Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

John McGinnis’s lead forum essay is characteristically intelligent, scrupulous, and concise. He reads the judicial tea leaves, discerning the Roberts Court’s priorities when it comes to undoing some of the institutional distortions that previous Courts have countenanced, and offering a path to reinstate a more robust nondelegation doctrine as the central element of constitutional renewal.

I write here not to quibble with McGinnis’s main argument, with which I am in general agreement, but to raise a question about an issue he mentions only in passing—though I think it is more relevant to the nondelegation issue than that reference suggests. And while his general approach is legal in nature, mine is more institutional and political.

McGinnis brings up the Court’s expansive commerce clause jurisprudence only by way of an analogy to the possibility that the Court, in reasserting “the Constitution’s design for executive and judicial powers,” could be “inviting … chaos.” He notes that widespread reliance on the expansion of federal power has long been seen as a reason not to overrule past precedents that have expanded the scope of the commerce clause, even if one believes they ballooned federal power well beyond what is authorized by the Constitution’s text. The horizontal, separation-of-powers problems under consideration, he believes, do not run into this issue, or can be addressed in a way that avoids it.

McGinnis does not say anything more one way or the other on the commerce clause or the expansion of federal power more generally, so I do not impute to him any particular viewpoint. I will only suggest that there is a close and domino-like connection between these three problems: 1) the erosion of strict limits on federal power, 2) the delegation of power from the legislature to the executive, and 3) the empowerment within the executive of unaccountable bureaucratic agencies. McGinnis rightly notes that the Roberts Court seems most interested in and has had the most success with #3; that it has at least some interest in #2, though just how far it is willing to go remains in question; and that it seems mostly uninterested in #1 beyond symbolic gestures. I would caution, however, that those latter two problems are dominoes that fell for good reasons once the first problem became entrenched and generally accepted.

Therefore, any attempt to revive the Constitution’s separation of powers framework without doing something about its federalism framework may only cause new problems.

To make a brief digression, I will call on James Madison to set the table conceptually. One of the most unjustly neglected of the Federalist essays is, I believe, number 56, which considers whether the overall size of the House of Representatives is adequate to make it properly representative of the people’s interests. One of his premises is relevant to the present discussion:

It is a sound and important principle that the representative ought to be acquainted with the interests and circumstances of his constituents. But this principle can extend no further than to those circumstances and interests to which the authority and care of the representative relate. An ignorance of a variety of minute and particular objects, which do not lie within the compass of legislation, is consistent with every attribute necessary to a due performance of the legislative trust. In determining the extent of information required in the exercise of a particular authority, recourse then must be had to the objects within the purview of that authority.

He then goes on to note the relatively few and defined “circumstances and interests” that federal authority addressed—namely, interstate commerce, taxation, and the militia. A relatively small handful of representatives will be perfectly capable of possessing a sympathy of interests and the “local knowledge” necessary to make policies in those areas.

Similarly, in number 14, Madison reminds his readers that the federal government’s

jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any. The subordinate governments, which can extend their care to all those other subjects which can be separately provided for, will retain their due authority and activity.

He then goes on to note that “were it proposed by the plan of the convention to abolish the governments of the particular States, its adversaries would have some ground for their objection” (emphasis added)—namely, their objection that the new Congress would be unable to adequately account for the interests of its people.

Fast-forward 230 years or so, and the landscape of policymaking is radically different, but Madison’s basic premise is still relevant. There is a certain amount of specialized knowledge that is necessary to make any given policy. When we are talking about an extremely large and diverse country, it may still be possible to make policy in a republican fashion by representatives, but only if the policies are broad and limited in scope. If that same government were to be a general-purpose regulator of all aspects of common life, genuine republican self-government would no longer be possible.

Any attempt to resolve the structural distortions of our constitution, without addressing the expansive commerce clause, may be like attempting to flatten a water balloon—squeeze in one spot, and you will only cause a flare-up somewhere else.

One of the most common arguments in favor of delegation is that Congress does not possess the requisite knowledge and expertise to make good policy. Accordingly, it hands that duty off to those who do. To be sure, the kind of “knowledge” and “expertise” that we talk about today isn’t exactly what Madison had in mind, but his basic point still holds. Advocates of delegation are right that members of Congress don’t really have the requisite knowledge to make detailed policy choices on every conceivable social question. Where they go wrong is thinking that the solution is to send that power to “experts” in the appropriate bureau with scientific knowledge as their guide, rather than sending that power back to localities and states with local and circumstantial knowledge as their guide.

Moreover, as federal authority has expanded, so has the public expectation that the federal government will solve a variety of social ills that it never had the capacity to address properly. This almost certainly contributes in some way to the declining trust in federal institutions, of which Congress has long been the prime example.

If the Court is successful in pushing real policy choices back to Congress, as McGinnis hopes, we are likely to relearn the lesson that, given the current scope of federal regulatory power, the institution is incapable of making such choices—at least of making them well. If our reforms stop at the horizontal plane of nondelegation, it may simply result in a greater crisis of congressional legitimacy as it inevitably fails in its expected role. That may prompt an even stronger push for rule by executive, a practice that seems to have growing bipartisan support. Perhaps the Court would stand fast in resistance to the backlash, striking down “phone-and-pen” governance. But it may cave; or its justices may be replaced; or it may be ignored. That last possibility is a prospect that might not be too far off, given just how executive-centered our political system is becoming.

To avoid that fate, the Court would need to take the next step of the constitutional restoration project: the vertical balance. That would be a much more difficult prospect. Americans now look to Washington, DC, not only for policy but for their identity as citizens; the most powerful interests in the country all have a vested interest in having a single hub of authority to which they can send their lawyers and lobbyists; our economic system is built around there being one set of rules pronounced from DC; and both major political parties have built messages and coalitions around national visions that given them every reason to resist an erosion of federal power.

If all this is correct, it would raise two important questions. First, could McGinnis and Rappaport’s “prospective overruling” work for the commerce clause, too? Could it make decentralization palatable enough to prevent massive resistance? Second, does the current iteration of the Roberts Court have any more inclination to pursue this path than the 2012 version, when Roberts himself went out of his way in NFIB v. Sebelius to ensure that some rationale would be found to uphold federal regulation, even when the commerce clause fails?

In theory, I don’t see why prospective overruling could not be applied to questions about the scope of federal power. Just as McGinnis describes its delegation questions, it could allow past pieces of legislation that have generated sufficient reliance interests to stand as a matter of precedent, while still making clear that they are unconstitutional on the merits, and thus rob them of precedential import. Nevertheless, prospective overruling would likely create an extremely awkward and rigidified regulatory environment in which outdated federal rules would still apply, without any ability to update them. And it would raise the question as to whether such grandfathered-in rules would perpetually preempt state and local attempts to update them.

Which is to say that prospective overruling of commerce clause precedents would likely be an extremely difficult prospect—maybe not even any easier than the “chaos” that outright overruling would invite. John Roberts has already shown his disinclination to pursue the difficult path. Will the other originalist justices be willing to take on such a radical agenda?

Any attempt to resolve the structural distortions of our constitution, however, without addressing the expansive commerce clause, may be like attempting to flatten a water balloon—squeeze in one spot, and you will only cause a flare-up somewhere else. The only way to succeed is to choose a painful route: poke a hole and let the water out.

A provocative thesis underlies Joe Jackson’s Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of the American Empire. The author argues the Spanish-American War was a pivotal moment in US foreign policy that ushered in an age of American interventionism. It became the “template” for every so-called small war ever since­—“from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.” The war, Jackson argues, is not only history but a cautionary tale.

Splendid Liberators is a work of modern narrative nonfiction that covers the Pacific and Caribbean theaters of that war. At the time, US Secretary of State John Hay called the conflict a “splendid little war.” To his credit, Jackson has reached beyond traditional US sources, materials, and perceptions. He uses archival materials in the Philippines and Cuba and interviews with scholars in those countries. This material and firsthand accounts gleaned from diaries, letters, and unpublished reminisces add genuine depth to this account. The result is a broad, sweeping work that captures America on the eve of empire building, replete with revealing insights that sometimes sink under the weight of tangential narrative and uneven writing.

Unrest, War, and Insurrection

Jackson begins his narrative by recounting the decades of unrest created by exploitive Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century. The vestiges of a once vast overseas empire in the New World and the Pacific were island possessions that included Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and “Spain was a parasite sucking them dry.” Spanish policy bred unrest, years of armed rebellion, and revolution that was met with terrible force. The Cuban rebellion, Jackson notes, lasted nearly thirty years and was not quelled by military action, arrests, executions, or the establishment of reconcentrados­—concentration camps created to separate rural populations from rebels.

Splendid Liberators describes the outsized role the American press had in publicizing and then exaggerating Spain’s heinous efforts to suppress unrest and crush rebellion. Symbolic images of “Cuba as a starving woman with sunken eyes and fleshless ribs” in a reconcentrado first appeared in print in 1896. American correspondents were imprisoned and deported. Nothing outraged Americans more, however, than lurid stories of defiled Cuban maidens, trumpeted with banner headlines asking: “Does Our Flag Shield Women?” Eventually, “coverage reached an unprecedented level of shrillness and cascading cries for intervention became the new norm,” as correspondents flooded Cuba and yellow journalism took hold of New York City’s penny press and midwestern weeklies.

Although previous works explore this coverage more fully (for one, Charles Henry Brown’s The Correspondents’ War), Jackson is on solid ground with claims that the popular press of that day shaped American foreign policy. The author describes how pressure built on the McKinley Administration—especially on the president himself, “a man trapped between two unmoving rocks of belief” between peace and humanitarianism—to intervene in Cuba and ultimately declare war on Spain.

Even in this well-grounded beginning of Splendid Liberators, what should be a tight narrative thread begins to unravel. Jackson first loses his narrative focus here and writes pages about Stephen Crane, just one of the famed correspondents in Cuba. Then the author segues into an out-of-place discussion on the “roots of twentieth century American literature,” in which “suddenly, no higher meaning or old truths intercede, only the lonely struggle to survive amidst a revelatory rage.”

Splendid Liberators is mistitled. There was nothing splendid about one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

This will not be the last time Jackson writes maudlin prose in this book. Jackson can write vividly and with a keen eye for description. For instance, in describing the public reaction to yellow press accounts of Spanish assaults on Cuban women, Jackson writes that “America hummed like an angry hive.” At other times, he is mawkish, as when he describes American war fever making “the young and the restless want to be a part of it. The winds tremble. The distant thunder rolls.” 

More troubling for the reader is the author’s decision to cast bit players in recurring roles. In the book’s front matter, Jackson lists no fewer than 96 “Dramatis Personae” with narrative roles to play. These include infantry soldier Carl Sandburg (later poet and author) and nurse Clara Maass (a victim of voluntary yellow fever trials), and others who are only on the margins of the story here. Dozens of these minor actors come and go throughout Splendid Liberators, and what should be a crisp, lively narrative becomes at times stodgy and sluggish reading.

Race and Remembrance

Splendid Liberators is a book of social and political narrative history, as well as one of military history. While Brian McAllister Linn’s The Philippine War, 1899-1902 and G. J. A. O’Toole’s The Spanish War: An American Epic,1898 are standard military histories of these wars, Jackson does a credible job writing military accounts. He covers, in sound detail, military actions from fleet engagements to land battles—including the poorly planned assault on the San Juan Heights. The author is at his best, however, when he gleans from individual accounts the suffering and privations of the men and women caught up in this conflict.

Jackson uses some of these accounts to buttress his argument that racial animosity was a key factor in events leading up to and during the Spanish-American War and especially so during the Philippine Insurrection (1899–1902). For example, he ascribes McKinley’s failure to intervene in Cuba as early as 1897 to his fear that a free Cuba would be “a racial Utopia compared” to the United States, although the author’s assessment is based only on one obscure source.

