon gave way to curiosity. As I began to race through the pages, I felt that I was learning much of the material for the first time. Read the full review.

Interviewed:

RealClearBooks: Americans on the left and right seem to have their own versions of our history. How do we bridge that gap?

McClay: This is going to be a great challenge. But part of it will involve clearing our minds of cant and illusion. In this respect, I think that a certain kind of pop postmodernism has done us a great disservice in undermining the idea that there can be truth in history, preferring the lazy and self-serving idea that “narrative is all,” and your narrative and my narrative are equally good, since they are “ours” and are therefore incontestable. But truth is the basis of our common world. We cannot have a common world unless we can agree on its contours. So this “my narrative” business cannot be sustained.

That said, as I insist in Land of Hope, history itself is a narrative, and is best related and studied as a story, one whose contours we agree about. And some part of that involves agreeing not only about the facts of American history but about its larger trajectory. History can tell us a lot about that, although history cannot predict the future, and always stumbles when it tries. But as countless writers have observed, what most closely binds a people is the remembrance of its past, and of those who have sacrificed to make the future possible. One of the most deplorable aspects of the present environment has been its tendency to condescend to the past, a tendency that has even found expression in the wholesale vandalism of the past. Edmund Burke once observed that “people will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.” When we lose the past, we also lose the future. Read the full interview. 

The rise of ideology in late-nineteenth-century America presented challenges beyond those inherent in the political, economic, and cultural changes of the time. By the early twentieth century, progressivism had become a powerful force—a movement declaring that the structures and limitations of the American Constitution must be set aside so that “the people’s will” could be divined and put into action by a centralized federal government in an era of centralized national and international economic power. While conservatives entered into a complex and sustained engagement with these challenges, conservative prejudices, habits, and norms remained strong in America, thriving in New England, the Midwest, the Great Plains, the Mountain West, and, in an eccentric version, in the South. In these regions, communities were organized around the principles of ordered liberty in the context of community and reciprocity among neighbors. There the people belonged to myriad voluntary and fraternal associations, they stressed biblical religion, and they continued to believe in the centrality of self-reliance. 

Encounter Books

From this stream of practical American conservatism came one of the key figures in this tradition: Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge gave conservatism a spare but eloquent voice, enlivening coherent principles and norms in a time of change. He grew up in New England, one of the seedbeds of local self-rule, rooted in a culture dedicated to both thick community and the self-reliance of individuals and families. Educated classically at Amherst College, Coolidge came of age with a deep knowledge of, and love for, American history, and he drew special inspiration from Abraham Lincoln. As a young lawyer (among the few by his time to still enter that profession through apprenticeship rather than attending law school), Coolidge often defended the property rights of small interests. While he understood the importance of concentrations of capital, he stressed that work was prior to capital and that ordered liberty rests on the ability of people to use their freedom and their labor to create property and supply the necessary conditions of life in self-governing associations.

Throughout his career’s ascent from local politics to governor of Massachusetts and ultimately president of the United States, Coolidge embodied the conservative politician as have few others. He was deeply rooted in his regional culture, devoted to his family and the range of obligations that make family important to each person’s identity, hard-working and self-reliant, intensely patriotic, quietly but profoundly religious, and committed to the principles of conservatism while offering no ideology. In times of dramatic change, Coolidge sought to apply conservative principles.

A practical but passionate focus on freedom and opportunity shaped Coolidge’s prudential response to progressive reforms. Devoted to constitutionalism and fully aware of society’s reliance on deep, widespread respect for the law, Coolidge generally accepted reforms done within the limits of both. When Theodore Roosevelt used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 to break up monopolies, Coolidge appreciated this government action designed to provide greater opportunities for entrepreneurs and small commercial interests. Here Roosevelt acted within the law and did so in defense of what Coolidge called the American ideal. In his many local and state roles, including mayor and governor, Coolidge not only worked to prevent monopolies from taking away opportunities but also followed Roosevelt’s lead in trying to find common ground between labor unions and corporations.

Coolidge sought to encourage economic and technological progress in ways that supported communal self-governance. The railroads, primary targets of progressive reformers, for Coolidge were crucial assets for communities. To deliver its services a railroad needed huge amounts of capital and certain governmental protections. But only the railroads, even within certain inescapable regional monopolies, allowed small towns easy access to larger cities and markets. In this case, a well-run and properly regulated, relatively corruption-free railroad supported both economic growth and self-governing local communities.

Accepting some of its reforms, Coolidge opposed progressivism’s ideology. This opposition emerged in response to the administration of President Woodrow Wilson and particularly its actions during World War I. The federal government, under the guise of wartime measures, had violated many sacred American principles. The Wilson administration had abused property rights, undermined constitutional limitations on federal power embodied in the Tenth Amendment and the structures of federalism, and expanded presidential powers through unconstitutional executive actions. Worse yet, the Wilson administration undertook the most extensive repression of speech and civil liberties in American history, imprisoning and deporting thousands without due process for any speech the government deemed subversive, including any “abusive language” against the flag, the Constitution, and American military uniforms. These wartime measures built on years of abuses—including Wilson’s personal decision to impose racial segregation among federal employees—and exposed the power of an imperial presidency to rule without law.

The authoritarian and lawless nature of the progressive regime frightened Coolidge and set the context for the policies and practices he would pursue as president. Coolidge believed that his primary task as president was to manage the government well, according to the strict requirements of law and the Constitution. Thus he devoted much of his energy not to introducing changes but to making the government responsive within its limited realm. After a spate of progressive reforms (many salutary and legal, but many others harmful to American principles and extralegal), Coolidge wanted government to get out of the way of self-reliant Americans while working efficiently to create and sustain the order and structure that facilitated private and associational life.

Coolidge’s learned and brilliant speech celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence articulated American principles as well as any presidential address. Rejecting the progressive claim that the Constitution was an open-ended call for ceaseless change in the name of personal autonomy, Coolidge insisted that the American revolutionaries were no radicals. Rather, the Revolution “was conservative and represented the action of the colonists to maintain their constitutional rights which from time immemorial had been guaranteed to them under the law of the land.” Coolidge deftly explored the deep religious sources of American principles while connecting “natural rights” to both these religious commitments and the Anglo-American tradition.

In a speech welcoming Charles Lindbergh back to America and celebrating his famous solo flight across the Atlantic, Coolidge articulated the principles most evident to American conservatives in this time. First, he praised Lindbergh’s character. For conservatives, character had long been a key term denoting a well-formed person: one who has matured so as to be self-governing, in mastery of his passions, and in love with good and noble things, and who possesses such virtues as to be a good citizen, family member, and neighbor. To praise a man’s character is to suggest that he is unspoiled, unwilling to “commercialize” himself or to seek cheap fame. More than that, to praise a man’s character implies praise of his family, his community, and those who helped form him. And so Coolidge gave clear voice to the conservative view of the self-reliant man—one with character, shaped by others in tandem with his own indomitable will to become self-possessed and self-ruling. Moreover, the liberty of the individual person is possible only when the relevant social institutions have shaped that person to possess good character. Otherwise liberty is transmuted into libidinous license, which ends not in self-rule but in a pathetic form of dependence.

Coolidge did not confine himself to praise for Lindbergh; he made special mention of the more than one hundred American companies that contributed to the making of Lindbergh’s plane. It was a technological marvel, and it would not have been possible without the “genius” of American economic liberty. Coolidge called these companies “silent partners” with Lindbergh and praised American economic ingenuity because America’s free-market system, when it is entrepreneurial, helps empower people of character, of strong will and desire, to make their mark on the world. The American hero—as exemplified by the brave, solitary pilot—is possible only through community and by way of American principles at work in the economy and society. Conspicuously, Coolidge celebrated Lindbergh’s achievement as a sign of American greatness: a greatness not made by government action but arising out of its people and their sense of industry.

Coolidge embraced prudential reforms labeled “progressive” when they served American communities, traditions, and principles. He opposed ideological progressivism, which focuses on the abstract idea of a “good society” while pursuing particular goods in defiance of constitutional and historical norms and regardless of social costs. This progressivism would come to dominate the American government during the New Deal and the war years that followed. Because progressives believed that modern conditions had made inherited constitutionalism obsolete, they helped construct a different purpose for the federal government. During the New Deal and its aftermath, a government claiming to guarantee the substantive good of the people also claimed unprecedented power to do so. Conservatives thus confronted a challenge new both in principle and in degree. This confrontation would help spawn the modern conservative movement. The great American conversation was no longer limited to American liberals and conservatives; a new species of progressive liberalism (a version of leftism) would become important in shaping the America of the next hundred years. The most powerful figure in writing this progressive ideology into American politics was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR’s pedigree and character did not suit him ideally for the role of revolutionary. Inheritor of vast wealth and privilege, holder of no particular deep thoughts or convictions, he forged his “New Deal” out of expediency and short-term responses to great events. Consequently, if Roosevelt’s New Deal was not doctrinaire progressivism, the regime clearly had no sense of loyalty to inherited principles. His presidency and the New Deal represented experimentation with new powers and new methods, and this alone made them dangerous. Vastly expanding work begun under Wilson, the Roosevelt presidency presented American conservatives not only with ideological challenges but also with a vastly expanded federal government, with new powers and new institutions that would be almost impossible to reverse. This, along with new geopolitical realities during World War II and the subsequent Cold War, produced novel conditions for American conservatives and required compromises, coalitions, and challenging decisions about which principles must be preserved and which ones might be temporarily sacrificed to the exigencies of the historical moment. These factors produced a movement that included powerful conservative voices but embraced a competing liberal ideology: a right-wing liberalism. This modern conservative movement could function only so long as the conditions that produced it were still operative. But if this new movement would not be fully conservative, it nonetheless represented the most prudent option for conservatives during times of unprecedented challenges to individual liberties and the nation as a whole.

The New Deal rested on assumptions and declarations that deviated from the American tradition and became more radical over time. First, as declared in his famous Commonwealth Address, Roosevelt believed that the principles and forms of government established in the Founding were outdated. Second, the New Deal assumed that modern life required of the federal government a level of involvement in regulation and support formerly unknown in the United States and inconsistent with constitutional limitations. Third, even more than Wilson, FDR built a bureaucracy premised on belief that the complexity of the circumstances combined with the new roles played by government required experts to make decisions outside the democratic process. The Roosevelt administration did dramatically more than any prior administration to turn governance over to a managerial class of bureaucratic elites and academic advisors. Fourth, because of the New Deal the new capitalism was going to be steered less by entrepreneurs and more by the joint efforts of business and government managers. Fifth, the Roosevelt administration established the enduring principle that the federal government has a compelling interest in providing basic protections for its citizens, from old-age pensions to direct and indirect assistance to find work or obtain unemployment support.

The sixth change, which came at the hands of the Supreme Court, is perhaps the most important. In a dramatic reversal in constitutional interpretation, the Supreme Court authorized Congress to make laws, establish agencies, and create new powers as it wished so long as these changes served the “general welfare” of the American people. The key passage in the Constitution is found in Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, … to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Since the founding period this section had been understood as a limit on the “enumerated powers” of Congress. In effect, it outlines the specific powers delegated to Congress and states that outside of those specifically enumerated Congress has no authority. For the Constitution’s framers, the general welfare language further limits the power of Congress by saying that legislators could use the enumerated powers only to the degree that they were providing for the general welfare. It was out of an abundance of caution that the First Congress proposed what would become the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, specifically stating that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” No major Supreme Court decision and no real precedent existed for a different understanding of the constitutional language until the Supreme Court’s 1937 decision in Helvering v. Davis, along with several subsequent decisions over the next five years.

Without any democratic process, and without any developed precedent, the Supreme Court handed Congress the power to do whatever its members deemed in the general welfare, expanding the reach and power of the federal government beyond anything imagined at the Founding or chosen by the people. The contrast with earlier progressive reforms is important: to accomplish their key goals, progressives followed the constitutional amendment process to alter that document four times in seven years. Since that time, armed with a handful of unelected judges’ novel interpretation of the general welfare clause, Congress, presidents and executive agencies, and even courts repeatedly have increased the power and reach of the federal government without recourse to the constitutional amendment process. This broadened understanding of federal power as tending to the needs of the people has undermined the people’s formerly cherished principle of self-reliance.

Strangely neglected in discussions about preserving constitutional rule, the Helvering decision undermines two essential principles of Anglo-American conservatism, that governments must be limited in their scope of power and that only the people have the authority to grant powers. Once congressional power extends to anything it deems relevant to the citizens’ welfare, limits on governmental power become unclear and may change with congressional or judicial whim. Worse yet, this expansion of congressional power alters the nature of the relationship between the executive and legislative branches. Congress, passing laws to assist in the general welfare, turns over the administration of those laws to the executive branch. The modern president directs and oversees a vast administrative system, giving the executive branch near-complete freedom, subject primarily to checks from the judiciary, to determine how to administer the laws. Congress might pass a law requiring clean air, for example, but it is an administrative agency, which answers to the president but not to the people, that defines clean air, determines what regulations must be in place to achieve clean air, and decides how to enforce regulations the agency itself interprets. Congress ends by abdicating most of its newfound power to an ever more imperial presidency.

No sustained American conservatism—no ordered liberty, no rule of law, and certainly no respect for traditions of self-governing communities—is possible without altering this power arrangement and without establishing clear boundaries and checks on power. A large, powerful, distant government wars against the conditions that foster self-rule and attachment to institutions that ought to connect individuals to their society and their nation. We can expect no truly conservative political regime unless we reclaim the robust power of the people to authorize and limit what governments can do and by what means. If we can understand that the conditions of World War II and the Cold War might have prevented conservatives from giving appropriate attention to this abuse of constitutional powers, we can insist that the time to reclaim our protections against tyranny is now.

Even before World War II, the Roosevelt administration had put in place a set of principles and practices hostile to American constitutional traditions. The reception of these changes, however, was complicated and would shape the coming conservative movement in profound ways. Conservative responses to FDR’s innovations were vigorous and numerous. But among those who grew up during the Depression, their understanding of the New Deal was emotionally complex. Many, like Ronald Reagan, would be critical of certain parts of the New Deal but otherwise see in FDR and his policies a genuine effort to empower the “forgotten man”—to help him, with a job and a safety net, to regain the dignity of being able to take care of himself and his family without “going on the dole.” By the same token, the often forgotten pressures of a life-and-death struggle with Marxist totalitarianism during the Cold War caused most Americans to overlook or accept the ever-solidifying concentration of federal government power in the interests of victory in a long, difficult, and often bloody international struggle. It is to these post–World War II realities that we turn next.  

Power Trip

Amazon

Energy is humanity’s ultimate obstacle—and also its most promising opportunity. Such high stakes set the stage for Michael E. Webber’s latest book, Power Trip: The Story of Energy. 

Thankfully for the reader, Webber takes a systematic approach to this sprawling subject. After a brief introduction, he explores the role of energy in six thematic chapters ranging from wealth and water to cities and transportation. Insights abound, such as the paradoxical relationship between water and energy: “It is a great irony that energy lets us treat and clean water, but that energy production also puts water quality at serious risk.”

Speaking of curious connections, another is the relationship between wealth and energy. Common sense may dictate that there’s a linear relationship there, but Webber reveals that “there is an even better correlation between electricity consumption and wealth.” As a matter of fact, countries that use their energy for sophisticated purposes, such as generating electricity, are richer than those that do not.

Moving beyond water and wealth, perhaps the most important argument Webber makes deals with decarbonization. As we know, decarbonization refers to the reduction of greenhouse gases released into our atmosphere. Echoing other energy experts, Webber asserts that it is, perhaps, the defining challenge of the twenty-first century. A bold claim, surely, but one backed up with logic: If energy is our most profound problem, and decarbonization is energy’s defining challenge—that would make decarbonization our biggest problem’s biggest problem.  

With the skill of an experienced professor, Webber addresses decarbonization while avoiding the extremes of energy poverty or environmental negligence. He knows deprivation won’t work. “Energy poverty,” Webber explains, “won’t be very satisfying or humane.” Take North Korea, for instance. Its darkness, in contrast to brightly lit South Korea, is revealing. In Webber’s words, “autocracy and energy poverty are different expressions the same idea. Energy is freedom.”

At the same time, negligence won’t work either. The approaches that got us into our current state of affairs will not get us out. We cannot drill our way to decarbonization, nor can we overcome CO2 emissions with endless consumption. And while there may be much disagreement about decarbonization, that does not mean common ground cannot be found.  

In fact, the answer to many of our energy challenges may be right beneath our feet—if we’re driving an electric car. With characteristic optimism, Webber details how electric vehicles (EVs) can provide quieter, cleaner, and more efficient transportation for all. The choice is clear, and stark: “Electric vehicles get cleaner with time as natural gas, wind, and solar replace coal in the power sector, whereas combustion engines get dirtier with time as their systems degrade from normal wear and tear.” Ultimately, EVs have the potential to dramatically reduce emissions and put us on the path to decarbonization.

So what, then, to make of Power Trip? Let’s put it this way—if a Nobel prize-winning chemist came up with a top 10 list of energy books, this would certainly make the cut. It might even be number one. 

Quinn Connelly is the editor of econpwr.com, an energy and economics website.

RealClearBooks: What was your goal in writing Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism?

Heaven on Earth

Encounter Books

Joshua Muravchik: This story is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all time, or at least since the Garden of Eden. Here was an idea that enchanted the world but could not be made flesh. Some of the efforts to realize it brought about unparalleled suffering and ruin. It is what made the twentieth century so awful. I wanted to capture the story in broadest compass, how this idea marched through history, but not in a Hegelian sense as if the idea were a disembodied thing. Rather, I wanted to examine the experiences and thoughts of the key individuals who conceived the original idea and then each of its variants from theory to practice to disaster or recantation.

RCB: People often use socialism, communism, and Marxism interchangeably. Are there important differences between these terms and why are you writing about socialism?

JM: Socialism is the omnibus term. Before 1917, the terms “socialism,” “communism,” and “social democracy” were used interchangeably—at least there was no consensus about distinctions among them. Shortly after Lenin seized power, he decreed that his group, previously known as the Bolsheviks, would call themselves Communists. Around the world, socialists divided between those who approved Lenin’s accomplishment and those who decried his dictatorial ways. Thereafter, the former were “Communists” and never again “social democrats” while the latter were “social democrats” and never again “communists.” But both sides still claimed the label “socialist,” as did other subsequent political movements like National Socialism, African Socialism, Arab Socialism, etc. I shrank from trying to define “true” socialism. Rather, I wanted to tell the story of this captivating idea in all its variants and mutations.

RCB: In Heaven on Earth you sometimes refer to socialism as a faith. In the prologue you write, “In this book I trace socialism’s phenomenal trajectory. It is the story of man’s most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine about how life ought to be lived that claimed grounding in science rather than religion.” Why do you compare socialism to religion?

JM: Socialism was not proposed as a solution to a discrete problem but rather as a path to human redemption. It would spell the end of exploitation, alienation, jealousy and competition. Michael Harrington, the leader of the Socialist Party to which I once belonged, and the founder of Democratic Socialists of America to which Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib belong, wrote that socialism would constitute “an utterly new society in which some of the fundamental limitations of human existence have been transcended. … [W]ork will no longer be necessary.… The sentence decreed in the Garden of Eden will have been served.” Ergo, the title, Heaven on Earth, which I borrowed from the words of Moses Hess, the mentor who tutored young Marx and Engels in socialism. 

RCB: Heaven on Earth follows individuals who have been attracted to, and shaped the history and theory of socialism. How did you decide which individuals to write about?

JM: Babeuf, Owen, and Engels created and developed the idea. (I chose Engels over Marx because it was he who really made Marx, not only supporting him financially but also putting across the image that Marx’s ideas were of world historic importance.) Lenin, Mussolini, Attlee, and Nyerere each either invented or exemplify a main branch of the socialist tree: Communism, fascism, social democracy, and third world socialism. Gorbachev and Deng, on the one hand, and Tony Blair on the other, represent the fall of Communism and of social democracy. (The fall of the other two branches didn’t need to be personified because fascism brought its own demise through war and the fall as well as the rise of third world socialism can be seen in the experience of Nyerere.) For the “afterlife,” Corbyn, Sanders, and Chavez were obvious choices. A few other figures are portrayed to represent what I regard as other critical elements in the unfolding of the history or in the possible future.

RCB: Are there psychological similarities among socialism’s leaders? Are there common reasons they have been attracted to socialism?

JM: Almost every one saw himself as larger than life, as engaging with the world or with history in a momentous way. These were not people who were out merely to have a career, even a big career. Some were extreme narcissists, for example, Owen and Mussolini (and Marx, who looms in the background of the Engels chapter). Just a few demonstrated compassion in their private lives. For most, the solicitude for mankind was highly abstract.

RCB: Of all the socialists you write about, whose ideas do you think were most dangerous? And whose were most responsible for the major failures of socialism in the 20th century?

JM: Lenin was the greatest disaster the world has known. Without Lenin there would have been no Stalin, no Mao, no Pol Pot, no Mussolini, no Hitler. Lenin set the model they all imitated. 

RCB: Have there been any experiments with socialism that have not resulted in authoritarianism?

JM: Social democrats kept faith with democracy. But, while some admit it and some do not, they jettisoned socialism. Instead, wherever they have held power, they contented themselves with erecting welfare states while preserving capitalism as the underlying generator of wealth. Kibbutzim in Israel stand as the only example of true socialism that was also completely free and democratic.

RCB: In your op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Socialism Fails Every Time,” you write that “Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried – even where it succeeded.” What do you mean by that?

JM: This was a reference to the kibbutzim, a true laboratory experiment in socialism. I devote a full chapter to them, the only chapter not built around an individual but rather around a specific kibbutz. Kibbutzim practiced complete socialism, sharing not only work and property but meals, childrearing, sometimes even clothing. And everything was decided by discussion and voting. They were successful in that they were pillars on which the state of Israel was erected. But once the state was firmly and securely on its feet, the kibbutzniks decided democratically to turn away from socialism and put their communities on a private property basis.

RCB: What is it about socialism that continues to make it attractive despite so many failures?

JM: I could answer this question two ways. First, I could point to its religious quality, the enduring allure of the promise of redemption in a secular age. Second, I could say ignorance or pigheadedness. This idea has been around more than two hundred years. It has been attempted in every imaginable way and in every corner of the world, and its record is catastrophic. It beats me why people think it would be a good idea to do it all again.

RCB: What can we learn from the current situation in Venezuela?

JM: I see two glaring lessons. First, it had often been said that the failure of socialism in “third world” countries was due to their poverty and lack of capital. Venezuela when Hugo Chavez took power was a middle-class country with unlimited capital in the form of the world’s largest known oil reserves. Even this could not shield the country from debacle. Second, with Russia propping up Maduro as it has Assad, we see that Moscow will be a vicious, belligerent, malign force in global politics. After 1989, I had hoped that Russia and China would evolve into peaceful, democratic countries. Instead, although Russia is post-Communist and China post-socialist, the secret police and the Communist Party—the two pillars of Communist regimes—continue to rule, respectively, Russia and China. This makes each an ongoing menace with which we will have to contend for years to come.

RCB: And from the continued popularity of Bernie Sanders?

JM: Sanders appears as an anti-politician which clearly has some appeal. Running always as an independent and declaring himself a socialist, which used to be considered taboo, show he really is different. He also seems to promise lots of new, large benefits that will be paid for by someone else. As with Trump, Sanders shows that Americans are not immune to the appeal of demagogues.

Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism is now available from Encounter Books. 

Why is a new history of the United States necessary? Why now?

McClay: We have long had a need for a well-written and appealing history of the United States that, while being informed by the best scholarship, does not lose sight of the big picture about our nation’s admirable and exceptional history. Too many of today’s textbooks are overburdened with detail and disfigured by partisan animus, and leave students of the American past confused, ill-informed, and unprepared for the task of citizenship in a free society.

Encounter Books

Not long ago, Americans shared a basic consensus regarding our history. How did Americans lose confidence in their own story?

McClay: Some of this came about for reasons that are entirely commendable. We have had, and continue to have, serious national problems, such as our problems of racial inequality, missteps in our relations with other nations, and other problems that show us to be in conflict with our national creed and our deepest values. We are very far from being perfect, and it has been important for Americans to face up to these problems, rather than pretend that they do not exist. Self-criticism is both healthy and necessary in our form of government. The trouble comes when the self-criticism loses all sense of perspective, and becomes relentless and corrosive, taking the nation’s flaws as the totality of its being. We have to agree before we can disagree. The loss of basic consensus, and the consequent erosion of our sense of patriotic membership and national unity, have made the solution to our problems far more difficult.

Jefferson wrote that citizens should be “rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.” Can one properly serve as a citizen without a grasp of history?

McClay: No, it isn’t possible. We need to know about the past that shaped us, and shaped all the people and institutions that surround us. This is part of what it means not only to be a good citizen, but to understand the fullness of our humanity. We did not call ourselves into being out of the void. Each of us was born into a world we did not make, a world that has shaped what is possible for us, and to which we have had to be responsive at every turn. And furthermore, we can cannot fully appreciate the preciousness of the rights and liberties of which Jefferson spoke unless we see them against the background of all of human history, in which the flourishing of such rights and liberties has been extremely rare and always fragile. We take for granted the principles of liberty and equality that make up our national creed, as if they were the natural, default position of the human race. Nothing could be further from the truth.

How did we lose this discipline in education?

McClay: I think the loss of history itself as a discipline, in favor of “social studies,” was one of the chief landmarks in our downward path.

Do the U.S. history courses taught in most classrooms have an agenda?

McClay: That is hard to say. Some teachers bring a progressive outlook into the classroom. And it is not always a bad thing for good teachers to have a strongly held point of view, whether conservative or progressive, if they also have a commitment to the pursuit of the truth, and if they encourage a lively and open classroom, in which a diversity of perspectives is encouraged. A great many students will tell you that their favorite teacher was someone with whom they consistently disagreed and were allowed to disagree.

But my own work with teachers in various parts of the country suggests to me that there are a great many excellent and dedicated teachers in this country who try very hard to play it down the middle, and teach young people how to think historically about events, and yet have to struggle with the clunky, poorly written textbooks that are available to them. We are hoping that Land of Hope can be an alternative for them.

