After the political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered last year, I wrote that the horrific event was about something bigger than free speech. It was about the dehumanization of Kirk by his murderer and other detractors who denied his right to live. Again, a public death is leading to public dehumanization of the deceased. This is unhealthy and reminds me of the mindset in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

During the Irish Troubles, the British Army was deployed to defeat the Irish republican insurgents and establish law and order so that the UK government could find a political solution that kept Northern Ireland in the Union with Great Britain. It took thirty years because as the conflict progressed, the two communities—republican Irish versus British loyalist—became as a British Ministry of Defense study argued “victims of their own views; moderate political opinion, compromise and often logic has largely been marginalised.”1 (Emphasis mine)

This view of identity conflicts shaped my subsequent research at Howard University and still strikes me as true. When people see reality through the lens of an identity conflict, they prioritize whether taking a particular position would be a betrayal of their identity or cost their “side” something, and they stop thinking rationally about what is happening.

The same attitude that broke Northern Ireland is dismantling our shared reality concerning Minneapolis and ICE, and about Venezuela, Cuba, Canada, Greenland, Russia and Ukraine, government benefits fraud, and so on. Renee Nicole Good was a human being before the opposing sides labeled her one thing or the other. If acknowledging the humanity of the “other” is seen as weakness, then cruelty will be mistaken for strength. Northern Ireland lost two generations of history to that madness; we do not need to follow that pattern.

We do not have to be Rome, 1930s Spain or Germany, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, or any other past example currently in vogue in the minds of those fearing our imminent collapse.

We can refuse to be the bitter victims of our own tribal views.

We can choose to be Americans and be the exception to the troubles.

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It is easy to comply in advance with what those in power indicate you should do. It is much harder to take, maintain, and use your freedom to govern yourself politically and personally. Being a subject only requires that you bow down—gravity helps with that. Being a citizen means keeping your chin up and resisting the downward pull.

Do the harder thing.

The Moral Necessity of Republican Virtue and Recognizing True Conspiracies

Americans had to learn how to do government without the monarchy and the Lords. Effectively, the American Revolution was the commoners of the colonies declaring independence from the hereditary imperial system. The British monarchy had become corrupted by the avarice of Parliament’s elite, alienating the colonies from the mother country. To replace this system and support a new one, Americans developed a philosophical “republicanism.” They argued that power is inherently corrupting, yet without an empowered government, you have anarchy—which eventually becomes an alternative power structure of chaos, crime, and exploitation.

Therefore, the Founding generation determined that a successful republic required citizens to possess virtue. Virtue is the ability to tell yourself “No” even when you could take advantage of others. It is the internal voice that says: I could do a bad thing, but I will not, because it is wrong, and power is not enough justification to just take what I want. Seeking the “public good” over your own “self-interest” equaled virtue in the early republic. American women were central to this. They developed the ideology of "Republican Motherhood," shaping a patriarchal society to unlearn the attitudes of monarchism. American mothers taught their sons to be egalitarian citizens rather than tyrants or subjects.

And of course, we can see why women without political power would want the social influence to shape the way men would use their power. They did the job so well that by 1812, Americans had nearly forgotten what life was like under the monarchy—except for the idea that kings were bad and un-American.

But in every time period, there are men who want to bring the rest of society under their control and reestablish exclusive rule by force and privilege. These are men who reject restraint and lack virtue.

To understand this, we need to be adults about the word conspiracy.

In recent years, this term has been weaponized to dismiss anyone who questions authority as “crazy.” That dismissal, like the spread of the QAnon deception, is a deliberate attempt to disarm you—like in Orwell’s 1984—because if you cannot name a thing, it is hard to oppose it. Conspire comes from the Latin conspirare, which literally means "to breathe together" like if we were closed up together in a smoke-filled room, huffing and puffing away, scheming. QAnon and other internet conspiracy theories have made us numb to the reality of conspiracies. A conspiracy is simply an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal or immoral act.

• Price-fixing is a conspiracy.

• Watergate was a conspiracy.

• The assassination of Julius Caesar was a conspiracy.

Conspiracy = A Plot.

Early Patriots understood this. They believed they had to remain vigilant against conspiracies to recreate tyranny. So, they built in layers of accountability and then gave the people the ability to amend the Constitution in case they needed more accountability and additional safeguards. This concern is why they added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution only a few years after ratification. It is why the Radical Republicans—responding to the “Confederate Secession Conspiracy” (the Civil War) and the conspiracy to enforce the Black Codes—passed the Reconstruction Amendments to enshrine rights in the supreme law of the land.

Creating unnecessary divisions among US citizens and setting them against one another is just another type of conspiracy that crops up from time to time in our history.

The Divine or Natural Origin of Rights—It Doesn’t Matter the way they want you to think it does.

Whether you are Christian, non-Christian, agnostic, or atheist, you do not have to fall for the trick that the concepts of “Divine Rights” and “Natural Rights” are in conflict. Or that you have to be political opponents.

Think about it, the Founding Fathers had different ideas about this topic, all the way from Thomas Jefferson and his secularism to Continental Army Major General Rev. John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg and his brother Rev. Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, the first Speaker of the US House, who were both Lutheran ministers. Yet the founders agreed that what was meant by the divine/natural argument was that the government cannot just do whatever it wants to people. Exploiters want you fighting each other about the origins and not opposing their stripping you and others of human dignity.

Enlightenment rationalism and religious revivalism by arguing that human rights are not granted by kings but are "endowed by their Creator" and are "unalienable," shifted the moral and ethical authority over the social order from hereditary privilege to the individual and their right to pursue happiness according to their ability. This conclusion was not something that simply appeared in the 1770s but grew from the experiences of 1,000 years of English history.

When we lose the context, we lose the ability to identify when we are being robbed. Liberty is something you own, and, like any possession, you can misuse it and or have it stolen.

Con-artists and gangsters love “too much liberty” because they exploit your weaknesses—like addictions— to make you their servants. That is what Licentiousness is. It is the “I can so I will” mentality that rejects all restraints without asking why the restraints are there. It is the anti-virtue and anti-empathy mindset.

We see this in foreign policy. It is a mindset that thinks the US was “cheated” by the world order after 1945 because we were the only country with nukes, had 12 million troops, and an intact economy. To the licentious mind, Truman was a “loser” because he did not simply take the resources of the world by force.

To them the Marshall Plan was a waste because it created alternatives to raw American power. They hate the UN, NATO, IMF, and the World Bank because those institutions constrained American power. But those institutions were created by Americans who knew that the USA benefited when the world had rules. The WWII-era leadership realized that war was the usual way great powers fell. If the US was already the greatest power, why risk a major war?

Peace through the international rules-based order meant that there were fewer opportunities for another power to take advantage of a global crisis to displace the United States. Less risk, more reward sounds like Americans First.

The licentious mentality is too simple and barbaric to understand that peace and structure are better for the United States. What they call “America First” looks more like the personalities currently running the American government first, and the American people last.

We forgot our natural suspicion of power in the years of fear after 9/11. That era, more than the Cold War, broke the restraints on executive power and unleashed a “revenge and domination” sadism that had nothing to do with securing the Homeland. Media personalities drove fear of our Muslim neighbors, and beltway bandits lined up to rack up billions of dollars in contracts performing newly bloated national security work.

The government became more unconstrained while problems at home went unaddressed. Americans became more desperate and alienated from one another while kept in various states of anxiety. It is time to reject the post-9/11 mentality of paranoia and return to a healthier mindset of guarded suspicion of all leaders who seek to rule rather than to govern, and to extract rather than to build.

Americans who lost control over their lives have been induced and tricked into indulging cruel domination over others at home and abroad. They do not want you to debate or reason; they want you to dunk, own, and destroy. It is a cheap dopamine hit that does not build roads, hospitals, or a future. That is not self-governing virtue; that is a temporary thrill that only feels like command, but is just another way to con you out of your money and your country.

But we can reject being subject to vile desires for retribution and finally bolt the second door. Instead, we can look them in the eye and ask: “What are you doing about that $38 Trillion debt? We will not be distracted by the latest foreign mischief—answer the question.”

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The obsession with youth has been around for a while, but its current form is a symptom of a uniquely boomer/early Gen-X media apparatus—one that has spent decades marketing and catering to a form of perpetual immaturity. This worship of youth and early success (often measured in possessions) has harmed the public spirit, but I tell you there are no people more disappointed in our boomer elites than the Quiet Boomers. We have not been led by the quiet boomers.

A quiet boomer is one of those Americans who got on with their lives by trying to do their best in their communities and families, often serving in the military or other positions where what was called for was sober-mindedness rather than a fixation on the self. They are our unassuming institutionalists who never gave much concern to the so-called "30 under 30" type of measuring contests that became popular in the 2010s. Such lists, marketing tools to capture the youth market in unhelpful ways, embraced a prodigy myth; they focused overly on early success—often celebrity success—rather than the more ordinary grind and grit of the average American. These citizens often have to wait until their forties or fifties, the so-called sandwich years of greatest family responsibility, to see the fruits of their labor honored, if at all.

That age for most is the Goldilocks moment, when they are mature and still have the energy to undertake major responsibility and creative reforms and innovations. In the Roman Republic high responsibility was supposed to follow the seasoning of your life that came with age and having to deal with failure as well as success. It is why the minimum age for a Roman consul was 42 and that is if you had been elected to the qualifying lower ranking offices previously. They wanted to see a history of duty and maturity before celebrating someone’s accomplishments with high office. This often meant experiencing setbacks and rising to the occasion. I think of how George Washington became president at 57 and his accomplishments are ultimately greater than the prodigy Alexander's. Abraham Lincoln became president at 52 and F.D.R. at 51, ready for hard tasks. For most, success comes later in life, and in the past this was understood and received the appropriate respect. And for some, even later achievement was the norm, but it was still achievement. Today it seems like if you are not early then you have failed. But the prodigy fixation is not only unhealthy, it is often illusory, and lacks the depth of the long-haul effort, the sort that builds, shapes, and sustains the institutions of civilization. There’s a particular biography that keeps this in focus for me, and the numbers to keep in mind are: 1884, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1934, and 1945.

Harry S. Truman was born in 1884, to a humble family with two grandfathers named Shipp and Solomon so he got an “S.” that stood for both of them rather than a full middle name. Nothing came easy to Truman, or early. He was smart but could not afford university, and could not get into West Point because he had poor eyesight; he was the last president to never finish college. In 1905 he joined the Missouri National Guard and served until 1911, the same year he proposed to a woman named Bess Wallace. She shut him down. He wanted to prove himself and thought that she didn't want to marry a poor farmer, but she did not have a mind to marry anyone she said. Truman tried his hand at various business ventures, he was a hard worker, and was willing to do tasks that needed doing, as the old saying goes. He was not a quitter.

His life went on and Truman's chance to finally serve his country as a combat soldier came in 1917 with the Great War; he was 33 years old, rejoined the Missouri National Guard which was federalized and sent overseas to fight the Kaiserreich. He was a trad Protestant who was known for his ability to get along with Catholics and Jews, the "new immigrant" groups of 19th century America. In fact Truman took over the Battery D, 129th Field Artillery Regiment, the so-called Battery D-Boys, or the Dizzy D. Rough, and rowdy—and apparently hungover when Truman first mustered them—they had a rep that made commanders shy away. Not Truman; he did not have the time for it and whipped them into shape. They tried to rattle him, he rattled right back after regaining his composure because the first sight of his new unit unnerved him for a moment. A moment.

“I didn’t come over here to get along with you. You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you right back now.”

He demoted several non-commissioned officers and privates first-class on day two of his command.

He eventually made this group of mostly Irish and German American Catholic lads from Missouri love his old Baptist and Presbyterian inflected discipline. A month before the massive Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Truman won them over in an incident known as the “Battle of Who Run”1 on a hill in the Vosges Mountains, when his horse went down after a German shell exploded nearby, Truman’s men ran. But Truman got up after being helped by a soldier and let loose with, shall we say, words of encouragement, to get back in the fight. The sight of the 34 year-old captain, more mature than previous commanders, wearing his glasses, and standing tall after they all saw his horse collapse, smartened the boys up really quick as to who this man was.

The Battery D-Boys never ran again and the Germans were the first ones Truman gave hell to. Truman left the US Army as a respected Captain and local war hero, and in 1919, now a veteran he shot his shot, and married his bride for life, Elizabeth Virginia Wallace. He never gave up courting her and she was glad to have him back.

He joined the Army Reserves, was promoted and eventually reached the rank of colonel in 1932, and stayed in until retiring as an inactive reservist the day he left the White House in 1953.

