Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

Many today are haunted by the question: Will AI take our jobs? From software engineers to truck drivers to call center workers, a wide range of occupations appear to be directly threatened, and no occupation seems entirely safe. Exaggerated warnings of mass unemployment are circulating, and AI is treated as a prime suspect in the unusually poor job market for recent college graduates, amidst a fairly healthy-looking economy.

The first step to appreciating the possibilities unlocked by AI is to reframe these prospective job losses as grounds for optimism, even if they bring discombobulating and sometimes painful career disruptions. Every great technological leap has involved job loss, usually a lot of it. Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), called this “creative destruction,” and it is part of progress. Our anxiety may bemitigated somewhat if we deepen our understanding of knowledge as afactor of production, drawing insights from great economists: Nobel laureates Robert Solow (1987), Paul Romer (2018), Friedrich Hayek (1974), and Claudia Goldin (2023), as well as Goldin’s co-author Lawrence Katz. Their concepts can illuminate how AI will enhance the wealth of nations. 

The first step in the argument verges on being too obvious, yet it requires explanation: AI contributes to the growth of knowledge.

Philosophers argue endlessly about what counts as knowledge, often dividing into “foundationalists,” who ground knowledge in inference from indubitable beliefs, and “coherentists,” who validate it through large-scale consistency. In practice, it takes a combination: a coherent worldview, continually tested against evidence and experience. Knowledge in this sense is not only a good thing in itself, but a factor of production that can grow the economy. AI expands economically useful knowledge on two fronts: it helps individuals learn more, and it lets them use knowledge they don’t personally hold. At the social level, it accelerates discovery and reduces the costs of storing and applying what humanity already knows.

There are trade-offs: just as literacy weakened memorization, reliance on AI may dull certain skills. But on balance, AI enlarges our intellectual reach. It makes us more capable of testing ideas, comparing them across domains, and applying them effectively. Some mental habits will atrophy, but the net result will be a society functionally more knowledgeable—and therefore more productive.

 Knowledge in the Solow Growth Model

Robert Solow’s classic 1956 paper, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, integrated the growth of technology into macroeconomics, while linking it to capital dynamics. Solow’s model relies on the exogenous growth of knowledge to explain why economic growth happens at all, since otherwise it predicts eventual stagnation. But when knowledge does increase, the gift keeps giving for a while, as elevated productivity causes a period of growth in the capital stock.

Solow wasn’t insightful about why knowledge grows or how it contributes to the economy. He simply assumed that. Knowledge grows “exogenously,” outside the system, and increases output for any mix of capital and labor by a fixed proportion. That explains nothing, but it plausibly describes the world. And once knowledge raises productivity, the theory gets interesting.

Higher productivity fuels investment. Solow assumes investment is funded by savings, always a fixed share of output. Since capital continually depreciates, some investment is needed just to maintain the “steady state.” Economists expect growth to stop at equilibrium, but history shows it continues. Solow solved this by introducing a productivity multiplier—knowledge—which grows over time. Extra productivity raises output, savings, and investment, which then outpace depreciation and cause the capital stock to grow. The short-run boost to output may be dwarfed by the long-term effect as new ideas set in motion a cascade of capital accumulation.

This is directly relevant to AI. If AI truly raises productivity, it will not be a one-off gain. It will launch a prolonged phase of faster growth as investment climbs above depreciation, just as Solow described. That was true of electrification and computers; it can be true again now. The irony is that Solow himself gave his name to the “Solow Paradox”—the 1980s quip that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” For a time, computers disappointed the optimists, but in the 1990s, productivity acceleration came.

The world is finally beginning to look more like Romer’s theory—where new ideas fuel compounding growth—because AI helps prevent old ideas from being lost or underused.

We are probably in the Solow Paradox moment of the AI revolution now. AI seems everywhere but in the statistics. Productivity will rise once organizations routinize AI use and compete by best practices—and job losses will follow. The sooner, the better.

Solow’s model was unfinished, since it left unexplained both why knowledge increases and how it contributes to productivity. Invention is partly economically motivated, and later models captured that. But Solow was partly right, too. Intellectual history has its own dynamics, driven by curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge as much as by profit. 

For insight into how capitalism itself fuels the growth of knowledge, we turn to another Nobel laureate: Paul Romer.

The Economics of Capitalist Innovation

Paul Romer, writing in the 1980s and 1990s, and especially in his landmark 1990 paper “Endogenous Technological Change” in the Journal of Political Economy, took Solow as a point of departure but wanted to open the black box. He sought to understand knowledge as the product of capitalist society itself—research and development, intellectual property, and the market power of innovators. His model captured a vital causal chain: invention leads to new varieties, greater specialization, and sustained growth.

Romer’s model represented output as depending on an ever-expanding variety of intermediate goods. The math was oversimplified, but it captured an essential truth: growth depends on novelty and division of labor. More of the same yields diminishing returns; variety spurs productivity. Capitalism, with intellectual property protections, monetizes invention ex post and thereby incentivizes it ex ante.

Romer’s conclusion was optimistic. Capitalists would keep inventing, the economy would keep growing, and knowledge would never decay. If you want faster growth, increase research budgets. His model was more optimistic than Solow’s because, unlike physical capital, knowledge did not depreciate. But while ideas don’t decay, society’s stock of knowledge, like society’s stock of structures and machines, requires constant maintenance—libraries, data centers, and human capacity to use them, laboriously inculcated in schools. That may explain why the real world resisted Romer’s optimism. In the late twentieth century, “the Great Stagnation,” as Tyler Cowen called it, and as Robert Gordon documented in The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016), underscored the difficulty of making the knowledge economy benefit the masses. Maintenance is costly, pulling Romer’s optimism back toward Solow’s stagnation.

The fun thing is that the AI revolution is making Romer’s over-optimistic theory come true. By making the storage, retrieval, and application of knowledge vastly cheaper, AI makes knowledge nearly as undecaying and universally available as Romer’s simplified model assumed. In that sense, AI makes his optimism more realistic than it was when he first wrote. The world is finally beginning to look more like Romer’s theory—where new ideas fuel compounding growth—because AI helps prevent old ideas from being lost or underused. Every individual with a smartphone and enough education has now been empowered to learn and apply a vast range of knowledge. The frontier of knowledge has become more accessible and easier to push forward.

But the economy needs local knowledge as much as global knowledge, and AI can help with that too.

Hayek’s Decentralized Knowledge

Knowledge can mean different things, and Friedrich Hayek’s famous essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) is an important counterpoint to Solow and Romer’s conception of knowledge as a quasi-public good. Knowledge in Romer is general: once discovered, it is generally available and remains applicable forever. But the economy also depends on specific knowledge: of unused stocks, underutilized people and machines, price differentials, and so forth.

Hayek lucidly explained why markets succeed where central planning fails: prices aggregate millions of bits of local, tacit information that no central authority could ever collect. The superiority of capitalism lies in relying not on any one mind but on decentralized coordination.

Cloud computing and AI may seem to centralize knowledge, but because AI remains complementary to human users, knowledge stays dispersed in Hayekian fashion. Farmers using AI-driven weather models, small businesses using AI for logistics, and citizens using AI to navigate bureaucracy—each applies it in local ways. Capitalism is diffusing AI tools into countless hands, empowering innovators and facilitating markets.

An underappreciated threat here is noise. For instance, anecdotes suggest labor markets have turned sluggish because AI makes it too easy to apply for jobs. Applications are now less credible signals of genuine interest. Ironically, this may make personal relationships more important as a refuge from noise. But best practices will emerge to harness AI’s verbal powers for better communication, smoothing markets, and deepening the division of labor.

A New Dynamic Between Education and Technology

If Romer and Hayek capture the significance of general versus specific knowledge, the concept of “human capital” highlights another distinction: social versus individual knowledge. Invention expands what society knows. Human capital consists primarily in what individuals know.

While Gary Becker is often credited with coining the phrase “human capital,” Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz applied the concept to twentieth-century US history in The Race Between Education and Technology (2008). They argued that two trends shaped inequality: rising education levels and skill-biased technological change. New technologies raised demand for cognitive skills and widened wage gaps, but mass education offset the effect, helping not only graduates but also less educated workers whose labor was complementary. Inequality fell when education “won the race” by outpacing skills demand, and rose when it lagged. Early expansion of high schools and colleges kept inequality in check; later slowdowns let it grow.