What are students missing when they learn history in the context of the AP exam?

McClay: “Teaching to the test” is a perennial danger in education, and the AP exam is no exception. It’s been made worse in recent years by the College Board’s constantly tinkering with the exam, and interjection of themselves into what teachers actually teach in AP courses, by vetting the syllabi of those teachers that they certify. The AP exam used to be the gold standard for academic achievement, but it no longer has that status. I’m not sure how the College Board can repair the damage it has done to itself in that regard.

But even if the test were above reproach, it remains the case that the study of history, and particularly of American history, should never be constrained by the requirements of a particular exam. Students should learn that history is not merely an inert account of self-explanatory details, but is a task of reflection that calls to our deepest sense of our humanity. And learning our history, the history of our own country, is part and parcel of learning who we are, and learning about the society of which we are already a part.

Howard Zinn said that his goal in writing A People’s History of the United States was to create a “quiet revolution” in our understanding of American history. Did he succeed in that endeavor?

McClay: Yes and no. He succeeded in unsettling many aspects of the consensus in which American historical writing was embedded. He did this to an astonishing degree, particularly since he was not himself a historian. But he did not succeed in providing a substitute account of American history that goes beyond simplistic melodrama. Most honest historians will acknowledge that, even if they are sympathetic to Zinn’s leftist politics.

Why was Zinn’s account so popular?

McClay: It is engagingly written, and gives a simple-minded, moralistic, account of the past as the struggle between the white hats and the black hats, the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. For some people, including many Americans who have felt disillusioned by our national flaws, this has been irresistible.

Americans on the left and right seem to have their own versions of our history. How do we bridge that gap?

McClay: This is going to be a great challenge. But part of it will involve clearing our minds of cant and illusion. In this respect, I think that a certain kind of pop postmodernism has done us a great disservice in undermining the idea that there can be truth in history, preferring the lazy and self-serving idea that “narrative is all,” and your narrative and my narrative are equally good, since they are “ours” and are therefore incontestable. But truth is the basis of our common world. We cannot have a common world unless we can agree on its contours. So this “my narrative” business cannot be sustained.

That said, as I insist in Land of Hope, history itself is a narrative, and is best related and studied as a story, one whose contours we agree about. And some part of that involves agreeing not only about the facts of American history but about its larger trajectory. History can tell us a lot about that, although history cannot predict the future, and always stumbles when it tries. But as countless writers have observed, what most closely binds a people is the remembrance of its past, and of those who have sacrificed to make the future possible. One of the most deplorable aspects of the present environment has been its tendency to condescend to the past, a tendency that has even found expression in the wholesale vandalism of the past. Edmund Burke once observed that “people will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.” When we lose the past, we also lose the future.

What are popular historians most often getting wrong?

McClay: I would say that they tend almost reflexively to see modern phenomena such as the growth of the power of the national government and of the Presidency, the creation of supranational organizations like the United Nations, the globalization of the economy, the rights revolution of the post-1960s era, etc., as inevitable forces of nature, “the arc of history,” and such; and the diminishment of the Constitution and the loss of its ingenious design to disperse power as equally inevitable. These are short-sighted and mistaken attitudes. Almost nothing in history is inevitable, and almost nothing in history is permanent. And while history cannot be reverse, some of its effects can be, and the ill consequences of what seemed obvious to previous generations have a way of manifesting them in the fullness of time. In particular, the Constitution’s many virtues are more apparent today, or ought to be by now, that they were a hundred years ago when Progressives were so intent upon getting rid of it.

In short, whenever you hear someone begin to speak of “the judgment of History,” grab a spoonful of salt, since what is coming next is likely nothing more than the judgment of the smug and self-satisfied Present.

Can you highlight some consequential moments in our history that mainstream accounts ignore?

McClay: It’s less a matter of moments ignored than it is of moments willfully misunderstood. This has something to do with the bias toward the growth of government that I mentioned above. I’m struck by how unfair historians are to the Republican presidents of the 1920s, and particularly Calvin Coolidge, who was a man of remarkable gifts, learning, and wisdom, an admirably modest man of unimpeachable moral character, and a highly successful president whose name became synonymous with national prosperity, but whom a great many mainstream historians treat as a joke, even when they know better. By the same token, the incoherence and ineffectiveness of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal always come in for very soft treatment. Little attention is paid to the central role of the Democratic party in promoting and preserving racial segregation in the South, or to the Republicans’ far more enlightened history. And the list goes on. The problems get worse from 1960 on.

In writing the book, did any episodes in our history take on new meaning?

McClay: Oh yes, a great many of them! I chose the title Land of Hope as a tentative one, to be used as a placeholder as I was writing the book. But it became a leitmotif as I proceeded, and again and again I found it to be a phrase freshly illuminating one episode after another in American history, describing not only the way that so many people have been drawn to come to America for its entire history, but also an explanation of why we sometimes feel such severe and disproportionate disappointment with ourselves. Even Howard Zinn’s readers are a part of this; they too harbor high hopes, against which they measure America and find it wanting. We really are a land of hope, even for our internal detractors. How many nations and peoples can say the same?

How would you describe a “patriotic” education?

McClay: We all have an instinct for patriotism, for love of what is our own, for the community of which we are members. But a patriotic education needs to be something much more than that. It is an informed and reflective education, one that prepares men and women for citizenship, while acquainting them with the national story of which they are already a part. It involves instruction both in the American creed, in those ideals and values we hold dear, and in the American story, which is the past that we share, and in which those ideals and values have been embedded and by which they have been carried forward.

Despite the breakdown of history in education, there seems to be a hunger for history in our broader culture. Are Americans ready to reclaim their story?

McClay: Yes, I think they are. I hope they are. It is a natural instinct, after all, for us to want to know and understand that from which our own existence has sprung. It is an instinct that can be dulled into near-oblivion by the various drugs and distractions of our media-drugged and device-ridden culture. But it is denied only at great expense. There is something incredibly poignant about the memoirs one sees, of adoptees trying later in life to locate their birth mothers, their missing fathers, their biological antecedents. What they are looking for, on a personal scale, is what those of us who are deprived of our history are, or will be, looking for.

The hunger is there, and the solution is not more Zinnification of history. That actually works toward a greater and greater inattention to the details of history. The solution is to write histories that will nourish the body and spirit of those who seek to be fed by them.

Land of Hope will be published next week by Encounter Books. 

Knopf

Though Trump looms, White is only interested in politics from a cultural vantage point. In episode after episode, Ellis describes conversations with long-time friends that turn into hostile arguments at the very mention of Trump. What, Ellis wonders, motivates this rage even amongst intelligent people? When the New York Times ran a front-page, headline story on Trump’s remark that Fox anchor Megyn Kelly “was bleeding from her eyes” and “her wherever,” Ellis wondered if the mainstream media had lost its sense of proportion, and worse, its ability to put themselves in the shoes of those who supported Trump.

For Ellis, the political arena is really only one manifestation of a more fundamental and personal problem. He begins White by exploring the sense that everyone in the social media era must live a public life disconnected from their authentic self. A successful author in his early twenties, Ellis learned early on that on that his public persona was a media creation beyond his control. More than politics, White is about the challenge of being an imperfect individual in an unforgiving and outrage prone culture. The impossibility of expressing a nuanced opinion about Trump is just the most extreme example of our culture’s refusal to tolerate different perspectives.

While Ellis is sensitive to how the outrage culture distorts public perception, he frequently plays with and ironizes his own public image. Once he became a well-known writer, Ellis had the sense that “there were now two Brets – the private and the public.” And even though these two selves coexist, “One Bret bought into the lie of it all; the other Bret was intensely aware that it was only a lie.” Rather than attempt reconciliation, Ellis engages more deeply with the lie. In an early episode in White, Ellis recalls writing an assignment for Vanity Fair on the hippest places in L.A. Instead, he purposefully extolled “some of the most retrograde, least fashionable venues in greater Los Angeles.” With his attitude of playfulness and self-ironizing, Ellis indicates that he is not interested in establishing a sincere public image. He prefers to play with his public persona—and the media itself.  

Despite its confrontation with outrage culture, White fails to transcend the culture it critiques. White often wallows in Ellis’ nihilism, his transient opinions, and the reactions they elicit. Similar to Patrick Bateman, who is disgusted by materialistic culture yet murders his colleague for having a nicer business card than him, Ellis complains about easily triggered “snowflakes” while actively inciting them on Twitter. “Social justice warriors never think like artists,” Ellis writes. “They’re looking only to be offended, not provoked or inspired, and often by nothing at all.” But Ellis’ provocations do not inspire. He is much more effective at taunting social justice warriors than in exemplifying a better discourse. It often seems Ellis has just given up.

This is not to say that White presents no positive vision. For example, Ellis writes about how the film Weekend portrayed gay life in a post-identity politics manner. In the film two gay men meet, “Fuck (explicitly), drink, do drugs, and admit their frustrations about gay life, and this guileless movie appears to have no overt agenda.” Ellis compares this with Moonlight which, “Strikes one at times as the strained progressive attempt of a straight artist to present a particular notion of what it’s like to be gay.” Moonlight comes off as engineered to produce a progressive and moral reaction. But for Ellis, good art should not be committed to any political project that requires minority characters to be painted in a particularly virtuous light. Transcending politicized art requires allowing minority characters to be equally complex and morally dubious as everyone else. 

In these brief moments, Ellis touches on something that he seems to value deeply and at least suggests what a world that is not obsessed with politics and homogeneity might look like.

Reviewed:

Bari Weiss, New York Times: 'If the author’s name rings a bell for the members of “Generation Wuss,” as Ellis has dubbed millennials, including his longtime (and surely long-suffering) boyfriend, it is likely because of one of his various headline-making tweets. Perhaps you’ll recall the one about the Oscar-winning director of “The Hurt Locker”: “Kathryn would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated.”

'White' by Bret Easton Ellis

Knopf

Now, at least in theory, snowflakes on both coasts in withdrawal from Rachel Maddow’s nightly Kremlinology lesson can purchase a whole book to inspire paroxysms of rage. “White” — even the title is a trigger — is a veritable thirst trap for the easily microaggressed.

It’s all here. Rants about Trump derangement syndrome; MSNBC; #MeToo; safe spaces. He thinks “Moonlight” only won the Oscar for best picture over “La La Land” because voting for it could be seen as a “rebuke to Trump.” He thinks that Black Lives Matter is a morally significant movement, but says its “lurching, unformed aesthetic” is why it never reached a wide audience. Had the “millennial mess” mimicked the look of the Black Panthers, he suggests, it would have taken off. I’m not exaggerating. Speaking of Black Panthers — yes, you guessed it — the author thinks that movie was insanely overhyped. It will not escape reader notice that the author of a book called “White” happens to be particularly fixated on black culture.' Read the full review.

Interviewed:

 New York Times:

Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker: 

New Yorker: 'The animating feature of the book is that you are frustrated and annoyed with the liberal consensus, which is “shrilly” and “condescendingly” looks down on Trump voters. Would that be a fair way of putting it?

Ellis: I would say that’s a fair way to put it, sure.

New Yorker: Is it that you think there are terrible things going on but we should all take a deep breath, or is it that you don’t think there are a lot of terrible things going on?

Ellis: I just think that there is a man that got elected President. He is in the White House. He has vast support from his base. He was elected fairly and legally. And I think what happened is that the left is so hurt by this that they have overreacted to the Presidency. Now, look, I live with a Democratic, socialist-bordering-on-communist millennial. I hear it every day.

New Yorker: He’s a character in the book.

Ellis: He is in the next room right now. And I do put myself in his shoes, and I do look at the world through his lens, because I have to. I live with him, and I love him. And I do hear this, and some of it changes my mind, and some of it doesn’t. I am certainly much more of a centrist than he is. I do listen, and I think that [lack of a] sense of neutrality—of standing in the other side’s shoes and looking at this from the other side—has bothered me among a lot of my friends and from the media.

New Yorker: What would looking at some of the issues that we have been facing from the perspective of Trump voters look like in practice?

Ellis: I don’t know. I am not that interested in politics. I am not that interested in policy. What I was interested in was the coverage. Especially in Hollywood, there was an immense overreaction. I don’t care really about Trump that much, and I don’t care about politics. I was forced to care based on how it was covered and how people have reacted. Sure, you can be hysterical, or you can wait and vote him out of office.' Read the full interview.

Excerpted:

Why Liberal Lunatics Are Deeply Wrong about Kanye West, New York Post: 'In 2018, various journalists wanted to talk to me about a couple of tweets I’d posted in favor of Kanye West. They couldn’t seem to believe that I supported his “crazy” feed, especially when he said he liked Trump, and couldn’t fathom why I tweeted “Hail Kanye!” in response to his weird blend of transparent prophet and calculated p.r. prankster.

I’d known Kanye since 2013, when out of the blue he texted me to ask if I’d like to work on a movie idea of his. We’d never met, but I was intrigued enough to go see him in a private wing of Cedars Sinai in LA the day after his first child had been born. We spent four hours there talking about the movie project and a wide range of subjects — everything from Yeezus to porn to “The Jetsons” — until Kim Kardashian came out of her room cradling their newborn North. This seemed the time for me to excuse myself, though it also seemed that Kanye wanted me to stay indefinitely, even offering me a Grey Goose that he was pouring out of a magnum as I prepared to leave.

Since then I’d worked with him on a few complicated and strange projects for film, TV and video that mostly never happened, yet because of all this I kept up with him on social media and now found myself reacting to his amazing stream-of-conscious thoughts on his Twitter page in the weeks before the release of his new record — just like hundreds of thousands of other followers.

These tweets were a reminder of why I liked Kanye: They were sweet and mysterious, dumb and profound, funny and playful, part absurdist stunt as well as a genuine reflection of where Kanye West was in that moment. And at one point during the Twitter-storms he mentioned that he loved Trump and admired his “dragon energy,” which he suggested he and the president shared. But this admiration was nothing new, since he’d said as much when he imploded with a rant at a concert in San Jose the week after Trump won — and told the audience, “If I would’ve voted, I would’ve voted for Trump.”

On top of all this, he was one of the only celebrities to visit the president in Trump Tower after the election. All of this was pure Kanye, obsessed with showbiz and spectacle and power — and to some of us his honesty had always been hypnotizing and inspiring. But the left acted like horrified schoolteachers, lecturing us that what he’d tweeted was very, very bad; that nobody should listen to him; that he should apologize so we all could forgive him for a narrative in which he — a black man — supported a racist and was therefore racist himself.' Read the full excerpt.

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HarperCollins

One special story we tell, particularly regarding our immigrants, is the story of social mobility. In school, we read our Jane Austen and George Eliot and roll our eyes at how stultified and regimented is the empire from which we broke. In America, more than anywhere else, you can become what you want to become regardless of where you started out.

It’s easy to fall into materialistic thinking here, and to view this mobility as a purely economic phenomenon. That would be a mistake. You cannot understand the American Dream and American economic mobility if you look at them as matters of dollars and cents. There’s another American peculiarity behind them, and Alexis de Tocqueville noted it a few hundred years ago.

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” the Frenchman wrote in Democracy in America. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small . . . . There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America.”

These two defining characteristics of America—our “associations” and our economic and social mobility—are married.

Economist Raj Chetty found that the places with high upward mobility tended to have high social capital, even when you control for other factors. That is, if you measure the number of community institutions, churches, and bowling leagues, along with the amount of volunteering, the political involvement, and the amount of charitable giving, you can predict the type of place where a child born in poverty could rise up the ranks.

America is the land of opportunity because America is the land of civil society. The American Dream of mobility is alive to the extent that the American Dream of robust local community is alive. For nearly two generations, this Dream has been fading.

A Recession in Social Capital

The early 1960s were probably the peak of civil society, Robert Putnam found in Bowling Alone. After that came the decline in civic involvement. Since then, fewer people have been joining clubs, parishes, or associations of any kind, and people who are still joining some institutions are joining fewer. Putnam’s book title connoted the collapse of bowling leagues, once a staple of middle-class America. Their disappearance left Americans bowling by themselves.

Alongside informal civil society are the formal institutions of civil society. Putnam charted serious drop-offs in participation in these institutions. Fewer people now attend local government or school meetings. Fewer serve as officers of some organization or serve on some local committee.

Simply tracking the membership of organizations (as a fraction of the population) reveals a rise and fall over the last century. From 1900 to 1930, likely as a result of an expanding middle class and increasing

education, membership in organizations grew. It then dipped during the Great Depression and rebounded with a vengeance after the war. “On average,” Putnam wrote, “across all these organizations, member- ship rates began to plateau in 1957, peaked in the early 1960s, and began the period of sustained decline by 1969.”

Updating Putnam’s work in 2017, Senator Mike Lee’s office studied the state of “associational life.” This study found similar results, and others studies confirm them.

“Americans’ growing isolation,” French sociologist Ivaylo Petev wrote more than a decade after Bowling Alone, “is thus corroborated here in the case of extended networks. We see evidence for the decrease of formal and informal ties” across America.

People go to church less and less every year. We belong to fewer organizations than our predecessors did. We know our neighbors less than we did a generation or two ago. We vote less than we did a generation or two ago. Men have fewer jobs than they did a generation or two ago. Men are in the labor force less than they were a generation or two ago. Americans marry less than we did in 1960. We have fewer and fewer children every decade.

It all adds up to this: Americans are less attached to society, their neighbors, their communities, other humans. Lacking the environment of a strong community, more Americans lack the scaffolding to climb above their starting point. More Americans lack the support structure that they would need to build a family. More Americans lack role models, and they lack roles. They are displaced persons living in their home country, even in their native state or hometown. They are strangers in their own land.

Millions of Americans are alienated.

In this light, it’s hard to disagree when they say the American Dream is dead. This view struck so much of the pundit class as odd because where we lived, the scaffolding was still there. There was something going on in flyover country that we had missed.

Civil Society Deserts

In Western Pennsylvania, you’ll see two tellingly divergent economies. Both Pittsburgh and rural Fayette County had been dependent on the steel industry and on coal. Both suffered economically when foreign steel and technological innovation drove the Pittsburgh-area steel industry into the ground. Both suffered again as coal faded into irrelevance under pressure from environmental regulations and competition from cheap natural gas.

Yet Pittsburgh is doing pretty well right now, while Fayette County isn’t. This makes it clear that jobs, trade, and economics aren’t the whole story. There’s something outside these things that Pittsburgh has that Fayette County didn’t.

The answer is local community. Specifically, it’s institutions of civil society. This is the core of the rural-versus-urban divide. Cities are planted far thicker with institutions of civil society, and so when a few disappear, and the money runs lower, they are more able to maintain community.

I saw this at Smitty’s Bar in Uniontown, where I met Dave. His son had died that morning, probably of an overdose.

The clientele at Smitty’s liked the bar, and except for a respectful somberness around Dave, the atmosphere was cheerful. But there wasn’t a lot of Uniontown pride. When talk of neighbors came up, Lisa the barmaid offered, “I don’t talk to none of mine. I got one who lives behind me who I think deals drugs. I got quacks who live below me.” Dave was staying in town only because of his elderly mom, who needed his help but also provided him with a roof and a bed. “I got a loaded .22 right by my door,” Dave told me. “I don’t trust nobody in my apartment complex.”

I asked what Uniontown kids do when they graduate from high school. “They leave,” one Smitty’s patron said. “Get outta town,” said another. “That’s about it.”

One local woman at Smitty’s, about twenty years old, was attending the community college. I asked her if she was planning on sticking around. She shook her head and said: “If I was rich in the mountains, I’d stay.”

Fayette County, for all its economic woe, has pockets of wealth in “the mountains.” In fact, Fallingwater, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright home, sits on a hillside in the Bear Run Nature Reserve about fifteen miles east of Smitty’s. Because of the mountains, though, it’s at least forty-five minutes’ driving time. And from the average Fayette County community, the wealth of “the mountains” may as well be a world away.

The suicide numbers and the overdose numbers in counties like Fayette tell us these are not happy places. Sociologists increasingly have begun measuring happiness through various means. These measures aren’t perfect, but they tell us something. Sure enough, poorer people are less happy, according to these studies.

But the sadness here can’t simply be ascribed to economic struggles. People aren’t killing themselves, drinking themselves to death, and overdosing just because their bank accounts are too low.

The very economists who have charted this disturbing wave of middle-aged white death concluded as much. “Many commentators have suggested that the poor mortality outcomes can be attributed to slowly growing, stagnant, and even declining incomes,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote in a 2017 paper. “[W]e evaluate this possibility, but find that it cannot provide a comprehensive explanation.”

Later they write, “[P]urely economic accounts of suicide have consistently failed to explain the phenomenon.”

A closer look at the happiness studies turns up even more evidence against the bare economic explanation, and points us toward the root cause. A quick analysis shows a stunning correlation. The states with the highest per capita suicide rate are Wyoming, Alaska, and Montana,12 the three least densely populated states. Washington, D.C., and New Jersey have the lowest suicide rates and the highest popula- tion density. This surface analysis suggests that physical isolation is behind suicide.

But we can go deeper. Social scientist Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, found something interesting: The difference between the average poor person’s happiness and the average upper-middle-class person’s happiness could be mostly explained by two factors: marriage and “high social trust.” Add on two more factors—religious observance and satisfaction with one’s work—and you’ve explained almost the entire remainder of the happiness gap.

Poor people in America, it seems, are less happy mostly because poorer people are less likely to get married and less likely to have many neighbors and friends they can trust. “There is no inherent barrier to happiness for a person with a low level of education holding a low-skill job,” Murray writes. Sure enough, the 1950s and 1960s had more equality when it came to marriage and neighborly trust. These have become so dramatically unequal only in recent decades.

And that helps explain the plague of deaths of despair sweeping America in recent years. It’s a fruit of the disintegration of community. These deaths of despair are symptoms of alienation.

Death, then, is a bitter fruit of community disintegration. Broken families and the retreat from marriage are other fruits. Economic woe is present in both of these problems, but it’s not the proximate cause. Alienation is.

Here, then, is the great divide in American life:

Do you belong to a strong community? Do you enjoy multiple, dense networks that provide both support and purpose? Do you consider yourself a part of many institutions, like a church, a club, or a cohesive neighborhood? The answer is generally Yes in the Oostburgs and Salt Lake Citys, the Chevy Chases and the Madisons. It’s generally No in the Fayette Counties, the Buchanan Counties, and the Middletowns.

The Alienated Working Class

“Like financial capital and human capital,” Putnam wrote in his 2015 book Our Kids, “social capital is distributed unevenly.”

Popular story lines would have you believe that the poor in America all hang together, braving material poverty through solidarity and close communities, while the rich, behind their gated mansions and plastic surgery, live isolated, barren lives. There are certainly instances of these in America (there are instances of everything in a country of 325 million). But they are not the norm.

“Contrary to the romanticized images of close-knit communal life among the poor, lower-class Americans today,” Putnam wrote in 2015, “especially if they are nonwhite, tend to be socially isolated, even from their neighbors.”

The working class is less adept at networking than elites are. Vance himself, determined to climb out of the deadly swamp that was working-class, white, Middle America, looked at the chaos around him—broken families, drug abuse, disregard for school and job responsibilities—and at first decided the path out was to play by the rules. As he began to emerge, and ascended to college and then law school, he realized that the rules were a bit of a farce. “The problem is, virtually everyone who plays by those rules fails. That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game. . . . They network.”

Vance explains: “[N]etworks of people and institutions around us have real economic value. They connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information.”

If this strikes you as either overstated or banal, that’s likely be- cause you, the reader, are so enmeshed in these powerful networks— communities, institutions of civil society—that you don’t notice them. At Yale Law School, Vance wrote, “networking power is like the air we breathe—so pervasive it’s easy to miss.”

This leaves downscale communities without as many guys who can get you a job, without as many examples of success, and without as many people motivated to form and cultivate networks. The result isn’t really working-class networks that are less powerful and less advantageous. The result is the absence of networks among the working class.

Timothy P. Carney is the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

 

Oxford University Press

Yet in June 2014, ISIS—or Da’ish as it is referred to in Arabic—stunned the world by overrunning most of northern and western Iraq, seizing the massive city of Mosul, and causing five divisions of the Iraqi army to collapse. Much of its success was a product of the weakness of the Iraqi armed forces. However, some of it derived from Da’ish’s own exceptional performance. Indeed, Da’ish and Hizballah are the two most important Arab non-state militaries that demonstrated a clear superiority in their battlefield competence over the vast majority of Arab militaries since the Second World War.  Understanding why they were exceptionally more successful is therefore a critical element in understanding how Arab society has shaped its armed forces during the modern era, and how the Middle Eastern military balance may change in the future.

Ultimately, there were a number of reasons why Da’ish did as well as it did in 2013-2015, and this excerpt explains the most important.

Poor Adversaries.

Warfare is a competitive activity, and to win you don’t have to be good, just better than your opponent. Neither the Iraqi security forces, the Syrian regime’s forces, nor most of the Iraqi and Syrian militias have been much competition for Da’ish. In fact, most have been dreadful. The best evidence of this has been how quickly Da’ish’s fortunes turned around as a result of the rather modest improvement in the capabilities of the ISF and some Syrian opposition forces thanks to the advisory assistance and training provided by the US-led Coalition. In the words of Israel’s former chief of Military Intelligence, Lt. General Amos Yadlin, “From a military perspective, the Islamic State’s mode of operation is not groundbreaking. . . . Its attempts to use heavier and more sophisticated weapons captured in battle have not led to significant battlefield achievements. . . . It has thereby acquired the ability to concentrate forces quickly and surprise remote enemies. Still, these tactics and tools are not suitable for fighting a modern Western Army.”

Zeal.

One of the most important advantages that Da’ish fighters bring to the battlefield is their commitment. This directly feeds into the disparity between Da’ish and its adversaries. Da’ish fighters—especially its foreign fighters, discussed further below—fervently believe that they are fighting a holy war on behalf of the Almighty. They are completely committed to the fight, and many are not just willing but enthusiastic to die for their cause. Moreover, Da’ish as an organization understands the military value of such fervor and consciously works to instill and enhance it. As Siboni explained in an important essay on Da’ish’s military power, Da’ish “deems military training of secondary importance as compared to the effort that it puts into cultivating the combatants’ desire to fight.”