Finally, in 1924 at the age of 40 he became a father to Mary Margaret and would remain a doting Dad all his life, famously taking to task a Washington Post critic who did not like Margaret Truman's singing after she embarked on a musical career as a young woman:

Mr. Hume:

I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.”

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!

Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

H.S.T.

Big Dad Energy from POTUS.

Truman entered local politics and was elected a US Senator from Missouri at the age of 50 in 1934. An honest man he lived thriftily, and as head of the Select Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program Truman gained respect and admiration for exposing war profiteering and substandard work by some firms taking advantage of the World War Two emergency. Then at the age of 60 he was asked to be FDR’s vice presidential running mate in 1944, and when FDR died suddenly in April 1945 Truman became president a month before his 61st birthday. When Truman left office in 1953 the world was transformed.

This ordinary American concluded the end of the Second World War, succeeding after the death of the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Truman helped set up the United Nations, supervised the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, democratized Japan, established NATO, recognized the State of Israel, resisted the communists in Korea, initiated the desegregation of the United States Armed Forces, and ensured that the civilian leadership of the United States would control atomic weapons.

In his last presidential news conference he was asked about his financial future after leaving office. I’ll let you get the measure of the man from his answer.

[30.] Q. Mr. President, when a 5-star general is put on the inactive list, I think he gets a pension and a salary of about $19,000 a year.

THE PRESIDENT. They are never put on the inactive list. They are not put on the inactive list. It was provided that they would be the eider statesmen of the military, that they would be on active duty at the call of the President all the time.

Q. My question was, does the President of the United States get any such pension as that?

THE PRESIDENT. No. The President of the United States is going to have to commence begging meals after the 20th. [Laughter] He is getting a lot of invitations, so I don't believe he will go hungry.

Q. Mr. President, if you don't mind this question--as a result of what has been done about the President's salary, will you be in a position so that you won't have to--oh, say, join an insurance company or become an editor, or something like that?

THE PRESIDENT. Yes, Eddie, but I wouldn't do that under any circumstances. I think-as I told you time and again, this Presidential Office--now remember I am talking about the office--is the greatest and most powerful office in the history of the world. It's the greatest honor that can come to any man in the world. And no man, I am sure, would want to exploit it. And under no circumstances would I do anything that would appear to use the great office which I have had the honor to hold as a means for exploitation.
—January 15, 19532

Truman received a regular income of just over $100 from his army pension, but contrary to myth, he and Bess were moderately comfortable because of his nature; he had saved much of his presidential salary and like U.S. Grant, sold his memoirs for a high advance payment on his autobiography to provide for his family. He refused jobs that would demean the office and carried on as a private citizen. But with concern that this situation might be unsustainable for himself or his successors, Truman, thinking of the institution, privately lobbied Congress for the Former Presidents Act. Passed in 1958 and signed by President Dwight David Eisenhower, the legislation provided Truman, his only living predecessor Herbert Hoover, and their successors a pension—later amended to add lifetime Secret Service protection—with the goal of ensuring that former presidents would be better able to preserve the dignity of the republic as disinterested elder statesmen.

Was he late or did Truman arrived on time?

How about you?

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I am a historian who loves to investigate ideas, manners, habits and their origins.

Intellectual and cultural genealogies are important context for understanding systems, governments, institutions, and peoples. In higher academia, for example, we pay attention to who someone’s dissertation advisors were. It matters that the discredited Lost Cause narrative of post-Civil War Reconstruction was promoted, not by a Southern school, but, by the Ivy League elite at Columbia University, a narrative developed by professor William Archibald Dunning and his students. This northern elite intellectual cadre created a historical narrative that served as an excuse Southerners used to justify Jim Crow. To them, giving Black men the right to vote was an awful idea that could only have come from idiots or corrupt politicians who wanted the votes of freedmen so they could take power. They claimed having to treat Blacks as fellow voters had been an undue hardship on Southern Whites, who were of course only to be expected to react violently against this imposition by the “corrupt” Yankee Republicans. How the former Black slaves were supposed to react to citizenship, after being robbed, violated, and beaten for centuries and then losing the right to vote, was beside the point; what mattered was that Southern Whites had a hard time and this school of historiography provided the academic pedigree to support Southern White supremacy and disarm Northern White liberal critics of the Southern racial order.

It also matters that Socrates was from Athens and lived from 470 BC to 399 BC. He lived through the Golden Age of Athens, and its hubris, and he was the teacher of Plato. Plato was also from Athens, and lived from around 423 BC to 348 BC, and saw Athenian democracy scapegoat and judicially murder Socrates after the Peloponnesian War. Plato went on, founded an academy and became the teacher of Aristotle who hailed from the northern city of Stagira near the Macedonian border. Aristotle, who lived from 384 BC to 322 BC, came to Athens and remained there until the death of Plato. That is an intellectual genealogy where we can trace the evolution and consequences of particular lines of thought through their work. After Plato died, Aristotle traveled for a few years and eventually went back north to become the tutor of the 13 year-old son of the Macedonian king, and that boy grew up to become Alexander the Great. Consequences.

Something I have mentioned before is that the 18th and 19th-century success of the United States versus its fellow former colonies in the Western Hemisphere can be explained by heritage. It matters immensely that the USA came from England and that its competitors came from Portugal, Spain, and France. America was not “European,” it was “British.” The colonial inheritance went through Canterbury, not Rome or Moscow.

Because origins, connections, and transmissions matter, we can analyze habits of social organization—like civilizational manners and leadership capacity, or their absence—by looking closely at who the caretakers of a culture were and whom they served.

The cultural critic Aaron Renn recently argued that the 'evangelical elite' is essentially a misnomer because it doesn't exist. Despite numbering in the tens of millions, evangelicals wield far less influence than their sheer size would suggest. Renn notes that while evangelicals are successful in “prosaic” business and populist politics, they are almost entirely absent from the “commanding heights” of law, finance, and culture-shaping institutions. This observation prompted a penetrating analysis from theologian, Dr. Anthony Bradley on Substack Notes last week:

The evangelical elite deficit is an intellectual-cultural inheritance crisis.

As a historian, I love these social-intellectual discussions about Protestantism, as it is the tradition with, by far, the greatest legacy impact on American society, especially during the first three centuries. My own trajectory through Oral Roberts University, Norwich University, and Howard University has provided me with a unique vantage point on how different American subcultures transmit their values and organize their worlds. I have seen the zeal of the relatively recent evangelical enclosure, the legacy reservoir of WASP institutional discipline in the military scholar tradition, and the excellence forged by the determined resilience of a Protestant tradition that could never assume respect or dignity.

1. Renn is right on the “what,” and Bradley is right on the “why.” We need to also look at the “who.” The evangelical elite deficit is an intellectual-cultural lineage crisis. Who are the evangelicals under discussion, and what were their ancestors doing a century ago? What habits did they inculcate and how did they get separated from earlier American Protestant traditions of elite formation? Institution-building requires a cultural mindset, and how many evangelicals come from American subcultures with a real history of doing that under duress and without inherited high status? Can you build institutions if your early 20th-century ancestors were defined by a habitus of withdrawal, separation, and a chronic, excessive suspicion of institutions?

2. Many evangelicals understand ownership, but they do not understand governance. Evangelical business success is concentrated in sectors like retail, restaurants, and distribution—niche fiefs, where the power of ownership is absolute. This is effective for building a company with a relatively predictable business model, but it is a poor preparation for the commanding heights of society. Institutional power in places like high finance, the Supreme Court, or elite universities requires a different social capital: the ability to marshal a consensus among the governed and to navigate complex, high-trust systems that you do not personally own. When evangelicals bring a fief mindset to politics or public institutions, they may win a few elections, but often fail to create durable institutions that flourish and survive in a messy and fallen world. Instead, they become lords of gated enclaves and public square paupers.

3. We see this evidenced in the habitual church splits triggered by contentious disagreement. Evangelicals require a tradition with stronger institutional brakes on the impulse for withdrawal from uncomfortable situations. This would mean adopting a culture of institutional patience, as mentioned by Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, in a recent article: “Anglican Churn & Protestant Impatience”.

4. This weakness is why Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option captured their imaginations a decade ago. Despite Dreher not being an evangelical, he articulated their anxieties so well because evangelicals do not do well with adversity—or with the growing pains and setbacks that come with trying to build institutions worthy of being called elite. And yet the examples in that work did not make use of the one most applicable to the USA: The Black Protestant tradition.

The chain linking evangelicals to the successful Protestant American past has been severed. Identifying who broke it—and which groups within American Protestantism have best preserved their connections to the old ways—is essential to recovering lost wisdom and avoiding the mistakes that led to both its loss and evangelicals' isolation from mainstream American society.

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(Finals Week is almost over)

George Washington is my favorite president and the one I rate the highest in terms of the office. My students figure this out quickly. I have a gag that they can guess my top two presidents too, but they will struggle to figure out my third.

One thing I note about Washington is that he allowed himself to feel tired and to know when he had done enough. The first time was December 23, 1783 when he resigned as commander of the Continental Army. The Army continued to exist after the war with Great Britain, and would fluctuate in size in the years before Washington became president in 1789. But, had he wished, he could have continued to command the peacetime army and exert influence that way from 1783—89. He did not. He was tired, he missed home, and what he had accomplished was more than adequate and he knew it.

Later in 1787 and 1789, he took two jobs for the benefit of the country: President of the Constitutional Convention and President of the United States. Washington could have served for life, but he did not. In 1796, feeling he had accomplished what he could to set the country’s new federal government on a stable path, he chose to step down. He left the presidency in 1797 after an exhausting eight-year term, and because he did not want to make America a country that depended on one personality to lead it. The Father of his Country knew how to let us grow up. And he was satisfied in what he had accomplished.

A lot of mistakes today in business and politics come from doing too much, a lack of contentment, and not knowing how to pass the baton. The Walt Disney Company appears to suffer from a Bob Iger-induced lack of creativity after what seems like a false retirement and later sabotage of his successor. The American people are ill-served by a political elite that refuses to hand over power to Generation X. I could go on, but one theme I have noticed from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Joseph Robinette Biden, is that American leaders struggle to admit when they are weary, and need to say their time is up and the next generation’s time is now.

Beyond retirement, in fact, before retirement, Americans suffer stress and burnout because they will not take needed breaks, such as vacation and sabbaticals. We convince ourselves that everything will fall apart if not for us. It is unhealthy, and if the thing cannot run without you, have you done your job to make it the best and most resilient it could be? Furthermore, retirement does not have to equal idleness.

George Washington rested from public burdens, but he kept active at home at Mount Vernon in Virginia. We learn a lot about his courage, character and wisdom, but not sufficiently, I think, about his self-honesty. He knew when to say “good enough” and take ample satisfaction in his deeds, and walk away, for a while at least. We—or rather, President John Adams—called him back to lead the US Army in 1798 when he thought we might have to defend the Eastern seaboard from a Revolutionary French invasion. It was the original American, “If you need me, give me a call.”

He answered, but that was a choice, not a demand.

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I guess, we might as well start walking now.

(Grading papers so a short one tonight)

Read list week’s Message

You do not want nervous allies and you do not want frightened citizens. If you keep doing things that provoke those responses you get one thing: alienation.

Alienation brings down empires. It makes the people you depend on to keep the system running decide that there is no point in working or sacrificing to maintain it. They look for alternatives, and better deals because you basically told them they were suckers for being loyal to you and your past relationships. But the days the unipolar world when American could just do as it pleased and ignore the world are over and never coming back. Yet the US government acts like it is 2004.

We do not want a Qing America that is woefully unaware of developments around the world and that insulates itself from reality by holding on to out-of-date ideas of superiority.

The early nineteenth-century Great Qing court of China learned that the hard way. For two centuries the ethnic Manchus had ruled over the Chinese empire, populated by the majority Han people, the group we often refer to as the ethnic Chinese. The Manchus were a people from what is now northwestern China, and they now sat at the center of one of the greatest empires on earth. But by the late 18th century they refused to see that the world around them had flipped. Earlier Tsarist Russian probes on the steppe of East Asia were treated as a nuisance in an old game of barbarian management, and not seen as evidence of a new kind of power projection. The Qing successfully checked Russian expansion in Central Asia in the 1690s but drew the wrong lessons. Russia’s limited but effective eastward push showed that European powers were gaining a decisive edge in logistics and long-range power projection. There were European ships in the South China Sea but no Chinese ships in the Channel or the Baltic. Yet after defeating the Russians in the steppe, the Qing made no effort to study Russia itself or to rethink their own military and strategic posture.