A cognitive elite might end up collaborating with AI, presiding over deskilled multitudes micromanaged into high productivity but compensated with good wages and work-life balance.

This story contrasts intriguingly with today’s “toolbelt generation” and fears that AI will disproportionately replace educated white-collar workers. AI seems adept at the very mental tasks college graduates do, while leaving most manual labor untouched. If Goldin and Katz were right about technological progress being skill-biased in the twentieth century, then AI might represent a striking historical turnabout. But the contrast should provoke skepticism both ways.

Was twentieth-century technological change really as skill-biased as Goldin and Katz suppose? Consider the Ford assembly line as a case in point. Before Ford’s Highland Park plant adopted the moving assembly line in 1913, cars were made by skilled craftsmen. The new system deskilled production into dull, specialized tasks, but productivity soared. Ford paid $5 a day—high for unskilled work—to compensate. Assembly line methods spread widely. The example suggests a reason for early-twentieth-century wage compression opposite to that of Goldin and Katz, namely, deskilling technological change. But of course, there are plenty of other examples of cases where technology did complement skills, starting with the highly skilled managers and industrial engineers at the same Ford factories.

AI may already be causing a similar mix of stratification and deskilling. Moravec’s paradox shows machines find reasoning easy but simple physical tasks hard, so many “unskilled” jobs will persist, though they may become duller under tighter control (see Hans Moravec, Mind Children, 1988). By the 1950s, mass production had compressed wages but concentrated power in a managerial elite. A twenty-first-century Fordism is conceivable: a cognitive elite might end up collaborating with AI, presiding over deskilled multitudes micromanaged into high productivity but compensated with good wages and work-life balance.

Goldin and Katz’s “race” assumes technology is skill-biased and underrates frequent deskilling. Still, their concept has merit. College students can take comfort in education’s long history of complementing technology, and can expect AI to reward mental flexibility and ambition. Meanwhile, the working class has reason to hope for higher wages if they adapt to AI-driven rhythms. 

Creative Destruction

If pessimists think AI will kill jobs, and optimists think it will raise productivity, both are right. Job loss—or job churn—and productivity growth are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes individuals keep their jobs, but in general, technology reshapes occupations and skills. A lot of career change is the usual price of translating innovation into economic growth. Job loss is merely the thin end of the productivity growth wedge.

Technological unemployment is temporary. Technological change has often eliminated jobs en masse, but has never reduced a substantial fraction of the population to permanent unemployment. Rising productivity fuels rising demand. Career changes can be voluntary or involuntary, but even involuntary ones can lead to better outcomes. Many who lose one job find a better one. The economics of knowledge is no reason for complacency, but it provides plenty of reason for optimism across the education and income spectrum. Knowledge is a factor of production, AI creates more of it, and that rising tide can lift most—if not all—boats.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a reminder that political violence has been rising in recent years. Though we are nowhere near the levels of the 1960s, there is still cause for alarm. Without resorting to extreme measures—a surveillance state, suspension of our Second Amendment right to bear arms, restrictions on free speech and activism—how can this trend be halted?

Fruitful solutions will depend on accurate diagnoses of what is causing the rise in political violence. To my mind, the chief cause lies in the realm of ideas, and especially in the practices to which specific ideas give rise. We have increasingly come to understand politics as a form of war—as opposed to, say, a form of cooperation or rule-bound competition. An indication of this is the extent to which American citizens view their political rivals today as “enemies” and as fundamentally unjust. Another indication is the assertion of moral superiority and asymmetry: “you do not deserve basic respect because you are wrong and, at the end of the day, wicked.” If politics is war, and opponents are enemies, then distinct political practices follow. Assassination is one of them.

We have come to view politics as war because we are influenced by ideological systems that explicitly present politics as war. Marxism, for instance, promotes this view. “Political power, properly so called,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, “is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” Or as Mao Zedong more bluntly put it: “Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” Of course, the line between politics (so understood) and war is porous, to say the least.

By “ideological,” I do not mean merely a set of ideas. I mean, instead, something more critical: Ideologies are flawed systems of ideas designed to galvanize mass political action—flawed because they make political-interpretive claims that exceed the limits of human knowledge. They treat hypotheses as foregone conclusions; they are reductive in denying the existence of rival interpretations of reality and rival goals for politics; and they are determinist in drastically limiting the role of free human agency and choice.

On the political right, Carl Schmitt (the German jurist and political theorist who wrote The Concept of the Political in 1932) presented politics ideologically as war: Schmitt maintained that our social world consists of radically different, mutually antagonistic ways of life. To protect our own “way” from the encroachment of others, we need to recognize that politics just is about existential conflict with an “other” that wants to destroy us. Any politics not framed in these terms is not “politics” in the strict sense. Politics is, by definition, the identification of “friends” and “enemies” with an eye to violent conflict.

Americans needn’t know that they are borrowing ideas from Marx and Schmitt in order to hold and act upon them. Ideas spread in uncanny ways. But sometimes they are explicitly taught, as the American educational system has taught soft-Marxism since the 1960s. A quick glance at Google’s Ngram for “Carl Schmitt,” which charts the frequency of references over time, shows that we have been paying more attention to him recently, too.

Another reason American citizens have come to view politics as war is that our long history of freedom in this country has resulted in what political philosophers call deep pluralism. Pluralism is a sociological phenomenon where people live radically different kinds of lives because they hold divergent ideas about what is good and most worth pursuing. Some people treasure religious freedom and the religious life. Others treasure economic freedom and the life of moneymaking. Still others prize expressive freedom and, say, the bohemian life.

I have enumerated nine distinct families of freedoms around which American factions tend to form. The problem is that freedoms are not always compatible, and yet Americans often regard their rights to specific freedoms as absolute. The result is a perception that people who differ from us pose an existential threat. The mere fact of pluralism does not necessitate a politics of war, but we seem to be increasingly uninterested in trying to accommodate ourselves to others.

An entire political ethics needs to be articulated and gradually put into practice—one that takes seriously our fundamental commitments to freedom and political equality.

A third reason we view politics as war is the ever-expanding scope and sweeping power of the American government. The Founders intended the national government to be narrowly limited in scope, with power divided and checked in ways that would frustrate the rise of factions to high office. Today, the scope of national government is so vast that hardly any sector of society is untouched by it. Under these conditions, a people that is deeply pluralistic and polarized into two opposing parties will necessarily view elections in “winner-take-all” terms. Who can afford to lose? Add to this the recent tendency of victors to use their political power to punish and humiliate their enemies, and you see how the increased scope of government fuels the politics of war.

Finally, I must mention social media and our unabashedly biased news sources. The distorted view of political reality created by these sources has led to what researchers call the “perception gap.” People tend to think that the “other side” holds views much more extreme than they actually do, and likewise that there are more extremists on the other side than actually exist. Interestingly, the perception gap increases significantly as people become more educated and politically active. The result is tragic. Those who play the most active role in political life turn out to be the least well-informed about the qualities of their opponents. They make war when war is not necessary.

Given the nature of these causes, the remedies are easy to describe but difficult to bring about. (1) Stop being the dupe of tired ideological systems with their half-truths that put us at war with each other. (2) Recognize that sociological pluralism is not a threat to our personal existence and, above all, do not make yourself seem like an existential threat to others. (3) Scale back the things we try to do with national government. Rediscover the practices of federalism and voluntary association and the philosophy of subsidiarity that underwrites them. And (4) take responsibility for your view of political reality. It is a disservice (to say the least) to your fellow citizens to willingly brainwash yourself with media that have every incentive to distort reality.

Again, this is all easy to say, but how do we even begin to bring about such change? My own view is that, if it’s possible at all, it will take time. I’m thinking in terms of decades, not years. That’s because it will involve the same kind of educational revolution that (negatively) got us to this point in the first place. Starting with K-12 and proceeding through the college years, we need to do better at teaching what ideology is and what the precise flaws of specific ideologies are. This will, of course, require teachers who are capable of doing this and are not ideologues themselves, which means graduate-level programs in education will need to be transformed. Currently, they tend to be hotbeds of leftist ideology.

I support the new centers for civics education springing up on college and university campuses around the country. But they will need to include in their curriculum something that is perhaps not an “easy sell” with conservative donors and lawmakers. They must explain why sociological pluralism is natural and even reasonable, given human nature, and offer strategies for living successfully in a pluralist society.

