It did little good. On Sunday, Victor Orbán’s Fidesz Party was handily defeated at the polls by the center-right Tisza party, putting an end to Orbán’s sixteen-year reign as Prime Minister of Hungary.

The United States is in the middle of a self-inflicted global energy crisis spiraling out of control and in a war in danger of reigniting. Vance was tagged last week to lead the peace negotiations with Iran.

Why take a detour to Hungary on the way?

Answering this question is not as straightforward as it is often treated in outlets like The New York Times or The Atlantic. There, Victor Orbán has long been treated as a dangerous bellwether for the particular kind of populism that Trumpism wants to replicate. As things go in Hungary, so they (could) go in the United States. Indeed, earlier this week, the Times published an editorial saying that if we want to know how to defeat Trumpism at the polls, we should take our lesson from Orbán’s victorious opponent. I am seeing very similar arguments all over anti-Trump social media this week, as well as plenty of prophecy that Orbán’s defeat means that the years of populist authoritarianism are coming to an end.

But obviously, Hungary is not the United States, not even close. Where did we get the idea it was? It turns out to be J.D. Vance’s camp, National Conservatism.

There’s nothing wrong with being a small country like Hungary, but the United States is not among such countries and never has been. When measured by purchasing power (PPP), Hungary’s GDP per capita is $47,600, compared to $85,800 in the United States. Per the IMF, Hungary’s GDP per capita puts it 48th in the world, 42 spots behind the United States. Hungary’s economy is so small that it comprises just over 1% of the European Union’s output. It is mostly seen by the EU as a source of cheap manufacturing labor. Orbán rose to power sixteen years ago by railing against all of this and promising better days, but during his long reign, the country’s economic growth took a downward turn and fell behind other post-socialist European countries.

Amid all of this, Orbán’s rule has made Hungary a case study for scholars of democratic backsliding. After the Fidesz Party took power in 2010, as one scholar writes, Orbán “moved to radically curtail the power of the judiciary, obstruct the autonomy of civil society [including universities], change the election laws to their own advantage, and consolidate their control over both the state and private media.” Today, the Trump-allied Heritage Foundation puts Hungary near the bottom of European countries in its (quite hypocritical) “Index of Economic Freedom,” knocking it especially hard for a lack of “Government Integrity,” “Government Spending,” and “Fiscal Health.”

Nevertheless, for all of this, among all the nations in the world, Orbán’s Hungary has been the leading light of American National Conservatism, the single most powerful national example for the single most powerful movement in American federal governance today.

National Conservatism is at the heart of the current Trump administration, the central force behind Project 2025, ICE raids, attacks on American universities, and media outlets. National Conservatism pretends to be anti-globalist. In fact, it is just another form of globalism, one that puts individual sovereign national leaders like Trump, Orbán, Netanyahu, and Xi at the center of global dealings rather than international institutions like the IMF, United Nations, or European Union. National Conservatism wears “patriotism” and “nationalism” on its sleeve, but its “patriot” is not the patriot of any particular nation, but just the idea of a patriot. Its “nationalism” is not tied to any particular nation, but simply to the idea of the “sovereign nation” itself. For all the ways in which National Conservatives rage against the “placelessness” of the lives of cosmopolitan liberals and coastal elites, when not at their private estates, they themselves live almost entirely in the world of abstractions.

J.D. Vance is not the only National Conservative who grew to love the abstract idea of Orbán’s Hungary. Patrick Deneen, sometimes christened the intellectual vanguard of American National Conservatism (he very much looks the part), has made pilgrimages to Hungary. Gladden Pappin, an American political scientist who helped found the National Conservative journal American Affairs, is now the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. Tucker Carlson has ventured there. Rod Dreher, best-selling author and mercurial genie of the American National Conservative movement, packed up and moved to Hungary.

Meanwhile, National Conservative-aligned publications like First Things and National Review have regularly covered the country under Orbán’s rule with admiration. The American-based Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) expanded to Hungary, holding a major convention there last year under the banner “The Age of Patriots is Here!” Indeed, Trump, who in fact is not much of a National Conservative—or a National Anything for that matter—nevertheless seems to have reserved at least one of his hydra of roving eyes for the affairs of Orbán, sending his hook-up man Paolo Zampolli to Hungary last week to accompany Vance.

But, really, we must ask why Hungary, a struggling landlocked country in Eastern Europe, about the size of Indiana, with a population half the size of the New York metro area and an economy closer in real dollars per capita to that of Iraq than Indiana?

To be clear, Americans—especially American elites—have regularly looked to other countries as sources of inspiration. The Founding Fathers were particularly invested in ancient Rome, seeing it as a model of the promise and perils of republics. They also looked to the contemporaneous Dutch Republic. Jefferson was, for a time at least, quite preoccupied with what was transpiring in France amid the French Revolution. Meanwhile, in the run-up to and during the American Civil War, Greece became the object of enormous enthusiasm among Yankees. As Greece fought for independence against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, Americans lined up in support. Later, as Garry Wills has shown in his remarkable book, Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address sat against the backdrop of the American memory of the Greek democratic legacy. Later in the 19th century and well into the 20th century, many liberal American political elites shared a great admiration for the British Empire. And as recently as the 1980s, we can find American admirers of the ingenuity and work ethic of the Japanese.

Greece and Japan, like Hungary, were relatively small countries, but they obviously stood for great things: democracy and freedom-fighting in the case of Greece, and remarkable economic growth and high-quality manufacturing in the case of Japan.

But Hungary? What has it stood for under Victor Orbàn’s rule?

There are three somewhat glib answers—but true nevertheless—and three more complex ones.

Starting with the glib:

Orbán styled himself as a kind of patron for God, Family, and Country. American National Conservatives resonated, emphasizing as they do traditional religion, strong and growing families, and tight borders. Oddly, however, Hungary has not been a particularly religious country in actual practice during Orbán’s rule. Indeed, religious participation and identification consistently fell. Meanwhile, the population under the “pro-family” regime continued to decline, as people left the country for better lives. None of this matters to National Conservatives. The point here is that just as National Conservatives prefer abstractions, so they tend to care far more about symbols than substance. Orbán was a symbol. They love symbols.

Second, under Orbán, Hungary was a burr in the shoe of the European Union. The irony here, apparently lost on National Conservatives, is that this was a fact made possible only by the prior fact that Hungary was included in the EU in the first place. Precisely because the EU is not just a bunch of “faceless bureaucrats,” as Vance and National Conservatives like to say, but a political entity with a constitution and a parliament, Hungary, despite its meager size and economy, was able to use its vote to constantly pester its European neighbors. Hungary has therefore been the source of intense pleasure for American conservatives whose political palette is wetted only by sucking the bile out of liberals.

Third, Hungary’s declining population is relatively homogenous, with ethnic Hungarians comprising 84% of the country. Even amid the great influx of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, Hungary has managed to stay pretty White by enforcing strong border policies. In other words, Hungary looks nothing like America. It does look, however, a lot like your typical American CPAC Convention.

I have spent a good deal of time observing National Conservatives from afar, and I think these glib reasons match the character of many of those involved in the movement.

But these still are really quite meager reasons to hold another country up as a model for the United States, no?

So there are good reasons to look for more complex factors in play here.

For one, the Orbán-love tells us something about the nature of the social networks that are at the heart of Western reactionary conservatism today. Social networks in a global age are paradoxical. They can be incredibly large in reach, connecting with millions upon millions of people, and yet, power in the global social network is never distributed evenly across its reach. Not even close. Rather, global social networks are organized according to hierarchies, and money tends to be the currency that determines who is at what level. And the higher up you are, the smaller the circle. The National Conservatives, by and large, lack good sense, but they don’t lack deep pockets or international networks. Orbán and American conservatives are linked by very small but overlapping networks of global influence, power, and money. They comprise a clique.

But an equally powerful currency in all of this is attention, and Orbán, like Trump, knew (until recently, it seems) how to master attention. In the digital-based attention economy in which we live, small can be better, for attention in digital media is achieved by standing out from the “crowd,” so to speak. Being a minority or being extreme is a strategic advantage. Trump is a master of attention because he is such an extreme outlier morally (where he is an extraordinarily small man, one of the smallest in world history), even as his policies, save immigration, have been quite conventional within the post-Reagan Republican Party.

National Conservatism, unlike Reaganism, is organized to maximize attention rather than to maximize votes. It is not a majoritarian political movement, nor does it have any real aim to be. Rather, it aims to exploit the power of small numbers to attract outsized attention in our media landscape and to build out of this the political power of a ruling minority on the vibes of a distracted public that simply has too many other things to pay attention to other than political policy and personal character. As a rabble-rousing populist figure who delighted in sticking it to European liberals but never built an authentic and sustainable political majority in his own country, Orbán got the attention of American conservatives because he showed them just how small can go big.

Indeed, ultimately, National Conservatism’s Orbán-love tells us just how small these men themselves are (yes, overwhelmingly men). Their networks are not only organized around small cliques of financial and attention elites, but they actively work to shrink the nation down to their own petty size. For all their talk of “national greatness,” the American National Conservatives are proving that it is just talk. For reasons that seem to be more psychological than political, they seem to need their “great leaders” to be men of utterly minimal character—Orbán, like Trump, used his office to enrich himself and his family. He was voted out of office last week because his rampant corruption was just becoming too much to hide.

Why are National Conservatives drawn to such small men? The political descendants of the Lilliputians, they can make themselves “great” only by shrinking the nation down to size—Victor Orbán’s size, or Donald Trump’s size.

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self-Reliance.” That point, it seems, has not yet been reached in the education of America’s National Conservatives. They are on a suicidal course and don’t mind taking us with them.

It’s true, Orbán’s Hungary seems to be over. But U.S. National Conservatism is not—not yet, and maybe not even close to being yet. Despite what The New York Times says, what happens in Hungary is not a reliable indicator of what’s to happen in the United States, or even of what we should do. For sure, there are lessons we can learn from post-Soviet Europe, but the future of American electoral politics is not among them. Trump and the National Conservative regime that supports him are distinctly American phenomena enabled by distinctly American ways of doing politics. Their presence is our disease, not Hungary’s.

Rather, we need to own up to our own country.

Recently, at the Supreme Court’s hearings on “birthright citizenship” —a Constitutional principle to which National Conservatives are generally opposed—the Trump administration’s solicitor general again summoned the parochial vision of the movement by arguing to the justices that America should just be like other countries:

[T]he United States’ rule of nearly unrestricted birthright citizenship is an outlier among modern nations. It’s a very small minority of nations that have that rule. For example, every . . . nation in Europe has a different rule [than the United States].

Later the same night, Sean Hannity was on Fox News repeating these lines in front of a cartoon-like animated American flag. What kind of America does Hannity want? Surprisingly, one just like Europe, as long as “Europe” is just like Orbán’s Hungary: ethnically homogenous, if overworked, relatively poor, and on the decline.

Not all American conservatives share this small vision. Justice Kavanaugh, for one, told Trump’s attorney in the hearings, “You’ve mentioned several times the practices of other countries, and that, obviously, as a policy matter supports what you’re arguing here. But, obviously, we try to interpret American law with American precedent based on American history.” In other words, we are Americans, damn it, not Hungarians!

In her kept journal, Anna Dostoevskaya, wife of Fyodor Dostoevsky, chronicled her and her husband’s time in Switzerland—a two-year period of extreme poverty and health complications. After visiting the Kunstmuseum in Basel, she describes the effect a great painting had on her husband: Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520-1522).

The tortured, decaying body of Christ depicted on the six-foot-long, one-foot tall canvas inspired such despair and shock in Fyodor Dostoevsky that he suffered an epileptic seizure in the gallery. It was the experience of Holbein’s Christ that inspired the great novelist to write a story from the perspective of a Christ-like man, resulting in Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.

The relationship between lived experience, the painting, and the novel, reconstructs a greater historical context, one that reminds us that art comes from people who have suffered losses, overcome obstacles, and lived in our same world.

While information about Dostoevsky’s experience exists—in Anna’s journals, in biographies, in curatorial studies—it rarely appears in the metadata (or, “data about data”) of the painting itself, whether in a museum’s digital archive or online database. What we encounter instead is a disconnected series of digital silos: one record for the artwork, another for the author, another for the seizure anecdote.

The connective tissue—the human narrative—is missing.

This absence reveals something deeper about our civic relationship to culture in the digital age.

Information is abundant, but meaning is not.

The original promise of the internet was a democratic one: a digital landscape where people and information could be connected across the globe, where knowledge was no longer gated by geography or privilege. Museums, libraries, and archives embraced this mission with enthusiasm. In the last thirty years, the world’s cultural memory—artworks, manuscripts, photographs, films—has been digitized and placed online, accessible to most anyone with a Wi-Fi signal. Such a powerful influx of cultural data makes the question of comprehensiveness rear its head, as access alone does not connect the public to digital reproductions of culture and art.

When we open a museum’s online collection, we might find Holbein’s Dead Christ. We see a high-resolution image, the artist’s name, the year, and a short curatorial text. But we won’t find the network of relationships that gives it life: Dostoevsky’s seizure, Anna’s journal, the broader 19th-century conversation of faith and despair. That kind of relational knowledge—the story behind the data—remains unstructured, dispersed, or buried in other databases.

Digitization achieved access. It did not achieve a connection. And in civic terms, that distinction matters.

In a healthy civic society, knowledge functions as a public good: it connects citizens to history, to each other, and to the moral and emotional lessons embedded in art and literature. But when our collective knowledge is scattered across opaque platforms, accessible only through precise keywords and institutional boundaries, our civic relationship to culture becomes transactional rather than participatory.

Every search online begins with two questions:

1. Where am I going to search for this?

2. What am I going to search for?

These questions are deceptively simple. To ask them well, one must already know something about how information is stored, who owns it, and what kind of language will retrieve it. Searching effectively online, whether for a historical detail or an obscure artwork, requires not just curiosity but fluency in the architectures of the digital world. Keyword-based search flattens meaning. It retrieves results based on literal matches, not conceptual ones. A query for “Dostoevsky Holbein Christ” may produce relevant results—but it won’t connect you to, say, other writers moved by depictions of suffering, or artists who explored the same theological questions. The search engine doesn’t understand why you’re asking—it only matches what you type.

This is the civic cost of digital fragmentation: knowledge becomes a puzzle that only the digitally literate can solve. Those without the right words—or the right search platform—are excluded from discovering the deeper relations that make culture meaningful.

Artificial intelligence, as most people encounter it today, is “generative”—it produces new text, images, or sounds.

But there is another dimension of AI that holds more civic promise: semantic AI.

Semantic AI doesn’t generate new content; it interprets relationships. It connects meaning, context, and association across diverse data sources.

In practical terms, this means that instead of simply “finding” files, it can connect knowledge. It can link Holbein’s Dead Christ to Dostoevsky’s seizure, Anna’s journals, the Basel museum records, and broader discussions about suffering and faith in European literature.

Information can be stored in knowledge graphs or relational databases—networks of interconnected information that reflect how human understanding actually works—and searched semantically, traversing through entities and their related or overlapping connections.

In a semantic web of culture, The Dead Christ is no longer just a painting. It’s a node in a living constellation that includes literature, religion, philosophy, and history.

Imagine searching for “artistic depictions of Christ-like figures” or “19th century ideas about religion” and being guided through a semantic map of interrelated sources: Holbein’s Christ, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, and contemporary works exploring resurrection or decay.

That is not keyword retrieval—it is conceptual navigation. In civic terms, it represents a shift from passive access to active participation in cultural understanding for the public.

If storage and search define the backbone of cultural digitization, semantic AI reimagines both. Traditional databases are built around fixed categories: artist, title, date, medium. They work well for inventory, but poorly for interpretation.

Human knowledge, by contrast, is associative, fluid, and contextual.

Emerging models like Linked Art and Europeana’s data framework are early examples of how institutions can use semantic structures to connect their archives. With semantic AI layered on top, such systems could become truly civic infrastructures—commons of cultural knowledge navigable by meaning rather than code.