At sea, they similarly misread the encroaching presence of European empires across maritime Asia. Spanish, British, Portuguese, and Dutch footholds from the Philippines to Burma and Macao were not seen as a new strategic environment; instead the Qing court dismissed naval and maritime issues as secondary. Han merchants understood the significance of oceanic trade far better than Manchu officials in Beijing, but the state neither valued nor organized that knowledge into something actionable. As a result, Europeans steadily gathered information on China through trade, missions, and regional contacts, while Qing forces went into the nineteenth century with little understanding of their opponents’ technology or methods.

Internally, the dynasty depended on Han resources and manpower while systematically privileging Manchus and preventing the emergence of an integrated, expert officer corps. Officers were rotated to block the development of independent power bases, but this also blocked the accumulation of local and functional expertise. During the First Opium War of 1839–42 the sad state of affairs was exposed. As a special imperial commissioner in Canton in 1839, Lin Zexu took several actions against the opium trade. He arrested Chinese smugglers, compelled British merchants to surrender their opium, and destroyed approximately 1,400 tons of the narcotic. The British started the war to stop the suppression of the trade because it was their way of getting silver out of China.

The opening clash of the First Opium War came in late 1839, when two British warships punched through the Qing blockade of the Pearl River delta and destroyed twenty-nine Chinese vessels. In a single action the Royal Navy made plain its technological and tactical superiority at sea and set the pace for the rest of the war. British forces attacked and occupied Canton in May 1841, and subsequent British campaigns were overwhelmingly successful, and China gave in in 1842. For the first time a European country had defeated a major East Asian power.

Manchu favoritism and the willingness to scapegoat Han officials, such as Commissioner Lin, eroded Han loyalty. In southern China, many Han merchants and even soldiers saw more advantage in cooperating with British opium traders than in supporting a distant court that did not fully trust them. This created a perverse situation in which the British benefited from Han intelligence and from the reluctance of Han troops to fight decisively for Manchu rulers. The combination of pride in “China” and ignorance of the “barbarians” led to the Qing state both ignoring the technological advances of the West, but also downplaying the allure the West might have on the Han subjects in the South. In the end, Britain prevailed not over the latent strength of the Chinese world, but over a self-crippled Qing state that had chosen to alienate those it needed to survive.

America is already in Qing territory. American citizens are losing faith and rethinking careers of government service. Nervous allies are decoupling, redirecting trade, and building new security structures that treat Washington as a problem to be managed not a leader owed deference. Canada is pivoting to Europe and looking to build a competitor defense industry. The US cannot afford to lose Canada to Europe.

Would-be opponents of American decline, like the Democratic Party, must start speaking directly to the crisis in foreign relations and the destruction of the civil peace. Especially Canada. There is no excuse for the silence regarding the treatment of Canada. It is an open wound that threatens to turn into a permanent infection in North American relations. The road back will require a humble country that does not dismiss the grievances we have caused. Pride did not save the Qing and it will not save us. To reverse the decline we will have to smarten up and be humble or get humbled by our opponents. We need our allies, more than they need us because they have each other and we are increasingly isolated. Not a smart choice.

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I love my students who ask basic why questions. The ones that do not take anything for granted. After teaching Western Civ and other medieval and Renaissance courses, I especially love it when someone asks about the “fools;” the figures who supposedly could speak truth to rulers. The class may roll their eyes when a classmate asks, “But why did they need a fool to tell them what was up?” I love it, because the question leads to an important realization: strong states do not rely on fools: they build institutions that force bad news upward and turn dissent into actionable counsel.

Weak regimes have to constantly project strength. Even when being dumb, very dumb. In such cases often only the unserious character of the fool, existing outside of the power structure, can speak the plain reality to the ruler because the fool is no threat, whereas an overly bold truth-telling aristocrat might be. Strong regimes can weather being wrong and strong leaders can be told they are wrong. Europe took a big step forward toward better government and stronger societies during the High Middle Ages when various kings began to rely on large councils, the ancestors of today’s democratic legislatures: representative institutions of the realms. A secret of England’s power after the reign of Edward I was that its medieval parliament could be described as unusually inclusive for its time, not because it was democratic in a modern sense, but because it developed a relatively stable habit of gathering multiple “estates” into one consulting assembly. You had the lords spiritual of the Church and the temporal lords of the nobility, and crucially Parliament included selected representatives from counties and boroughs. That broader composition mattered because it meant that politics at the national level received regular input from a forum in which the lords and a selection of commoners could consent, complain, and most importantly commit resources to an agenda. The crown’s agenda could become the national plan.

Kings with such a system received a great deal of respect and deference, but the system worked best because of argument and the sharing of concerns. The king also had to give respect. In return, the kings received more data and information about what was happening in their lands. Pulling everyone in and hearing their real concerns and issues was a major advantage to a smart ruler. By the 1500s, several countries across Europe had developed similar institutions. Castile had its Cortes, where representatives of the nobility, clergy, and towns gathered to advise the crown and approve taxation. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation convened the Reichstag, a complex assembly reflecting the empire’s diverse and diffuse political structure where the process of negotiating was critical to maintaining the Empire’s potency despite its decentralized structure. France maintained the Estates General, though, yes it met irregularly in the centuries immediately before the Revolution of 1789, and that should be a lesson. Poland operated a Diet where the nobility exercised considerable influence over royal policy, sometimes too much. And finally Sweden’s Riksdag was unique in that it had the traditional three estates plus a fourth estate of the yeoman peasantry.

On its path to dominating the world, Western Europe underwent a representation revolution which allowed Europe to out-administer the world. Before the Europeans could dominate the world militarily it first needed better government. Those who doubled down on empowered representation — like Britain, and the Netherlands — revolutionized economics and became more than a match for their more absolutist competitors.

The point is that in weaker states you need a fool to speak truth to power. In the best states, the truth tellers are incorporated into the state. Even an enlightened autocrat like Napoleon was empowered by the wide council he took during the First Empire, despite the final decision always resting with the emperor. Had he maintained even stronger institutions with some ability to check his impulses his descendants would likely reign in France to this day.

The United States is heading in the wrong direction. When an American president muses that he wishes his cabinet was scared and subservient like Communist Chinese officials, he demonstrates that his inclinations will only weaken the USA. China’s rise has as much to do with American institutional decline as it does with the leaders before Xi Jinping. Xi’s tenure is regressing China from its pragmatic consultative elite with generational turnover to a state that struggles to deal with corruption. Deng Xiaoping is widely seen as the greatest Chinese leader of the 20th century, in terms of positive influence on China’s rise he is greater than Mao whose ideological madness almost destroyed China. From Deng’s rise in 1978 until the decision of Xi to remain in office after 2022, China underwent a generational turnover in leadership roughly every decade, with real internal — though secret — debate that allowed for long term planning where the stakeholders bought in to the plan. China temporarily adopted something closer to representative consultation among stakeholders (the Party elite), which enabled its rise. Is it any wonder that America is declining just when the United States Congress, the oldest and most representative part of its national government, has stopped being a strong institution worthy of executive and judicial respect and deference?

As China, Russia, and the USA adopt strongman politics of thou shalt obey, flatter and never criticize the leader, they become less effective. These are courts that do not suffer fools. Who then shall speak the truth? If they continue along this path, the 21st century may actually belong to the power that realizes that open government is the secret to winning the future.

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Hi Readers,

So one of the things I like about academia is our library access to great international journalism. It really helps with a lot of my research, especially the older newspapers and magazines that have quality archives going back decades or over a century. The Economist is a prize in this sense. Another newspaper that I really enjoy reading for fun and my research is The Financial Times, founded in 1888. Which gets to the problem I want to bring to your attention, following up on my Friday post about The Economist warning of the problems that come from a corrupt transactional America. When even the pro-business, establishment Financial Times says America has hung up an “open for business” sign and abandoned its principles for cash, we’ve crossed a threshold. This is not partisan criticism anymore. This is the global elite—the people who have benefited from American power—concluding that the system is corrupted beyond plausible deniability. There is an emerging consensus that the shining city on a hill has gone dark.

As the college kids say these days, America is “sus.” Sus = Suspect/Suspicious for those who may not be up on the slang used by the youth today.

The Financial Times walks the reader through two scenes and why they matter. In the first, President Donald John Trump hosts Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) at the partially demolished White House and turns the Khashoggi murder into a non-factor while celebrating a claimed trillion dollars’ worth of deals. In the second scene they go through last week’s proposed “peace plan” for Ukraine, a document so cynically pro-Russia that Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio embarrassed himself trying first to defend it then to walk it back in a confusing - for him - mix of communications with Congress. In addition to granting Russia concessions it has failed to win on the field of battle, the proposed reconstruction setup would have become a scheme for profiteers. Europe and Ukraine have so far been able to force a rewrite, but what happens next will depend on the same concern I have mentioned before: Ukraine must be willing to fight alone and hurt Russia if it wants to end the war on more favorable terms. And frankly after nearly four years of war, Ukraine should have much less dependence on the US for arms and ammo. That the US still has such leverage over them is a serious mark against Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government and a reason to call for new elections.

But my focus here is what this all means for the United States of America.

There is a rising embarrassment among old-right conservatives who believe in ideas of national honor, integrity and the American creed. They believed America First meant restoring American dignity. They wanted America to stand for something again. They are seeing American power used to extract profit from countries in crisis facing the Russians. The Russians. This is not what they signed up for, they might want to stay out of the Russo-Ukraine War because the USA is $38 Trillion in debt, but that does not mean they wanted to help Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin achieve his ambitions. The shame is not just that the world sees the US is untrustworthy and unworthy of Western leadership, rather many American conservatives now think that assessment is accurate.

When people assume you are dishonorable, they charge you a “corruption tax” on every interaction. The International Monetary Fund has described corruption as a ‘hidden tax on growth and investment.’1 Trade deals require more concessions because partners assume you will cheat. Security partnerships demand upfront action or deployments. Everyone has to work harder. For example, diplomatic negotiations take longer because every clause needs strict enforcement mechanisms because you cannot be trusted to be sensible, fair, or charitable regarding any ambiguity. You spend more money and political capital to achieve less, because you are suspect.

Then there is the final issue, one I end my World War Two courses with: dishonorable countries make stupid decisions because corruption distorts information. In the communist and fascist countries, truth was a liability. Because loyalty to the party or the leader overrode loyalty to reality and the people, facts were distorted to appease and flatter the ones in charge. The 20th century honorless states were based on thuggery and force, the leader could never back down or appear weak, which meant information and data that contradicted them could never be promoted or acted on until catastrophe struck. Leaders surrounded themselves with yes-men who were hired for loyalty, not competence. Critical intelligence gets ignored if it contradicts what the boss wants to hear. Think of Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin dismissing the signs that Adolf Hitler was planning to attack the Soviet Union as disinformation. One of my mentors once described the Soviet Union as “nothing so like the economy and government of Satan on earth” by which he meant the whole system was built on lies and deception. As a result Stalin could not trust the alarm. Warnings are suppressed if they threaten profitable relationships and Stalin was profiting from Hitler’s wars, selling the Nazis the resources for their war machine. And then they bit them, killing 27 million Soviet citizens from 1941-45. Act like Stalin and eventually, you stumble into a crisis you did not see coming because your system selected for the wrong qualities. American liberal democracy was stronger because legitimacy and authority were based on law and the Constitution, not a particular leader’s image. Telling the truth was not a threat to Uncle Sam’s order, it was a critical advantage.

The USA is throwing away the qualities that made it number one.

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In one of my most popular essays, When Truth Comes Late: The Social Politics of Scams, Myths, Shame, and Recovering Ourselves, I wrote about what happens when people finally see that they were misled, or worse, that they helped promote a lie. I described the shame that follows, the temptation to double down, and the way pride can harden their error into their identity.

But there is also hope. There is a moment in every scam when the mark begins to suspect. The promises do not quite add up. The story has gaps, sometimes big ones. But the hardest part is not recognizing the deception, it is admitting you fell for it, and worse doing so in public. And it is also tough to watch someone else claim they have seen the light, and then try to figure out if they actually have changed.

In recent days, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia, has appeared on national television to apologize for what she called her participation in “evil toxic insanity.” She invoked Jesus Christ and his message of asking for and giving forgiveness and the need to be kind. Greene - popularly known as MTG - said she wanted out of the political complex that rewards outrage and punishes decency. The question is what do these words actually mean, and whether we can tell the difference between someone breaking free from bad politics and someone simply rebranding it. Some have argued she that is only breaking away from the leader of the Republican Party, President Donald John Trump because he will not back her for statewide office in Georgia. Others say that he is not backing her because she will not violate her principles to suit Trump’s agenda which is she believes is not truly conservative. Which is the truth?