Pluralism is not equivalent to relativism. If it were, it would not pose the profound problems it does. Pluralism is problematic because the adherents of rival moral orientations believe deeply in the truth of their views. They are not at all relativistic about it. Thus, one of the virtues that a good civics education will need to inculcate is the frequently misunderstood virtue of toleration. Toleration isn’t a mere happy willingness to live and let live. It means a frequently unhappy and begrudging willingness to live politically with people you really can’t stand, and to refrain from taunting and molesting them.

To scale back our expectations of national government requires nothing less than a radical rethinking of what politics essentially is. An entire political ethics needs to be articulated and gradually put into practice—one that takes seriously our fundamental commitments to freedom and political equality. We must come to terms with the fact that forcing highly controversial laws and policies on a deeply divided citizenry is unjust, a violation of freedom and equality. We must realize that a serious commitment to freedom and equality implies a politics of cooperation where cooperation is possible and “standing down” where it is not. This leads to a politics where many things can’t be done at the national level because of our deep pluralism. To put this in the form of a law: For a society in which freedom and political equality are fundamental values, the more pluralist we become, the less national government can and should do.

To my mind, the fourth and final kind of change will be the hardest to achieve. How could one encourage American citizens to take more seriously the challenge of citizenship itself, especially of accurately and sympathetically understanding others? Programs such as Braver Angels are doing this well on a small scale, but we need large-scale change. Moreover, how do we get Americans to do a better job of eschewing propaganda and ideological siloes, and taking responsibility for how they form their own political judgments? It’s a daunting problem, especially because so many incentives seem to discourage us from even trying. I do not pretend to have anything resembling a solution here.

But I do believe the assassination of Charlie Kirk has brought these questions into sharper focus. And I hope that people seeking explanations and genuine political wisdom will consider what it might look like to live politically in a way that rules out assassination as a tactic. In the politics of war, assassination and a host of other brutal tactics are par for the course. But how might we better live out our commitments to freedom and political equality in a society where people differ radically and yet need each other for the many goods that our political association brings? That is the question of our age.

Frank S. Meyer was an extraordinary man, so it’s unsurprising that his life is full of colorful stories. Interesting people always seemed to want to know him; noteworthy things always seemed to be happening in his orbit. It’s hard to choose a favorite Meyer story, but if it came to it, I would highlight the tale of how he emerged from his dissolute, communist youth to become a leading conservative intellectual. 

Meyer was the child of privilege, as the only son of an affluent New York businessman. Intelligent and rich, the world was his oyster, so naturally, he proceeded to waste his gifts on the Communist Party. He was in good company here. James Burnham, Max Eastman, and Willmoore Kendall all followed a similar path, as one-time socialists or Marxists who ended up as leading personalities at the fledgling National Review. 

For Meyer, the turning point came in World War II, when American communists were struggling to find their way in a culture brimming with patriotic fervor. Writing to Earl Browder, then General Secretary of Communist Party USA, he suggested that communism could only succeed in America if it was more successfully integrated with aspects of the American tradition. Browder was sympathetic and began working on the branding while Meyer tackled the intellectual questions. The project immersed him in the Founders and in serious works of political theory, with unexpected results. He liked the wrong texts, and in the wrong ways. F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom thrilled him; Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences was transformative. Instead of piloting an authentically American communism, he ended up walking away from communism altogether, to the point where he was soon testifying against former comrades in court. On one level, therefore, Meyer’s first fusionist voyage was an abject failure. But some failed projects open the way to better fruit. 

I read this account in Daniel Flynn’s new biography of Meyer, The Man Who Invented Conservatism. It’s a valuable book that meaningfully expands available material on Meyer, owing to a discovery Flynn made in the course of his research: a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which contained fifteen boxes of Meyer’s papers, including letters, pictures, and other personal documents. This remarkable find enabled Flynn to flesh out Meyer’s story and character as no previous biography could do. He weaves the new material into his portrait of a man whose life really ought to be better known, particularly among conservatives. Meyer was one of the great architects of the American right, and Flynn helps elucidate the reasons: with a restless intellect and a far-sighted capacity for synthesis, he helped conservatives move past some of their internal squabbles to focus on more enduring truths.

First, he had to leave Karl Marx behind. As a young man, Meyer climbed high into the ranks of the Communist Party, first in Britain and then in America. Flynn recounts these early years of Meyer’s life in great detail, which is especially appreciated since the story was heretofore very little known. The young communist flitted through multiple prestigious universities, shamelessly wasting his time and his parents’ money, squandering the academic opportunities but building a profile for himself as a charismatic titan of collectivism. 

When the universities finally got fed up with him (as even his more stalwart patrons eventually did), he became the director of the Chicago Workers’ School, effectively a communist academy. He taught classes in Marxist theory and recruited young Americans to go die on Spanish soil fighting Francisco Franco. World War II loomed, and he found himself decrying the fascists, then defending Josef Stalin’s signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Then he stole the wife of a more junior party member. By the time Meyer began veering to the right, he had reached midlife with a patchy resume, a host of disreputable friends, a family to support, and little experience in “adulting.” In his forties, his family was still living mainly (and meanly) on inherited income. But a new chapter was beginning in the life of Frank Meyer.

Meyer saw the valuing of human freedom as another gift of the Judeo-Christian tradition, captured in a specially explicit way within the American political tradition.

From his home in Woodstock, New York, Meyer began freelancing for libertarian magazines, and ended up aboard William F. Buckley’s merry ship of crusading conservatives. The latter part of Flynn’s book shifts our gaze to this landscape, exploring the adventures and controversies of the early years at National Review. Here we find the familiar personalities: Buckley himself, Burnham, Kendall, Harry Jaffa, Bill Rusher, Brent Bozell, and more. We move through debates well-known to lovers of American conservatism, about the excesses of anti-communism, Barry Goldwater (who captured Meyer’s full admiration), Richard Nixon (who didn’t), and Vietnam. Meyer was a founding editor of National Review in 1957, and fully in the thick of these debates, though it’s interesting to reflect that this period really only represented the final chapter of his life story since he died of lung cancer in 1972. He came to conservatism late, and departed this world early, at the age of 62.

Flynn narrates the sturm und drang of movement conservatism in detail, with very little effort to present Meyer as a heroic or even likable figure. For instance, he never seems to have developed a particularly strong work ethic. As the editor of National Review’s Books, Arts, and Manners section, he showed considerable talent for finding good writers and commissioning interesting work, but Flynn reports that his wife, Elsie, did most of the actual editing. Meyer never stopped expecting that the world should largely conform to his style and habits. He loved long telephone conversations, but he was a night person, to the point of being effectively nocturnal. He was (in)famous for calling people in the middle of the night, expecting them to be ready and willing to discuss big ideas on his timetable. What does it say about Meyer that so many people were willing to oblige him? Clearly, there was something magnetic about the man that enabled him to skirt the normal rules with minimal censure. 

The early days of National Review are of real interest to me, but at times I wanted to pull back a bit from Flynn’s granular analysis of the internal controversies to think more about the ideas, particularly Meyer’s. There is, of course, endless debate on the right about fusionism, which tends to move beyond textual analysis of Meyer’s own work and into broader discussions of political theory. That’s fair enough, insofar as Meyer clearly saw fusionism as more than just a pragmatic strategy for building a bigger tent. The ideas matter; indeed, once we’ve moved past some basic preliminaries, it can be a bit difficult to articulate what Meyer uniquely brought to the table. The conservative movement at that time had a good mix of limited government people and anti-modern traditionalists. The fact that they were already congregated in one editorial room strongly suggests that multiple people had already realized that freedom and tradition should optimally stand in some positive relationship to each other. Meyer surely doesn’t deserve to be dubbed the “inventor of conservatism” just for telling the two camps to shake hands and be friends.

Meyer’s manifesto, In Defense of Freedom, bridges that gap between freedom and tradition by explaining that freedom is at the core of the American tradition. That’s a neat formula, and even just by articulating what others might have thought or explained less cleanly, Meyer might have done a real service to the movement. I would tentatively suggest that his contributions went somewhat further, especially insofar as he articulated how the tensions that inevitably arise between freedom and tradition can be fruitful, not something to resolve, but rather a thing to embrace. Although Meyer approached this wedding (or welding) of elements mostly from the libertarian side, the point should resonate with anyone who has thought deeply about the Christian tradition. Christian philosophy enshrines fruitful mysteries at its very heart, especially in its teachings about the Incarnation and the Trinity. Meyer saw the valuing of human freedom as another gift of the Judeo-Christian tradition, captured in a specially explicit way within the American political tradition. It didn’t strike him as a problem that that freedom forces us to grapple with further difficult questions, about habituation, culture, the nature of political authority, and so forth. It’s healthy for a political theory to leave room for complexity, as long as the grey spaces in the theory match the ones in the world.