Especially in the kind of amateurish militia combat that has characterized much of the fighting in the Middle East, merely being willing to keep fighting, killing, and dying is often a decisive advantage. “Its operational capabilities are not stellar, but the high level of its fighting spirit and the readiness with which its followers embrace self-sacrifice have allowed it to expand its control over the region,” in Siboni’s words. More than that, Da’ish fighters are often, but not always, willing not just to keep shooting at the other guy and absorbing losses, but to advance against fire. That is a very unusual trait in these kinds of wars, something that also gave Hizballah an advantage over other militias during the Lebanese Civil War. It is less that such an assault can result in taking an enemy position (which it certainly can) and more that doing so can be terrifying to troops who know that they would never be willing to do the same, which often causes the morale of less committed formations to crack. That is often the surest path to victory in these kinds of militia firefights.

Darwinian Selection.

Again, like Hizballah, Da’ish has been able to rely on a reasonably competent cadre of commanders. And again, both at strategic/ operational and tactical levels, this has been uneven. Yet Da’ish’s victories, where they have come, have often been the product of some very smart strategy and/or able battlefield leadership. Moreover, Da’ish has proven itself to be a learning organization, a trait that has to come from its leadership, especially its senior-most leaders.

In the media, this is often attributed to a group of about 100–150 former Iraqi military officers who have acted as key commanders, planners, and generals for Da’ish. It is frequently claimed that this group brought expert planning and leadership, military discipline, and a genius for war-making to Da’ish’s military operations. That’s mostly nonsense. First, Da’ish was a pretty big military organization—with about 10,000 fighters at the time of their greatest successes in 2014, and perhaps as many as 50,000 fighters at their height in 2015—and such a small number of highly-competent officers is unlikely to have had that kind of impact on so large a force. Second, we have a great deal of information indicating that many of Da’ish’s best commanders were not former officers in Saddam’s army, and were not even Iraqis. Finally, let’s remember that Saddam’s army was pretty rotten. Just having been an officer in Saddam’s army was no guarantee that you knew what you were doing. The vast majority of them didn’t. Not even at their height in 1987–1991 did the Iraqi military evince much military genius. (Understand that for many Iraqis, this is another way of blaming the United States and Nuri al-Maliki for Da’ish: the United States for disbanding Saddam’s army in 2003, and Maliki for refusing to retain Sunni officers in the ISF, both of which pushed many Sunni former Iraqi military personnel out of the Iraqi armed forces into the arms of AQI and Da’ish.)

Please understand that I am not denying that these men exist or that they did not make important contributions to Da’ish’s military fortunes, only that their role has been exaggerated and the reason that they have contributed has little to do with their service in Saddam’s army. There are tens of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers who fought with Da’ish, and before that with AQI. What is important about those who have become key leaders of Da’ish is that they were the ones who survived and thrived through the American occupation, the 2005–2008 Iraqi Civil War, the Surge, and then the Syrian Civil War. The vast majority didn’t. They got killed. They got injured. They got tired. They got sidelined. Unlike all of the rest, these 100–150 men figured out how to fight, how to stay alive, and how to succeed in this kind of warfare. That is why they advanced through Da’ish’s ranks and why they became important members of Da’ish’s command staff.

They seem to have some degree of camaraderie as a result of this shared apprenticeship in Saddam’s army, and some no doubt learned some useful things there, but it was not their service in Saddam’s army that made them able military commanders. It is the fact that they had innate qualities that enabled them to get something out of service in the Iraqi army—which millions of other Iraqis who also served in the Iraqi army lacked and so got nothing from—that made them successful. In an army as large as Saddam’s was, with hundreds of thousands of troops and tens of thousands of officers, it is not surprising to find several hundred very good officers. And placed in the right circumstances, those very good officers can emerge, demonstrate their abilities, learn from experience, and become quite formidable strategists, planners, and field commanders. That is what happened with these men and what made them good commanders, not anything they got from Saddam’s army—which millions of others had passed through without benefit, either to Saddam or Da’ish.

Finally, to the extent that they deserve credit for Da’ish’s greater effective- ness, their impact was probably greatest in the early days of Da’ish’s success. At that time the organization was smaller, allowing a relatively small group of competent leaders to have greater impact. They also had far greater freedom of action then. At first, none of their primary foes—the Iraqi government, the Syrian regime, the Kurds, the Iranians, the United States—took them seriously, and so they could do more with the limited resources at their disposal. Once they had shocked the world with their run of victories, they quickly lost those early advantages and their limitations became far more pronounced.

An Unorthodox Hierarchy.

You may have noticed that I used the phrase “placed in the right circumstances” in the last paragraph. That was not an offhand reference. It isn’t just that these competent officers succeeded in the Darwinian struggles of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, it is that Da’ish’s structure enabled them to emerge and then took advantage of their qualities in ways that other militaries (including Saddam’s) did not.

Like Hizballah, Da’ish as a conventional army grew out of a terrorist group (AQI and al-Qa’ida before that). That is a very different pedigree from most militaries, and certainly from most Arab state armies. Because of it, Da’ish’s organization was very different from that of most conventional militaries. In particular, it retained a highly cellular structure like the terrorist group it once was. Even as a conventional army, it was broken up into platoon-sized formations that had a high degree of autonomy. As Knights and Mello have described it, “A typical attack force comprises 20–40 foot soldiers—historically the size of the average insurgent cell, including indirect-fire, IED-laying/ triggering teams, RPG/ambush teams, etc.—plus three to five armored and unarmored utility vehicles, with a couple of heavy support weapons. When larger attacks are undertaken, it is usually coordinated, simultaneous but only loosely connected activity by these small war bands, not a larger unit action per se.”

This structure had both advantages and disadvantages. As Knights and Mello point out, it made it hard for Da’ish to coordinate large operations, especially attacks, and is part of the reason most of their attacks were clumsy, except in the perfect conditions of June 2014. However, they also required and relied on tactical commanders willing and able to think and act for themselves with little direction from higher authority.

Hopefully, the link with Arab cultural patterns is becoming clear again. The point is that Da’ish is not a typical Arab hierarchy. It does not function like a typical hierarchic organization in the Arab world. As with Hizballah, many “culturally-regular” Arabs would have a very hard time relating to such a structure. Others, those who are not “culturally-regular,” who deviate significantly from the cultural mean, might thrive in such circumstances (people who probably felt smothered in traditional Arab organizations). Moreover, Da’ish as an organization is clearly led by such people, which is part of the reason their group has survived and become a major player in the Darwinian struggle across Iraq and Syria. They then seek out others like themselves, men who can think and act independently, and they put those men in positions of command because that is what they need for this organization to function properly. Da’ish’s leaders are clearly not culturally regular themselves. That has been a key element of their survival and success, and they deliberately seek out other, non-culturally-regular individuals for their organization, which requires such people for its continued success.

Joining Da’ish is not a “normal” thing for any Arab to do. There are 300 million Arabs and, at most, only about 200,000 have been part of Da’ish in any way, and many of them were forced into it. The small minority of Arabs who join Da’ish are very unusual. They clearly represent a highly rebellious minority. It should not be surprising to find that (1) they have created a hierarchy that does not function like a traditional Arab hierarchy, (2) that the system selects for people who do not behave in culturally-regular ways, and (3) that the organization does not perform in culturally-regular ways on the battlefield. Indeed, there is an extensive body of sociological and psychological work demonstrating that Arabs who join terrorist and insurgent groups have “emerged mainly in milieus where the culture has been distorted or destroyed,” in Gary Gregg’s words. In other words, Da’ish takes Arabs who are not “normal” by the standards of Arab society and then places them in a hierarchy that is also not “normal” by those same standards. It should not be surprising then that the organization does not perform the way that “normal” Arab organizations perform, and since warfare is an area where the normal Arab organization performs badly, it should not be surprising that this abnormal organization performs better.

Foreign Fighters.

A related piece of the puzzle is the high number of foreign fighters and how they have contributed to Da’ish’s success. Foreign fighters have clearly played a huge role in Da’ish, far more so than for any previous such group. Although the numbers are very soft, it may be that half or more of Da’ish fighters are from somewhere other than Iraq and Syria. For instance, in September 2014, the CIA estimated that Da’ish had 31,000 fighters al- together. Five months later, the chief of the US National Counterterrorism Center testified that 20,000 foreign fighters had gone to Iraq and Syria, most to fight with Da’ish.

The foreign fighters are important for two reasons. First, many of the foreign fighters are fellow Arabs from outside Iraq and Syria. Again, they are not “normal.” One could make the case that for a young, unemployed, Sunni Iraqi or Syrian male, joining Da’ish in 2012–2015 made some sense: their communities were enmeshed in civil war, they had no reason not to fight, they could justify doing so to protect their family or community, and Da’ish was the coolest gang in town. It is a lot harder to make that case for a Saudi, Tunisian, Algerian, or Egyptian. Again, tens of thousands did, but hundreds of millions did not. And not surprisingly, those who did were not culturally regular. As a result, some made for competent military commanders, such as Abu Jandal al-Masri (Egyptian) and Abu Huzayfa al-Yamani (Yemeni). Others may not have demonstrated the same military competence, but brought tremendous zeal with them instead. Thus, the foreign fighters have been a critical element of the high morale that has been an important aspect of Da’ish’s success. Moreover, for many, zeal made them prime candidates to become suicide bombers, a very important role for Da’ish, but again something ut- terly abnormal for Arab society. Thus, by attracting large numbers of non- culturally regular people from across the Arab world, Da’ish has benefitted by having a larger pool of people with useful military skills, whether it be leadership abilities or a reckless devotion to the cause.

One of the more interesting things about Da’ish is how many non-Arab Muslims it has attracted to its cause. This started with al-Qa’ida, but its offspring, Da’ish, really took it to unprecedented levels. These non-Arabs are important because they too show extraordinary commitment to the cause and because they do not evince any Arab cultural predilections. Talk about not being culturally-regular Arabs, these people aren’t Arabs at all. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the most dangerous Da’ish fighters are from this group. The Chechens in particular stand out as superb fighters, feared across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Da’ish’s greatest battlefield commander was a man named Tarkhan Batirashvili who went by the nom de guerre Abu Umar al- Shishani, or “Father of Omar, the Chechen.” If Da’ish had a truly gifted tactical commander, one able to wage maneuver warfare with the skill of Chad’s Hassan Djamous, it was al-Shishani. No other Da’ish commander even came close. None proved themselves able to fight and maneuver the way that he did. Moreover, not only he himself, but all of his key lieutenants were Chechens. When he was finally killed in 2016, his elite command was transferred over to a unit of Uzbeks, and he was succeeded as Da’ish “War Minister” by a Tajik.

The 74 Million

When IDEA founders Tom Torkelson and JoAnn Gama, both Teach for America teachers sent to the region (Tom, a student at Georgetown University, says he had trouble finding the place on a map), launched their first charter school in 2000 in Donna, the school was only grades 4-8, but the goal was always college: All our students will go to college. At that time, in a region where few of the low-income Hispanic students even thought college was a possibility, that promise couldn’t pass a laugh test. “Everyone thought they were crazy,” said Phillip Garza, who today oversees college programs for IDEA. “They said there was no way they could do it. But they had the courage and fortitude to get it done, and they delivered. For the last 12 years, 100 percent of our graduates have been accepted to college, and all but four students have gone.”

Today, when driving through the region, it’s not hard to spot billboards paid for by local school districts vowing that schools are all about “preparing students for college and careers.” That’s the impact IDEA has had in the Valley since 2000, said Garza. “Now, at all these districts, high school graduation alone is no longer the expectation.” That’s democratizing higher education. What this means on the ground is best viewed at the student level. Many middle-class suburban families might take one look at their stories and come to a quick judgment: These students are not college material. But that’s not how IDEA sees them, and now it’s not how the students see themselves.

Consider Ricardo Murillo, whose parents were deported to Mexico when he was 11. At the time, they were living in Edinburg, just outside McAllen. His mother sold ice cream; his father did everything from cutting grass to working as a handyman. His entire family moved back to Mexico, but when he was 13, Murillo — the only one born in the U.S. — concluded his future was brighter in the United States and returned to Texas, living with cousins outside Edinburg. After spending a summer in Mexico with his parents, he went back to Texas to learn that his cousins were transferring to an IDEA charter, and therefore he had to as well.

“I was pretty angry. IDEA was becoming a popular school, but it was not what I wanted. I thought it was a nerdy school.” What Murillo wanted was to stay at his traditional public school in Donna, where, by his own description, he was becoming a “baggy” — a term for gang members and their baggy clothes. But he had no choice, so he entered IDEA Alamo. There, his grades ranged from C’s to A’s, depending on the course. It wasn’t until his senior year that he even considered college, a must-do at IDEA.

Murillo ended up at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, best described as a commuter university. It’s a choice embraced by many IDEA graduates, either because of middling grade point averages and test scores, a desire to live at home with family, or both. But UTRGV, as it is known locally, is a cut above the average commuter university. Torkelson sits on the board, and IDEA keeps two college counselors on campus just to guide its students.

The college success rate there —  40 percent of the entering freshmen earn a bachelor’s degree within six years — is well below those of elite colleges and universities with success rates hitting the 90 percent mark. But that 40 percent is double what you find at many commuter universities, and IDEA’s involvement probably has a lot to do with that.

Murillo still lives with a cousin, and he works at the homework center at an IDEA school, helping high school students with their studies. Despite his spotty record in middle school and high school, Murillo stepped it up in college, tackling a challenging electrical engineering major. He’s on track to graduate in five years. With Pell Grants and scholarships, he will owe only about $4,000 after leaving college. After graduation, he’s looking at two careers — taking a job at a robotics company or working as a school counselor at an IDEA school.

“An assistant principal at IDEA Alamo said I would make a great counselor, telling students about my background, how I made it,” he said.

And then there’s Juan Reyes, whose family has struggled with finances. He grew up in McAllen, then Pharr. His father worked as a furniture company driver, but the company went out of business. “He has diabetes, so it’s hard to find work,” Juan explains. His mother has always been a stay-at-home mom. Reyes went to district schools until ninth grade, when he switched to IDEA San Juan. “My parents didn’t want me to go to [the local high school]. It was too violent, a lot of kids fighting.”

At IDEA, the academic challenge was different. “At my neighborhood school, the teachers didn’t care if you did the work. At IDEA, the teachers care. If you don’t do the work, it’s like you are hurting them.” Reyes was a good student, not great. When it came time to choose a college — something that in earlier years had been hard to imagine — he also chose the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “My family was struggling, and Hispanic families are very close. When one member of the family leaves, everyone is sad. So it would have been hard for me to leave.”

Much like Murillo, when Reyes got to UTRGV he stepped it up, enrolling in the accounting program. He has nearly a 3.0 grade point average, and in the summer of 2018, he was only one course away from graduation. He will leave with about $8,000 in college debt. His goal: a master’s degree in accounting and a job as an accountant at a university.

Both Murillo and Reyes represent what’s happening in the Rio Grande Valley, courtesy of IDEA charters. Yes, IDEA sends a fair number of its graduates to the more prestigious University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M and a sprinkling to the Ivies and other top Eastern universities [my personal favorite: several years ago, when watching a raucous college signing day at a local arena, I saw Gilberto Gutierrez celebrate his acceptance at MIT. His mother works at an IDEA school cafeteria]. But that’s not really what democratization of higher education is all about. What democratization does mean is that over the past 12 years, as Garza points out, 100 percent of IDEA’s students have been accepted to colleges, and all but four have gone, thanks in part to universities such as UTRGV.

The question to ask, of course, is: Are they successful? Do they earn degrees? Over those 12 years, roughly 44 percent of IDEA graduates ended up with bachelor’s degrees. For comparison purposes, roughly 11 percent of low-income students do the same. Even more interesting: Like other charter networks, IDEA tracks its graduates by cohorts. For the more recent Class of 2012, the projection shows that 55 percent are on track to earn a bachelor’s within six years, the highest in the network’s history.

Should IDEA worry that so many of its graduates end up at UTRGV? That question gets at the heart of what democratization of education means. Garza loves to cite the number of graduates who go off to prestigious colleges, where the likelihood of earning degrees is near certainty. But he also knows his IDEA families, who struggle with financial issues and grapple even more with seeing any of their children leave town. “College is an academic decision, but it’s also a fiscal decision and a social decision,” said Garza. “We are in the business of ‘me power’ … We want to give families choices.” And if they choose to stay close to home and graduate nearly debt-free, so be it. It was an informed choice.

IDEA’s push for the democratization of higher education extends to gathering up students who “stopped out” of college and want another shot. In what is called IDEA-U, students sign up for the online curriculum offered by College for America at Southern New Hampshire University. But instead of a problematic do-it-alone-at-home online program, IDEA-U offers an actual classroom building complete with a tutor/ counselor. Not only can the students escape home distractions, but they have the kind of education technology, including computers, that aren’t found in their homes. The tuition is $5,500 a year, which matches a Pell Grant, and IDEA predicts that most of its students will complete an associate’s degree in eight to 14 months.

What makes the College for America program work for low-income students, said Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, is that it’s competency-based. Mastering the content is what counts, he said, not mastering the content in a prescribed period of time, which is the way most colleges operate. “When a student’s daughter has a bout of illness, they can just stop out. There’s no penalty for hitting the pause button. When they are ready to begin again, they hit the start button.”

The coaches based at IDEA-U are about more than academics, said LeBlanc. “They are life coaches. If you are poor, society is sending you signals all day long that you don’t matter very much. Because if you did matter, you would have a decent grocery store in your neighborhood. If you did matter, people would care more about the plight of the poor in America.”

The coaches and the academic center offer a sense of belonging, a sense that you do matter — a sentiment these students rarely feel, said LeBlanc. “It’s no surprise kids join gangs. The gangs tell them that you matter so much they would kill for you. It’s a signal that you matter, that you belong.” The coaches, said LeBlanc, are always talking to the students. “They’re asking about their learning, how things are at home, how they did on that last project. And the students think, ‘Oh, wow, somebody cares that I’m doing this.”

IDEA-U opened in 2017 with 100 students. The goal: 6,000 students in six years with multiple centers. A fanciful goal, perhaps, for anyone other than IDEA, but this is the fastest-growing charter network in the country, and it has always met its expansion plan. Currently, IDEA has 79 schools with 48,000 students and aims to have 100,000 students in 200 schools by the year 2022.

IDEA offers an insight into Phase Two of The B.A. Breakthrough. Phase One was the push to do right by students who are talented but poor, those who graduate at the top of their high school classes, test well, but rarely make it to a college that’s their equal, a college from which they are likely to graduate. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which seeks out these students for scholarships, estimates there are 3.4 million high-ability, low-income students in grades K-12. That’s a lot, and the foundation deserves thanks for its pioneering work. But all those talented kids have siblings and neighborhood friends who attend school with them. Reaching all “ The coaches and the academic center offer a sense of belonging, a sense that you do matter — a sentiment these students rarely feel those students and finding a college pathway for all of them, not just the very brightest, is what IDEA and other charters do. That’s Phase Two of the Breakthrough.

Nobody believed Tom Torkelson and JoAnn Gama when they opened their first charter and promised college for all. Not only have they done that with their own alumni, but they forced the traditional school districts in the region to pursue the same college-for-all goal. The Rio Grande Valley is not the only place in the United States where the democratization movement is playing out. California is a close runner-up.

But the Rio Grande Valley may be the only place where you can read all about it on billboards.

Richard Whitmire is the author of 'The Founders', published by The 74, 'On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope' and 'The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes On the Nation’s Worst School District'. 

'The B.A. Breakthrough' will be published on April 9 by The 74.

Reviewed:

Michael Doran, National Review: 'Victor Davis Hanson’s newest book is also one of his most personal. Hanson is a celebrated historian of war, a retired professor of classics, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a National Review columnist. But he is also a farmer in California’s Central Valley. He routinely peppers his articles and even his academic work with telling details about farming life and social realities in Selma, a town outside Fresno where he lives in the same house in which he was born and raised. In this book, as in his others, the glimpses of Selma come only in support of Hanson’s wider thesis, never as part of an effort to tell his personal story. Nevertheless, beneath the surface of dispassionate analysis, the book burns with emotion.' Read the full review.

John R. Coyne, Jr., The American Conservative: 'At the end of two years, this base of support for Trump remains solid. This is in part, Hanson notes, due to Trump’s recognition that “the America ‘era’ was not ending, but at that time enjoying the strongest GDP growth, job reports, energy production, business and consumer confidence, and foreign policy successes in fifteen years.” The latest figures show that this administration’s economic policies have resulted in the highest number of job openings ever recorded in the United States, with more women and minorities employed than ever before.

Moreover, Hanson adds, “It was hard to see how U.S relations with key allies or deterrent stances against enemies were not improved since the years of the Obama situation…no more naïve Russian reset. China was on notice that its trade cheating was no longer tolerable. The asymmetrical Iran deal was over. And the United States was slowly squeezing…a nuclear North Korea.”

How does it end? At the moment, the McGovernite field of Democrats offers little threat to Trump’s reelection in 2020. But reelection or no, perhaps Henry Kissinger, quoted by Hanson, best sums up what Donald Trump may come to represent: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretense.”' Read the full review.

John B. Judis, New York Times: 'Hanson, who is a retired classics professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, compares Trump to a tragic hero, who, crippled by “an innate flaw,” suffers a sorry end, but in the meantime does incredible good. Hanson acknowledges Trump’s “tweeting … feuding … unbridled and often vicious speech, even his fast and loose relationship with the truth.” He writes that “Trump likely will end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism when he is out of office and no longer useful, or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries, as if his utility is no longer worth the wages of his perceived crudity.”' Read the full review.

Interviewed:

Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker:

'This is what you were saying about Greek heroes. You don’t get the perfect person who will phrase everything or do everything perfectly.

You don’t. You don’t. I was trying to look at Trump in classical terms, so words like eirôneia, or irony—how could it be that the Republican Party supposedly was empathetic, but a millionaire, a billionaire Manhattanite started using terms I had never heard Romney or McCain or Paul Ryan say? He started saying “our.” Our miners. And then, on the left, every time Hillary Clinton went before a Southern audience, she started speaking in a Southern accent. And Barack Obama, I think you would agree, when he gets before an inner-city audience, he suddenly sounded as if he spoke in a black patois. When Trump went to any of these groups, he had the same tie, the same suit, the same accent. What people thought was that, whatever he is, he is authentic.' Read the full interview.

Mark Levin, FOX News:

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Regnery

Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico had terminated Abid in 2015, before these other problems became known, but he kept logging into her servers after he was fired. In early 2015, Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona had fired the youngest of the three Awan brothers, Jamal, for “incompetence.” He was a well-paid incompetent, joining the congressional payroll at $165,000 when he was only twenty years old and was still employed by many of her colleagues. And why had the Awans’ elderly father Muhammad, a religious cleric who spent much of his time in Pakistan and who had not a lick of IT skills, been briefly on the congressional payroll as the systems administrator for then Congressman, now-Senator, Joe Donnelly of Indiana?

It was July 25, 2016, three days after WikiLeaks threw a bomb into the presidential race and permanently brought politics’ dirty tricks into the modern age by publishing the first of the DNC’s emails, when Theresa brought the first results of her months-long cybersecurity probe to the body that oversaw her work, the Committee on House Administration. The timing of the discovery of the server logs documenting their behavior made the seriousness of it all impossible to miss. WikiLeaks was publishing the DNC’s emails on a weekly schedule, reminding politicians that cybersecurity breaches were a real and omnipresent threat. The threat of malicious actors inside the highest levels of the government itself should have made the infiltration of the DNC, a private fundraising group, pale in comparison assuming Democrats valued data from their country’s government above that of their party.

Republican Congresswoman  of Michigan chaired the committee, but in practice, congressional staff runs much of Congress, especially sleepy minor committees like this one. Theresa reported her findings to the committee’s Republican staff director, Sean Moran.

Sean is a mild-mannered veteran congressional staffer with a short, slight frame and one of the rare gray-haired heads in a complex dominated by youngsters. He found the specifics hard to follow. After all, he only had two apps on his iPhone and it took his wife to install them. When he echoed his understanding of the findings to people later, it showed, saying “terabits” where he meant “terabytes,” and saying the Awans used “codes” rather than “scripts.” But the significance wasn’t lost on him. It was obvious that the committee needed to bring this to the top—Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—and fast.

Speaker Ryan’s office told Theresa to continue her investigation, but there was a complication. While many IT aides worked for members of both parties, the Awans worked exclusively for Democrats, so the investigation had to be done in a way acceptable to Democrats. A meeting was set up in the office of Kelly Craven, Ryan’s chief for internal affairs, about how to get to the bottom of it. The answer was very slowly or not at all. Craven heard viewpoints offered on one side by Nancy Pelosi’s counsel, Bernie Raimo, and on the other, Paul Ryan’s general counsel, Mark Epley.

Raimo said, “These are our employees. You can’t look at any files or interview them without getting permission from their bosses first.”

Theresa protested, “That’s forty-four members!”.

“Oh, and you can’t ask any members because that will disclose the case,” Raimo added.

When Theresa complained that it was impossible to conduct an investigation under those restrictions, Raimo yelled, “You’re not the policeman of the world!”

That meant Theresa was tasked with doing a cybersecurity investigation in which she was banned from talking to the suspects or their employers and had to watch data fly off the network without knowing what it was. Theresa considered where that left her. The Awans’ fraudulent billing of congressional offices for computers and other equipment wasn’t as critical as the cybersecurity breaches, but the falsified receipts contained easily provable lies. Those lies might enable police to put the Awans behind bars before they dismantled more evidence and did more harm. She just needed to learn how the falsified receipts were generated. She could at least search the Awans’ government email accounts, right?