This is not just about museums or academia. Think of public broadcasters, local archives, or libraries that hold oral histories, ephemera, or community art projects. Right now, these materials live on isolated platforms, discoverable only if you already know they exist. Semantic AI could give them visibility in the broader web of cultural history, allowing a school student in Amsterdam or Nairobi to follow a thread from Dostoevsky to Holbein to their own community mural.

The architecture of storage thus becomes an architecture of civic memory.

We often talk about AI as a threat to human creativity or as a tool for efficiency. But AI’s most meaningful civic potential lies in its capacity to reconnect. By mapping relationships between dispersed data, AI can rebuild a sense of continuity that the internet’s platformization fractured.

In a time when civic discourse is fragmented—when every domain of knowledge has its own algorithmic echo chamber—the idea of shared cultural understanding feels increasingly fragile. Semantic AI offers a counterpoint: a way to see the connections that link different forms of human expression, and to experience culture as a living system rather than a series of isolated posts, records, or thumbnails.

As Frederic Jameson puts it:

The history of an artwork and its materiality are inextricable, and recognition of this dichotomy can only come to be through knowledge, a knowledge which is not distinct from the aesthetic that henceforth includes it.

Understanding art requires understanding its history—and therefore, the social and political conditions that shaped it.

To make that kind of understanding available to everyone—to embed it in our digital infrastructure—is a civic act.

The internet began as a public project, a network meant to democratize knowledge. But as platforms privatized discovery and fragmented attention, the web lost its connective ethos.

To rebuild a civic internet, we must rebuild civic meaning.

Semantic AI offers not just a technical solution, but a philosophical one. It encourages us to see data not as property, but as shared understanding; not as isolated facts, but as relationships. It has the potential to make our digital culture participatory again—to turn archives into conversations and collections into communities of knowledge.

Of course, no technology is neutral or without flaws. Semantic AI will inherit biases from the data it learns on, and its interpretations will always reflect the limitations of human description. But unlike the generative tools that flood our feeds with synthetic “content,” semantic applications aim to clarify rather than obscure—to deepen our understanding rather than imitate it. In this way, they counteract the cultural noise produced by generative excess. When used for the public good, these systems can restore a kind of epistemic balance, helping us make sense of what already exists instead of drowning in endless reproductions of it.

When Dostoevsky stood before Holbein’s Dead Christ, what he saw was not just the body of Christ, but a mirror of human despair and endurance. That moment—its fragility, its depth—exists in our collective memory, but only if we can find it, connect it, and make it visible. In an age of overwhelming information, the task before us is not to digitize more, but to reconnect what we already have—to rediscover the human meanings that lie dormant in our digital archives, and in doing so, to rebuild the civic web.

Valentina Fazio holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Data and AI from the University of Amsterdam, and researches how flexible data storage structures and artificial intelligence can aid in the recontextualization of artwork within broader cultural and historical frameworks.

Speaking of embarrassing, have you heard about the Adams County, Ohio sheriffs? Perhaps you’ve come across Afroman as of late?

If you have not gotten in yet on the travails and trials of Afroman and the Adams County Sheriff’s Department, Civic Fields is glad to introduce you. I think he teaches us something about the art of public shaming.

Afroman is a rapper. I missed his only big hit, the humor-filled “Because I Got High,” which came out in 2000 (admittedly, for me, not much to miss). Since then, the artist has been releasing music on the internet and doing small gigs here and there.

Back in August of 2022, a team of careless sheriff’s deputies from Adams County, Ohio, broke down the door and raided the home of Joseph Edgar Foreman, a.k.a. Afroman. Yes, they had a search warrant in hand—but it was based only on the scantiest of evidence for their SWAT-style operation. A single informant, apparently Foreman’s ex, told them that Foreman was trafficking large amounts of weed, kidnapping women, and using his basement—described by the informant as a “dungeon”—to imprison his victims. These are serious accusations, to say the least, so wild that they might cause a deputy to want to check their veracity before getting too worked up. The Adams County sheriff’s department, however, bypassed this step and took the informant at her word.

Foreman is a black man, and Adams County, Ohio, is 96% white—as is, it seems, the sheriff’s office. Even “worse,” Foreman is a rapper who sings about weed and performs under the name Afroman.

Foreman was out of town when the sheriffs arrived and busted through his driveway gate and front door. But his children were at home, being cared for by his ex-wife. As they looked on with horror, the sheriffs, guns drawn, proceeded to scour the house like they were entering a drug lord’s enclave. Their search was futile. They dug through Foreman’s closet, rummaged through his CD collection, and looked behind couches and under tables with bewilderment.

When they discovered that they were being watched by the cameras of a home security system, they proceeded to disconnect it, but not before one deputy flipped the bird at a camera.

Needless to say, the sheriffs did not find any kidnapped women. They did not even find a basement or “dungeon”—for there was none, just a slab (a basic fact they surely could have investigated before battering their way into Foreman’s house). And they discovered only the tiniest amount of weed. No charges were filed. Nevertheless, they took into custody “evidence” in the form of $5000 in cash. Eventually, Foreman got $4600 of it back.

By any reasonable standard of “probable cause,” the operation was unwarranted. It was terrifying for Afroman’s kids. And it was humiliating for Foreman, who as a black man represents less than a half-percent of the Adams County, Ohio population.

What about the sheriffs? It is tempting to label them cruel and unjust, but mostly they were just incompetent and thoughtless.

Which raises the question, how should we respond to the bad behavior of public officials?

Shaming is one legitimate way.

But shame needs care—better, it needs art. For shame is a double-edged sword. So much of “cancel culture” is a form of shaming, and so much of cancel culture is wrong and unjust. It has done great personal and public harm to its targets while doing little that is productive for democracy.

Cancel culture represents a form of shaming meant to banish people from public life. It is a form of mob punishment. It is fundamentally paternalistic: we know what is righteous; you are unrighteous; be gone! It is no different in structure than the worst forms of mob violence against people accused of social transgressions, e.g. lynching (though it is very different in form).

Yet, democracies need the capacity to shame public actors who behave badly. Shaming can be used to call people to be better in public life. A great part of the devolution of public culture in the United States is fundamentally about how we’ve replaced the art of shaming with either (1) the blunt force of cancel culture, or (2) utter shamelessness.

Afroman, of all public people, teaches us something about a better way to approach shaming in a democracy.

Before his security cameras were disconnected, Afroman got ample footage of the actions of the sheriffs in their embattled excursion into his harmless house. His ex-wife also captured a video on her phone of the deputies at work. The year after his home was raided, Afroman used this footage to make a series of music videos about what happened to him.

The music videos have the form of plaintive satires. And they are hilarious.

One video, called “Will you Help Me Repair My Door?”, shows footage of the tactical-geared sheriffs busting down his door and searching his property with bewilderment. Another, called “Lemon Pound Cake,” pokes fun at a pot-bellied sheriff’s deputy caught on camera eyeing the pound cake on Afroman’s kitchen counter. A third, called “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera?” is, well, self-explantory.

The music in these videos is cheesy (“Lemon Pound Cake” is sung to the tune of “Under the Boardwalk”). The lyrics are funny in an understated sort of way. The edits and graphics are willfully campy. That is, nothing about these videos suggests that they should be taken seriously . . . except the shameful, and at times stupid, behavior of the sheriffs that they portray.

Afroman was engaged in the art of public shaming.

I want to put a strong stress on “art” here, for so much of “cancel culture” is just artless and cruel, no better in its political or moral quality than a bunch of white deputies showing up at a black man’s house on the flimsiest of evidence and making a mess of things.

But Afroman does not “cancel” the sheriffs. He simply showed them to the world in all their incompetence, poking a humorous and biting finger at them (ok, sometimes a crude and humorous finger).

What can we learn about the art of public shaming from Afroman?

Several things stick out to me.

First, Afroman shames, but he is so far from self-righteous. To the contrary, he’s self-deprecating. The stories he tells in the music videos are about injustice and incompetence of the sheriffs rather than about his own self-righteousness or victimization. Indeed, he goes out of his way to portray himself in such a way that no one would ever mistake him for being a man without sin.

Second, Afroman messes with rather than complains about power differentials. For him, the profound power differential between white law enforcement and black life at once does and doesn’t matter. Part of his art of shaming entails drawing attention to his and his kids’ victimized position in the whole affair. Yet, Afroman does not act like a victim. Instead, he goes artfully on the offensive. As he later said, he sought to “turn my bad times into a good time,” and it is the manifest good time that he is having in his videos that helps make them so viral and so effective as satire. On social media, rage and anger may get momentary attention, but artful humor like this gets both attention and retention.

Third, the music videos leave viewers with ample room for interpretation. As some of the titles to the songs suggest, they question more than they condemn. This is a good approach to using shame in political rhetoric. Keep it loose. “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera?”

Finally, Afroman addresses the sheriffs as equals. That is, he shames without paternalism. There is no effort to send the kids off to their rooms here, no stirring up an online mob to acts of banishment. Does Afroman “disrespect” the sheriffs? Yes and no—he gives them the level of respect their behavior warrants, no more or less. He treats them no differently than he would want to be treated himself: you get what you deserve. Or, put another way, be better than this! This is egalitarianism at work. (And it is sadly what too many in law enforcement in the United States have chosen to evade, hiding bad behavior behind the paternalistic power of the badge.)

This last feature of Afroman’s plaintive satires—shaming without paternalism—seems to me the most crucial thing we can learn from him about the art of shaming in democratic public life.

The story of Afroman and the sheriffs gets worse, or better, depending on how you look at it. The sheriffs, unlike Trump and his lackeys, apparently retained the capacity to feel shame. We should celebrate this. Good for them! But they chose to respond to their public shaming by digging themselves further in. They filed a civil lawsuit against Afroman for defamation of character, asking for nearly $4 million in damages.

Afroman was vindicated before a jury in court, but not before the sheriffs walked right into even more embarrassing moments while testifying on the stand.

And Afroman only wanted them to be better.

Since the 1990s, under the fraudulent power of the culture wars, the belief that politics hinges on ideological divides has taken on an increasingly cartoonish cast. No longer just Democrats or Republicans, we are Good Guys and Bad Guys, the Virtuous Ones and Deplorables. Among other things, this has had the deleterious effect of rendering so many of us incapable of making needed distinctions and seeing obvious differences between two unlike cases. “Ideology” can make even the smart and sophisticated political simpletons.

There are, however, deeper divisions in American political culture than ideology. One is that between those who are “checked in” to politics and those who are “checked out.” This may be the single most important division at the level of elections. Presidents are now made and unmade by those who political scientists dub “low-interest voters.” Primaries and midterm elections tend to swing to extremes because those same “low-interest voters” opt out, leaving only the most engaged voters at the polls. And the effects of bots and memes on political outlooks are strongest among those least engaged. So much of what shapes 21st-century American politics rides on the great divide between the “checked in” and the “checked out,” whatever their ideological leanings.

But there is an even more fundamental division in the United States that has to do with understandings of “politics” itself—what is it, why it matters, and how it works?

This week The New York Times published a devastating story about the great civil rights icon, Cesar Chavez (free link). In it, we learn in disturbing detail of Chavez’s crimes against girls and women, including sexual abuse and rape. For me, as for many others, this was a profoundly disturbing story, first for the great harm Chavez did to his victims and second for the ways in which in his crimes he betrayed his own political ethic.

According to his biographer, Miriam Pawel, Chavez kept in his office portraits of Gandhi and Martin Luther King as well as busts of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. According to The New York Times, in that very same office he forced himself on a 13-year-old girl and told her not to tell anyone lest they get “jealous.”

Under the tyranny of the culture wars, these revelations are bound to get turned into another “both sides” story, as if there is little distance between Chavez and Jeffery Epstein. It is true, both were men who horribly abused girls. Both took advantage of their prestige and power to draw victims into their orbit. And both used their power to protect themselves. Morally speaking, I am not interested in trying to differentiate the crimes of Epstein from those of Chavez. Both equally deserve condemnation, even if the circumstances of the case were different.

But Chavez and Epstein were politically different, and here I don’t mean ideologically different, as if it were merely a matter of Left, Right, and Middle. Rather, their political differences concerned how they understood power itself.

Power is the unavoidable means of politics, which is another way of saying that power is unavoidable wherever two or more are gathered and have to figure something out. But power can be exercised in two radically different ways. One is through predation and domination, the other through argument and persuasion.

The core difference between these two modes of politics is centered on the relative balance of rational agency in the relationship between those involved. I am persuaded when I, by my own reason and of my own volition, come to act and believe in a certain way because I find another’s argument, appeal, or case compelling. But I am prey when power is exercised over me primarily in relation to my vulnerabilities. Persuasion respects my agency, predation denies it. (This critical distinction dates all the way back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, not to mention the Ten Commandment’s prohibition against bearing false witness.)

Epstein was all predation—not just in his dealings with women and girls, but in his business dealings, his social life, and his patronage. President Trump comes out of the same world. A big part of the reason Trump attacked Iran was because he saw it (correctly) as weak and vulnerable. It is the same thing he did to the post-Bush Republican Party. And it is the same thing he’s done to more than a few women, and quite possibly young girls. For Trump, power is predation. (Faced now with the need to get allies to help with the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, the president is finding himself persuasively helpless—predation has its limits.)

But Chavez was not all predation. He was a great persuader. He knew how to bring people along by respecting their rational agency rather than merely looking for their vulnerabilities. And it is this fact that makes his crimes all the more damning. His politics, apparently, stopped at the door to his office, at least when a vulnerable girl was present.

At least Trump’s politics are consistent.

Next week Civic Fields will be taking the week off for Spring Break recuperation.

But today’s American conservatism has been gobbled up by twits and tweets. Ideas in the movement today get about as many words as a McDonald’s menu. Contemporary conservatism has no core, just a collection of grievances and grunts. Ideology, yes. Ideas, no. (Not unless you consider “the great replacement theory” and “emasculation” ideas.)

I am not a conservative, not in any recognized contemporary sense. But I am deeply committed to the conservation of certain intellectual and political traditions, and I spend many of my days teaching both undergraduate and graduate students a curriculum centered around the classics of history that to many would look quite conservative.

This semester alone, for example, on the menu are Plato, Aristotle, and Tocqueville (as well as Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Martin Delaney). Meanwhile, I am writing a book that has lengthy sections on David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Walter Bagehot, and Walter Lippmann, all figures recognized within the conservative canon. Finally, I have been sharpened in my thinking by wrestling with mid-20th-century conservative thought, be it the free-market ideas of Milton Friedman, the natural rights argument of Harry Jaffa, or the hyper-individualism of Margaret Thatcher. All this to say, I am not conservative in any recognizable sense, but I engage with the conservative tradition because I respect it to a point. And I miss seeing the proponents of that tradition in the public sphere with actual ideas. Today, if they are there, they is crowded out by memes and deep fakes and attempts to distract.

There is, however, one advantage of having an ideology without ideas. It is fluid. Like water, it is drawn to voids. It is helpful to think of contemporary conservatism as a “negative-space ideology” or an “ideology of the void.”

We can learn a lot, therefore, about what is being neglected in contemporary society by paying attention to the places to which conservatism flows. Negatively, we are seeing it flow into racist spaces again, which tells me we have not done nearly enough here as a society to deal with racism. But conservatism is also flowing into poor rural America, the lives of young men, and the teaching of the classics—all of which desperately need more attention.

That last item—the teaching of the classics—may not be what you were expecting. But it’s been on my mind a lot.

You may have heard that there are a group of new initiatives at public universities across the country aimed at creating departments, schools, or small colleges devoted to teaching a curriculum centered on the classics of the Western tradition. These are generally quite well-funded initiatives, backed by conservative donors and Republican legislators. They are already underway at the University of Florida, the University of Texas, Ohio State University, the University of Utah, Iowa, and elsewhere.

This, in its basic form at least, is one good idea coming out of today’s conservative circles.