He also describes the indignities heaped upon black units in the regular army, an indictment of the bigotry and racial animus of the times. For example, Jackson brings to light the little-known race riots in Tampa, Florida. It was, he writes, “one of the worst racial clashes in an army camp during the war, a culmination of all the hatred that had grown between blacks and whites,” not only in Florida but throughout the post-Reconstruction South and during the start of the Jim Crow era.

It was, however, only a harbinger of worse things to come. Splendid Liberators recounts outrages perpetrated on the Filipino people during the insurrection after the Spanish cession of the Philippines to the US. In retaliation for gruesome Filipino guerrilla tactics, Americans carried out reprisals and executed a scorched-earth policy against people they called “n*****s” and dehumanized as “gugus.” “The war that resulted transformed the archipelago into a post-apocalyptic wasteland of famine, disease, ecological disaster, and hundreds of thousands dead.”

American troops’ atrocities are cited in this book—the execution of unarmed prisoners and civilians, torture (including infamous waterboarding, called the “water cure” then), the wholesale destruction of crops and livestock, razed villages, targeted attacks on non-combatants, murder, and rape. Given these horrific and widespread war crimes, Splendid Liberators is mistitled. There was nothing splendid about one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

Jackson’s unflinching account of the Philippine Insurrection is the best of what narrative history can offer readers. Still, this book is not without flaws. Splendid Liberators is flecked with errors that should have been corrected by the author or a careful editor. Jackson, for example, describes the Krag-Jørgensen rifle carried by some American troops as a “30 shot, 5 caliber” weapon; it is a 30-caliber rifle with a five-round magazine. In another instance, Jackson claims an officer graduated “number 3,616 in West Point’s class of 1894—the ‘goat.’” That graduating class numbered 54. These errors are not confined to the text. The 43 historic photos in the book include a picture of Frederick Funston, a pivotal figure in the conflict who fought in Cuba and the Philippines. The caption claims Funston is wearing the uniform of a junior officer of volunteers, but, in fact, this is a photo of Funston as a brigadier general in the US Army. The cover art, ostensibly illustrative of the American war with Spain that began in 1898, is a depiction of the Battle of Desmayo between Cuban insurgents and Spanish forces in 1896.

Beyond annoying errors of fact, the book can be difficult to read. Jackson sometimes skips forward and back, writing broken chronological accounts. This is distracting, especially when the author suddenly shifts from the past to the present tense when he writes not only about the same event, but even in the same paragraph. The notes, organized by page numbers, are a confusing jumble that don’t always provide a direct citation for quoted text. It’s difficult to reconcile attribution and specific claims in Jackson’s work with either a primary or a secondary source.

Jackson also makes acerbic comments throughout his book, wholly out of place even in writing a narrative history. He writes, for example, that various American presidents looked to the Philippines and “hoped to recast the archipelago ‘in our image.’ Considering America’s current number of mass killings, they succeeded.” In another instance, he claims to have found a “frequent fixture in the American character: patriotism that allows malice at home, and … murder overseas.”

In the end, Jackson’s Splendid Liberators is a bitter commentary on the onset of the age of American empire and especially on the nation’s first wars overseas. On many levels, then, this is a difficult book to read; but its critique of American exceptionalism and the nation’s little wars cannot be ignored.

New York, August 16, 1824. The guns had scarcely fallen silent when the bells began. Bunting unfurled; apprentices scrambled onto rooftops; veterans pinned sun-faded cockades. A steamboat shrieked past Staten Island as ferries veered in for a glimpse of the man the papers called the Nation’s Guest. Then the figure who had once ridden beside Washington—older now but unmistakable—stepped ashore at Castle Garden: Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette. At the subsequent reception, “In they came, rich and poor, Black and white … old veterans, young soldiers.” For thirteen months and more than six thousand miles, through all twenty-four states, variations of that scene replayed: processions, banquets, tears, toasts. Ryan L. Cole’s The Last Adieu invites us to follow Lafayette’s Farewell Tour—and asks why it mattered.

Cole, a former speechwriter to Governor Mitch Daniels and author of Light-Horse Harry Lee, writes with a journalist’s eye for municipal pageantry: arches and illuminated decorations, menus and militia drills, the civic theater of a republic tidying itself because a hero is coming. He is superb at showing how towns rehearsed gratitude until welcome became a national language, even if the interpretive spine sometimes lags behind the scenes. Published to mark the tour’s bicentennial this year, The Last Adieu doubles as commemoration and lens: a timely reminder that Lafayette’s persona—so steeped in Revolutionary ideals—could briefly knit a fractious nation together, and a mirror for our own moment.

The timing was perfect. In 1824, the United States was noisy, expanding—and divided. The presidential race splintered over who would succeed James Monroe: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, or William H. Crawford. The economy lurched; slavery’s westward push darkened debate; and the Revolution’s living witnesses were fading, their ideals dimmed in a more partisan, commercial age. With the Declaration of Independence’s fiftieth anniversary approaching, Americans looked backward with yearning. The Founding Fathers had become figures of near-mythic unity, even as that unity had always been fragile. Few of them remained alive—only John Adams and Thomas Jefferson still survived among the great names. In this atmosphere of nostalgia and uncertainty, one man embodied the living memory of that heroic age: the Marquis de Lafayette, the last surviving major general of the Continental Army and George Washington’s self-proclaimed “adopted son.”

President James Monroe recognized the symbolic power of inviting Lafayette to return from France for the approaching semicentennial. The results of the Tour were extraordinary. As a foreign hero above domestic factions, visiting hundreds of cities and counties, Lafayette indeed became a unifying emblem in a season of division. Cities and towns staged vast civic rituals, and political opponents stood side by side to cheer “the last general of the American Revolution.” The tour turbocharged early American celebrity culture—portraits, ribbons, crockery, songs, and endless newspaper coverage—and it catalyzed commemoration: monuments rose, Revolutionary sites were restored, and local histories flourished. In celebrating Lafayette, Americans rediscovered the Revolution itself.

As Cole explains in The Last Adieu, Monroe’s invitation arrived alongside private letters from old comrades who wished to see the marquis “before it was too late.” Lafayette needed little persuading: he longed to embrace his brothers-in-arms—and he had other reasons to come. Under the Bourbon Restoration, he was admired by some but sidelined by many, criticized from the right for his liberalism and from the left for his moderation. He longed—not unreasonably—for the public affection he had once known in America. Materially, he needed relief: years of imprisonment and confiscations during the French Revolution had damaged his fortune. The American visit promised not only honor but concrete support: Congress would ultimately vote him a substantial cash grant ($200,000) and a land grant of 24,000 acres in Florida—welcome help to a man whose finances had been battered. He also wished to see how the republic had grown since 1784. And ideologically, he hoped that his reports and writings on a thriving American experiment might rekindle liberal confidence abroad, especially in France.

The 1820s did not simply “discover” Lafayette—they made him through souvenirs and songs, orations and schoolbook stories, and the christening of towns.

Cole opens the story at La Grange, Lafayette’s château, moving readers past portraits and objects that summarize a long life—a gallery-like prelude that orients without claiming to be a full biography. Swift and effective, it still raises background questions that would enrich the opening: why did contemporaries judge his wartime role crucial? What shifted between Washington’s caution in the 1790s and the adoration of 1824? How did Adrienne de Noailles shape his life? And why was his standing so battered amongst his French countrymen, and yet he achieved a kind of apotheosis in America? The next chapter’s survey of US politics and growth is informative but long for material not tightly tied to Lafayette; much of the content could have been braided into the itinerary.

The heart of the book traces the Farewell Tour almost day by day: six thousand miles by steamboats and canals, stagecoach and horseback. Cole draws on an impressive trove of newspapers, correspondence, municipal records, invitations, and speeches to paint New York’s delirium; Philadelphia’s pageantry; receptions in Washington City and Lafayette’s remarks to Congress; the hushed pilgrimage to Mount Vernon; Yorktown’s anniversary; a push west to the frontier; and the spill and scare when the Mechanic sank near Louisville. Towns refurbished Revolutionary landmarks; souvenirs proliferated; a young consumer republic learned to monetize—and memorialize—its gratitude. The landing’s emotional temperature is “the return of the Revolution … the perfect confluence of feeling, history and time.” No faction could monopolize him; Lafayette became “the object of the entire nation’s admiration.”

Read alongside the itinerary, the book doubles as a brisk portrait of a republic transformed in half a century. Canals and steamboats collapse distances; print culture and civic associations thicken public life; towns balloon into cities with new markets, professions, and tastes; party structures harden even as civic rituals try to soften them. Without pausing the narrative, Cole lets readers feel how different 1824 looks from 1776—an America more populous, commercial, infrastructural, and self-conscious about its past. That lightly threaded backdrop is one of the study’s most engaging contributions.

One of Cole’s other signal contributions is staging the tour as a traveling theater with a marvelous ensemble. Closest to the star are his son, Georges Washington de Lafayette—who lived with the Washington family during his parents’ imprisonment during the French Revolution—and Auguste Levasseur, the indefatigable secretary-publicist whose 1829 account helped shape memory of the journey. In city after city appear elderly veterans, Masonic lodges in full regalia, merchants turning admiration into handkerchiefs and medallions, poets and bandmasters minting odes, politicians like Andrew Jackson and orators like Daniel Webster, French émigrés, and the Custis family at Arlington and Mount Vernon. John Quincy Adams toasts him; Jefferson and Madison receive him; schoolgirls crown him with garlands; printers sell broadsides by the ream. Cole is at his best when he lets this cast bustle across the page.

The blow-by-blow gives texture and momentum, but at times repetition creeps in—the long streak of parades, crowds, balls, dinners, veterans, Freemasons, political notables, and miles traveled on horseback. Within a single volume, Cole understandably privileges pace; even so, a few added scaffolding beams would steady the interpretive frame.

A firmer thematic spine—veterans’ culture, municipal boosterism, Masonic networks, the press as promoter, preservation and philanthropy, celebrity and politics—would more directly test whether Lafayette truly “united” the nation amid serious political and economic strains. That newspapers wrote less about party while he was in town does not, by itself, mean that minds reconciled. Cole notes grumbles about “too much adulation” and cites Lafayette’s confidence in a “reconciliatory effect,” but dissenting voices and partisan readings would sharpen the question. Likewise, historians trying to understand the mechanics of nineteenth-century fame—how adoration is constructed and to what ends—could profit from modern celebrity studies.

Another thread could have been Lafayette’s evolving ideas. What precisely did he believe by 1824, and how had his views shifted since wartime and the 1784 tour? The book offers flashes—on emancipation, religious liberty, representation, women’s education—but little synthesis. A comparative glance at 1777–81, 1784, and 1824–25 would illuminate constancies and adjustments and show how his principles met the realities of a more populous, commercially ambitious, infrastructural America.

Subjects that surface in anecdotes could also use fuller treatment. Slavery appears repeatedly—in cityscapes, in encounters (Cole notes an old acquaintance from 1777, “Pompey,” with whom Lafayette shares champagne), and through Frances Wright—yet Lafayette’s antislavery program (his experimental plantation, his advocacy in France, the through-line of his views) receives only brief attention. Native nations appear at the margins: the Creek predicament is sketched, as are the effects of expansion and industrialization on Indigenous life, but we hear little of Lafayette’s responses to Native Americans, a topic close to his heart—he collected indigenous artifacts at La Grange after the tour. Women beyond Wright are mostly belles at balls; there are richer ways to see them as shapers of memory culture in academies, civic philanthropy, trades, and commemorations, and to bring forward Lafayette’s views on women’s education and rights.

Another shortcoming is that Cole leaves Lafayette’s companions on the journey under-drawn. Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette’s private secretary, appears mainly as a source rather than a presence. Yet Levasseur was far more than a stenographer: his Journal of a Voyage to the United States of America (published in 1829) became the official narrative of the tour, shaping how Americans and Europeans alike remembered it. A skilled propagandist and liberal journalist, Levasseur helped craft the marquis’s public image as the “nation’s guest,” curating newspaper coverage, organizing appearances, and controlling access. Through his pen, Lafayette’s passage became a model of transatlantic republican virtue—part travelogue, part political lesson, and part mythmaking.