Because if we have learned anything about fraud shame and moral injury, it is this: the language of redemption can be hijacked by those who have no intention of changing course. And a society that cannot distinguish performance from transformation will be fooled by both the original con and the apology-con that follows. At the same time, if someone has changed you want to support them because you gain nothing if people feel they are stuck playing the role of the bad guy. How can they embrace a new, healthy role?

The behavioral economist Dan Ariely once asked Catholic priests to explain confession from an economic perspective.1 The answer Ariely arrived after discussing with them is interesting: confession works not because it erases consequences, but because it requires confrontation. You have to speak the specific sin aloud to another person. You have to hear yourself say what you did. The anticipation of that discomfort—not necessarily immediate divine punishment, but human acknowledgment—acts as a deterrent.

But there was another angle which he explored in his 2012 book The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, and he explained in his 2012 talk to the Royal Society of Arts in London:

Now if people cheat a lot, all the time, why would they ever stop? If you think you’re going to hell, in the Catholic version why would ever stop? The Catholic confession might have actually stumbled on this, which is, this might be a really good idea that if you are cheating a lot maybe you need to be able to open a new page.2

In his experiments Ariely found that when given a chance to confess to cheating, the cheaters actually cheated less, the misbehavior declined. But his research found the opposite was true, if people thought they could never get clean they would decide to revel in being unclean. If we want civic reform and a better moral environment we must have a way for people to turn a new leaf or they will choose to bloom in defiant corruption. Both pride and hopeless resignation entrap people in wrongdoing, harming the rest of us who suffer from the actions of the unrepentant.

But here is what matters for our purposes: confession without specificity does not work. You cannot simply say “I have sinned” and receive absolution. The tradition requires naming what you did. Generic contrition is not enough. The moral framework demands precision about the harm. That is, confession is clear and targeted.

Has MTG gone far enough? Maybe not, but we can hope that her contrition is real. Some are very skeptical. Even while calling for an end to toxic rhetoric, MTG recently defended Tucker Carlson’s decision to host white nationalist Nick Fuentes. That does not seem like someone who has reckoned completely with the road she has gone down. Perhaps she is still navigating a change in direction. I wrote previously that “the scammer flatters your instincts, mirrors your fears, and adopts your language.” What I, perhaps, did not emphasize enough is that scammers also adopt the language of moral awakening when it serves them. They know that decent people want to believe in redemption. They know that Americans love a comeback story. They are aware that the vocabulary of faith and forgiveness carries weight and places a burden on the target. Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?

But using religious jargon or Holy Scripture does not make someone sincere, it could mean nothing more than that they understand code switching.

The Victims We Must Not Ignore

So, I am interested in the idea of people making real changes, because that can become a point on the decency scoreboard. We need them. But, genuine repentance centers the harmed, not the harm-doer. It asks what restoration requires for those who suffered, not what forgiveness offers to those who caused suffering. It acknowledges that some damage cannot be undone by words alone, no matter how artfully arranged. For political leaders, a real reckoning would involve reaching out to those victims. Making amends where possible. Supporting the institutions she undermined. Using her platform to counter conspiracism. MTG can do all this while remaining in office.

There is a deeper question, however, about how we got to this point, because MTG did not invent toxic politics, she has only been in elected office since 2021. Nevertheless, she read the room, she saw what worked, she watched as concocted outrage generated attention, attention generated donations, and that money got people elected, got her elected. The system, the current American system, rewarded her for behavior that a healthy civic culture would have rejected. MTG’s alleged transformation is happening at a moment when her - old? - brand of politics has become less useful, and there is a clear MAGA split happening. So, one can ask if she is experiencing moral growth or is she adjusting to a new political market?

Now here is where it gets hard, and where we need to be careful.

If MTG is sincere, we gain something by recognizing it and nothing by dismissing it. We make it easier for the next person who wants to turn away from toxic politics to actually do so. We demonstrate that recovery from fraud shame is possible. But if this is a performance and if we treat cynically strategic repositioning as a real transformation then we become marks again. And worse, we make it harder for actually reformed individuals to be believed, for an honest transformation to be recognized. And then people might persist in bad behavior because they think no one will believe they have changed. That would be a loss. This is why the question of grace matters. Not because we owe Greene anything, but because we owe ourselves a culture that can distinguish between genuine transformation and talented performance.

If Greene’s turn is serious, we should see specificity in the coming months. Not vague regrets about “toxic politics,” but naming which conspiracy theories she may have promoted and why they are wrong. This is important because there is another group watching this: the people who supported Greene’s previous approach. Who defended her. Who amplified her messages. Who built their own political identities around the same combative, own the libs, style she now claims to reject. If she is truly changing course, what does that mean for them?

When a leader you have backed claims they were not just wrong but fundamentally wrong in their whole approach to politics, you face a major choice. It is an odd spot to be in. You can say you were misled by them and reject their change of heart. That feels like admitting you were a sucker, but also means doubling down and insisting she was right before and wrong now, and that the real betrayal is her abandonment of “the cause.” Or you can continue to follow that leader and treat their reform as your awakening as well. You can follow them into a better way of responsible politics. Both are plausible responses, but it is the duty of the reformed politician to reach out to their supporters and bring them along to the sensible path.

A healthy and robust civic culture creates space for those supporters to change too. Even if the leader turns out to be a fraud, the break with their prior stance might make it easier to reach their supporters. Those who advocate for careful, rules-based leadership & accountability within government, business, schools and churches, do their organizations a favor. You get the environment you create. Good behavior is to be expected & confessing mistakes should be seen as a strength not a weakness if you want more of it.

So where does this leave us with MTG? We have to hold multiple truths simultaneously.

Self-government is hard, being ruled is easy. Civic maturity requires discernment: the ability to evaluate claims, watch for patterns, remain open to surprise while grounded in evidence. It requires us to be neither marks nor cynics, but something harder: careful observers who can recognize both true change and a feigned skilled performance. So are we at the trust but verify stage? Maybe more like let’s wait and see. Democrats should encourage MTG while still acknowledging where they disagree. Our civic health requires lowering the temperature so that compromise, reasoned debate, and changing your mind are once again seen as normal.

The truth comes late, but it comes. Our job is to have the wisdom to recognize it when it arrives.

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It is a particular, deliberate thing to commemorate the fallen, in our modern digitized worlds. The lights on our screens not only distract us, but fill our minds with images that before required actual experience or imagination to contemplate, relieving us of the requirement to do and think. Within the bounds of our glassed-over eyes, behind the rim of optics, our minds’ capacity to feel the deep pain and horror of memory is overwhelmed. Liquid modernity is real; we cannot hold our shapes as Western societies. Unlimited options mean lack of boundaries, boundaries of communities in which we formed connections to our past, without which we struggle to know ourselves. Alienation is born of our context collapse. The deliberate nature of Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and Canada is a stab against the veil of forgetting, to let the haunting specters of national memory infest the temples of our being.

We need our ghosts.

On the Second of May, 1915, forty-two-year-old John McCrae lost his young protégé, the twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, in the Second Battle of Ypres. The loss of his friend compelled his hand to write the poem that defined the war. His words named our muted truths that we are the dead, our lost are us and we are them. We cannot know ourselves without the relationships that define us, and being deprived of meaningful relationships and contact and memory erases not just the past but who we are and can become.

Today, before a presentation by one of my students about our research and trip to Normandy as part of the 2025 Class of the Normandy Institute, of course, poppies came up, and I was told by one of our heads of school that, in gifted-education circles, a poppy is an analogy for a student. The idea is that a student who develops faster and differently than the rest needs special tending, and, like poppies, they can be conspicuous and delicate, needing the right conditions to thrive. And, cases of bad care or limited educational perspective, it can be easier to cut down tall poppies to keep the field even rather than allow the landscape to beautify with difference. This also seems like a reasonable approximation of the burden of grand histories and pressures that come with them. And like a suppressed gifted student, societies that repress the histories that make them special have been harmed.

But these histories made us into great societies that are the envy of the world. It is no coincidence that, after two centuries of global domination, first by the British Empire and then by the United States, Britain’s first wayward colony, we are beginning to slip from our places in the sun as we suffer from amnesia and context collapse. Those jealous of our achievements can feel a need to cut us down, and conscious of position we may be tempted to self-denigrate rather than acknowledge both our gifts and burdens.

Yet the poppies in the fields of Flanders demand that we acknowledge them.

In the United Kingdom, Remembrance Sunday began in 1939 so that their already generation-old, November 11 commemorations would not interfere with wartime production. The British continued the additional tradition of memorialization on the nearest Sunday to November 11, which in 2025 was November 9.

Earlier in the United States, Congress recommended to President Calvin Coolidge that he issue a proclamation in 1926 to establish an anniversary of remembrance:

Back during that time of more confident civic religion, it was not seen as an imposition for Congress to invite schools and churches to join in with “appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.” What could be more neighborly? The siloing of faith has only provoked a backlash of particularism, an ugly segmenting of society. Would we not rather have a confident, context-rich celebration of heritage and history that enlivens those in proximity?

Likewise, too many of our school systems use the day as an extra day off. It would be one thing to close the school and replace it with commemoration ceremonies in the buildings, but instead it is treated as a holiday from work and education. The true spirit of the proclamation would be for Veterans Day to be an instructional day with a special curriculum and activities built around the First World War and America’s other wars so that children would each year be reminded, in detail, that freedom is not free. More engagement would also allow immigrant children to participate in America’s story and begin to feel themselves more at home, generating better inclusion through context immersion. As an educator, I have seen how those kinds of activities become memories the students bond over and recall as they grow up.

Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, doctor, soldier, and poet, rose to the same rank as his father before him. He did not return to his native Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He died in the war, one of many casualties of illness, contracting pneumonia while commanding a Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne. He died January 28, 1918, and was buried in Wimereux Communal Cemetery in France. He died for king and country, and lived tending the wounded, healing the sick, and promoting the memory of his fallen friends and comrades-in-arms, until he joined them and became one of the dead.

To acknowledge him and the story of all our veterans, those who fell and those who returned home to friends and family, is a deliberate act of defiance in an age of forgetting. It is an act of rebuilding connections and community and an invitation to join the work of transmission in our schools, our churches, our public squares, and to make Veterans Day, Remembrance Day, and Remembrance Sunday what they were meant to be: not days off, but days on, when we deliberately gather and remind ourselves that our communities were worth fighting for. And still are.

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Gift is the German word for poison and there are times I am reminded of this fact.

Context matters. Without it we cannot understand each other or what is happening around us. Illocutionary is a word that means the thing a speaker does in saying something, not just the words themselves or their after-effects, but the act performed by saying the thing is the ordering, promising, warning, requesting, or threatening that is implied by context.

Conservatism cannot exist without context. Neither can appeals to liberal norms. Conservatism is, by definition, the philosophy of preserving what works based on historical experience, and you cannot conserve what you do not remember or understand. Liberal norms depend on shared constitutional principles built over centuries. Remove the context, meaning the history, the precedents, and the reasons why certain procedures and traditions matter, and you end up in a situation where critical political principles need defending more than ever, but the would-be defenders are disarmed because they too lack the context to understand why the principles matter. The defenders sound like scolds, and many Americans don’t think these scolds care about them anyway. So why should anyone care?

This is why the loss of context matters so desperately for both true conservatives and Democrats. They are making arguments in a country where context has collapsed, and against the policies of individuals who do not care about context—only about power and getting more for themselves. They do not care about the future or the past, except to erase it so that no one will remember what a proper functioning government looks like and how it worked.

Every civilization is built by stages. One plank, one level at a time. This evolution is sometimes natural and subtle and other times is deliberate and jolting. The American Revolution is an example of the jolting shock to the system that was deliberated openly until the Founding Fathers concluded they no longer had a place in the British Empire. An alternative example is the evolution of sentimentalism giving rise to more frequent love-matches, that is, marriages where a woman could expect better treatment from her husband because he actually loved her; that was a more subtle evolution in America having a lot to do with the openness to social advancement and less class rigidity caused by colonizing land not already controlled by the old nobility. Both had massive impacts on how American civilization developed and became more attractive to Europeans than their home countries.

But these developments, even when slow and subtle, had causes and reasons: context. Americans have lost the context on so many issues they do not recognize why something is wrong and is a risk to themselves and their freedoms. People genuinely do not know why particular traditions, behaviors, procedures and processes matter. Part of the problem is education, part of the problem is immigration, and part of the problem is comfort. It matters that people have lost their collective or tribal memory and that others have not been taught the stories of their new country.