These centers are filling a void. The fact is that you can pass through most public universities today in the United States without reading a bit of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Jefferson, or Lincoln. “So be it,” some may say (though, frankly, not many). “We are done with the Western canon.”

But the neglect of the canon means also that you can pass through most public universities today without reading an iota of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Ida B. Wells. In other words, it is great thinkers that are being neglected, not the canon per se.

Why? The public university today, quite contrary to the conservative narrative, is not dominated by left-wing ideology. My university’s faculty, for example, can’t even come close to managing the most left-wing thing ever: forming a union!

Rather, the contemporary university is dominated by a technocratic liberalism that puts a premium on making young people useful members of the white-collar work force.

That is, the reason that the classics are not systematically taught in public universities is not that faculty hate “Western Civilization” but because administrators, professional advisors, and student services have little imagination beyond “getting a job.” After all, that’s what students or students’ parents are paying tuition for, right? I have literally been told that as a professor.

So, while some of the opposition to these conservative-backed humanities units popping up on campuses can get quite alarmist—as though they represented a Right-wing incursion that threatens the heart of higher education—the truth is that they are filling a void at public universities, and a pretty big one at that.

In this way, they could be doing public universities a great service by calling attention to a big hole in public higher education. They are saying, presumably, that public higher education needs to be about more than “getting a job.” It needs to include engaging with big ideas, great debates, civic lessons, and the tangled mess of history. To get a college education, in short, means learning how to think with and alongside civic and intellectual traditions. Amen!

I truly hope these centers are successful in pushing such a broad humanities-based philosophy of higher education into the public university mainstream. If they are, I don’t care if they are backed by Republican money, or even if they are staffed by a majority of white males who feel disenfranchised by the academic establishment. They will have done public university education in this country a great, great service.

But I doubt they’ll be successful in this way, and for two big reasons.

The first is that technocratic university administrators are generally tone deaf to anything but that which harmonizes with the hum of industry and the job board. They have come to see the public university fundamentally as an economic engine, even if they sometimes say otherwise. Sure, if we are able to throw into university-based job prep a bit of diversity training, great! But even that diversity training, in form, must be consistent with corporate diversity training. In other words, “woke” ideas have only been welcome in the university as long as they are consistent with the ideology of the white-collar job world. Nothing in the technocratic liberalism of public university administration seems capable of resisting the economic imperative.

It is not just that many university administrators lack imagination and guts. It is that they are playing to a field—legislators, governors, and the people who elect them—that has learned to justify education, especially higher education, only in economic terms. And this was largely a Republican Party accomplishment. Go figure.

But the other reason I think these centers will fall short is that they themselves are playing to an equally restrictive field. They are bound by the commitments of those who fund them, and those folks have an agenda, not a mission. Funders hope to produce “conservatives” on campus and beyond.

If these centers leaned all the way in to what they professed—the Western tradition, intellectual freedom, civics—they would be systematically unable to produce anything resembling ideological coherence, Right or Left. For the classics on the whole do not offer us anything like an ideological program—just big ideas and great questions.

I teach Plato. This week I have about 115 undergraduate students reading a section of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. But there is no way to honestly teach Plato that results in a coherent ideology or political worldview. Teaching Plato well results only in big questions and major debates, fascinating ideas, and critical arguments. Indeed, that’s why I teach Plato. My goal is to teach students how to think. There are few better guides than Plato.

I know that something like this is genuinely going on in some classrooms in these conservative-backed start-ups on public university campuses. But I also know that the faculty there are not free to truly let loose, despite the mantle of “intellectual freedom” these places wear.

Teaching and reading the classics well could easily lead one to directly challenge the forms of social and political power of the enriched elites that fund these centers. In Plato’s Gorgias, for example, the villain is Callicles, a rich young man full of a sense of his own rightful privilege in society. Callicles is a “type.” He is the sort of rich aristocrat in Athens who sought to kill poor Socrates (recall, Socrates refused to profit from his teaching). Indeed, Socrates, with all his annoying questioning, appears to me an archetype of the ideal democratic citizen—someone who wants to get to the bottom of things and will not be kowtowed by the rich, no matter what.

This indeed is just the sort of thing that public universities should be teaching to their students as a matter of course. So, I wish these start-ups success. And I hope that the liberal technocrats will feel threatened enough by the Right-wing encroachment into the humanities that they will want to counter with force and gusto. It would mean that what I teach would no longer be a tiny enclave in the big university, but near its center. It would fill a void.

Of course, this was not the only justification for the war in Iraq. On February 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State (and former army general) Colin Powell made a speech before the United Nations Security Council in which he argued that Iraq possessed dangerous weapons of mass destruction that could do grave damage to Europe and America unless destroyed. He claimed that these weapons meant Iraq was in direct violation of the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, and an armed invasion was justified.

Almost all of this, it turns out, was bunk. The great damage done by the Bush administration to public confidence is still playing out.

But at least they tried.

That modern presidents name wars or otherwise seek to justify them is itself worth noting—we have seen, historically, great efforts at trying. FDR, of course, did not name “World War II” and while the D-Day assault was tagged “Operation Overlord,” this was for purposes of operational security, not public relations. FDR would refer to the war in Europe rather blandly as “the present war” and speak of the fight against the Axis. But he had no big brand for the war. Because he did not need one. People understood what the war was about and why it mattered. Famously, FDR went before the American people after the attack on Pearl Harbor and presented the case for war.

Until our present war in Iran, presidents always made such live primetime speeches to try to explain the casus belli. Beginning in the 1980s, with the invasion of Grenada, they also started to name or brand these wars, perhaps unsure of the merits of the case.

Reagan, therefore, dubbed Grenada “Operation Urgent Fury.” George H. W. Bush called the invasion of Panama “Operation Just Cause.” He followed it with “Operation Desert Storm,” the U.S.’s first invasion of Iraq in 1991.

Which brings us to the Trump administration naming the war in Iran “Operation Epic Fury.” The name by itself is not particularly remarkable. It may (albeit I am skeptical) represent an homage to Reagan’s invasion of Grenada. I think it was more likely chosen because it sounds like a good name for a video game. (“Operation: Desert Storm” also became the name of a video game, which seems all the more relevant now in the age of Hegseth.) “Operation Epic Fury” rolls off the tongue like a 12 year old rolling into a skate-boarding park.

Its banality, however, is its most important political feature. Unlike “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Operation Epic Fury” is meaningless. It says only, “We’re pissed!”—and even then it is not clear who is pissed or why, let alone why now?

So, too, unlike the elaborate skeins of fact and fiction wound together by the Bush II administration to justify the second Iraq war, the Trump administration has made almost no effort to convince a doubtful American public of the need to go to war with Iran. The reasons the Trump people have offered do not stand up to even modest scrutiny:

• Iran is the largest supporter of state-sponsored terrorism in the world. . . . Ok, so if the regime is toppled, who will be next? There will always be a “largest” supporter of state-sponsored terrorism until there is no more state-sponsored terrorism. Is that what we’re after? War on Terror 2.0? And why spend billions on state-sponsored terrorism when non-state sponsored terrorism can be just as deadly?

• Iran someday (?), soon (?), will acquire a nuclear weapon and we can’t have nuclear weapons in the Middle East. . . . I thought we took care of Iran’s nukes several months ago, at least that’s what Trump said. And what of Israel’s arsenal of nukes?

• We started this war because if we didn’t, Israel was going to do it, which would provoke Iran to attack U.S. bases in the Middle East, so therefore we needed to attack Iran first to prevent Iran from attacking U.S. bases, which Iran has since done anyway, and that’s why we did this. . . . Psychedelics anyone? Might help with lucidity.

The fact is that the Trump administration is clearly not trying. The question is, why are they not trying? And the answer to that question, I suggest, tells us why we went to war with Iran.

The Trump administration is not trying because they do not believe they need to try. And they’re right about this! Through a long history of choices and events that far precede the rise of Trump, the war-making powers of the executive have been largely removed from popular and Congressional governance. I know some of you may be growing weary of me saying this, but functionally speaking, we live under an elected monarchy, especially in foreign policy.

Again, there is a long history here, but it is one that can be traced back to the very founding of the United States itself.

Amid the debates and disputes around the crafting of the U.S. Constitution, the founders tried to find a sweet spot between too much hierarchy in government and not enough hierarchy. They all understood this sweet spot as the space of “republicanism.” Republicanism rejected monarchy—that is, too much hierarchy. Yet, at the same time, republicanism, at least as it was generally understood among the founders, rejected mere confederacy—that is, a flat system premised on state power with relatively little role for a federal government. The very idea of a federal union, or a formal federation of states with a central government, was an attempt to strike a balance between national centralization and total decentralization, or between a strong hierarchy and no hierarchy.

The men who won the day on this matter were deemed the “Federalists.” The Federalist Papers, the collective work of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay penned under the pen-name “Publius,” presented their case in exhaustive yet accessible terms. If you have not read any of the Federalist Papers, you might consider doing so. It’s a great example of trying. (Each paper is the equivalent of a short book chapter. Federalist 10 and Federalist 51 are good places to start.)

But the other side in the debate was, in my judgment at least, the wiser—the so-called “Anti-Federalists.” We owe the Bill of Rights to them, and without the Bill of Rights, Alexis de Tocqueville would never have written about “democracy in America” because there would have been little to report on. We have largely forgotten the Anti-Federalists, and it’s a shame. You can read some of their writings and speeches here.

The Federalists were worried about not enough hierarchy (see in particular Federalist #17 through #20). Hamilton, who was fond of the British system of government, was especially worried about how not enough hierarchy would lead to lawless anarchy, disunion, and disaster. He wanted a strong and centralized national government. He was keen on America becoming a sea-based commercial empire, like Britain. Of all the people contemporary liberals could have chosen to celebrate in a spectacular Broadway musical, why Hamilton? (I have thoughts.)

The Anti-Federalists, however, were worried about too much hierarchy. They saw in what the Federalists were proposing the threat of “despotism,” which might be thought of as a kind of anarchy from above, a condition where the ruler is immune from or above the law. I will quote from a few speeches from one of the great Anti-Federalists, Patrick Henry (the “Give me liberty or give me death!” guy):

But now, Sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country to a powerful and mighty empire: If you make the citizens of this country agree to become the subjects of one great consolidated empire of America, your Government will not have sufficient energy to keep them together: Such a Government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism: There will be no checks, no real balances, in this Government. (June 5, 1788)

Speaking in opposition to the Constitution the country would soon adopt (prior to the Bill of Rights amendments), Henry stated,

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, Sir, they appear to me horridly frightful: Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints toward monarchy. . . . Away with your President, we shall have a King. (June 7, 1788)

One of several problems with kings, Anti-Federalists like Henry argued, was that they would be, by virtue of their power and standing, inevitably keen on empire. Kings make wars. That’s what they do. The whole history of Europe taught them as much.

A second problem was that kings were by definition anarchic—that is, they lacked any strong ruling principles to govern themselves. They were essentially lawless. As Trump told some interviewers when asked if there were any limits to his powers on the world stage: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.”

The third great problem was that kings were, in the exercise of their executive powers, likely to be inattentive to any need to convince subjects of the justness of their cause. For they operate by command, not persuasion.

So, why are we at war with Iran? That the Trump administration is not really interested in telling us why—that they don’t feel the need to try—is the essential clue. It means we ultimately have to look at structure, not circumstances for our answer.

The modern American executive, the Anti-Federalists would say, just has too much power. Trump, because his “own morality” is so juvenile and unrestrained, is showing us the full extent of that power. Those who decry this war as “illegal” are but throwing darts at a stampeding elephant. No president has gotten a formal congressional declaration of war since FDR. The vulnerabilities of the constitution are being exploited. The issue we need to focus on is how this elephant got out in the first place.

The present war, whatever we call it, is a symptom of a more severe constitutional malady. We are in this war because there is too much hierarchy in our system, and not enough effective representation. This was precisely the worry the Anti-Federalists had.

The good news is that a move toward less hierarchy is well within the American tradition. Indeed, it has been central to the on-the-ground, living American political tradition. The Bill of Rights, for example, is far better known among everyday people than the seven original (Federalist-inspired) provisions of the Constitution. The less-hierarchical spirit is with us, but its weight is lacking in our institutions. Long-term reform will require reinvigorating, formalizing, and professionalizing the original Anti-Federalist spirit of American politics.

Here at Civic Fields, I am loath to stay too timely! Part of what we are up to here at Civic Fields is to be current without being too caught up in the news cycle. There is ample punditry out there. By training and vocation, I am a scholar, historian, and political theorist, not a journalist. I don't have the temperament to be big on social media, or big even on Substack here. It’s just not me.

Yet, this morning I’ve been getting pinged and called about my thoughts on what’s going on with the war on Iran. Rather than wait till Thursday, here’s what I’ve been saying, in sum.

First, I am not surprised, not at all. This has been in the works for months. The only reason it did not happen last summer when Israel and the United States struck Iran’s nuclear sites was because Israel was not ready to take on another prolonged war. The “cease fire” with Palestine, in addition to giving Palestinians a modicum of relief, has allowed Israel to prepare itself for war with Iran. The United States under Trump was ready all along.

Second, what is happening today is entirely consistent with neo-royalism. If that term is a bit foreign to you, you might revisit the Civic Fields post from a little over a month ago, “Internationalizing the New American Royalism.” Just replace “Venezuela” there with “Iran.” Trump & Co. are after a “clique change” in Iran, not a regime change.

As I wrote some friends this morning,

The basic modus operandi of Trump & Co. is one of expanding the scope and power of the clique of hyper-elites at which Trump & Co. are at the center. Look literally at the images of the Board of Peace gathering last week. That says it all.

Israel of course has its own reasons for wanting to topple the Iranian regime, more realpolitik in nature.

Different motives, common end.

Why does the Trump court want access to power in Iran? Part of what is different about neo-royalism is that personal access is its own end. We are used to thinking in traditional diplomatic terms—power is about particular strategic interests. That’s not what is going on here. In neo-royalism, power is about personal connection. What Trump imagines is a new Iranian government that is in relationship with him and in some way dependent upon him. Just like Venezuela is shaking out (and Mexico, and Cuba soon, etc)

This is old European royalism redux. The 16th to 18th centuries are the places to study for precedents, not the Cold War.

I should have said, perhaps, that it is old European royalism redux, but under the terms of modern elite power. As the Epstein Files have shown us so clearly, among elites and hyper-elites, one’s power and influence is directly correlated with the scope of one’s network, and the shape of that network relative to particular persons. In the war in Iran, Trump & Co. are busy building their network. Whatever else they might think they’ll gain—oil, riches, or even “peace” in the Middle East—is secondary to the primary goal of expanding the network of power at which they are at the center.

I have no idea how the war will play out. None. It could be over before the day’s over, in which case my subtitle “America’s first neo-royal war” above is premature.

But it could well go on for months, even years. That all depends on Iran and their allies. Regardless, Trump has taken a huge gamble—and for reasons that have little to do with the “national interest.”

I am confident that this is not going to play out well for Trump on the domestic politics front, but I am just not sure that matters to him that much. He’s not planning on being president past 2028 (despite whatever theories are out there). He’s looking to build a highly personalized empire in the mean time. He has a concept of greatness with plenty of historical precedent.

He may use the war at home to attack the opposition as traitors. He may attempt to suppress speech. He may use the war to corner Democrats keeping funds from the Department of Homeland Security until ICE reforms are put in place.

But we are in a world of uncertainties now. Part of what’s powerful about kings is that they are unpredictable.

Be true,

Ned

How this park was created is what fascinates me and is part of the reason I went to Mississippi last week. It’s a fine example of the power of a politics without enemies.