Lafayette’s son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, likewise receives only passing notice. His very name—bestowed in honor of his father’s American mentor—embodied the symbolic bridge between the two republics. Georges had once taken refuge at Mount Vernon during the darkest years of the French Revolution, and his return to America in 1824 alongside his father closed that emotional circle. His impressions of a vastly transformed United States, and his role as both filial companion and emblem of youth in the public ceremonies, could have deepened the narrative. The father-son dynamic—aged hero and heir, memory and renewal—offered a human dimension to the tour that remains largely latent in Cole’s telling.

Cole deserves real credit, though, for weaving Frances (Fanny) Wright into the story. A Scottish-born writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and later a US citizen, Wright addressed diverse audiences on politics and reform, advocated universal education, women’s legal rights and liberal divorce laws, birth control, and emancipation, and in 1825 founded the Nashoba commune to model a path from slavery to freedom. She traveled alongside parts of the tour, visited Monticello with Lafayette, and moved within reform networks he admired. Cole’s inclusion of her perspective is a real strength of the book, even if the material invites even more examination of Wright and Lafayette together. We should understand their ideas in dialogue rather than in parallel.

If Americans in 1824–25 used Lafayette to remember who they had been, our task today is to use him to think about who we might become.

One further question—apt for the bicentennial of Lafayette’s farewell tour—is how the tour itself shaped the telling of Revolutionary history: did schoolbooks, local histories, and national narratives accord Lafayette a larger place after 1825, just as towns and counties took his name? Answering that would round out the story Cole has begun.

Because Lafayette was profoundly transatlantic, the clearest opportunity for expansion is the French side of the story. The book notes his divergent standing in France but rarely lets French sources speak. Was the tour followed in Parisian papers? Did Lafayette or Levasseur write home to seed the “reviving [of] moribund liberal spirits in France”? How did the journey affect his position under Louis XVIII and Charles X, and the energies that would break in 1830? Given the American rejoicing rendered here, the comparative shadow feels faint.

Accuracy matters in a history book. The Metz dinner occurred in 1775, not 1776. Washington’s physician was James Craik, not “John Cochran.” Lafayette did not “found” the French branch of the Society of the Cincinnati; he was a prominent member, not its founder. None is fatal; all are easy to fix.

To its credit, the book’s insights travel well to the present. Cole shows how public ritual and shared memory can, at least for a season, quiet partisan tempers. Editors who had dined on faction turned to parade routes and ball menus; rivals cheered side by side as the “Nation’s Guest” passed. Whether that harmony outlasted the fireworks is harder to prove, but the aspiration is recognizable. He also reminds us that commemoration is constructed. The 1820s did not simply “discover” Lafayette—they made him through souvenirs and songs, orations and schoolbook stories, and the christening of towns.

Many moments of the Tour are beautifully rendered, too many to list, but three scenes especially linger. At Mount Vernon, Lafayette emerges from the vault “with his eyes overflowing with tears,” and George Washington Parke Custis presents him with a ring containing Washington’s hair, creating a genuinely moving moment for the reader; later, as Lafayette glimpses Mount Vernon for the last time from the deck of the ship carrying him back to France, the farewell is all the more poignant. On the Ohio River, Lafayette and his party face the greatest peril of their journey when the steamboat Mechanic sinks near Louisville on the night of May 8. Cole’s account lingers on the chaos in the dark, the drowning of a beloved dog, the terrifying uncertainty over whether Lafayette’s son has survived, and the loss of clothing, keepsakes, and money gathered along the way, before the party regroups and continues on through Indiana and Kentucky to Cincinnati. And last but not least is Lafayette’s comparison that France might have fared differently had 1789 “kept its original direction,” which makes the tour feel less like a triumphal victory lap than a final, insistent argument for liberalism.

The Last Adieu is, finally, a generous gift for readers who want to walk the route, see the arches, hear the bands, and meet the people—veterans and politicians, reformers and merchants, mothers and schoolboys—who made a continental party of gratitude. The research in correspondence, newspapers, and municipal ephemera is tireless; the portrait vivid and exhilarating.

The affection has proved enduring. Across the United States, towns named Lafayette, counties styled “Fayette,” and innumerable streets, squares, schools, and colleges attest to a sustained habit of gratitude. In 2024–25, the American Friends of Lafayette retraced the route with partners in all twenty-four states, reviving ceremonies and teaching the principles Lafayette championed. The Lafayette Trail continues to map and mark sites nationwide; in France, several efforts are led by the Fondation Chambrun. Forthcoming commemorations from 2026 through 2033 promise deeper public engagement on both sides of the Atlantic.

Taken together, these projects underscore the very point Cole presses: commemoration can do civic work, not just ceremonial work. If, as he shows, Americans in 1824–25 used Lafayette to remember who they had been, our task today is to use him to think about who we might become. The durable lesson of the Farewell Tour is not simply that a republic can crown a hero for a year, but that liberal ideals of constitutionalism, civic equality, the rule of law, and representative government can be taught, argued, and renewed. This book, abundant in scenes, sturdy in reportage, candid about what it leaves up for debate, helps that renewal along. Now, in 2025, with America 250 approaching, Lafayette’s story offers a guide: commemoration can be more than ceremony—an occasion to elevate constitutional ideals and recover a sense of common purpose.

Helen Andrews has a point about wokeness and women. Together, they have done a lot of damage to American institutions.

As many of her critics have pointed out, males as well as females are culpable for mistakes of the 2010s, when performative racial grievance elevated a new multiracial elite at the expense of everyone else, including and especially non-white non-elites. Yet, unlike many of Andrews’ other critics, I do concede that college-educated women deserve a disproportionate share of the blame. 

However, contra Andrews, I contend that this is not the result of elevating women. It’s the result of elevating the wrong women: the kinds of women who organize marches with no discernible objectives, yet claim to embody female empowerment. The kinds of women who cry and scream because professors do not forbid other young adults from wearing Halloween costumes they find offensive, yet claim to be “tolerant” above all. The kinds of women who cannot define the word “woman,” yet insist that the world is rife with misogyny. 

In other words, we have elevated the kinds of women (and, it bears mentioning, the kinds of men, too) who are chronological adults yet think and behave like toddlers: profoundly unreasonable, proudly irrational, and occasionally hysterical. 

The problem Andrews identifies, then, is not feminization. It is infantilization. 

America the Infantile

For over a decade now, clickbait sound bites and one-sided narratives have both created and reflected all sides of our polarized politics and culture. True believers on the left have various litmus tests of illogical allegiance for friends, family members, and politicians alike: trans women are women, equity is true equality, and masculinity is toxic. Their counterparts on the right likewise have nonsensical premises that bond them to like-minded others: America is a Christian nation, America first means America alone, and women ruin workplaces. 

No right-thinking adult could take these views seriously, let alone hold them. They have been elevated because there are now far too many overgrown children, both male and female, in positions of political and cultural power. This immaturity is affecting and infecting nearly all of our political and cultural institutions, rendering Andrews’ fear of a future in which rationality is superseded by irrationality entirely legitimate—and not by the left’s hand alone. 

People with adult qualities of mind and character uniformly accept the reality principle that economist Thomas Sowell has termed “the constrained vision.” They recognize that trade-offs between competing goods and values are an irreducible aspect of personal and political life, and that eradicating these trade-offs is not possible. Grown-ups also recognize that, given the constant reality of competing goods and values, not all moral people will prioritize those goods and values in the exact same way. Among adults who actually merit the designation, Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism reigns: it is entirely possible for two perfectly reasonable people to disagree without one of them necessarily being evil. 

The leftist excesses that rightly worry Andrews are borne of a widespread rejection of these basic tenets of political and cultural maturity. There is also an abdication of personal responsibility for one’s own failures and successes. When everything is “systemic,” nothing is really up to anyone. There is no authority. So it should come as no surprise that performative helplessness, the defining characteristic of toddlerhood, is arguably today’s most potent political and cultural currency, on left and right alike. 

In the remainder of this essay, I will make two arguments. First, I will illustrate why Andrews’ feminization thesis is such a seductive red herring—but a red herring all the same—for the real problem of endemic, unisex American immaturity. Second, I will make the case for recognizing anew, and actively elevating, the incomparable societal value of grown-up women. 

Not All Women

In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed, Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility, topped the bestseller lists. DiAngelo’s thesis is that white people should treat Black people not as fellow human beings and presumptive equals but as endemic “others” meriting sycophantic devotion. She can be fairly considered the founding mother of what New York Times columnist and Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter calls “woke racism,” or the creepy condescension of the racial equity initiatives that dominated mainstream academic and corporate spaces from 2020 to 2022: The Smithsonian calling “being on time” a tenet of “white supremacy”; discussion circles in schools and elsewhere segregating participants by race; and politicians allowing crime to spike, watching while schools instituted so-called “restorative justice,” and echoing activists’ calls to “defund the police.” 

These patronizing affronts against the dignity of Black Americans (which managed at the same time to introduce various kinds of discrimination against white males ) were not perpetuated equally by Americans of all races, creeds, and colors. Indeed, as I wrote in 2020, progressive, college-educated white women bear a disproportionate share of the blame for the mainstreaming and institutionalizing of the worst “woke” excesses of 2020 and beyond. Without thousands of shrill “mini-mes” embedded everywhere across the nation, DiAngelo would easily have been dismissed as an incoherent, self-aggrandizing fool. 

Adults are supposed to embody authority and women are supposed to be adults. We may need men more than fish need bicycles, but we should not need them in any given moment to make boys or girls behave. 

For Andrews, this reality of women’s unequal blame in the various leftist excesses of recent years amounts to “feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” In other words, wokeness is a direct consequence of the increasing number of women. That alone made wokeness inevitable. 

Andrews fails to notice how our institutions’ elevation of anti-meritocratic performative empathy over reason, and of anti-pluralistic intolerance in the name of tolerance, happened concordantly with their inclusion of women. Unless Andrews is arguing that the removal of barriers to female advancement is, in itself, an outgrowth of leftist excess (which, to be fair, she is not), then correlation and causation remain distinct things. 

So, the problem is not that we began including women, but that we began paying obeisance to infantile nitwittery at the same time that we began including women. As a result, we have included too many infantile nitwits who happen to be women (along with, it bears mentioning, plenty of infantile nitwits who happen to be men). 

There is a complicated history behind this. As Erika Bachiochi has documented in The Rights of Women (2021), the earliest iterations of proto-feminism concerned themselves with women’s spiritual and legal equality within a framework of Christian virtue that applied to women and men alike. While males and females might be expected to demonstrate qualities like strength, bravery, and honor in distinct ways, owing to their inherent biological differences, these virtues themselves were expected from and prized in both sexes. 

Unfortunately, the history of mainstream feminism amounts to a series of moves away from this concept of women’s equal dignity and morality. Beginning in the nineteenth century with the equation of elite white women to “angels” whose feelings could stand in for moral argument—and extending to arguments for suffrage predicated not on women’s equal humanity but on their superior emotive morality—feminism and the corresponding progressivism lionized leftist women’s feelings. That’s where what Allie Beth Stuckey has termed “toxic empathy” (or, many progressives’ endemic elevation of feelings over reason) comes from. 

One can acknowledge that women are, on average, more agreeable and by extension more empathetic than men, and thus the likeliest and ablest promoters of toxic empathy, without accepting Andrews’ thesis. Likewise, to acknowledge that men are on average less agreeable and by extension more aggressive than women, and thus the likeliest and ablest perpetrators of violence, sexual and otherwise, is not to accept the theses of mainstream feminism. 

Empathy and aggression are morally neutral traits. But the indulgence of either, contrary to reason and civilization, should be expected and accepted only from toddlers. 

Our institutions have long been designed to resist, marginalize, and punish undue aggression, which can be properly understood as infantile masculinity, and to select for males mature enough not to indulge it. They were not designed to resist undue empathy. Indeed, many were long ago hijacked by a progressivism that equates unreasoned empathy with virtue. Hence, they resoundingly failed to resist, marginalize, or punish infantile femininity or to select for females mature enough to resist it. 