Flynn ends his book by noting Meyer’s foresight in anticipating both the rise of Reagan and the end of the Soviet Union. Those reflections are interesting, but it’s clear that he made a deliberate choice not to flash forward any further by applying morals from Meyer’s story to the conservatism of today. Perhaps that forbearance is admirable, but it inevitably leaves the reader speculating on those sorts of questions. What would Meyer make of our own internal conservative debates? What should we try to draw from him?

Meyer also believed, sincerely, that the West would win. Though he admired the work of many anti-modern thinkers, such as Weaver, Meyer’s view had more triumphalist notes.

I myself am comforted by the reminder that older generations of conservatives were also riddled with fractious controversies, prone to being petty and territorial, and regularly battling against formidable headwinds in the larger culture. Threats to civil liberties are not new. Vain, attention-seeking politicians are not new. It’s interesting, too, to consider just how many conservative intellectuals spent their early adulthood marinating in deeply perverse political ideologies, especially communism. Maybe today’s wokesters, socialists, and proto-fascists are also capable of reform?

I hope so. But even without having lived through the earlier era, it’s hard not to feel that there is a real change since Meyer’s day: right-wing politics seems more performative and less serious today, driven more by memes than ideas. Buckley’s conservatives included a lot of big personalities, and they could be prickly and unforgiving to one another. There was a fair amount of drama in Meyer’s social and professional life, first among his communist comrades, then at National Review. But it does at least feel as though the personal drama largely proceeded from the ideas, instead of using them to mask pettier impulses and desires. Witnessing the endless posturing and jockeying of today’s influencers, so many of them lost in the clouds of their fairy-tale political fantasies, one begins to yearn for the honest intellectual brawl.

This is where the virtues of a Frank Meyer truly shine. He liked to be right, and he could be drawn into turf wars, but he still approached ideas with a real desire to understand, and to see what might be true and worth affirming even in views he regarded with suspicion. His middle-of-the-night phone calls, even if presumptuous, spoke to this same desire to meet minds and understand perspectives. He knew the value of the “yes, and.” His ability to grasp the direction of another person’s thought was what made him so invaluable to National Review; he knew which person to put on a given assignment. But it was his ability to fit these pieces into a larger whole that enabled him to shape conservatism in lasting ways.

Meyer also believed, sincerely, that the West would win. Though he admired the work of many anti-modern thinkers, such as Weaver, Meyer’s view had more triumphalist notes. There are reasons why Western Civilization has reshaped the world so completely. It will endure. This was why he believed firmly that the West would win the Cold War. It may have had something to do with his deathbed conversion to Catholicism. It helps explain why a new President Reagan acknowledged a personal debt to Meyer, years after his death. 

The West did win the Cold War. Now, as in Meyer’s youth, the world again seems to be gripped by destructive political ideologies that attract the anxious young. Maybe it’s time for traditionalists and lovers of freedom to shake hands and be friends. 

As we lurch uncertainly and with diminished confidence into America’s semiquincentennial, we would do well to reflect on the reasons our constitutional system seems rickety, our democratic norms attenuated, public trust in institutions shattered, and faith in the American dream and exceptionalism at ebb-tide. Two hundred and fifty years is no small achievement for a republic, but most of us would like to see it last at least a little longer. Current criticisms of the state of the nation result from disparate answers to this question: are the problems we are facing features of the system or an imported virus that has corrupted it? If the latter, from whence and when did that occur?

In some ways, however, that question obscures the nature of our constitutional framework, one that emerged out of intense debate and overcame serious resistance. Rereading the constitutional debates reminds us that no perfect instrument was ever crafted by imperfect hands and that critics of the Constitution had legitimate concerns, many of which now seem prescient. History, not simply tinged but driven by irony, has a way of undoing the best of designs. We have become the empire Alexander Hamilton longed for, and like all empires, we are brought nearer to the dust but no closer to wisdom.

It is difficult to determine which part of the Constitution generated the most debate, but certainly those disagreements over a standing army hold a special place. Sarah Burns’s essay gives us an overview of the history of congressional and executive wrangling over control of that army, yet such wrangling can only occur once that entity already exists. The overall structure of her narrative is pretty straightforward: as the military gets bigger, the ambitions for it grow larger and the restraining actions of Congress shrink, resulting in an increasingly imperial president in charge of an increasingly imperial military. Just as the anti-federalists feared, for they knew America could be a republic or an empire, but it could not be both.

If a gaffe is mistakenly speaking the truth aloud, then Madeleine Albright committed a classic and revealing one when she wondered what the point was of having a powerful military if you weren’t going to use it. The anti-federalists understood and worried about this temptation and worried that, all too often, giving control of that military to the president would be like giving a chainsaw to a child: he might be able to fell a tree, but more likely would cut off a limb.

Burns’s story is about congressional abdication of not only its war-making power but also its oversight authority. I have no objections to that argument, and I think any clear-eyed observer of American politics realizes that the ascendancy of executive over legislative authority is as serious a “threat to our democracy” as any dreamed up in the fevered imaginations of letter writers to The New York Times. 

Which might not be an enormous problem were it not for the head-rush-inducing fact that the executive presides over “the world’s most powerful military” both in size and strength. One need not be a Freudian to see at least part of what’s at work here. An increasingly swollen military necessarily results in a tumescent presidency. While it is true, as Burns writes, that “voices in both branches wanted continental dominance, and they won out over those whose preference was for a small republic,” her accompanying observation is equally true that “the large standing military caused the most damage to the powers of the legislative branch.“ We would do well to remember the root causes of the imbalance of power.

In contemporary America, one complains about the size and status of the military to one’s own peril. We are constantly asked to defer to the militarization of our daily lives, from flyovers at ball games to military salutes at public concerts to allowing military personnel to board planes before us—throughout even our daily lives, we are slowly bent at the knee. We now find ourselves in a world where to criticize the military is to criticize America itself, and thus it goes with empires. We would do well to revisit the resolution of the argument that set us on this path.

Standing armies corrupted leadership but also the morals of the community.

Hamilton’s arguments in Federalist #24–29 all engage anti-federalist concerns over a standing army. The anti-federalists contended that standing armies necessarily threatened liberty, not only in the sense that their power could be applied directly to citizens but also in the two-fold problem of provisioning the army and the likelihood of succumbing to the temptation to use it for offensive rather than defensive purposes. Brutus identified this connection between executive power and a standing army:

The liberties of the people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in the usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that any army will subvert the forms of government, under whose authority, they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of the leader.

Burns identifies the Spanish-American War as a turning point in the balance between congressional and presidential control of the military, and indeed it was, but perhaps more importantly, it marked a turning point in the projection and use of American military might. As Walter McDougall has argued, the Spanish-American War marked the transition from our “Old Testament” period, whereby we were to be an example to other nations, to a “New Testament” nation that went out into all the world with a messianic sense of purpose. Burns misses this messianism in her assessment of presidents from Wilson forward, especially the second Bush, but it’s a central feature of foreign and thus military policy. She does recognize the added danger that accompanies “a victor’s sense of righteousness,” but here too misses the proleptic application of that sense in Wilson. 

Nor does she, in my judgment, make enough of the desire to become a great nation. It’s in her essay, but not as a driving force, one already clearly identifiable in Hamilton’s Federalist essays. Like a young man trying to eclipse his father, Hamilton believed America could only rise to its level of greatness if it overcame and overwhelmed Great Britain. Only with a strong military could America take its place on the world stage and become a consequential nation and clip the wings of European power and pretension. Hamilton realized that Congress would be neither flexible nor fast enough to employ that military properly. What was needed was a strong chieftain, clearly modeled on Washington, who could command. J. G. A. Pocock wrote of Hamilton that his “known desire to build up the republic’s permanent military strength, and the widespread suspicion that he hoped to head that strength himself, were all that was needed to confirm his critics in their inherited belief that rule by a strong executive, wielding influence and supported by a monied interest, led logically to rule, at once corruptive and dictatorial, by a standing army.”

