Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

As Steven F. Hayward lays out in his forum lead this month, the environmental legal and activist movement that started in the 1960s, and which is best known culturally for the first observance of Earth Day in 1970, is rapidly coming to an end in ways that its advocates are just beginning to realize. While the underlying motives for modern environmentalism—primitivism, naturalistic fallacy, power lust, and an atheist/materialist hatred of humanity—will likely always be with us, their combination into an allegedly benevolent political movement is well past its effective peak.

It is, of course, possible to have an environmental movement not based on these unfortunate impulses—the work of the Property and Environment Research Center, American Conservation Coalition, and the Breakthrough Institute comes to mind—but groups like these have historically been in the minority of the wider world of green activism.

The environmental movement as we have known it has peaked for multiple reasons. Hayward says that the movement has specialized in “billion-dollar solutions to million-dollar problems” that “maximize political and legal conflict.” I’ll say that it has inflicted negative externalities that have significantly harmed the standard of living in the wealthy, developed world; caused widespread misery and death in the poor, developing world; produced politically toxic dynamics via the arrogance and overreach of its most celebrated advocates; and generated roadblocks even to its own proclaimed ambitions via its internal contradictions. Perhaps most importantly, though, in the near-to medium-term within Western democracies, a political pivot toward populist-right preferences has severely attenuated the power of progressive, elite, transnational policymaking—all hallmarks of the environmental activist movement.

Over the last several years, center-right and populist political activists across the world have risen in opposition to progressive-left and globalist goals, chief among them international environmental policies that have raised energy prices, constrained economic growth, and threatened national sovereignty. From the success of the Brexit Leave campaign in June 2016 and the unexpected first election of Donald Trump as president in November of that year to the successive victories of center-right and explicitly populist parties against their left-wing opponents in many nations since, most international political observers, whether they celebrate or deplore the development, agree that we are living through an anti-elite turn in world affairs. 

A shift to a more populist style of politics, of course, wouldn’t necessarily run counter to environmental objectives if most environmental policy were based on widely held preferences among the electorate. But that has generally not been the case. Environmental policy objectives, and the willingness to sacrifice other social and economic goals to achieve them, have long been the strongly held preference of a relatively small number of voters and policymakers with the most aggressive forms of progressive-left ideology. In the world of environmental economics, we are now seeing a battle between the elite environmental policymaking associated with the Baby Boomer generation and what we could call an emerging “Kuznets populism.”

Higher-income, white-collar workers, who depend much less on industrial jobs, are the ones trading away growth and productivity for environmental amenities.

The work of economist and Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets (1901–85) has remained popular and frequently discussed into the twenty-first century, largely because of two related theoretical premises. First, he theorized, beginning with a paper published in 1955, that there is a predictable relationship between economic growth and inequality: inequality rises as an economy advances, reaches a peak, and then falls as a society becomes more developed and its economy more diversified.

Second, a parallel theory called the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) posits that pollution grows as an economy develops, eventually peaks, and then begins to decline, even as the economy continues to grow. In this dynamic, rising living standards lead the population of any given nation to demand greater environmental amenities as they collectively become willing to sacrifice additional units of economic productivity for cleaner air and water, as well as the conservation of wilderness and wildlife. Research by economist Nemat Shafik (1994), for example, suggested that local air pollutants like sulfur dioxide begin to decline in countries with per-capita incomes in the $3,000 to $4,000 range (in early 1990s dollars). My late colleague Fred L. Smith Jr. captured this dynamic when he wrote:

early societies were poor in both wealth and technology; perforce, they had to extract from Nature the values needed to address human needs. Only wealthy societies can value ecological resources to the degree demanded by today’s environmental establishment … poverty leaves little room for aesthetics.

Many defenders of the market economy have enthusiastically championed Kuznets’s work on both inequality and pollution, arguing that, far from them being problems created by capitalism as their critics suggest, inequality and pollution are effectively problems of not enough capitalism. After all, the only way to avoid inequality and industrial pollution entirely is to stay poor forever. Once these conditions begin to increase significantly, the only way out is through—by pursuing even greater economic growth, which will deliver optimized outcomes on the right side of the curve.

Is this view accurate? Plenty of subsequent economists have critiqued Kuznets’s work on both inequality and pollution in technical detail, but in the case of environmental politics, there is a more basic question to ask: are “the people” of a country actually making the tradeoff described? The measurement of wealth associated with bending the EKC away from greater pollution is generally expressed as a national average of annual income. In a broadly democratic polity, this seems to make sense, since citizens generally elect the people who implement environmental policy and thus the income of the average (or, in some analyses, median) citizen can be associated with the point at which a society adopts more aggressive environmental regulation.

But anyone who knows anything about the actual process of elections and policy implementation in a country like the US knows that average citizens have relatively little knowledge and virtually no direct influence on how such policy is made. Most citizens, as we should expect, are rationally ignorant about most public policy details and even general policy topics. Policy change is led and implemented in an extremely lopsided way by credentialed economic elites, in what an academic from the heyday of Kuznets’s career would likely have called the professional-managerial class (PMC).

It is thus the policy preferences of the PMC that are overrepresented in policymaking, and their preferences, not those of the average citizen of the nation, that trigger the production versus conservation tradeoffs of the EKC. Ironically, there are plenty of left-aligned researchers, pundits, and journalists who make the same point, such as the authors of a much-discussed 2014 study who declared the US political system to be an oligarchy (favoring the wealthy) rather than a true democracy. Such arguments tend to focus on moneyed interests’ alleged selfish desire for policies such as low-income tax rates, while ignoring how the class and ideological interests of the upper-middle class also create and sustain the nation’s staggeringly expensive and complex regulatory state, compliance with which costs Americans over $2 trillion each year.

The progressives are right that there is a distinct strain of affluent-favoring oligarchy in the political economy of the United States, but it does not tend toward smaller government, less regulation, or less spending and debt. All of the federal government’s current statistics in those areas make this clear.

The dynamic of elites having excess influence could be said to accurately describe public policymaking in general, but it is true of environmental policy in particular. Preferences of economic and professional elites are wildly overrepresented in environmental policy, as both public opinion polling and revealed preference make clear. Even when survey data finds general concern for an environmental issue with the public, such as when a majority of respondents agree that “the federal government is doing too little to protect key areas of the environment,” more detailed polling yields a very different impression.

When my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a poll in 2021 on the costs of climate policy, they found that a strong majority of respondents, 71 percent, said they are either somewhat or very concerned about climate change. Those same respondents, however, also made clear that they were not willing to pay for mitigation policies out of pocket.

Thirty-nine percent said they would not spend one dollar more than they already spend annually on gas or electricity to mitigate the effects of climate change. A further nine percent said they would spend as much as $10 more per year on gas and electricity on account of policies to mitigate climate change. Four in ten Americans were unwilling to spend more than $1 annually on higher gas and electricity prices to mitigate the effects of climate change.

People will often express a preference for goods, services, and public policies that are delivered at no cost to them. When the price for those goods rises above zero, however, enthusiasm for them rapidly contracts. This relationship expands, in a relative sense, with income. The smaller a share of income something costs, the more affordable it will seem. Thus, environmental policies that would incur significant costs are always going to see higher demand among wealthier individuals and households. Those individuals just happen to also be disproportionately influential in the political process. That preference, as a signal of affluence, thus becomes a kind of luxury consumption good for the upper-middle class in wealthy countries.

Advocates for prosperity and abundance should leverage the populist revolution’s current hostility to progressive environmentalism for all it is worth.

This recasts the political economy of Kuznets’s work significantly. The underlying dynamic remains, but suggests that the actual EKC is shifted significantly to the right of what we originally imagined—that higher-income, white-collar workers, who depend much less on industrial jobs, are the ones trading away growth and productivity (via their political and economic influence) for environmental amenities. If you hear someone say, “We, as a society, can afford to transition away from coal,” that person is almost certainly a member of the PMC laptop class, not a coal miner or steel worker.

This dynamic, by which high-status, economically privileged progressives trade away the affordable economic amenities of modern life for higher-preference environmental goods, has sparked no small amount of concern, ire, and activist fury throughout the developed world. While not schooled in the subtleties of Simon Kuznets’s academic work, many center-right policy advocates have intuitively understood that their own economic aspirations are being throttled by an in-group of elites with a very different value hierarchy. Hayward points out that even some left-leaning critics diagnosed as early as the 1970s that, for many people, the “ecology craze” was a self-serving fad that distracted from more important issues. Somehow, it has taken us half a century to catch up to the common sense of the Nixon-era staff writers of the New Republic.

A NIMBY homeowner living in a $2 million house in the San Francisco Bay Area will have no compunction about campaigning to stop new housing construction nearby in order to preserve their view of undeveloped land. They will also likely have enough knowledge of and leverage over the local planning and zoning process to do something about that preference. The working-class people who would have otherwise been their future neighbors, unfortunately, will have no such resources. They will likely never become aware that someone they’ve never met has made it impossible to live in the new housing that would have otherwise been constructed. Some populists, angry about the high cost of housing, have recently blamed bogeymen like private equity investment funds for high housing costs, but the distributed actions of millions of PMC environmentalists over the last half-century are almost certainly far more to blame. 

All of this creates a compelling tension for those of us who are skeptical of the environmental activist movement but still support a classical liberal political framework. Central government control of environmental policy, much like central control of public health policy during the Covid-19 pandemic, has inspired many small-government activists to oppose the specter of totalitarian “whole-of-government” approaches. This is a form of governance under which policymakers presume to manage for citizens both how much energy they will use and which medications they are allowed—or required—to take. Growing opposition to this administrative state of plenary powers should be nurtured.

But the populist turn could also significantly empower the state in other areas: to tax imports by arbitrary and capricious means, to micro-manage corporate behavior, to censor broadcast speech critical of politicians, and even strip citizenship from Americans accused of unpatriotic conduct. These are alarming trends and proposals that everyone who believes in limited government principles should resist.

Given that we are already in such a populist moment, however, it is the responsibility of each of us as policy advocates to go to war with the army we have, not, a la Donald Rumsfeld, with the one we wish we had. Environmental policy maximalists on the left, if not sufficiently countered, could easily implement policies that would cause the disintegration of human society and a collapse of material prosperity around the world. Their presumptive control over energy use alone, propelled by their climate anxieties, would knock out the support that the master resource gives to industrial modernity.

Advocates for prosperity and abundance should leverage the populist revolution’s current hostility to progressive environmentalism for all it is worth, even as those same individuals and organizations vigorously counter illiberal policy recommendations on other topics. Hayward is almost certainly correct that the “rigidly statist and adversarial” era of environmentalism is coming to a close—we just need to make sure a different flavor of central control doesn’t take its place.

Across America today, some of the most remarkable debates are raging in the public square, while credentialed experts in established centers of inquiry race to keep up. We can see this in discussions about citizenship and borders, about the nature of sex and the ethics of human reproduction, and about trade. It is also true in discussions of foreign policy. The conflict in Ukraine, especially, has sparked defining debates about core principles, which have been ongoing in public for a while, as experts are racing to keep up or trying to frame new debates in old categories or theories.

And yet, there is so much to think through in foreign policy, the topic of Emma Ashford’s First Among Equals. The last twenty years of US foreign policy seem to have been a blip of mistaken visions, many of which ended tragically. Americans have had big failures in the Middle East, but also failures to foresee or prepare for Russian bellicosity toward the West and the Chinese effort to win at least regional, if not global mastery. These developments seem to call for novel strategies that reflect the new geopolitical realities and are appropriate to the limitations of American power. The author proposes an allegedly new approach to US foreign policy, calling it “realist internationalism.” It is typical to devise new terms to suggest novelty, but in essence, “realist internationalism” is another version of the doctrine of retrenchment (or restraint, or, a word that is not to be spoken, isolationism), a particular version of the academic theory of Realism. The policy prescription is that the US must withdraw from Europe and the Middle East, while maintaining only a maritime presence in Asia. According to the author, the world, or at least Eurasia, will be better off with such a posture, and the US will be more secure. 

This is a bold claim, but not much that has not been said or written before appears in the book. Often what is there is wrapped in generalities that obfuscate more than clarify. Just one, albeit important, example: the author advocates that the US should define its interests more narrowly, “confined primarily to territorial security, nuclear deterrence, American democracy and prosperity at home, and the avoidance of the rise of a peer hegemon elsewhere in the world that could threaten the nation over the long term.” I don’t know who, except for some extreme crank, could possibly disagree with this list, which is very broad and ultimately does not supply a clear answer to how much and where the US should act. Certainly, this lengthy list of foreign policy goals does not include humanitarian interventions or foreign aid, tasks favored by liberals. But these call for relatively small expenditures of resources, and in some cases may be useful to achieve the objectives presented by Ashford. Even the Trump administration has not fully eliminated foreign aid but moved its management under the oversight of the Department of State to make sure that financial outlays abroad clearly support US national security. Similarly, American prosperity, for instance, may require maintenance of stability in the Middle East, military presence near Iran, or protection of Europe and its markets; to prevent the rise of a peer hegemon may demand more than a naval presence in the Pacific; and to preserve nuclear deterrence may require physical presence of military capabilities, including American tactical nuclear weapons, in Europe. But that’s the opposite of what the author proposes. 