The park is the work of a group of ordinary Mississippians, both black and white, who worked in cooperation with some folks from Chicago. Together, they strove for two decades to ensure that the memory of Emmett Till and the racial violence to which he was so brutally subjected in 1955 would be officially remembered. Just as we have lionized the signing of the Declaration of Independence by making Independence Hall a National Park, so, they believed, we need to lament the long history of racial violence in this country by making monuments out of the sites where the injustices that followed Till’s murder were executed or grieved: the Sumner courthouse where Till’s murders were acquitted despite overwhelming evidence, the site where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river, and the church in Chicago where Till’s funeral was held.

Here’s what’s remarkable, though. These folks did this in the state of Mississippi, a state that has until very recently stubbornly held onto its Confederate symbolism, a state that still celebrates the “Rebels,” that still clings to the structures of white power. On top of that, these folks did it with relatively little in the way of public resources or big-time political support. And they did it in a political context notorious for race-tinged culture-war convolutions.

In my book Politics for Everybody, I devoted a whole chapter to “political miracles.” The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument is one of the great political miracles of recent American history.

Mississippi may be our best national emblem of the harm extractive industries and massive wealth inequality do to a people. For a small minority of Mississippians, wealth is great. For a larger number of suburban whites, purchasing power remains strong. And yet the majority of Mississippians either live at the subsistence level or dangerously close to it. Mississippi is the poorest state in the union, and outside of Oxford or the suburbs of Jackson and Hattiesburg, it shows.

There is still in Mississippi today a Gone-with-the-Wind-style culture centered on the careful cultivation of manners, the idealized white female form, and cultured southern traditions that are incomprehensible to outsiders.

At the same time, the historically fertile soil of Mississippi has been literally stripped of its riches through the massively extractive economy of cotton. Mississippi is 85% of the size of the state of Illinois, where I live, and far more rural. Nevertheless, despite Mississippi’s great delta floodplain, its agricultural production does not even approach half that of Illinois. To drive through the delta today is to see acre after acre of land that has been beaten and bruised. The level of human poverty in the Mississippi delta today competes with places like Haiti and Cuba. Jackson, the state’s capital, is notorious for neglect. There have been parts of the city recently where sewage runs out onto the streets for days and where drinking water is scarce.

To visit the power centers of Mississippi, however, is to be met with white tablecloths and crystal glasses. It is to encounter a world where everybody seems to know everybody else, where business is done with a handshake or pat on the back, and where “back-room deals” are just deals. Mississippi is a place where, politically speaking, nothing is straightforward, at least not if you are an outsider. You have to learn how to jump through not just hoops, but pretzeled ones. The more shape-shifty you are, the more you might be able to get done.

But the people who created the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument are not shape-shifty. They are just salt-of-the-earth savvy. And they definitely know how to get things done, even in the state of Mississippi.

Yet, these are not powerful people, not at least in the sense of major movers and shakers. These are culture-shifters who defy the model that tells you that to have real political or cultural power, you have to be an elite or an influencer.

Most of them are black in a state where white people have worked long and hard to keep blacks in their supposed “place.” None of them have degrees from Harvard or Stanford. None of them are super rich. And yet, they’ve managed to build something, something that people wanted, something that will last for generations.

I could write a short book on lessons we could learn from them. Maybe someday I will. But what stuck out to me most was that these were people who refused to have enemies.

Theirs is a politics without enemies.

When I say “without” here, I do not mean “absent from,” as if there are no people who oppose them. Quite the contrary, the opposition was fierce, even violent. Rather, what I mean is that these folks refuse to operate according to the political logic so dominant today of “friends versus enemies.”

There is nothing naive or Pollyanna about this, or about them. These are people devoted to the Good, Hard Work of racial and economic justice. They are Truth Tellers—no beating around the bush with them. They are fighters, fierce in their commitments.

And they are builders. Unlike so many “builders” in our society today—I am thinking of the Tech Bros—these are builders who build things people actually want, even need. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument is more than a needed memorial; it is an economic ignition switch for the Mississippi Delta. These builders know that.

The only things they seek to destroy are lies.

But, at the same time, these are also people who chose not to alienate the political and ideological opposition.

We may not think this way, but the fact is that having political and ideological enemies is a luxury that many of us can afford. But when the odds are starkly stacked against you, you can’t easily afford enemies. You have to learn the art of converting opponents into at least provisional political friends.

For example, the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, in which Emmett Till’s murderers were tried and acquitted, is at the center of the new national park. Not that long ago, it was falling apart, ready to crumble to the ground. The powerful white landowners in and around Sumner had little to no interest in saving the courthouse for the sake of remembering Emmet Till. Some of them were utterly opposed to anything Till-related in Sumner, and not because they just wanted to let the past be past, but because they are still today committed white supremacists, believing in the superiority of the white race.

But the folks building the national park were able to convince these opponents that if the courthouse crumbled down, so would the legal industry in the town of Sumner and in the county of which it was a part, Tallahatchie. Legal business would move away to a nearby county. And if there was one thing well-off white landowners want, it is lawyers. So, a compromise of a kind was reached. The folks behind the Emmett Till memorial would help raise money to renovate the courthouse, and the powerful white landowners would permit it—the latter to serve their own interests.

It’s not pretty, but it’s savvy and good. I am writing about a national park in Sumner today because these folks refused to let enemies just be enemies—they worked to make them political friends, temporary allies, on behalf of a common end.

Different motives, but a common end nevertheless. Can you imagine?

To get anything of any significance done in Mississippi, especially in and around the delta, you have to work with the white landowners and the Republican establishment that protect them. There’s just no other way.

So the ideological purity tests have to be thrown out. Politics has to become not a means of separating friends and enemies, us versus them, but a means of refusing to have enemies.

It’s the way to get things done that people actually want.

This week, however, I want to write a follow-up to the open letter to Q of QAnon that I published here last week. The gist of that letter was that while the conspiracists among us were closer to the truth than I and many others imagined, right down to the pedophilia ring, the populist faith in the power of the Great Man to save the day is as wrong today as it has ever been.

I have been making a case here over the past few weeks that old-fashioned democracy is a surer and better means of security than we might imagine, as well as an effective means of countering corrupt, decadent, and out-of-control power. Democracy can deliver on populism’s dreams. This is not a pipe dream.

But I continue to feel alarmed and disgusted at what we are learning in and through the Epstein Files. The problem ordinary people in this country face is far more severe than an unruly president with an out-of-control domestic militia at his command. And it is more than even a horrific pedophilia ring made to satisfy the perverse lusts of brute millionaires.

We are dealing with a class problem.

Recently, Anand Giridharadas, a journalist who has spent much of the last decade covering the hyper-elites, did an interview with Ezra Klein. Near the end of the interview, in a moment of hard-earned clarity and passion, Giridharadas described the class problem in a nutshell.

It is best listened to (here’s a gift link), but I will quote here at length some of what Giridharadas said. He and Klein are talking about Kathryn Ruemmler, the former White House chief of counsel under President Obama and, until recently, a high-up attorney at Goldman Sachs (making $20 million per year). Ruemmler was also one of Epstein’s closest confidants through all the violence, corruption, horror, and raping.

Giridharadas states,

I think a lot of people listening to this (podcast) live downstream of people like this (Kathryn Ruemmler). All you may know on a day-to-day basis is that your pay doesn’t feel like it’s enough, or the adjustable-rate mortgage you got feels like it’s screwing you over, or your union doesn’t have the leverage it used to have, or your kid’s school keeps having these funding cuts, and you’re really scared for whether your kid is going to be able to make it in this new economy, or A.I. is going to [take their jobs]—and you’re just swimming in the muck.

[People like Epstein and Ruemmler] are the people deciding upstream how you live: what your pay is like, what kind of companies, the quality and timber of the companies you end up working for, what kind of pension you have or don’t have, what kind of prices you pay or not, whether you get foreclosed on or not because their bank bets against itself in the run-up to a financial crisis and imperils the whole system.

You are just trying to swim through. And you don’t normally get a glimpse of how these people talk among themselves. This is a glimpse, and it turns out to not be particularly brilliant, not be particularly insightful. They don’t know a bunch of stuff that you don’t know.

They’re literally gliding from jokes about how one of them used to be a pedophile, to advice (from Epstein to Ruemmler) about taking an attorney general job, to her (Ruemmler) requesting an Hermès Apple Watch band as a gift from Epstein.

This is what they’re doing as you struggle to just eke out your life.

Giridharadas knows these people. He talks to them. He interviews them. He writes about them. This is not a man looking, like me, at the problem from afar. He’s worked his way as an investigative journalist into the heart of the darkness of the hyper-elite. And they are not special. Often, they are far worse than special. They are self-centered, entitled, and perverse to the point of pedophilia, or at least joking about it.

Giridharadas is equally right about their inordinate power. They, more than Congress, set the tax rates. They determine the median wage of American workers. They decide on how much in the way of benefits and retirement is sufficient for most of us. They crank up the stock market and then blow it up, leaving the retirement accounts of millions in shambles. And all the while they knowingly feed us the spectacle of “culture wars” on social media and cable news—as if there is any real daylight between Steve Bannon and Kathy Ruemmler, Elon Musk and Lawrence Summers. It is an avaricious and amoral class consciousness that binds them together, not an ideology, philosophy, or politics.

What to do?

At another poignant moment in his interview with Klein, Giridharadas talks about a conversation he had with Laurie Tisch, the uber-wealthy sister of New York Giants’ co-owner Steve Tisch. Laurie Tisch is an unusual character, for she—far more than most in her class—seems to recognize the wrongness of it all. When Giridharadas, therefore, pushed her on what to do, she responded, “Revolution, maybe.”

Revolution, maybe.

Giridharadas himself suggested as much, telling Klein:

I’m not encouraging any particular approach here, but I think it’s revealing that someone in the heart of that world (like Laurie Tisch) ultimately is like: It’s very difficult to ask us to be different from the way we are when this is the power distance, when these are the incentives, when this is the way politics works. It’s very, very difficult to get (ultra-rich) people to behave contrary to the way the system is encouraging them to behave and allowing them to behave.

So, a revolution maybe?

I am, among other things, a student of revolutions. I am currently writing about both the English and French Revolutions. I also take part in some local community efforts in which my fellow citizens, energized by opposing the fascistic Right and informed by the academic Left, talk of revolution. And I think that the problems before us—the massive wealth and power inequalities (I just got back from the state of Mississippi!), the lawless violence of ICE, the blatant lies coming from the White House on almost a daily basis, the extraordinary corruption of the Trump family and their crony partners, and the fast fall of the infrastructure of American civil society—demand something of revolutionary proportions. I join here those who are utterly fed up with the ruling class—big donors be politically damned! They all need to have their egos, their fortunes, and their power cut down to size.

Yet, the reality is that a revolution is simply not feasible, at least not a democratic one, at least not under these conditions. The overwhelming monopoly the state has on violence is just too great. We are not dealing with the king’s calvary and foot soldiers. We are dealing with deadly drones, precision-guided missiles, electromagnetic weapons capable of cutting off all our communications, and cooperation between Big Tech and the Department of Defense.

The only thing that would result from a revolution in the United States, were it to happen, would be a new—and quite likely far worse—form of oligarchic rule, something on the order of a military dictatorship. And what we have now is, in fact, better than a military dictatorship. I don’t want fat kings, but I’d take them any day over dictators. Give me liberty, or give me Louis XVI. Just don’t give me Stalin or Suharto.

Therefore, I think we need to take the long, deliberate, determined, and thorough road of reform, not revolution. I think this road needs to begin simultaneously in our neighborhoods and with our legal institutions (the law schools, the courts, and the legislatures). We can argue about the political effectiveness of violence (I am dubious), but whatever is to come, if it is to be better than the current situation, it needs to be rooted in a combination of neighborly solidarity and the rule of democratically controlled laws.

That’s possible. Even quite possible. Democracy is capable of controlling and constraining elite power. It is capable of chopping down their powers. But it will take more than outrage or calls for revolution. It will take the generous long-term work of devoted democratic citizens.

As you know, thanks to some firebrand representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, explosions have been going off in Washington, D.C. and the fallout is hitting power centers across the Western world and beyond.

It turns out you were right . . . almost. For years, elite power in the West had at least one horrific pedophilic center. I give you credit for smelling something foul. But it’s where you were wrong that is most important now.

You imagined that the hyper-elites were organized around an ideological agenda. Moreover, you believed that a Great Man—one of the hyper-elites but not quite one of them—could swoop in and save the day. The reason for your errors is that you were thinking as a populist rather than a “small-d” democrat.

I admit, “populism” is a contested term. In one sense, it is nothing but a particularly forceful expression of democracy. Both populus and demos mean “people,” and both populism and democracy can mean people-power. I have had my populist moments. I know you do as well, big time.

But in another sense, when a forceful minority uses its voice, vote, and even violence to attack other minorities, populism can function as an alternative to democracy. Long before you obscurely showed up, modern populism tended to go this direction.

Most importantly, modern populism has tended to assume that elites are allied around a common but insidious ideological agenda, and therefore need to be attacked for ideological reasons. All along, your followers have focused on what the elites believe as much as what they do. This led to your fetish for a Great Man who stands on your “side” of the ideological battle and who can come in and save the day.

But Q, the Epstein files are showing us that the hyper-elites are not ideologically allied at all.

It’s about what they do and who they associate with, not what they believe.

Take a look: Among those named are MAGA guru Steve Bannon and leftist academic icon Noam Chomsky; Bill Clinton and Donald Trump; Bill Gates and Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick; oh, and the magician David Copperfield, the rock star Mick Jagger, the inventor Dean Kamen, the business-tycoon Richard Branson, Woody Allen, Prince Andrew, the YouTube health guru Peter Attia, and so on. (Necessary note to prevent a lawsuit: Being named here or in the Epstein Files does not mean one directly participated in illegal activity or noxious behavior, it simply puts them in Epstein’s circle.)

So, while I want to credit you and your fellow populists for smelling out the moral decrepitude and vacuity of the hyper-elites well before I did, I want to urge you to take seriously the ideological spectrum here: it’s all over the place. The conspiracy is not ideological.

I know, in our hyper-partisan mediascape, as in many academic circles, the weakness or irrelevance of ideology in organizing power can be confusing. We are all taught to think power is all about ideology. But Epstein proved us wrong.

I also want you to note that your Great Man, Donald J. Trump, even with DOJ’s presumably protective redactions, is all over the Epstein Files.

But most importantly, I want you to notice who is not appearing in them—elected representatives, particularly in the U.S. Senate or House. (A U.S. President is technically not a representative.) To be sure, it is possible that the absence of what we might call the “representative political class” in the Epstein Files is because representatives are being protected via redactions or unreleased documents. You might by thinking this right now. But I am skeptical that this is the case. I think it is already pretty apparent that ordinary senators and representatives were just not generally part of Epstein’s circles. They are not who he played with.

Not that you necessarily want to know, but I have two thoughts about the non-participation of the representative political class in Epstein’s circle, and the two thoughts I have are related to each other.

First, the absence of the representative political class is further testament to just how weak our democratic representative system is before the hyper-elites. You and I might agree on this. Epstein moved through power like hot air, ascending up as high as he could go. That he rose right past the representative political class is an indication of where the real power was (and still is): with the tech bros, with the billionaires, with influencers and entertainment headliners, with academic stars, and with captains of finance. Epstein moved in such heights, and they moved with him.

Second, and related, none of the men (or the enabling adult women) involved in Epstein’s circles seem to be people that ever spent much time talking to or relating with ordinary people. Have you ever thought about this?

What binds the hyper-elites together is not ideology. It’s being out of touch.

Yes, it is true, Q, some of the men who appear in the Epstein Files have spent time, even careers, talking to ordinary people—Copperfield on stage, Attia on YouTube, Trump and Clinton on the stump, or Chomsky in one of his countless interviews—but they did not, as a matter of practice or habit, talk with ordinary people. As an academic, I am struck by the way in which the academics who appear in the files are all the types that rarely actually teach. Out of touch.

By contrast, the U.S. Constitution—I don’t know how you feel about the Constitution—centers political power in the people even as it places “elite” power in Congress, a representative body (see Article 1). There’s a good reason for this structure. Making elite power “representative” forces elites to engage with ordinary people. For if they don’t, they won’t last long.