Standing armies corrupted leadership but also the morals of the community. J. Glenn Gray, in his essential The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, commented on how the base crudeness of military life, particularly when in battle, had a way of bleeding over into civilian life. The proliferation of “F-bombs” finds its provenance in the military but has now become a feature of American public life. A powerful military attenuates the fundamental principle of constitutionalism and also republican virtue: self-restraint. America has become, as Saint Augustine might have said, dominated by lust, either by libertine self-definition or by dominating others. Gray identified this trait as well: the tendency of military power to narrow the temporal horizon and to weaken the checks on will and appetite within that horizon. Jonathan Shay, in his work, related how soldiers found themselves doing things they never thought they were capable of doing, and they take this regrettable and hard-won knowledge with them back into public and private life. War may be a means to glory, but it debases us in the process.

The anti-federalists defined a good society as a peaceable one. They were not pacifists, but they understood that standing armies invited conflict. They understood the subtexts involved in Hamilton’s occasionally esoteric musings and that he saw European powers not simply as rivals but as a mimetic rivalry, and this positioning would ultimately disrupt a peaceful public life and a satisfying private one. As Brutus wrote:

The European governments are almost all of them framed, and administered with a view to arms, and war, as that in which their chief glory consists; they mistake the end of government—it was designed to save mens [sic] lives, not to destroy them. We ought to furnish the world with an example of a great people, who in their civil institutions hold chiefly in view, the attainment of virtue, and happiness among ourselves. Let the monarchs, in Europe, share among them the glory of depopulating countries, and butchering thousands of their innocent citizens, to revenge private quarrels, or to punish an insult offered to a wife, a mistress, or a favorite: I envy them not the honor, and I pray heaven this country may never be ambitious of it.

Alas, we have become ambitious about it. Burns’s essay is one of declension, but, read a certain way, also one of inevitability. The standing army is a central feature of the constitutional system, and the rise of the military-industrial complex necessarily weakens Congress, for it operates under the authority of the executive. Furthermore, voters would become beholden in various ways to the military-industrial complex, thus forcing their elected representatives to yield even more power to the executive. 

How might we have avoided such inevitability? Brutus offered a simple solution: require a two-thirds supermajority for all bills concerning peacetime military build-ups. Hamilton had argued that the standing army had to be large enough to cover every possible contingency; Brutus believed such a capacious standard would necessarily bankrupt society financially and morally. 

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” Madison observed. Even so. Burns notes in her essay, that “despite mountains of evidence proving the need for a more assertive Congress, presidents continue to make the same kind of mistakes in military engagements, large and small.” If people keep cutting wood to the wrong length, perhaps it’s time to take away their saws.

From colonial times through the twentieth century, Western civilization became America’s own cultural heritage, and it was always taught in schools and universities. Then, in the later part of the twentieth century, Americans turned on Western Civ. Why did that happen? What are the consequences for our culture today? What can we do now to recover that heritage? Professor James Hankins joins John Grove, editor of Law & Liberty, to discuss these questions in connection with his new book, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.

Related Links

The Golden Thread, by James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo
“Reviving the Study of Western Civilization,” by James Hankins, Law & Liberty
“The Right Standards for American Schools,” by James Hankins, Law & Liberty
“The Origins of the West,” by Max Skjönsberg, Law & Liberty

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, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

John Grove (00:39):

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty. I’m filling in this episode for our regular host, James Patterson. Pleased today to be joined once again by Professor James Hankins. Professor Hankins is professor of history at Harvard University and a senior writer for Law & Liberty. He’ll be joining the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida for the 2026 academic year, and he is the author of several books including Virtue Politics and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy. And most recently he has written with Allen Guelzo, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, and that is what we’re going to be talking about today. Volume one was released last month, and volume two is scheduled to be out by the end of the year. So Jim, thanks a lot for joining me again.

James Hankins (01:28):

It’s a great pleasure to join you.

John Grove (01:30):

So before we get into the book itself, I thought we would talk a little bit about the project and where it came from and a little bit about Western civilization and the study of Western Civilization. So I understand you and Allen Guelzo have a relationship that goes way back, far beyond the writing of this book. So tell us a little bit about how you two know each other and where this project came from.

James Hankins (01:54):

Okay. Well, Allen is my oldest friend in academia. We went to junior high school (middle school, they call it now) and high school together. We were in the marching band together, but we’ve been close friends for about 55 years now. And we always kept up our friendship and met, and we’ve been talking about Western Civ and other topics for many, many years. We didn’t actually come up with the idea of doing Golden Thread. This was a proposal to us by Encounter Books. They knew of our relationship and they were looking for someone to write a Western Civ book. Encounter is involved in a massive project to reform and revive the study of American history and Western history in a way that is appropriate to our time. As you know, people have taught Western history to educated people for hundreds of years in America.

(02:54):

It’s been called Western Civ since, let’s say, the late nineteenth century. But if you went to school in America in the eighteenth century, you would learn about the Greeks and the Romans. You would learn about medieval civilization, you would study history of Europe, all of this. This is standard fare for educated persons in the West since the Renaissance, really. And this stopped rather suddenly about 40 years ago. The educational establishment decided that they wanted to go global. There was discussion of this in an article in Law & Liberty published this week that talked about why it was put down, and how no one gave a thought to what the long-term effects were going to be of not teaching our own tradition. So now we find ourselves in a clash of civilizations—and we do have a clash of civilizations—but the West has unilaterally disarmed itself. We don’t know anything about our own civilization. And believe me, I know this, I teach at Harvard. I teach what are supposed to be the best students in the country and the level of civilizational ignorance is just astonishing.

(04:12):

They’re smart kids and they’ve learned what they can learn in high schools, but high schools simply aren’t teaching Western Civ anymore. That stopped also 40 years ago. K12 education gave it up. I once went through the social studies standards for all 50 states, when I wrote another article for Law & Liberty, and it’s just not there anymore. They’re teaching global history now. Anecdotally, I have three nephews who teach in public school system and what they’re teaching as history these days is just completely disengaged from any narrative of the West. And this is a terrible thing for us. As I said before, we’re unilaterally disarming ourselves in the clash of civilization.

John Grove (04:58):

Before we go on, why is that? What was happening? Obviously, we know about the radicalism of the ’60s, but what was the rationale? Why were so many people convinced to give up the study of Western Civ?

James Hankins (05:11):

Well, it’s partly the Vietnam generation, which didn’t like Western Civ. They thought of it as a Cold War historical phenomenon. This is incorrect, right? Max Skjönsberg published an excellent article recently,

John Grove (05:29):

I was going to mention that too.

James Hankins (05:32):

… reviewing a book that shows that Western Civ has always been taught. I knew this already because I do Renaissance history. It’s just not true that Western Civ is an artifact of the Cold War, but that’s how the Vietnam generation saw it. And so they didn’t want to teach it anymore. They had a very negative view, not just of the United States, but the whole west. So there’s that element. But I think even more powerful, in the 1980s and ’90s when this was done, was that the universities and colleges in America aspired to globalize themselves. This was a big project at Harvard in 1980s. Derek Bok wanted to make Harvard an international institution. They wanted to found branches in India and there was going to be a Harvard Law School in India, this center and that center. And they were also taking in lots more foreign students than they used to take in.

(06:32):

So the population of the university changed. There were fewer people who were native speakers of English. There were fewer people who had any background in Western Civ. And those people had to be educated. And also the professors didn’t want to teach it. Professors never want to teach required courses. They want to teach their research, and in places like Harvard and the Ivies that was going on. People were teaching narrower and narrower things; they didn’t want to teach a big narrative anymore. So that’s part of it. It was the globalization project of the 90s. And that wasn’t necessarily coming from the left either. It was coming from conservatives as well who just wanted a university that was more globe spanning.

John Grove (07:18):

It was interesting. Prepping for this, I looked up that phrase, because I knew that phrase, right? “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.” And I was surprised to find that they started doing in the ’80s. That was an ’80s slogan. I was expecting to find it in like ‘66 or ‘67, but it was in the ’80s that people did that. And so that’s interesting background about what was going on in the ’80s at that time. How do you respond to that? It sounds like a related issue. How do you respond to that idea that focusing on Western Civ is a sort of cultural chauvinism or western chauvinism or something like that. And how does the focus on Western Civ relate to this idea that, well, we also want to study the world and study other cultures. Other cultures are always represented as good. So how do you respond to that?