So, what Andrews positions as a simple chain of events (in came the women, and out went the objective truth!) fails to account for the character and quality—the maturity—of the women in question. In other words, we used to value objective truth and exclude women; now, we value infantile untruth and include women. 

What have we never yet tried? Valuing truth and including women. 

If we attempt that, I suspect we shall find that America is in fact home to large numbers of actual adults who happen to be female. Indeed, I am fairly certain that we could fill every relevant institution many times over with such women, while avoiding all the perils of what Andrews misleadingly calls “feminization.”

My primary worry for America’s future, though, is not that there are too many infantile, weak-minded women in historically male spaces, but that there are not enough mature, strong-minded women in historically female ones. 

American Girl Power

Andrews is worried that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” The predictive value of this statement depends entirely upon the maturity of the females in question. My own worry is that the nation itself will not survive if our mass infantilization continues. 

If we want to grow and institutionalize renewed American maturity, we need adult women to lead the way—not only in our board rooms and courtrooms, but first and foremost in our homes and schools. 

Historically female spaces, as well as historically male ones, merit and require the triumph of reason and discipline over impulse and indulgence. This is necessary for the country to persist. 

After all, it is teachers and mothers lacking in adult reason and authority who produce girls too weak and sentimental to resist misguided empathy (take a look, once again, at today’s young female left) and boys too weak and petulant to resist revolutionary destruction (take a look, if you can bear it, at today’s young male right). 

Those who advocate for more stay-at-home dads and more male teachers, as Richard Reeves does in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men, do so in large part to diversify role models for male success. I have no objection to that. But another tacit assumption is also at work here: we need more male teachers to facilitate better school experiences for boys. Men will allow for more male competition and bodily movement, yet tolerate less bad behavior. 

Aside from realizing that the kinds of men who tend to go into education are not particularly likely to resist the antimeritocratic, undisciplined tenets of today’s educational institutions and that men are not going to become stay-at-home dads or teachers en masse (unless we socially engineer that outcome, psychological and personality differences between men and women being what they are), we must resoundingly reject the notion that women must be flanked by men in order to exact compliance from children. 

American women should be universally more than equal to the task of establishing sufficient structure and authority to facilitate children’s education and formation, whether there are more men in our homes and schools or not. 

I defy anyone to find me any child or group of children hailing from law-abiding, two-parent homes, from toddlerhood through grade school, who I cannot deftly keep in line. This is not a boast; it is a baseline and a given, and one that should be shared with every other normal woman in America. Adults are supposed to embody authority, and women are supposed to be adults. We may need men more than fish need bicycles, but we should not need them in any given moment to make boys or girls behave. 

To put it another way: returning the right’s “soft girl” moms and the left’s gentle “parenting” moms from the courtroom to the classroom and the home would not serve anyone’s interests. Weakness disguised as virtue destroys everything it touches, and schools and homes are upstream of laws and research. 

Thus, we are no better off with today’s overgrown little girls failing to do the work of yesterday’s grown women than we are with their failing to do the work of yesterday’s grown men. Indeed, the former might be more destructive. 

The key to reversing our national infantilization, then, is not to have fewer female attorneys. Rather, we need more Tocquevillian matriarchs—as lawyers and nurses and engineers, yes—but most importantly, as mothers. 

We need, in short, the hands of more grown women like Helen Andrews, rocking more cradles to rule an imperiled world.

Housing has become front-page politics. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City featured pledges to freeze rents and build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, responding to an issue that is felt to be increasingly urgent nationwide. Public housing and rent control have bad track records, but Mamdani’s sense of urgency is justified. Why is housing so expensive? In most sectors, modern technological capitalism has brought plenty, making former luxuries cheap, and food plentiful, yet it seems harder than ever to get a roof over one’s head. What explains that? 

Naturally, there are multiple factors. Partly, remote work has dialed up demand. Partly, housing is a financial asset that often tracks other financial assets such as stocks. But the real problem is the way housing supply is constrained by red tape. 

To house people more affordably, we need to make homebuilding more efficient. But a deeply entrenched overregulation of land use and the building trades keeps homebuilding firms small and backward. Other industries—aviation, computing, agriculture, containerized shipping, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and so on—have raised productivity through deregulation, big business, innovation, automation, standardization, and scalability. Homebuilding needs to follow suit.

The Divergence of Home Prices and Paychecks

Housing really has become unaffordable for many people, and Figure 1 sheds light on this by comparing (a) the median sale price for homes, (b) the Case-Shiller home price index, and (c) median household income, all adjusted for inflation and normalized so that the year 2000 = 100. Together, they detail how home prices have diverged from paychecks.

Figure 1. The time trend towards housing unaffordability

Source: US Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), accessed October 2025. Series include:

• Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States (MSPUS, US Census Bureau, quarterly) 
• S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index (CSUSHPINSA, S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and CoreLogic, monthly) 
• Median Household Income in the United States (MEHOINUSA646N, US Census Bureau, annual)
• Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (All Items, SA) (CPIAUCSL, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, monthly)

The median home sale price has risen from a 1990 median of $293,630 to $418,975 in 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars). This can be misleading because of composition effects (rich versus poor doing more of the selling). The Case-Shiller index addresses that by tracking prices across repeat sales of the same houses for selected cities. It omits new houses and doesn’t sufficiently capture home improvements, but it gives meaning to a particular concept of housing affordability. The same houses that were affordable to middle-income families a generation ago are often unaffordable for them today.

Real median household income, also shown in Figure 1, hasn’t shown the steady uptrend that one would hope for. It rose and fell during the dot-com bubble and its aftermath, then rose and fell again during the 2000s housing bubble and its aftermath, and was lower in 2012 than in 1995. Since then, incomes have been rising, but haven’t kept up with housing prices. In the 1990s, it took roughly four years’ worth of median household income to cover the median home sale price. This surged to roughly five years in 2004–06, and approached six years in 2022. By the Case-Shiller measure, home prices climbed more than 50 percent relative to median incomes between the 1990s and the 2020s. 

None of this quite proves that, in general, kitchens and bedrooms, central heating, front porches, and nice neighborhoods with good schools, etc., have become less affordable vis-à-vis basic earning power. Rising prices in established urban neighborhoods, as tracked by Case-Shiller, often reflect falling crime and other real improvements in quality of life. A benign urban revival has occurred in many places. And while homebuilding has slowed, new houses tend to be larger, while older houses get expanded, so the average family has more floor space than in the past. US cities have also tended to de-densify over time, so people are living their lives in less crowded spaces.

At best, rising home prices could be a win-win. Incumbent homeowners enjoy capital gains in pleasantly gentrifying neighborhoods, while income-constrained young families move further out, but get larger homes in spacious emerging neighborhoods with plenty of amenities and their own prospects for capital gain. But the reality is less benign than that.

When the Office Came Home

The recent surge in home prices reflects familiar factors—low interest rates and broad asset optimism—but also one distinctive shock: the mass breakthrough of remote work forced by the pandemic. When lockdowns hit in 2020, office work didn’t break, and managers discovered that the office was optional. Hours worked from home have fallen from a 2020 peak of 60 percent to about 27 percent, but the decline is leveling off. The best guess for the new normal is roughly one in four hours worked remotely.

A leap in productivity made cars affordable for ordinary families and helped create a middle-class way of life defined by mobility, household appliances, and a backyard for the kids. Housing needs a similar breakthrough.

This shift has clear long-term benefits for families, communities, and productivity, but awkward short-term consequences for housing. Mondragon and Wieland (2022) find that each additional percentage point of remote-work prevalence across metro areas corresponds to a 0.9 percent rise in house-price growth and may explain about 12 percent of the national increase in real home prices since 2019. The mechanism is intuitive: when people work from home, they consume more space. Extra bedrooms become offices; empty nesters postpone downsizing. Stanton and Tiwari (2021) show that remote workers choose larger homes and different locations, consistent with higher housing-space demand. 

Remote work also helps explain why the 2020–24 housing boom was more evenly spread than that of 2002–06, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The house price surge in 2002–06 was concentrated, that of 2020–24 was diffuse

Source: US Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), accessed October 2025.

The earlier boom centered on “superstar” metros tied to the IT revolution, where proximity drove productivity. Today’s rise in prices is economy-wide. Freed from the daily commute, some remote workers operate as the arbitrageurs of housing markets—leaving expensive cities for cheaper regions and taking their jobs with them. That has narrowed inter-city price gaps but spread affordability pressures nationwide.

 It’s widely recognized now that superstar cities’ costs drive workers away from high-productivity regions—and thus hurt national output. Those supply bottlenecks still weigh on productive metros, but remote work is beginning to outflank them—exposing another constraint: our inefficiency in building new housing. Remote work increases the need for space only modestly. Its large price impact stems from inelastic supply. When housing demand rises, a sluggish and bureaucratically hamstrung construction sector struggles to meet it.

Why We Need a Henry Ford of Housing

It would be nice if twenty-first-century homebuilding could emulate twentieth-century carmaking. Henry Ford’s assembly line raised output per worker by roughly 700 percent between 1913 and 1925, cutting the time to build a Model T from twelve hours to ninety minutes. That leap in productivity made cars affordable for ordinary families and helped create a middle-class way of life defined by mobility, household appliances, and a backyard for the kids. Housing needs a similar breakthrough.

The best proof of concept already exists where the automotive and real-estate sectors overlap: the mobile home. Factory-built housing achieves large productivity gains because it is standardized, mechanized, and—crucially—shielded from local red tape. Federal code preemption under the 1976 HUD Code created a nationwide market in which homes could be mass-produced and sold across state lines. That legal loophole allows real economies of scale: costs average about $88 per square foot in 2024, roughly half those of site-built homes.

For a time, manufactured homes steadily gained market share, peaking at 580,000 units shipped in 1973—more than a quarter of all new single-family homes—before collapsing to 50,000 per year by 2009. Researchers such as Carly Slade (2019) and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (2024) have shown how institutions throttled the industry as zoning boards and local codes reasserted control. Urban Institute (2018) data show that three-quarters of US jurisdictions restrict or ban manufactured homes in residential zones.

Where federal preemption ends, local obstruction begins. The HUD chassis rule (24 CFR § 3280.902) adds cost and precludes basements. Zoning blocks infill, while “affordable housing” subsidies such as LIHTC and HOME direct resources to much costlier projects—often $250 per square foot. The result is a perversity: government suppresses naturally affordable housing with one hand and subsidizes bureaucratized “affordability” with the other.

Ironically, the same HUD Code that limits mobile homes’ design also demonstrates what can happen when production is liberated from local micromanagement. Factory-built housing shows that standardized, scalable methods can deliver abundance. Yet outside that narrow sector, construction productivity has stagnated. Labor productivity in US construction has fallen more than 30 percent since 1970, even as the broader economy’s productivity has doubled. The industry remains one of the least digitized: dominated by small contractors, solving problems locally, and too fragmented for systematic R&D or technology adoption.

With luck, we might get a pattern for houses like we have for cars, where the rich buy the newest and best while people on a budget buy hand-me-downs that are still pretty good.

Occupational licensing compounds the problem. As economist Morris Kleiner documents in Licensing Occupations (2006) and Guild-Ridden Labor Markets (2021), licensing growth in construction has outpaced nearly every other field, raising prices without measurable quality gains. The apprenticeships typically required to get occupational licenses have their romance, but doing and teaching are actually different skills, and the route to productive, specialized work today usually runs through education and open competition, not incumbent gatekeeping.

Mobile homes are what economists call an “inferior good,” like margarine, instant Ramen, or public transit, disproportionately bought by poor people, because they can’t be wider than road lanes allow, which precludes the most appealing floor plans. More mobile home adoption as starter housing would free people to start families sooner and help them save money for a down payment on something better. Meanwhile, further up the scale, new building materials, more energy-efficient designs, smart homes with embedded Internet of Things devices, and integrated photovoltaics, AI, 3-D printing, and virtual and augmented reality—want to walk through your dream home virtually before you build it?—are enabling new frontiers of convenience and luxury. With all this improvement going on, it’s a missed opportunity that we’ve let the median age of US housing rise from 31 years in 2005 to 41 years in 2023.