Raimo said no. The initial complaints named only Abid, so including the other family members would amount to a “fishing expedition.” On top of that, Raimo cited the “speech and debate clause” of the Constitution. That clause states that members of Congress “shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” The clause is part of the Constitution’s separation of powers and is intended to protect members of Congress from the executive branch. Raimo argued that it extended to IT support staff like the Awans, and implied that it protected them from Theresa’s investigation even though she was part of the legislative branch. 

Theresa offered a concession: have a third party use a computer command to pull only those emails sent to or about the federal contractor CDW-G. Authorities could then learn whether the Awans were running a fraud scheme, CDW-G was responsible, or the Awans had a man inside CDW-G. Whatever they found would be significant because CDW-G was a multi-billion dollar company that did business throughout the federal government. This was classic government accountability work.

Even that was too much for Pelosi’s man. Craven looked at Ryan’s general counsel, Mark Epley, a former aide to the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice, to settle the dispute. He wasn’t making much of an effort to push back. Internal matters were different than the hard-fought legislative battles that played out along party lines each day on the campus. Such issues inside the House were more personal and routinely defined by bipartisan agreement, with a lack of consensus defaulting to inaction. Epley offered a meager, but classically bureaucratic, compromise: the House would preserve the Awans’ emails, but for now, no one would look at them. When the meeting adjourned, no such bargain was reached for accessing data that held the key to what by all appearances were major cybersecurity violations. 

Paul Ryan wasn’t just the head of House Republicans, he was the leader of an institution with hundreds of years of precedent and a reputation to preserve. The Democrats were in the minority, but they were far more invested in shaping this case than the Republicans, who didn’t seem to know much about it.

For all Craven, Epley, and Raimo knew, the Awans might have been working for a foreign intelligence service, selling sensitive information to the highest bidder, or dealing in extortion or blackmail. Neither party in Congress seemed interested in finding out, at least not before the 2016 elections. Politics took precedence.

He moved to Manila and set up his base of operations there because it offered cheap labor for his call centers, which took orders and pushed sales. As important, the Philippines’ legal system was rife with corruption. He could buy silence. He registered a long list of Internet domains and set up a hand-crafted Black cloud of his own websites and multiple servers. A few sessions at his keyboard and he was a founder! In the New Economy, founders were rock stars. No factory, no staff, no board, no business plan—no problem.

In the tech age, all anyone needed to start a company was a good idea, and LeRoux had one. 

Pills. 

Little pastel bits of feel-good and chill were going to make him rich enough to curl up on a sofa made of currency. They were going to get him boats, cars, villas, airplanes, long-legged girls—freedom. Exactly how this stroke of genius came to him isn’t clear, but genius it was.  His timing was spot-on. He was perfectly positioned to ride the crest of a wave—a tsunami, really—that the established drug cartels didn’t see coming. In the United States, the world’s largest market for drugs, both legal and illegal, “dirty” street drugs peddled by the likes of Pablo Escobar and El Chapo were on their way out. 

Pills that looked like Willy Wonka made them were in. In 2004, according to an annual U.S. government survey, 7.2 million Americans regularly abused pharmaceuticals, double the numbe of Americans who habitually abused cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and hallucinogens combined.

William Morrow

The numbers translated to a very appealing business opportunity. There were at least 7 million very loyal potential pill buyers in the United States and probably almost as many in the rest of the world. The black market was a tiny fraction of the global pharmaceutical market, whose revenues exceeded $1 trillion in 2014, but it was big enough to generate some serious money. It was a niche, but exactly the kind of niche LeRoux was seeking—not yet saturated and plenty of room for growth.

Even better, LeRoux didn’t have to spend a dime on marketing. The pharmaceutical industry had been shaping the image of pills over many decades, lavishing many billions of dollars on ads and other promotions. (One estimate put Big Pharma ad spending at $33 billion in 2004.) Pharma ads invariably showed the product being manufactured in pristine labs and dispensed by physicians in white coats.

Healers! Nobody argued with healers.

LeRoux’s websites piggybacked on those themes. His your-pills.com website of May 14, 2005, featured a photo of a man and a woman, both in the white coats of physicians, both fair-skinned, apparently American archetypes. It promised, “Our U.S. Licensed Physicians will review your order and issue your prescription. Next, our U.S. Licensed Pharmacies will dispense, and FedEx your order discreetly using next day delivery.” LeRoux’s matrixmeds.com website for September 1, 2005, featured a photo of a movie-star-handsome man in surgical scrubs, rattling off a lot of very good reasons to buy online: “Why put up with the waiting rooms, the time off of work, the traffic, the embarrassment, and the long lines when you don’t have to!

Unlike other e-commerce pill peddlers, LeRoux did not buy pills wholesale from poorly regulated third-world sources and dispatch them to American buyers. The front-end costs for purchasing, maintaining inventory, packaging, shipping, and getting past U.S. border controls were substantial. That method needed a lot of hands and incurred a lot of risk.

Instead, he recruited a network of physicians and pharmacies inside the United States. He remained offshore as the unseen digital middleman somewhere in a cybercloud. LeRoux found he had more worries from business competitors than from law enforcement. The black market in pills was cutthroat, with rivals hacking one another’s servers, stealing customer lists, and sabotaging software. LeRoux applied his cybersecurity skills to creating elaborate defensive measures. He set up more than fifty servers in various nations, including the Philippines, Israel, and Costa Rica, and rotated them daily. When one server detected an attempted intrusion, it automatically shut down, and the traffic rotated to another server.

In 2008, just as RX Limited hit cruising speed, the business environment for Internet pharmaceutical sales started to change. In the United States, policy makers and lawmakers were beginning to recognize that abuse of prescription drugs had become a serious public health problem. In October of that year, Congress enacted the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act, named for a teenager who died after taking Vicodin, the trade name for a pharmaceutical containing hydrocodone, a prescription opioid painkiller. The legislation made it a felony to distribute a controlled substance across the Internet without a valid prescription. Although RX Limited was not selling controlled substances, the new spotlight on Internet pharmacies threatened to raise questions about RX Limited’s commercial relationships with banks that processed its credit card payments and with shipping companies.

LeRoux tried to head off deeper inquiries by carpet-bombing the banking system with subterfuges. He sent the banks fake paperwork and set up fake websites that appeared to meet the letter of the new law. When American Express and Discover demanded that online pharmaceutical sellers have valid pharmacy licenses, LeRoux signed up licensed pharmacists to front for him.

Amazingly, he managed to outsmart the Google algorithm. Google executives were trying to do their part to curb prescription drug abuse by barring questionable online pharmacies from buying keywords for the Google AdWords program, which caused advertisers’ names to pop to the top of search results. LeRoux solved this problem by identifying the IP addresses Google was using to collect information about RX Limited. He then redirected the Google probes to fake websites that omitted information that would have disqualified RX Limited from buying keywords.

DEA agents would eventually document that RX Limited shipped over 3 million prescriptions worth $300 million. 

……

Late in 2008, LeRoux set out to create a stronghold—his own small kingdom—in a part of Somalia that he judged was far off the radar of the Great Powers. “My objective in Somalia was to obtain a small territory and set myself up as a warlord, using whatever violence was necessary,” he later testified.

He had several lucrative sources of income in mind. First of all, he wanted to sell hard drugs—heroin, cocaine, meth, opioids, and whatever else the market wanted.  Through a contact in the Chinese Triad organized crime group, he arranged to acquire industrial quantities of pure North Korean crystal meth. He planned to sell the meth through intermediaries to buyers the United States, Japan and Australia and also barter it to a Colombian organization in exchange for cocaine, which fetched a high price in Asia and Australia.  

Second, LeRoux was going to green-light RX Limited sales of pharmaceutical opioids and ship them directly to customers. Call center workers said that customers in the United States were begging for the synthetic opioid, oxycodone, brand name OxyContin. It was the best-selling opioid prescription drug on the United States market. Hydrocodone, brand name Vicodin, an opioid painkiller, was almost as popular. Both were highly addictive. He would make a lot more money selling opioids. No customers were as loyal or free-spending as addicts. Pain relief trumped pleasure. Tranquilizers and sleep aids were enjoyable, but people could live without them. Addicts would give their last dollar, literally, for the drugs their bodies had to have, or suffer excruciating pangs of withdrawal.

LeRoux set out to build an Amazon-for-small-arms on the coast of Somalia. He envisioned it as a base for the biggest international arms business ever conceived. He figured war was a growth industry, generating billions of dollars, doubling and redoubling as militant bands, guerrillas, warlords, death squads, and private militias cropped up like weeds and new conflicts flared up. Wealthy people in places that weren’t in active conflict were plagued by robbers, kidnappers, and assassins. They all had to have bodyguards, and the body guards had to be equipped. He would be their supplier, no questions asked. Guns were as desirable as crack, crank, and smack. Demand would fluctuate from year to year, but it would never go away, because the postmodern, globalized world had entered an era of never-ending war. Colonial powers and authoritarian rulers had been replaced by chaos as globalization elsewhere left behind certain peoples and regions. Tribes, clans, and communities that weren’t engaged in an active conflict but might be drawn into one at any moment, wanted a stockpile of weapons for the defense of their people and territory.

LeRoux observed that guns, like drugs, were addictive. Nobody who fell in love with them could stop at just one. Powerful people wanted rooms full of them, houses full. They would build private armies just to show them off. If a warlord, political power broker or business tycoon already had an army—call it a militia, guerrilla group, gang, or security force—he or she needed to equip it.

He considered stirring up more small wars. “It’s good if countries get trouble and civil wars,” he told an aide. “It’s good for business.”

LeRoux engaged a Manila architect to draw up blueprints for a self-contained arms receiving and shipping facility on the Somali coast, with modules so that it was expandable as volume demanded. It was labeled “Forward Base Site Development Plan.” There were spaces for offices, bunkrooms, shower rooms, kitchens, and arsenals. Connected to the Somali base would be a private port, outfitted with landing craft to load and unload arms and other goods and supplies from merchant ships and bring them ashore, unseen by airport and waterfront snitches on whom intelligence services traditionally relied. Near the port, LeRoux planned to build an airstrip at least 6,500 feet long, to accommodate big cargo planes coming in from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. LeRoux intended to buy a whole fleet of old Russian and Ukrainian Antonov cargo planes to transport arms from Eastern Europe and building equipment from the United Arab Emirates. 

All that was missing was a secure supply of small arms for his inventory. On September 26, 2012, LeRoux thought he had nailed it down. That day, he met with a man he called Jack in Monrovia, Liberia. They were there to set up a meth-for-cocaine deal with a Colombian cartel representative. LeRoux was exultant because he had just heard that the Iranian Defense Industries Organization had agreed to sell to him.

“Everything we want, even bigger shit, is available in Iran,” LeRoux rejoiced. “And there’s no questions asked! They will deliver to us in any Muslim country anywhere in the world—Indonesia, for example...I mean, the stuff they have for sale is unbelievable, even s@#$  the Russians won’t sell us, we can get there, even seven-meter-long rockets the size of this room! They sent me a catalogue! It’s unbelievable, you can fricking buy whatever you want!!”

LeRoux never got a chance to place his order with Tehran. Jack was an undercover operative for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. So was the Colombian. Everything he said to both of them was on videotape. He was arrested, expelled to the custody of DEA and flown to New York to face charges. He made a plea agreement in which he admitted to dealing with Iran and North Korea, plus ordering seven murders. Hoping for leniency, he dismantled his business empire and turned state’s evidence against his hitmen and meth trafficking team. He is awaiting sentencing. 

Excerpted from "Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire" by Elaine Shannon, just published by William Morrow.

— John Adams

The New Criterion recently published a review by Michael Anton of a new book by Thomas West, The Political Theory of the American Founding. Anton’s review is entitled “Founding Philosophy.” 

Anton and West are two of the best, and The New Criterion deserves praise for publishing Anton’s thoughtful review and for highlighting West’s important book. Both the book and the review are deserving of all the acclaim that will be heaped upon them. 

Early on in his review, Anton addresses the question of how we are to understand the claim in the Declaration of Independence that we are all equal. In what way are we equal? After all, we are certainly not equal in intelligence, strength, beauty, or virtue; we do not all have the same gifts and talents.

The Declaration teaches that all men are created equal. But do we today understand equality as the Founders did?

In his book, West presents Harry Jaffa’s explanation of the Founders’ declaration that all men are created equal.  Anton puts the Jaffa/West account like this:

“The idea is elegantly simple: all men are by nature equally free and independent. Nature has not—as she has, for example, in the case of certain social insects—delineated some members of the human species as natural rulers and others as natural workers or slaves.”

This account will be familiar to any reader of Jaffa’s work. Because it was a favorite of Jaffa’s it shows up again and again in slightly different versions in his writings. Here is one: 

“The queen bee is marked out by nature for her function in the hive.  Human queens (or kings) are not so marked.  Their rule is conventional, not natural.  As we have seen Jefferson say, human beings are not born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them.”

Jaffa’s now iconic account of equality is true and important, and a tenet of my own civic faith. The claim can even be made that it has established a reasonably secure beachhead on the vast continent of America’s forgetting of the thinking of the American founders.

Because Jaffa’s account is so well established perhaps the time is ripe for a look into its history and logic to find out what more we can learn, to discover if we can expand the beachhead that Jaffa achieved.

Jaffa’s neither booted nor saddled image has a splendid pedigree. Here is the Jefferson quote Jaffa refers to:

“All eyes are open to or opening to…the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”  

Jefferson in his turn had borrowed the metaphor. It was made famous by Richard Rumbold. Rumbold was a British subject executed for his political views in 1685, shortly before Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. In his famous “Speech from the Gallows", he declared:

“I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”

To us, Jefferson’s words have a very clear meaning: that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few [born] booted and spurred” means human beings are not born subject to the rule of monarchs and aristocrats who have political power by right of birth.

Although Rumbold said “none comes into the world with a saddle on his back [nor does anyone come into this world] booted and spurred”, he uses the image in service of a very different political vision than Jefferson’s—and ours. In the same speech, just before his execution, Rumbold denies that he is “antimonarchical”:

“It was ever my thoughts that kingly government was the best of all where justly executed; I mean, such as it was by our ancient laws—that is, a king, and a legal, free-chosen Parliament—the king having, as I conceive, power enough to make him great; the people also as much property as to make them happy; they being, as it were, contracted to one another!”

The Glorious Revolution which followed soon after Rumbold’s execution did not put an end to monarchy in Britain, nor did it even seek to end monarchy. Neither it nor Rumbold were “antimonarchical.” The Glorious Revolution kept the monarchy, and brought in William and Mary in order to put the monarchy on a new, improved basis. The new arrangement included the Bill of Rights and other reforms that put some limits on royal power. The intent was kingly government, as Rumbold’s said, “justly executed.”

You might think that Rumbold and those who carried out the Glorious Revolution were simply unwilling to confront the obvious conclusion that if none are born to rule and none are born to be ruled by others born to rule, then the world was done with government by monarchs and titled aristocrats. And you would be right.

The traditional British unwillingness to stray very far from their tradition becomes somewhat understandable when you consider what happened when the French got around to having their revolution. The French Enlightenment exalted abstract reason. Consequently, the French revolutionaries were perfectly willing to draw the logical conclusion that the time for monarchy and the aristocracy was over. As a result, the French Revolution was decorated with human heads displayed on pikes. The French traded monarchial tyranny for the tyranny of the Jacobin mobocracy and eventually the tyranny of Napoleon. The French actually voted to make Napoleon their emperor, in effect choosing to put saddles on their backs and to be ridden by those booted and spurred and ready to ride them.

But the Americans did not establish a new monarchy like the British nor did they fail catastrophically and then in defeat humiliate themselves by choosing a new and even worse tyranny. The Americans drew the conclusion embedded in Rumbold’s metaphor, and went on to create a regime of liberty unlike anything that had existed before. Because Jefferson was thinking differently, the booted and saddled image meant something different to him than it did to Rumbold.

What made the difference in America? Unalienable rights, of course. The “palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred” alone does not get you to the American founders’ idea of equality. To get to the American idea of equality you must introduce unalienable rights. 

After all, what was the idea at the core of the American founding? Was it not the Founders’ radically new understanding of our rights? According to George Washington, the American founding occurred at a time “when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period.” Alexander Hamilton put it like this:

“The sacred rights of mankind are…written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” 

The new understanding of the rights of mankind that electrified the Founders was the idea of unalienable rights.  Jefferson, Adams, and the other Founders were all about unalienable rights. According to the Founders, our unalienable rights, as Adams wrote in the quote at the head of this article, are “natural’ and “essential.”

The important point if we are to understand the Founders is that unalienable rights are fundamentally different from the kind of rights conferred by the British Bill of Rights. After the Glorious Revolution put an end to the Stuart dynasty, rights were granted to the British people by a royal sovereign as a condition of him becoming their new king. The British awarded the throne to William of Orange—who was from the Netherlands—and his co-monarch wife Mary on the condition that William agreed to a Bill of Rights as part of the deal.

The American founders had a very different conception of rights. Unalienable rights are not rights granted by a ruler as part of a political bargain but are natural and essential and inherent to each individual human being. 

The French revolutionaries did not follow the example of the Americans on unalienable rights. Instead, they followed the political doctrine of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Rousseau’s political vision, everyone surrenders all their rights and submits to the general will which then creates and maintains absolute equality. Everyone and everything must be subject to the general will. What is required, Rousseau wrote, is “the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community.” 

Unalienable rights would have made it possible for the British and safe for the French to confront the absurdity of hereditary power.

It is all there in the Declaration:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…"

Note that unalienable rights get the greater share of attention—twenty-one words as opposed to six and two complete clauses instead of one. That reflects the Founders’ special emphasis on unalienable rights.

The problem for us is that living as we do on that dark continent of forgetting we see even this statement which we all know through a glass darkly. What to do? I propose to disassemble into its elements and then re-assemble in order to give it the opportunity to speak to us afresh. Let’s first consider the elements and then the structure. 

Listing the elements gives us these four:

Self-evident truths

Created equal

Unalienable rights

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

Restoring the structure and making the structure graphically evident, we get:

Self-evident truths

1. that we are all equal

2. that we all have unalienable rights

3. that among those unalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

However, 3 simply offers examples of unalienable rights.  Consequently, 2 and 3 can be shown like this:

2.  that we have unalienable rights

a. examples are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Putting this together, we get:

Self-evident truths

1. that we are all equal

2. that we all have unalienable rights

a. examples are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Let us note in passing that in the Declaration, “self-evident truths” occupies the highest position.  Setting aside that fascinating discussion for now, our layout of the elements makes it clear that that we are all equal and that we all have unalienable rights can now be placed side-by-side precisely as they are in the Adams quote with which we began:

We are all equal. We all have unalienable rights.

These truths are two sides of the same coin.  For the American founders, we are all equal in that we all possess unalienable rights equally; these two truths are at heart one truth:

We are all equal. We all possess unalienable rights equally.

This way of relating our equality and our possession of unalienable rights provides a very precise definition to the Founders’ idea of equality. Endowed equally with unalienable rights by our Creator, we are created equal.

By the way, the Founders learned to think about our rights in terms of alienability/unalienability from the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson. Here is Hutcheson on rights: “Our rights are either alienable or unalienable.” His book, A System of Moral Philosophy, arrived in 1755, just in time to influence the thinking of the founders.  When Hutcheson turns in that book to discussing equality—he calls it “natural equality”—he also takes up a version of the Rumbold image, minus the boots and saddles:

“Had providence intended that some men should have a perfect right to govern the rest without their consent, we should have had as visible undisputed marks distinguishing these rulers from others as clearly as the human shape distinguishes men from beasts.”   

It is interesting to note that his most precise statement regarding our equality makes it clear that we are naturally equal because our natural rights belong equally to all:

“The natural equality of men consists chiefly in this, that these natural rights belong equally to all.”

Why “chiefly”? Because, of course, any account of our natural equality must also include the absence of “visible undisputed marks distinguishing…rulers from others.” But our natural equality mainly, principally, primarily consists in our equal possession of our natural and unalienable rights.

The Founders understood that the golden coin of natural liberty has two sides, on one side our natural equality and on the other our unalienable rights. According to the standard set by the Declaration, creating a regime of liberty meant the Founders had to design a system of government which, unlike the British regime of the time, would recognize our natural equality, and which, unlike the various attempts of the French, would secure our unalienable rights. That was the challenge laid down by the Declaration and the task taken up by the men who gathered in Philadelphia and crafted the Constitution.

“We the People” no longer understand equality—the moral and natural touchstone of our experiment in self government. Consequently, we are in danger of losing the Founders’ gift, our republic of liberty. Equality decoupled from strong individual rights inevitably results in the despotism that has occurred everywhere it has been tried. Abandoning the Declaration Standard according to which our natural equality and our unalienable rights define each other has made it possible for the enemies of natural liberty to substitute a counterfeit, now in wide circulation in our nation. This debased coin of the political realm is easy to recognize. On one side, there is the debased understanding of equality; it claims to legitimate the redistribution of wealth, robbing Peter to pay Paul. On the other side, in the place of unalienable rights, there are the dictates of political correctness; they more and more determine which of our thoughts and feelings are forbidden and which are required. Americans who accept this counterfeit without protest do so because they have forgotten or never knew the look and feel of the real thing.

Our only salvation is a return to the Founders’ common sense understanding of natural equality and unalienable rights.

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea, from Encounter Books.

After the Flight 93 Election by Michael Anton

Encounter Books

"A Hillary Clinton presidency," wrote author Publius Decius Mus, "is Russian roulette with a semi-auto." A vote for the Donald, at very least meant "spinning the cylinder and taking your chance." Hopefully more.

To the guardians of conservative thought, the piece provided the intellectual justification for a Trump presidency that they had, until then, successfully squashed. 

Rush Limbaugh picked it up and ran with it, reading the entire essay on the air. Ambivalent conservatives jumped on the Trump train. Trump took the White House. And that's the story of the essay that launched a presidency.

OK, perhaps Decius did not directly secure Trump's victory, but the deeply vindictive critiques that erupted (and continue to flare up) over 'Flight 93' suggest that the essay really did matter: in cracking elite conservatism's mesmeric hold over the right and in signaling the seemingly overnight decline in relevance of its name brand influencers. 

Following a stint as deputy assistant to President Trump, Michael Anton (the artist formerly known Publius Decius Mus) fleshes out his 'Flight 93' thinking in After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose. Drawing on "the foundational principles of the American and Western traditions", Anton serves his never-Trump critics what he describes as a "positive" vision for Trumpism. 

But with another binary choice on the horizon, Anton's fundamental "charge the cockpit or you die" philosophy may well endure as the galvanizing electoral principle for conservatives in 2020, despite the continued protestations of his twittering enemies. 

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“The liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science,” Machen wrote—he disliked the term “liberalism” to describe the obsequious attitude he inveighed against, but there was no convenient alternative—“has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene.” His aim in writing the book was not to show that Christianity shed of the supernatural was a bad thing, though he thought it was. His aim, rather, was to show that it was a form of mere uplift and not Christianity at all. To the extent that Christianity adopted “liberal” positions on its distinctive doctrines, Machen felt, it relinquished any claim to authority or purpose. Western nations had no shortage of institutions trying breathlessly to align themselves with dominant cultural trends. There was no need for another.

The publication of Christianity and Liberalism occasioned an uproar in the large Protestant denominations of the Northeast and Midwest and marked an early fray in the ongoing conflict between conservative and liberal, or orthodox and progressive, interpreters of the Christian religion—a conflict in which neither side has always acquitted itself with honor and charity but one in which the disputed principles were, and remain, important. Whatever else may be said about this long struggle and its many ugly controversies, Machen’s argument has largely been vindicated: His hermeneutical assumptions have been derided as regressive and naive by the most esteemed scholars of Europe and North America for a nearly a century, but liberal Protestant denominations find themselves in more or less the situation he foresaw: dwindling in numbers, without influence, bereft even of the respectability they believed they had purchased. 

I thought repeatedly of Machen’s insurrectionist little book as I read Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. Mahoney is a Roman Catholic and accordingly his book is concerned with institutional corruption rather than the integrity of doctrinal belief, but his aim is strikingly akin to Machen’s: He is less interested in arguing that the social progressivism embraced by the Catholic Church’s enlightened elite is in itself a bad thing than in insisting that it’s something altogether other than Christianity.

Mahoney gives a name to the heresy passing itself off as Christianity, and to my mind it’s about as unsatisfactory as “liberalism” was for yesterday’s Christian materialists: humanitarianism, or “the religion of humanity.” The word “humanitarianism” suggests inner city soup kitchens and aid workers handing out medical supplies in third-world countries, but Mahoney has reasons for his choice of terms. Humanitarianism in this sense holds that the Christian’s highest and, perhaps, only duty is to exhibit compassion and fellow-feeling toward humanity as a whole. The humanitarian’s chief concern is with humanity in the abstract, the supposed plight of faraway peoples of whom the humanitarian likely has little or no direct knowledge. Humanitarianism looks with suspicion on any attitude or religion that treats one’s own family, church, neighborhood, city, or country with special affection. “Good works, humanitarian works, are welcomed, of course, but one can love Humanity through a vague and undemanding sentimentality, Mahoney writes. “Loving real human beings is another matter altogether.”

The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity

Encounter Books

That may sound like a merely stupid failing—an obsession, say, with injustices done to illegal immigrants thousands of miles away but hatred for one’s neighbor who takes a different view—but Mahoney contends that religious humanitarianism is much worse than that. As the citizen’s love and loyalty attach less and less to those nearest to him and more and more to an abstract and idealized agglomeration of “humanity,” social bonds loosen and politics itself becomes meaningless. Political activity can only take place within defined groupings of people; there can be no negotiation or arbitration among members of an otherwise undefined humanity.

This is of course not a new concern; the principle of subsidiarity, the belief that social or other problems are best handled by the people nearest to them and not by faraway authorities, is an old one in Catholic social teaching and has a central place in Anglo-American conservatism. Mahoney draws on the works of the the contemporary French philosopher Pierre Manent, the Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai, the Russian theologian and literary critic Vladimir Soloviev, the American journalist Orestes Brownson, and the great Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn to elucidate the ways in which Catholic laymen, intellectuals, and authorities—very much including Pope Francis—are allowing a desiccated humanitarianism to take the place of the Christian gospel itself. They are, as Machen complained about liberal Protestants a century ago, dutifully taking their orders from sages and experts who have only contempt for Christianity and so relinquishing the very thing they mean to preserve: their own relevance.