Q, you think the country is in dire straits. You and I agree here. But, unlike you, my reasons for alarm are not because “my side” is losing.

Rather, my concern with American democracy has to do with where real power is currently located. It is in super-representative “cliques” (super = “above” or “beyond” representation). Concretely, it is located in a morally decrepit and overly rich hyper-elite who can fly to remote islands and rape and pillage young women and girls. Real power today is centered in men and women for whom the concept of neighbor is as foreign as the idea of taking a commercial flight.

I believe that democracy provides surer and better means of security for people than other forms of government. I also believe that representative democracy, if it can be made to function well again, is the surest way of fighting the corrosive corruption of the ruling class.

So, Q, let’s learn to be democrats.

Yours in disgust and democratic determination,

Ned

This year, we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American democratic experiment. My academic hat tells me that there are a few qualifications we need to put around our celebrations this year—the United States has never been a full-fledged democracy, the Declaration of Independence of 1776 is a less important moment in our nation’s founding than the ratification of the Constitution (finalized in 1790), and, well, the whole democratic thing is currently sitting ominously beneath the water, waiting to die.

It may be wondering why it lived in the first place.

With respect to American politics and culture, one of several greatly damaging things President Woodrow Wilson did to the republic early in the 20th century was set out to “Make the world safe for democracy!” Implied in this battle cry was a conviction that democracy itself is but a kind of political luxury that needs non-democratic means to protect it. Wilson believed this deeply, and he acted accordingly, setting up during the Great War not only mass military conscription but a propaganda and censorship regime that had been totally foreign to prior American experience.

Wilson’s project culminated long after his death in the Cold War. Over several decades, the Cold War taught Americans to think of democracy as a luxury and security as a necessity.

The compromises made in American governance during the Cold War were many and permanent. Most of what we now think of as our national security apparatus was built in the Cold War: the Department of Defense (created in 1947), the National Security Agency (1952), the Department of Energy (formerly called the Atomic Energy Commission, created in 1946), the Central Intelligence Agency (1947), and more. The Cold War also grew the power and prestige of pre-existing agencies like the Department of State and the Department of Justice. Further, it brought private corporations into the heart of American governance, often in collaboration with universities—this is what Eisenhower ominously called “the military-industrial complex.” Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the Cold War led to the dramatic permanent transference of catastrophic war powers to the president, delegating to him exclusive decision-making power over the use of nuclear weapons.

None of these Cold War security organizations were particularly democratic. It is true they were subjected to a degree of democratic accountability through the election process, but by and large, they themselves did not embrace a democratic spirit, and elections had very little consequence for them. Internally, they operated like bureaucratic or military organizations, depending on strict hierarchies of authority and control. From the outside, they were insulated from direct democratic accountability. Together, they formed a state within a state. This is what Eisenhower meant by “the military-industrial complex.”

Historians, including myself, have argued about the appropriateness and effectiveness of these measures. I am not going to focus on that here. Rather, I am thinking this week about their effect on our idea of democracy, our sense of what it is and what it can do.

For, in classic Wilsonian style, the military-industrial complex justified its great power in terms of defending democracy—and not just American democracy, but that of the whole “Free World.” Implied in this rhetoric was an implicit argument that democracy itself has little to do directly with security. Democracy is a kind of political luxury enjoyed by “free people,” and “national security” is its extra-democratic fortress and arsenal.

I am teaching this semester a graduate course on democratic theory. One of the first things that you learn is that democracy has long been considered in itself to be a means of security. Democratic theory, in other words, has long been seen as a form of security theory—a means of protecting human life against arbitrary power and accident.

Following the work of the political scientist and classicist Josiah Ober in his book Demopolis, I want to highlight here several reasons we should think of democracy itself as a means of security.

First, the greatest non-natural danger that humans have faced as long as they’ve roamed the earth is the danger of arbitrary, violent power. Ober shows that democracy was created in ancient Athens, and has been recreated since, to address this perennial problem. At the core of democracy is a refusal—the refusal to be ruled by an arbitrary master. Collective self-governance must be a form of governance by rules, rules that have reasons. Collective self-governance inherently says no! to masters.

Why have small-d democrats for ages sought masterless rule? Because masters, like the military, make you sign your life away. Even when they are good and benevolent (how rare is that!), they still demand a basic agreement: I will work for your protection and prosperity, but in return, you must obey. Submitting to a master, in other words, creates a particular kind of risk for a people: the risk of arbitrary, violent rule.

Second, Ober notes that democracy necessarily depends for its existence and success on interdependence, communication, and cooperation among relative equals. Empirically speaking—that is, speaking in terms of historical facts, not theories—societies that have built strong forms of interdependence, communication, and cooperation are far more successful at the business of survival, and indeed prosperity, than societies that lack these strengths. This is what Robert Putnam’s work is all about (someone Civic Fields looked at last year). Democracy, that is, cultivates interpersonal practices and habits that increase the probability that humans will flourish.

Third, democratic societies are far more vigilant than non-democratic ones. As Aristotle said ages ago, democracies are “many-footed and many-handed . . . possessing many sense-capacities” (Aristotle, Politics, 3.11). Autocracies and oligarchies, by contrast, are far more vulnerable to short-sightedness, groupthink, or simply being out of touch with reality. We are seeing that in spades right now in the federal government of the United States, especially in the White House and courts. A thriving democracy, by contrast, is like an octopus operating with millions of senses and thousands of little brains. Democracies, if they are allowed to thrive, are far smarter than other types of societies and therefore more secure.

There is more that could be said here, much more, but historically and empirically speaking, democracies far outpunch their weight when it comes to security and prosperity. Democracy is a security theory.

It should be obvious how important it is for us to remember this right now, as roving hordes of military-armed harassers with government badges are on the streets. What is happening in Minneapolis is happening on a smaller and less visible scale elsewhere: a non-democratic “security” regime seeking to enforce its will on a vulnerable population. But what is happening also in Minneapolis is an authentic democratic response by ordinary citizens, acting with vigilance on behalf of themselves and their neighbors. Democracy is making Minneapolis safer and better.

The surfer who told of his near-death experience, of course, came up to the surface of the water and recovered his breath. He lived to surf again. I hope something like that is happening currently in many parts of this country with respect to democracy. If we lean into democracy, we will be safer and better.

But first.

I knew a man once who lived in the rural south. He had managed, over time, to become rather well off.

Still, he lived a relatively simple life as an older man. No showy cars, just a truck. Lots of stuff, yes, but the sort of stuff that you would see gathered in sheds and barns in many farmsteads across the country. There was little, if anything, about this man that I know of that would make him a target of people wishing to take what is his or do him harm.

Nevertheless, he lived with a persistent fear of strangers coming to do him harm. These strangers took two forms in his mind, neither of which had any concrete representation in his rural community: the federal government and blacks from the city.

Because of these fears, his farmstead was well-stocked for self-sufficiency, and he had plenty of guns. It is true, he was not nearly as well-armed as some of his peers. He did not go to many gun shows. No military-grade machinery that I know of. Just pistols, rifles, and shotguns.

As long as I knew this man, I often wondered about his fears. Over time, they came to seem to me more fantasies than fears. That is, I am not sure how much he really feared the feds showing up (why would they?) or bands of urban blacks trekking long distances to find his farm in unfamiliar terrain.

It seemed to me, that is, that his fears served for him a kind of ego-function—they were there to prop up a sense of self that was at once embattled and valiant, under existential threat and yet strong, vulnerable yet prepared.

In one sense, it was always very hard for me to understand where this fantasy came from. Nothing in his biography seemed to justify it. Yet, in another sense, it was clear where it came from. It is common to the rural southern white male psyche, even among those men who are, like this man, quite well off.

Part of what I had to reckon with is the way this fantasy did not grow entirely out of a mirage. It was rooted, at least in part, in the southern experience of Reconstruction, when federal troops did indeed roam the South, sometimes terrorizing its residents, and when blacks for a moment—but just for a moment—felt at liberty to roam in what had been a white-only world.

How was it, I wondered, that this man who came to maturity a full century after Reconstruction came to imbibe its fantasies and fears as if they were present realities? Whatever historical reality they echoed, they were not mere echoes but present realities in his life.

I have been thinking about this recently in light of what’s happening to so many communities in the disunited states of America.

Why is the Trump administration bent on beating upper-midwest big cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, and now the smaller cities of Maine, into some sort of submission? There are far more people without legal citizenship living in Texas and Florida than in these places. If this operation were about sheer numbers, the focus would be elsewhere. But it is far more nebulous. It is about political payback, yes, but also about psyches and fantasies. We are dealing with a regime that is centered on reorganizing reality (actual reality) first and foremost by engaging the fears and fantasies of the population.

After the brutal killing of Alex Pretti, Stephen Miller posted on social media, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” It is tempting—and I’ve heard this many times—to characterize this as but a partisan effort to shape the narrative around Pretti’s death. But I think “partisanship” does not account very well for what we are witnessing in responses like these.

What Miller offered is a fantasy interpretation of real events: “In Minneapolis, radical left-wing terrorists are on the prowl, targeting federal law enforcement. Vigilance and violence are called for.”

The Trump administration is constructed around such fantasies. You know them. You’ve heard them, over and over. But it is tempting to therefore dismiss their accounts as “partisanship,” “ludicrous,” or something equivalent.

It is tempting, that is, to minimize the power of fantasy.

I think instead that the success of Trump and his groypers is further testament to the power of fantasy in grown people’s lives. Like the man I knew.

Today, fantasy has ready technological means of dissemination and inculcation. It is what happens in video games, in chat rooms, and on porn sites. It also is what happens through “news” channels and now even the official social media accounts of the U.S. government.

It used to be that fantasies—for example, of white southern male vigilance—needed social ties and particular cultural contexts to spread. Now, social media can draw a young man in Montana or Maine, even Mexico or Montenegro, into this psyche. Fantasies are everywhere.

I think Miller and Trump each, and each in their own way, understand what they are trying to do in terms of an attempt to shape reality through fantasy.

There are myths—shared collective stories that bolster a sense of the “we.” But then there are fantasies—alluring dreamworlds detached from reality that draw us in to bolster the sense of the “I,” the ego. We are living under a regime of fantasies.

This does not mean we are on the verge of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism rested on an appeal to the masses, a possibility that today is functionally exceptionally difficult due to the fragmentation of social media. But I think Trump and Miller, for different reasons, each understand their job as one that aims to dismantle and destroy democratic and Constitutional norms by changing a sufficient number of people’s perceptions of reality by feeding fantasies. And this was, in fact, a tactic used by the Nazis.

Hannah Arendt writes of this in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The Nazis understood “that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.” As such, rather than try to first directly challenge the constitution, the Nazis targeted people’s fantasies: you are a victim, life is a violent struggle, strong men are needed, race and blood are real markers of dignity, Jews are a disease, you can rise again, etc.

This certainly was not “partisanship.” This was a form of psychological warfare applied to a country’s own citizens, fantasies turned into weapons of ideology. It rested on a conviction that the capture of psyches, not engaging in genuine politics, is the surest way to hold and wield power.

Resistance to this, therefore, has a mental quality and must be approached something like a spiritual discipline.

I am reminded of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius of Loyola, who in fending off what he saw as Protestant fantasies (“enthusiasm” was the word), asked his priestly foot soldiers to focus on the work of the mind—not by imbibing a Catholic set of teachings and doctrines, as if one doctrinal platform could dismantle another doctrinal platform, but rather by meditating deliberately on the life of Christ. Example and internal experience, not the chapter and verse of the law, was the key to Ignatian spirituality.

I would not hold the Constitution or democracy up as the equivalent of Christ, but I do think that citizenship these days in the United States, where fantasy has become a chief means of wielding power, calls for something equivalent to an Ignatian discipline of spiritual meditation on what is true, real, just, and good. Today, when even Constitutional rights seem so feeble, exemplars and experiences matter.

There are many ways to do this. Walk in a public park and observe your neighbors. Listen to a history book. Read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Get the Economist. Listen to others’ stories. Read philosophy or Scripture. Or some combination of such things.

But the point is that citizenship today calls for forms of mental and spiritual exercises that turn our attention toward the truth and reality of the better things. This does not mean a retreat from the news of the day, but rather a refusal to let it define the entirety of our reality. We may find ourselves confused, sad, or frustrated, but the key is to continue to stare at reality in the light of truth and goodness, which are also real, rather than to retreat into fantasies of one kind or another.

The southern man I knew died anxious. In one sense, the fantasies he harbored served him by giving him a sense of self, but in a more profound sense, he became their prisoner, disconnected from reality and, even more sadly, from other people. A life of fantasies will do that. He would have been so much better served by reality.

On October 18, 2007 Professor William J. Stuntz of Harvard Law School stood before an audience at his alma mater, the University of Virginia Law School. It was not MLK Day, not even close. Nevertheless, in a talk called “Law and Grace,” Stuntz used his academic homecoming to reflect on the life and work of Martin Luther King. It is a reflection that a good friend in law enforcement shared with me, and one I’d like to share with you here. Recalling King and the Civil Rights movement, Stuntz spoke of a different kind of culture war, a good culture war.

Given everything that’s happened since, October 2007 seems like a century ago. George W. Bush was tumbling toward his final year in the White House. John McCain would be the heir ascendent in the Republican Party. And on the side of the Democrats, a Hawaii-born black upstart senator from Illinois named Barack Hussein Obama II was running against the entitled Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.

Perhaps this is why Prof. Stuntz spoke that day as if an old era was passing and a new one was being born. But rather than speak with hope, his tone that day was largely one of regret. He began,

Two metaphorical wars have defined American politics and American law over the last generation: the culture war and the war on crime—especially, drug crime. Aside from the fact that these two non-wars have been misnamed, they seem to have little in common. One is about abortion and gay rights, the other is about crack and crystal meth. The key actors in the first are Supreme Court Justices and religious right politicians; the key actors in the second are big-city prosecutors and the members of urban gangs. There doesn’t seem to be much overlap here. Actually, I think there is a lot of overlap.

Stuntz explained that both the culture war and the war on crime were strongly supported by theologically conservative Protestants in America, and in both “wars” the results were quite inimical to what one would hope from the political mobilization of legions of people who call themselves Christians. Instead of producing care for the vulnerable and grace toward the struggling, the political mobilization of conservative Christians had produced a regime that thinks of law and government first and foremost as forces meant to “condemn and punish moral wrongs.”

As Stuntz looked out on the country in 2007, he saw a nation bent on righteous violence and punitive solutions to social problems. Stuntz—who self-identified as an evangelical Christian and member of a theologically conservative Protestant church—largely blamed conservative Christians like himself for the flooding of prisons, the growing violence of policing, and indeed the adoption of “war” as a metaphor for struggles against crime and vice.

Little could he imagine 2026.

Stuntz tried to offer some explanations for what had gone so terribly wrong: mistaking political power for social power, believing that law and government have the power to shape culture, an implicit moral paternalism, a retreat among religious types from neighborly love in favor of policy positions, and, not the least, a fundamental conflation among many American Christians (in fact a fundamental confusion) between being Christian and being American.

But, again, Stuntz spoke as though the long era of the overlapping culture war and the war on crime were coming to an end. New horizons were opening up in American life. The country had the opportunity to try on a different kind of politics, and Christians in the country an opportunity to recall a different ethic. Of course, he was wrong, woefully so. But he can be forgiven for holding out the hope. I recall vividly the sense of national optimism that Obama was generating in 2007. I recall the feeling that after years of war—including literal wars overseas—the country seemed primed for peace at home and abroad.

But in fact, Stuntz was not speaking of a Pollyanna new era in American life. Instead, he was looking forward to a new culture war, a different kind of culture war, one premised on the hard work of relationship and reconciliation rather than retribution.

For this, he summoned the memory of King and the Civil Rights movement. “King fought and bled and died for the right to have a relationship with those who refused relationship with him. He did not seek to punish, though he had every excuse and every right to seek precisely that. He wanted his enemies’ embrace.”