From a generic and broad list of goals, it is impossible to derive unequivocal paths of action. In fact, as the author writes, the ultimate task of American leaders will be to avoid “war whenever possible, but not at any cost.” Again, it’s hard to disagree with such a statement. Has any leader claimed to seek war regardless of the costs?

Without American presence, many Europeans, eager to avoid a military buildup, may align more with Russia (and China), opposing our interests.

Despite the infinite flexibility that these generic goals offer, the argument of the book is, in the end, very rigid. To a large degree, this is due to the fact that the breezy overview of US foreign policy and of the proposed new realist strategy is wrapped in an old debate among US academic theories. On the one hand, there are theories, like liberalism, that want to alter the world through trade, international institutions, or democratic regimes. The telos is peace, even a Kantian perpetual peace. On the other hand stands realism, the theory of the eternal struggle for power due to human imperfections residing in original sin (think Saint Augustine) or imperfect rationality. Realism is thus seen as the realistic vision, grounded in a clear assessment of political possibilities, which is opposed to ideological aspirations to change the world here and now. The argument of the book is placed in the latter theory, with chapters sprinkling in realist concepts such as relative power or polarity. 

All this is standard and light American academic fare. But the version of realism presented in this book—arguing that a retreat from parts of Eurasia is a necessary and beneficial policy—is neither realistic nor ideology-free. Naturally, every policy prescription, whether coming from the left or the right, from the realist or the liberal camp, is defined by its proponents as pragmatic, realistic, prudent, and not utopic or ideological. As the author puts it, the book offers a “prudent, yet non-doctrinaire, realist foreign policy.” Prudence is by definition non-doctrinaire, and yet the proposed strategy is really neither. Beyond the broad claims that the telos of history is not imminent and that here and now we live in a fallen state that requires us to manage power dynamics, many policies advocated by realists like the author of this book are neither realistic nor grounded in a nuanced appreciation of the complexities of politics.

In fact, this book’s “realist internationalism” (and, more broadly, retrenchment) is a doctrine based on several articles of faith that, regardless of how much they can be proven wrong in day-to-day geopolitics, undergird the policy prescriptions. It is an ideology that is as risky as its liberal nemesis: both share a faith that a more secure international environment can arise with less American presence. The former hopes others will do our job with no costs to us; the latter hopes international organizations or trade or the rise of democratic regimes across the map will obviate the need for the US.

A recurrent belief behind retrenchment is that the US is the primary cause of the behavior of other states. For instance, Russia is aggressive because of American behavior. Its imperial expansion is therefore, as the author writes, “newfound,” a result of NATO enlargement (the book calls it, erroneously, “expansion” as if NATO troops had marched to Warsaw and Riga in an analogous fashion to the Red Army, which expanded Russia’s empire half a century earlier). This view implies that Russian imperial desires are a product of the West (NATO and the US mostly) rather than a historical constant going back to Peter the Great, if not earlier, or, more immediately, a fruit of Putin’s ambition to die as the great restorer of the Muscovite empire. Such a belief then leads to the dodgy suggestion that American absence from many regions in the world will eliminate many of our enemies. We leave Europe and certainly its eastern flank, and Russia will stop its westward imperialism. Similarly, the author suggests that Iran’s Islamic regime has developed its military capabilities, including support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, because the US has a sizeable military role in the region. The cause of Tehran’s regional aspirations is America: remove America, and Tehran loses its aggressiveness. This is another article of faith that flips the line of causation in ways unproven by history and dangerous for the future. To act upon it would amount to a bet against historical evidence.

A related belief behind this ideology of retrenchment or “realist internationalism” is that an American absence will be filled by our allies in their respective regions. As Ashford puts it, a “United States that is not present overseas and is less capable of trying to solve every problem will tempt policymakers less and allow other countries to step up.” But this is a big assumption, based on a flawed analysis. The fact that many countries, including our allies, do not spend much on defense is not because the US, or even a mere US presence, does not “allow” them to do so. On the contrary, many US political leaders from Eisenhower to Trump have been haranguing Europeans to step up and devote more resources to their own defense. Allies are encouraged to do more, but they simply do not want to, because for many, opposing Russia or China is not a core interest due to distance (Portugal is far from the Dniepr), economic interests (some, like Germany, rely on the markets or resources of these great powers), or other local dynamics (Hungary may be balancing EU domestic pressures with warmer relations with Moscow). In fact, it is plausible to foresee the exact opposite happening: without American presence, many Europeans, eager to avoid a military buildup, will align more with Russia (and China), opposing our interests.

Nevertheless, the author assures us, once the US has no military presence in Europe, allies there “should” fill the military void, “should” develop naval forces to provide security in the Mediterranean and the Baltic seas, and “should” more broadly have a serious commitment to their security. Ashford even puts a clear date on this proposal: in ten years, there should be no American troops in Europe. This may be desirable in an abstract theoretical way, but with the few exceptions of states that are the most threatened by Russia and have already increased their defense spending, it is doubtful whether Europeans will be willing to trade their social welfare for more artillery shells or be politically and fiscally capable of incurring higher debt levels for defense purposes. Italians will not cut their social welfare to build a navy to patrol the Mediterranean or the Red seas, and the French or the Germans will not send soldiers (which they don’t have anyway) to man trenches facing Russian tanks. Hope, or the expectation that somebody “should” do something, is not a good strategy, especially as the evidence points in a very different direction.

The academic theory of retrenchment has never been influential in American policy. Most US political leaders, in fact, shy away from the rigidity that a doctrine imposes.

One of the key reasons for American involvement and presence in various regions of Eurasia is the experience of what happened—and continues to happen—when the US stays offshore. By only floating on the seas, other great powers in history had a very limited effect on the politics on land, and only insofar as the polities on land were dependent on sea lanes. The US is not immune to this problem, and its maritime power is a necessary but insufficient tool to shape the geopolitical dynamics in Eurasia. Balancing on the continent does not just happen automatically, and, in fact, Eurasia has been prone to dramatic collapses of its equilibrium that required costly and massive American interventions in the last century. To leave Eurasia is to place naive hope over hard-won experience. And yet Ashford wants the US military to be smaller, and what is left should have “a substantially heavier emphasis on naval and air forces.” A smaller land force may not save that much money, as ships and places are more capital-intensive assets. Moreover, a navy and an air force can bomb places, but bombing alone doesn’t win wars.

The greatness of the realist tradition is the flexibility of its policy prescriptions. In its best form, realism is a simple belief that power is necessary and a position of strength should not be relinquished. It is not a doctrine proscribing what “should” happen or a grand theory explaining every motion in the world. Realism is also a tradition that accepts the perennial existence of difficult trade-offs. Any decision carries some costs and risks, exactly because the outcome is never certain. The virtue of the leader is thus prudence, right reason in action, and not blind faith in new or old axioms. 

And this—prudence—is exactly what is missing in this book, despite the recurrent use of the term to describe the advocated policy of retrenchment or “realist internationalism.” The certainty of outcomes—good if the US leaves Europe and the Middle East, bad if the US stays there—leaves little room for this virtue because the right path is doctrinally prescribed. US security can be engineered if only we follow the proposed doctrine, untested in history, but confident in the results it will produce.

Unsurprisingly, the academic theory of retrenchment has never been influential in American policy. Most US political leaders, in fact, shy away from the rigidity that a doctrine imposes. And Donald Trump is attracted to policy flexibility, perhaps even more than his predecessors. It is not in think tanks or academia, therefore, that a new US foreign policy is being and will be shaped. In fact, one of the effects of the Trump administration is the marginalization, already well advanced before him, of both, as they have been unable to offer a strategic vision attuned to the American electorate and to the increasingly more competitive relations with rival great powers. These places offer less prudence and more doctrine. 

This book is not an exception and is a product of academic theories and niche think tank debates. It restates the old doctrine of retrenchment, theorizing with great conviction that the world will be safer for the US with less American presence abroad. If not even Trump, a revolutionary figure capable of disrupting many existing policies, is willing to adopt this doctrine, it is likely that retrenchment will remain the academic abstraction that it is.

Especially since the controversies of 2020, the commanding heights of American culture have been dominated by a king of left-wing moral panic. In his new book, Adam Szetela analyzes this toxic mentality’s influence on the publishing industry specifically. Many writers are either drafted into ideological crusades—or else become their victims. In this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, Szetela joins James Patterson to discuss his book and the sorry state of American literature.

Related Links

This Book Is Dangerous! by Adam Szetela
Publishing Prejudices by Theodore Dalrymple

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

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

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson. I am contributing editor to Law & Liberty. Our author today is Adam Szetela. He earned his PhD in English in the Department of Literature at Cornell University. Before that, he was a visiting fellow in the Department of History at Harvard University. He’s written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, and other such publications. Today we’re going to be talking about his new book, That Book is Dangerous: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing. It’s from MIT Press. Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Adam Szetela (01:21):

Hey, thanks for having me, James. Appreciate it.

James Patterson (01:24):

So I just want to start off by saying that when I was carrying this book around at my office at the University of Tennessee, it got a lot of attention. People were very excited, and then when I told them about it, it got even more exciting. People were very thrilled to hear that someone had written this book. But before we get started talking about the details of this book, why don’t you give us an outline of what you argue in it?

Adam Szetela (01:49):

Yeah, so basically, so for context, I started noticing kind of in the early 2010s, this period that now hopefully in hindsight we’re referring to as the “Great Awokening” and sort of the birth of cancel culture, however you want to describe it. So there was a lot of attention around that time, rightfully going to universities for example, and sort of how they were shutting down speakers and you had these high profile cases of Charles Murray and Brett Weinstein and all these other folks. But around that time I noticed there was something similar happening in publishing. And every now and then a story would end up at The New York Times or The Washington Post that a book had been canceled before publication, and I don’t use that term metaphorically, I’m talking literally canceled before publication because someone had said it was racist or sexist or transphobic or homophobic.

(02:43):

And then sort of around the George Floyd “Summer of Love,” those cancellations really amped up a lot and I was seeing them more and more. And it was extending from picture books to journalism to scholarship to adult novels to memoirs. Really no corner of literary culture had been untouched by this climate of social media cancel campaigns. So basically I started with the question of if this is what I know about as someone who does not work in publishing, then surely this culture is affecting decisions that are being made behind closed doors. So I spent a few years interviewing people in all corners of publishing. So people who are presidents and vice presidents at the Big Five publishers, places like Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette, et cetera, to editors, to people who work in the marketing departments, to people at indie presses to directors of public library systems. And I even interviewed more than one person who is part of this growing career field of “sensitivity readers,” people being brought into edit manuscripts for potentially insensitive material. And these folks have now edited everything from a children’s picture book to there’s even scholarly journals that hire sensitivity readers now. So the book itself is really in many ways an exposé of this new historical moment in literary culture.

James Patterson (04:15):

The publishing industry, I don’t think, is something a lot of people know much about, but in particular you spend time talking about YA novels or young adult novels. And this is an area of publishing that really started to blow up as a result, I guess, of Harry Potter. So there’s a lot of details about the publication of young adult literature that I don’t know if people necessarily know. What is a “sensitivity reader,” how do they affect what’s published? And most of all, what is this whole concept of the moral panic? How does it play into all of that?

Adam Szetela (04:54):

Yeah, so the way I use moral panic in my book comes out of the sociological tradition called the “sociology of moral panic.” So these are folks who have studied everything from the Salem Witch trials to the hysteria over rock music at the end of the twentieth century. And basically a moral panic is a disproportionate response to a perceived threat. So the folks that I focus on in my book, and these folks in publishing, these folks on social media, who are getting books canceled and whatnot, they’re not people who are just like, “Oh, I think this book is not very good. I think it could be more well written.” These are folks who are associating books with violent crime. There’s someone I quote in my book who is actually head of an imprint who said, “Trayvon Martin might be alive right now if his killer had read better books as a kid.” These are folks who are comparing books to cars without seat belts. And in their minds, they think that the way you’re going to get rid of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and ultimately, people who voted for Trump, is to control publishing and control what people read, especially young people. So children, young adults, and they’re waging this crusade from their perspective to be on the right side of history, and they’re more than willing to get books removed from bookstores and to outright stop the publication of books before they even hit bookstores.

James Patterson (06:29):

Yeah, an element of the sensitivity era in which we use these sensitivity readers, you describe as a kind of reintroduction of race essentialism, and on page 58, a discussion of “racial mysticism.” How is it that these sensitivity readers that are attempting to kind of engage in some kind of filtering or refining of racial representation ends up ironically reproducing the very bias they’re trying to prevent?

Adam Szetela (07:01):

Yeah, it’s a great question. So basically to be a sensitivity reader, you do not go to college to be a sensitivity reader. You don’t complete any sort of course to become a sensitivity reader. All a sensitivity reader is, is someone who shares an identity with a character in a fictional book or the topic of a nonfiction book. So if I’m a black guy, I could be a reader, a sensitivity reader for say a nonfiction book written by a white guy that is in some way, shape or form about black people. I could be a sensitivity reader for a white guy who has a black character in his novel. And it’s premised on this idea that as a black person, I can speak to the needs, interests, values, et cetera of the “black community.” So what the way this sort of manifests in practice, and I try to offer a lot of empirical examples from the sensitivity readers themselves about what they actually do, but in practice, it sort of recreates the idea that people who share these demographic characteristics think the same, that they eat the same, that they have the same views of politics and things like that.