Perhaps the most direct and salient critic of the tendency to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian message is Benedict XVI. Mahoney analyzes the second volume of Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, in which he contends that the Pope Emeritus reflects on the Devil’s first temptation of Jesus in the wilderness—“If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” It was in essence, Benedict thinks, a suggestion that Jesus drop his salvific mission and replace it with a kind of political-humanitarian one. An easy solution to the problem of world hunger! Marxists would have called it an excellent suggestion and Jesus a fool for rejecting it. (An added note: Later Jesus did produce food for the hungry in a miraculous way, but he did so for people he could see and speak to, not as a signal of his virtue for the benefit of humans in general without regard to their hearts or circumstances.)

Among the greatest publicists of the humanitarian religion was Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, recall, took a literalistic reading of the Sermon on the Mount’s injunction to “resist not evil” to its logically ludicrous conclusion: pacifism, the nonsense philosophy that values the lives of faraway belligerents over the lives of the pacifist’s neighbors and countrymen. Mahoney relays a wonderful passage in Solzhenitsyn’s November 1916 (the second part of The Red Wheel) in which Father Severyan remarks that Tolstoy raided the Gospels for his own purposes and was no Christian at all. This shocks his young interlocutor, who, influenced by Tolstoy, can think of nothing worse than war. The priest responds that there are many things worst than war:

“An unjust trial, for instance, that scalds the outraged heart, is viler,” he says. “Or murder for gain, when the solitary murderer fully understands the implications of what he means to do and all that the victim will suffer at the moment of the crime. Or the ordeal at the hands of a torturer. When you can neither cry out nor fight back nor attempt to defend yourself. Or treacher on the part of someone you trusted. Or mistreatment of widows or orphans. All these things are spiritually dirtier and more terrible than war.”

Father Severyan takes this view both because war is necessary to the human condition and because without it there is no possibility of checking an aggressor. Tolstoy’s embrace of humanity in the abstract led him and his many admirers to formulate a philosophy that leaves innocent people of flesh and blood without defense. 

I recall a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Barbara Boxer in 1990 in which the California senator urged against using military force to push Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Boxer read lines from the song “From a Distance,” made popular that year by Bette Middler. “From a distance,” Boxer intoned, “you look like my friend / Even though we are at war / From a distance / I just cannot comprehend / What all this fighting’s for.” It was a preposterous and shameful oration, but it must have made perfect sense to Boxer and her allies: War can never be just because, considered in the abstract—“from a distance”—our enemies look just like ourselves. In a sense, the religion of humanity sees everything from a remote distance. How blessed are we that—at least according to the Christian gospel—God doesn’t regard us with the same aloof, theoretical concern.

Bad habits are hard to change, and even harder when America no longer has a meaningful public culture. Tocqueville talked about it this way:

Epochs sometimes occur in the life of a nation when the old customs of a people are changed, public morality is destroyed...and the spell of tradition broken....The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens....The country is lost to their senses,...and they retire into a narrow and unenlightened ­selfishness....In this predicament to retreat is impossible, for a people cannot recover the sentiments of their youth any more than a man can return to the innocent tastes of childhood; such things may be regretted but they cannot be renewed. They must go forward and accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever.

Our predicament is uncomfortable. Our political muscles have atrophied. The parties are inbred, with values and ideologies that are diametrically opposed to what’s needed to support a practical society. But Americans are restless and demanding change, so the status quo is not an option either.

It’s little consolation that we brought it on ourselves. We tried to create a kind of automatic government, where lots of rules and processes would obviate our need to stand for particular values, or, indeed, even to pay attention. Now those supposedly neutral mechanisms are crowding out our freedoms and causing failure. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner. Every year the corner of our freedom gets ever smaller.

That’s why Americans want to burst out. But we can’t just wrap ourselves in a patriotic flag and expect shared values to permeate our culture. We need to figure this out anew, and revive a sense of personal ownership in public choices and activities.

A new governing vision grounded in human responsibility, with citizens and officials aspiring to meet public goals in their own ways, could achieve Tocqueville’s proposal for a “union of private with public interests.” But liberating people to take responsibility is not all that’s needed. Letting people make public decisions requires a common frame of reference by which to discuss the fairness of choices, and to resolve differences by reference to shared moral principles.

Americans no longer have a shared sense of public morality. That too has atrophied. We no longer know what we’re supposed to believe. A kind of moral anarchy has descended upon the land. Moral debate is dominated by fringe groups and fanatics, with no keel to keep debate centered on the common good.

We no longer believe in belief. We’ve been indoctrinated into believing in moral neutrality. At every level of society, people feel uncomfortable making what are pejoratively known as “value judgments.” It is mandatory for judges seeking confirmation, for example, to kneel before the altar of complete neutrality and promise that they will not “make the rules” but only “apply them,” as if justice were a multiple-choice test.

Relativism is practically a religion on campus, with the notable exception, of course, that victimhood is put high on a pedestal. When a friend who is a sociology professor asked his students to judge which was better—the nurturing curriculum of Montessori schools versus the relentless high-pressure Korean schools—the students reacted against making that “value judgment,” even when presented with higher rates of suicide and other pathologies among Korean students.

For several decades now, thoughtful observers such as Michael Sandel have explained why moral neutrality is not only a myth but a scourge of a free society which causes our virtues to degenerate. People who want to do good have no moral authority to overcome selfishness: Who are you to judge?

Contrary to conventional wisdom, morality is not merely a matter of personal belief. Morality is the mortar of a healthy society. Man must be moral, Durkheim emphasized, “because he lives in society.” Morality infuses social dealings with mutual trust. People are able to achieve more when they trust others to abide by shared norms of fairness, such as the Golden Rule directive to “do unto others...” Truthfulness is essential for trust. Norms of sharing and restraint are essential for stewardship of scarce common resources—including protecting clean air and water, and allocating finite public budgets in schools and government.

A culture of people aspiring to do what’s right will have more “social capital.” Social capital is like money in the bank. Mutual trust in a shared vision inspires people. It gives meaning to activities independent of economic considerations. You can do so much more with yourself, and with your community, and everyone else can as well. Cultures with more social capital, such as the Centers for Disease Control where employees volunteer for hazardous assignments, are able to achieve high levels of institutional performance and personal fulfillment.

Every joint activity depends upon shared values. “Between ‘can do’ and ‘may do,’ ” a British law lord once observed, “exist[s] the whole realm which recognizes the sway of duty, fairness, sympathy, taste and all the other things that make life beautiful and society possible.”

Adherence to moral virtues was considered by the Framers as an essential element of a successful democracy. They were explicit about the human tendency towards selfishness, and created a framework where people would act as checks on each other. But they also understood that people want to do good, and believed that the success of democracy hinged on shared social values putting the common good ahead of selfish goals. “Only a virtuous people,” Benjamin Franklin observed, “are capable of freedom.” Thomas Jefferson suggested that we must affirmatively enforce good values: “No government can continue good but under the controul of the people...encoraged in habits of virtue, & deterred from those of vice.” 

Conventional wisdom is that Americans no longer share the same values. Indeed, people do have many differences in values—including work habits, ways of communicating, humor, attire, political views, and, above all, different cultural traditions.

The core values needed for a healthy society, however, are not optional. These are values of truthfulness, reciprocity, and loyalty to the common good. We must demand them in all social dealings, and hold accountable those who refuse to abide by them.

American culture has frayed in large part because we made those core values optional. Disabling moral judgments about right and wrong has steadily dissipated America’s social capital. Here is what moral neutrality has unleashed in America:

A culture of selfishness.

Public selfishness, Edmund Burke believed, spells the end of free society: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”

The supposedly neutral rules of correctness have transformed law into a vehicle for self-interest. The rights revolution, for example, has degenerated into demands for personal gain. How did it happen that lousy teachers have a “right” to keep teaching our children? What about the students’ rights?

Selfishness is a contagious disease. Once people start grabbing for themselves, others do as well. Distrust replaces sharing and helpfulness. Distrust breeds fear, causing people to act defensively instead of feeling free to act on their best judgment. People retreating into defensive foxholes lose their sense of ownership for society. The common enterprise starts to disintegrate. “A brackish tide of pessimism,” columnist David Brooks observes, “turns into passivity,” and “people are quick to decide that longstanding problems...are intractable and not really worth taking on.” 

Overgrazing the commons.

A moral society requires fidelity to the future. As Frederick Douglass put it, “You have no right to enjoy...the labors of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors.”

Washington no longer feels a duty of responsible stewardship for the future. Budget deficits mean that our children will pay the tab for Washington’s refusal to fix wasteful programs. Obsolete programs stay in place because, well, some interest groups want to keep them. We are living on infrastructure built by our grandparents and great-grandparents, and can’t modernize it because Democrats won’t cut red tape and Republicans won’t raise taxes to fund it.

Political debate is about self-interest, not competing visions of the common good. Politics “lacks moral resonance,” as Michael Sandel puts it, and is replaced by appeals to personal gain. Republicans claim that tax cuts will stimulate the economy, but the subtext is that tax cuts will help rich supporters. Democrats argue that individual rights are critical for a just society, but what they really mean is that they will help public unions and other political supporters. Absolutist policy positions deny the need for balance—“No New Taxes!” is the natural companion to “Give Me My Rights!“

The irresponsibility of political leaders is matched by the anti-responsibility of civil servants. Officials worry about avoiding blame instead of getting things done. The surest way to get in trouble is to actually do something. Far safer to retreat into legal process. The proposed new power line is needed to access wind power, but who will defend the official when the farmers complain about unsightly power poles? Better to do a few thousand more pages of environmental review.

Washington has sold out the future of our society. We are living off the investments of our ancestors, while bequeathing our children the debt of our profligate entitlements. Without a vocabulary of public morality, few people even pay attention. Advocates of fiscal restraint, such as Pete Peterson and Paul Volcker, are politely ignored.

What you believe doesn’t matter.

Most people want to do what’s right, and feel pride in their work and in their role in the community. But morality needs to be honored, not treated as a foolhardy gesture by the weak. All around us, in politics, in the community, and in social media, we see people with antisocial values who are not called to account. People demand as much as possible for themselves, without regard for others. Bad attitudes, bad morals, and untruthfulness have no consequences. Self-absorbed people have a kind of competition for the greatest narcissist. The Kardashians are famous for...being famous. 

Relativism grew out of justifiable guilt over bad social values, such as racism and gender discrimination. We were taught, as Michael Polanyi put it, that “to refrain from belief is always an act of intellectual probity.” But what we accomplished was not a fairer society, but one dominated by groups more than willing to fill the vacuum with their own values. “Fundamentalists rush in,” as Michael Sandel put it, “where liberals fear to tread.”

Relativism is an abdication of basic norms needed for a civilized society. The goal was to replace bad values with neutral rules, but this amorality opened the door to selfishness and inevitably degenerated into immorality. The erosion of mutual trust unleashed a downward spiral of destructive conduct. At this point, facts have lost their authority. Disregard for reality is not confined to fringe groups in their echo chambers—whether right-wing extremists or public unions defending indefensible abuses. Flagrant falsehood is now an accepted technique of partisan debate by our political leaders, including, profligately, by President Trump. When what’s true doesn’t matter, all basis for social trust disappears. American culture is transformed into an “anti-culture.” The harm is not just to our public institutions, but, ultimately, to our own ability to function effectively in society. Hannah Arendt explained: “The result of a consistent...substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted...but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world...is being destroyed.”  

Try Common Sense by Philip K. Howard

W.W. Norton

Reviewed:

Kirkus: 'For more than two decades, Howard ('The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government', 2014, etc.) has offered viable solutions for more effective democracy, and his latest book is right in line with his efforts to invoke long-overdue change in our stagnant, dysfunctional political culture. “America needs a governing framework that reconnects real people with actual results,” he writes. Though there are countless calls for Washington to produce more laws and better rules, this only complicates an already dense morass of legislative overkill. “Government’s abject failure to make practical choices is not a matter of dispute,” writes Howard, continuing, “Republicans call for deregulation. Democrats call for more regulation and more funding. Meanwhile the actual cause of the failure, the inability to be sensible in actual situations, is demonstrated to Americans on a daily basis.” But mere tweaks won’t be sufficient; the government needs an overhaul. Wishful thinking? Not according to Howard.' Read the full review.

Interviewed:

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“[I]f I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened,’” Solzhenitsyn continued. “And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century,” including in the rest of the world, “here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: ‘Men have forgotten God.’”

The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity

Encounter Books

Now, more than 35 years after Solzhenitsyn’s momentous Templeton remarks, Assumption College professor Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity similarly forthrightly labels and harshly critiques the self-regarding humanitarianism of our time, the “religion of humanity.” In this religion, according to Mahoney, modern man is the measure of all things—as opposed to transcendence, which one might normally expect in a religion. In our century, across the globe, more men have forgotten God.

Modern man is so much the measure in this religion, Mahoney respectfully argues, that it has now sadly come to corrupt Christianity itself. Essentially, even Christians are forgetting God. Confusion caused by Pope Francis’s pronouncements, moreover—basically borne of left-wing humanitarianism and egalitarianism as they are—do not help improve their memory.

Russian Tough-Mindedness

Mahoney cites Solzhenitsyn’s ’83 Templeton lecture in The Idol of Our Age, and parts of Mahoney’s larger argument in the book also share other points made by Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008. In particular, Mahoney urges that Solzhenitsyn’s final novel, the “treasure that is The Red Wheel (Solzhenitsyn always considered it to be his most significant work) … become better known as the years go by.” A series of works, The Red Wheel evidences Solzhenitsyn’s “tough-minded Christianity,” which is hard on “the pacifistic distortion” of it by revolutionaries.

Elsewhere in The Idol of Our Age, Mahoney describes, relies upon, and attempts to revive the congruent thinking of another, earlier, lesser-known Russian intellectual, Vladimir Soloviev.  The enigmatic and learned novelist, philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic, who favored healing the schism between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, died in 1900 at age 47.

In particular, Mahoney provides a close reading of and commentary on Soloviev’s A Short Tale of the Antichrist—“a masterpiece of world literature” that is “perhaps the most powerful and profound exploration of the humanitarian subversion of Christianity ever written,” according to Mahoney. A Short Tale is a biography of Superman, the anti-Christ, who is beautiful, spiritually powerful, and claims to bring paradise to Earth.

Soloviev’s aim with the book is to expose “the world-unifying power of the Antichrist,” as he describes in its preface, quoted by Mahoney. He “will speak loud and with high-sounding words,” according to Soloviev, and he will “cast a glittering veil of good and truth over the mystery of utter lawlessness.” He will “promote a moralistic falsification or corruption of the Gospel,” in Mahoney’s words. Basically, he will help lead us to the forgetting of God.

Tough-minded and powerful indeed.

Philanthropy and Human Dignity

Interestingly, along with many other relevant characteristics, “Soloviev presents the Antichrist as a humanitarian benefactor and ‘philanthropist,’” in Mahoney’s summary. The demonic antihero’s plan, seductively outlined in a tract entitled The Open Path to Peace and Prosperity, is “a philanthropic project.”

“We are not accustomed, when it comes to philanthropy, to this kind of talk—or, really, to any kind of negativity at all,” notes Jeremy Beer, writing in 2014 about Orestes Brownson. (Mahoney’s book also features Brownson, who once claimed that Satan’s “favorite guise in modern times is that of philanthropy.”)

Vladimir Soloviev

Wikipedia Commons

Soloviev’s Antichrist figure in A Short Tale is prideful and narcissistic by nature, and thus easily yields to temptations. Philanthropists, being humans, are susceptible to feeling the same pride, to the same self-obsession. This vanity seems to be in the very nature of the philanthropic enterprise.

A Short Tale’s Superman is also materialistic, seeing much value in discrete things and pleasures. Philanthropists can too easily see value in the material, as well—in the assets at their disposal and the distribution of beneficence at their behest. Soloviev’s villain is presentist, too, preferring the moment over eternity. Similarly, philanthropists are often presentists, seeking and loudly touting immediate or short-term ends rather than the transcendent. “Time flies, eternity waits,” as the aphorism goes.

Whether stated as starkly as the apocalyptic Soloviev does or not, there are strong temptations in philanthropy, too—and whether one is a religiously informed philanthropist or not. Some Solovievan and Solzhenitsynian tough-mindedness can help overcome those temptations, to good effect.

As Solzhenitsyn lamented in 1983, absent such toughness, there can be other, highly tragic effects. “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” As Mahoney argues in The Idol of Our Age, humanitarianism’s prideful placing of the material and the present over the transcendent is happening again, now.

“Humanitarianism subverts human dignity,” Mahoney observes, “when it identifies our highest aspirations with a peace and prosperity, a godless philanthropy, shorn of any concern for that which transcends humanity and which ultimately grounds our dignity as human beings.”

These are temptations, as Mahoney warns. Tough-mindedly, as Solzhenitsyn urges, we should all remember—to overcome them, and how and why. With humility, a broad worldview, and a long-term timeline, as underscored by Soloviev, philanthropy and philanthropists in particular should sure remember. 

Daniel P. Schmidt is the retired vice president for program at The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. Michael E. Hartmann is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Strategic Giving at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. He is a former program officer and director of research at the Bradley Foundation.

The Patch by John McPhee

Macmillan

Reviewed:

National Review: One of McPhee’s talents is noticing something and nudging it toward an essay. Consider the winding, endless line at Radio City Music Hall, “doubling and redoubling upon itself through a maze of sawhorses set up by New York police.” Or the first time McPhee drank. It was whiskey, and he was ten years old, playing sandlot football on a vacant lot at the university. The games had an unlikely spectator: “Walking to work from his house on Mercer Street, Albert Einstein, leonine and sockless, would stop for a while to watch the action.” 

His subjects are eclectic, and his range is impressive: Mensa meetings, Richard Burton, the etymology of the word “notion,” playing basketball with legendary Princeton coach Pete Carril, learning from an altimeter specialist, and a summer spent in Alaska. Dis­cussing the last, he tucks a lament near the end of his book: “To become absorbed in an almost total way with a people and a place and then suddenly to be cut off from those people, except through the mail, is something that could be listed among the liabilities of the writing life.” Read the full review.

The San Francisco Chronicle: "The “Album Quilt” is made up of little time bombs of writing that come from throughout his writing career, but many seemingly from the early years. How else to explain such lines as this one, characterizing Barbra Streisand’s nose: “It starts at the summit of her hive-piled hair and ends where a trombone reaches pedal B flat”? The subject matter can appear out of the blue — “The age of oared ships lasted three thousand years” — or start in midstream: “He was a tall man of swift humor whose generally instant responses reached far into memory and wide for analogy.” The brief biographical pieces have the fine lines of a cameo and highlight some aspect of Peter O’Toole, Mort Sahl, Peter Sellers, Joan Baez, Jenny Lind, Marion Davies and Richard Burton, among others." Read the full review.

Interviewed:

Excerpt:

Pools and pools and pools of chocolate—fifty-thousand-pound, ninety-thousand-pound, Olympic-length pools of chocolate—in the conching rooms in the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Big, aromatic rooms. Chocolate, as far as the eye can see. Viscous, undulating, lukewarm chocolate, viscidized, undulated by the slurping friction of granite rollers rolling through the chocolate over crenellated granite beds at the bottoms of the pools. The chocolate moves. It stands up in brown creamy dunes. Chocolate eddies. Chocolate currents. Gulfs of chocolate. Chocolate deeps. Mares’ tails on the deeps. The world record for the fifty-yard free-style would be two hours and ten minutes.

Slip a little spatula in there and see how it tastes. Waxy? Claggy? Gritty? Mild? Taste it soft. That is the way to get the flavor. Conching—granite on granite, deep in the chocolate—ordinarily continues for seventy-two hours, but if Bill Wagner thinks the flavor is not right, he will conch for hours extra, or even an extra day. Milky? Coarse? Astringent? Caramely? For forty-five years, Bill Wagner has been tasting the chocolate. His taste buds magnified a hundred times would probably look like Hershey’s kisses. He is aging now, and is bent slightly forward—a slender man, with gray hair and some white hair. His eyeglasses have metal rims and dark plastic brows. He wears thin white socks and brown shoes, black trousers, a white shirt with the company’s name on it in modest letters. Everyone wears a hat near the chocolate. Most are white paper caps. Wagner’s hat is dapper, white, visored: a chocolate-making supervisor’s linen hat.

For forty-five years, Bill Wagner has been tasting the chocolate. His taste buds magnified a hundred times would probably look like Hershey’s kisses.
A man in a paper hat comes up and asks Wagner, “Are we still running tests on that kiss paste?”

“Yes. You keep testing.”

Wagner began in cocoa, in 1924. The dust was too much for him. After a few weeks, he transferred to conching. He has been conching ever since, working out the taste and texture. Conching is the alchemy of the art, the transmutation of brown paste into liquid Hershey bars. Harsh? Smooth? Fine? Bland? There are viscosimeters and other scientific instruments to aid the pursuit of uniformity, but the ultimate instrument is Wagner. “You do it by feel, and by taste,” he says. “You taste for flavor and for fineness—whether it’s gritty. There’s one area of your tongue you’re more confident in than others. I use the front end of my tongue and the roof of my mouth.” He once ate some Nestlé’s; he can’t remember when. He lays some chocolate on the tip of his tongue and presses it upward. The statement that sends ninety thousand pounds on its way to be eaten is always the same. Wagner’s buds blossom, and he says, “That’s Hershey’s.”

Milton Hershey’s native town was originally called Derry Church, and it was surrounded, as it still is, by rolling milkland. Hershey could not have been born in a better place, for milk is twenty per cent of milk chocolate. Bill Wagner grew up on a farm just south of Derry Church. “It was a rented farm. We didn’t own a farm until 1915. I lived on the farm through the Second World War. I now live in town.” Wagner’s father, just after 1900, had helped Milton Hershey excavate the limestone bedrock under Derry Church to establish the foundations of the chocolate plant. Derry Church is Hershey now, and its main street, Chocolate Avenue, has streetlamps shaped like Hershey’s kisses—tinfoil, tassel, and all. The heart of town is the corner of Chocolate and Cocoa. Other streets (Lagos, Accra, Para) are named for the places the beans come from, arriving in quotidian trains full of beans that are roasted and, in studied ratios, mixed together—base beans, flavor beans, African beans, American beans—and crushed by granite millstones arranged in cascading tiers, from which flow falls of dark cordovan liquor. This thick chocolate liquor is squeezed mechanically in huge cylindrical accordion compressors. Clear cocoa butter rains down out of the compressors. When the butter has drained off, the compressors open, and out fall dry brown disks the size of manhole covers. The disks are broken into powder. The powder is put into cans and sold. It is Hershey’s Cocoa—straight out of the jungle and off to the supermarket, pure as the purest sunflower seed in a whole-earth boutique.

Concentrate fresh milk and make a paste with sugar. To two parts natural chocolate liquor add one part milk-and-sugar paste and one part pure cocoa butter. Conch for three days and three nights. That, more or less, is the recipe for a Hershey bar. (Baking chocolate consists of nothing but pure chocolate liquor allowed to stand and harden in molds. White chocolate is not really chocolate. It is made from milk, sugar, and cocoa butter, but without cocoa.) In the conching rooms, big American flags hang from beams above the chocolate. “Touch this,” Bill Wagner says. The cast-iron walls that hold in the chocolate are a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit. “We have no heat under this. It’s only created heat—created by the friction that the granite rollers produce.”

“What if the rollers stop?”

“The chocolate will freeze.”

Read the full excerpt.

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Random House

was the provider of enormous amounts of information, all through the 1970s, the Reagan years, the Gorbachev-Reagan-Thatcher friendship, the development of glasnost, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of Russia. Although Gordievsky has written his own memoir about his years as a spy, he now lives under a new name in Britain. Nobody has ever interviewed all the British people who were involved in running the Gordievsky operation, until now.

Ben Macintyre has not had access to the MI6 archives, because they are sealed. But he has been allowed to interview absolutely everyone who worked on running Gordievsky, and it’s an incredible read. It’s like a truly rip-roaring piece of the absolutely best spy fiction.' 

David Ignatius, Washington Post: 'The Spy and the Traitor arrives at a moment when the machinations of Russian intelligence (election meddling, Internet manipulation, assassination by poison) are the subjects of almost daily news stories. Russia and its ex-KGB president seem brutally dominant in the intelligence sphere. Ben Macintyre offers a refreshing reversal of that theme: In this story, it’s the Russians who get turned inside out by a British mole. It’s the Kim Philby case, in reverse.

The subtitle of Macintyre’s latest real-life spy thriller calls it “The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.” Like pretty much everything in this fine book, the description is accurate.'  Read the full review.

The Guardian: 'Over the past decade, from his breakout success with Agent Zigzag to his biography of Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends, Macintyre has built an entirely justified reputation for his true spy thrillers. Those books were good, but this one’s better. In fact, it feels a little like he has been waiting all the time to tell us about Gordievsky, since this story is so much bigger than those he has told before.'  Read the full review.

Interviewed:

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What follows are five logical fallacies, along with descriptions of how they can be misused and abused.

1. Argument From Authority. Just because a group or person is an authority or expert does not mean that they are necessarily correct about a certain claim. To assert that something is true because an authority says it's true is a logical fallacy. However, too often people misapply the "argument from authority" fallacy to dismiss a solid scientific consensus. GMOs are safe. Vaccines don't cause autism. Earth's climate is changing and, at present, humans are the primary cause. Organisms evolved. These are all scientific facts touted by prominent scientific organizations based upon mountains of evidence. Claiming an "argument from authority" because somone referenced, for example, the National Academies of Sciences, doesn't change that... Read more at RealClearScience.

Interviewed:

Reviewed:

Publisher's Weekly: "In this handbook on applying logic and reason to everyday life, Novella, a clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, expands on his podcast of the same name, assisted by the podcast’s other cast members. Seeking to give “one giant inoculation against bad science, deception, and faulty thinking,” Novella unpacks and defines false perceptions, biases, and logical fallacies while showing how emotions can overwhelm judgment and memories can lie... Empowering and illuminating, this thinker’s paradise is an antidote to spreading anti-scientific sentiments. Readers will return to its ideas again and again." Read the full review.