Fast broadband connections, including to build sites by wireless and satellite, computer vision, augmented reality for smart tools, delivery of supplies by autonomous vehicle or even by drone, AI, and the new culture of remote work among workers and managers, are all tools in the arsenal of a potential Henry Ford of twenty-first-century housing who might bring factory efficiencies to on-site homebuilding. Humanoid robots won’t build houses anytime soon—general robot dexterity remains elusive—but task-specific robots and smart tools could help. The scale economies, capital intensity, and benign deskilling characteristic of Fordism are more achievable in a geographically distributed business like on-site homebuilding, now that broadband is ubiquitous and remote work is normal. And AI art, 3-D printing, and augmented and virtual reality open up fascinating new possibilities to satisfy idiosyncratic tastes and sentiments while at the same time deploying factory-produced modular components, capable of easy repair and upgrading, to make homes as smart as phones and cars. With luck, we might get a pattern for houses like we have for cars, where the rich buy the newest and best while people on a budget buy hand-me-downs that are still pretty good. But we can’t find out what can be achieved because the same forces stand in the way: incumbent gatekeeping in licensed building trades; opaque and fragmented local zoning and building codes; and firms too small to practice scientific management and lean into technological progress.

Finding the Freedom to Build

Housing needs a strong dose of libertarian common sense. Some things are none of the government’s business, and low construction productivity and housing unaffordability are largely a function of government meddling more than it should.

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that Americans fall asleep tonight and are visited by the ghosts of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, who teach them new principles. They then wake up burning with new convictions that all men are created with equal and inalienable rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, including the right to improve one’s land as one sees fit, park a mobile home in one’s backyard, and hire whomever one wants to fix wires and pipes. Convinced that governments are instituted among men to protect, and not to violate, these rights, they alter or abolish zoning and occupational licensing boards. What would happen next?

Our housing affordability problems would melt away. The change would probably begin with a lot of mobile home infill in suburbs. Consolidation and scaling in the homebuilding and rental industries would follow. Then we’d see technological change and productivity growth in construction, as we did in manufacturing. By the late twenty-first century, the next generation might look back on the bad old days when only the rich had graceful, garden-ringed mansions the way we look back on the bad old days when only the rich had cars.

As St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas wisely taught, “human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason. … Insofar as it deviates from right reason, it is called an unjust law; in such case, it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.” This admirable principle is difficult to put into practice. But the rise of Uber provides a fascinating case study in a kind of capitalist civil disobedience for the common good, which might outflank the unreasonable rules that bottleneck homebuilding. Before 2009, taxi service was controlled by tight rules that served no purpose except to enrich certain insiders. Uber’s “ride-sharing” service was effectively a taxi service, yet it launched in city after city, quite outside the rules, and was borderline or outright illegal. Some authorities intervened with cease-and-desist orders, fines, and impoundments of vehicles, but Uber ignored the orders, mobilized its customers, lobbied aggressively, and won. Likewise, to fix housing, entrepreneurs may need to combine the virtues of Henry Ford and Robin Hood.

Wendell Berry’s most recent novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, cements him as one of America’s finest propagandists.

I don’t mean this as a personal attack. Berry, now 91, has written more (and more insightful) essays, novels, and poems in his old age alone than most of us could imagine writing over the course of our entire lives. Several of these have impacted my life profoundly. Some I teach every year. 

But Berry has long displayed a tendency to subordinate artistic forms—which should seek primarily after beauty, a true representation of reality, and an authentic account of human flourishing—to politics. Berry’s art is didactic. It wants to teach you something, and that thesis—at least in Berry’s more recent work—is political. It has an ulterior motive. It wants to sell you something. Specifically, it wants to sell you the idea that there is one way of viewing politics that is correct and many, many others that are wrong. This approach instrumentalizes the art into a piece of technology and transforms his relationship with his audience from a dialogue—a mutual gazing on, paying attention to, and representing reality to discern the truth—into a monologue. 

Take, for example, this passage towards the end of Marce Catlett, in which Berry’s omniscient third-person narrator discusses how World War II transformed the role of farmers in America:

It was a foreign invasion, the homecoming of the war, except that the invaders now were the industrial corporations of urban America, employing rural labor as cheaply as possible to establish what has remained a domestic colonialism. … The good, frugal famers [sic] who drove their first tractors into the fields around Port William were entering, without knowing it, the technological romance of the corporate giants, the millionaires and the billionaires, who would conquer the earth, conquer “space,” invade Mars, a place known better to them than the country that grows their food. (This is now a policy of the second Trump administration.)

Here, Berry models his way of seeing the world. Human beings are divided into two groups: the good and the evil. On the side of the good, you have thinly veiled representations of four generations of Berry’s family and those who agreed with their politics. On the side of the bad, you have everyone who fails to live up to their standard. This latter group is doomed, in Berry’s eyes, to ideological slavery to the technocratic, Mars-conquering millionaires and billionaires who represent for Berry the logical and inevitable end to farmers using tractors.

On the side of the good, Berry holds up farmers like the ones in the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, a real organization founded in 1945 and dissolved in 2020. In our world, as writer Jodi Cash recounts, Wendell Berry’s father, John Berry Sr., witnessed his own father, Pryor Thomas Berry, come home to their place near Port Royal, Kentucky, from Louisville “with devastating news. After a year of ardent labor over his tobacco crop, he returned from the auction with not a penny for his efforts. What little money the fastidiously grown plant had earned was spent simply on the sale’s commission and transport to and from Louisville, some 40 miles from his home.” This inspired John Berry Sr. to devote his life to “protecting his father and fellow tobacco farmers from the same hardship. This was a promise he upheld, spending years as a lawyer and farmer” championing the Burley Tobacco Program, which his granddaughter Mary Berry tells us he was the “principal author” of, a piece of “New Deal agricultural legislation that dealt with tobacco” and “brought stability to thousands of small farmers in Kentucky. … The tobacco industry hated the Program because it required them to pay farmers fairly.”

Berry’s world sorts into two camps: the intellectually enlightened, hard-working old farmers and their ignorant, ease-seeking prodigal sons.

In Berry’s “fictional” novel, Marce Catlett, grandfather of long-time authorial stand-in character Andy Catlett, returns home from Louisville to their place near Port William, Kentucky, with devastating news. After a year of ardent labor over his tobacco crop, he has returned from its auction with not a penny for his efforts. What little money the fastidiously grown plant had earned was spent simply on the sale’s commission and transport to and from Louisville, some 40 miles from his home. This inspires his son Wheeler Catlett to devote his life to protecting his father and fellow tobacco farmers from the same hardship. This was a promise he upheld, spending years as a lawyer and farmer championing the Burley Tobacco Program, which our omniscient narrator tells us he was the principal author of, a piece of New Deal agricultural legislation that dealt with tobacco and brought stability to thousands of small farmers in Kentucky and was hated by the tobacco industry because it required them to pay farmers fairly.

You get the point. Marce Catlett’s front matter promises that “all of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” But this is simply not the case. Marce Catlett is the story of the Berry family’s political ventures, a “‘real story’” which, Berry tells us in his acknowledgments, “because it is mostly undocumented, must be told as fiction.” 

This intertwining of reality with fiction makes Berry’s easy division of the world into two camps, friend and enemy, more disturbing, as this valorization at best results in historical revisionism and at worst in a Pelagian vision of the world. Berry breaks with the tradition he’s worked in before, one which combined eastern and western philosophy and stretched back as far as Hesiod and the first indigenous peoples of the Americas, and instead accepts the modern, post-industrial view of human community that posits work—not leisure—as the basis of culture.

Here’s an example. Berry characterizes the farmers of Marce Catlett’s generation as achieving “an authentically settled life in place,” which was “not possible” before “because of chattel slavery and its malign influence on everything within its horizon. Slavery was, and it is, correctable only by the courage to connect freedom with responsibility … the ability and readiness to do one’s own work and to clean up one’s own messes.” The wisdom of this generation was in its anti-mobility, its taking up the duty it had to its particular place to put into effect, “from the work of [their] own hands,” a “democratic, anti-slavery, if not anti-racist, sentiment often spoken in the Port William neighborhood: ‘I won’t ask another man to do for me anything I won’t do for myself.’” These farmers believed that “if the puzzle of a community in place is put together and kept together long enough, it will work out on its own the terms and conditions of its coherence through time and change. It will need no help, no expert advice.” 

 Berry contends that human beings, if rooted to a particular place and left to their own devices, will basically work out any injustices that might come up through their own efforts and wisdom without any external help—including, presumably, the workings of divine grace. Historical injustices like racism and slavery occurred only because people were too focused on freedom of mobility and were unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions. Sin, for Berry, is ignorance, something that you can fix through your own work and efforts if you can think your way out of it.

Meanwhile, ideas that come from outside the community are suspect and bring totalizing solutions that undermine the real goods of rootedness. One of these intellectual viruses is Port William’s “failure to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself. Gradually, it had learned to value itself as outsiders—as the nation—valued it: as a ‘nowhere place,’ a place at the end of the wrong direction.” After World War II, and especially under the production-oriented USDA policies of the 1970s, the people of Port William were infected with, among other dangerous ideas, “a reluctance” towards the “accepting of the work,” as “they began—the older people slowly, the young at once—to work with their minds diverted to quitting time or Saturday night, places where the lights were bright and the good times rolled.”

Berry emphasizes the contrast in the old and new ways of approaching farm labor in his final chapters, which give highly detailed descriptions of older methods of growing tobacco. At every stage—from the burning of the tobacco fields to their being “painstakingly weeded” to the degree that “sometimes you needed the point of a blade of your pocket knife to remove the weed seedlings from among the tobacco seedlings” to the eradicating of pests by hand rather than via insecticide to the tobacco harvest itself, which Berry admits was excruciating, back-breaking labor—the farmers realized how great and enjoyable it all was. “The remarkable thing about this work, hard as it might be,” writes Berry, “was that you got used to it. And just at the hardest, hottest, most miserable, most troublesome moment,” someone would always “render a complaint of exceeding eloquence or make a joke or recall something funny … until the whole miserable bunch, without noticing how it had happened, would be enjoying themselves.” The difficulty, the painterly attention it demanded, made the work more significant, and the suffering that went along with it united the community and built the common character of their local culture.

A community that values leisure, with worship at its center, cannot but see its lack of self-sufficiency. It can only be fulfilled by something it receives as a gift, by grace.

Does an annual season of picking weed seedlings from the dirt with the tip of a knife not appeal to you? Does inspecting tobacco plants individually for hornworms and removing them by hand sound too hard? Do you not want to harvest tobacco in wet clothes and scorching heat? If you don’t, you don’t care about local community. Even if you do, looking forward to the weekend or thinking about using a backhoe or natural pesticides shows you’ve fallen prey to the externally imposed, un-local, unnatural, governmental mentality of tech billionaires, private space travel corporations, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of the United States, the “so-called conservatism that had always opposed” and ultimately ended the Burley Tobacco Program, the domestic colonialist architects of America’s economic production in World War II, tractor users, and everyone else Wendell Berry doesn’t like.

Obviously, I’m being hyperbolic. But Berry’s world really does sort into two camps: the intellectually enlightened, hard-working old farmers and their ignorant, ease-seeking prodigal sons. Certainly, we need both meaningful work and meaningful play to live truly flourishing lives. A life without hard work would be miserable. But the health of human culture is not determined simply or primarily by common work but by common worship, the highest leisure activity, the ultimate pursuit of a good in itself. A community whose center is work, even excellent work, can only point towards itself. It begins and ends with the political. Its beauties are necessarily artificial. Its virtues are industrious but incomprehensible without reference to labor. It perpetuates the lie that we are self-sufficient, that we can overcome the deficiencies of our natures through our own efforts. 