(08:10):

So there’ll be a sensitivity reader who’s like, “Hey, if there’s a black character in your book, I want to know what that character is eating for dinner.” That’s literally one example I quote, and it’s premised on this idea that black people in the US are supposed to be eating certain kinds of foods, talking a certain way, and ultimately the expectations for what they should be eating and how they should be talking actually are sort of the very stereotypes that they’re ostensibly sort of trying to correct in publishing. So an “authentic black meal” would be collard greens, something like that. Now, in reality, and one of the reasons that writers of color who I interviewed for my book who identify as being on the Left find these people so infuriating is because we’re now in a moment where a black novelist trying to get a book published is being told that their book is not “black enough” to be published. And essentially what the publisher means is we need more slang vernacular, we need more collard greens, we need more hip hop, things like that. And so that’s the short answer to your question. And a lot of this is being betrust by certain incentive structures in publishing. So right now, all the publishers are aware of the controversies. They don’t want their book to be called racist or sexist or whatever. So the sensitivity readers have created a market for their services, for their racial expertise and their expertise of these “communities”.

James Patterson (09:40):

There appears to be professional incentives within the industry to get ahead of a lot of the trends. In fact, I use the term “Get ahead” because I was just looking on page 62, probably one of the moments in the book where I had to stand up and walk around, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It said there was a Filipino author who was talking to a white editor and upon the white editor discovering that the Filipino author is not black, he says, “Hey, you’re not black, you’re Filipino. Oh my God, we got to get ahead of this. We got to get ahead of this. You’re going to face a—” and then we’re not allowed to swear on this podcast. And the author, recounting this event to you, says, “The agent is telling me, ‘Hey, we got to swap some races around.’ We need to get a Filipino in this book somehow because so far it’s all black. I mean, there’s some mixed race people, but they’re black.” So what is it on earth is driving this white editor into such a panic that he thinks he’s about to lose his livelihood?

Adam Szetela (10:46):

Yeah. So especially around 2020, there was this emergent but now institutionalized idea that writers should “stay in their lane” when they’re writing. So if you’re a Filipino author, you shouldn’t be writing from the perspective of a black character or what have you. So in that case, this gentleman’s agent thought he himself was black and he turned out to not to be. So he was like, we need to, in his words, “swap some races around and get more people in this book who look like you, because I don’t want to take this to a publisher.” And the publisher realizes the author is not black, because they’re going to see that as potentially becoming the next target of these folks online who will be very quick to go after you if you’re writing outside your own identity.

James Patterson (11:34):

So there’s a particular book that becomes a kind of paradigm case, and this is the book Blood Heir. What is this book and what happens with this book?

Adam Szetela (11:46):

So this one’s wild, but is in many ways just representative of other incidents. So this is early 2019, there was a young adult author named Amélie Wen Zhao. This was her debut book. It from my understanding, got a good advance. It was getting hyped up. It’s a fantasy novel, set in a fantastical world. And in the months leading up to publication, people had started posting screenshots of the book’s description. So not even the book itself. And in the book’s description, they say this is a novel set in a fantastical world where there is slavery, but the slavery is not based off skin color. And people started saying that this was appropriating African American slavery, that this was “whitewashing” slavery. And for someone like myself who doesn’t have cognitive deficiencies, it’s obviously like a preposterous claim at face value, the idea that any book with slavery in it is speaking to African American slavery or taking something from that tradition.

(12:54):

From my understanding, the author was actually writing about sort of indentured servitude back in China, her home country. But anyways, so this reached a crescendo and the publisher, Penguin Random House actually canceled the publication of the book, sent the book to sensitivity readers for editing, and eventually it came out. Now, one of the things that’s most striking about this example is that there was someone, another author who led the charge in this cancellation campaign. He himself also, he was about to have his debut book come out. He’s an author of color as far as I can understand. He is on the far left. And a few months later, the same thing happened to his book. People went after him, said his book was, if I recall correctly, Islamophobic, because he had a villain in his book who was Muslim, and this guy, his book got canceled, it never got published, and he himself is a sensitivity reader. So when I was watching this, I was kind of like, if this guy cannot “get it right,” what hope do the rest of us have? This is a sensitivity reader for Big Five publishers who is heavily active in these cancellation campaigns, and even he himself cannot prevent himself from getting canceled.

James Patterson (14:15):

“Above all,” this is page 105, “above all, moral crusades tend to become more extreme. As they become more extreme, they lose sympathizers.” And you talk about how this was the case for the comic book crusade, and now it’s the case over why literature moving in the same direction, and it’s, like many revolutions, a revolution that is eating itself. But a part of this story about Blood Heir is the rise of social media. One of these social media sites, I think is going to be one that may not be familiar to many listeners to this podcast, maybe some, and that’s Goodreads. What on earth is Goodreads doing to authors, especially in YA?

Adam Szetela (14:55):

Yeah. So Goodreads is a platform where anyone can write a review of a book even if the book has not come out yet. So these folks who are involved in these cancellation campaigns, these are not what I will, for lack of a better word, called normal readers. These are very left-of-center people who spend a lot of time online, so not just on Twitter, not just on Facebook, but a big platform for them is Goodreads. So you’ll come across people on Goodreads who are not authors, who aren’t professional reviewers, but they have hundreds of posts, hundreds of ratings. They sort of see themselves as the de facto gatekeepers of literary culture and sort of the moralness of literary culture. So what happened was they started using this tactic that we call the “Goodreads review bomb.” So the way this works is let’s say you James have a book coming out in a few months, I get wind of it, maybe I get an advanced reading copy, or maybe as in the case of Amélie Wen Zhao, I just read the book description and I don’t like it.

(16:02):

I find it problematic. I can start sharing screenshots, posting on Twitter, things like that. But when you put in a book’s title on Google, Goodreads can be one of the first sites that come up, especially if you’re a new author and you don’t have a huge platform. So what these people realized is that working together, they could totally tank a book’s rating on Goodreads in a way that it won’t recover, and they can post comments that are like, “this book is racist, this book is sexist.” “This book is,” as my own title suggests, “this book is dangerous”. So some of these controversies, ones that eventually get covered in places like Slate in The Washington Post because a book gets canceled or what have you, or an author gets death threats, as was the case with the woman that wrote American Dirt. Some of this stuff just starts on Goodreads with people posting.

James Patterson (16:57):

For the life of me, and I can’t remember if it’s in the book or not, but for the life of me, I cannot think of a single real definitive indication that YA novels cause violence against underrepresented people. It just occurred to me while you were talking, it’s like, well, does this really happen? Do people have a moment they’re thinking of when this happened?

Adam Szetela (17:20):

Yeah, so no, they don’t, short answer to your question. And the relatively little empirical work that has been done on how reading actually shapes people’s opinions and stuff like that, I mean, it’s, it’s a skim field, and basically what they find is, yeah, if you watch, I don’t know, Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth or something as a 13-year-old, then maybe on a survey a week, two weeks later, you might be more liberal in terms of your views on that. But it’s not like people are doing these ten-year long studies about what books you read and how they affect your life and stuff. Now, one of the biggest ironies here is that a lot of the people in the pundit class who have been making that connection between books and the election of Donald Trump or the death of Trayvon Martin, these same people are highly critical of that one-to-one causality in other contexts.

(18:14):

So these are the sort of left-of-center people who will be like, yeah, it’s preposterous that someone’s going to shoot up a school because they played Grand Theft Auto, or it’s preposterous that listening to rock music in the 1980s is going to convert you to a Satanist or something. So they’re aware of, for lack of a better word, the stupidity of those sorts of arguments. But I call them “magic words,” when you’re and start inserting these “magic words” like racism, sexism, a lot of the sort of logical thinking just kind of goes out the window and then all of a sudden you’re connecting a picture book about George Washington’s slave to the death of George Floyd. And these are people who have power. It’s not just a random blogger online, it’s like distinguished professors of English or the presidents of imprints at  Big Five publishers and so on.

James Patterson (19:09):

Yeah, I was always laughing about seeing these tenured faculty that were participating in this. I guess once you’ve gotten tenure, you don’t really have a lot else to do for some cases except to review on Goodreads. I mean, there are better uses of your time. So there’s a lot of people listening to this that might remember Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally getting canceled. But one thing you point out is that aside from these kinds of examples, this specific one, it’s not really conservatives targeted by sensitivity readers or by the Big Five. So conservative authors aren’t the targets. This is a circular firing squad.

Adam Szetela (19:57):

So Big Five publishing houses are Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan are the sort of Big Five. So those are the ones that, for lack of a better word, have a near monopoly on the books that get published, and particularly the books that are profitable. I could of course start my own indie publisher and stuff, but I don’t have the distribution channels of Simon & Schuster. So the reason I focus on those publishers are in the same reason I would focus on the UFC as opposed to some backyard fighting organization if I want to study MMA.

James Patterson (20:33):

Yeah, this is not a video podcast, but is that Connor behind you I see? Is that

Adam Szetela (20:39):

Yeah, yeah, yeah…

James Patterson (20:39):

If we were running a different podcast, we could talk about the UFC because unfortunately that’s something that I follow probably too much.

Adam Szetela (20:49):

Anyway, I followed quite closely. I’m trying to get my hands on some White House tickets for July.

James Patterson (20:55):

Oh, man. Well, maybe they’ll bring Jones back. Although, anyway, no, no, no, we’re not going to do that. That’s not this kind of podcast. There is probably the funniest chapter to read is the chapter on political economy, and in the political economy chapter you talk about, or you open it with this man named Jason Allen who’s at a mansion in Bridgehampton, New York, and Allen is working as a pool repairman for another writer. Why is this story so emblematic of the problems you see with access to resources in publishing and the incentives to keep people of a certain kind of way?

Adam Szetela (21:38):

Yeah, so I will answer that and then I’ll actually go back to your other question about the relative paucity of conservative authors like Ryan T. Anderson. So in terms of this question, yeah, so one thing you’ll notice as I did when I started really studying this zeitgeist is that there’s a borderline fetishistic obsession with identity and making publishing as diverse as possible. And by publishing, I mean who works at the publishers, who works in the agencies, who are the authors being published? So it’s like if 1.5% of the population is, I don’t know, trans African-American women, then we need 1.5%. It gets that granular, but one thing you’ll not see is virtually any attention to the class backgrounds of people who end up working in publishing and the class backgrounds of people who end up getting the big contracts and things like that. So as someone who’s very much interested in that dynamic, that chapter is very critical of the kind of in some ways, hypocrisy of this movement. Because they will look at statistics on say, the number of women of color in publishing or the number of trans people or what have you, but particularly when it comes to race, there’s this idea that if you get more unconscious bias training seminars, if you force your workforce to read Robin DeAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi, then publishing will become this sort of multicultural paradise where you walk down the hallway and there’s five black people and three in it.

(23:21):

But one of the things that explanation fails to grasp is just the material realities of working in publishing. So you could go on LinkedIn right now or Indeed or Glassdoor and just plug in what is a starting salary for an assistant editor at Penguin Random House make, and you’ll see it’s like $51,000, and these are really, really hard-to-get jobs first off. And then two, it’s like, who’s living on $51,000 working in Manhattan? Well, I’ll tell you who. It’s people who have a parental safety net or people who have a trust fund or a wealthy spouse, that sort of thing. And one thing you’ll also notice when you look at who’s working in publishing, who’s working at agencies, these are people who are not being pulled from the local community college. These are people from the same, I dunno, 30, 40 to 50 universities, but really the same top 20 universities.

(24:19):

It’s the Ivys, Chicago, NYU, UC–Berkeley, UCLA, NYU. It is a very, very elite culture and one in which all problems including this problem of diversity, which is on all these people’s minds, are solved with solutions that have nothing to do with say, increasing the amount of working class people, people have working class backgrounds in publishing and that sort of thing. And then the question then becomes following their own logic. So their logic is like if there’s majority of white people in publishing, then it’s going to affect the stories that are being told. If its majority cis people, then it’s going to affect the stories that are being told. Well, then the question is like, well, if its majority highly educated people from selective universities and colleges in the US, then yeah, what kind of books do you think are going to be published and accepted?

(25:18):

And I will say this too, it’s not something I talk about at length in my book, but it’s something I’ve started talking about a bit more since its publication because it kind of relates to some current research I’m doing. The number one demographic of people who work in publishing is actually women. It’s a heavily feminine workforce, depending on what stats you’re looking at, it’s as high as 75 percent of people, and it’s largely white middle to upper class women who live in New York City. So if I’m a man and say, I want to write a book for, I don’t know, high school boys, a population that is historically not big readers, and I’m like, this is my audience. I want to write a cool book that connects to them, get some reading, that can be my audience. But in reality, my audience is the gatekeeper who is a middle to upper class white woman who lives in New York City and probably voted for Hillary Clinton. So if you want an explanation as to why certain books are not being published, that would be according to the Left’s sort of own logic why that is.

James Patterson (26:21):

The line here on page 131 is about sensitivity readers that really raised my eyebrows was “Many sensitivity readers earn more per hour than public school teachers, daycare workers, bus drivers, firefighters, dentists, and doctors. According to one university as of March, 2019, the average pay for a sensitivity reader was $0 to one penny per word. For a work of 60,000 words, you can expect to receive about 300 to $600 at an average reading speed of 250 words a minute. A 60,000 word manuscript will take five hours, four hours to read. This means sensitivity readers make an average of $75 to $150 per hour. If they work 40 hours a week, they can make $156,000 and $312,000 per year.” Are they providing any value that matches this? Are the books any good?