Money is Power. The English learned this painful lesson over centuries, and America is a direct, and consequential offshoot of England. The Founders knew their English history. In the late 17th century England began to shift away from the continental Europeans regarding the relationship between freedom and military power. In England, if the king went to war, he needed to raise taxes which required the approval of Parliament. This relationship was so clear and bound together in how Englishmen understood themselves that the more the king went to war the more powerful Parliament became because it controlled the money needed to fight the war and could ask for more privileges from the king. Rights and privileges came from the monarch, even Parliament was a creation of the Crown, but once privileges were granted they could not be unilaterally revoked. It was a constant negotiation, and it worked well.

But without the context, Americans will not understand that a president who receives gifts and donations to do the business of government is subverting the power of the people over the government. The dependence on taxpayer money equals citizens’ control over the government. Here is how deep the context collapse has gone. I saw a post by a former state legislator who could not understand why people were upset by the East Wing demolition and the claim that it would be paid for by donations from corporations, “why can’t you accept a gift” he said. He honestly did not understand the difference between a president destroying government property - the People’s property - without the permission of Congress, paying for it with private funds, and a president doing so with taxpayer money requisitioned by the people’s representatives in Congress. The context of power, money and permission was lost on him.

As readers know I like to deal with things directly. The claim is that people should not complain about the demolition because the proposed ballroom will be “free” and other renovations were paid for by the taxpayer, and being paid for by the taxpayer is worse because you have to pay for it.

That is the ethic proposed by the MAGA demolition team: if it is free and the people are not paying for it the people should not care. And that is all wrong. Why?

Government is not business. Government does not exist to make a profit, it exists to provide law, order, and protection, and to steward community resources toward community ends, and this requires that the community be in charge. No taxation without representation is the tool to keep government under control because if the government cannot spend money or take money without permission then the ones you get permission from —the People— are in control. Anything that gets around that deliberately is stealing power from the people. Governments have tried this before, and they called it benevolence 400 years before George Orwell could call it doublespeak.

A benevolence tax was a sum of money that English kings, from Edward IV to James I, extorted from their subjects without the consent of Parliament. It was disguised as a gift. Now the idea before was that the gifts were — forced — loans and so the king would promise to “repay” the money. Not really though, and most ended up just holding a promise which of course they could not collect against the king. The way it worked was the king would come up with a “need” then he either sent a letter of request to the richest men in the kingdom or sent government officials to different localities with marketing tools, I mean arguments, to justify the loan. The kingdom is in danger, please do this instead of being called up to serve in the war, etc, etc.

Then Edward IV stopped pretending there was going to be any repayment, and the word benevolence was first used in 1473 to describe an extorted gift. After all, cannot the king accept a gift? You do not payback a gift. But the goal was to get around asking Parliament’s permission for new taxes. Why would people agree to gift extortion? This gets to the nature of unchecked power and what the late philosopher John Searle called indirect speech acts.1 Something like “nice shop you have there, shame if something happened to it.” The words do not mention any threat, but you know it is a threat because of the context and probably the tone. That is the illocutionary effect.

First, people paid benevolence taxes to English kings because the monarchy had great power, and people felt they had to do what the king asked to avoid getting in trouble. Rich nobles and wealthy people also felt pressure to show loyalty to the king, worried that if they refused to pay, they might lose the king’s support or their important position in society. Additionally, people were afraid of what might happen if they did not pay, especially if they were the sort of rich people who were used to not abiding by the rules, meaning if the king decided to take a closer look at their affairs he might find justifications to punish them with fines, throw them in jail, or take revenge in other ways. Finally, some people paid because they hoped the king would reward them later. They saw it as an investment, thinking that if they showed loyalty now, the king might give them special treatment or favors in the future.

Eventually the practice of extorted benevolence gifts went away in the 1620s due to resistance from Parliament and the people. The People understood if it could be done to the wealthy, it could be done to them, and Parliament realized that they had to draw a line or become irrelevant. But without this context, it is hard to understand why a gift might really be poison for a republic. Conservatives and Democrats need to work together to reclaim the context.

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Every driver understands the fundamental logic of lane discipline. Okay they should - looking at you, Maryland. But, Virginia’s neighbor across the Potomac aside, we stay in our lanes not because someone wishes to limit our freedoms, but because doing so protects everyone on the road. When a vehicle drifts across the lines without signaling, we enter the danger zone. Other drivers must adjust and the risk of collision becomes real. The lane delineation exist not to diminish the driver but to allow everyone to progress in peace.

Accordingly, organizations function under the same principle, though the consequences of drifting are less immediate and therefore more often ignored. When individuals or departments operate beyond their designated scope, they do not simply overstep a boundary—they create organizational turbulence that can compromise accountability, dilute credibility, and confuse both internal stakeholders and the public. Staying in one’s lane is not a restriction on competence or initiative. It is a recognition that complex systems require clearly defined roles, and that clarity itself is a form of institutional strength. This is especially important when an organization feels like it is under attack or unfairly maligned. We see this so often in politics. A party or an administration is under fire and it seems everyone is rushing to respond rather than taking a cooler assessment of the issue.

We also see this in another more critical way today: when the Presidency too often does the job of Congress.

But focused presidential authority is an assignment, not a harmful limitation.

To stay in one’s lane begins with understanding what that lane actually is. Authority in organizations is not a prize to be claimed or a territory to be expanded. It is an assignment, a mandate entrusted to a person or body for a specific purpose. When people speak or act only from the office or expertise granted to them, they honor the structure that makes collective work possible. They also preserve the credibility of their voice, because their words carry the weight of legitimacy. When a president, whose job is to uphold and defend the Constitution, claims a mandate, it can never be to violate the thing they swore to uphold. The same goes for the courts, for every entity of the government.

Again, temptation to speak and act beyond one’s scope is common, particularly in moments of pressure or controversy. A department head may feel compelled to comment on a matter outside their purview because they have an opinion or because silence feels passive. A board member may issue a statement on operational issues because they believe their perspective is valuable. And it may be, but, when people speak beyond their mandate, they do not add clarity—they blur it. Lines of accountability weaken. The organization appears uncoordinated, and the public begins to wonder who is actually responsible for what. We see this in the US federal government today. Congress is supposed to set the policies on tariffs, war and funding. The president is to execute. And Federal Courts are merely to apply what Congress has enacted, to particular circumstances, not enact policy themselves.

The Necessary Separation of Powers

One of the most critical lane distinctions in any organization is the separation between those who govern daily operations and those who provide oversight or ensure compliance. Administrative leaders manage, execute, and make decisions within the scope of their operational authority. Oversight bodies—whether boards, compliance officers, or external reviewers—exist to ensure that those decisions are made with integrity, consistency, and accountability. Like Congress and its committees. Respecting this distinction is about power and hierarchy, but that hierarchy is not arbitrary, it is about function. Even a capable person can do too much, and with power the temptation is always there. A good mechanic does not also serve as the safety inspector of their own work. A judge does not prosecute the case they will decide. The separation exists because impartiality and accountability require it. When each body does its part and resists the urge to trespass into the other’s responsibilities, decisions remain defensible and trustworthy. Where the most power lies you want more people involved to check impulse, pride, and greed. The Constitution is the GPS of the state.

However, while there is good reason to be suspicious of politicians and of people in power in many organizations, it is not useful to adopt the attitude that everyone is corrupt. For one, we now see that attitude actually raises rather than lowers the toleration of bad behavior because we stop seeing it as extraordinary, and those good people who do not want to risk their reputations because of the messy work of leading will steer clear, leaving the lane wide open for bad actors. And yet, American institutions that have lost trust need to look more clearly at how they got to the place where they are. Often they will find it is because they started doing things they had no business to do. Self-government requires restraint. Prudence is not timidity. It is wisdom. It is the recognition that words have consequences, that institutions have responsibilities, and that the goal is not to win the day but to sustain the mission.

When the Founding Fathers set up the separation of powers it was so that no one body of the government could act without clear consensus and that by being forced to reach agreement the government would have more energy to accomplish its objectives. Essentially the balance of powers meant that major actions of the federal government would have more buy-in from the various constituencies involved. It might be a compromise but at least enough people could live with it to make it work. That is why it made sense ultimately to have the People and the State Governments each have a chamber of Congress that represented them. In the 19th century when Congress agreed you had less friction with the state governments because they had their say through the Senate. Effectively US senators were ambassadors from their states to the federal government, and since they had equal representation, in principle nothing could be done without at least half of the states having one of their senators voting in favor. That has been lost since the 1913 ratification of the 17th Amendment, and we consequently see a lot of unnecessary conflict between our levels of government. Good government requires discipline, and discipline makes excellence possible. When every person and every body within an organization operates from their proper authority, respects the boundaries of their role, and communicates with care and coordination, the organization becomes stronger, more coherent, and more trustworthy. This true for a church, a university and a government.

In moments of scrutiny or crisis, the wise organization responds from its proper authority—calmly, truthfully, and only as far as its responsibility extends. It does not drift. It does not overreach. It stays in its lane, not because it lacks ambition or courage, but because it understands that safe arrival depends on faithful adherence to the path assigned. And in that discipline, rightly-ordered authority finds not constraint, but the liberty to fulfill its purposes. That is better for all of us.

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Politically, I like a lot of what Donald Trump does, but I would never hire him as an employee — Anonymous Conservative Marketing Guy

Young George Washington wanted to be a sailor in the Royal Navy after learning about seafaring from his older brother Lawrence Washington who had served as a marine under Admiral Edward Vernon. Lawrence named his estate after his old commander, you know it as Mount Vernon. George inherited it in 1761 and the rest is history.

George Washington never got his commission in the king’s navy. Though Washington’s early years were typical for a Virginia youth in the planter class, his time at Lawrence’s Mount Vernon exposed him to culture and the promise of adventure. Lawrence was 14 years older, and married into the important Fairfax family; he could show George how the world works in the absence of their father, Augustine Washington, who died in 1743 when George was eleven. Little brothers without fathers need their older brothers then and now to help be that role model and Lawrence did his best. Lawrence’s stories fascinated George; ships, navigation, and war, so much so that George Washington wanted to join and Lawrence encouraged him. However, his mother, Mary Ball Washington, after consulting friends and family including hearing from George’s uncle in England, who warned of the dangers of naval service, refused him. Her word was final and incontrovertible, ending his pathway to the fleet. How would history have been different if he had gotten his wish? Would Admiral Washington have driven the French from the Western Atlantic and won the war for King George III?

Pathways are important, the best thing for youths is to have guided pathways, to give them options with direction rather than to shut them down or leave them wandering. Failure to do so contributes to the failure to launch for many young men, their fears of adulthood and chronic immaturity.

Lack of Roadmaps

This past year I had conversations with young men, my students trying to make their way as they approach the end of college. I am struck by how little their actual struggles match the culture war rhetoric. These young men, mostly white Americans, are feeling left out and more than a little afraid to really grow up. And it is not their fault.

The trouble with many young men today is not rebellion. It is ignorance—an absence of instruction in how the world works and how one grows within it. They want stability, honor, and competence, but have never been shown the routes by which those things are earned. It is not that they reject discipline or purpose. They have simply never seen it modeled. Worse, the models they do see—trust fund entrepreneurs, celebrity athletes, social media stars—only work if one is born wealthy or becomes famous, and for anyone else would be catastrophically self-destructive.1 Society’s rewarding of such behavior is misleading for young men.

In one sense it is a good time to be a well-put-together young man—less competition—but in other more important ways it is the worst time because society provides fewer examples and road maps for young men to become well-put-together in the first place, and they have fewer peers to help them along. It is not good to be the lone civilized man when you are trying to stem the tide of barbarism, you need your friends who are able to sharpen you.

For generations, boys could look outward and see examples. A father, an uncle, a coach, a neighbor—men who did not need to explain what work, duty, or mastery meant, because their lives displayed it. Those patterns created an intuitive sense of sequence: how to start, what to learn, when to persevere, whom to emulate. Today that sequence has been broken. Young men live amid immense technological and social complexity, yet lack the simplest cultural map of how a man becomes competent, useful, and good. The result is confusion and fear. Many young men think success is a matter of luck or personality, not craft and discipline. They do not understand how the pathways of life actually function—how institutions reward reliability, how small reputations build into large ones, how service opens doors that talent alone cannot. They are told they can “be anything,” but rarely shown what anything requires.

Take the military. For many young men, it remains one of the best pathways to adulthood—structured, demanding, and developmental. It offers education, leadership, and skills that translate: cybersecurity, logistics, intelligence, engineering. Service opens doors to federal work, law enforcement, and technology sectors that reward discipline and clearances. It is a proven road to stability and lifelong employability. Yet few schools or advisors present it that way. Instead, the military is mentioned vaguely, or not at all, as if it were an archaic or desperate option. Young men who might thrive there are quietly steered elsewhere, often into universities that cannot deliver what they seek. Given the need of these young men for what the service offers there should never be a recruiting crisis.