Excerpt: This Is the Evolutionary Reason We Often See Human Faces Not on Humans

Pareidolia refers to the process of perceiving an image in random noise, such as seeing a face in the craters and maria of the moon.

If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see diverse combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well-conceived forms. —Leonardo da Vinci

At some point in your life, probably when you were young and carefree and had more time than you knew what to do with, you lay on the ground and looked up at the clouds. Clouds are beautiful, their structures are fascinating, and they can give you a little perspective on how massive the world really is. But it’s also fun to try to find images lurking in the white vaporous billows.

While animals and faces are common patterns to see floating overhead, no one actually thinks (or should think) the detailed shapes of clouds are anything but random. We intuitively understand that when we “see” a bunny rabbit in a cloud, we are just imposing that pattern onto the randomness. But this phenomenon goes much deeper than just children imagining a sky menagerie, and it reflects how our brains process and interpret information.

The term for this phenomenon is pareidolia, which refers to the perception of familiar yet meaningless patterns in random stimuli or noise. It usually applies to seeing visual patterns, but sometimes the term is used to refer to other sensations, such as sound (in which case it might be called, fittingly, audio pareidolia). Read the full excerpt.

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Provocations by Camille Paglia

Amazon

While Provocations offers timely condemnations of left-wing excess and will therefore be classed with recent critiques of identity politics like Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion or Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind, for Paglia there is more at stake. Unlike other politically minded advocates of freedom, Paglia writes “for those who see life in spiritual terms as a quest for enlightenment, a dynamic process of ceaseless observation, reflection, and self-education.” Paglia has a vision far more interesting than merely condemning college students or opining about contemporary illiberalism. She is guided by a deep search for meaning and authenticity against today’s spirit of censorship and orthodoxy.

Like her previous book, Free Women Free Men, this book, excluding the introduction, does not include any new material. This is unfortunate as we do not get to see Paglia apply herself to contemporary problems. Nonetheless, her essays remain thematically relevant and provocative decades later. Her work on Warhol, Madonna, Hitchcock, and other pop-culture icons, as well as religion and Shakespeare, is of lasting interest.

The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity

Encounter Books

Daniel J. Mahoney: My book is not a critique of the Good Samaritan, or of people doing good work, or Doctors Without Borders, or anything of the sort. I think help for the poor, a philanthropic impulse, those things are not only required by the Gospel but are a fundamental part of what it means to be a human being. But humanitarianism and, specifically, the phrase “the religion of humanity” entails what the great French thinker Alain Besançon calls “a falsification of the good.” Virtue is reduced to an effort to transform the human condition on Earth and where various projects aimed at egalitarian social justice exhausts the meaning of the Good Samaritan or the Gospel’s call for us to love our neighbor. Our politics focuses more and more on a kind of vague cosmopolitanism that forgets the arduous demands of the political common good in each political community. Of course, the term “religion of humanity” goes back to the 19th century thinkers Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, who used it to refer to a self-conscious intellectual and moral project to eliminate God and establish a wholly atheistic humanism. I think the humanitarian ethos in the end at its deepest level and its most thought-out level entails a kind of self-deification of man and an utter valorization of the terrestrial experience of human beings. So instead of human beings being temporal and eternal, what it means to be human is reduced to the temporal sphere, and that is then reduced to an aggressive, leftist, and humanitarian ethos that isn’t satisfied with the human condition as it is, but aims at initiating a broadly utopian vision of human perfection on earth.

RR: Humanitarianism doesn't ignore the religious nature of man but it collapses it. It draws it down into a very immanent, mundane way with a worldly focus on various methods to improve life for human beings. What do you see as the negative consequences? I think if we were talking to an apostle of humanitarianism he would say we started this because the alternatives were much worse: national pride, religious aggressiveness. These lead to all sorts of violence and killing and the history of man demonstrates all this. What's the problem?

DM: G.K. Chesterton once said in reference to contempt for the nation that we don't get rid of marriage because some people abuse it, and we don't reject love because it takes pathological forms. All human goods can take pathological forms, and the task of the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues is to guide human conduct individually and collectively in a direction that maintains the integrity of common life and the integrity of the virtues. Humanitarianism is much worse than what it replaces. First, a particular political community mediates universal goods. Here, we learn to love others, to appreciate our duty, to have a sense of the political common good, etc. A vague and abstract conception of humanity not only weakens the concreteness of the virtues and of our obligations to our neighbors, our fellow countrymen, and ultimately to humanity itself, but it also can lead to a new and dangerous fanaticism where the perfection of humanity—with a capital 'H'—becomes the goal. And that goal is completely divorced from real and concrete human ends and from a sense of limits.

Auguste Comte

Wikipedia Commons

Auguste Comte is also the founder of the religion of humanity. He was a famous French philosopher and a social scientist in the early and middle 19th century. He initially was a proponent and theoretician of social science positivism. Comte decided that human beings are religious beings and there has to be a God, a Supreme Being. But Comte said the Supreme Being is man! So that involves, as your remark suggested, a complete immanentization of the horizon of greatness or excellence. There's nothing above man except the highest in man, and I think that my book is inspired and moved by a deep concern that many of my contemporary co-religionists, not just Roman Catholics but other Christians and believers in theistic religion, more and more conflate a Biblical religion or theistic understanding of God with a humanitarian ethos and impulse. Essentially the church becomes a NGO. Essentially the task is to ameliorate the human condition and often to do so in a very thoughtless, aggressive, and ideological way. Hence liberationism, hence certainly an indulgence for left wing tyrannies in the third world, hence a downplaying of the arduous moral virtues especially when it comes to sexual morality. I think the religion of humanity is a terrible and corrupting replacement for authentic or transcendental religion. Secondly, I see the Christian religion being subverted from within by people who are at best half humanitarians, and in many cases simply lose any real concern for the transcendental aims and goals of what the religion is.

RR: Another idea is that humanitarianism really comes out of Christianity. Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin argue that you really can't understand this sort of emancipationist idea and the progressive improvement of man without this Christian idea of salvation to begin with. What do you say to that?

DM: Well, I think there's a good deal of truth to that. I think it's very easy for the commandment to love our neighbor to be transformed into a vague notion or hollow feeling. I remember the wonderful interview that Malcolm Muggeride, the British journalist who converted to Catholicism at the end of his life, did in 1969 with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He asked her why she did what she did. And she said I want to do something beautiful for God. Scripture is never simply on a horizontal plane. It is and always is an elevation of the soul toward God. That doesn't mean we don't love real people and they're just instruments for the love of God. But it means that love of neighbor is never simply an end in itself. I think humanitarian is a heck of a word, humanity with a capital 'H'. The communist newspaper in Paris is called L’humanite. Think of all the terrible ideological movements of the 20th century, they were led by believers in humanity with a capital 'H'. This abstraction of a transfigured humanity was willing to do terrible things to real human beings in order to achieve the unachievable. I would say all forms of humanitarianism from the most mild progressivism of the West to full scale totalitarianism, they have no real sense of the moral fissures in the human soul. They have no sense of what I like to call the enduring, the sempiternal drama of good and evil, and the human soul that will never go away.

RR: You introduce and discuss the ideas of a number of thinkers regarding their critiques of humanitarianism. One of them, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, actually gives us a way to think about what you were just describing. Maybe it's this idea of no enemies to the left, and that sort of a well–intended, progressive humanitarianism you see in liberal democracies over the decades whose members have struggled to understand or see tyranny within communist states or socialist states. Is this an explanation for why this sort of humanitarianism makes it difficult to distinguish motives from intentions and consequences of political outcomes? 

DM: I think that's exactly on the mark. There's a chapter in Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, and this is a great book about the years he spent as an inmate in the scientific research prison in the Soviet gulag in the late 1940s. Chapter 54 called “Buddha’s Smile,” is about the visit of a American politician’s wife, Mrs. Kirby Eleanor Roosevelt to the prison. And she comes and she's taken in by this Potemkin village, this staged-showing of the prisoners all well-fed, no lice, haircut, old copies of the Talmud and the Bible and the Koran, and the statue of Buddha smiling in the corner, rightly so, given the fact that this is a completely staged presentation. But there was something in the character Mrs. Roosevelt, a softness of liberalism, a humanitarianism that got in the way of her appreciating the hard side of humanitarian or the totalitarian side of a certain kind of totalitarian secularism. So she saw no enemies to the left. She could only see another movement that cared for the poor, that was working for penal justice, and that was attempting to ameliorate the human condition. This has always been the problem with soft utopianism or soft humanitarianism. Reinhold Niebuhr said years ago that it always gives way to a more consistent, more materialistic, more atheistic, more violent, hard humanitarianism. Just one more thing about Solzhenitsyn, I concentrate a lot on The Red Wheel, his great cycle of books about the coming of war and revolution in Russia.

In this May 25, 1994, file photo Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn gets into the family car as he departs his Cavendish, Vt., compound. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File)

AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File

On his critique of Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy is what many humanitarians would see as a true Christian today. He was against all war, all violence, he wanted to help the poor. He wanted to get rid of the sacraments and the Cross. He wanted the effectual truth of Christianity. But Solzhenitsyn argued that given the importance of the state as an instrument for protecting and sustaining the common good, and given the reality of evil in men's souls and in certain political movements and regimes that absolute non-resistance to evil was an abandonment of our concrete obligations to charity and the common good. Solzhenitsyn thought evil had to be resisted. He criticizes Tsar Nicholas II for doing nothing to stop Revolution in 1917. He endorses what he calls an active struggle against evil that was well embodied in his multi-decade struggle against totalitarianism, so Solzhenitsyn really provides us with a different vision of the human and political consequences of Christianity that are quite opposed to humanitarianism. His predecessor, Vladimir Solovyvov, I talk about his book Three Conversations, he says there can be a good war and an evil peace. Think about that sentence today. Ninety-nine percent of the progressives in the church and ninety-nine percent or more of the humanitarians would vehemently deny it. As Pope Francis recently did in a new book called Politics and Society. He explicitly denies that there can ever be a good war and affirms that all peace is just. From Solzhenitsyn to Solovyvov's point of view, that is not the teaching of the Gospel, that is the teaching of the modern religion of humanity.

Pierre Manent

Wikipedia Commons

RR: Thinking about humanitarianism and politics, Pierre Manent writes the forward for this book. Manent is a great French thinker, one of our best thinkers on the nation state: What it means, why it's good, and why it should be defended. He’s a really tough critic of the European Union. He's argued in any number of books and essays that the ethos of the European Union is a humanitarianism. Your thoughts on that idea and how that shapes the way the European Union chooses to govern itself?

DM: Pierre Manent has some sympathy, he doesn't think it's likely or advisable, but he has some sympathy for an impulse that would encourage Europe to build a greater common good. A United States of Europe could think and act politically in the world, but in the end he sees an opposite process at work in the European Union. The EU has extended the field of culture and civilization, but at the same time has weakened the internal resources available to each political community and nation state. So to use a shorthand, Pierre Manent sometimes speaks about post 1968 Europe as being marked by two broad processes one of deep politicization that undermines collective virtú, that undermines the capacity to think and act politically in the world and to be meaningful actors on the world stage. The second is the de-Christianization of Europe. Europe without putting anything plausible in the place of the old nation has succeeded in weakening and encouraging, if not the withering away, at least, the loss of strength of the old nations and of course the old religion, the Christian religion of Europe. Manent’s view is Europe does have a religion, a secular religion, and a secular religion is precisely the religion of humanity. And this religion of humanity is tied to a radical and imprudent understanding of the rights of man where human rights, which are salutary within their own limited sphere, become the alpha and omega of humanity. There are no limits to rights. New ones are invented every hour. And without a political framework of law, of custom, of continuity, of tradition, this excessive valorization of rights undermines the integrity of a political community and even of the moral life.

In Manent’s last book on natural law, we suffer, in this case Europeans, but we, too, in America, ‘the tyranny of the explicit’ as ideas, projects, or choices that ought to be subject to debate and deliberation become absolute right. There is a subsequent undermining of both politics and the politics of prudence, and so natural law goes hand-in-hand with practical reason, which goes hand-in-hand with political self-government. And this religion of humanity just puts an end to all the questions including political deliberation because we know that there are no limits to ever newly discovered rights, to ever more egalitarianism, to ever more aggressively defined social justice. There are no open questions. These are the goals and they have to be applied in a unilateral, aggressive, and as absolute a way as possible.

RR: Fulfilling what Manent is saying about humanitarianism in the way it dominates the politics of Europe is the great European intellectual and man of the left, Jürgen Habermas. You also write about him in your book and his attempt to enshrine constitutionally this vision in the European Union.

DM: There are certainly worse figures in Europe today, much worse. Slavoj iek and Alain Badiou who are the defenders of the idea of communism. iek’s defense of lost causes celebrating Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, and the Cultural Revolution. Badiou does more or less the same thing. However, Habermas isn't that. He is a little soft on communism. He's very clear that Nazism was intrinsically evil and without being pro-communist he had a certain indulgence toward communism as at least being a movement on the left, and therefore committed to certain desirable goals.

But as you're alluding to he is most famous for his idea of constitutional patriotism, which is an understanding of patriotism that would denude patriotism from anything that wasn’t institutional: tradition and shared inheritances, language, and collective memory. So it's a kind of patriotism that a modern left progressive could like because it's very limiting and it tears down any authentic connection to the past, a past which Habermas, no doubt, associates with bellicosity, injustice, and inequality. In recent works, however, he has written about the need for a world community, a world sovereign. So he sees the EU as the avant-garde of humanity pointing toward a more comprehensive and complete cosmopolitanism.

It's interesting to say this is utopian, which it is, but it's also undesirable. He speaks explicitly of the religion of humanity, that's his religion. What will bind this world community together is the religion of humanity. Just one other thing about Habermas, he is one of the few proponents of the religion of humanity who knows that this idea of universal dignity of man is dialectically dependent on Christianity. It doesn't have intrinsic spiritual resources of its own.

RR: Pierre Manent has pointed to the EU having no real political criteria by which it would use to decide who should be in the Union or even who should be out of the Union. That also seems to be a consequence of the type of politics you get with humanitarian ideals dominating your know your discussion.

Pope Francis at the Vatican, Friday, May 25, 2018. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

AP Photo/Andrew Medichini

DM: Yes, absolutely. Pope Francis, who in these regards is a full fledged secular humanitarian, said in his speech to the European Parliament in 2014, We can't let people drown in the Mediterranean Sea. Manent responded: As Christians, as men of goodwill, we can't. But it doesn't mean we have an obligation to make these people citizens of our countries. And this absence of any political criteria of judgment has been seen in the influx of not mainly women and children but young men in their 20s admitted into this open zone of the European Community. In terms of safety as we saw in Cologne, Germany on New Year's Eve a couple of years ago, in terms of simply the European community, its integrity, and its demographics. And by the way, it is a meaningful question. The European community wants to pretend that it is wholly secular in its failed EU constitution. It's simply bypassed 2000 years of Christianity in Christendom. As Manent argues, whether it likes it or not it has a Christian mark, the Christian faith. It's not merely a secular field of open civilization. The so-called populists in Eastern Europe, the civilizational parties, Fidesz in Hungary and Law and Justice in Poland, they know what's at stake. They want to protect the Christian character of Europe, but people like Merkel or Macron who define Europe simply by openness and secularism have no ground to resist a radical and complete cultural and demographic transformation that would, in effect, entail the end of European civilization. Merkel's decision was not only imprudent, mindless, thoughtless, and anti-political, but it showed a sort of contempt for any idea that Europe has an interest in maintaining its soul or its integrity.

RR: The decision [by Merkel] has produced any number of political consequences throughout European countries, including the beginning of the erosion of her power. This suggests the awareness, or it forced sort of a collective thinking on the part of many Europeans: Is this the direction we want to go? And you've seen the rise of these parties in various countries, some of which do things that make us a little uncomfortable, but they're trying to recover a certain politics for their country that's been ignored.

DM: Two articles are extremely helpful. There's an article by Manent that appeared in French which was translated in English and published in American Affairs called “Populism and the Fanaticism of the Center” making the very simple point that it's the fanaticism of the centrist parties and the refusal to think seriously about immigration, borders, and Islam, etc. This has led to the rise of the populism that is sometimes undisciplined and raucous, but at the same time if the centrist parties, or the center-right and center-left, took these human and political questions seriously, then we wouldn't be dealing with the problem of populism in the way we're dealing with it. Secondly, there's a wonderful piece “Europe’s Civilizationalist Parties” by Daniel Pipes in the October edition of Commentary where he argues that responsible conservatives ought to welcome but aim to tutor the civilizational parties in Eastern Europe because they are not anti-democratic. They have clarity about the civilizational roots of Europe, including Christianity, and they show much more seriousness and realism in their thought about the illiberal tendencies of political Islam than the bien-pensant thinkers in the heart of Western Europe. I mentioned those two because there examples of some good European and American thought about what the alternative to humanitarian thought ought to be.

RR: I don't want to be self-indulgent, so I didn't start with Orestes Brownson, but we can end with Orestes Brownson. Orestes Brownson was very conversant with two thinkers you mentioned at the beginning as the arbiters of humanitarianism, Comte and Saint-Simon. Brownson knew them well, wrote about them extensively, and believed in their ideas. This is an American in the 1820s-1830s who is something of a socialist, a kind of an agrarian socialist humanitarian, who believes in this progress of man and progress of the age through science and through a secular Christian ethic. He believes all of these things. Tell us, though, why he leaves this behind?

Orestes Brownson

Wikipedia Commons

DM: I love in his book The Convert, when he discusses his movement from a sort of liberation theology, a secular Christian ethic of progressivism, [to Catholicism]. He wrote essays in the 1830s on a new understanding of Christianity. But he always made clear this had nothing to do with the divinity of Christ. He was listening to a Reverend Parker, a progressive, a partisan of the religion of humanity, in Boston in 1842. He was literally repulsed by the argument, and he realized [Parker’s argument] had been [his] argument. There are many other things that happened: the election of 1840 and Brownson’s newfound awareness of the problems and vulgarity and potential liberalism of majoritarian democracy. He also says in various writings that his conversion to Catholicism in 1844 occurred at the same time as his reading of Aristotle's Politics. So his turn toward political moderation and sobriety went hand in hand with his conversion to the Catholic Church.

But I think Brownson is so important and so important for my book because he not only limned or sketched a deeply serious and persuasive critique of the religion of humanity, but he had been a ideologist of the religion of humanity for 13 years or so. He lived through it, and worked through it, and repudiated it. Then he turned to look at Catholicism that in the clearest and most emphatic way defended the sovereignty of God as the precondition for human liberty. He argued in his approach to the Declaration of Independence that it's precisely because we don't own ourselves that we don't have the right to own anyone else. In other words, he saw what was at stake if human beings own themselves and there are no limits on our freedom, then that's an invitation to unlimited despotism.

RR: The common trope of our age is the more religious one becomes the more dangerous one becomes, politically. Yet, with Brownson, it’s the exact opposite. It's through a discovery of Christianity in Catholicism that he actually begins to understand what Republican constitutionalism really is, why it's good, why it should be defended, and why those who claim to be its biggest defenders maybe unintentionally its biggest enemies.

DM: He was a critic, as he put it in 1873 essay of “The Democratic Principle” and by that he did not mean self-government or human freedom. He meant the valorization of the human will, that there were no limits on either majority will or human willfulness. He was an adamant critic of that. But I should also add, and you bring this out very nicely in your selections in Seeking the Truth that he was a critic of the obscurantists in the church, the people who did not believe in religious liberty. So he was a friend of human liberty. But he was a friend of human liberty who also saw that radical socialism and radical humanitarianism were new threats to the integrity of republican government, just as a certain kind of obscurantism in theocracy were such a threat.

RR: His descriptions of the abolitionists, which he refers to as the humanitarians in the American Republic, he not only sees their claims against slavery, and he sees their claims against slavery as things they are willing to pursue in unconstitutional ways, which he thinks is very dangerous. And he fears after the end of the Civil War that there will be no sort of limits on what they're able to achieve.  I think you can also see his critique of abolitionists play out amongst progressives in a way.

DM: And I think it's very easy for a certain kind of reader to open Brownson and be embarrassed. But he was against slavery, but he didn't like the radical Republicans and the abolitionists and he saw a certain fanaticism and liberalism in their writings and activism. But he was right. By the way Lincoln, whom Brownson could be ambiguous about, but Lincoln, too, was never an abolitionist because he saw that they were willing to jettison certain goods: rule of law and constitutionalism, in order to achieve their end and achieve it in ways that may have undermined republican government or political moderation. So I think that's a good example of Brownson’s moderation, and that he saw a fanatic lurking beneath the surface of the religion of humanity.

RR: It's interesting as well, Brownson saw the Civil War in terms of Union and holding the country together because it was a nation. It was a political entity that could not be dissolved just on the basis of property right interests. Brownson sees this very politically and in the best sense of that term. He met with Abraham Lincoln in the White House. He urged upon him the need for the Emancipation Proclamation well in advance of when it was actually issued, and Brownson stated it in very political terms that it would help undermine the South and you should do this now. That to me is always very telling about how he approached politics, and how he thought about the Constitution.

DM: I think that's right and he could be a man who could reason politically and sometimes he seems to be criticizing Lincoln for the slowness in which the slaves were emancipated.

But look at the contemporary Church, all the talk is about a world governing authority and a critique of nationalism and identification of the common good in a very humanitarian way with globalism. Brownson really saw the nation as the home of the common good. And that in no way undermined an appreciation of the moral law, the natural law which is obligatory on all human beings. We have all these debates, you're part of them, I'm part of them, about how loyal Catholics ought to be to the United States. Is the United States still morally estimable? I think Brownson is still our best guide, and probably along with Tocqueville, in showing us that the great project is to keep together the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion. It not only remains a great imperative but it's really the only imperative. Otherwise, we succumb to an irresponsible withdrawal from society, or an open contempt for a regime of self-government, which is still open to change and amelioration and improvement by committed Christians and committed men of goodwill who don't identify liberty with the endless unfolding of moral nihilism.

Richard M. Reinsch II is the editor of Law & Liberty and the host of Liberty Law Talk. He is the editor of Seeking the Truth: An Orestes Brownson Anthology (CUA Press, 2016). He is coauthor, with Peter Augustine Lawler, of the forthcoming volume, A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty. (University Press of Kansas, May 2019).

This interview was transcribed from the Liberty Law Talk podcast. Listen to the full interview here.

Mr. Trump's Wild Ride: The Thrills, Chills, Screams, and Occasional Blackouts of an Extraordinary Presidency by Major Garrett

Amazon.com

Personally, Trump disdained politics and avoided active duty military service. He is a hero and an antihero at the same time. His long history of self-promotion and fascination with tabloid culture fits more seamlessly than we might want to admit into our current selfie and social media mind-set and mania—a place where relentless self-branding can be a path to notoriety, infamy, riches and at times all three. From the moment of his election, Trump was a force for and a crucible of division . . . and devotion. His presidency, quite apart from its record, is already original. No one has been more publicly tempestuous, dare we say stormy, with the words and mannerisms of the presidency.

Trump is recklessly authentic—a living, breathing, orangish and hairsprayed Rorschach test of what early-21st-century America wants and expects from politics and the presidency. Importantly, Trump is also a barometer of how much we as a nation are prepared for this highly personalized and vocalized presidency to permeate—through the minor miracle of digital technology—every moment of our waking lives. Eleven days into Trump’s presidency, one of the great satirists of our times, Jon Stewart, read aloud on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert a mock executive order: ‘I, Donald J. Trump, do declare by executive order that I, Donald J. Trump, am exhausting.’ It has been 11 days, Stephen,” Stewart said to the host. “Eleven fucking days. Eleven! The presidency is supposed to age the president, not the public. We have never faced this before. Purposeful, vindictive chaos.” Part of Trump’s originalism exists within that humor, that truth and that collective (and possibly exaggerated) anxiety. And yet on Inauguration Day, my CBS colleague Dean Reynolds was in Kenosha, Wisconsin, one of the crucial states in Trump’s electoral map. He was surveying voter attitudes and expectations at Frank’s Diner. “I think you got a country that’s fed up with the establishment and they wanted change and they didn’t want a politician,” said Jim Roberts, a Kenosha city worker. Glen Woods, sitting at the diner’s counter, summed up the Trump mystique. “He’s a pit bull. He swam upstream against both parties. I’ve never seen that before.” Reynolds asked if Woods considered Trump a disruptive force. “Oh, absolutely. Tear 90 percent of it down. He was the only candidate who seemed to really hammer in that you can’t tell people to go get a job if there aren’t any.” All presidencies arrive with lofty expectations. Historic ones leave behind big ideas and big changes. What kind of presidency is Trump’s? What kind of president is he?

The Idol of Our Age

Encounter Books

Christianity thus loses its transcendental reference points at the same time that it undermines balanced political judgment. Humanitarians, secular or religious, confuse peace with pacifism, equitable social arrangements with socialism, and moral judgment with utopianism and sentimentality.

With a foreword by the distinguished political philosopher Pierre Manent, Mahoney’s book follows Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in affirming that Christianity is in no way reducible to a “humanitarian moral message.” In a pungent if respectful analysis, it demonstrates that Pope Francis has increasingly confused the Gospel with left-wing humanitarianism and egalitarianism that owes little to classical or Christian wisdom. It takes its bearings from a series of thinkers (Orestes Brownson, Aurel Kolnai, Vladimir Soloviev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) who have been instructive critics of the “religion of humanity.” These thinkers were men of peace who rejected ideological pacifism and never confused Christianity with unthinking sentimentality. The book ends by affirming the power of reason, informed by revealed faith, to provide a humanizing alternative to utopian illusions and nihilistic despair. Read The Idol of Our Age

Interviewed:

Mahoney and John J. Miller discuss 'The Idol of Our Age' with  on National Review's The Bookmonger. 