Adam Szetela (27:19):

I mean to give them the most generous reading humanly possible. It’s certainly true that when you look at the long history of literature, particularly American literature, yeah, there are books that have recreated stereotypes and et cetera, et cetera, and there still are cases. I learned this from talking to sensitivity readers where it seems like in certain contexts they can be somewhat helpful. But yeah, I mean I think about their value less in terms of the actual value they provide to literature and more in terms of the optics for the publisher. In many ways, sensitivity readers are now a kind of disaster insurance, and that evidenced quite clearly when you read acknowledgements for books. So now in acknowledgements ten, 20 years ago, you’d see, thank you to my editor, thank you to my agent, thank you to these readers.” Now you start seeing “thank you to the two sensitivity readers for helping me whatever, write about the Asian character in my book” or whatever.

(28:22):

And it’s kind of like this public relations preface of sort of getting ahead of any potential controversy that might ensue, right? Because it’s hard to say, “Hey, Adam, you don’t understand how to write Indian American characters” when I thank three Indian American sensitivity readers in the acknowledgement section of my book, I think that is what’s fueling it in large part because the stuff that I think most people would agree could be better like avoiding certain stereotypes, things like that. That stuff was already getting addressed by editors and by other people because in regards to the question that you brought up with Ryan T. Anderson, mainstream publishing is overwhelmingly left-of-center. It’s not like there’s this huge phalanx of conservatives or sort of far right people who are churning out these genuinely racist books season after season. As Durkheim would say, this is largely a society of saints, and in a society of saints, the saints go after the least saintly, which is why from the outside, this is just progressives going after progressives essentially for not being progressive enough.

James Patterson (29:40):

You provide a copy for the submission of stories to Folio, which is a literary journal published by American University, and it’s what came to mind when you mentioned the overrepresentation of wealthy white women because the description here is, okay, I’ll just say it, and people can make their own conclusions. It says, “If your jam is recreating Grimm’s fairy tales with a badass feminist spin, we want to hear from you. If your love language is recommending stories by Carmen Maria Machado, your taste is up our alley.” It’s an odd mixed metaphor. “If you correspond to how Jordan Peele corners the intersection between horror and racial social commentary, send us your stuff. Folio does not tolerate racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, ableism, or any work that promotes harmful stereotypes and viewpoints.” And as you comment, that Folio is not getting a flood of racist, antisemitic, or otherwise intolerant submissions. So why bother even saying this? And I guess the answer is because of staking a kind of public reputation on the line, right?

Adam Szetela (31:02):

Yeah. I mean there’s few corners of culture that are as hyper left as literary culture, particularly literary culture tied to universities. So these days, if you want to be a writer, you can move to New York City and try to bus tables and sell your first novel. But increasingly, the more common path is you go to a university, you get an English degree, you get an MFA degree, and a lot of those university writing programs have these magazines like the one you quoted. So when they post that, I know I have published in these literary magazines, I have friends who have worked on them, professors I know who run them, there’s no significant contingency of racists and homophobes submitting stuff. So then it becomes a question of like, is this just virtue signaling to the public because we too want to make a statement about how we don’t tolerate racism, sexism, whatever.

(32:00):

Yeah. I mean, that’s probably the case in my opinion. But one of the profound ironies of this is like, and I quote a bunch of submission guidelines in my book, is these people will be like, we’re not going to publish your racist sexist work. We want whatever stories like Jordan Peele and stuff, but then they’ll say, Hey, if your story includes pseudo-sexist language or something like that, you need to preface this with a trigger warning at the front. So I just read that and I read these guidelines where these people, some of them will literally tie their literary magazine that has 400 followers on Twitter to global revolution and stuff like that. And then I read that and I’m just like, dude, you’re literally saying your staff is going to be brought to pieces if a trigger warning is not on the cover of your poem. And then it’s like these same people are talking about overthrowing global capitalism. These are literally the very last people I would want near me if I was interested in concrete political change. There are people who can, unless they’re lying, they’re people who can sort of get broken by the most minimal nudge of something that upsets them.

James Patterson (33:19):

When you start to piece together the book, it actually gets more horrifying because you’re learning now that the stated position you just mentioned justifies the creation of a $300,000 a year position to do race essentialism and YA novels. This is the thing, by the time I finished the book, I got so sad because I think a lot of people, I mean I’m 45, I don’t know how old you are, but a lot of us remember the Scholastic Book Fair, and it was fun. You would go there, you’d maybe buy an eraser, you would get Frog and Toad or something, and now you’re getting sort of left-wing race essentialism for sale. Does it have to be this way? Can there be some billionaire that creates a sixth alternative or are we stuck with this?

Adam Szetela (34:15):

Yeah, it’s a good question. I appreciate the Scholastic Book Fair throwback. I haven’t thought about that.

James Patterson (34:21):

I loved it. I would go there and I would just walk around and take it in. It was my favorite thing ever.

Adam Szetela (34:26):

Yeah, yeah. So money talks and BS walks. I think there’s some publishers, obviously Skyhorse Publishing, Regnery, its imprint, which publishes some of the big hitters on the right, like Ted Cruz, et cetera, et cetera. There are people trying to do that work. Now, do they have the same sort of capital, like a Penguin Random House? No. So I think for me to see actual change, it’s probably going to come from a cultural level in the same way the Left has been very effective at bending culture to its will. At the end of the day, these are for-profit companies. People don’t know it was the Murdoch family that has owned Harper Collins. And these Big Five publishers, they do have their conservative imprints where they publish really profitable books, but for the most part, the people who go into publishing are left of center and that sort of affects the norms.

(35:21):

But at the end of the day, it is bottom line, which is why you see people get fired from these publishers when they’re not meeting their bottom lines. I think it’s the main reason conservative imprints still exist. So if there was something comparable to what the left has done to put pressure on publishers, I could see them responding to that because the ones at the very top do have shareholders and they do have to meet public need and stuff. And I think more importantly, there’s an audience for books that are not pushing this over the top left wing agenda. One of the critiques I make just from an aesthetic position as a reader is these people who have spearheaded this movement, they will say, we need more diversity in publishing. When we need more diversity in publishing, we need to stop teaching Mark Twain.

(36:17):

We need to stop teaching whoever, and instead we need to teach this book, that book and that book. And then you read the descriptions of the books and it’s all more or less the same story. It’s all a story about some character from a marginalized background set in the present who’s valiantly trying to solve some social problem like police brutality or something like that. I quote specific books in my own book and I’m like, I have no problem with those books existing. To every reader their own book. But once you start talking about trying to prevent the publishers from publishing books that deviate from that, once you start talking about getting Huck Finn kicked off the syllabus so that your contemporary social justice YA novel is widely taught, that becomes a problem. In the same way I interviewed a director of a public library system who was like, I have colleagues who will not purchase Christian fiction even though there are people in our library network who would want to read that because it goes against their personal, moral-political beliefs. And at the end of the day, that’s doing a disservice to art to readers. And I think as we’re seeing with the backlash that’s going on against universities, I think there can be a moment where the proverbial chickens come home to roost when people are aware of what’s going on and frustrated with what’s going on.

James Patterson (37:56):

Yeah, we’re getting towards the end, but there is this one thing I wanted to ask about Fight Club. You point out, and American Psycho is another one, these are books written sort of a different period. The funny joke about Fight Club is it was written back when the worst thing a person could imagine would be having a boring job, right? Very pre-2008. But these are books that have taken on a new political valence among very extreme right-wing people. So is this an indication that there may be something about literature? I guess this isn’t YA. I mean, if you’re giving your kid American Psycho, maybe reconsider… But is this a good counterpoint to the criticism you’re leveling?

Adam Szetela (38:44):

Yeah, so I mean, I love Chuck Palahniuk who wrote Fight Club. If you see that severed arm on my bookshelf?

James Patterson:

I do. I do.

Adam Szetela:

That is an arm that he sent me that he signed. It’s a medical replica. He’s awesome.

James Patterson (38:58):

I’m insanely jealous that you have that.

Adam Szetela (38:59):

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you should be. It’s amazing. Yeah, so I mean I’ve interviewed Chuck Palahniuk for another project. I listened to Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast and stuff. Both of those dudes have said that if they were coming up in this moment, their magnum opus would not be published. They got sorta grandfathered into the system where they have proven profitable, they’ve been around for decades, so they’re going to continue to do what they do. But if you were a young novelist and your only goal was to get published, you would not do well by trying to mimic Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis. That said, I think your point about the way these books have been received differently over the years is a really good point, and it’s one that I’m very much on the side of, which is the side of polysomy, which is this idea that there’s always multiple interpretations to a text.

(40:02):

And so when Fight Club first came out, the left loved that book that was around the time of the Seattle antiglobalist protests and things like that. That was very much, I think Marxism had a sort of kick during that moment and they were like, yeah, this is awesome. Fight Club like “Eff American Capitalism, eff the sort of existential crises produced by white collar work.” He was in many ways a hero of the left, especially after the film came out. But now that book is considered alt-right, because I think this is a fair observation, it does sort of glorify what the left calls toxic masculinity, but a more violent kind of masculinity, which I’m kind of a fan of, as you mentioned with the UFC, but now it’s considered that’s bad, Chuck Palahniuk is bad. Same thing with Bret Easton Ellis. When American Psycho came out, that was considered the satire of the hour of Wall Street and excess, and he did get some flack by feminists and things like that, but now he’s considered super far right, et cetera, et cetera.

(41:11):

Same thing. I mean, JK Rowling’s a great example. Her books used to be the primary people going after her book used to be people really on the Christian who are accusing her of converting kids to witches and glorifying Satanism and stuff. Now it’s all about the trans stuff. That’s why people are burning her books now. So the lesson from that is there’s always multiple interpretations to attacks. I could read Fight Club and think it’s super progressive. You could read it and think it’s super conservative. I could get something out of it that’s totally different from you. So why would you try to define a book in one way and then try to enforce your definition of a book through defacto censorship and these other methods that these folks are using to control what we read and what we’re allowed to write.

James Patterson (42:01):

Well, to close, I have one last question, which is on, let’s see here. November 15th, Jack Della Madalena is fighting Islam Makhachev for the welterweight belt. Who do you got?

Adam Szetela (42:17):

I don’t foresee Islam losing to anyone right now.

James Patterson (42:20):

He’s already pretty GOATed. I appreciate the conversation. Sorry, those of you listening who don’t follow the UFC, but I cannot tell you how excited I am for that point. Thank you very much, Adam Szetela for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Adam Szetela:

Yeah, thank you man. I appreciate it.

James Patterson:

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

While the media focus on the political and policy implications of the recent federal appellate court decision upholding in-part (and remanding in-part) a lower court summary judgment against President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, there are both legal and judicial aspects of the case that merit attention as the case wends its way to expedited consideration by the Supreme Court. (The tariffs remain in place pending the Supreme Court’s decision; oral arguments are scheduled for early November.)

First, it bears underscoring that while the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals endorsed the substantive aspects of the lower court’s decision, it nonetheless remanded the court’s remedy in the case—a permanent injunction—back to the court to apply the subsequently released Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Casa, Inc. regarding the authority of lower courts to issue “universal injunctions.”

Secondly, while much of the media group the case under the broad rubric of executive power, the case circles around an issue of statutory interpretation regarding congressional delegation to the president. The case does not relate to the distinct legal issue of inherent executive power (that is, the case does not relate to an exercise of presidential power absent congressional authorization).

The specific question in the case concerns whether Congress statutorily delegated authority to the president to impose Liberation Day tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. The lower court, a three-judge panel of the US Court of International Trade (CIT), held in a summary judgment that it did not. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 7-4 decision, upheld the CIT’s summary judgment.

Both decisions held only that current law does not authorize the imposition of the president’s tariffs. The media often get so caught up in reporting the judicial horse race—who’s winning and who’s losing in court—that they lose focus on the fact that statutory interpretation cases, if decided adversely to the preferences of current policy makers, are fairly easy to reverse.

To wit, irrespective of what the Court decides, Congress was entirely free, and will remain free, to enact new legislation authorizing the tariff system the president wants to impose (provided Congress is careful to provide an “intelligible principle” for its delegation of authority to the president).

Thirdly of note is that the partisan composition of the lower and appellate court coalitions belies oft-repeated narratives of partisan judges. There were bipartisan judicial coalitions at both levels of court decisions.

The Original Decision by the US Court of International Trade

The court of original jurisdiction in this case was a specialized Federal court, the US Court of International Trade. Despite its specialized jurisdiction, it is an Article III court. The three-judge panel for the court unanimously granted the requested injunction against the tariffs in summary judgment. Of note, a majority of the three-judge panel were Republican appointees: President Trump appointed one judge (Judge Reif), Reagan appointed one judge (Restani), and Obama appointed one judge (Katzmann). All agreed that the tariffs exceeded the president’s statutory authorization.

The appellate court in the case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, is also a specialized court, with appellate jurisdiction over exclusively federal questions related to trade, patents, trademarks, federal employees, and a few other areas.

The full appellate court, less one judge (who is involved in an ongoing dispute with the court unrelated to the tariff decision), affirmed the lower court’s decision, but remanded the question of appropriate remedies back to the trial court. Of the seven judges voting with the majority, one was appointed by a Republican president, and the other six were appointed by Democrats. More notably, among the four dissenting judges, two were Obama appointees and the other two were George W. Bush appointees.