But a community that values leisure, with worship at its center, cannot but see its lack of self-sufficiency. It can only be fulfilled by something it receives as a gift, by grace. Worshippers cannot force God to love them any more than poets can force inspiration or an infant force his mother to care for him. A culture of leisure is a culture of contemplation, which will necessarily get sick of thinking about itself after a while—because to stay in the realm of only thinking about human beings and the world is to fail to see how humanity and the cosmos open up to the divine, how the imperfect opens up to the perfect.

Therefore, Marce Catlett’s problems begin with its subtitle: The Force of a Story. In his essay “Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power,” the philosopher Josef Pieper, author of Leisure: The Basis of Culture, argues that conversations, like works of art, have the same aim: to reveal reality as it is, delightfully. That doesn’t mean that the excellent conversationalist or author shies away from the harshness of natural or human evil, but it does mean proceeding under the assumptions that truth is real, that it underpins reality, that we are meant for the truth, and that we can work together to find it. This is at the heart of dialogue. When my conversation contains within it an ulterior motive, particularly a desire to get something out of the other person, the other “is no longer a fellow subject. Rather, he has become … an object to be manipulated, possibly to be dominated, to be handled and controlled.” I can “use him for my purposes. … Basically, what happens here is speech without a partner (since there is no true other),” as my manipulation takes the form of monologue. When the goal is not to see the truth together, but rather to sell something to the viewer—a political agenda, for instance—then what has been made is no longer, properly speaking, art. It’s propaganda.

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story lacks force because there is no story. The plot is minimal. The characters are wafer-thin ersatz Berrys, and none of them grow. There are no character arcs, unlike in Berry’s past novels. Their dialogue reads like lecture notes, as even Berry’s usually well-edited and precise prose is lacking: typos abound, a rarity for Berry’s novels. What’s left is a rhetorical exercise lobbying for a particular politics that presumes ignorance of its audience and generational superiority of its author. It treats its readers like how Berry thinks tractors treat the land, plowing over them and crushing them for the sake of a “better way.” I think I’d much rather be crushed by an actual tractor.

I’ve never been to Port William, Kentucky. It is, after all, fictional. And yet, I feel like I know its streets and their one-time inhabitants so well that I may recognize them, if I were to visit. Over there used to stand Jayber Crow’s barbershop. And that’s the house where a wounded man once rushed in and bled all over the floor in Anno Domini 1888, as five-year-old Mat Feltner watched—yes, that same Mat Feltner who would grow up to become the friend and neighbor of Marce Catlett, and then both of them would in the course of time become the grandparents of Andy Catlett, although long before that Mat would also be the father of Virgil Feltner, who would marry the Hannah who would eventually become Hannah Coulter, the wife of Nathan Coulter, but first for just a short while she was Hannah Feltner, before her husband of too short a time was killed somewhere in the Pacific in WWII and his body never recovered.

Time and stories and people in Port William can unfurl and at other times collapse together over the series of novels and short stories about them, reminding us that no one’s story is his own alone. The people and their stories all belong together and to each other, in a covenant that they describe as “the membership.” For a time, the meek in these stories inherit the earth—quite literally, in the farmland in Port William that they lovingly work. Except, this inheritance, as all else since the expulsion from Eden, comes with the obligation of much hard work. 

This fictional town is not wholly fictional, however. It is loosely based on Wendell Berry’s own home of Port Royal, Kentucky, where he still lives and farms in the same county that has been home for his family since before the Civil War—a reality on which he reflects in his 2022 work of memoir-cum-cultural criticism, The Need to Be Whole. How might we heal our souls and our places? The two, after all, are sick or well together, not separately. 

Ever since Berry published the first of his Port William novels—Nathan Coulter, which appeared in 1960—he has been thinking about the story of this place, so similar to the real one where he dwells in rural Kentucky, and whose decline (along with the rest of rural America) he has been lamenting in such works of nonfiction as The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977). Against its backdrop, the people of Port William have acquired stories, which have grown deeper and more three-dimensional over the course of the intervening decades. We have gotten to know the joys and the sorrows of the life and work of Nathan Coulter, Hannah Coulter, Jayber Crow, Andy Catlett, the many Feltners and the Branches, and now of course, Marce Catlett too—after whom Berry’s newest (and likely final) Port William novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, is named.

The relationship of Berry’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—for he has been a prolific writer in all three genres—is unapologetically close. But in his review of Marce Catlett, John-Paul Heil is concerned that Berry has abandoned any interest in developing the plot of the novel in favor of a political manifesto glorifying the hard work of the leisureless, industrial variety. “Marce Catlett’s problems begin with its subtitle: The Force of a Story,” he remarks, clarifying that “Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story lacks force because there is no story.” The story, he suggests, has been hijacked by Berry’s defense of his family’s own real-life political decisions. Worst of all, Berry seems to present in this novel “work—not leisure—as the basis of culture.” 

The charge against Berry that this novel lacks a plot is, to an extent, true. And yet, the accusation misses something important—that all of Berry’s Port William fiction is one continuous story to which he has been adding with subsequent books and short stories for the past sixty-five years. Marce Catlett, as a result, is an epilogue to a very long story of a lifetime, or even several lifetimes—its author is now ninety-one years old, and the novel’s protagonist, Andy Catlett, is in his tenth decade as well. As an epilogue, it is fitting that this novel does not have a developed stand-alone plot and story arc of the sort we’ve seen in the previous Port William novels. Instead, Berry at last offers his readers—and himself—needed closure. There is a force to the overall story of Port William, we realize as a result—just as there is force to the overall story of American farmers and others who live in towns like Port William or Port Royal. Most of all, though, there is force in telling stories of virtue prevailing over vice in an age that makes the latter so much easier. And the ultimate virtue is to stay, choosing to love a place and its people well.

To abandon one’s story, we know from some of the younger characters of this series who haunt this particular novel as ghosts by their loud absence, is to become unmoored, uprooted, lost and confused in the modern world.

As a result, this novel, unlike Berry’s earlier ones, does not have as much of an overall plot, once we depart from the opening backdrop tale about Marce Catlett and the injustice of a tobacco sale that defrauded small-scale farmers. Instead, we hear Andy’s now elderly voice—Berry speaking through him—reflecting in the novel’s opening sentence on the story that has defined his life: “Grown old, Andy Catlett has still ahead of him and in obligation the story of a time a hundred and eighteen years ago.” 

Except, the force of the opening story continues to drive the novel. The characters all belong to that story. There is, indeed, much reflection throughout the novel about stories to which people belong—stories of family, community, place. So it is, for instance, that “the story of a family at home is like a puzzle put together. Put together, the separate parts cohere in a kind of sense, not otherwise ever to be made: the story of the family at one for a time with the story of its place.” 

As seasoned Berry readers will recognize, all of Berry’s stories have been stories of gradual decline—of the “unsettling of America,” as the children of the Port William families move away, abandoning that family story and choosing other careers over the agriculture of their ancestors. But what effect does it have on the soul when one moves away from the place where one belongs to a story? Belonging to a place means belonging to a story; the two are inextricably connected by roots no less strong for being invisible. To abandon one’s story, we know from some of the younger characters of this series who haunt this particular novel as ghosts by their loud absence, is to become unmoored, uprooted, lost, and confused in the modern world.

This brings us to Andy Catlett, who, a half-century ago now, once lost an arm to the latest agricultural technology. Now he is an old man, thinking alone about the story to which he belongs—and which belongs to him: “For a century and more after the time it happened, the story has been kept in living memory, and so it has had a future. It has been joined to the story of its own survival and influence. If it has at present no public life, it continues to live locally, to inspire local work, and to produce local benefits. So far, it has not ended.” 

But do these reflections on the value of local work amount, as Heil believes, to a glorification of hard, industrial, modern work that is the enemy of leisure? Not so fast. While Berry indeed glorifies work in this novel, as in his previous ones, it is the beauty of work that takes the front seat in these discussions. Berry continues to juxtapose work that is beautiful and soul-enriching (and usually done by people in love with their land and the craft of caring for it) with work that is very modern and mechanized, apt to crush souls and bones (as Andy Catlett had experienced). But when Marce Catlett comes home from his heartbreaking day in the opening story of this novel, he joins his family for a dinner together where they rest as one. Yes, there is leisure in the hard-working life of Berry’s farmers. It repeatedly involves the cultivation of relationships and the sharing of a table—the communion of saints, breaking bread together. 

It is undeniable that Berry’s novels appear more politicized to some readers now, as Heil contends. But if this is the case, this isn’t because Berry’s message about the value of small-town life, farming, family, and community has changed since 1960. Rather, it is because more voices in our society have grown louder in rejecting these concepts as worth preserving or even in any way praising. In response, Berry’s message of love for place, family, and the rooted life suddenly seems decidedly radical. 

Berry’s Port William novels are an invitation into the achingly beautiful membership that the novels describe. It is fragile and imperfect, and yet you cannot help but see its beauty that inspires longing. You too, reader, can come into this community, get to know its history, and consider who you might have been had your own ancestors lived in a town like this one, where you still could live now. Perhaps even, like Berry, without a computer.

There is undeniable melancholy in this novel and its conclusion—and yet, as in The Need to Be Whole, there is hope and warning too. We have all been created for relationships, real roots, and stories to which we need to belong for our wellbeing—spiritual, intellectual, familial. The promises of the American countryside still beckon, and I reflect on this as I share the road with Amish horse-drawn buggies in my small Ohio town. Even in this age of cities and the reign of machines, the meek—the farmers and others who choose to dwell in America’s small towns and the countryside and love them—could still inherit this earth. 

Writing to her husband John in a May 4, 1775 letter, Abigail Adams expressed her disdain for the “wretched” Loyalist former royal governor of Massachusetts Bay, Thomas Hutchinson. She wished upon him “the fate of Mordecai,” mistakenly swapping in the heroic Jewish figure in the biblical book of Esther for his nefarious foil, Haman, who, at story’s end, is hanged on the gallows he had prepared in order to kill Mordecai.

The Adamses were not the only Founders fond of the ancient tale in which the young Jewish woman Esther, after being taken to the palace of King Ahasuerus to be his queen, heroically risks her life at the urging of her cousin Mordecai to foil the wicked vizier’s plot to murder all the Jews after Mordecai refused to bow down to him. On December 17, 1778, then-General George Washington wrote to Joseph Reed, the newly elected president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council: “I would to God that one of the most atrocious of each State was hung in Gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman.” Affinity for the Esther narrative has manifested well beyond its original Jewish readership—though, as in Abigail Adams’s bungled allusion, the details have oftentimes been muddled along the way.

Haman: A Biography, by Adam J. Silverstein, the Max Schloessinger Chair of Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offers a reception history of the book through the framework of an academic fan-letter to its archvillain. Arguably the Bible’s second-most notorious antagonist, besides Pharaoh of “I will not let them go” fame, he has proven a malleable metaphor for varied audiences over centuries, and a useful portal of entry into understanding the central purpose of the tale in which he appears. “His impact over millennia has been enormous,” Silverstein argues, “making him one of history’s great overachievers,” serving as “a divisive figure both within religions (on account of stirring debates about his status), and between religions (as his name was used polemically, to denigrate rivals).” He is threaded through the Abrahamic faiths, and a prism through which they “share with us their fears, worries, frustrations, and hopes by expressing their thoughts about Haman, each in their own way.”

In the opening pages, the author notes, Esther’s “story was retold and reimagined time and time again, far more than most biblical narratives.” Readers have long been regaled by the palace intrigue of a humble young woman’s courageous maneuvering to prevent the slaughter of her kinsmen. So much so that they tried to, in their eyes, make it even better—with mixed results.

In ancient times, anonymous Jewish scholars translating the book into Greek inserted prayers in the mouths of the Jewish characters they felt were missing in the canonical original. For other ancient sages, in traditions collected into what are called midrashim, the book was understood to be yet another iteration of the Jewish people surviving evil forces throughout history that sought their destruction. These rabbis suggested that the conniving snake in the Garden of Eden was a prefiguring of Ahasuerus’s malevolent advisor thousands of years later. Haman, to them, was the evil inclination in human form, which must be defeated for humanity to be fully free.