Such an ethic, Stuntz argued, was at the heart of “America’s Good Culture War.”

I believe King’s movement was America’s Good Culture War, one that was fought as such battles ought to be: aggressively and passionately and with deep commitment to principle, and yet also with love for those with whom the movement did battle. Call it the marriage of law and grace. Legal change helped produce social and cultural change—not by locking up evildoers, but by building the beginnings of an integrated national community.

Abraham Lincoln, the historical leader whom King most resembles, would have understood. Lincoln fought a terribly bloody war . . . and yet, as hard as he fought, Lincoln could not bring himself to hate those he fought. They are our countrymen, he liked to say; we should approach them “[w]ith malice toward none; with charity for all”—famous words that define the spirit of the one who spoke them. That spirit, and King’s spirit, have been too little evident in the culture wars of the recent past.

Some might wish for an American future free of culture wars. I do not; I think these battles are worth fighting. But I do wish for good wars: the kind King fought—the kind in which we love our enemies, and fight for the chance to embrace them.

Good words for today, and every day to come this fateful year.

Rodríguez was Nicolas Maduro’s Vice President, and a full participant in the corruption and dictatorial cruelty of her predecessor. What is the United States doing entertaining at the White House a representative of a Leftist dictatorial regime they just decapitated?

A thought: Perhaps Trump’s dealings with Venezuela have nothing at all to do with “regime change.” Perhaps we need to be thinking instead about “clique change.”

Last April, I wrote here at Civic Fields of “The New American Royalism.” My argument then (before the rise of “No Kings!” protests) was that it was not quite right to call Trump an “authoritarian.” Instead, as I wrote,

We are witnessing a form of American Neo-Royalism. It’s American because it comes out of a mash-up of American messianism, hero-worship, celebrity culture, imperialism, and Constitutional ambiguity around the limits of executive power. It is Neo-Royal because it centers on a form of courtly politics.

There’s been a lot of talk about Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts. I take this talk seriously. It is not an overreaction. But it is in important ways a misdiagnosis. The truer thing to say is that Trump wants to be, and in a certain sense already is, king. To be sure, he has no throne. But kings don’t need thrones. The only thing monarchs absolutely need is a court, and that is what Trump has built for himself, first by dramatically transforming the power-dynamics of the Republican Party into a dynasty project and now by shaking the rickety bones of our republican Constitution to satisfy his unquenchable need to be at the center of things.

My argument, in short, was that a political system was developing around Trump that looked very much like the political systems that existed for centuries in Europe, in and around monarchs—a courtly system of competing clients, each vying for Trump’s attention and beneficence. This, I suggested, is different from a straight-up authoritarian system. In the latter, power is wielded strictly through force. In the courtly or royal system, it is wielded through favors and flattery, too.

Recently, a couple of political scientists have taken the idea of American Neo-Royalism into international relations. In an article that appeared this winter in the journal International Organization, political scientists Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman argue that the Trump administration is approaching international power in a way that reinvents an old royalist approach to international relations.

Needless to say, I think what these scholars argue makes a lot of sense, and makes sense of the Trump administration’s seemingly erratic international dealings. Looked at through the paradigm of "Neo-Royalism” they in fact don’t look all that erratic at all.

Here I am going to summarize for you the argument Goddard and Newman make, and then reflect on Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela in light of their argument.

Goodard and Newman argue that the Trump administration is trying to create a new international order, “Neo-Royalism.” This order, they argue, has already been championed over the last decade by the likes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, and the various kings and leaders of the Gulf States. But the Trump administration, they argue, is in a unique position: As leader of the world’s only real superpower, Trump is able to use U.S. power to push Neo-Royalism into global rather than regional dimensions.

So, what is Neo-Royalism as an international order?

The answer starts with what it is not. It is not a system based on nation-state sovereignty. That is, it is not part of the old “Westphalian Order,” which, in the words of Goddard and Newman, “rested on the legal recognition that sovereign states maintain exclusive control within their boundaries.” Nor is Neo-Royalism an extension of what political scientists call the “Liberal International Order,” which adds to the Westphalian Order an emphasis on rules that are upheld and enforced by international institutions.

Neo-Royalism wants to replace both these historic systems. How and in what ways?

First, Goddard and Newman argue, Neo-Royalism is not organized around states, nations, or even institutions, but around what they call global “cliques”—small groups of “hyper-elites” bounded by “their connection to an absolute sovereign.” These networks are vertically rather than horizontally organized, centralized rather than distributed.

These cliques of hyper-elites are by their very nature highly exclusive, keeping out not only “commoners” (you and I) but many elites who, for one reason or another, are either not able to access the sovereign’s attention or are not in his or her good graces.

If it helps, we are not all that far off here from high school, where cliques of “cool kids” police the boundaries of social power and vie against each other for influence. But here, the cliques are operating on an international scale, have armies at their command, and are as much interested in economic power as social power.

Let me stress something here: Goddard and Newman argue that these cliques “extend across territorial boundaries.”

That is, they are not national or nationalist, though they frequently use the rhetoric of nationalism to prop themselves up. Rather, they represent a small network of international global hyper-elites. Goddard and Newman, for example, mention the connections between Trump and his family to Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, and Erik Prince. Together, these global hyper-elites are “playing strategic games unbound by national borders or Westphalian systems of [nation-state] political ordering.”

Neo-Royalism relies not on rules, but on personal power and “personalist pleas.” When Trump receives a call from a foreign leader, or a CEO, or a social media influencer, he interacts with them not as an “office holder” with particular duties to observe, but as Trump, the man, the personality, and the sovereign. His “transactional” dealings, as they are often called, in fact fit perfectly the older pattern of kings who extract “rents” or “tributes” from clients.

Similarly, the use of force, or threats of the use of force, are not used as actions taken in defense of the nation, but as personal moves against persons who, for one reason or another, have crossed the clique or its leader.

Goddard and Newman write,

This is not liberal cooperation [liberal in the classical sense], but instead is much closer to the type of collaboration [and aggression] practiced in oligarchic and mafioso systems and protection rackets. Leading cliques engage with local cliques in a process of distribution, in which they leverage threats, promises of access to the inner circle, or status recognition to maintain their hierarchical positions.

Think here of virtually any mob movie you’ve watched. This is how power works in Neo-Royalism.

Finally, the authors argue that Neo-Royalists depend for their “legitimation”—a political-science term for the right to rule—not on providing public goods for the state or its people (e.g. security or prosperity), let alone on democratic sanctions, but on “stories that explain why some actors are uniquely endowed with the right to wield sovereign power”—be it “God’s will” (i.e. the neo-divine-right thinking we see among many sectors of American evangelicalism) or “genius” (a claim Trump makes about himself frequently, with questionable justification, but which the tech-bros also make with more justification).

Goddard and Newman say more, and at more length. But this is the gist of their insightful article.

So, what about Venezuela?

One thing that Neo-Royalism opens up on the world stage is personal wars among elites. In the frame of Neo-Royalism, what happened on January 3 was not an attack by the United States on a foreign country in the service of national interests, but a much more personal attack by Trump, using the U.S. military and the CIA, on another person, Maduro, in an act of personal retribution.

What did Maduro do to become Trump’s personal target? It’s a good question, but if the Neo-Royalist thesis is correct, we should not be looking for an answer in the “national interests” of the United States, as if Trump is playing a global Westphalian chess game, but rather in those networks of warring global cliques that are currently dominating the world stage.

Clearly, Maduro had ties to Putin, Xi, and Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. But so do many world leaders. So what gives? Maduro’s crime may have been exercising those ties in Trump’s international backyard. The so-called “Donroe doctrine” may represent an attempt to organize the international clique system along hemispheric lines.

The Trump administration seems to be for now throwing its weight behind Maduro’s right-hand aid, Delcy Rodríguez. Replacing one Leftist authoritarian with another makes little sense within the frame of the Liberal International Order, or from the perspective of Westphalian national interests.

But it does make sense within a Neo-Royalist frame.

That is, in Venezuela we may not be looking at a “regime change” (a very Westphalian way of looking at things) but rather at a “clique change.”

The message Rodríguez may be getting upon her visit to the Trump White House today: Welcome to the Donroe racket. Join or die.

But first, thank you to all of you who have been readers this last year. We started this little newsletter a little under a year ago to try to make Substack a medium for rooting and reflection and not just reaction. Civic Fields has been that, I hope.

But Civic Fields has also turned into a bit of a virtual gathering space. The greatest joy here for me this year, by far, has been featuring voices that are not my own. A big thank you to Katie Bruner, Graham O’Gorman, Matt Pitchford, and Dave Tell for taking part in this little epistolary venture.

Thank you also to all of you who have emailed or sent notes. Given the time and energy Civic Fields takes, I have thought about throwing in the towel more than once. But each time I start moving that way, someone among you out there sends an encouraging note, keeping me going. Again, thank you. I am so very grateful for these acts of friendship and support.

The tag line for Civic Fields does not roll off the tongue, but it is the truest one I could come up with: “Working between the headlines and history, Civic Fields is a weekly newsletter devoted to civic life and its repair.” What follows is a review of what we’ve done this year and a concluding thought on what I at least am digging for here at Civic Fields.

Civic Fields has brought you a year of writing about our current civic life alongside writing about people and notions from the past.

We started with a reflection on rooting, meditating on the wisdom of Simone Weil. Any viable civic future, Weil teaches us, needs to be rooted in the past.

And then we went and began digging.

On of our patron saints, Hannah Arendt, urged us to think about what political strength really looks like. I argued Trump lacks it, and I still believe that. For all his power, he is a political weakling.

I also suggested that calling Trump an “authoritarian” is somewhat of a misdiagnosis. Instead, Trump’s style of governing more closely reflects what I called neo-royalism (something we were exploring here at Civic Fields well before the “No Kings” protests began popping up across the country). I also wrote about my skepticism about MAGA arguments that Trumpism represents a break with neoliberalism. And at the height of the Epstein news cycle this summer, I asked what the Epstein files might reveal about Trumpism itself?

A big theme here this year has been republicanism as understood in political theory, not political partisanship. In the spirit of republicanism, I argued for politics of duty over politics of authenticity; I argued that the republican conception of liberty is a superior alternative to "liberal" concepts of freedom; I wrote on “red republicanism” and conceptions of civic good while reflecting Wim Wenders’ great film, Perfect Days. We also touched on civility in an age of incivility and looked back at a great black republican, Martin Delany, who argued that civil rights are never enough without political rights. In the republican spirit, I reflected on the glories and crimes of the Declaration of Independence.

Does MAGA know anything about the old tradition republicanism? I doubt it. However, this fall, I got myself into a bit of hot water with a good friend when writing about how the Founding Fathers seem to me conspicuously absent from MAGA. My friend and colleague, Dave Tell, thought this was nonsense and smartly pushed back. He wrote a post here that argued the Founding Fathers are quite present in MAGA land, but in the service of a racist politics rather than a kind of republican revival. Dave and I continued the discussion with a joint post on “thick” vs. “thin” conceptions of history.

Finally, we closed out the year on political matters by considering Congress’s role in American politics and offering “three cheers” for the Democratic Party as it seems to be moving toward functioning the way a national political party must if it is to function well.

True to its name, Civic Fields has also engaged with a number of “fields” other than politics.

We’ve done a bit of sociology. We looked at Robert Putnam’s vision for civic renewal in contrast to Trump’s grievance capitalism. We also did a deep dive into James Davison Hunter’s book, Democracy and Solidarity, in two parts: an affirmation and a critique. Sociology also led us to contemplate two representative American cities, Las Vegas and Boston. We looked at the “Vegas-ification” of America, discussing how what happened in Vegas definitely did not stay in Vegas and how culture shapes political and civic life. These posts were followed by a series of posts from Northeastern University’s Matt Pitchford on the great, if fraught, city of Boston, with focus on its complex civic history. Matt concluded his posts by reflecting on how social and civic life are shaped by one’s immediate surroundings. I really loved these refections.

Another field we’ve explored this is American Christianity. After Pope Leo XIV was elected to the papacy, I reflected on what the new pope’s vision of politics and social teaching might mean. Later, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I commented on the dangerous apocalyptic state of the religious right. In our most recent post, my son and right-hand man here at Civic Fields, Graham O’Gorman, wrote about violence and American Evangelicalism.

We’ve also looked at the field of media theory. The age of AI is upon us, but it’s more than it’s cracked up to be, or so I argued in a two-part post (Part 1 linked here and Part 2 linked here). This fall, we also touched on the work of a great media philosopher, John Durham Peters, who has a different take on the effects of social media than you are used to encountering.

Finally, we wrapped up the year thinking about higher education: earlier in the year I asked, what are “civics” for? More recently, I explored and lamented what is going on with federal funding cuts to higher education. And Katie Bruner of MIT wrote a really thoughtful piece about how to think about federal funding for research in the sciences.

Whew!

So, looking back, what is Civic Fields about?

First, the premise here is that civic life is not one thing over here and other fields—economics, culture, religion, technology, media—things over there. Civic life is not a “sector” of our life; it is part of the ecology of life together. The civic crisis today is multi-pronged; renewal must be multi-pronged. So, whatever you do on a day-to-day basis—teaching, writing, nursing, building, preaching, baking, studying, walking, reading, conversing, bowling—can be part of renewal.

Second, Civic Fields also works from the premise that the past is a crucial resource for what it can teach us both negatively and positively about our present and our future. I worry a lot about a society that has no real engagement with, or memory of, the past. The past-focus at Civic Fields is not about nostalgia; nostalgia is but a way of avoiding actually engaging the past. Instead, it is about rooting.

Finally, if there’s a politics here at Civic Fields, it’s republican in the old-school sense. If there’s an economics, it is one set against Big Capital and technological take over. And if there is a religion, it is one that is humble and wondrous, not a violent and militant.

Civic Fields is planning on coming back in 2026. Meanwhile, Graham and I wish you a holiday season full of deep and rooted rest.

As is now being widely discussed, on September 2, after destroying a boat at sea, the U.S. military fired again and killed two people clinging for their lives to the wreckage. The boat was purported to be carrying drugs, though there has been no independent confirmation of this claim. The second firing upon the boat was in direct violation of both U.S. and international rules of war.

Before disavowing responsibility for the attack and throwing Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley under the bus as the culprit, Pete Hegseth, America’s tough-guy Secretary of Defense, gloated over the violence with an AI-generated meme. In Hegseth’s own words, such merciless military violence is a reflection of the “warrior ethos” the American military desperately needs to get back—“maximum lethality,” in his view, frees the “hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”

Alongside ICE raids, which are becoming increasingly violent, and a conspicuous culture of misogyny, the Trump administration seems to be relishing in the violence. Indeed, the military veteran Phil Klay has recently argued that the Trump administration is making America “great again” by returning it to gladiator-style bloodsport. Ross Douthat, a well-known conservative commentator, is dismayed. Citing the boat strikes, Douthat has written recently that in Trump’s supposed “Christian administration,” Christianity is in fact extremely hard to find.

Perhaps.

Hegseth does not seem much interested in following the law, but he is following a logic, a logic of violence that is ingrained in certain sectors of modern American Christianity.

Contemporary American Christianity, particularly certain forms of evangelical Christianity, is more comfortable with violence than Douthat seems willing to admit. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez has argued in Jesus and John Wayne, there is a version of American Christianity that grew out of World War II and found its feet in the Cold War that has nurtured spectacles of heroic violence. And as the religious scholar Matthew D. Taylor observes in a fascinating book, The Violent Take it By Force, the January 6 insurrection was very much a “Christian” event. Indeed, since Trump first took office in 2017, a fringe of right-wing Christianity, quite comfortable with violence, has moved to the center of power. “Today,” as Taylor quotes the Republican strategist Andrew Card, “the rug [of American evangelicalism] seems to have little rug and a lot of fringe.”