The pathways did not vanish by accident. Deindustrialization and wage stagnation destroyed the 1950s single-breadwinner model, after earlier changes had destroyed the extended family network; forcing both parents into the workforce and fracturing the home as a site of formation. Too many socioeconomic shifts in a short space of time. Geographic mobility for jobs scattered extended families—boys no longer grow up near uncles and grandfathers who once formed a network of masculine example. With smaller families, youths have fewer uncles, older siblings and cousins. It all contributes to fewer models.

Then divorce became the norm: 24% of American families are now single-parent households, the statistic hides the fact that many of the “fathers” are not their dads, but their mothers’ new husbands. In the majority of cases we are not talking about widowhood or marriages ended due to domestic abuse. I am not talking hypotheticals. I know young men who have to live with their mother and the man their mother cheated on their father with, while their dad pays child support from an apartment somewhere. What lessons should these young men draw from their father’s losing their homes to another man when he did not choose to end the marriage? We want these men to be brave adults who pursue healthy relationships, but what have the adults in their lives modeled for them? What has the state told them about their value? About fairness? There are consequences to operating this way.

Sociologists call this path dependence: the way early choices lock in later outcomes. The choices of society and parents removing the old networks has led to pathway deprivation—the loss of visible, honorable routes into manhood. Economic necessity broke the family structure. Mobility scattered the extended family. Divorce removed the father. And with them went the men who showed the way. Once a society dismantles its ladders of advancement, it becomes hard to rebuild them.

The good news is that the hunger is still there. Talk to young men candidly and you will hear not cynicism but a kind of aching seriousness. They want to know what work is for. They want to know how to love, how to build, how to belong. They are waiting for adults to stop diagnosing them and start showing them the way. The question is not how to rescue them, but how to rebuild the conditions under which they can rescue themselves. That means restoring visible pathways—through service, through skill, through local institutions that actually take an interest in their futures. It means elders who will mentor, not lecture; schools that will orient, not teach a rigid scolding conformity.

We owe young men a map—not because they cannot find their way without it, but because they should not have to walk alone.

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First I want to commend Aaron Renn1 and Stephen Adubato2 for adding to the conversation on American pluralism with recent Substacks about symbolic recognition and Italian American identity respectively.

It is Columbus Day.

I do not know about you but I miss the pluralism of the late 1990s and early 2000s; multicultural tribal America is a drag. We keep trying to flatten things into either or racial categories and we lost our almost happy ethnic American equilibrium.

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush really fumbled the ball with what America could have been in the 21st century and I blame a lot of the problem on the 2007/2008 financial crisis’ crushing of the economic progress of many previously marginalized Americans. The heightened history wars and the fight over dignity and recognition can be traced to the moment the bottom fell out for too many recently middle class Americans and the coming of age of the first millennials. In its wake, the whole American story was newly litigated, by everyone not just the “Left.” In case you do not remember, 2007 was also when the conversation over immigration flipped to questioning the melting pot and a new open xenophobia. A relatively positive or neutral Columbus Day is causality of the new history culture war.

However, Americans should not fight each other over this day. Instead, we should allow Italian Americans to celebrate their inclusion into the Anglo-American national project, and the rest of the country should either join them or just go about their business. But we should stop pretending that Columbus is that big a deal to the USA or that rejecting Columbus Day has anything to do with empowering Native American tribes.

The Irony of Anti-Wokeness

The terms rightwing and leftwing have become almost meaningless in the USA, so I won’t bore you with litigating that today. But I will ask your indulgence to look at the strange logic of the so-called anti-woke. They define wokeness as an ideological framework that interprets social relations primarily through power, identity, and oppression, seeking to remake culture and institutions around mandated equity rather than individual liberty or objective standards of truth.3

Would that not make Columbus Day the “wokest” holiday in America?

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but that is the beginning, not the end of the tale. After all, Columbus did not found Jamestown or win Independence from Great Britain, yet the day was celebrated and promoted by the federal government because Italians were a discriminated against immigrant minority that was historically dis-empowered by Protestant American society to such an extent many - perhaps half - of the early immigrants returned to Italy.

Spain and the House of Colón

The story of Columbus doesn’t end with his death in 1506. His descendants became some of Spain’s most exalted nobles through a fascinating transformation that reveals just how little Columbus himself has to do with modern American identity politics.

The crucial turning point came in 1508, when Columbus’s eldest son Diego married María Álvarez de Toledo y Rojas, niece of the powerful Duke of Alba and a royal cousin. This marriage catapulted the Colón line from litigious outsiders into the heart of Castilian aristocratic networks. Within a year, Diego was acknowledged as governor of the Indies, restoring the stature his father had lost.

But here’s where it gets interesting: Columbus himself was a headache in his own lifetime. He enslaved Indigenous people and shipped them to Europe. During his conquest of Hispaniola, he spread devastation among the Taíno people. Allegations were made that cruel beatings, dismemberment, and that execution were common punishments under his administration. His sailors engaged in looting, kidnapping, and other violent acts.

The Spanish Crown was so disturbed at the allegations that an official was sent to look into it and in 1500, that man, Francisco de Bobadilla arrested Columbus after discovering he had hanged five Spaniards. Columbus was sent back to Spain in chains, disgraced. While Ferdinand and Isabella eventually released him and acknowledged his skills as a navigator, they never trusted him with administrative power again. Ferdinand did fund his final voyage however.

Columbus died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain, feeling a little ill-used and shortchanged, pressing for redress until his final days.

The Great Lawsuit

The most consequential episode shaping Columbus’s posthumous status was a sprawling series of lawsuits known as the pleitos colombinos. The controversy originated in the Capitulations of Santa Fe (1492), which promised Columbus hereditary offices and a tenth of the profits from his discoveries. Queen Isabella agreed to these terms against King Ferdinand’s wishes because Ferdinand believed reaching Asia the way Columbus proposed was impossible. Ironically, Ferdinand was right—Columbus never made it to Asia and continued insisting he had even on his fourth voyage, despite clear Portuguese evidence to the contrary.

Once Spain’s American enterprise began yielding power and wealth, those open-ended grants collided with the monarchy’s determination to centralize authority. Having Columbus’s heirs as hereditary lords of the New World was not going to fly. After Columbus’s death, his son Diego pressed the family’s claims with new urgency. The first major verdict in 1511 favored the Colóns in principle, but satisfied no one. The dispute metastasized into new suits over whether privileges extended to the mainland, and even over how much of the “discovery” could be credited to Columbus alone with the crown digging up testimony from Columbus’s contemporaries to cut his legacy down to size. By the 1520s the suits were still ongoing and a new player wanted it settled: Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor the new King of Spain, the same one locked in a struggle with Luther and the Protestants in Germany.

By 1537, they settled. Columbus’s grandson Luis Colón received the titles Duke of Veragua and Marquess of Jamaica, along with entry among the Grandes de España—Spain’s highest-ranking nobility. The family retained the hereditary title Admiral of the Indies but renounced claims to feudal and viceregal authority. Instead of a huge Colon sub-empire in the West Indies, the Crown gave them two lordships as hereditary fiefs, plus a substantial perpetual annuity compensating for surrendering the open-ended tenth of “all riches.” Charles V got what he wanted and the Colon’s got guaranteed cash: an annuity paid by the Spanish Treasury until 1898. The family prospered for centuries, investing in estates, a palace in Madrid, and the famous “Veragua” fighting-bull ranch. Through advantageous marriages to houses like the Braganzas and Fitz-James Stuarts, they sustained social prestige. Today, the title is held by Cristóbal Colón de Carvajal y Gorosábel, the 18th Duke of Veragua—a titled aristocrat whose wealth is private and whose connection to American politics is exactly zero.

Who Even Wants to Claim Columbus?

Modern genetics has ventured into the Columbus identity question with findings that are tantalizing but contested. While tradition places him as a Genoese son of a wool weaver, alternative theories have long circulated. A Spanish research team has announced results suggesting genetic markers compatible with Sephardic Jewish ancestry and a biogeographical profile pointing to western Mediterranean roots possibly Spanish or, yes, Italian.4

This raises an awkward question: considering his misbehavior in the West Indies, should Jewish people want to claim him?5 Or Italians? The answer seems to be that identity politics makes strange bedfellows, and posthumous claims on problematic historical figures tell us more about present needs than past realities.

America Came From England, and Columbus Didn’t Work For Them

Here is where Americans come into the story. Following the mass lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison declared the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a one-time national holiday in 1892 to ease diplomatic tensions with Italy. The Kingdom of Italy had withdrawn its ambassador and severed diplomatic relations with the United States over the lynchings. A Southern lynch mob had created a serious international crisis and this required making amends and placating feelings. In 1937 with FDR was president, Columbus Day officially became an annual federal holiday through presidential proclamation.

Columbus Day exists because of American xenophobia and violence against Italian immigrants—not because Columbus is central to American identity. I actually think we should honor the pain of Italian Americans and remember not to give in to bigotry and xenophobia.

Let’s be clear: Columbus never made it to mainland North America. On his first voyage, he landed in the Bahamas, reached Cuba, and explored Hispaniola. It was a Caribbean story. As an *Italian working for Catholic Spain, Columbus had nothing to do with Tudor England or the later English colonial empire under Protestant Stuart kings who founded Jamestown, Virginia where our America began.

The English had their own explorers. John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), authorized by Henry VII, made landfall in North America in June 1497—somewhere in southern Labrador, Newfoundland, or Cape Breton Island. His voyages laid the groundwork for later British claims to Canada. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Columbus was not widely celebrated as a hero in England or the American colonies. The English celebrated Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. Americans celebrated Captain John Smith.

This makes sense when you remember that the Colón family titles were tied to places like Jamaica, which was conquered by English Puritans during Oliver Cromwell’s fiercely anti-Catholic rule and is an English-speaking country today. Spain was a competitor empire, and their heroes were not English or colonial American heroes. Here’s the critical point that modern discourse misses entirely: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, history was still largely national and not yet flattened into a racialized view of “white” Europeans against “inferior colored” races. The English did not see themselves as part of some pan-European “white” civilization project with the Spanish. The leaders of England saw themselves as a Protestant English kingdom competing against Catholic Spanish people. National and religious identities mattered far more than racial ones. As that changed, European American identity became more confused and contested, not less. You can assimilated many people into national and ethnic histories and cultures, but racialist history flattens and permanently excludes. The English celebrated Sir Francis Drake not as a “white explorer” but as an English hero who defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 and circumnavigated the globe.

Columbus remained a Spanish hero—and therefore not an English or American one. He became more celebrated after American independence as part of a romantic interpretation of the discovery of the New World, but even then it was relatively low-key. Yes, the American capital is in the “District of Columbia,” but at the time “Colombia” or “Columbia” was simply another name for the Americas—a name derived from Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed for Spain and Portugal and became convinced the lands were a “New World” rather than Asia. German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map was the first to use “America” for the New World. Back then you could use America and Colombia interchangeably for the New World. In fact, another thing, while some people complain that the USA is called America, they forget that the República de Colombia is also a country. Some of these fights are really not worth any of our times.

Columbus is Dead and Not Worth Another Culture War

Knowing history is important for living in peace with our neighbors, but Columbus Day should not be another culture war flashpoint. Columbus himself is dead. Nothing we do will affect him. Furthermore, he had no personal contact with the Indigenous peoples of what is now the USA, and dissing him will not repair one broken treaty or build a single hospital or school on a reservation.

Let Italian Americans have their day. It commemorates their painful integration into American society after facing discrimination and violence some of which reappeared during World War Two’s Una Storia Segreta.6 If you are not Italian, enjoy the day off doing things Columbus would not approve of—like evicting him from living rent-free in your mind and not thinking of him at all. But do not ruin the day for your Italian neighbors.

Being one country does not mean we have to share 100% the same heroes or commemorations. We can coexist, and even thrive, without demanding ideological uniformity on every historical figure.

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Virginia Democrats have a problem. The Democratic Party’s candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, has been outed for texting messages wishing death and pain on former Virginia House Speaker, Republican, Todd Gilbert. Jay Jones sent the messages to another Republican colleague in the General Assembly, Carrie Coyner.1 That is horrific and weird. He texted a Republican about wishing political violence on another Republican, because apparently, he felt he had a good enough relationship with her that she would be fine with it. I repeat: this is weird. This is bad. This is not acceptable. Not sent to Democrats, not sent about Democrats, not the GOP, no one. Coyner exposed the horrible messages. But after the assassination of Minnesota Democratic legislator Melissa Hortman and the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Virginia must take a stand against political violence. The texts are bad enough on their own, but in context they cannot be allowed to stand. That is okay. Virginians are supposed to lead the way. We have to make a point.