James Hankins (08:03):

Well, I think the real problem is not cultural chauvinism—what the left at the time labelled Eurocentrism—but cultural self-hatred right now. I mean, the best taught subject at Harvard is the history of China. And I say this with admiration because the people who teach Chinese history have done a great job of covering the entire spectrum of Chinese history and having somebody to cover every era and teaching a survey course every year and having upper-level courses that people can study after they get interested. They do a fabulous job on that. And they also teach Islamic civilization. But Western civilization, no. Harvard last hired a senior faculty member to teach any Western subject, ancient, medieval, and modern, in 2007. And we have lost eight senior historians through death, departure or retirement or since 2007. So it’s actually neglected. There are so many things you can’t study at Harvard now.

John Grove (09:04):

That includes any faculty member that has just an expertise that happens to be Western, not necessarily somebody that committed to Western Civ as a whole? That’s any faculty member who has a specialty that’s western focused since 2007?

James Hankins (09:18):

Anybody. I’m talking only about the history department, okay? I’m not talking about the other departments, but in our department, there have been no new hires in ancient history, in medieval history, and European history since the Renaissance. That’s the whole of Western Civ. And we haven’t hired anybody. And this year I’m the only person at Harvard University teaching ancient philosophy. So once I retire, who’s going to teach Plato and Aristotle, and the ancient philosophical schools, and Augustine and authors like that? I don’t know. They might be able to get an Augustine course in their religion department, I don’t know. But that philosophy department used to have course called Philosophy 10. It was taught every year since the time of William James. And they introduced people to ancient philosophy because they thought that was important for people to know. And they have a guy they brought in from Munich to teach Stoic ethics or something this year. But that’s really it. And in the gov department, they have a course where they teach a few texts, political philosophy. It’s very sketchy. They’re well-taught courses, but they’re not really survey courses of Western political philosophy.

John Grove (10:35):

Okay. Yeah. So you mentioned this idea of just self-hatred or sort of self-loathing. Roger Scruton always used the phrase oikophobia. And I know at times he sort of presented that as a Western phenomenon, that it’s something that seems to have really taken root in Western countries. And so there’s just an interesting dynamic there. What is it about Western civilization, about the train of Western thought, that somehow led us to that desire to just turn our back on and hate our own tradition and thoughts and ideas? Do you have any thoughts on that?

James Hankins (11:14):

Yes. Well, I spent a lot of time in China, and I studied Chinese history because of a comparative history project that I’m involved in. And China went through this whole period of self-hatred from the time the Marxist took over in ‘49 down to quite recently. But at some point the Chinese decided, oh, we can’t really hate on Imperial China. We can’t suppress the history of it. We have to turn it into something that’s positive. So if you go to China today and study Imperial China, they’re very positive about their own history, but we have not had that turn. I think it’s basically coming out of the post-colonial studies people, a trend that has not been that strong in the US until recently. Post-colonialism dominates historical study in Europe, especially England. We have a very strong strand of it here in the US now, [particularly in indigenous studies and Middle Eastern studies], and I think those are the people who are demanding that

(12:06):

…we hate on the West. They feel that the West has been responsible for the state of post-colonial Africa and post-colonial Middle East. And it’s a way of shifting blame for them. They don’t want to take any responsibility for their own problems. So they blame everything on the West. But that has been picked up: I mean, this is what’s behind the endorsement of the Palestinian cause. And we have to side with the victim. So the West is strong, the West is wealthy, powerful. So we are the victimizers and we should be ashamed of that fact, [they say]. 

And in the US of course, the big issue is slavery. People have been taught nothing about Western civilization except that it had slavery. So we’re supposed to hate on the West because of its history of slavery. But of course, all civilizations have had forms of unfree labor, sometimes chattel slavery, sometimes forced labor regimes that you get in China. It’s just the fact that anytime a society is strong, it attracts labor from foreign countries that are not doing so well. And those people sometimes sell themselves into slavery, or sometimes they’re captured in war, but this happens in all civilizations. And Islamic civilization, I think, had a much more serious slave regime than anything in the recent Western history. But that’s forgotten.

John Grove (13:44):

I’ve often thought there is, to get back to that phrase like Western chauvinism, there’s a kind of Western chauvinism I think that holds Western civilization to this much higher standard. So the things that have happened all throughout the world, well, Western civilization is guilty of them and the others really aren’t. There’s a sort of implicit sense of superiority there, that we are more morally elevated and therefore have responsibility for these things.

James Hankins (14:10):

But John, it’s tunnel vision, right? Because the West has fantastic civilizational achievements, and this super negative history is just totally blind to all the great things that happened in the West, such as the invention of democracy, the invention of experimental science, the invention of theoretical applications to medicine and mathematics. And you can go on. In fact, if you look at our book that we just published, Allen and I published, it’s a kind of treasure trove for all of the achievements of the West. And that is its goal in large part, to remind people of all the wonderful things that the West has produced, not just in political theory, but also in the arts and in music and in architecture. The West has had an extraordinarily rich civilization. And unfortunately, one result of hating on the West is that people don’t learn that anymore. So we have a generation that’s growing up that doesn’t know the names of Michelangelo or J. S. Bach. They don’t know who they are. They don’t know who Thomas Aquinas is. They don’t know anything about anything. And it’s impoverishing. They’ve lost the golden thread, as we call our book. They’ve impoverished themselves with all this hatred. And that’s why we really feel it’s important to start studying Western Civ again, but in a way that’s appropriate for our time.

John Grove (15:41):

That’s a great segue. So let’s get more, talk more specifically about the book. I’ll note, first off, that it is a beautiful book. It reminded me, going back to when I was in college, how you went to the bookstore and got your books, and you could tell which courses were going to grab you and which ones weren’t. And this was the sort of textbook that says, yeah, this is going to going to be a good course. It’s beautiful, it’s well designed. It’s also very large. So anybody who’s picking it up outside of a course better prepare yourself. You’re going to want to plan accordingly. That’ll take a while. So looking at the substance of the book though, I’m going to do something that’s a red flag, and that’s if you have a 1000 page book and you quote the first page of it. That’s what I’m going to do, though. I’m going to quote this very opening of the introduction, and just let you elaborate a little bit. It says, “A civilization is a space, so to speak, in which people may breathe.” What does that mean? And we’ve already been talking about Western civilization, we’re talking about the importance of studying civilization, but what is civilization?

James Hankins (16:46):

Well, that first paragraph is written by Allen, and he was trying to make the point that civilization is a flower of a culture, one might say. It’s not enough simply to survive, and to have wealth, stability, and all the basic necessities of any society. The society also has to flourish. It has to give reasons to people why they love their civilization, why they love the countries that have inherited that civilization. And it gives them a space to perform music and to cultivate the arts. And it gives them a space to think about deep philosophical questions and to enjoy literature. And this, I think, is really behind a lot of our motivations in writing the book. We’re afraid that these great civilizational achievements will be lost. People have to understand that a civilization is something that has to be cultivated; it has to be practiced. We don’t only need to have people performing in symphony orchestras, we need to have people in high schools playing music that will enable them to keep alive these great musical traditions.

(18:09):

We need to have the works of classical civilization taught. So I have a friend on the faculty at Harvard who came from England and he’s looking for a school for his daughter, a 14-year-old daughter. She wants to study English literature. They went around to all the fancy private schools in Boston area, and they couldn’t find anybody teaching anything older than the year 2000. This girl wanted to read Jane Austen. She wanted to read George Elliott, but she couldn’t read them because the schools considered older English literature to be white supremacist. They worried that the students might pick up some colonial or racist ideas by reading older authors. So they’re being made to read young adult literature written by woke writers, mostly since the year 2000. It’s tremendously impoverishing. 

I have my own definition of civilization, slightly different from Allen’s. And my definition is a civilization is something that civilizes. That makes us more civilized people.

(19:17):

And this extends from developing all the human capacities, human flourishing, the ability to reason, the ability to speak, the ability to appreciate the arts, but also extends to things like good manners and treating other people well. Western civilizations have always had books, from the Greeks onwards, telling you how to treat other people, what’s polite, how to shave down the rough edges of society. And this is something we obviously need to be doing in our society today because we’re so much at each other’s throats and angry and shouting. Teaching the arts of civility is part of what a civilization does. It teaches the arts and civility. And in order to do that, you need to have examples. All of the great moralists of antiquity talk about precept and example. You had to teach “little morals,” etiquette is little morals, and you had to teach morals alongside that. But what you really needed is examples. An example is so much more powerful than precept. You can tell people the rules, but if you see somebody who’s really good, you want to be like that person.