As Taylor’s book details, when Trump sought to capture the religious vote in 2016, he was far too polarizing a figure to garner support from the evangelical “old guard.” He turned, instead, to the scraggily threads clinging onto American evangelicalism. Capturing support from Paula White and other New Apostolic Reformation leaders, Trump began to corner an overlooked section of the religious market. As he rose in prominence, so too did these “apostles” and the influence of their radical beliefs about spiritual warfare, territorial expansion, and American exceptionalism. When it came to theology and piety, not all of them looked alike. The New Apostolic Reformation carries with it an apocalyptic feel, whereas the Christian theocrats that have directly influenced Hegseth seem more interested laying down the Law. But no matter what their stripe, they are all comfortable with taking the country “back” by violent force.

In early November this year, after the Charlie Kirk assassination, the cultural critic Sam Adler-Bell wrote a piece in New York Magazine on political violence in America. He noted how quickly the American imagination can clutch onto a familiar, comforting, salvific genre from the world of cinema where “American brutality is transformed into salutary myths of moral cleanliness.” Like Du Mez, Adler-Bell found in this genre a heralded hero: the John Wayne figure. John Wayne figures,

redeem the violence underpinning the social order while allowing us to remain, at once, tut-tutting bystanders to its cruelty and deliciously complicit in its excess. They venerate and authorize the law while preserving a vital place for the exception. They elevate American innocence and barbarity—our chief vices—to foundational virtues.

Hegseth presents himself very much as a John Wayne figure, minus the holster and hat. He and the Trump administration talk as though they are on a mission to restore American innocence through brutal, targeted aggression against “narco terrorists,” immigrants, and—if they had their druthers—“radical leftists.”

There is a distinct logic of violence here, and it is, however uncomfortably, a “Christian” one, or at least a religiously-infused one: real violence is a means of protecting fantasies of purity. “The perennial American delusion,” Alder-Bell summarizes, “is that purgative violence can be used to restore our blamelessness, our purity.”

From this view, Hegseth’s boat strikes look less like gladiatorial entertainment and more like another famous Roman act of state violence: the crucifixion. Historically, of course, the Christian proclamation was that Jesus was wrongly crucified. Many Christians hang a cruciform symbol of violence in their churches or around their necks in remembrance of a great injustice. But it’s not hard to reverse the logic of the crucifixion back into its old Roman form and make state violence means of purging the impure. Jesus was crucified outside the city according to just this sort of logic: the “guilty” are sacrificed for the sake of the purity of the nation.

What to make of this apparent reversal of the Christian dialectic among self-professed Christians? A look back a short twenty years might shed some light.

In 2003, two books took off in evangelical bookstores. That year, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book that helped spark the “purity culture” movement in American evangelicalism. It was published just as another evangelical best seller hit the shelves, Wild at Heart. The latter was a defense of regulated male aggression. Around the same time, still shocked from 9/11, parts of evangelical America began rallying behind anthems like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue” to spur on troops fighting in Afghanistan and preparing to invade Iraq. It was all there—purity, violence, and America. Even if it wasn’t a cohesive ideology, these themes were swirling around in the American evangelical imagination, and took root in certain fringe movements like the New Apostolic Reformation and Calvinist theocracy.

But in 2016 and again in 2024, as Taylor argues, the fringe became the carpet of American evangelical Christianity. Hegseth is a fringe figure sitting squarely at the top of the most powerful military force the world has ever known. Violence, for him, as he has made clear in numerous ways and at numerous times, is not a tragic but necessary means of defending the country. It’s a way of purging all that’s wrong with America. And what’s wrong with America? Hegseth has had the gall to say it is not Christian enough. Except this is for him, not galling at all; it’s what the faith teaches.

Hegseth says he follows in the footsteps of the spiritual influencer, Doug Wilson. He attends Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, founded by Wilson. Wilson is a hyper-Calvinist supporter of American theocracy. He believes that America has “made God angry.” He also believes God made some people irredeemable. “Villains are villains and bad people are bad people,” he said in an interview with Douthat.

Hegseth may be, like John Wayne, just playing a role. But he wears a crusader tattoo, and he clearly enjoys talking both about taking back America for “biblical principles” and relishing in unlawful military violence. Whatever he actually believes, the fringe evangelical imagination is there: the time has come to appease God’s wrath with the mighty arm of the U.S. military, cutting out the evildoers looking to defile the nation. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.

Earlier this week, The New York Times published a report (gift link) on the dramatic drop in federal funding for science research as a result of the Trump administration’s policies. The precipitous decline in funding is getting plenty of attention at universities and regular attention at places like The New York Times, but most people are probably, at best, only barely aware of what is happening and what it means. Others may look at a bunch of the projects funded by Congress over the last decades and think good riddance!

So, since I have a perch here at MIT, Ned reached out to me and asked me to write a bit about the history of federal funding for science in the United States: a sort of who, what, why, where, and when of what became known as “basic science.”

Since World War II, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on scientific research, and among these billions, tens of billions on failed scientific research: drug trials with null results, energy research gone wrong, spacecraft gone up in flames, and new innovations never making it to market. Historically, Americans on the whole have had few complaints here. They know that scientific research and development involves risk; without a tolerance for failure, science would go nowhere.

But what about research on rat massages, or on a mathematical model for running an auction, or on why jellyfish glow in the dark? All three have been funded by American tax dollars.

In some worlds, examples like this of “useless science” vindicate the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to scientific spending this year. Grants are being denied, research budgets drastically cut, award cycles cancelled, and projects stopped mid-stream. Trump’s proposed budget for 2026 would include even more cuts.

So-called “useless science” has long been known in the scientific world as “basic science.”

The National Science Foundation (NSF) defines basic science as “work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundations of phenomena and observable facts, without any particular application or use in view.” According to the NSF, basic science accounted for nearly 25% of federal research funding during the Biden administration.

The basic argument for “basic science” goes like this: in order to know what drugs to make, or how a spaceship might tolerate interstellar travel, someone had to do more fundamental research on these physical or technical phenomena.

Spending billions of taxpayer dollars each year on research undertaken “without any particular application or use in view” may conjure in our minds a mad scientist toiling away on their pet project. Many basic science projects seem odd or of dubious relevance to anyone except the passionate researcher who may have a particular interest in a type of mold, species of beetle, or unique medical condition. Many of these projects are published in obscure journals that few read, and some are never finished or forgotten altogether.

So why do we do this? What is basic science even for?

One line of argument is that it has a direct relationship to future economic growth. Let’s call this the “Return-On-Investment” argument, or ROI.

Many defenders of basic science use ROI. Basic science, they argue, is a sound financial investment. Championing the dividends of basic science, they cite projects like ARPANET and Mosaic, which set the foundation of the internet you are reading this on, or space race-era research that led to the development of the GPS we use to find our way around, or investments in translation software that tens of millions now use when playing Duolingo. From this vantage point, cutting basic science funding is like neglecting to invest in the next Apple or Google. Economic investment in basic science, this line of thinking goes, begets economic growth. The next big idea is just around the corner.

The irony here is that ROI arguments are also at the heart of those who want to cut government funding for basic science. Trump and his appointees in the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have been cutting away at federal investment in scientific research in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Trump is not the first politician to use ROI to cast suspicion on basic science. In the 1970s-80s, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire publicized what he considered wasteful government spending through his monthly “Golden Fleece” award (the name referring to a con artist “fleecing” their mark). Many basic science projects were chosen for Proxmire’s public condemnation, such as an NSF project on the impact of marijuana on male sexual performance or a University of Michigan study on why humans (and some animals) clench their jaw.

DOGE and the Golden Fleece Award share an approach to basic science that presumes that for every dollar spent on research, the return should be greater. Return-On-Investment. As such, projects that require significant capital investment or projects that are of dubious return potential are de-prioritized or defunded. Science here is about economics and only economics.

So, ROI is an understandable but risky approach for defending basic science. It forces scientific research into a ledger in which it cannot thrive and may not even survive.

But there is a different historical argument in defense of basic science: the “pacemaker” argument.

Some argue that basic science benefits the nation beyond the economy. Basic science here is sometimes called “the pacemaker of technological progress.” In a road race, a pacemaker runs a consistent speed in order to signal to other runners that they need to slow down or speed up. This keeps the group of runners at a sustainable pace. An artificial pacemaker is used to create the electrical signals that tell a patient’s heart to beat at a healthy rhythm.

If we take the pacemaker metaphor seriously, then we could think of economic and market forces (such as new discoveries, consumer demand, or the latest technologies) as signals that tell the nation to speed up or slow down investment in scientific knowledge. These signals, however, may be weakened by strain or fatigue. They may be distorted by political interference, distrust, inequality, or nihilism. They may get put in the wrong hands. A tech billionaire might come along, for example, and decide to slash the federal budget.

Basic science, in this metaphor, would keep scientific research progressing at a steady pace, regardless of the health (or disease) of the economic and market forces.

The phrase “pacemaker of technological progress” comes from a 1945 report called Science The Endless Frontier. The Report was written by Vannevar Bush, a former MIT engineer who had just completed his tenure managing American research during World War II. Bush had observed how crucial basic science had been to the ability of US researchers to collaborate on urgent wartime projects such as radar, atomic weapons, and early computing. The foundation of basic science laid by researchers at American universities allowed the United States to stay strong and spring into action when World War II began.

That basic science would make U.S. researchers capable of responding quickly to national threats became a central selling point of basic science when it was marketed to the American public during the Cold War. After World War II, Bush’s Endless Frontier report led to the creation of the institutions of modern research we know today: the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more.

The critical point here: By calling basic science a “pacemaker,” Bush was advocating for federal funding not because he thought it would necessarily be a good economic investment. His focus was on preparing America to be ready for when another war came about (a very real concern in 1945). For the next few decades, America justified basic science inasmuch as it allowed the U.S. to out-compete its enemies.

But there are limits to this argument, too. It makes science subservient not only to the nation-state but to warfare. That so much basic science funding has come through defense-related spending is no coincidence.

There is a third and, to my mind, more satisfactory argument to be made for basic science. Here, we might use a bit of speculative fiction. This line of thinking asks us to imagine what would have happened if we had not invested in basic science.

Inspired by Senator Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece Award,” the Golden Goose Award recognizes three publicly funded projects each year that have “resulted in significant societal impact.” One of their recipients in 2021 was Dr. Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman for their work on the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. This vaccine was the first real-world application of the basic science research on mRNA that Dr. Karikó and Dr. Weissman had been conducting since the 1980s.

The race to develop the COVID-19 vaccine was a sprint, and the American research community was healthy enough to participate because they had a pacemaker implanted decades prior. Market forces would not have cut it.

Without basic science, we could be living in a world in which the pandemic was still around.

Here, hindsight helps us appreciate how basic science can contribute to the public good. But support for the basic science being done today (or late last year, before it was cut) depends not on hindsight, nor even on foresight (for the benefits of basic science are radically unpredictable), but on a kind of “no-sight.” Basic science is not quite the same as flying blind, but it is flying into unknown territory.

This, to me, is the best justification for basic science. We should invest in it precisely because we don’t know. What would it look like if more researchers did not have to promise that their work would have any particular outcome? What if we did not pretend to know what the future will bring? What if we invest in knowledge not because we know it will stimulate the economy, or because it will lead to the next “big idea,” or because it will strengthen American diplomacy, but because it is inherently good to learn more or, conversely, to learn more about how little we in fact know?

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with conducting research with a goal in mind, and there’s wisdom in preparing for future threats. But a culture in which we regularly invest in activities meant to evoke a collective sense of humility, wonder, and the unknown might just be a counterbalance against the confident ignorance that seems to plague our current political moment.

Because let’s be honest, we don’t know what is coming. We can try to make complex models of the future, we can do our best to anticipate and plan, and we can try to maximize ROI. But we cannot escape the path of the unknown. Science undertaken without a “practical use in view” is perhaps the most clear-eyed way to proceed into the unknown.

At research universities like Illinois, federal grant monies have been a staple of research and teaching since the late 1950s. However, in the last year federal funds have gone from being a big and steady stream to something more like an on-and-off kitchen faucet as the Trump administration has pursued its agenda. In fact, three different agendas, each of which has little relation to the others apart from their connection to ecosystem of the Trump administration. What are those agendas?

First, led by Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget, the Trump administration is making widespread cuts to federal funding, save projects where the lobbying or ideology is strong enough. The agenda here is an old GOP one: to permanently cut the size and role of the federal government. Research at universities is a relatively small part of the federal budget, especially given the return on investment. In 2023, just under 1% of total federal outlays was devoted to university-based research & development projects. Most of that money went to the sciences and engineering. Now, many of those projects are either on hold or have been terminated as part of what have been presented as “across-the-board” cuts—which, it turns out, are not so across the board.

Rather, reflecting Stephen Miller’s influence in the administration, federal funding has become intensely ideological. Universities and researchers have been told outright that they have to eliminate certain words and topics from research (and in some cases teaching) to maintain federal grants. This is the second prong of the Trump administration’s higher-education agenda, and it points to how these cuts, though widespread, are not even handed. The Trump administration is insisting that researchers tow the new ideological line or lose funding. I have an economist friend, for example, who lost a federal grant that looked at the economic opportunities, or lack thereof, of black farmers in the United States. (The latest statistic I saw said only 1% of American farmers are black, and the number was shrinking.) Why? Because the research focused on blacks.

Amid all of this, the Trump administration claims American campuses are rife with anti-semitism and anti-whiteness. May Mailman seems to have a significant role in this set of maneuvers. Given just how white the Trump administration is and how out loud is anti-semitism in Trump’s coalition—witness Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson—the sincerity of these efforts is dubious, to say the least. Rather, accusations of anti-semitism and anti-whiteness is about using a federal law called “Title VI” to exert ideological control over universities.

Title VI allows the federal government to sanction and punish higher education institutions for discrimination. As has been widely reported, the Trump administration is using this law aggressively. They have targeted cases of anti-semitism coming from the political Left, some of which are legitimate, but the vast majority of which are about students and faculty opposed to Israeli policies in Gaza (most Americans, by the way, are opposed to the Israeli government’s policies). Some sixty universities are or have been under investigation for anti-semitism. None of them, as far as I know, are targeted at anti-semitism coming from the Right. Other universities are being investigated for anti-white and anti-Asian-American discrimination. I was not able to find any that are being investigated for anti-black or anti-Latino-American discrimination.

The sum of this three-pronged attack on higher education has already meant millions of dollars have been lost research funding. Administrators and university presidents are running scared. Grant-funded graduate students in the sciences and social sciences are living with uncertainty about whether they will be able to finish their degrees. Campus speech is being closely monitored. University administrators are being forced to turn over the names of students and faculty who participated in campus protests against the war in Gaza. The campus climate, to say the least, is fraught.

We are learning through the Trump administration just what the state can do to punish its political enemies. In short, far too much. And the collateral damage is wide and deep. Many are talking about the adverse effects cuts in research funding will have in the sciences (we will do that a bit here in two weeks at Civic Fields). Medicine is under siege. And let’s not forget farmers, who, in addition to getting bombarded with tariffs, are seeing university-based agricultural research being cut left and right.

But I want you to know about another victim: the teaching of foreign languages.

Since the late 1950s, the U.S. government has provided hundreds of universities with funds to teach a variety of foreign languages. Indeed, in the 1950s the federal government helped give birth to a whole academic field called “Area Studies.” The basic idea behind Area Studies, as one historian wrote in 2002, was twofold:

It is primarily an effort to make the assumptions, meanings, structures, and dynamics of another society and culture comprehensible to an outsider. But it also creates reflexive opportunities to expand, even challenge by the contrast, the outsider’s understanding of his or her own society and culture.

These were goals suited to the Cold War and the national interest. Indeed, they were products of the Cold War. As a great power, the United States assumed that it needed at least a portion of its citizens to be conversant with the outside world and to have the capacity for self-reflection on one’s own cultural assumptions and biases. The United States wanted to be a great power—rather, it was a great power—but it wanted to also be a smart one.