Democrats do not want a Republican attorney general—especially when there are serious issues regarding federalism, the constitutionality of actions by the Trump administration, and when Democrats are projected to win by 5–10 points in the three commonwealth-wide races, including governor and lieutenant governor.

Okay, I get it.

Democrats have condemned Jay Jones but dropping him as a candidate seems like risking too much electorally. That is wrong. Sticking by him risks more. Democrats have universally condemned him, but now he must be defenestrated. That does not mean handing the race to the GOP.

There is a solution for Democrats, who are projected to maintain control of the General Assembly and win the governorship and the lieutenant governor’s race: Jay Jones must preemptively resign.

Let me explain.

1. Jay Jones stays in the race but announces he will not serve.

2. He writes a postdated resignation (January 17, 2026, is Virginia inauguration day) and hands it to Abigail Spanberger the Democratic candidate for governor. He should do this immediately.

3. Then he campaigns for the attorney general’s office on behalf of a Democrat to be named later. But here is how that would be decided:

Virginia Code § 24.2-213. Filling vacancy in office of Attorney General.

If a vacancy occurs in the office of Attorney General during the session of the General Assembly, the General Assembly shall fill the vacancy by a majority vote of the total membership. If a vacancy occurs during a recess of the General Assembly, the Governor shall appoint a successor to serve for the remainder of the unexpired term or until the end of thirty days after the commencement of the next session of the General Assembly, whichever happens first. At that next session, the General Assembly shall fill the vacancy by election by a majority vote of the total membership for the unexpired portion of the term.

Code 1950, § 24-153; 1970, c. 462, § 24.1-85; 1993, c. 641.

If a newly sworn Virginia attorney general pre-files a resignation effective one minute after taking the oath on January 17, 2026, the office becomes vacant at that moment. Because the General Assembly will likely be in regular session, the General Assembly would fill the vacancy by election “by a majority vote of the total membership” —probably his opponent in the primary Shannon Taylor — but they are within their rights to pick someone else based on conditions in January. If, for some reason, the vacancy occurs while the Assembly is in recess, the governor — most likely Spanberger — makes a temporary appointment that lasts until 30 days after the next session begins, when the General Assembly then elects a successor for the remainder of the term. So, Democrats can still hold the office if they play it straight with voters.

This solves the problem for them.

• They take a stand against political violence

• They impose a penalty on Jay Jones

• They are upfront with the voters and have a chance to win the race.

Otherwise, they contribute to the idea that “the Left” and the Democratic Party are hypocrites about political violence. Virginia Democrats can do the opposite; they can win on all points by thinking like Virginians and solving the problem.

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Read the first in the series

One the fathers of Zionism was Moses Hess (1812 – 1875).

Moses Hess was a German journalist and socialist who influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels1 and who became an early proponent of Zionism. He read Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and tried to put ideas to work through a humane, sometimes anarchic socialism. He organized workers’ groups and argued his case in the radical Rheinische Zeitung, serving as its Paris correspondent from 1842 to 1843.

After Karl Marx joined the paper, Moses Hess helped shape Marx’s early thinking and they collaborated. Marx later rejected Hess’s approach and mocked it in The Communist Manifesto (1848). During the Revolution of 1848 in Germany, Hess fled the German lands. After years of moving through Europe, he settled in Paris in 1853.

In 1862 he published Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage—Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationality Question, also translated as “the last national question.” The book influenced Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (Aḥad Haʿam) and Theodor Herzl. Its central claim was direct: Jews would remain a homeless people, never fully accepted by others, until they had a country of their own. That claim became a core doctrine of Zionism. Hess’s socialism shaped his Zionism. He linked national renewal to social repair—land, labor, schools, and language—and Rome and Jerusalem gave that link a coherent form. For Hess the maintenance of Jewish nationality did not work within systems emphasizing German nationality and emancipation of the Jewish people within Germany. Effectively in his thinking either the Jewish peoples emancipated in Europe had to fully assimilate into the nationality where they were such as German or French, or they had to have their own fatherland - the Holy Land - so they could be respected as a separate people with a natural place even if they were currently abroad.

Aḥad Haʿam meaning “one of the people” was the pen name of Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927) who advanced the cultural argument for Jewish nationality. His cultural Zionism emphasized the revival of Hebrew, ethics, learning, and shared norms so that any future state in the Holy Land would host a living civilization rather than an empty form of nostalgia. Culture first, so that politics would have something worthy to exist for and to represent. It was Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) who developed the organizational depth of the movement. An Austro-Hungarian journalist and playwright, he convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and translated the claim of Jewish statehood into diplomacy, institutions, and funds. The idea did not begin with him, but he turned it into a program that could recruit people, raise money, and negotiate with governments. While Haʿam and Herzl are better known to general audiences, but the correct starting point is Moses Hess because he framed the question of Jewish nationality within the context of the existing debates over nationalism in Germany and elsewhere. Herzl then provided the machinery that made the project functional. Hess articulated the idea clearly, and Ha’am and Herzl gave it form.

We have to place this intellectual history within its European setting. Organized Zionism developed during Europe’s second great wave of colonization, the Scramble for Africa. In the 1870s, European powers controlled about ten percent of African territory; by 1914 they controlled roughly ninety percent. Great-power competition, nationalist ambition, profits, access to raw materials, and the search for markets drove this expansion.

The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 set rules that legitimated and accelerated the scramble. Technology made conquest and control faster: quick-firing weapons, steamships and railways, telegraph cables, and improved medicine. This was the world in which Theodor Herzl sought charters and guarantees and in which the movement organized immigration, land purchase, and institutions. Zionists worked in the same diplomatic and intellectual climate as their European contemporaries. That is the fair context to place analysis of the issues. A common antisemitic move is to “other” Jews, to claim Jewish ideas and actions are alien or uniquely suspect. They were not. Early Zionists were products of European thinking. They read the same philosophers, spoke the same political language, and used the same tools.

Hess did not live to see the consequence of the ideas he helped to unleash. The village of Kfar Hess in Israel is named after him.

To understand the Zionist intellectuals is to place them inside nineteenth-century Europe, not outside it. Judge them and their movement by the standards used for other national movements of the era: claims, conduct, and consequences. Europeans were going abroad to establish states and protectorates, placing Zionist ideas in the same space as Liberia, Rhodesia, Sierra Leone and British South Africa. It was a return movement and a settler movement. This comparative frames allows one to offer fair critiques of Zionism within its actual world not a fictional one. And in the real world, early Zionists had to think about how to engage the last great Islamic empire: the Ottoman Caliphate.

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Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is one of the shortest in U.S. history — and one of the most profound. Delivered in March 1865, with the Civil War still raging and Richmond, Virginia was still occupied by the rebels who claimed it as their capital. If anyone had recent to be angry and hate their opponents it was Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1860 election fair and square, and his opponents threatened his life and tried break the American Union. And yet he never wished for more than their military defeat and reconciliation to the national government and Constitution. His Second Inaugural Address in 1865 should be reread as celebrated as the American way, and the alternative as something un-American. He said the following but I have added notes in parentheses:

Lincoln’s words remind us that disagreement is inevitable — but malice is optional. Americans must decide if we want to practice politics without hate. You can wish for your policies to prevail without wishing harm on your opponents. In fact, if you believe your cause is just, you should want it to benefit the whole society — your opponents included. Malice always invites return fire. Do unto others what you would have them do to you, because in politics they often can. Your opponents get a vote. Always. No one wants to be insulted, humiliated, or threatened. And when provoked, people will respond in kind. So why feed the cycle? We can turn off the provocateurs, tune out the rage-bait, and change the channel. This is not a call to stop disagreeing — disagreement is the work of democracy. But we can disagree without seeking annihilation. Because most attempts at annihilation fail — and only create desires for revenge. We can choose peace and a common future. We can choose it.

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Tonight, I gave a talk to the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Great group. Good questions asked; I will have to do a write up later. For this Monday, I want to continue my indirect response to Ta-Nehisi Coates and his writing on Israel and Palestine.

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Zionism is Jewish nationalism. Full stop. It is both simple and problematic because of the context and location. We have to travel to the years after the defeat of the Emperor Napoleon the Great and establishment of the Congress of Vienna system.

Jewish thought during this period was electric with anticipation and in awe of European ideas in the Christian world. This was the era after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and the era of Romanticism. The Jews of Europe were taken in by the heady mixture of European power and political activity. Zionism grew out of that European moment; as such, it was ordinary, yet its position was unique.

A way I introduce this to my students is to focus on Italy, Germany, and Poland. To be succinct, I’ll focus on Germany first. The Congress of Vienna sorted the borders of Europe to create a balance of power among Austria, Prussia, Britain, Russia, and France. In many ways the big winner was Austria, though Russia also gained. The losers—other than the French—were the German people, the Italian people, and the Poles. Many looked at France and Napoleon and said, “They could do that because they had their own nation-state; we have a nation with many states.” Germany had around 30 sovereign states with their own armies and foreign policies. “Germany” was a nation; it was not a government. People responded differently to that fact.

Most Germans had Vaterlandsliebe, or love of the fatherland, which meant love of Germany as a land and its shared culture. It did not have to imply political opinions of one sort or another. Many Germans also had Lokalpatriotismus—that is, an intense political loyalty to their part of Germany. For example, there was a Kingdom of Saxony and a Kingdom of Bavaria, and a Saxon or Bavarian with Vaterlandsliebe could love “Germany” without wanting Saxony or Bavaria to cease to be independent states with their own kings, laws, and armies. However, many Germans wanted a single German monarch and parliament to rule the other German lands with one common foreign, military, and economic policy: this was Nationalismus (nationalism). Nationalism is not hatred of other countries, nor is it the wild belief in your people’s supremacy—that is chauvinism. Nationalism was a specific political position regarding a people and their governance: if you believed that Germany was one nation that needed one government, you were a nationalist. You could disagree and simply have Vaterlandsliebe—or even be a chauvinist. If you already have a nation-state then patriotism and nationalism become synonyms because the goal has been achieved. Could you call someone an American patriot if they believed that America was not a nation indivisible? Of course not. But in the German case, Germany was not a nation-state and had not been one at least for centuries, if not ever.

This is only counterintuitive because too much of our history is read backward from 1945 or 1933. Put it this way: anti-colonial movements in the Third World were usually nationalist—oppressed peoples saying, “We should rule ourselves in our home with our own sovereign government, free of foreign control.” That sounds a lot like the Polish people in the nineteenth century, with their country conquered and divided by Prussia, Austria, and—primarily—Russia. They resented that the tsar declared himself “King of Poland.” The Russians oppressed the Polish people for the better part of two centuries, from the 1770s to 1989. Poles who resisted and fought wanted a Polish government that was sovereign and ruled all Polish lands; again, they were nationalists. Their nationalism was a response to mistreatment by imperial powers. And the Italians were stuck in a mix of the German and Polish situations.

Austria ruled the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia in northern Italy; the papacy ruled the regions around Rome; the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under the Bourbon dynasty ruled the south; and members of the House of Habsburg ruled in Parma, Modena, and Tuscany. Together, these arrangements meant that Italy was disunited, and, effectively, Austria was the overlord of Italy. If you were an Italian patriot who felt that the heirs of the Romans deserved to rule themselves and not be pitted against one another by rival monarchs, then the solution was, once again, national unification. Other peoples, including Norwegians, the Irish, and the Greeks, saw the solution to their problems as national independence and sovereign states for their own nationalities.

The US Civil War was a nationalist war; we just called it Unionism. Was the Union a nation-state or not? That was the argument of the Lincoln administration: the Southern slaveholder rebellion was illegal, and secession was treason. When men volunteered to fight to force the South to remain under the sovereign authority of Washington, D.C., and the US Constitution, they were fighting an avowedly nationalist cause and did not hesitate to own that. African Americans saw American nationalism as the solution to slavery: join the war effort → fight for the Union → end slavery → get citizenship as Americans. Frederick Douglass was an American nationalist, which is why he pushed for America to live up to its creed regarding everyone, regardless of racial category as opposed to a “return” to Africa or other such scheme.

And the history overlaps. The wars that unified Germany were the Second Schleswig War (1864), the Austro-Prussian or Seven Weeks’ War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). The wars and campaigns that unified Italy were the First Italian War of Independence (1848–49), the Second Italian War of Independence (1859), Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand and the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1860–61), the Third Italian War of Independence (1866), and the Capture of Rome (1870). Poland’s January Uprising insurrection against Russian rule was from 1863–64. And the US Civil War, in which American nationalism crushed an attempt at slaveholder nationalism, lasted from 1861–1865. This was an era of nationalist consolidation and resistance to foreign oppression.