Reviewed:

Gerald Rusello, City Journal: "Mahoney draws on a tradition of reflection on humanitarianism, including Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai, and Russian Orthodox thinker Vladimir Soloviev. As Mahoney frames the debate, “woefully ignorant of sin and of the tragic dimension of the human condition, [humanitarianism] reduced religion to a project of this-worldly amelioration. Free-floating compassion substitutes for charity, and a humanity conscious of its unity (and utter self-sufficiency) puts itself in the place of the visible and invisible Church.” From this perspective, the rise of humanitarianism is a story of the fading of Christianity. Indeed, Mahoney cites French philosopher Pierre Manent to explain that humanitarianism may actually represent the last flowering of Christian charity, and could have arisen only in cultures with a Christian tradition." Read the full review

Roger Scruton: “Daniel Mahoney is one of those true intellectuals whose wide reading feeds into and is fed by his experience of life. The world he lives in is a world illuminated by books, and one in which books are also put to the test. Few writers today are so aware of the pervasive influence of ideas, especially among those who have no ability to grasp them. In this study of the religion of humanity, propagated by Auguste Comte, but now the source of a thousand escape-routes from the burden of responsible existence, Mahoney shows the great damage done by forgetting that man is made in God’s image. His devastating criticisms of the self-congratulatory sentimentalism of Pope Francis are backed up with refined studies of thinkers who today are unjustly neglected, partly because they saw what is at stake in the religion of humanity: the American Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, the Russian social thinker Vladimir Soloviev, and the Hungarian phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai—all three of them at odds with the humanism of their day. Those thinkers do not agree about the alternative to humanitarian ways of thinking, but, as Mahoney shows, they are united in their belief that being human consists in the search for something higher than the human. I recommend this book to all who share that belief, and who want to know exactly why it should be adhered to.” Read The Idol of Our Age

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The Once and Future Worker

Encounter Books

In 'The Once and Future Worker', the Manhattan Institute's policy wunderkind Oren Cass reveals how decades of bad decision-making in Washington -- and not the supposedly uncontrollable and inevitable forces of technology and globalization -- led to disaster for America's job markets. 

Cass served as Mitt Romey's domestic policy advisor in 2012 and while the book has "reform conservatives" buzzing, it will also charm populists on both sides of the aisle. Trumpists will enjoy Cass's critiques of globalization and unfettered immigration while his endorsement of worker co-ops and attacks on America's at-all-costs pursuit of consumption will be applauded by the Sanders wing of the left. 

Though wonky, the book offers a thoughtful meditation on the essential value of work itself in providing meaning in American life. More urgently, it reminds us that the decisions being made by elites in Washington have very real consequences in lives of individuals and their communities across the country. 

Sam Pretlow is the editor of RealClearBooks.

Basic Books

Many will be interested in this book in order to put the Trump presidency in the context of America’s history of powerful personalities and presidencies. Like Trump, Jackson was not a career politician. His charisma and hold on the American people came from a single military victory during the war of 1812. Also like Trump, Jackson campaigned against the elites and fought the central bank. As a work of history, “The Rise of Andrew Jackson” looks in depth at how Jackson was sold as a candidate to the American people. It should be valuable to readers curious about the development of campaigns and elections since the 19th century, and those interested in what light Jackson’s rise can shed on our own outsider president, and his seemingly perpetual campaign.

Max Diamond is a reporter for RealClearInvestigations. 

W. W. Norton & Company

In the “Fifth Risk,” Lewis takes on a bigger institution — the federal government — and bigger stakes. But the familiar characters are still here: oligarchic power in the form of Donald Trump and the corporate cronies he’s installed in many agencies, and the brainy, good-hearted underdogs — these agencies’ civil servants — whose one advantage is better data. The difference here is that the underdogs seem to be losing.

Lewis details Trump’s botched transition, which left many agencies without staff or direction, and the ways in which Trump officials, through both incompetence and malice, are undermining or threatening to privatize the functions of various agencies. (Lewis focuses especially on the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce.) His narrative frame and the book’s brevity necessarily leave the picture incomplete, but he draws valuable attention to an administration hostile to its own commission and a population alienated from its own government.

Alexander Stern is the editor of RealClearPolicy and RealClearBooks.

Oxford University Press

In the book’s introduction, Vaidhyanathan assents to a general impression he finds among tech journalists that Mark Zuckerberg is “a deeply thoughtful, sincere, idealistic, and concerned person” — not at all, Vaidhyanathan assures readers, like the character portrayed in David Fincher's film “The Social Network.” Vaidhyanathan’s good will notwithstanding, the Zuckerberg that appears in “Antisocial Media” is arrogant, prone to doublespeak, and in denial about the mischief his platform has wrought — he is much like Fincher’s Zuckerberg. His “techno-fundamentalism” and penchant for “neutral, almost meaningless language” papers over the insidious political effects of Facebook. In the pursuit of a “more open and connected world,” he has left one more confused and divided.

One of the most valuable sections in the book sees Vaidhyanathan retell the role of social media in the “Arab Spring.” Journalists credited Facebook and other social media with sparking democratic revolution in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran. While organizers did use Facebook to communicate and to stage protests that would have been difficult without the technology, there remains little evidence Facebook played anything like the starring role journalists cast it in. Its legacy is mixed at best. Vaidhyanathan quotes organizer Wael Ghonim who, in 2011, held Facebook partially responsible for the breakdown of the democratic movement in Egypt: “We failed to build consensus and the political struggle led to intense polarization... Social media only amplified that state [through] the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers, and hate speech.” Indeed, Facebook, as Vaidhyanathan details, has proven far more useful to autocrats than activists.

These kinds of toxic politics are by now familiar to all of us. But Facebook’s role in the degradation of American political discourse is not as simple as echo chambers, Cambridge Analytica, and Russian hackers, and its more lasting effects have perhaps yet to be left. In his discussion of the 2016 election, Vaidhyanathan instead emphasizes the Trump campaign’s innovative, above-the-board Facebook advertising strategy, which was facilitated and guided by Facebook employees and which leveraged the platform’s reams of personal data to present users with highly targeted and tailored messaging. Manipulation, Vaidhyanathan’s analysis suggests, is not a misuse of the Facebook; it is what it was designed for.

As with many books of its kind, the diagnosis offered in “Antisocial Media” is ultimately more compelling than its prescriptions. But we must see the problem before we can solve it, and Vaidhyanathan’s book offers a clear first look.

Alexander Stern is the editor of RealClearPolicy and RealClearBooks.

Yoram Hazony: Nationalism is a principled standpoint that sees the world as governed best when nations are given their independence and freedom to chart their own course on the basis of their own unique national, religious, and constitutional traditions.

RCB: So, it’s less a sense of love of country akin to patriotism and more a sense of political order? 

Hazony: The word is definitely used in both ways. “Patriotism,” as far as I know, is always referring to an individual’s attachment to some kind of country or place or nation. I’ve never heard patriotism used to describe a general political theory; it’s always used as a sentiment, either positive or negative.

Basic Books

Nationalism is broader. It certainly can be used as synonym for patriotism. Sometimes when you say Ghandi is an Indian nationalist or de Gaulle is a French nationalist, you may be referring to their love of their own people. But in the nationalist intellectual tradition the usage is broader: Nationalism is a political theory. It’s opposed usually to imperialism on one side and to localism and tribalism on the other. So it’s a theory about the best political order. Although obviously that theory is built on the reality of patriotic sentiments, of emotional attachments to nations. 

RCB: What are the factors that in history have made a national identity?

Hazony: National identity emerges it seems almost always as a result of external adversity. You can have all sorts of tribes that have similar cultural characteristics: Their language is similar or their religious rites are similar. And maybe they even recognize themselves as a nation. You can think of the example of the Greek city-states: internally divided, almost always at war with one another. Yet they did recognize themselves as being part of a larger ethnos, which means nation. They knew there was a larger Greek nation even though it was never united politically. But they did unite for certain purposes. They united in war, for example, against the Persians, and they had certain cultural institutions which were unifying, like famously the Olympics. They all knew they were Greeks even though they never had a unified Greek national state until modern times.

What causes the unification and the possibility of establishing a permanent national state is external threat which we see clearly in the case of biblical Israel, and we see it again with the Greek city-states, and we see it with the Dutch and the English, and with the Americans as well, who might very well never have unified into a single nation and remained thirteen independent countries if they hadn’t been fighting a war against the British. So it’s usually an external threat which serves as a catalyst for creating a solid and permanent national state even if often the nation can be seen to exist before the state.

RCB: What are the negative consequences of our new, more globalized world?

Hazony: The most obvious negative consequence is a completely unrealistic view of the capacity of the United States and other Western countries to impose cultural uniformity on other countries, especially through military power. The examples are well known: Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan. All of these interventions were, in one way or another, political failures if not disasters, and all of them were motivated in some significant part by a belief that other nations around the globe are simply waiting to adopt an American way of life and an American outlook and all you need to do is apply sufficient coercion and then they’ll suddenly be transformed. I think this is delusional and therefore leads to all sorts of terrible consequences in foreign policy.

In addition, I think that domestically Americans and Europeans are suffering terribly from the hegemony of this utopian idea. If you look at American public life it’s really turned into a battle between two competing universalisms: a kind of neo-Marxist — Americans call it progressive —  vision of what’s right for the entire planet versus a liberal internationalist vision of what’s right for the entire planet. More restrained, humble, realistic political views have really been suppressed for a long time.

This is a period where we’ve watched America go from possibly the most tolerant country in the world to a country whose public debates are clearly and constantly marked by fanaticism and intolerance, and that’s a result of, I believe, the embrace of these universalist theories. You come to think that your ideas are so absolutely correct that not only do you personally believe that they are the best, but you believe that they really must be imposed on everybody else because they’re self-evidently correct, and that anybody in your country or anywhere else would simply — if pushed in the right way — come to see the light and accept them. This is just an awful way to run a polity, and Americans internally are careening at alarming speed towards ungovernability because of this belief that many ideas are so absolute that they simply have to be imposed. 

RCB: Who are your critics? What don’t they agree with in your analysis? 

Hazony: There are plenty of critics. The book has only been out a month and there’s already more than 50 reviews and so there’s plenty of enthusiasm and plenty of critics. The critics are from all sides. There’s a neo-conservative kind of criticism which is hesitant to give up on the picture of Jefferson as the father of the country, Locke as the ideological software, and liberal universalism as the policy consequence of it. There’s a certain school of neo-conservatives who find my arguments to be an attack on what they see as the foundations of America. There are some Catholic critics who are defending a closely related liberal universalism which they see as represented by Pope Francis. They feel that my view of Scripture and its historical role in the West is undermining this liberal internationalist interpretation of Catholicism. Of course, there are critics on the left who just think that the move to try to understand nationalism as a potentially beneficial politically theory is itself akin to some kind of racism. Even if they don’t directly accuse me of racism — that has not happened yet — still they think that I’m empowering a kind of primitive tribalism which will lead in all sorts of terrible directions.

RCB: Do you think that national identity can easily be disentangled from racial identity?

Hazony: I do believe that the biblical tradition of nationalism, meaning nationalisms that are descended from the Hebrew Bible and enter the modern period with a biblical basis can easily be and should properly be non-racialist, and in fact anti-racialist. The biblical examples of what a nation is are not based on race. When the Israelites leave Egypt, Egyptians join them and go stand at Mt. Sinai and becomes Israelites. Ruth the Moabite can become an Israelite by saying, “Your people are my people and your God is my God.” That’s certainly not liberalism; it’s not based strictly on consent. But it does allow for the integration of racially diverse individuals. It allows them to join a given nation if they embrace both the existing people, joining them in a bond of loyalty, and their God, their central values.

RCB: Do you think that the Trump Presidency has forwarded your view of nationalism?

Hazony: Yes. Certainly Brexit and Trump have reopened the issue of national independence in Western countries in a way that hasn’t been discussed really since World War II. This is long overdue. I don’t know whether it’s going to save the West or lead in other directions which are ultimately undesirable. But I do know that this debate is long, long overdue and President Trump and the Brexiteers are the people who put this on the table, opened the issue, and allowed us to have an intelligent conversation about it for the first time in generations.

RCB: During his speech at the UN, President Trump supported what he called “patriotism,” but at the same time he was calling for a turn towards greater national sovereignty. Do you think that in calling for patriotism he was calling for nationalism as you understand it?

Hazony: He said, “We reject the ideology of globalism and embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” That is substantively the theoretical distinction that my book proposes and seeks to advance. The distinction that I draw between imperialist politics and a nationalist politics, you could call that a distinction between a globalist politics and patriotic politics. I think it’s basically the same idea.

RCB: Steve Bannon frequently talks about economic nationalism and a turn against globalism. Do you think there is a commonality in your two projects?

Hazony: I don’t know Bannon’s views well enough to comment on him specifically. I would say that nationalism is not exactly the same thing as populism. I’m not sure what populism means exactly, but I’m worried it’s another form of class warfare. It seems like its basis is saying: The elites are wrong, the broad public is right. Now it happens to be the case that at this moment my views are much, much more aligned with the broad public than they are with the elites. But I don’t see myself as being opposed to elites in principle. I think there could be cases where the elites are right and the broad public is wrong. Nationalism is about attempting to unite the elites and the broad public around a common heritage which is distinct from that of other nations. In proposing nationalism I’m proposing that the kind of mutual loyalty and internal cohesion that unifies different classes in the nation rather than setting them at war one against the other. And that’s what I hope to see in America and in Britain and in other countries: a greater nationalism which will allow for a greater unity between the elites and the broad public, rather than devastating class warfare between them.

RCB: What do you think the role of international organizations like the EU and the United Nations should be? Do you think they should exist at all?

Hazony: Any organization that sees itself as being a voluntary and collaborative forum for discussion among independent nations can possibly fulfill useful functions. I don’t want to simply reject them. But both the UN and the EU have been repeatedly treated as though they have the power to legislate international law, which is then binding on nations and legitimately enforced by foreign military efforts. I reject that completely. If the point of the United Nations is to serve as some kind of world governing body, then I reject it. The European Union certainly since the Treaty of Maastricht has been intended as an international governing body with aspirations to dismantle the independence of its subject nations, and I think it’s a disaster. It’s a disaster for the Europeans but it’s also a disaster for Americans because these European ideas get pumped back into the United States by way of the universities and then the media and they end up being part of the American debate, whereas a generation ago they were completely fringe and irrelevant.

RCB: In “The Virtue of Nationalism” you lay out many dangers of imperialisms, but you don’t appear concerned about the dangers of a world in which nationals pursue their own self-interest. Do you see any concerns here?

Hazony: I’m critiquing imperialism because that is the threat of the moment. The dangers of small nations I think are very well known. They can become, on the one hand, too provincial and bogged down in their own petty local quarrels to care about larger issues. On the other hand, the fragmentation of the world into competing national states may create, in some situations, insufficient deterrent strength to prevent empires from arising. Those criticisms are based on historical reality and they’re completely valid. I just think that at this point we are so deep into trumpeting universalism and that we’ve completely lost track of the importance of particularism as the basis for, for example, the Anglo-American tradition of limited government, which is rooted in particular English and American traditions; or as the basis for the concern for individual liberties which is deeply rooted in the English and American traditions going back to the Bible, and is not something that everybody around the world will just accept because it is self-evident.

RCB: Do you think there is ever a reason to violate national sovereignty other than pure national self-interest? When another country has committed human rights abused for example?

Hazony: Yes, in extreme cases: genocide in Rwanda, or in Cambodia, where there are hundreds of thousands, millions of lives at stake. Someone who has sufficient power to go in, put an end to it, and quickly get out, I would say has a moral obligation to intervene. The problem is that I see that moral obligation as being fundamentally distinct from a belief that any kind of violence, persecution, laws we don’t like, or traditions we don’t like, is automatically a justification for coercion and military action. I think people are very confused about this. It may be utterly wrong for the Serbs, let’s say, to engage in atrocities in Bosnia, and at the same time be imprudent and mistaken to start bombing Serbian cities and killing Serbian civilians in order to try and get the enormities of Bosnia to stop. If you don’t have some kind of clear understanding that you’re going to make things better then it’s just as likely that you’re going to make things worse. And I don’t yet see how the American intervention in Yugoslavia ended up making things better. Military intervention is not a policy to be pursued every time warfare or abuses take place anywhere in the world, and it’s not identical to a clear case of intervention as an imperative where there’s genocide or its equivalent taking place.

RCB: What do you think are the greatest challenges facing conservatism today in the United States? 

Hazony: The greatest challenge facing conservatism is to recover the Anglo-American conservative tradition, including its biblical roots and its common law and English constitutional inheritance, which has been pushed aside in favor of liberalism. There are many people who have the two things confused. I’m not saying liberalism doesn’t have a place. It has a place and it can contribute all sorts of things that can be significant and good, but in the absence of a powerful conservative tradition I fear for the future of these nations. And so, the principal job of conservatives at the moment is to recover conservatism, which has largely been lost to liberalism.

Yoram Hazony is the author of “Virtue of Nationalism.”

Max Diamond is a reporter at RealClearInvestigations.

Encounter Books

Wallison traces the development of the administrative state back to its conception in the Progressive Era. Woodrow Wilson believed that administrative agencies were essential to governance in the complex modern world. The administrative state was enabled, Wallison argues, by decades of Supreme Court precedent that allowed the legislature to hand off more and more discretion to unelected bureaucrats. This culminated in the 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision in which the Supreme Court established that it would not overturn an agency’s interpretation of the law as long as that interpretation is “reasonable.”

Congress’s subsequent inability to rein in the administrative state is tied to the reason that the administrative state exists in the first place. Wallison argues that Congress has an interest in the growth of the administrative state because it allows Congress to avoid difficult bipartisan law-making. Instead Congress can pass broad policy and then hand off all the difficult work of interpretation and implementation to an administrative agency, thus expanding the power of bureaucrats and limiting the representation of the people.

Wallison’s hopes for reining in the administrative state depend on the contention that it is acceptable to overturn precedent, even in very important policy matters — a move which conservatives have long criticized liberals for promoting, and which figured heavily in Justice Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation. Last term, in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Court’s conservative majority overturned a decades-old free speech precedent. Justice Kagan described the decision as a weaponization of the First Amendment that was contrary to long-established interpretation. By promoting the reversal of precedent that dates from the 1980s in favor of particular policy objectives, Wallison and others risk pushing the Court further in the direction of partisanship and conservative policy objectives.

Regardless, “Judicial Fortitude” is essential reading for those hoping to gain an understanding of the economic and legal history of the administrative state. Even if one does not agree that Supreme Court precedent ought to be overturned, Wallison shows what is at stake in the current precedent, as well as the risks the administrative state poses to every individual’s liberty.

Max Diamond is a reporter at RealClearInvestigations.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Going through the intellectual and economic history of Europe, Fukuyama focuses the alienation of the individual in modern society. In chapters on Hobbes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, Fukuyama describes how the conception of the individual changed through the course of European intellectual and economic history. He argues that modern individuals have become increasingly alienated and turn towards nationalism and religion, especially Islam, as a means of forming new collective identities. Part of his explanation, for example, for radical Islamic terrorism is the alienation young Muslims feel living in Europe.

Fukuyama sees contemporary identity politics on the left as an intersection of the desire for recognition, a culture of therapy, and disillusion with attempts to use state power for economic progress. According to Fukuyama, the decline in traditional Western religion had led people to seek out a quasi-religion in psychotherapy. Our culture has become obsessed with self-esteem and feeling that one is properly recognized. Further, the failures of the welfare state to decrease inequality, as well as more general failures of government in Vietnam and Watergate, led the Left away from economic policy. The shift in focus had was associated with a shift in philosophy. Unlike traditional Marxists who embraced Enlightenment values and believed in the epistemic norms of science, the identity-driven left is relativistic and completely anti-traditional. It regards Christian culture, for example, “as the incubator of colonialism, patriarchy, and environment destruction,” Fukuyama writes.

Fukuyama’s argument could be stronger if he spent more time considering alternative explanations for some of the developments that occupy him. Perhaps Trump’s rise to power, for example, has been fueled not by identity politics, but by purely economic motivations. Similarly, Fukuyama’s discussion of the rise of a therapy culture does not take into account the empirical literature on actual increases in anxiety, depression, and suicide.

Still, Fukuyama provides a provocative framework in which to understand contemporary politics and identity. Popular discussion on this issue, which is often ahistorical and superficial, stands to benefit from Fukuyama informed philosophical perspective.

Max Diamond is an investigative reporter at RealClearInvestigations.

Little, Brown and Company

Trump’s disruptive election and its aftershocks — the ongoing Kavanaugh ordeal is perhaps the biggest yet — seem to have hallowed out the political center and instigated something of a “Cold Civil War,” exacerbating divides and even pitting family and friends against each other. Bradlee zeroes in on Luzerne County because it figured prominently in Trump’s slim 40,000-vote victory in Pennsylvania, which in turn fueled his electoral college win. Obama won Luzerne comfortably in 2008 and 2012, but Clinton fell to Trump there in a landslide, losing by 20 percent and over 25,000 votes.

Bradlee’s book primarily takes the form of interviews with “the forgotten”: including Obama voters fed up with the decades-long economic decline in county seat Wilkes-Barre, disaffected union members desparate for an outsider in the White House, residents of Hazleton alarmed by rapid immigration and rising crime rates in the small city, evangelicals, and a white nationalist, Steve Smith, who managed to get himself on the Luzerne County Republican Committee.

The book makes it clear that the line dividing the forgotten from the forgetters is far more cultural than ideological. What unites the Trump voters in Luzerne is a negative: They don’t feel as if there is a place for them in the world being of liberal elites and they don’t want one. How they characterize this world depends on how exactly they feel excluded from it, but the complaints are familiar: elite condescension, political correctness, assumptions of rampant racism, disdain for traditional values, and favoritism to foreigners with victim cachet over fellow Americans. Feelings of economic abandonment play a significant role too of course. Interviewees complain of trade policy advanced by both Republicans and Democrats that decimated manufacturing jobs. And they reject social programs perceived to generate dependency and lock in community decline.

It remains to be seen to what extent this divide exploited and exacerbated by Trump can generate more populist-conservative victories. But Bradlee counsels that the Democrats should “curb the tendency […] to paint most Trump voters as bigots” and start treating their discontent seriously. Along with other books in the “what-happened” genre, Bradlee’s offers a valuable glimpse into the communities where Trump’s candidacy resonated and where his presidency continues to unite those who feel shut out.

Alexander Stern is deputy editor of RealClearPolicy.

Penguin Random House

Perhaps for this reason, immigration has become one those policy issues about which rational debate seems increasingly impossible. “Restrictionists” construe arguments in favor of amnesty for those immigrants who currently live and work in the United States illegally as an embrace of “open borders” and “globalism.” To “admissionists,” calls to reform our immigration policies away from a family-based system toward one that prioritizes skills — as Canada and other countries do — are met with accusations of xenophobia or nativism. Ironically, the immigration policies of past Republican presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush look, by today’s lights, un-conservative. And, at a time when immigration activists are calling for the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the policies of the Obama administration — which deported more immigrants than any previous administration — appear positively Trumpian.

Reihan Salam’s new book, “Melting Pot or Civil War,” is thus a welcome reprieve from the Sturm und Drang over immigration today. Salam reminds us that “immigration policy is not about whether to be welcoming or hard-hearted”; rather, “it is about compromise.” This is because “like it or not we need to weigh competing interest and moral goods, and to adjust our approach over time.” Our current system is, for better or worse, the result of such a (past) compromise. And it is not at all clear why defending that particular arrangement should be the only rationally or morally defensible point of view on such a complex and multifaceted matter.

A son of immigrants and an advocate of amnesty, a robust social-safety net — including for poor immigrants — and a multicultural middle class, Salam is surprisingly and ironically well-positioned to make the case for reforming our immigration system. His case against our current system is not based on ethnic anxiety, but rather a concern about rising inequality and diminishing opportunities for the children and grandchildren of low-skilled immigrants. His case for moving away from a family-based immigration system towards a skills-based one does not stem from nostalgia for a declining white America — Salam is the child of Bangladeshi-born immigrants and grew up in a Muslim household in Brooklyn — but rather from a desire to see a flourishing, multiethnic, and multiracial American middle class.

The thrust of his argument is this: Were we more conscientious about the capacity of those wishing to immigrate to our countries to be self-reliant and economically prosperous, we would also be able to afford to provide for those already in our country who are less well-off, whether native or foreign born. This, in turn, would alleviate inequality, stimulate our economy, and help repair our nation’s fraying social fabric. To accomplish this, Salam argues, we must make a compromise: accept large-scale amnesty “followed by resolute enforcement” as well as a points system for accepting new immigrants that would “place greater emphasis on skills.” Rather than a slapdash pragmatist response to political realities, Salam outlines a coherent, not to say uncontroversial, conservative approach to immigration.

Salam’s policy prescriptions will certainly not please all parties — many on the left will decry his critique of our family-based system while many on the right will balk at his defense of amnesty and welfare programs. But his arguments for these policies are advanced carefully and humanely, making the usual ad hominem responses ring hallow. In short, this book serves as a reminder of what a genuine policy debate about a hot-button political issue can and should look like, even in our fractious times.

M. Anthony Mills is managing editor of RealClear Media Group. 

With these issues in the background, Dr. Yoram Hazony, director of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, sets out to answer fundamental questions of political organization in his new book “The Virtue of Nationalism.” For Hazony “nationalism” means not simply a love of country akin to “patriotism,” but a particular political order in which the world is divided into independent nation-states, each with its own self-determined way of life. Hazony’s thesis is that a world of free and independent nation-states, much like a free market unfettered by centralized regulation, is best.

Basic Books

A hallmark of conservative thinking is captured by Edmund Burke’s famous line in Reflections On the Revolution in France that in political matters, it is better to talk to a farmer than a metaphysician. The philosopher’s concerns — abstract, ideal states of affairs — are largely irrelevant. It is far more useful to ask what can actually be done and therefore to consult those who have the relevant hands-on experience. By contrast, Hazony, despite his conservative orientation, attempts to argue that nationalism is best in an abstract and absolute sense. In so doing, he undermines the practicality of his thesis and fails to consider whether nationalism is tenable in the real world.