After Sputnik in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. Among its many provisions, it distributed money through the Department of Education to universities to begin “Area Studies” units. Most of these universities were research universities like my own that also got a lot of funding for STEM research. The primary job of these “Area Studies” units was to teach foreign languages—not just Spanish and German, but Arabic, Korean, Russian, Hindi, Modern Hebrew, Persian, and more. The aim here was to draw on university-trained graduates to help staff and shape U.S. policy and diplomacy in a complicated world.

One of the first things the Trump administration did this year was to cut these decades-old grant programs. Kapoosh. Gone. It was one of the first big steps in the Trump administration’s body slam of the Department of Education (recall, our current education secretary is the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment!).

What does this mean for the University of Illinois and over a hundred other universities? It is not entirely yet clear, but it looks very much like we will soon be a university where only four or five modern foreign languages are taught, barely better than high school. No Arabic, Korean, Russian, Hindi, Modern Hebrew, or Persian, and few in the way of courses on campus about these regions, nations, cultures, and histories. Given how tight a ship universities like my own run financially, after Trump is gone it is unlikely that foreign-language instruction will make a come back (unless Congress gets involved). The damage being done is, for all intents and purposes, permanent.

So, what is happening to universities? Higher education in the United States is being diminished, made smaller and more parochial, all in keeping with a very parochial administration. This seems self-defeating to say the least, but it is a self-defeat that was always a risk in the bargain the federal government made with universities decades ago.

And here’s where my lament for everything destructive that is going on includes also a reckoning with how research universities like mine have long been getting it wrong.

Federal funding for foreign language instruction was never really about learning in itself. It was about the exercise of power. The same is true of federal funding for science and engineering, which also took off in the Cold War.

Research-heavy universities made a bargain with the federal government: you invest in us, and we will organize ourselves to serve you first, students second.

We are now going through the great reversal of this logic: The federal government built a powerful relationship with research universities to create a steady flow of university-trained graduates to centers of U.S. economic, governing, and cultural power in a complex global climate. But this made universities dependent on the federal government, and not just financially. The dependency extended to their very mission. Education and research became, under this Cold War logic, a means of supplying and serving state power.

The first cracks in this arrangement appeared as early as the 1960s. The Vietnam War caused many professors and students to question the university’s contract with the state. Area Studies departments were sometimes at the frontlines here. Trained in the study of other societies, Area Studies became quite critical of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. They also became critical of Area Studies itself for its apparent complicity with the warfare state. Scholars in Area Studies departments, almost all which depended heavily on federal funding, began to turn the lens back on themselves.

As long as the federal government felt it still needed university services, it tolerated such dissent, and as long as Area Studies departments continued to get a steady flow of federal funding, they limited their dissent.

Indeed, for the federal government there were good Cold War reasons for tolerating “radical” faculty. After all, the United States presented itself to the world as the vanguard of freedom, including free speech and free thought. What kind of free government would punish universities for having faculty and students engaged in acts of protest or dissent?

So, as awkward as the relationship was, Area Studies and the federal government maintained their bargain. The upside for the federal government was a continued stream of well-educated young people who could serve in government, industry, or education in ways that continued to advance the U.S.’s “Free World” agenda. The upside for Area Studies units was continued funding. But the downside was dependence on federal funding—not just financial, but mission-curricular dependence.

And now, under a mad fit of ethno-nationalism and grievance capitalism, the academic dependents are being cut short or cut off by the federal parents and kicked out of the government’s fiscal house.

I feel the pain here. I really do. I lament what is happening. I hate it. I hate that Persian, Arabic, or Modern Hebrew may not be offered at my university in a couple of years.

But I also see in it a faint but real opportunity: we need to figure out a way to disentangle learning and justifications for higher-learning from primarily serving power, be it state or corporate. This is not a way of denying the reality of power. Nor is it a way of saying learning should never serve power. But it is a way of saying that power and learning have become virtually identical in the modern American university—if not the power of the state, then the power of industry. In all kinds of ways, power is the lingua franca of the American university. (Not coincidentally, “power” has become the key word of humanistic inquiry over the last half century.)

Could learning, including learning Persian, instead be “useless”? Could it be about wonder, humility, health, holism, healing, and repair? Could it be about the sheer joy of learning? Could it be about de-parochialization without uprooting? Could it be about attention, awareness, empathy, and other virtues?

First, was an effort to reconnect with political and moral roots that might improve our lot. Second, was to highlight the ways in which civic health depends not only on what goes on in Washington, D.C., but what happens at the level of the local community. Third, I wanted Civic Fields to continue the work I’ve done in the classroom and in print, defending politics against its critics.

This last item is the umbrella that covers the first two and is at the heart of my diagnosis of our current cultural and civic ills. When people grow disgusted with politics, they either “check out” or “lock in”—the former produces apathy, the latter authoritarianism. Our first alienation as a country is an alienation from politics.

Politics is about how difference and disagreement needs to be buckled up with compromise and community. Most of what we think of as “politics” today is a far cry from its authentic expression. It is the stuff of media cycles, propaganda artists, pollsters, and bullies, not citizens, neighbors, negotiators, and persuaders.

Given this, I’ve been heartened recently by what we seem to be witnessing in the Democratic Party: An opening toward politics?

I have said in these pages before that I am not a member of the Democratic Party. It, like the Republican Party, has become far too top-down and centralized. That is, by my logic, political parties have become less political—and that is a bad thing, for it means it has become too closed, exclusionary, and ideological. Thankfully, what the Democratic Party has not done is become a cult of personality—à la the Republican Party. That would be a worst-case scenario, not just for the Democratic Party, but for the country. The cult of personality, as we are seeing on the Right, is too easily grows oppressive, anti-democratic, corrupting, and cruel. But while the Democratic Party has this crucial difference with its Republican counterpart, it has been too top-down and ideologically monolithic.

That may be starting to change.

Three things have happened in the last two weeks that give me some reason to believe that the Democratic Party is starting to become an actual political party again. When I say “political,” I mean a party that is capable of holding together different constituencies with quite different perspectives. Because we in the United States are stuck in a two-party system—and that will not change—it is crucial that our political parties be “big tent” parties. Otherwise, they become vehicles for making enemies, alienating the “other,” and enforcing ideology. I don’t identify as a Democrat today because it says too much to do so. And all the more so if you are a Republican. Membership in a political party, by contrast, should say only a little bit about you.

My reasons for some optimism? The first thing that happened was the elections last week, which Democrats won in a rout. As many have noted, the types of candidates and the types of issues featured in the state and local elections at issue were quite diverse. There was no ideological uniformity across the board. Each candidate tailored their message to their specific context and electorate.

This is how politics is supposed to work, and how it goes to work. It should not be about ideological conformity or loyalty to the man. It should be about the matching of values and policies to particular contexts, with the goal of actually doing something for the electorate, not simply winning their vote and securing party power.

Which brings me to the second thing that has heartened me recently. What I just said here is more or less what Ezra Klein has been repeating recently (see here and here, both gift links). On a national level, Klein, the New York Times columnist, is the most important voice in the Democratic Party. He can move mountains. For example, on a policy level, he is partly responsible for the recent changes the state of California made with respect to housing regulations—weakening regulations so as to allow for the more rapid construction of desperately needed housing in the state, and this in a state infamous for resistance to such change.

Klein has recently taken to arguing that the Democratic Party needs to become a “big tent” party capable of holding together a bunch of different constituencies representing a bunch of different perspectives, even ones that are blatantly at odds with one another. He’s embraced “politics” in the way Civic Fields has framed it all along: ideological litmus tests need to come to an end, differences need to be acknowledged and even encouraged, and being a “Democrat” needs to mean less, not more.

This means Democrats need to focus on only a few big national issues—affordability, opposition to authoritarian cruelty, and—I wish Klein would add—law enforcement that is both professional and civilian (in contrast to the militarized security that has been a trump card for the Right). Meanwhile, different Democrats in different parts of the country can and should represent their constituencies differently from each other. This, after all, is what representation is all about. It is not rocket science, though, given the direction of both parties over the last decades, it certainly can seem that way.

So, I’m glad to be hearing all this from a strategy and policy mouthpiece of the Democratic Party.

The third reason I am heartened is the fact that seven Democratic senators (plus an independent who caucuses with the Democrats) broke with their party this week to support a Republican bill to end the shutdown. Ironically, Klein has been critical of this move. It seems he is still struggling to learn his own lessons. I think, by contrast, that it is a promising sign for two reasons.

First, it is consistent with the principle of representation. Senators should not be agents of parties, though they absolutely need to work with their parties, but rather representatives of their constituencies. A lot of folks are being hurt by the shutdown, some in more areas than others. At some point, practical issues have to take precedence over party loyalty. We would live in a different and better country if more politicians thought this way.

Second, it speaks to the growing weakness of Chuck Schumer, and that is a very good thing—not only because Schumer has proved himself to be a very unlikable politician but because a central problem in governance right now is the top-down structure of our political parties. They need to be democratized, not disciplined.

Together with Mamdani’s victory in Schumer’s home city of New York, the Democratic Party is trending away from top-down control. Given the widespread hatred for Trump and the very legitimate worries about the new form of American authoritarianism, it is understandable that the opposition party would want to walk in lock step. But that’s the wrong move.

Digging in, contra Bernie, is not the best way forward for the Democratic Party or for combating oligarchy. For democratization in the country must start with democratization in our political parties. That some Democrats decided they could not toe the line indefinitely, no matter what the party leadership said, is a good thing. It means that maybe, just maybe, more political space may be opening up in at least one party.

This will all likely soon end—on November 1, the pain is going to set in. But it might be a good time to ask why we have a Congress at all, and what we can do, if anything, about its current dysfunction?

Last spring, I read Why Congress?, a book by Philip Wallach, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I recommend it for folks of all partisan or non-partisan stripes. It is a historically rich and policy-smart text, the sort of thing that think tanks do at their best. The basic argument of the book is that Congress was created to be a political body, but that it has, over the last fifty years, become a party body.

Wait a minute, you might say: I thought politics was about partisanship. Isn’t being a political body the same as being a party body?

Not quite.

Political parties are mechanisms for organizing and directing political power, but they are not necessarily political bodies. To be political, they have to be able to generate power through the give-and-take of difference. This is Wallach’s Madisonian thesis. And it is one echoed in the works of one of my chief influences, Hannah Arendt.

Politics, in Wallach’s words, is a process wherein “disparate interests, conflicting visions of the good, and divergent judgments about prudent policy” come into contact with each other, get worked through, and reach provisional compromises. Or, in Arendt’s phrase, authentic politics is “different people getting along in the full force of their power.”

Our two political parties, in fact, are not very good at doing this kind of work at all. They are top-down organizations. They operate more according to the command structure of a corporation than the horizontal openness of a town hall meeting.

But Congress, Wallach argues, was created to be a political body more than a partisan one. His book takes us back to the founders, particularly James Madison, to argue that Congress, as the only representative branch of government (n.b., the presidency was not created as a representative branch of the federal government), is the sine qua non of Constitutional political order, the branch without which we cannot function as a democratic republic.

As it was originally conceived, Wallach argues, Congress offers,

the promise of taming interests through structured competition and dialogue with each other. Congress is not perfect, nor does it solve problems with great efficiency. It is all too human. But Congress’ shortcomings do not render it a constitutional liability. Rather Congress’ plural, representative nature makes it the only body in our system capable of setting our national priorities while respecting the diversity of our vast citizenry.

And his book shows through careful historical case studies centered on the 20th century that this is more or less how Congress has functioned in the United States at crucial moments in its modern history. Hence, it is not a pollyanna view of Congress.

Nevertheless, the problem facing us now is one of which Madison was only barely aware, and which Wallach does not address squarely enough. Madison warned of “factions.” But factions looked nothing like modern political parties, and political parties at his time looked nothing like today’s. Madison lived in a day when, loosely speaking, political parties existed, but they did not have any of the organizational and operational fortitude that they do nowadays. They operated more like social clubs than corporations.

Some, like Ezra Klein, therefore say the Constitution is simply not prepared to deal with modern political parties. I am less certain about this. The Constitution is far more flexible than many allow. Even an “originalist” must admit this if they are being honest. And Wallach agrees with me on this. Congress could get fixed within the bounds of the Constitution even with the particular force of modern political parties in full view.

Indeed, Wallach focuses much of his analysis on the rules that Congress sets for itself. The filibuster, of course, is the most famous Congressional rule, but there are many, many others. And they are quite open to change. Congress could fix itself in a day if it wanted to, and in so doing help fix the country.

Instead, as Wallach chronicles, over the last thirty years, Congress has chosen of its own accord to consolidate power in the hands of a tiny group of House and Senate leadership. Congress, with its wide-open floor and its lecterns for debate, has become a top-down institution. Bills are now made in tucked-away committees, not in the full chamber or among loosely organized coalitions, and these committees can “kill” bills by simply refusing to act on them. Today, there is really no such thing as open debate in Congress about legislation. Most senators and representatives never read the legislation on which they are asked to vote. They overwhelmingly follow the party line, heeding dictates from above. “Party boss” politics has been re-institutionalized in American government (this was a problem, too, in the late 19th century).

This is not a problem of the Constitution, at least not directly. It is about the rules Congress makes for itself. Indeed, Wallach’s point is that the current top-down rules fly in the face of the spirit and letter of the Constitution. Congress is given its power and place in Article 1 of the Constitution—it is to be the supreme body of the federal government because it is the only truly representative body. And yet it has relegated itself to the position of Article 3 or worse, choosing to be an extension of party organization.

The current Trump-led effort to redistrict House districts to assure Republican victories, and the tit-for-tat response of Democratic states, represents the nadir of the anti-representational thrust of partisanship. Leaders of our political parties are working to consolidate their power by denying us any electoral power whatsoever when it comes to federal elections. Soon we will all be living in the Boss’s neighborhood.

What to do? It would be nice if Congress would simply fix itself, but that’s not likely to happen apart from the sort of national catastrophe that none of us wishes for.

I wish I had grassroots solutions. The fact is that the two major political parties are wildly unpopular for a plurality of Americans. There might, just might, be some hope here for a diminution of party power in favor of political power. But I am not especially hopeful on this front. Some political Independents are what they are because they feel alienated from the two major political parties. I am one of these. But I suspect that most Independents are just checking out of politics, sick of it all. These are not the kind of voters, in general, who are going to drive a grassroots movement. Indeed, the apathy of Independents only makes the parties more powerful.

Rather, any hope of change, apart from catastrophe, comes down to leadership.

Earlier, I said that political parties are mechanisms for organizing and directing political power. But they do not have a monopoly on political power. It is not even clear that they can effectively generate political power. This is key.

Part of the lesson of contemporary populism is that political parties have to latch on to popular political power. They are, in a way, fundamentally parasitic. You can’t really create a popular movement top-down, astroturfing style, though sometimes these approaches have had some limited success. Instead, those at the top need to find sources below for political power, attempt to capture it, and do with it what they will.

Donald Trump, with his predatory genius, has been a master at this. Trump is where he is at because he captured a political party. But he captured a political party because he succeeded in parasitically attaching himself to popular political frustrations and grievances.

But I don’t want another Trump anywhere—not on the Left or the Right.

What we can learn from Trump, however, is the power of party insurgents—party outsiders who, through popular appeal, become party insiders and redirect the party apparatus according to their aims, wishes, or desires. Given that our two major political parties are centered in the White House—either because their leader is the President or because their party leadership is being fought over in terms of who will run for President—the place to look for party insurgents is in the presidential primaries. Those are still several years away.

But what I will be looking for is a reform insurgent in the order of Teddy Roosevelt in the Bull Moose campaign in 1912, or, for that matter, Lincoln in 1860. We need leaders with charismatic appeal who actually care about the Constitution. And we’ll know if they do, not by their positions on gun control or abortion, but by their view of Congress and Congressional reform. If that sounds like a far-out possibility, it is an indication of just how far out of order our polity is.