As mentioned above, the CIT granted summary judgment on the tariffs. “Summary judgments” require that there be “no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.”

To reverse a lower federal court’s summary judgment, a court of appeals needs to find that the lower court “made a clear error of judgment in weighing the relevant factors or exercised its discretion based on an error of law or clearly erroneous fact findings.”

Congress and the president need not wait even for an expedited Supreme Court decision to move to enact new legislation.

The CIT’s decision was derived from two conclusions. First, the CIT concluded that IEEPA’s language authorizing the president to “regulate” imports given a national emergency did not extend to what it concluded was the president’s assertion of authority to impose “unbounded tariffs.”

In concluding this, the CIT noted, first, the Delegation Doctrine’s requirement that a congressional delegation required an “intelligible principle” on which presidential action would be based. Secondly, the CIT concluded that the president’s assertion of authority to impose the Liberation Day tariffs did not meet the “intelligible principle” threshold. The court also made passing reference to the Major Questions Doctrine. This recently articulated doctrine requires that congressional delegation be clearly stated when executive authority asserts delegated authority in matters of “vast economic and political significance.”

Secondly, the CIT held that the Administration’s asserted justification for the tariffs did not rise to the level required by the IEEPA. The statute authorizes presidential action in response to an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” The court held that the Administration did not assert “[a] standard inherently applicable to the exercise of delegated emergency” and, as a result, it rejected the Administration’s claim that the tariffs bear “a reasonable relation . . . to the emergency.”

The Decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

The appellate court reviewing the CIT’s grant of summary judgment applied a “clear error” standard of review, asking whether the CIT decision resulted from an “abuse of discretion” by making “an error of law or clearly erroneous fact findings.”

The appellate court’s majority nonetheless highlighted different aspects of the case than the CIT decision did.

First, the appellate court made much more of the distinction between taxes and regulations than the CIT’s opinion did. The IEEPA authorizes the president to “regulate” imports in a national emergency. The appellate court argued that taxing something is different than regulating something.

Beyond different dictionary definitions of “tax” and of “regulate,” the majority pointed to laws in which, unlike the IEEPA, the tariff power was delegated to the president in “clear and precise terms.” Drawing on a logic similar to what courts assert in preemption cases, it made the argument that congressional practice habitually delegates tariff authority in express statutory language. Absent that express delegation, the court was reluctant to read the statute to authorize a tax—the tariffs—when the express language of the statute authorized only regulatory power.

Like the CIT, the appellate majority buttressed its argument by appeal to the Major Question’s Doctrine. It concluded,

we discern no clear congressional authorization by IEEPA for tariffs of the magnitude of the Reciprocal Tariffs and Trafficking Tariffs. Reading the phrase “regulate . . . importation” to include imposing these tariffs is “a wafer-thin reed on which to rest such sweeping power.”

As a result, the majority held that the substance of the CIT summary judgment was not in “clear error” even as it remanded the remedy—the universal injunction—back to the CIT.

The four dissenting judges (including, as noted, two judges appointed by President Obama) pointed out in response that, first, while tariffs (and taxes more generally) can be used for raising revenues, they can and have often been used for regulatory purposes as well.

Secondly, the dissenters argued that the IEEPA does meet the Delegation Doctrine’s requirement that a congressional statute provide an intelligible principle for the exercise of delegated authority by the president. Not only does the IEEPA require the “declaration of national emergency,” the dissenters wrote, but it also imposes other conditions in the statute relating to the nature of the external threat to the nation. These were sufficient to provide the required “intelligible principle” for delegation to the president.

Further, the dissenters observed that in articulating its Delegation Doctrine objections, the CIT opinion did not explain why “these particular tariffs” would be an unconstitutional exercise of “’unlimited’ tariff authority.”

The legal issues in the case regarding whether the IEEPA delegates the authority that President Trump asserted in imposing the tariffs notably cut across political lines. This is obvious given the cross-cutting judicial coalitions at both the trial court and appellate court levels. The original CIT panel included a Trump appointee as well as a Reagan appointee; the appellate court dissenters included two Obama appointees as well as two George W. Bush appointees. The decisions do not neatly fit into current narratives on both left and right regarding judges laying down for Trump, on the one hand, or seeking to stymie Trump’s political goals on the other. Beyond that, it merits emphasis that the case implicates “only” an issue of statutory interpretation. Congress and the president need not wait even for an expedited Supreme Court decision to move to enact new legislation that would fully and clearly authorize the president’s preferred tariff policy. Of course, that assumes that the Republican-controlled Congress wants to authorize the president’s tariff policy. But that’s a political issue, not a legal issue.

All year, the sense has been growing that freedom of speech is broken in Britain, and that it must be fixed. US Vice President JD Vance was one of the first to draw attention to it. In a meeting with British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the Oval Office in February of this year, the vice president expressed his concerns directly to the prime minister. Later that month, Vice President Vance expanded on the theme as he addressed the Munich security conference in Germany. There, he said that Europe’s greatest threat was posed not by Putin’s Russia or by Middle East radicalism, but “from within,” as European leaders ignored voter concerns on matters such as free speech. He cited as an example the recently enacted ban in Britain on all protest—even peaceful protest—within the bounds of an abortion clinic. Even silent vigil and prayer have been banned in Britain within so-called “abortion zones.” Those caught in breach of such a ban are committing a criminal offence and may be fined or even jailed.

Britain’s friends in the United States are right to draw attention to the challenging state of free speech in the UK, even if some of them are at the same time posing problems for free speech in America. The vice president’s (and others’) reaction to those who appeared to celebrate—or not sufficiently to condemn—the recent murder of Charlie Kirk is seriously troubling, from a free speech point of view. When we seek to cancel those whose speech we loathe, we undermine any credibility we might otherwise have as a free speech champion, for the test of our commitment to free speech lies in our willingness to defend speech we hate.

Be that as it may, the points about British free speech Vice President Vance (and others) have been making this year demand attention and careful scrutiny. Let us focus on the message, not the messenger. Four recent issues shine light on the issues.

Take Allison Pearson, a well-known newspaper columnist and cultural commentator in Britain. She tweeted a picture of police officers standing next to people she believed were pro-Hamas protesters. She asked: “How dare they?”—implying that the police should be arresting the protesters for supporting Hamas rather than standing alongside, apparently facilitating them. She described the people in the picture as “Jew haters.” When it was pointed out that the people depicted were in fact demonstrating about a matter relating to Pakistan, and that the picture had nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas conflict, the tweet was deleted. But this did not stop police officers from visiting her family home one Sunday morning to warn her that she may have committed an offence in posting the tweet and that, if she did it again, she was liable to be arrested.

Or take Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor. In July 2024, three children were stabbed to death and ten other people (eight of them children) were injured in a horrific attack in Southport, Merseyside (near Liverpool). Misinformation about the attacker spread immediately on social media, claiming (falsely) that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker. Riots spread across the north of England, as anger erupted over the murder and maiming of children. More than one thousand arrests were made in connection with the riots, which saw serious public disorder and damage to property. In this climate, Lucy Connolly posted a tweet expressing anger at immigration policy and saying “set fire to all the [expletive deleted] hotels full of the bastards for all I care,” referring to hotels in Britain housing asylum seekers. She was arrested and charged with the offence of inciting racial hatred. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 31 months’ imprisonment. She was released in August 2025 after serving 40 percent of her sentence, whereupon she described herself as Sir Keir Starmer’s “political prisoner.”

As bright a line as possible needs to be drawn in the criminal law between speech which is threatening or abusive, and speech which is merely offensive.

Thirdly, consider Graham Linehan, well-known both as the creator of the hit 1990s TV show Father Ted and, more recently, as an outspoken and sometimes intemperate critic of gender self-identity. Linehan has moved to Arizona, quitting Britain, not least because he considers it a country where freedom of expression is no longer protected. Returning to Britain in September 2025 to face trial on charges of harassment and criminal damage, he was arrested by armed police officers at Heathrow Airport over tweets he had posted five months earlier, in which he had said, among other things, that if you meet a trans man in a female-only space (such as a women’s toilet) and they refuse to leave, you should “punch him in the balls.” Linehan was arrested for inciting violence. He was so enraged by this that he had to be taken to hospital to be treated for dangerously high blood pressure.

Finally, consider Palestine Action, a direct-action group that agitates against British government, military, and commercial support for or collaboration with Israel. In July 2025, when two Palestine Action activists unlawfully entered a military base in Oxfordshire and spray-painted two RAF aircraft, the Government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Demonstrating support for a proscribed organisation is a criminal offence in Britain. In September 2025, during public protests against the decision to proscribe, 890 arrests were made. The decision to proscribe Palestine Action is controversial and is currently being challenged in the courts.

If these four episodes form (at least part of) the case for the proposition that free speech is broken in Britain, how does that case stack up? What should we make of the evidence so far?

The Allison Pearson and Lucy Connolly cases concerned the same law—the offence of stirring up racial hatred. This is not a new offence: it has been on the statute book since 1965. The offence is to use “threatening, abusive or insulting” words or behaviour which are either “intended or likely” to stir up racial hatred. This offence, first enacted in the Race Relations Act 1965, was the UK’s first hate crime. Since then, hate crimes have been extended to cover not only racial hatred, but hatred on grounds of religion, sexual orientation, and other such characteristics. However, the offence of stirring up racial hatred is broader than these later, newer offences in two regards. First, outside of the context of race, it is only threatening or abusive words or behaviour that are prohibited, not “threatening, abusive or insulting” words; and secondly, outside of the context of race, the offences can be committed only intentionally, not where it is either “intended or likely” that hatred will be stirred up.

The narrower formulation, I would argue, is to be preferred. No one should be criminalised solely because they have insulted someone, and no one should be criminalised because their words are merely “likely” to stir up hatred. If you use threats or abuse and if you intend to stir up hatred, there is a good argument that such action should expose you to criminal liability. After all, you cannot use your fists to threaten or abuse, so why should you be able to use your words to do so? Even in the United States, what the Supreme Court refers to as “fighting words” are afforded no protection under the First Amendment (see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 US 568 [1942]).

This, then, is the first fix that the Allison Pearson and Lucy Connolly cases suggest is required for Britain. The scope of the offence of stirring up racial hatred needs to be narrowed, so that it covers only threats and abuse (and not mere insult), and so that it can be committed only intentionally. The second matter that the case of Lucy Connolly in particular throws up is the length of the sentence. I do not consider that Connolly was any sort of free speech martyr; still less, that she was a political prisoner. What she posted to X was appalling: if calling for asylum seekers to be burnt to death in the hotels which house them does not constitute “fighting words,” nothing does. That said, however, the length of her prison sentence struck many observers as hard to justify, notwithstanding that England’s Court of Appeal upheld the sentence as appropriate in the circumstances.

The Graham Linehan case is similarly controversial. Making an arrest for inciting violence five months after the alleged offence took place, when no evidence appears to have been presented that any violence against trans men in female spaces was actually carried out under the inspiration of Linehan’s messaging, seems hardly a proportionate use of police resources. Of course, Linehan has form when it comes to speaking out: his Twitter account was permanently suspended in 2020 for repeated allegations of hate speech and was reinstated only after Elon Musk acquired Twitter two years later. Even in the Musk era, Linehan’s X account has been (temporarily) suspended for breaching X’s terms of service. That his “punch him in the balls” tweet is far from the first occasion when Linehan’s speech has been called into question may lead some to think the September 2025 arrest was inevitable. Others may take the view that the fact that Linehan was returning to the UK to face what, on any account, are more serious criminal charges—albeit charges he denies—suggests that the arrest was simply over the top. If Linehan sues for wrongful arrest, as he has indicated he might, the matter may yet end up requiring judicial resolution.

The Palestine Action case is different. It concerns not offensive (or hateful) speech, but speech which the authorities have deemed to be contrary to national security. Under the UK’s anti-terrorism legislation, the Government has the power to proscribe any terrorist organisation. Terrorism is given a broad definition in UK law: it extends to action “designed to influence the government” which entails, among other wrongs, “serious damage to property.” A proscribed organisation is an illegal organisation. Membership of a proscribed organisation is a serious criminal offence, as is expressing support for a proscribed organisation. This latter offence is similar to, albeit broader than, the provision of US law upheld as compatible with the First Amendment in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project 561 US 1 (2010), in which advocacy for a “foreign terrorist organisation” was held to be capable of constituting “material support” as long as the advocacy was co-ordinated with the organisation in question and not offered independently of it.

For all these reasons, my plea would be that our American friends keep holding our feet to the fire.

I would draw three conclusions from the episodes narrated here. The first, and most important, is that as bright a line as possible needs to be drawn in the criminal law between speech which is threatening or abusive, and speech which is merely offensive. Threats and abuse, whether physical or verbal, may well attract criminal liability, but the criminal law should have nothing to do with speech that is merely offensive. The answer to offensive speech is not to criminalise (or cancel) the speaker but to speak back, showing with your own words why the offensive speaker is mistaken or wrongheaded. This is a line that the law in the UK does not always respect. The over-breadth of the offence of stirring up racial hatred—the offence about which Allison Pearson was warned and of which Lucy Connolly was convicted—is but one example. There is also an offence in the UK of “grossly offensive” electronic communications. The Law Commission recommended in 2021 that this offence was unfit for purpose and should be repealed, but Parliament declined to act on this advice, and the offence remains on the statute book.