Unlike Adam Smith, who used painstaking empirical argument to demonstrate the utility of the free market, Hazony’s argument in favor of nationalism is a single chapter. The argument is comprised of five theories about nationalism. One is that a world organized by national freedom offers a competitive political order that results in periods of social and cultural flourishing:

Competition among independent states explains the fact that those periods of history that we find most admirable in terms of the kinds of individuals they produced, and their fruitfulness in terms of works of science, religion, and art, were periods in which the political order was one of small, independent states in competition with one another, whether national states, or tribal city-states. 

The problem here is that Hazony does not attempt to demonstrate causation from this apparent correlation. Granted, it may well be the case that the independent nation-state has, at times, been crucially associated with technological and artistic progress. But history also shows that nationalism has, on other occasions, as in Nazi Germany, been associated with the destruction of art and culture. Hazony’s theory is only plausible if one cherry picks historical facts. It will only be convincing to those whose biases already favor nationalism.

Hazony also theorizes that nationalism is better suited to our epistemological condition. National freedom, Hazony writes, is “premised on the supposition that political truth is not immediately evident to all.” Under these conditions, a global laboratory of diverse nations pursuing experiments in living is best for all. But this is in tension with Hazony’s thesis that nationalism is the best political organization in an absolute sense. Hazony’s preference for nationalism seems premised on the view that we do in fact know political truth. 

Hazony also fails to make a practical case that nationalism can keep the peace on the world stage. There are, according to Hazony, supra-state principles that are required to secure the order of nation-states. But these “natural laws of nations,” as he calls them, seem arbitrary, untested, and ethically dubious. One of Hazony’s principles is of non-interference in the internal affairs of other national states. Hazony writes:

This is what, in a free state, permits the nation to pursue its interests and aspirations according to its own understanding. Without this principle, powerful nations would take control of the affairs of smaller nations, and the order of national states would collapse into an imperial order.

Hazony does allow for the violation of national sovereignty when one’s own national interest is at risk. When nation-states are confronted with imperialist actors like Hitler and Stalin, for example, they “have no choice but to interfere, whether by political or military means to slow or prevent their rise.” However, Hazony leaves no room for intervention in the case of human rights abuses.

Independent of ethical arguments against Hazony’s rejection of interference based on human rights, he does not present clear evidence that his principles can actually secure an international order. There is little evidence that international laws based only on self-interest can secure global peace. Hazony’s view seems on particularly shaky ground if one considers similar, failed principles for securing an international order that emerged in the 18th century. Legal theorist Emer de Vattel, for example, wrote that,

[The] first general law that we discover in the very object of the society of nations, is that each individual nation is bound to contribute everything in her power to the happiness and perfection of all others.

We have no reason to assume that Hazony’s international policy of self-interest is any more likely to establish global order than this older view of altruism between nations.

Ultimately, the simple binary opposition Hazony assumes between nationalism and supra-state power is not well founded. On Hazony’s account, to be a nationalist is in principle to oppose all supra-state power. But a less strict theoretical distinction seems more germane to history, and more useful. A more nuanced account of national power would allow us to pose an important practical question Hazony’s theory rules out, namely: what is the proper balance between state and supra-state power? Most likely, it will vary to some degree depending on the particular international challenges a given historical epoch faces.

To be sure, there remain deep and important questions about nationalism. How can a love of nation can be balanced with a supra-state ethic? Do human rights abuses ever justify the violation of a country’s sovereignty? And who has the authority to decide? Should non-Western nations accept Western ethical standards of individual rights and liberty at the price of their traditions? Unfortunately, in Hazony’s book, these practical issues are largely ignored in favor of a wishful metaphysics of nationalism. 

Max Diamond is a reporter at RealClearInvestigations. 

Basic Books

Hazony has recently been a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and has written books on reading the Bible as philosophy, Israel, and politics. In his new book, Hazony aims to detach “nationalism” from its negative connotations. For Hazony, it is not an irrational psychological condition, but a particular political order in which the world is divided into independent nation-states. If Europe, for example, were reorganized around nationalism, no state power would have been ceded to the European Union. There would be no higher power than the nation. Hazony argues that such a world presents the best kind of political order.

Hazony traces a historical opposition between nationalism and imperialism going back through Western civilization to the Roman Empire. According to him, an order of nation-states eventually emerged in contradistinction to idea of a Christian empire. Ultimately, Hazony sees the political life of Europe as resting upon two principles: the fundamental ethic by which all states ought to secure personal freedom for their subjects and the right to national self-determination.

Those who feel a love of country may be pleased to find a book that articulates the virtues of political independence. And an argument for nationalism may reinvigorate a debate that skews heavily toward arguments in favor of international organizations. For those who are already in favor of nationalist order, Hazony will provide some provocative questions and ideas. But for those who come to this book thinking that nationalism ought to be superseded, his work may seem under-argued and unpersuasive. For example, Hazony argues that the nationalist order undermines imperial conquest, promotes individual liberties, as well as technological, scientific, and artistic progress. However, the historical and political argument necessary to thoroughly justify these views is missing. Hazony, nevertheless, succeeds in making “nationalism” intellectually serious. Convincing arguments against nationalism will have to contend with Hazony rather than simply assuming its time has passed.

Max Diamond is an investigative reporter at RealClearInvestigations.

Brookings Institution Press

This was an early pop culture hint of a problem that is now surfacing in our public discourse, though still generally lacking in definite contours or nuanced exposition. Were the series coming out now, the internet would be rife with think-pieces about Tony’s “toxic masculinity.”

Andrew L. Yarrow, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and former reporter for the New York Times, has made a bid to give this problem more definition. “Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life” organizes a cluster of men’s problems — unemployment and underemployment, divorce, social isolation, addictions to porn, drugs, and video games, criminality, misogyny, and general irresponsibility — under the rubric of alienation. Men increasingly feel as if the job market, politics, and culture have no place for them. Their response has been, in various ways, to effectively drop out of society.

In telling the story of this crisis in masculinity, Yarrow is careful to avoid both a conservative tendency to identify culture as the sole culprit and a liberal tendency to place all the blame on the economy. Liberals, according to Yarrow, are generally right that “the social contract was broken” when, beginning in the 1980s, deregulation, hostility to unions, the financialization of the economy, and globalization conspired to dismantle the middle-class ideal of a man able to support a family on a blue-collar job. But, he points out, it’s also clear that even if these jobs were to suddenly flood back into middle America, the civic problems that plague many communities and the lives of the men that inhabit them would not simply disappear.

Of course, women suffer from economic stagnation and inequality as much as, if not more than, men. Yarrow is not out to deny that: Things may still be worse for women overall, but suffering is not a competition, he insists. Yarrow wants to show the particular features of the problem for men. Here culture becomes especially important.

It’s fitting that Tony Soprano’s model for masculinity was not a relative but Gary Cooper, an actor. When men and boys struggle today, they are less and less likely to find models for masculinity in local relationships and organizations. Men are less likely than women to go to church or synagogue; they participate less and less in clubs like Rotary or the Kiwanis; they have fewer friends, and when their marriages break up, they tend to receive limited custody rights and become disconnected from their children. Television, video games, and opioids flood in to fill the void. The internet makes alienated life more sustainable, providing endless distraction and simulacra of social engagement that provide temporary, sham relief while only deepening disaffection.

The result? A caricature of masculinity owing a great deal to pop culture gains sway. Artificial versions of strength, self-reliance, and stoicism — the Gary Cooper ideal — serve as thin veils for resentment, narcissism, and isolation.

Yarrow offers a number of policy prescriptions that address both the economic and cultural dimensions of the problem. These involve renewing the social contract by, for example, supporting unions, offering adults job training, and reforming the criminal-justice system. At the same time, Yarrow hopes we can once again “find a common core of values” through things like civics education, parenting classes, and better supports for civil society.

Perhaps more than these prescriptions, though, the value of Yarrow’s book lies in the way it shows how engrained tendencies in our black-and-white political dialogue prevent us from not only solving social problems, but from seeing them in all their shades and complexity.

Alexander Stern is deputy editor of RealClearPolicy.

St Martin's Press

In acerbic and irreverent essays, Mac Donald rails against left-wing dogmas that seem ubiquitous on university campuses. She is determined to show not just that there are zealots in higher education, but that their closely held beliefs are false. The notion, for example, that one in four or one in five women are raped on college campuses is, she writes, the result of dubious polling. It is activists, not serious social scientists, who are behind these inflated numbers.

And despite the constant genuflection to affirmative action, Mac Donald believes it does not actually benefit blacks. She argues in favor of the mismatch hypothesis: When, due to affirmative action, students are admitted to schools they are not academically qualified for, it ultimately disadvantages them. According to Mac Donald, they would be better served going to a school suited to their academic abilities.

By juxtaposing these critiques, Mac Donald offers a near exhaustive primer for anyone looking to a debate a dogmatic undergraduate. But for those already familiar with both sides of the debate, the book may be less useful. She parrots well known critics of campus sex culture and Title IX procedures like Christina Hoff Sommers, Emily Yoffe, and Camille Paglia. In reviewing the “mismatch hypothesis” Mac Donald presents some provocative studies but does not offer any novel interpretations.

While Mac Donald succeeds in bringing attention to a troubling trend on many campuses, her book is in spite of itself not really about American college education: It is about a few egregious cases of intolerance and dogmatism at a small set of well-endowed elite schools including UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Duke.

For example, in a well-known 2017 case, conservative writer Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury. Protestors silenced Murray and ultimately assaulted a professor. Conservatives and liberals agree that such cases go too far. Indeed, even Cornel West penned a letter after the Middlebury incident in support of the values of tolerance and open-mindedness.

The controversial question is to what extent these incidents are representative of a much broader trend. Mac Donald assumes, without enough argument, that one can generalize from these incidents to the culture at large. Still, regardless of the breadth of her argument, Mac Donald does succeed in describing repeated problems of intolerance and dogma in institutions supposedly committed to intellectual openness and the pursuit of truth. Whether or not there truly is a national trend, anyone who cares about education and the pursuit of truth should be disturbed by these events.

Max Diamond is an investigative reporter at RealClearInvestigations.

Yes, the headlines scream, “near record low unemployment.” But many economists of all political persuasions scratch their heads when they see little of the wage growth associated with a genuinely tight labor market.

President Trump, before he was inaugurated and started crowing about the low official unemployment rate, frequently described the rate as “totally fiction.” Analysts from the right, like the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, and the left, like Princeton University’s Alan Krueger, have pointed to the sharp decline in the numbers of American men working in recent decades.  

Take Hank, a white man in his late 50s from the Cotton Belt, who developed an agricultural software program, only to become abusive to his children and (ex-)wives. He stopped working and went off the grid into rural Appalachia.

Or Yates, who quit his job as a partner in a law firm in his 40s. Descending into a world of prescription-drug abuse and prostitutes, his wife divorced him after a decade of not bringing home the bacon.

And then there’s James, a 60-year-old African American man in the Midwest who had spent time in prison, who said, “There is discrimination that means you don’t even get a job interview. I committed a crime long ago. It’s what I did, not who I am.”

These are among hundreds of men of all ages, races, and classes whom I interviewed throughout the country. None are counted in the unemployment rate.

It’s not just men leaving the workforce. After decades of increasing numbers of women working, this trend began to reverse itself in the early 21st century. But, while some can be accounted for by growing numbers of women choosing to stay home with young children, the story of men who don’t work is different.

The United States, supposedly imbued with a Puritan work ethic and long boasting about its job-creating prowess, now is well behind Germany, Japan, Canada, Britain, and other rich countries in terms of its percentage of adults who work, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which sorely needs some new terminology to describe the state of the U.S. workforce, counts only those who have looked for a job within the last four weeks as unemployed. Less noticed are its counts of how many Americans are “participating” in the labor force by working or being “unemployed” as a proportion of the entire “working age” population. Unfortunately, BLS seems stuck in a long-ago world where “prime working age” is still defined as between 25 and 54 years old.

The reality is that millions of us older than 54 work or seek jobs, and a fair number of Americans under 25 also work. If one expands the “prime working age” to age 64, about 18  percent of prime working age men are not in the labor force.

There are further problems with this number: 64 doesn’t even bring us up to full Social Security retirement age (and many work longer); it fails to include the nation’s two million incarcerated men, the at least 10–15 million men who work part-time or in the gig economy — often not by choice — and men like a once high-earning 60-year-old New Yorker who said: “I retired after failing to find a suitable opportunity.” Also uncounted are the several million males between 16 and 24 called “NEETS” (not in education, employment, or training).

Cutting these numbers another way, millennial men’s labor force participation rate is about 15 percentage points lower than that of 45-to-54-year-old men. Many, if not most of America’s 17–20 million male ex-felons don’t work. Despite the political focus on the Trumpian white working class, Millennials, those who have done time, and men higher up the socioeconomic ladder are also among what I call “men out.”

We’re left with the reality that the percentage of men not employed today is about three times what it was during the Truman and Eisenhower eras: well over 20 million men. Not the four million officially deemed to be unemployed.

The possible causes, not fully understood, are many: pain, depression, ill health and opioids; mass incarceration; the internet and online gaming; women’s increasing earning power; government benefits like disability insurance; a sense that women now get many of the better jobs, helicopter parents; or just plain laziness in a culture that has “defined deviancy down,” as the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan so pithily said.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and unemployment rates.

Andrew L. Yarrow is a former New York Times reporter, a historian, and a wonk.

Scruton moves through the conflicts that gave rise to conservatism in America, England, Germany, and France. He describes how the sense of spiritual desolation which afflicted artists and critics like T.S. Eliot and John Ruskin produced cultural conservatism, and how the threat of communism gave rise to the anti-communist conservatism.Now, conservatives face the challenge of applying these strands of a tradition to complicated new problems of theory and practice: how to balance originalism and precedent in the realm of law; how to make a case for the free market despite the damage a global free market of labor has done for the American working class; how to maintain a sense of American identity without appearing completely opposed to immigrants. A book that could synthesize the history of good conservative arguments, evaluate them, and apply this understanding to contemporary issues would prove very useful.

“An Invitation to the Great Tradition” gets part of the way there, providing the outline of conservative history and a reading list for such a project. As an introduction, Scruton’s book can at times gives one only a loose sense of the historical connections and underlying philosophy. He is more interested in describing than in critiquing conservative arguments. One, therefore, does not necessarily walk away understanding whether or not one ought to be a conservative. But anyone interested in conservatism will come away with a wealth of new writing to read, and a more thorough sense of the conversation held among conservative intellectuals over the last few hundred years.

Max Diamond is an investigative reporter at  RealClearInvestigations.

“There is a huge industry dedicated to executing the wishes of human beings after their death,” Lam, an associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College, correctly notes. This “industry,” like many others, is contingent on policies enshrined in law. “Through endowments, charitable trusts, dynasty trusts, and inheritance law,” he writes, “trillions of dollars in the US economy and many legal institutions at all levels are tied up in executing the wishes of wealthy people who died long ago.”

After providing some examples of particular expressions of these wishes — “donor intent,” as it would be called in the context of grantmaking — and how they can be legally effectuated, Lam concludes, “These practices are, on reflection, quite puzzling.” 

Both attacks on and appeals to donor intent are not new, and will continue. Earlier this year, for example, a Massachusetts state court allowed the struggling nonprofit Berkshire Museum to sell art donated to it for purposes of display there.

Joel L. Fleishman’s recent book “Putting Wealth to Work: Philanthropy for Today or Investing for Tomorrow?” describes the ways in which many establishment philanthropies have wrestled with donor intent. He accuses conservatives of exaggerating the degree to which donor intent is violated by American philanthropic pillars, including the Ford Foundation. Martin Morse Wooster’s “How Great Philanthropists Failed & You Can Succeed at Protecting Your Legacy,” new from the Capital Research Center (where I work), profiles donor-intent violations, including Ford’s, and offers advice about how to better honor donor intent. 

A Foundational Attack on Donor Intent
Lam presents a more foundational attack on donor intent than most people, who, even in violating it, usually maintain a pretense of adhering to it. One of the things that puzzles Lam about donor intent is that the principle behind it is not equivalently applied in other contexts. In legal matters, for instance, dead people can’t vote, prevent their surviving spouses from remarrying, or run their companies anymore.

Lam does acknowledge that, even if only as a moral matter, a dying person can make his or her wishes regarding a spouse’s remarriage after his or her own death known to that spouse. “A promise itself holds some moral weight,” he says, “but not overriding moral weight.” 

Whether asked in a legal or a moral context, Lam’s larger question is a good and challenging one: Why this beneficial deal for the dead when it comes to their wishes regarding their wealth? Why place the past above the present? 

Whether you’re rich or not, morally or ethically, what do you think you owe your dead grandparents?

The Perils of Presentism
In answering his larger question, Lam touches on several arguments, many often made or invoked elsewhere by less bold skeptics of donor intent. However, his concluding reason we protect donor intent

is that we have a self-interested desire that our own interests and values be preserved by future people after our own death, on pain that we disappear from the world without any legacy of influence. This existential fear we overcome by permitting institutions to honour the wishes of the dead in order to guarantee a place for our wishes in the future. But it is time to recognise the vanity and narcissism of the practice, and do what is actually best for the living, which is to have the living determine it for themselves.

Lam is willing here to allow “vanity and narcissism” to be meaningful measures of the morality of picking the past over the present, and he should, but this measure is equally applicable to the present. There might be some vanity and narcissism in us here arrogantly wanting “to guarantee a place for our wishes in the future,” but there is much more arrogance in automatically thinking we know better than the dead.

Presentism is bad enough when it prevents us, the living, from learning from about our own past, whether as individual donors or philanthropic institutions. It lessens or outright eliminates the benefit of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, which is worth something. In the context of philanthropy, while perhaps not strictly speaking arrogant, presentism risks inefficient and often ineffective grantmaking. 

In terms of donor intent, the perils are even worse. In addition to inefficiency and ineffectiveness, there’s an additional moral risk that’s incurred: namely, breaking the cross-generational promise to the now-dead. This is also worth something, even to Lam. He just doesn’t think this promise has “overriding moral weight.” But, since we’re motivated by selfishness, there is outright arrogance in our breaking this promise — maybe vanity and narcissism, even. 

We do not necessarily know better than our forebears, and we should not think so. We are certainly not better human beings by virtue of the mere passage of time. We might, I suppose, think we have more evidence to bring to bear on our judgments, but why on earth would we think we have more wisdom?

Our forebears — part of what some traditions would consider the “communion of saints” or the “democracy of the dead” — have some standing, to use a legal word, to complain if and when an important moral obligation like this is forsaken. They have an interest, and it should not go unrepresented. This is the reason for the existence of the “industry” Lam laments.

Those interests — donors’ intent — should not just arrogantly, cavalierly, and nearsightedly be overridden by us. 

Hartmann is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Strategic Giving at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. He is a former program officer and director of research at The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee.

Given the way Donald Trump successfully coopted traditionally leftist economic and anti-corporate rhetoric to win the election, it seems clear that the answer in the Democratic party must at least pay lip service to populism. But different programs — from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s “Better Deal,” to Bernie Sanders ambitious entitlement proposals, to Elizabeth Warren’s newly proposed Accountable Capitalism Act — suggest different visions for how the Left can address the depredations of capitalism it has long managed to ignore.

W.W. Norton & Company

As journalist, Brandeis professor, and cofounder of the American Prospect Robert Kuttner describes in his recent book “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?”, the Clinton-Obama center has been discredited by Hillary’s loss and four decades of neoliberal economic policy that have triggered a current populist backlash from the right, both here and in Europe. Only by properly understanding that failure — by determining how capitalism got away from us — Kuttner suggests, can we arrive at a viable left-populist approach for putting it back in its place.

Kuttner argues that the process of globalization since the 1970s has allowed corporations, centrist politicians, and international organizations like the European Union and the World Trade Organization to successfully reimplement a laissez-faire approach to markets. As a result, we have returned to an economic environment like that of the late 19th century, which bred inequality and eventually fueled populist uprisings in the United States and fascism in Europe. The post-war system established by FDR’s decency and ingenuity, and by a confluence of other fortuitous circumstances, was destroyed.

Kuttner calls that system, a version of which he wants us to return to, “nationally managed capitalism.” On its face, the phrase sounds something like Steve Bannon’s “economic nationalism.” And indeed, shortly before his ouster from the Trump administration, Bannon called Kuttner to express admiration for the latter’s views on trade and emphasize commonalities in their approach to China. But for Kuttner, Trump offers only a simulacrum of the economic reform that is needed, mixing it with racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric and using it to veil mainstream right-wing policies, including the tax bill and deregulation.

Nationally managed capitalism does nonetheless involve a version of protectionism, which was in Kuttner’s view wrongly stigmatized on the left during its neoliberal turn. Dick Gephardt, for example, was, like our current president, “pilloried as a vulgar protectionist” for questioning the free-trade consensus during his 1988 presidential run. In addition to embracing free trade, Clinton reoriented the party by cutting welfare, deregulating the banking system, and insisting on a balanced budget, all while shifting the social justice discussion away from class and toward an identity politics corporations could embrace.

The result of trade deals like NAFTA has largely been what people like Gephardt said it would be. Manufacturing in the country was decimated, especially in the upper Midwest, and communities fell apart. Free-trade policy, moreover, Kuttner claims, became a gateway to free-market economic policy in general, becoming “an all-purpose tool to dismantle managed capitalism.” American corporations did benefit of course, from access to cheap labor and new markets, but Kuttner emphasizes that the country as a whole did not: These deals did not even produce net economic growth. Instead China was allowed to export goods more easily while continuing protectionist policies at home.

Whereas the dominant centrist sentiment at the time held that bringing China into the global economy would eventually lead to an embrace of democratic liberalism, Kuttner argues that the opposite has taken place. That received view presumed an affinity between free markets and democracy, but “democratic capitalism today” has become “a contradiction in terms.” Instead of countries like Russia and China “becoming more like us,” Kuttner writes, citing James Mann, “we are becoming more like them.” Our national government no longer acts to check corporate power and make space for genuine democracy, but instead acts in cahoots with capitalists, while political and business interests are blended at all levels of government and on both sides of the aisle.

So, what kind of left populism can revive democracy? Kuttner’s prescriptions revolve around “reclaiming the public realm.” That means restoring faith in genuine government services — ones like Medicare that don’t act in dubious partnership with private industry (as Obamacare does); reinvigorating antitrust and financial regulations; exploring public supplements to labor income; and implementing trade polices that affirm rather than undermine a national social contract with workers. In brief, democracy can survive global capitalism only if it succeeds in making it less global and less capitalist.

Alexander Stern is deputy editor of RealClearPolicy.

Jonathan Rauch: Positive, trusting social connection. Hands down. Being in supportive, trusting, and loving relationships is more important than wealth, health, and status. In fact, investing in wealth and status just makes us hungrier for more of the same (what researchers call the hedonic treadmill). Investing in core relationships and giving back to others provides lasting satisfaction that grows over time.

RCB: Jon, in your book you write about a Canadian named Derek who sent you a note after reading a magazine piece of yours about the U Curve. He seemed grateful to know about it — happier, actually. So my question is whether the mere knowledge that most human beings experience this big U-shaped curve when it comes to life satisfaction … will that help people get through their 30s and 40s? 

Rauch: Yes! Forewarned is forearmed. Knowing what’s going on won’t abolish the U-shaped happiness curve. Age-related midlife slump is a natural, normal, and healthy transition in our values, with a wonderful payoff in later-life contentment. But it’s much easier to get through if not compounded by fear and alarm that we’re suffering from some kind of permanent depression, or that something is wrong with us, or that we have some kind of shameful secret ... or that it’s a “crisis.” My book is all the stuff I wish I could have known when I was 38. I would have been more relaxed and optimistic in my 40s!

RCB: So the “happiness trough” exists even in chimpanzees and orangutans? That’s what you write in Chapter 3. Apes don’t even have tuition bills or four-car garages, so if they’re susceptible to the “midlife crisis,” I guess there’s no escaping it for humans?

Rauch: Something analogous happens in chimps and orangutans. They’re not human, obviously, so the phenomenon isn’t identical. But the cross-species parallel suggests that there’s something pretty fundamental about the U-shaped curve, probably based in evolution and related to our changing social roles as we age.

RCB: I loved your book, but don’t remember being unhappy or unfulfilled in my 40s. Am I an anomaly?

Rauch: No. Lots of things influence life satisfaction; the aging process is only one of them. It’s significant, but it can be swamped by other factors, like satisfaction with work and relationships. Ironically, those who experience smooth sailing in life — people who objectively have the most to be grateful for — are most at risk for feeling age-related malaise, because other factors are stable. Here’s how I think about it: It’s perfectly possible to be satisfied and grateful in your 40s ... but it’s harder. So don’t be surprised if you have trouble. Not everyone will, but lots of people do.

RCB: Your subtitle is “Why Life Gets Better After 50.” And in one podcast I listened to, I heard you say that our 60s and 70s are the prime emotional peaks of life. Those are some of the most optimistic things I ever heard. You write about wisdom, presumably a trait we acquire as we age. Why does being wiser make us happier?

Rauch: Wisdom is related to maintaining emotional equilibrium, being able to balance multiple points of view, having a larger perspective on life, having some experience about how to handle ourselves and others, caring about others, and not being a drama queen. All of those things are good for happiness. Best of all: They are also good for the happiness of those around us! If there’s one virtue I wish our society valued more, it’s wisdom.

RCB: Do our poisonous current politics or the “Trump Effect” negate any of your findings? It certainly seems like many of my friends are uncommonly sour these days.

Rauch: I hear you, brother. If chimps could read the news these days, it might upset them, too. Seriously, there’s a lot to worry about in our country right now. Remember, the aging process isn’t the only thing that influences our satisfaction. Life and politics also matter. Let’s put it this way: There have been better times to be a middle-aged Democrat than right now!

RCB: You sound personally happier now than when you started researching this book. Is that because you’ve sailed past your 50th birthday? Or because you finished the book?

Rauch: Yes, yes.