Early Christians, emerging from the Jewish community that to this day celebrates the holiday of Purim in commemoration of Mordecai and Esther’s ultimate triumph, also encountered the book, but were hesitant to embrace it. As Isaac Kalimi, the author of The Book of Esther between Judaism and Christianity (not cited by Silverstein), has summarized, “At best Esther has a marginal place within Christian religion, theology, and culture which has tended to assess the book quite negatively.” The Book of Esther is never quoted in the New Testament, and early Christians debated including it in their canon at all. The first extant Christian commentary on the text was not written until the ninth century. Later Christian skepticism toward Esther has been well-documented. Though he continued to include Esther in the canon, Martin Luther clearly did not think highly of it, and he weaved that low opinion into the antisemitic commentary that exploded late in his life.

The current volume’s attempt to find echoes of Haman, and the Book of Esther as a whole, in the Christian textual tradition unsurprisingly proves to be a challenge. Silverstein suggests John 19, in which Jesus is portrayed “wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe,” is an intertextual allusion to Mordecai’s triumphant emergence after Haman’s defeat “in royal robes of blue and white, with a magnificent crown of gold and a mantle of fine linen and purple wool” (Esther 8:15). But Silverstein struggles to make sense of his own observation. Perhaps Jesus is a new Mordecai, he posits, “Just as Mordecai’s elevation represents an apex of success and prestige, the inversion of the language when describing Jesus’s passion represents a nadir.” Then again, Silverstein wonders, maybe Jesus is a new Haman: “Jesus was crucified in lieu of Barabbas, just as Haman was crucified in lieu of Mordecai; and both were executed after having been falsely accused.” While his Gospel is not particularly friendly to “the Jews,” the idea that John would portray Jesus, who lived and died as a Jew, as the second coming of a Jew-hating genocidist, and sympathetically so, seems more than a stretch.

In another unconvincing attempt to find echoes of Esther in the New Testament, Silverstein notes that Jesus’s words on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (a quotation from the Hebrew Bible’s Psalm 22) is attributed in the Babylonian Talmud (composed three to four centuries after the New Testament) to Esther herself, as she trepidatiously approached Ahasuerus’s throne room to advocate on behalf of her people. “It is possible,” Silverstein offers, that the Talmudic sage who suggested the Psalm’s verse was composed by Esther, “was influenced by an ancient pre-Christian tradition about Esther’s self-sacrificing approach to the king,” which, goes Silverstein’s theory, Jesus was then alluding to when he said his last words. This strains credulity.

The Book of Esther reflects the power of unexpected heroes and heroines to risk their lives in defense of their liberties.

In analyzing Muslim traditions about Esther, Silverstein points out that Haman is mentioned six times in the Quran. Strangely, for those well-versed in the Hebrew Bible, however, the character appears in the context not of Ahasuerus of Susa in Persia, but of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. The Quranic Pharaoh asks Haman to build a tower made of bricks baked from clay, which seems to be a mash-up of Genesis’s Tower of Babel story—but in Egypt, in the time of Moses. This places the Quran with a figure, who, per the Hebrew Bible (which was composed over a thousand years before the birth of Muhammad) lived around 700 years after Pharaoh of the Exodus’s fame, and over 1,300 miles away. Esther and Mordecai, mind you, are not mentioned in the Quran’s account. Haman in the Quranic context exists as a foil for God, opposing Moses’s call for monotheism.

In attempting to explain how Haman shows up in the wrong time and place, repeating a theory from his earlier volume Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story: The Reception of a Biblical Book in Islamic Lands, Silverstein suggests that “Haman” was possibly confused by Muhammad with Haran, who Genesis lists as a brother of Abraham. Thus, the Quran placed this “Haman” in a Genesis-era setting, Egypt, not in Abraham’s time period, but rather in Moses’s.

In a bizarre attempt to integrate the Islamic version with Jewish interpretive tradition, Silverstein tries to propose a thread of the Jewish tradition that also saw Haman as existing independent of the Esther story, as an enemy of God. To do so, he cites a Jewish prayer recited on the holiday of Purim, which contains the line praising God for Haman’s defeat: “You, in Your abounding mercies, foiled his council and frustrated his intention.” Unfortunately for Silverstein, that short prayer begins with the line: “In the days of Mordecai and Esther, in Susa the capitol, when the wicked Haman rose up against them and sought to destroy and annihilate all the Jews, young and old, children and women.” Support for his attempt to prove an Islamic-style Esther-free Haman character somewhere in Judaism requires sundering a beloved prayer recited by millions of Jews for hundreds of years.

Silverstein, throughout the work, makes his affinity for the archvillain explicitly clear, a particularly bizarre perspective in light of the recent bloody struggle Israel waged with today’s Persians, the Iranians. Even putting aside the contemporary resonance, Silverstein’s fandom for the mastermind of a plot to murder his ancestors, perhaps meant to be tongue-in-cheek or some sort of marketing strategy, strikes one as quite literally self-defeating. “An objective reader … cannot but empathize with Haman,” Silverstein effuses. “His rivalry with a particular Jew, and by extension all Jews, appears motivated and strangely reasonable, for it is he who loyally and consistently executes the king’s orders, even at great emotional expense, while the Jew(s) refused to do the same. He is the victim of … more than one miscarriage of justice.” The horror! An antisemitic mass-murder motivated by one individual Jew’s disrespect put motivation, reason, and emotion into trying to kill millions of that individual’s coreligionists, wasn’t able to do it, and then was duly punished. Poor Haman!

Whether Israeli soldiers who have been risking their lives in defense of Israel after Hamas’ Iran-backed slaughter on October 7, 2023, or the millions of Israeli civilians who have lived through two years of Iranian and Houthi ballistic rocket attacks that have thankfully largely been foiled by Israel’s Iron Dome might be sympathetic to the claim that Haman, who organized a genocidal attempt to wipe Jews off the map and whose name they stomp at the sound on in synagogues on Purim was unfairly punished because after all, he didn’t kill anybody, I leave to them. Speaking as one such Israeli civilian, I possess no such sympathy, let alone “empathy.”

Speaking of Jewish interpreters of Esther, Silverstein notes how the story found particularly devoted readers among conversos, Jews who outwardly practiced as Christians while avoiding the Inquisition, as Esther had operated as a Persian Queen, hiding her Jewish identity. Silverstein does not mention the American Founders’ fascination with the Book of Esther. 

Another Israeli academic, Eran Shalev, by contrast, has written, both in his American Zion and my own edited volume, Esther in America, on the many citations of the book by preachers and the press during the years immediately preceding the American Revolution. Nor does Silverstein note Abraham Lincoln’s citations of the book in the nineteenth century. In these contexts, the Book of Esther reflects the power of unexpected heroes and heroines to risk their lives in defense of their liberties. In times both ancient and modern, that has been to practice as proud Jews, or, in the case of the Founders and Lincoln, as Americans who saw themselves as biblical Israel reborn. Both groups sought to imitate Mordecai and Esther’s coreligionists in achieving triumph over tyranny.

He does note, however, that in the twentieth century, the Nazis self-identified with Haman, an analogy that global Jewry, including American, surely agreed with. Julius Streicher, the convicted war criminal, wrote in a 1939 essay, “When they mention ‘Haman’ in the synagogues they think of Hitler.” Streicher even shouted “Purimfest!” as he was led to the gallows for his execution at Nuremberg.

“Different Esthers, refracted through different interpretive lenses,” Silverstein writes, “produced different Hamans.” Haman: A Biography is a testament, then, to the timeless allure of both biblical interpretation and misinterpretation.

Many historians have assailed the originalist project. While flawed, these scholarly works present serious arguments and sometimes provide useful added information for originalists to consider. But Jill Lepore—one of the nation’s most widely read historians and a chaired professor at Harvard—has recently offered a different sort of broadside in The Atlantic, “How Originalism Has Killed the Constitution.”

In recent pieces for Law & Liberty, legal scholar Robert Natelson and historian Paul Moreno have defended originalism against Lepore’s “constitutional despair.” It is safe to say that, unlike the more rigorous work of her colleagues, her jeremiad fails to meet standards of scholarship, as it distorts quotations out of context, misstates facts, and confuses concepts. And its central thesis—that originalism thwarts constitutional change and kills the amendment process—gets matters precisely backward.

Properly understood, originalism preserves the Constitution and its Article V amendment process, the lawful mechanism for change that a constitutional republic requires. By distinguishing between judicial and political processes, originalism provides a vital framework for protecting the democratic legitimacy, popular sovereignty, and the formal amendment machinery at the heart of the American Founding.

Problematic History

Lepore’s treatment of Antonin Scalia’s ideas is particularly shabby. To support a central claim—that the “idea of amending the Constitution” is “dead”—she quotes the late Justice: “The whole purpose of the Constitution is to prevent a future society from [doing] what it wants to do.” But this comment is out of context—it is in a speech about constitutional interpretation, not amendment. Scalia never opposed the idea of amending the Constitution; quite the opposite. For instance, he stated in a 2007 talk, “If you want more rights, create them by statute; if you want more constitutional rights, create them by amending the Constitution.” What he resisted was changing the Constitution by means he considered extraconstitutional—interpreting the Constitution to reflect present-day values rather than the meaning that was enacted.

Lepore also wrongly claims that interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning is a recent invention of the political right. She argues that “the word originalism didn’t enter the English language until 1980, and it had virtually no currency before 1987, when Reagan nominated Bork to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.” It is extraordinary for a historian to suppose that contemporary usage settles whether the concept of originalism predates the 1980s.

Even a cursory review of history reveals that originalism’s roots date back to the early Republic. Many statements of the Founders espouse interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning. To take just one: James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, wrote: “I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the Nation. In that sense alone, it is the legitimate Constitution.” Professor Howard Gillman, hardly a conservative, wrote a well-known article in which he established that, until the Progressive Era, almost all official interpreters of the Constitution were, in some form, originalists. Woodrow Wilson was innovative precisely because he compared the Constitution to a living organism that evolved. Surprisingly, Lepore appears unaware of such well-documented facts.

For a professor, Lepore strangely does not investigate whether originalism has intellectual, rather than partisan, origins. During the 1950s and 1960s, many constitutional theorists struggled to provide constraints on judicial power. The Warren Court’s activism had created a crisis for constitutional theory. Even if the results were beneficial, how were they legal and not simply political judgments dressed up in the garb of legal opinions? At that time in academia, the legal process school supplied the framework for legal decision-making, and neutrality was its key concept. For the legal process school, what distinguished the judicial from the political process was the judiciary’s obligation to follow neutral rules of law, rendering consistent decisions from one case to the next.

Lepore acknowledges Robert Bork’s role in initiating the modern originalist turn but fails to describe how his theory was a logical outgrowth of the jurisprudential framework of the day. Bork’s insight was that neutral rules of the legal process, by themselves, are not sufficient to constrain judicial discretion because judges would still have discretion to decide which rules to follow. The rules themselves had to be neutrally derived. The original meaning of the Constitution supplied that method. Lepore is right that, in the decades since Bork first wrote, originalism has developed many “nice” distinctions; however, such careful reticulation and debate also show that it is a jurisprudential, not a partisan project.

The Failure of the Constitutional Amendment Process

The most serious flaw in her article, however, is its central thesis: that originalism hinders the process of constitutional change and exacerbates political polarization by making the composition of the Court more salient. Both are the opposite of the truth. As we have shown in detail elsewhere, it is originalism that protects the process of constitutional change outlined in Article V. In contrast, allowing judges to update the Constitution undermines this process.

First, constitutional amendments should garner a consensus of the country so that they do not impose a partisan vision that will be strongly opposed by opponents. This consensus often takes a long time to develop. But suppose the Supreme Court can use non-originalism to decide cases. In that case, they will act to update the Constitution instead, thereby taking the wind out of the sails of a movement to pass a constitutional amendment.