Secondly, the protection the law accords to freedom of expression depends in practice not only on what Parliament writes into legislation, but also on police and prosecutorial discretion and, indeed, on the discretion of judges handing down sentences. The Linehan saga reminds us of this. Many will think that there is little wrong with a law against inciting violence. Many will, at the same time, think that sending five armed officers to Heathrow Airport to arrest Linehan for a five-month-old tweet is a disproportionate and unreasonable way to proceed.

Thirdly, whilst the focus of much of this year’s criticism about free speech and its limits in Britain has been on hate speech and offensive speech, the proscription of Palestine Action and the 890 arrests which followed it are a reminder that this is far from the only restriction on freedom of expression which demands, as Thomas Jefferson and Oliver Wendell Holmes famously insisted, “eternal vigilance.” National security, official secrets law, contempt of court—all these, as well as “offensiveness” remain as legal restrictions on free speech.

I would add one final remark. In these observations, I have been concerned with criminal law. Yet this is not the only area of law we need to be mindful of. The regulatory reach of the administrative state also demands our “eternal vigilance.” In the UK, broadcasting continues to be licensed—regulated—in ways US courts would rule to be contrary to the First Amendment. News reporters continue to be under obligations as to “due impartiality,” for example, whereas the like restrictions in the US were lifted in the 1990s. Until 2025, no challenge to regulatory rulings on broadcast political speech had been upheld in the British courts, but this year, such a challenge was finally upheld—a belated sign, perhaps, that UK lawyers are waking up to the manifest unfairness of continuing to impose strenuous licensing conditions on broadcast speech which do not apply to other forms of media.

That cherished freedom—of speech free from licensing—is under renewed threat in Britain when it comes to the Internet. Social media platforms and search engine services are now regulated in the UK, as they are also in the EU, in ways that have no equivalent in the US. Yet the Westminster Parliament is not content. A House of Commons committee recommended in July 2025 that the new regulatory demands of Britain’s Online Safety Act be extended, to curb yet more speech. The clear direction of travel in Britain is that speech—particularly online speech—is likely to come under greater regulatory challenge, not less.

For all these reasons, my plea would be that our American friends keep holding our feet to the fire. It was two Britons who wrote, in the 1720s, that freedom of speech is “the great bulwark of liberty.” Three hundred years on, in the 2020s, let Britain never forget the truth of it.

A simple change of assumption can place an entire political policy in a new light.

The famous economist, Arthur Laffer, who is known to everyone for his curve drawn on a table napkin, warned a visiting British politician recently that Britain had reached the point of tax saturation such that proposed rises in taxes—the government’s response to yawning deficits and ever-increasing debt repayments—would result not in an increase, but in a decrease in government revenue. 

Incentives both to work and to invest would decline, and welfare dependency—or its simulacrum, unnecessary work creation in the government bureaucracy—would increase. This would inevitably lead to a declining standard of living for practically everyone, including those dependent on government handouts. Thus, further tax rises would be economically irrational. A government that claimed to be concerned for the welfare of the impoverished would actually have deepened impoverishment and added to the numbers of the impoverished. 

It is likely that Laffer’s warning will fall on deaf ears: those ears, at any rate, attached to those with the power and responsibility to determine policy. 

To the majority of people who give even passing thought to such matters, Laffer will appear to be in the right, and obviously so. No one can say that he is right beyond all possible doubt, for absolute certainty of prediction in economics (other than such banalities as that the stock market will either go up or down) is not possible. Economic journalism is, after all, a graveyard of confident predictions falsified by subsequent events. Still, with a little connected thinking—the lack of which among his fellows the late economist, Peter Bauer, deeply lamented—and a few simple facts, it seems very probable that Laffer is right. 

The mistake, however, is to suppose that increasing government revenue so that current obligations can be met is the purpose of the proposed tax rises. They might be economically irrational, but economic irrationality is not irrationality tout cour. 

Though I have no high respect for the individual intellectual calibre of members of the British government, I am sure nevertheless that they are quite capable of understanding Laffer’s point of view, for it is not very difficult to understand, though they are probably incapable of refuting it. But that does not matter to them, because taxation is not for them principally a matter of economic rationality. Its purpose is to achieve something else, which is much more important for them, namely, control over the economy as a whole and the population that comes with it. This is what taxation will do, and why so many of them think taxation is a good in itself, independently of its economic effects. A survey of supporters of the government found that a majority of them favoured the driving away of rich expatriates from Britain, even if it meant a loss of revenue to the government. 

This geometric reasoning applied to entire societies is very tempting to educated people of adequate intelligence and limited experience or capacity for reflection.

No doubt members of the government are in part driven by a desire for power, but that does not distinguish them from any political class. It is not necessary to ascribe to them power-hunger to explain their attachment to high taxation, even if such taxation has the effect of increasing their power. It is their whole world outlook that explains their love of taxation. 

When the Franco-Swiss fascist architect, Le Corbusier, saw the traditional street, he was appalled by its irrationality, its disorder, its lack of overall plan, its spontaneity, and his architecture and urbanism were designed specifically to eliminate these characteristics by means of a rational plan. 

The members of the government who believe in high taxation have the same reaction to a free society as Le Corbusier had to the street. It lacks rationality, an overall plan or goal, it is higgledy-piggledy, and above all, it is not only unjust but unfair. Terrible things go on in it: people are not nice to one another, they are full of prejudices and bad thoughts. And since humans are born good, it must be society and the way it is organised that accounts for this baleful situation. It is therefore the proper role of government to correct matters so that society becomes what Le Corbusier called one of his utopian building projects La Cité radieuse, the Radiant City. 

The means to constructing the new and better society—societies for these watered-down Lenins are constructed, not grown—is taxation, which will be used to eliminate not only injustice, but unfairness. The fact is that in a free society, not everyone ends up equal, however scrupulously equality under the law is observed. It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that good fortune in such a society, left to itself, tends to concentrate in certain classes and families, which is unfair. It is not right that children should be born with different chances in life. Moreover, it has been shown that, above a certain level of economic prosperity, people do not become happier with greater wealth, and more equal societies are happier than less equal ones. What argument, then, can there be against further redistribution, even if everyone as a result were to become poorer, provided that everyone became more equal? 

This geometric reasoning applied to entire societies is very tempting to educated people of adequate intelligence and limited experience or capacity for reflection. They think of society as a precocious child thinks of Lego, with taxes as the studs that hold the whole construction together.

Humans being human, they escape this geometric reasoning. Without being the most corrupt people imaginable, government ministers have already, in only a few months, been caught up in corruption scandals, and it is a racing certainty that, as they tax yet further in the name of social justice, they will be caught in many more. The deputy prime minister has already had to resign, and the man Keir Starmer appointed as ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, had already resigned twice in his career from high positions because of financial irregularities. 

In practice, the model of society that higher taxation will produce is one divided into three classes: a government nomenklatura with a sub-class of licensed millionaires, a class of modestly prosperous apparatchiks, and a much larger class of impoverished dependent proletarians. Social justice will at last have been achieved. 

If one changes the assumption that increased taxation is a response to economic conditions to the assumption that it is a means of social engineering, the conduct of the British government becomes not only explicable but rational.

The federal government shut down, again, and the political drama, which is half farce, half shrewd calculation, and entirely profitable for both parties, continues.

Imagine a household with $62,000 in income and $456,000 in credit card debt that threatened to “shutdown” and stop paying its bills unless the family agreed to keep spending more than they earn. Then imagine that the parents were blaming one another for the repercussions of refusing to pay their bills on time and the resulting hardships as household utilities like water, gas, and electricity are shut off one by one. Meanwhile, both parents fundraise off the crisis, each publicly telling their friends and families that only they can save the household’s finances from the other.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the situation that Washington politicians are foisting upon the American people right now. The numbers above are simply scaled-down versions of our national fiscal situation: a federal debt of $37.5 trillion, annual revenues of about $4.7 trillion, and annual spending of about $6.7 trillion. We are a nation maxing out credit cards while the parents argue about which one of them gets to go shopping first.

Congress missed a Tuesday night deadline to pass either a continuing resolution or a new budget in order to keep the government “open.” In a 217-212 vote, the House passed a “clean continuing resolution” that would fund the government at current levels through November 21, postponing the fiscal reckoning for another seven weeks. Senate Democrats, however, blocked it. They said that extending more than a trillion dollars of healthcare subsidies was their “nonnegotiable” price for avoiding a shutdown.

The question isn’t whether Congress will eventually cobble together a deal; it always does. The real question is, why does this keep happening?

In what has become an annual ritual, Republicans and Democrats race to cast the other as the villainous source of shutting down the government. Senator John Thune alleges that “the ball is in [the democrats’] court,” pointing to the House’s continuing resolution. However, Senator Schumer has said, “God forbid the Republicans shut the government down.” At this point, the script is so familiar (and absurd) that it might as well be a Broadway play.

This theater is the result of two legal items: first, the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which, among other things, lays out the budget process, including deadlines, step by step. Since this bill’s passage, Congress has met its self-imposed deadlines just four times: 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997.

Second, the 1980 opinion by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, citing the Antideficiency Act, which created the concept of a “government shutdown” as we know it today. Prior to this Act, “departments of government” would routinely spend their entire annual budget in the first few months of the year. This created a “coercive deficit,” whereby Congress was faced with a difficult choice: fund the overspending department with additional appropriations over the course of the year or risk important departments, like the Department of Defense, being unable to fulfill their duties. Civiletti’s opinion inadvertently turned a law meant to prevent executive overreach into a tool for legislative hostage-taking.

Why does this costly political theater keep happening? Because the system rewards it.

Historically, government shutdowns have caused more smoke than fire. The truth of the matter is that, during this so-called government “shutdown,” about 80 percent of the government’s activity still happens automatically. Social Security checks are still sent out, Medicare continues to pay its claims, and the interest payments on the national debt will all still continue to be paid uninterrupted.

What really shuts down are national parks, the Smithsonian, and major components of the non-military aspects of the Department of Defense. The last shutdown, from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, resulted in 380,000 employees being furloughed (i.e., not coming to work) and 420,000 people who worked without pay. These are federal workers who may have struggled to pay their mortgages and other bills, who had to take out loans or borrow money from family members to make ends meet while they went without pay. While they all receive backpay, whether working or furloughed, receiving backpay does not solve the disruption of cash flow that these households feel.

The sixteen-day shutdown that began at the start of the 2014 fiscal year (October 1, 2013) is estimated to have cost the American taxpayer between $2 billion and $6 billion. While these numbers sound large to fiscal mortals such as us, they pale in comparison to the astronomical amount of money that Congress spends each and every day.

But this time, instead of “temporary furloughs,” the Office of Management and Budget has instructed agencies to prepare for permanent layoffs. The president himself has echoed similar ambitions. This could all be a part of the government shutdown political theater, but it could also portend a radical shift in how shutdowns are going to be used going forward.

The real problem that government shutdown talks reveal is Congress’s addiction to passing continuing resolutions, which are nothing but temporary funding measures that maintain spending at current levels for a short amount of time. Since 1977, Congress has passed 207 continuing resolutions to temporarily fund the government. This political brinksmanship has created its own form of dysfunction and has caused serious problems.

Because Congress routinely fails to pass a budget on time, government agencies face unnecessary challenges and uncertainties. A 2022 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the temporary funding from continuing resolutions “creates uncertainty for agencies about when they will receive their final appropriation and what level of funding they will ultimately receive.” In their 2009 report, the GAO lists inefficiencies stemming from “(1) delays to certain activities, such as hiring; (2) repetitive work, including issuing multiple grants and contracts; and (3) challenges executing budgets in compressed time frames after prolonged CRs.”

Since 2013, the Pentagon has started the fiscal year under a continuing resolution in all but one year. This uncertainty led former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John E. Hyten to testify that budget stability would create 5 percent annual efficiencies in defense spending. With a FY2025 defense budget of roughly $850 billion, this means that $42.5 billion in buying power is squandered because Congress refuses to meet its own deadlines.

Why does this costly political theater keep happening? Because the system rewards it. Both parties benefit from the brinksmanship that is government shutdown debates. Fundraising messages flood inboxes and mailboxes. Voting bases are mobilized. Media outlets cover every development. Congresspeople go on television and radio, showing their performative outrage and loudly proclaiming that they will save “us” from “them,” attempting to position the other party as the cause of the shutdown. When the inevitable deal comes to fruition, both sides will congratulate their own party as the ones who finally averted the “crisis” while silently preparing for the next one.

The shutdown circus hides the important truth that whether Congress passes a continuing resolution this week or in a month, the fundamental problem continues unabated. We are a nation that is spending $6.7 trillion while raising only $4.7 trillion, which is already $37.5 trillion in debt. Rather than address this problem, federal leaders would rather perform for the camera.

One cannot help but wonder if the politicians are actually the children, rather than the parents, when it comes to federal spending. Perhaps the American people should not let the children in Washington determine how trillions of dollars are spent.

Unlike a household, Congress cannot declare bankruptcy and effectively start over. Whether we like it or not, we are stuck with our national debt, the dysfunction, and the officials who profit from it. The least it could do is spare us the theatrics and pass a budget on time.