Jews in Europe—facing discrimination and persecution, especially in Russia, and those watching other Jewish communities suffer—came to see a self-governing Jewish homeland as the answer. That impulse was not unusual; it matched the nationalist currents sweeping Europe. One difference mattered: location. Poles were in occupied Poland; Germans and Italians were in their divided homelands; African Americans were in America; the Irish were in British-ruled Ireland. European Jews…were not in Judea. How could they get there? That posed a problem.

Next week I will look at how Jewish thinkers considered the position of Jews in late 19th century Europe, and the early ideas, assumptions and drama around the development of Zionism.

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When readers got ahold of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay on Palestine in his 2024 book The Message, the response was swift—praise from some, unease to anger from others. Why did it hit so hard?

This was the writer’s first political/social commentary book of the post-Trump I/Covid era, and it landed October 1, 2024, almost the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas that started the Gaza War. Maybe time really is everything?

Coates recounted what he saw on his visit to the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the summer of 2023, before the war; it was his first trip. (I went to Israel as a college student in December 2005 and spent New Year’s on the shore of Galilee and travelled as far South as Masada). He drew parallels between Palestinian life under military occupation and the Southern racial order of Jim Crow America. He described checkpoints, restricted movement, and separate systems that reminded him of the American South he had studied so closely. He did not propose policies or offer diplomatic solutions or rather he had the “diagnosis not the cure.”1 He wrote as a witness. His claim was simple: naming oppression is itself an act of justice. As his official website states:

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities…Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.2

So, he wrote The Message about the messages, the narratives shaping and grounding particular political assumptions and systems. Fair enough.

For admirers, the essay mattered precisely because it refused neutrality. Coates spoke plainly about what he observed as he saw it. Coates is undeniably a great writer. His echoing of the Black American freedom struggle gave his words added weight. And curiously of his three essays, which include the topics of Africa and the American South —situations where readers can see Coates has a connection— his longest essay was on the West Bank and the eastern portion of Jerusalem? That alone raised eyebrows and told us that something there, in the east, struck Coates. Critics said the piece left too much unsaid. They charged that by centering only Palestinian suffering, it ignored Jewish trauma, Israeli fears, and the security concerns of a nation with a history of relatively recent wars with their neighbors and the memory of serial terrorist campaigns. They claimed Coates risked flattening a history thick with competing claims. Maybe so, maybe not. But again, Coates as a writer is so good he cannot be ignored. Coates woke up many Americans about racial injustice and those who were most affected by his writing in 2014, are often those most afflicted by feelings of angst over the two presidencies of Donald John Trump, and the continuities of Biden’s support with Israel’s war —even after he was a lame duck— with his predecessor/successor.

This clash was also about what audiences expect from public writing in moments of conflict. Was Coates’s witness enough? If it was not enough why should those who do not like it be so agitated, would it not be easy to dismiss the musing of someone who does not know the issue? Was the disquiet because of Coates’s stature or because people who say they are not guilty felt indicted? It was all of the above and that is a disorienting mix. Disorientation is perhaps the dominant political feeling among Americans today.

Most of us know this tension intimately. One voice says, "We must name the wrong when we see it." Another says, "But it's more complicated than that." Both voices can have wisdom. Both also carry risks. That is why the essay became a flashpoint.

But I think more needs to be said with clarity and specificity, so I am going to write my own message about the issue of the Holy Land for a bit and see where it takes me. I’ll start on next Message Monday with the question of nationalism, which is also the subject of my first curated reading list on under the Outside the Academy Bookshelf tab. Hopefully you will stick with me on Mondays as I answer questions about Israel and Palestine, without the need for a seminar. (Maybe I should do one through my soon to launch podcast?) Though, given I have read and thought about this topic more than any other non-American-centric issue over the last twenty years, I probably have more to say than even I realize.

It will be my indirect reply to The Message.

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Contemporary capitalism often places workers in positions where survival requires moral compromise: tolerating insults, enduring abuse, cutting ethical corners, or embracing indignities. This produces a social trauma akin to moral injury: not from being deceived, but from being forced to live against one’s own moral compass in order to eat. Over time, this erodes civic dignity and conditions people to normalize exploitation—making them miserable, more likely to be a bystander to harm, and more likely to grow numb to the abuse of authority.

Economic hoarding and hyper-concentration mean fewer good jobs, fewer pathways to stability, and more power in the hands of bosses and institutions. With too much market power, they can afford to behave in irresponsible and harmful ways because the disparity of wealth gives them a higher margin for error. Workers “grin and bear it” not because they are ambitious but because they are desperate, caught in a chokehold economy. The old claim that work builds identity and honor rings hollow through the valley of desperation. In practice, for too many, work now corrodes identity, eating away at dignity. They can afford to lose their income less than they can afford to lose themselves.

The Stripping of Dignity

The problem is captured ironically by The Full Monty, the acclaimed British comedy about unemployed men in a declining steel town. Out of options, they decide to earn money by staging a striptease show. Inspired by professional male strippers, they vow to go further—to strip completely naked. The film presents this as ordinary men taking control of their lives in a humorous and liberating way. But the story is subtle and subversive.

Beneath the laughs lies desperation. These men want to work. There is no work. So they do what they must to survive. For one man, the humiliation is layered. As a father estranged from his son, blocked by his ex-partner’s new lover, he endures yet another emasculation, this time by disrobing for strangers in order to reclaim some semblance of manhood and income, and therefore fatherhood. In normal times we would see this clearly: these men are not empowered, they are stripped of their dignity. The writer, Simon Beaufoy, said that he was inspired by the lack of employment, especially industrial jobs, in post-Thatcher Britain—how working-class men had nothing to do. He later spoke with Italian producer Uberto Pasolini, who asked what had happened to British men to make them lose their pride. For Beaufoy, the story became one of working-class disenfranchisement, the loss of dignity, and an attempt to regain control over one’s life. However, American audiences tend to miss this, to see the film and think these desperate men of England are somehow an example of the bootstrapping entrepreneur. We evade the obvious.

If fraud shame is betrayal by trust, negotiable virtue is self-betrayal by necessity. Workers forced into systems that contradict their moral core internalize shame, cynicism, and complicity.

Mistreatment as the Boss’s Perk

The MeToo movement revealed how deeply this culture of expected negotiable virtue had spread. MeToo hit a nerve. It should have, the casting couch is wicked. For decades, employers in the entertainment industry treated the humiliation of workers as a perk of the job. It had nothing to do with maximizing profits; it was about asserting privilege. The “casting couch” is a system where powerful men demand submission. Preying on young, insecure women and men, telling them that they should strip for the camera to “gain confidence” is a ploy of vile manipulative men who in earlier ages would have shunned —and perhaps even violently held to account— but now are promoted and given accolades for their “artistic vision.” The smiles of their victims were then used to say “See their method works, you should try it.” Harvey Weinstein was protected and promoted by the social system of the film industry and also scapegoated by it. The problem was social and beyond the horrible actions of one media executive.

Forcing people into silence to preserve the careers they love strips them of self-belief.

How many models and actors were told to pretend to enjoy themselves? How many hated themselves afterward for going along? How many carried broken and impaired relationships for years because of compromises forced upon them? The visceral anger of MeToo was not a conspiracy but pent-up rage at a workplace culture where humiliation had become the privilege of power.

The Utopia That Owns You

A different threat to human happiness hides beneath the glossy visions of the future promoted by institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2016, Danish politician Ida Auken sketched her idea of a life of ease in the techno city of 2030: a world where no one owns anything,1 everything is a service, and citizens are happy because their needs are instantly provided by algorithms and corporations. She wrote of a life where homes are shared, appliances delivered on demand, and privacy erased in the name of convenience. “I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded,” she admitted, but insisted that this was a small price to pay.2

The details of the vision reveal its problems, however unintended. The essay appears to celebrate the idea that the writer’s living room would be used for business meetings whenever they were away, as if the loss of a private home is an advance in civilization. It shrugs at the fact that “AI and robots took over so much of our work” because it gave people more leisure to eat and sleep—as though the destruction of human labor and craft is a happy trade. And the essay concedes that in this hypothetical 2030 city she has “no real privacy” but treats it as an inconvenience rather than a violation. The very things that should provoke resistance—loss of home, loss of work, loss of privacy—are recast as the markers of progress. But given what we know about humans and the potential for abuse, the total loss of privacy and private spaces is a horrific vision. Whether the WEF or others, you cannot credibly reimagine human flourishing and leisure if you do not first understand humanity.

This is not to endorse wild conspiracy theories about plots from the WEF. Rather it is to challenge these imagined futures that are developed by leaders in tech and government who do not understand the individual need for worth and dignity that comes from being true to oneself and actively engaged in living life productively. Given the economic challenges since the 2008 financial crisis, it is no wonder the vision “You’ll Own Nothing. And You’ll Be Happy.” provoked backlash.3 It touched the same nerve the pro-Brexit campaign tapped into with its slogan “Take Back Control.” People felt something was slipping away—stable jobs, dependable futures, their say over their own lives.

Everyday Negotiable Virtue

Most people will never face the Hollywood casting couch, but there is a good chance they know the experience of swallowing indignity to survive. Gig workers are expected to smile through mistreatment. Junior staff in corporate hierarchies are expected to accept status games that reward cruelty as the cost of “paying their dues” when all they want is a mentor to help them grow into their roles. We have created workplaces where virtue—loyalty, honesty, dignity—becomes negotiable and where good people are driven away by leaders too cowardly to confront deputies who act like petty tyrants. Experts are dismissed because of bureaucracy and their pleas are ignored. People have gotten used to making bricks without straw, as employee support and resources are cut, and then blamed when the bricks do not stack like they used to. Far too often good people cannot afford to quit, so they stay and absorb the abuse and become smaller in their own eyes. Too many young professionals are entering the workforce not as respected graduates but as workers in a system where their integrity is constantly on the table because their employers do not want someone with an independent spirit who will say no to an unethical request. So the youth are stripped of their excitement for their new careers.

The workplace is one of the major forms of social engagement, but it can also be one of the most corrosive. Its pressures can make people lose their prior moral formation, and over time desperation becomes a destructive habit of mind. Imagine a young woman with a brilliant mind, yet unknown to her, unwanted attention by others to her appearance is what secures her the job. Or perhaps she is pushed into gig work where survival depends on generating clicks because the jobs are lacking. Both cases are insulting to her and her hard work. When this happens, what is society communicating to her and her peers about worth and work? If out of desperation she goes along with the tide, we judge her, and she judges herself. Eventually, a person grows weary of the judgment and embraces the infamy, not because they want to, but because trying to maintain their dignity while compromising it to survive caused one to give way. So some choose OnlyFans and other forms of self-exploitation and we avert our eyes and convince ourselves that everyone has agency so the context of the choice does not matter. But deep down we should know the difference between a free choice and a tragic one. Too many see these choices as personal failures rather than as signs of wider economic problems we refuse to quantify; we pretend they missed opportunities that were never there to begin with. Many are out there just trying to survive with very limited options and that is a shared tragedy of our society. They need grace.

In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, only 25% of Americans said they think they have a shot at improving their economic situation; 70% do not believe the American dream is still true.4 While people can also be mistaken and suffer from misperceptions, it appears their experiences have crushed their hope.

Against the Command to Smile

When wealth piles up at the top, big firms raise prices, push down wages, and bury rivals. That means fewer firms to hire employees. Innovation slows. Competition fades. Growth drags because those at the top spend little of their income, while workers are left with debt, weak schools, and crumbling roads. Over time, birth and connections matter more than talent and hard work. And once people are desperate enough, they can be told to accept exploitation.

Dignified work is not just an economic concern. It is moral infrastructure for democracy. When survival requires constant compromise, citizens grow habituated to indignity—not only at work, but in politics. What we endure at work, we begin to excuse in public life. Dog-eat-dog workplaces produce citizens too exhausted or too jaded to defend democratic norms. It is hard to go on strike, let alone protest, when you are in debt and forced to laugh at your own humiliation just to keep food on the table. Credit card debt has become a more effective tool of social control than the gulag ever was.

The fix is not to hate markets but to make them work as they should: open and fair. That means antitrust with teeth, tax rates that actually fund spending, limits on non-compete contracts, and workplace cultures that honor employee dignity. Capital must serve people, not the other way around.

This is no time for passivity or resignation. Recovering dignity and respect in labor and at work means having the right response for when you are told, “You will do the full monty and like it.”

No.

See also

Outside the Academy w/ Prof. Thompson

When Truth Comes Late: The Social Politics of Scams, Myths, Shame, and Recovering Ourselves

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. — JFK Yale Commencement, 1962…

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a year ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Albert Russell Thompson

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