Lepore fails to recognize that originalism, fairly applied, is not a form of policymaking on par with nonoriginalism. It is the opposite.

Second, if judges update the Constitution, political energy will naturally be directed into the less laborious process of confirming judges who will update the Constitution in the direction of their supporters. Finally, citizens will become less interested in enacting constitutional amendments to incorporate their own provisions into our fundamental law, as they will rightly fear that judges will treat the new amendment as a blank check to write in their own views. Consider this analogy: if judges did not enforce contracts according to their terms, far fewer people would bother to write contracts.

The need for originalism to support the amendment process is illustrated by the success and failure of the amendments most recently proposed by Congress. For instance, in Oregon v. Mitchell, the Supreme Court correctly interpreted the Constitution’s original meaning to preclude Congress from lowering the voting age to 18 for state and local elections. Because that position did not accord with a consensus of the American people, Congress proposed, and the states ratified an amendment a year and a half after the decision.

In contrast, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) likely failed due to the Court’s nonoriginalist approach. The Court had already updated the Equal Protection Clause in a nonoriginalist manner, providing substantial rights to women and making the ERA seem less necessary. And its reputation for judicial activism made it less trustworthy. Not surprisingly, one of Phyllis Schlafly’s arguments against the ERA was that the Supreme Court could not be trusted to interpret the amendment faithfully, and that it would instead use it to impose same-sex bathrooms and other extravagant notions. In short, because the Court had already granted many women’s rights through judicial rulings—and because activists like Schlafly distrusted how judges might interpret a new amendment—momentum for the ERA dissipated.

Lepore unwittingly provides evidence against her own thesis. She writes that “in the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt largely abandoned constitutional amendment in favor of applying pressure on the Supreme Court.” The Court he opposed had generally interpreted the Constitution according to its original meaning, but in many instances against popular consensus. Roosevelt could have used the unpopular originalist interpretation to facilitate constitutional amendments.

By choosing to eschew the amendment process and appoint nonoriginalist justices, Roosevelt made it less likely that the Constitution would be amended. For instance, it seems likely that during the New Deal, the nation would have supported an expansion of the Commerce Power, but the strategy of appointing justices who would not enforce the Constitution as originally written deprived us of the need for such an amendment, along with the salutary social consensus that would have accompanied it. Thus, had Roosevelt pursued amendments (for example, to expand federal power), those changes would have garnered broad democratic support and legitimacy. By instead relying on appointed justices to reinterpret the Constitution, he undercut the very amendment process that could have solidified lasting consensus.

Lepore’s Mistaken Understanding of Originalism

Lepore also fails to recognize that originalism, fairly applied, is not a form of policymaking on par with nonoriginalism. Again, it is the opposite—an effort to follow the meaning of the Constitution, regardless of the policy consequences. In other words, originalism compels judges to apply historical meaning, whereas non-originalist approaches permit judges to consider the preferences of contemporary society or their own views of constitutional morality.

As a result, overruling a nonoriginalist decision does not represent any policy judgment, but just the view that the previous decision has failed to reflect that meaning. For instance, Dobbs (the decision that overruled Roe) did not address the merits of abortion at all; instead, it followed the constitutional line between the authority of the federal judiciary and that of state legislatures, returning the authority to regulate abortion to the people and their elected representatives.

Lepore is also incorrect to contend that originalism makes the confirmation process polarizing. Nonoriginalism is much more polarizing because, if the original meaning of the Constitution does not restrain judges, they are more likely to look to their own values in deciding questions. Americans have different views on what values should be prioritized in policymaking. To be sure, judges may disagree about the meaning of the term, but that is an empirical question to be decided by the strength of the relevant historical evidence. And while the evidence about a constitutional provision’s original meaning is not always clear, often it is. And even if the Court sometimes engages in bad originalism, that reasoning can be criticized by appealing to empirical facts.

Moreover, forcing constitutional change through the amendment process tempers social polarization. To persuade the supermajority of the citizens necessary to enact a constitutional amendment, no social movement or party can achieve its maximum demands. Instead, proponents must build a broad-based coalition, persuading fellow citizens with whom they do not agree on every other issue. This process has the benefit of requiring citizens to think of one another as partners in the common enterprise of constitution-making, not as political enemies.

Ironically, Lepore’s essay itself underscores the virtues of originalism. She is a distinguished American historian, but not a specialist in American legal history. She simply has not undertaken the sustained inquiry the subject demands. Many of Lepore’s claims are contradicted by the relevant literature and the historical record.

Disengaged from the discipline of evidence, ideology supplies Lepore’s narrative, and because she writes from the left, the jurisprudence favored by conservatives becomes the constitutional menace. We should be grateful that our best jurists adhere to a method that prioritizes empirical knowledge of the past, thus making such ideological frolics far less likely.

Before heading for a special London summit earlier this year, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk noted “a paradox” involving the continent’s security relationship with America: “500 million Europeans [are asking] 300 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians.” His numbers were slightly off—it’s more like 600 million Europeans and 340 million Americans—but his conclusion, that Europe “must take greater responsibility for the continent’s security,” was sound.

The time is well past for burden-sharing, however. It is time for burden-shifting.

NATO was created 76 years ago. Yet the Europeans remain seemingly haplessly and helplessly dependent on the US for their defense. Of course, that was not Washington’s original plan. Multiple officials affirmed that the alliance was to provide a temporary shield behind which Europe could recover. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe before serving two terms as president, explained in 1951: “If in ten years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”

President Donald Trump was not the first US official to subsequently question why Americans were still expected to babysit a potential continental colossus. In his famous 2011 valedictory address Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed: “The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.” The continental response was nothing, not even the pretense of doing more. Europeans continued to treat Washington’s military guarantee as a birthright entitlement, which “allowed European governments to spend a certain amount on butter that might otherwise have gone on guns,” observed Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh.

It is obvious that Europeans will never defend themselves unless they have to defend themselves—which means when Americans stop defending them. This is certainly evident from Donald Trump’s experience. Nearly a decade after he began hectoring NATO countries about their contributions, and even longer after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and intervention in the Donbass, Europe remains far short of defense self-sufficiency. According to a recent study from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, “The gaps in military hardware and software are considerable, and the IISS estimates that replacing key elements of the US conventional military capabilities assumed to be assigned to the Euro-Atlantic theatre could cost approximately USD1 trillion.” Such contingencies can be remedied, but where will the money come from? Warned the IISS experts: “European NATO members took just over ten years to increase spending from an average of 1.4% to 2.1% of GDP, so the new commitment will require even greater uplifts and difficult policy choices, raising doubts as to whether it is achievable for all allies.”

In his first term, Trump was effectively neutralized. At the 2018 Brussels NATO summit, averred Stoltenberg, “he was really afraid that President Trump would leave” and “that NATO would stop functioning that day.” In response, Stoltenberg turned to flattery: “I was quite deliberate on the wording I used: that the message from the president is having an impact.” Similar is how Mark Rutte, Stoltenberg’s successor, has handled Trump’s second term, even referring to the latter as “Daddy.” Politico described “Rutte’s broader approach to the president, leaning heavily into public and private flattery.”

Individual European leaders have helped by acting as imperial vassals of Trump. For instance, in September, the British government hosted its second state visit for the president, apparently pleasing him greatly. An embarrassed Ganesh endorsed the ostentatious humiliation: “The reason for courting Trump isn’t (just) to puff up Britain on the world stage or to secure AI investments. It is to keep him engaged in Ukrainian and European security. Just be glad that he does respond to flattery and obeisance. Imagine if he didn’t.”

An American-dominated NATO made sense when it was established in 1949. The transatlantic alliance, however, was always supposed to be about security, not charity.

In fact, this tactic has proved to be a great success. Although Poland and the Baltic states have chosen to greatly hike their outlays, few other European governments share their commitment. In June, a disunited alliance adopted a new guideline committing members to spend five percent of GDP on their defense. Members will be allowed, however, to count as 1.5 percent of “military expenditures” civilian projects, dubiously said to serve military ends, perhaps including Italy’s long-proposed bridge to Sicily. Even so, Europeans emphasized the many challenges to meeting the standard, while Spain brazenly rejected the new requirement. The formal mandate doesn’t take effect until 2035, six years after Trump leaves office, allowing the allies to revise the requirement once there is a new occupant of the White House. As for Europeans worried about the administration’s ongoing global posture review and rumors of troop redeployments to Asia, The Times offered reassurance: “Several sources briefed on the matter said Washington had signaled through back channels that the cuts in the Colby review would be nothing like so drastic as previously feared.”

Oddly, the president appears to be encouraging this sustained subterfuge. Far from insisting that the Europeans take over their own defense, he appears to be using America’s defense dominance to force continental concessions on economics. Apparently, many of the Europeans have decided this is a good deal if they can avoid bearing the costs and risks of defending themselves. Explained Ganesh: “How, if not through a smaller welfare state, is a better-armed continent to be funded?” Better to pay off Washington than make politically painful social welfare cuts!

In its recent trade negotiation with Washington, Europe’s Eurocratic elite essentially did the full monte. Observed Carnegie Europe’s Stefan Lehne: “Faced with the double threat of a trade war and of the United States abandoning Ukraine, European leaders decided to bow to the wishes of the Trump administration. But this pragmatism came at a high price. They accepted a deeply unequal trade deal, betraying their commitment to WTO rules. They made promises on military expenditures and on investments in the United States that will be almost impossible to keep. They showered Donald Trump with praise and flattery, which will hurt their image back home and probably also their self-esteem.” European Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič admitted the obvious: “It’s not only about … trade: It’s about security, it is about Ukraine, it is about current geopolitical volatility.” Ganesh wrote more concisely and crudely that Europe must sacrifice the “ultimately not existential matter of trade” and “assume the position.”

For Europe, including nations once ruled by avid nationalists such as Otto von Bismarck, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle, submission and humiliation are now preferred to sacrificing cash and risking blood. There are some dissenting voices. Federica Mangiameli of the international think tank GLOBSEC complained that “what’s unfolding is not pragmatism, but appeasement.” European governments, however, appear to believe that paying America tribute is the most effective way to force increasingly reluctant publics to underwrite their defense. After all, a Pew Research Center survey found that most Europeans did not support fighting on their neighbors’ behalf, even as they expected Americans to go to war on their behalf.

The continent’s capitulation, with Americans continuing to pay so Europeans don’t have to, is not to America’s advantage. The United States would be better off with competent, committed allies capable of defending themselves than whiny cheapskates desperate to stay on the Yankee defense dole. Then Washington and Brussels could cooperate as equals on issues of common concern, without Americans being dragged into conflicts—think Yugoslavia, Libya, or Ukraine—of minimal security interest to the United States. Europeans could defend themselves. They will never do so, it seems, unless left with no choice but to do so.

With neither the Trump administration nor the Europeans currently serious about transferring defense responsibility, it is especially important not to further expand the alliance. Every new member is a military burden, not an asset, for the United States. Washington has always provided the practical combat power necessary to defend NATO members. At least recent additions Montenegro and North Macedonia, while irrelevant to American security, are unlikely military targets. Ukraine would bring war into NATO. The burden of protecting Kyiv, with nuclear weapons if necessary, would fall almost entirely on Washington. If it wasn’t in America’s interest to defend Ukraine before the Russian invasion or intervene after the Russian invasion, it won’t be in America’s interest to defend Ukraine when the invasion ends. Washington’s principal responsibility is to protect the American people, not the rest of the world, no matter how warm the former’s feelings toward the latter.

An American-dominated NATO made sense when it was established in 1949. The transatlantic alliance, however, was always supposed to be about security, not charity. The justification for a US-dominated transatlantic alliance expired decades ago. If Europeans fear aggression by Russia, they should spend the money, raise the manpower, and provide the materiel necessary for its defense. The United States shouldn’t expect the transformation to be immediate, but should insist that the transformation be certain. The time for treating the continent as a helpless child is long past.