Political wisdom can be dispensed in small packages, as was the case with Thomas Paine’s succinct pamphlet, Common Sense, published in 1776. Many turgid “doorstop” books, in contrast, contain little in the way of lasting insights. Philip K. Howard, a well-respected New York lawyer who has authored many acclaimed “small” books, has now written another, Saving Can-Do, subtitled “How to Revive the Spirit of America.” Howard’s métier is debunking widely-held conventions in lively prose featuring illustrative real-life vignettes. He is the rare lawyer who decries the excesses of our legal system and administrative state, with their byzantine rules and bloated bureaucracies.

Like his previous books, Saving Can-Do is a joy to read—and loaded (in a mere 97 pages of text) with nuggets of wisdom and common sense. Howard uses the MAGA movement and opinion polls showing a bipartisan consensus for major reform of the federal government as a springboard for planning “what comes next.” Howard sees the 2024 election as a “major shift” in our social order, triggered by the perceived failing of the “ruling elite,” and—somewhat portentously—compares our current moment to the circumstances that led to Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He wonders: What will fill the void if President Trump succeeds in taming the federal leviathan?

Howard, who served on Trump’s transition team in 2017, speculates: “Letting nature take its course after Trump’s wrecking ball is unlikely to end well, leaving a wreckage of public agencies, perhaps replaced by an AI-driven autocracy that would exacerbate populist alienation.” That’s certainly not an appealing image, but neither is it particularly realistic. Howard proposes a post-Trump vision for “better government” that consists of delivering results by letting people use their judgment without unnecessary government interference. His solution reiterates themes from his previous books: “Replace red tape with responsibility. Give leaders room to lead. Let us tackle local problems in our own ways. Let us interact honestly without the overhang of legal threats.”

More federalism and less government regulation, in other words. Most libertarians, classical liberals, and small government conservatives agree with this vision—and have been advocating it for decades. The tough question is, how do we return to the halcyon era that existed prior to the Great Society, New Frontier, Fair Deal, the New Deal, and possibly even the Progressive Era? Short of inventing a time machine, how do we get the Big Government genie back in the bottle? We know the extent of the problem—too many laws, too many lawyers, too many bureaucrats, too much rent-seeking, too much centralized control, too much federal government, etc.—but how do we fix it? How do we “revive the spirit of America”?

DOGE has already petered out, and it is too soon to tell how far the Supreme Court will allow Trump to go in dismantling the administrative state. Many Trump supporters, myself included, wish it were true that “Trump is smashing the drowsy bureaucracies with nothing to replace them,” as Howard claims, but the vast swamp in DC is proving to be very resilient. Despite Howard’s assessment that “Democrats are strangely quiet,” the Resistance is readily apparent, especially in the lower federal courts, and the rhetoric emanating from the left grows progressively shrill (no pun intended). In short, while Trump is making some headway, the notion of “draining the swamp” is still a pipe dream that could disappear at the next election.

Accordingly, the prospect of a “power vacuum” in the nation’s capital, and even the characterization of Trump 2.0 as a “wrecking ball,” may be overblown. Nevertheless, calls for reform are always timely, even if solutions are often elusive. Howard acknowledges that “replacing the red tape state will be a decade-long project,” but many of his proposals—such as replacing civil service with a merit system, eliminating public employee unions, repealing employment discrimination laws, and dramatically reforming our civil justice system—will require that America’s most powerful special interests be brought to heel. This is extremely unlikely to happen. Many center-right think tanks have broken their picks unsuccessfully pushing such policies—since President Reagan’s election in 1980.

Howard’s game plan for accomplishing his ambitious reforms is laid out in three essays, two of which were previously published by the Hoover Institution and the Manhattan Institute, respectively. (The slim text is augmented by nearly 40 pages of endnotes.)

The first essay, “How to Recover America’s Magic,” draws upon Americans’ heritage as “strivers”: “America’s culture of striving was born of exiles and explorers confronting the challenges of the wilderness. Americans were not locked in to predetermined paths of the old world.” Howard deftly explores this theme and describes how far afield we have gone as a nation, conceding that “the spirit of America has been collapsing over the past fifty years.” Nostalgia aside, I wonder how much of the settlers’ and founders’ character is reflected in urban voters who elected far-left candidates such as Brandon Johnson (and seem poised to elect radical socialists such as Zohran Mamdani) to helm our major cities, or the urban cohort that celebrates Luigi Mangione for murdering a healthcare executive in cold blood by shooting him in the back, ambush-style.

Howard rightly questions whether, under the current system, we could successfully undertake projects such as the Erie Canal.

I appreciate Howard’s ringing peroration in honor of our past, but a great deal of cultural, moral, and spiritual rot must be fixed before “America’s magic” will be anything more than a distant memory. I concur that “the only cure is to restore to Americans their personal, institutional, and moral agency,” assuming that a majority of Americans want those things. Political choices being made in blue states and cities suggest otherwise. “Let Americans roll up their sleeves and act like Americans again” is a bracing dose of Boomer tough love, but ignores the fact that half the country has a different notion of citizenship, and a starkly different vision of America’s future. Not all voters share Howard’s discontent.

Howard’s second essay, “The Human Authority Needed for Good Schools,” addresses the crisis of K-12 public education, which is undeniably failing to educate our youth. Howard properly blames teachers’ unions and excessive regulation, which in many cases strips teachers of their ability to maintain discipline and order in the classroom. “Mediocre schools are the norm in America,” he correctly posits, for a variety of reasons. Teachers’ unions are a major factor, but flawed pedagogy promoted in our universities’ colleges of education goes unmentioned by Howard. I believe that the best way to fix the broken K-12 system is through school choice: charter schools, vouchers, and other options, empowering parents to escape the public education monopoly. Howard touts innovative programs such as Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy and the Knowledge Is Power Program model, but in my opinion, large-scale reform requires competition enabled by widespread school choice.

Howard’s third essay, “Escape from Quicksand,” addresses the sclerotic obstacles to infrastructure improvements. Inefficiency, fraud, waste, and abuse (as well as outright corruption) make it impossible for state and local governments to execute large-scale construction projects that prior generations treated as routine.

FDR’s public works programs (WPA, CCC, and the Civil Works Administration overseen by Harry Hopkins) promptly put people to work and got things done. The massive Hoover Dam was built ahead of schedule and under budget. As Howard reports, under President Biden, it took three years (and a budget of $7.5 billion) to build eleven electric vehicle charging stations. What happened to our can-do? Environmental regulations, labyrinthine permitting processes, excessive bureaucracies, cumbersome procurement rules, lawsuits, workforce quotas, union-mandated feather-bedding, climate change initiatives, and a host of other maladies have seemingly made it impossible for the federal government to competently perform any large construction projects. Howard rightly questions whether, under the current system, we could successfully undertake projects such as the Erie Canal, Panama Canal, transcontinental railroad, or the Interstate Highway System.

Devising solutions is more difficult than identifying problems. His proposed solution to “infrastructure paralysis” is to implement “a legal framework that empowers designated officials to make multiple trade-off judgments. Choices need to be made. This requires replacing balkanized approvals by multiple agencies and multiple levels of government with one decision-making hierarchy.” This assumes a competent manager acting in good faith, which is not something that can be counted on today. As Howard notes, “Judgments can be made poorly, of course. That’s why oversight and accountability are critical.”

The crux is oversight by and accountability to whom? As always, personnel is policy. And politics—in the form of elections—determines personnel. Ever the nonpartisan, Howard does not confront the fact that much of the dysfunction he woefully describes is the result of deliberate “progressive” policy decisions. Our modern predicament is not an accident.

Howard’s solution to reforming the bureaucracy is “creating new institutions that can inspire trust.” This would be done by creating a “national infrastructure board” to “advise political leaders and the public on the priorities and progress of infrastructure projects.” He also proposes a “nonpartisan recodification commission” to “design and propose the details of these reforms,” subject to their adoption by Congress. These proposals resemble a reform Howard advanced in his 2019 book, Try Common Sense, reviewed here by Charlotte Allen. Allen wryly observed that “the chief problem with Howard’s book” is its reliance on boards of independent experts to “implement this massive mucking out of multiple Augean stables.” Allen aptly added that

Perhaps Howard’s faith in the virtue, mental fortitude, and sheer numbers of the best and the brightest whom he would designate to staff all those commissions and committees is greater than my own, but I can’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t be the usual round of faded politicos, Ivy League superstars, and anointed public intellectuals. … William F. Buckley’s chestnut about preferring to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory comes to mind.

Just so.

Howard convincingly demonstrates that we have dug ourselves into a deep hole, over a period of many decades, by relying on feckless leaders pursuing misguided ideas. In many cases, Americans voted for these leaders precisely because they promised to keep digging the hole. What we need isn’t a board or commission—however chosen or staffed—to recommend solutions to the hole, but leaders who see that the hole is an abyss, and who stop digging, fill it in, and pursue more sensible policies. Arguably, the voters sensed this in 2016, when—in Howard’s words—“broad populist resentment … led to the takeover by Trump’s MAGA movement of the Republican Party, and now Washington.”

Before Howard writes off the Trump presidency and plots “what comes next,” perhaps he should focus on concrete policies and reforms that Trump 2.0 could implement, via executive order or otherwise. As he recognizes, we have in the White House an agent of change and disruptor like no other in our lifetime. Saving Can-Do would have been more useful as a blueprint for shaping Trump’s second-term agenda. Instead, Howard’s evident disillusionment with Trump reduces Saving Can-Do to yet another iteration of Howard’s wishful thinking. We need realistic solutions to the nation’s myriad problems.

The American diet is increasingly a state-managed affair. For more than a century, Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies like the FDA, USDA, CDC, and EPA have determined what goes into our food, how it must be labeled, which claims can be advertised, and even what counts as “healthy.” Yet despite all this oversight, Americans are heavier, sicker, and less active than ever. 

This is no coincidence. The economics of government food control make success nearly impossible. Misaligned incentives, regulatory capture, and the knowledge problem ensure that bureaucratic management of something as personal and local as food can only produce failure. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touts his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement, he would do well to recognize his limits. Although government has been promising to improve our diets for decades, the population has grown increasingly unhealthy.

A Century of Bureaucratic Control

The regulatory state’s reach into food has grown steadily since the early twentieth century, justified by crises and fortified by the permanent expansion of agencies. The result is a sprawling network of federal overseers that collectively shape nearly everything Americans eat.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which originated in 1927 as the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration, regulates around 80 to 90 percent of the nation’s food supply, essentially everything except most meat, poultry, and some egg products. Its rules govern the nutrition facts panels that dominate every package, the allergen warnings on ingredient lists, and the health claims that can be attached to cereals, beverages, or supplements. It polices food additives, infant formula, seafood, bottled water, and countless other categories. Inspections, recalls, and enforcement actions flow from FDA offices across the country.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), through its Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), handles what the FDA does not: meat, poultry, and processed egg products. Its inspectors are a constant presence in slaughterhouses and processing plants, ensuring compliance with federal standards. Beyond safety, the USDA certifies organics, sets grain standards, and administers the massive food assistance programs, SNAP, WIC, and school meals, that shape the diets of tens of millions of Americans.

Other agencies join the fray. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigates outbreaks of foodborne illness. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) establishes limits for pesticide residues and enforces water-quality standards that affect agriculture. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees food advertising and polices marketing claims, especially those targeting children. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) guard America’s ports and borders, coordinating with FDA and USDA to prevent tainted imports from entering the country.

Taken together, these agencies form a web of control that is both ubiquitous and constantly expanding. For more than 100 years, the federal bureaucracy has asserted that such oversight is necessary for public health. Yet the results speak for themselves.

The State of American Health

The macro statistics are sobering. Adult obesity has more than doubled since 1980. Between 1999–2000 and 2021–2023, the prevalence of obesity among adults rose from 30.5 percent to 40.3 percent. Diabetes, including undiagnosed cases, afflicts nearly 15 percent of adults today, up from less than 10 percent at the turn of the millennium. Childhood obesity tells a similarly grim story: just 5 percent of children were obese in the early 1970s, compared to nearly 20 percent by 2020.

Life expectancy has stagnated. Americans can expect to live 78.4 years, still below pre-pandemic levels and far behind peer nations. Diet quality remains dismal, with the national Healthy Eating Index, a measure of diet quality, hovering at 58 out of 100. Ultra-processed foods now make up 57 percent of adult caloric intake, up from 53 percent in the early 2000s.

If bureaucratic control were a recipe for health, America should be thriving. Instead, despite decades of tighter rules, more labeling, and larger nutrition programs, the trajectory has been unrelentingly downward. Why? No doubt some portion of these results reflects Americans’ own poor decisions. But much of the answer lies not in a lack of good intentions but in the economics of centralized food governance. Three fundamental economic problems plague government management of food: misaligned incentives, regulatory capture, and the knowledge problem. This ensures that bureaucratic control fails where individual choice and market feedback are required. 

Misaligned Incentives

Public Choice Theory teaches us that bureaucrats are not neutral technocrats acting in the public interest. They are people responding to incentives, just as consumers and businesses do. Economist William Niskanen famously argued that bureaucrats seek to maximize their budgets because bigger budgets mean more staff, higher salaries, greater prestige, and expanded authority.

Consumers want food that is tasty, affordable, healthy, and convenient. Each person weighs those trade-offs differently. Some value convenience over health, others seek the cheapest option, and still others are willing to pay more for nutrition or sustainability. These are diverse, individual preferences.