(20:41):

Our civilization preserves examples of great heroism, great conduct, great artistic achievement. And if people are unaware of these possibilities, the chances that they will meet an inspiring example go down dramatically. Because most of us in our daily experience, we occasionally meet outstanding people, people of extreme goodness or holiness or heroic people, but it’s just not very common. If you read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (this is his own book that he wrote for himself, for his own edification), he starts with all of the people that he had met in his life who encouraged him to be a good person and to live a Stoic philosophical life. And that example is so important, but we’re stripping out all the examples of goodness and human achievement from our educational system.

John Grove (21:38):

And it seems like there’s something to it being shared, too. Somebody gets a good example from their father or somebody in their life, or just a book they happen to read. But there’s something about having this, the examples that we all recognize and share. And then we can talk to one another about that example or with that example in the back of our mind without even recognizing it. Today, even when we do have good examples, it’s sort of like it’s your own personal example and it doesn’t provide us something to…

James Hankins (22:10):

It’s just good luck. And I’m very grateful that my father was a great man. I mean, man of high moral principle, and I’m so glad for that. Not too many people these days have that; there are many people who don’t. But your point about the shared culture, I think is absolutely on target. And one reason why we have such partisanship and fragmentation in our public life today is there is no shared story. There is a shared story of America, of course, but America is a product of Western civilization. And it was created by people, the Founding Fathers, who knew Western civilization very well. Just read the Federalist papers and you’ll see that they’re very well informed about history, but they know they’re very interested in founding a republic. So Madison and Adams, above all, and others as well, had libraries. And they were looking for all examples of history of successful republics that they could find. And this is a shared discourse of the Founding Fathers, which we don’t have anymore, but they knew about the ancient Greeks. They knew about the Roman Republic and the medieval city Republics and Dutch Republic, and they were using that to inform their practical wisdom.

John Grove (23:33):

This is actually leading directly to my next question. So why don’t I go and pose it? When we’re thinking about Americans looking back at ancient Greece, and the Romans and the Dutch, I asked previously, what is civilization? My next question was, what is a civilization? So when you think of Americans and the ancient Greek polis and the America we live in today, quite different. There’s huge gulfs there. You’ve got Christianity in the middle, you’ve got modern commerce. So across time and also across space, what makes a civilization such that it’s not exactly a cultural unity, but there’s something there. So another way of saying this might be, what is this golden thread that you’re talking about? What is the thread that binds these things together that we can speak of it as maybe not a complete unity, but something that’s together?

James Hankins (24:26):

So in this book, we’re following Sam Huntington’s idea that the modern West is a third or fourth order of civilization that embraces earlier civilizations, which is itself an achievement, by the way. So Greek civilization was a self-standing civilization, its own heroes, its own stories, its own historical experience, its own arts and music. And the Romans, when they conquered the Greeks in the second century BC were wise enough to say, we need the Greeks. We want to be civilized like the Greeks. We want Romans to be civilized too. We want our own literature, we want our own architecture, but we want to stand in that tradition. So the Romans absorb the Greek tradition, and when Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the Christians were tempted to be abolitionists if you will. They were tempted to stamp out the earlier civilization,

(25:28):

because they had a lot of problems with the morality of the Greeks and the Romans. But they didn’t end up, like Islam, being completely secessionist. They didn’t crush Roman civilization the way that the Islamic civilization crushed Persian culture. They decided that they needed it and that it was valuable for Christianized Romans to remember the Greeks and the Romans. And so they kept it going. They kept teaching the same authorities, the same philosophy, the same literary monuments, and they kept building buildings in the classical style. Romanesque style is a version of the classical style. So they kept it going, and they adapted it to Christianity. In the 4th century Christianity itself changes and the Romans change at the same time, but they kept the golden thread going. 

And when the Roman Empire fell in 476, it’s the Benedictine order that decides it has to preserve civilization.

(26:37):

So they are copying manuscripts. Every single work of a classical text in Latin that we have today was copied at some point by a Benedictine monk in the early Middle Ages. So they kept it alive, and they fought for it too. I mean, there were many key battles that kept the Western civilization alive. 

European civilization emerges in my account in the eleventh century, and it also inherits the classical Christian past as well as the Greek and Roman past. But European civilization is something new, and one of the things that it includes is the cultural practices of the barbarians who had conquered the West. So it’s not true that the West has always destroyed barbarians. It’s in fact the case that Europe actually picked up from the German tradition an idea of consultation, that rulers have to consult with people and have the permission or acquiescence of the people before they can proceed with any policies that they’re going to do.

(27:44):

So the modern West is a fourth order civilization, which inherits from the past a very, very rich civilization. This is why people sometimes ask me, do you think Western civilization is better than Chinese civilization? I get this question in China, right? So the answer is: it’s not a fair comparison because Chinese civilization has a great unity to it from the time of the Han dynasty, or even before that, down to the early twentieth century. It’s really one civilization in a way that ours is not. So it’s not fair to compare four civilizations to one, and it’s an unanswerable question anyway, and not fruitful to pursue. But we want people to understand that we have an enormous cultural heritage, 3000 years of it that we need to preserve. And we in our generation have the same responsibilities as the Benedictine monks and the European intellectuals who founded the university. We have to keep it going. It’s up to us or we’re going to lose it all. And you can lose it.

John Grove (28:57):

Right. And it is nice to remember that there were other times where it seemed like things were on their way out, and things changed, but something was still handed down. So, I want now to just get more into the substance in the book. So volume one—and I understand you are primarily responsible for Volume One, and Allen Guelzo primarily responsible for Volume Two—Volume One, takes us basically from classical antiquity up to the Renaissance. So there’s a lot there. I’m not even going to try to cover the scope of that. But just to give a sense for how you approach some of these things, I thought I would just ask a few big picture questions about the development of Western civilization. So you’ve already kind of hinted at one of these, but one of the huge dividing lines in that period from antiquity to the Renaissance, obviously, is the rise of Christianity. And so we were talking about handing down, and how Christianity rose in this pagan world. They kept some things, they changed other things. What do you think is the most important thing to take from this massive movement?

James Hankins (30:05):

Well, Tom Holland wrote a wonderful book about this. I’m sure you read Dominion, and he talks about the fact that we’re all Christians, whether we believe in Christianity or not. The moral world that we inhabit today is a post-Christian world, at least for people like Tom Holland (I’m a Christian, so I don’t consider myself post-Christian), and even if you’re hostile to Christianity, you still have Christian morals. We still privilege the suffering victim. We consider that a suffering victim is someone who deserves our help. They didn’t have that attitude in pre-Christian Roman Empire or among the Greeks. And suffering was a shameful thing. So I have a section in the book, I think it’s chapter six, about the moral revolution of Christianity. The Christians, they’ve been alienated from the Roman Empire for centuries. The Book of Revelation is a gigantic denunciation of the Roman Empire, and they had been persecuted by the Roman Empire for centuries.

(31:12):

They worshiped a criminal who had been executed by the Roman state. That’s about as in your face as you can get. They were not persecuted continuously, there were outbursts of persecution, but they were determined to change the Roman state when they took over at the time of Constantine. They hated its violence. They hated its militarism. The early Christian military saints were all people who were sainted or martyred because they refused to fight under certain circumstances. St. George and St. Maurice and all these early military saints were saints who refuse to fight for the wrong reason, against the wrong people. They were determined also to do away with blood sports. Tom Holland starts off by talking about crucifixions, right? The crucifixions that were done by Crassus, I believe; in the first century—he wanted to put down a slave revolt, and he wanted to remind people that they shouldn’t rise up against the Roman state.

(32:22):

So they lined the Via Appia for hundreds and hundreds of miles with crucified slaves. And this was a message, a very strong message, do not revolt against the Roman Empire. But what Tom doesn’t talk about, or maybe he does and I just missed it, is that the Romans used to have beast fights. They would slaughter thousands and thousands of animals in the Circus Maximus or the arena, the Colosseum, for the entertainment of people. So people could enjoy seeing the blood spurting out of the animal and watch them die in agony. They would applaud at a particularly large animal being killed by a gladiator. It’s just sickening, but that’s what people liked to do in ancient Rome. And so the Christians did away with that. No more blood sports, no more gladiator sports. It took awhile to get rid of them, but they got rid of them. And so if you go to the Christian capital of Rome, which is Constantinople, now Istanbul, there are no gladiatorial games.

(33:26):

They have horse races. That’s the big public entertainment put on by the emperors. 