Bureaucrats, by contrast, want to expand their agency’s scope. They achieve this through “scope creep” (redefining risks to expand jurisdiction), tightening standards that require more paperwork, staging visible enforcement actions, and seizing upon crises to lock in permanent authority. Agencies build monopolies on expertise through labs, surveillance networks, and proprietary data. Their success is measured not in healthier citizens but in the number of inspections conducted, recalls issued, or guidance documents published.

Regulators often serve the interests of the industries they oversee, not the public. This is not accidental but inherent in the structure of centralized regulation.

The FDA, for instance, broadens its oversight by redefining what counts as “added sugars” or “healthy” claims. The USDA expands its inspection apparatus with new microbial tests and stricter hazard standards. The CDC launches more outbreak dashboards, the EPA tightens pesticide tolerances, and the FTC extends its advertising scrutiny. Each step justifies larger budgets and greater control, regardless of whether outcomes improve.

Over the decades, this dynamic has ballooned agencies far beyond their original mandates. The FDA, once a modest office, now regulates everything from biologics to tobacco. FDA headcount increased by 79 percent between 2007 and 2019. The USDA has morphed from an agricultural support agency into a sprawling bureaucracy whose budget ballooned by 61 percent in the eight years between 2006 and 2014. The CDC, founded to fight malaria in 1946, has become the nation’s vast public-health agency, tasked with everything from obesity to pandemics. The headcount at the CDC increased by 28 percent between 2007 and 2018. Growth is constant because growth serves bureaucratic self-interest, not necessarily the public’s health.

Regulatory Capture

Even if bureaucrats sought only the public good, they face another trap: regulatory capture. Nobel laureate George Stigler described this phenomenon in the 1970s: regulators, meant to discipline industry, are instead co-opted by it. Industry actors, who have strong financial stakes, invest heavily in shaping regulation to their advantage, while the public remains diffuse and underrepresented.

Food regulation is riddled with capture. The FDA relies heavily on industry “user fees” to fund its drug programs; 46 percent of its budget comes directly from the companies it regulates. This dependence creates perverse incentives to accommodate the industry. The controversial approval of Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm revealed “atypical” backchannel coordination between the FDA and the company, according to a bipartisan congressional investigation.

The CDC has faced scandals over corporate influence as well. Emails obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that Coca-Cola was cultivating ties with CDC officials, shaping conversations about obesity to emphasize “energy balance” over sugar consumption. Such episodes illustrate how private donors and the CDC can bend public-health priorities toward corporate goals.

The USDA’s conflicts are perhaps the most blatant. It is tasked both with promoting American agriculture and regulating its safety, a dual mandate the Government Accountability Office has criticized for decades. The USDA subsidizes corn more than any other US crop, driving down the price of high-fructose corn syrup and fueling its widespread use in foods, a trend closely linked to rising obesity rates. In 2010, the USDA worked with Domino’s Pizza to introduce pies with 40 percent more cheese, all while warning the public about saturated fat.

The EPA, too, has long been vulnerable. Its pesticide program relies heavily on studies conducted by manufacturers themselves. Political appointees with industry ties have tilted decisions on controversial chemicals like glyphosate and chlorpyrifos, sometimes in defiance of the agency’s own scientists.

These examples reveal a pattern: regulators often serve the interests of the industries they oversee, not the public. This is not accidental but inherent in the structure of centralized regulation.

The Knowledge Problem

Even if incentives were perfectly aligned and capture eliminated, government would still fail at managing food because of the knowledge problem. F. A. Hayek explained that no central planner can ever gather the dispersed, tacit knowledge held by individuals in society. Food, perhaps more than any other good, is intensely local and personal.

Consider the FDA’s drug approvals. Decisions are based on limited clinical data, yet populations are diverse. Vioxx was approved after showing efficacy in trials, but widespread use revealed severe cardiovascular risks. That crucial knowledge emerged only through the decentralized observations of doctors and patients.

Another shortcoming of FDA regulations is the notion of preemption. The practice of preemption locks the entire country into the cautious instincts of federal regulators, no matter how poorly those instincts fit real-world needs. When federal regulators preempt, they set one-size-fits-all rules that override state and local discretion, or even individual choice, removing whole categories of options from the table. 

The FDA’s drug approval process illustrates this dynamic. Regulators are judged harshly if they allow an unsafe product to slip through, but they face no penalty for blocking, or indefinitely delaying, drugs that might help millions. As a result, they are biased toward excessive caution. This dynamic means patients, doctors, and even states cannot legally choose differently, even if they are willing to accept the risks. What looks like “safety” from Washington often translates into fewer choices and slower innovation on the ground.

The CDC suffers from the knowledge problem when it issues uniform guidelines on disease response, but these prescriptions often clash with local realities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, national directives on school closures or masking frequently ignored the economic and social trade-offs of particular communities. Rural schools with few cases faced the same mandates as dense urban districts, despite vastly different conditions.

The USDA’s dietary guidelines set national standards for programs like school lunches and SNAP. Yet diets are shaped by culture, affordability, and supply chains. Mandates for low-fat dairy or whole grains often result in wasted food because they do not match local tastes or budgets. A centralized prescription cannot capture the variety of American diets.

The EPA’s one-size-fits-all environmental rules encounter the same problem. The Clean Power Plan attempted to impose national carbon standards, but regional energy grids differ dramatically. Pesticide regulations fail to account for local pest pressures that vary by climate and soil. Central planners cannot incorporate the granular, context-specific knowledge held by farmers, families, and communities.

The knowledge problem guarantees that bureaucratic food governance will misfire, even under the best of circumstances.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement has tapped into a genuine crisis. Americans are indeed unhealthy, and the decline is alarming. But the answer is not another layer of federal control. The economics of government regulation ensure that centralized solutions will fail.

If Americans are serious about restoring health, they will need a different approach: empowering individuals, families, and communities to make their own choices about food, unencumbered by the dictates of distant bureaucracies. Knowing how to live a healthy lifestyle is challenging; there is a constant interplay between diet, exercise, food safety, and environmental factors. This complexity no doubt poses intrinsic challenges in an incredibly multifaceted and free society. But the answer is not to give bureaucrats top-down control over what can and cannot go into our food. 

The answer lies in a multipronged approach. Let farmers innovate, let entrepreneurs experiment with labeling, guidelines, and ingredients, and let consumers decide. Health will not be restored by more recalls, more labeling mandates, or more bureaucratic programs. It will be restored by food and health freedom.

In the end, the only way to make America healthy is to let Americans cook.

Conventional wisdom has held that the populist resentment that fueled the political ascendency of Donald Trump is evidence that the political right in America has grown more extreme, more reactionary, and more radicalized. Progressives have used this narrative to double down on identitarian politics, and the political right has used it to justify new types of political tactics and nationalist policy proposals.

Conventional wisdom among elites has had a patchy record over the past 15 years, and the radical-GOP-voter narrative is yet another example of how it has gone awry. Political scientist George Hawley’s book, The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization, is the most comprehensive account to date showing how Republican voters are more mainstream than radical, more ordinary than extreme. At the outset, Hawley writes “claims about Republican extremism have been overstated” and that the “notion that the Republican Party in the electorate is dominated by crazed radicals has little empirical backing.” Instead, he aims “to provide a sober analysis of Republican voters, noting their demographic traits, geographic distribution, policy preferences, religious identities, ideological constraints, and cultural attitudes.”

Hawley’s “sober analysis” is a welcome corrective to the fixation that left-wing critics and right-wing influencers alike have on the oddballs within the Republican party. He acknowledges that white supremacists and conspiracy theorists exist within the GOP, but also demonstrates empirically “that these groups are a small minority within the party.” By overstating the influence of nutjobs on the right, progressives have pushed Democrats too far to the left in a gross act of overcorrection, and Republicans have adopted clownish ideas and tactics in an attempt to appeal to a “base” that is much fringier than actual rank-and-file Republicans.

Republican voters, Hawley shows, have been consistent over time on policy issues. For instance, they care less about cutting government spending than Democrats do, but not by the margins common in higher-order Republican discourse, and they have long been more economically moderate than the more libertarian-minded leadership within the conservative movement. Republican voters have also had a patchwork of foreign policy views with no clearly identifiable common theme. Republicans have changed over time by becoming more conservative, as they understand the term, which also changes. In other words, how rank-and-file Republicans understand “conservatism” is a moving target, but a greater share of them now, compared to a generation ago, say they are conservative.

This coheres with polling by YouGov and others after the Tea Party election of 2010, which found Republican voters much more supportive of cutting discretionary federal spending than entitlements, even though entitlements were the key driver of deficit spending. Like good conservatives, they believed in a smaller government—so long as it didn’t come at the expense of their Social Security and Medicare benefits. News reports in the Tea Party era portrayed the average Republican voter as more extreme than in the past, when in fact their views were both consistent with Republican principles on spending and with mainstream American views on social welfare.

There are many useful takeaways from Hawley’s book for anyone who has spent too much time marinating in the conventional wisdom of the radicalized Republican voter, but two are especially worth highlighting.

Hawley’s “sober analysis” is a welcome corrective to the fixation that left-wing critics and right-wing influencers alike have on the oddballs within the Republican party.

The first is the role and importance of cultural issues in how ordinary Republicans see the world. The gap between Republicans and Democrats, Hawley shows, is wider on cultural attitudes than on views on economic policy. There is nothing surprising in his findings on the differences between the two camps on issues related to same-sex marriage, LGBT issues, and feminism, for example, including that Republicans have grown more comfortable with same-sex marriage over the past twenty years. The more salient point in the data is the consistent, long-standing distrust of government, and increasingly, of mainstream media among Republican voters. The anger that political commentators observe among Republican voters seems to be rooted more in their reaction to elite, institutional bias against their values than outright hostility to specific hot-button cultural issues that commentators tend to focus on.

Trumpism has always been more of an anti-elitist cultural than economic phenomenon. My former American Enterprise Institute colleagues and I found little support in large national surveys during and after Trump’s first presidential term for the idea that Trump’s voters supported economic populist policy ideas. In fact, working-class Trump voters were less interested in such ideas than those with college degrees and were more optimistic about their future. They cared about what most Americans care about: living in a country where their kids could own a company or achieve whatever else they set their minds to. What united Trump voters, rather, was a strong anti-elitist, anti-leftist sentiment, which expressed itself more intensely the higher a Trump voter’s level of education and income.

Republican voters are still committed to lower taxes, Hawley shows, but not for the wealthy as is often assumed. They want the federal government to spend less on welfare, but they do not support cuts on public safety and infrastructure. This consistent moderation gets overlooked by partisan bias. Progressives see support for reduced spending as evidence of Republican voters’ heartlessness. Nationalists and the MAGA right see their lack of support for tax breaks for the wealthy as evidence of support for redistributionist policies. The reality, it seems, is that average Republican voters still think high taxes are bad for everyone except the super-rich and that welfare spending on able-bodied people is bad. They are, as Hawley’s title suggests, much more part of a “moderate majority” than anything radical or extreme.

An important takeaway from Hawley’s book in the current political landscape in America is that the new face of the GOP, as has been popularized in recent years as socially conservative and economically liberal, may not describe as much of the electorate as its adherents claim. The anti-elitism of Republican voters is strong, but their concerns about the economy are pretty mainstream: they want inflation lower, and the economy more vibrant. Immigration ranks high, too, but that has been as much an issue of elite failure than an economic issue. And Hawley points out that hot-button culture war issues, such as gender identity, did not animate Republican voters as much as one would expect given the constant media attention to them. The bottom line is that moderation marks conservative voters on both cultural and economic issues in ways that the more online, publicly visible voices of the New Right and MAGA Republicanism acknowledge.

A second important lesson from Hawley’s book is that Republican voters, contrary to conventional wisdom, are happier and more optimistic about their upward mobility prospects than liberal voters. Over four decades, there has never been a year in the General Social Survey in which Democrats have been happier than Republicans. Even the last time Democrats simultaneously controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, Republicans were happier than Democrats overall. When asked during the pandemic whether it is harder than in the past to improve one’s economic status, 47 percent of Republicans said yes compared to 73 percent of Democrats. These data track with other survey findings that conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that hard work pays off and that agency and responsibility are essential to upward mobility.

Arthur Brooks discovered years ago that the “happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is, in fact, astonishingly large and enduring, and it doesn’t have anything to do with who is winning elections.” In his best-selling Gross National Happiness, Brooks wrote that until he studied the data for himself, like any good social scientist, he bought into the common narrative among academics and elites that conservatives are an unhappy lot compared to liberals. It turns out that conservatives’ views and practices related to religion, family, and individual effort combine to boost their assessment of their lives, Brooks writes, in ways that liberals lose out on. There has been plenty of research between Brooks’ and Hawley’s work to corroborate the claim that drivers of human happiness tend to correlate better with conservatives’ values and principles. By ignoring the data and running with unproven narratives about conservative anger and angst, progressives consistently miss the motivation behind conservative voter behavior, and the overly online political class on the right assumes there is more pent-up demand for what they are selling than actually exists.

Caricatures of Republican voters have led to policy ideas and political tactics that most Americans do not like, which is why a book like Hawley’s provides such a valuable service. We could use a little more sobriety in our politics, so let’s hope as the next political cycle ramps up that more people in the political class and media give Hawley’s “sober analysis” a read.