But there are many things like that. And one of the things that has been written about is the attitude to sex. In the ’60s, the Romans and the Greeks were admired for their open attitude to sex, but nowadays it looks a little different. The Christianized Romans decided that slave masters who forced their slaves to have sex with them were doing something wrong, and that should not be allowed. And the first expressions of the concept of human dignity emerged, right? St. Paul prohibits porneia, which is sex outside of marriage. And husbands—there was as a double standard as there usually is, that the males could do whatever they wanted for sex, with their slaves or with other women. And the women had to observe sexual purity, although they didn’t.

(34:29):

But the Romans, Christianized Romans, decided that forcing sex on your female slave was wrong. Historians today forget things like this. And I think that that’s something that we need to recognize again. Christianity has had a huge moral effect on Western civilization, going right back really to the Jews. I wrote a whole chapter on ancient Judaism and early Christianity, partly because I wanted to make the point which became ever stronger in my mind as I wrote about it, that Christianity is really descended from Judaism. It tries to distinguish itself from Judaism, especially in the second century when Jews are being persecuted. But it really grows out of the Jewish religion and its values, like equality, for example, the value of equality among members of the state—that really comes out of ancient Judaism. And so that’s something I’ve discovered. 

John Grove (35:36):

You mentioned tradition and a handing down or passing down. And one of the things that so many people today don’t realize is—even people who are anti traditional—they’re clinging onto these ideas that emerged from this or that tradition, so part of the divide is just: do you realize that you are traditional or not? And are you grateful for that tradition that gave you the ideas that you have or not? Other than the rise of Christianity, the other topic I was going to have you say a little bit about is the Renaissance. So you chose to end this section at the Renaissance, presumably, I’m guessing Volume Two is going to start right up with the Reformation. What’s interesting about the Renaissance for us today? I know you’ve written in some other things for us that you think various elements of our life are sort of ripe for a renaissance, and I thought there was a sort of interesting unity in ending Volume One with the Renaissance. What is interesting for somebody in the twenty-first century looking back on the Renaissance? What sort of example does that period give to us?

James Hankins (36:44):

Well, first of all, Allen and I decided to divide the book there because I’m Catholic and he’s Protestant. We spent our adolescence arguing over Catholicism versus Protestantism. So we decided we would not reenact our adolescent debates in The Golden Thread. But I personally believe that the Renaissance is a tremendously important period for us today because we need a renaissance. Our civilization has gotten rotten. We have forgotten our past, to start off with, but we also have tremendous partisanship. We have an educational system which doesn’t improve our human nature anymore. It doesn’t aim to improve our human nature. And the Renaissance is a period where suddenly in the mid-fourteenth century, people realized that things were falling apart and they had to renew the sources of civilization. 

So in the mid-fourteenth century, you have the failure of the crusades. All the soldiers come back, they start wars in Europe, and there’s continuous warfare.

(37:53):

The longest war in human history, the hundred years war, which is actually more like 150 years of war, starts with the end of the Crusades and it doesn’t let up. Europe is destroying itself, and the soldiers come down to Italy and they maraud and shake down towns. The town of Siena was surrounded by soldiers, I think it was 27 times, and they had to pay huge amounts of money and everything was destroyed. So they had that problem. They had just discovered deficit financing. Governments had discovered deficit financing for public funds using banks. So it wasn’t long before the King of England had bankrupted his entire country with debts to Italian bankers because the Italians were the bankers for Europe at the time. So the result of that was that the banks all collapsed. So this is gigantic financial collapse in 1342.

(38:55):

And then you have famines, and then you have the Black Death, which wipes out at least 40% of the European population. So things are looking pretty bad in the middle of the fourteenth century. And Petrarch, who’s the great leader of the humanist movement, he thinks God’s punishing us, obviously, but what can we do about it? And his idea is that we have to renew humanity, and we’re going to renew humanity through education, through reviving the ancient education. Because he lives in Italy. He’s surrounded by the ruins of the Roman Empire. He knows there was a great empire there at one time. And he’s a man of letters. He has the best library of his time, a private library. He’s read Roman history; he’s read Greek history. He reads the great writers of the past, Virgil and Seneca, and he says, where is the virtue? Where is the human excellence? The ancients had it.

(39:53):

We don’t have it. Our leaders are all tyrants. Our leaders are military thugs, or they’re very rich men without good morals. So his goal is to bring back the virtue of the ancients. And obviously it’s idealized. I think he was aware that the ancients were not morally perfect; he’s fully aware of ancient vices and disasters of different peoples, but he also recognizes that the ancients had something that no longer exists, which is this high level of human excellence, which only comes from a civilization. So he’s trying to refound European civilization through education and through trying, especially, to convert the elites—the princely elites and the republican elites of his day—to classical civilization. He wants them to bring back the virtue of the ancients, which includes wisdom and prudence, as well as the ordinary virtues of justice, temperance, and courage, which are not so ordinary.

(41:05):

So that’s his project: to bring back virtue. And the Renaissance is an age that seeks virtue, that seeks excellence, and that fact has been somewhat obscured by the modern historiography on the Renaissance. That’s what I was writing about in Virtue Politics, trying to correct the negative view of the Renaissance that you find in Hollywood. The view that the Renaissance is Machiavellian, for example, or that the sins of the corrupt Popes define the era. But the Popes are actually part of the humanist movement. They’re part of the Christian humanist movement that was founded by Petrarch. Many of them were, not all. So I’m trying to build a more positive image of the Renaissance itself, because it’s a resource for us. They pulled off a renaissance, and this is what the classical schools are trying to do right now in the US. They’re trying to create an alternative educational system inspired by the past.

John Grove (42:05):

Well, on that point then, you talk about refounding Western civilization in part through education. Obviously this book is part of that. It’s also part of a broader initiative, the Golden Thread imprint, that Encounter is going to do. Why don’t you just tell us a little bit more about that broader project?

James Hankins (42:21):

Well, it started with Bill McClay’s, Land of Hope, Wilfred McClay. It’s a wonderful book. It’s been very successful, and that was designed to give a balanced account of United States history. It wasn’t a celebratory account. It does celebrate, but it also points out the failings and the attempts of Americans to overcome their various failings. But it does describe the positive side of the US, and it does try to give people a sense of loyalty and love for their country. So then the Encounter people came to us with this project. They said, well, we have to do this for the civilization as a whole. We need a second volume, which is going to be like Land of Hope, a volume that will tell the story of the West in a balanced way, that will not deny the failures of the West, but will also celebrate its achievements. Keep the thread of our civilization going, or reconnect it, really, before it’s too late.

(43:23):

So that’s how this project got organized. And now Encounter has an entire publishing project built around the Golden, I think it’s called The Golden Thread Initiative. And they’re going to try to supply teaching materials and teacher training and all sorts of things that will be connected with both books, Land of Hope and Golden Thread, to renew education in America. And while I hope that there will be some public schools interested in doing this, we’re really directing these projects at the new educational alternatives, homeschoolers, Christian classical, classical charters. One of the things about our book and Bill’s book is that we’re trying to write a book that’s not hostile to Christianity. And many of the older Western Civ books are implicitly hostile to Christian societies, and they present the modern world as something that’s escaping superstition or dogmatism. And we don’t take that line. It’s not a sectarian book, it’s not a Christian book. It’s written for everybody to read. But we’re trying to write a book that’s not going to be hostile to Christians, or Jews for that matter. And so they can use it without the fear that their whole worldview is going to be subtly undermined.

John Grove (44:43):

Well, as somebody who has two kids in classical schools, it’s always reassuring when I hear that you have an involvement in that classical school movement. That’s obviously a really fast-growing movement, and hopefully this initiative will give a lot of clarity to that movement and give it even more momentum. So James Hankins, thanks so much for joining us here. You’ve been a guest on our podcast several times, three or four times. Always a great pleasure to talk with you. This is a great and worthy endeavor that you’re undertaking, and glad it’s finally out. We’ve been hearing about it for a while. It’s been much talked about, so it’s great to finally see it and to be able to dive into it. Thanks so much for joining us here again.

James Hankins:

It’s been a pleasure, and thank you for having me on.

James Patterson (45:29):

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.

The story of the Great Depression is well known. It started with the stock market crash; Herbert Hoover dithered as things got worse; then Roosevelt came in with his New Deal and solid Keynesian principles and saved the day. Cue the old adage: It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you know that isn’t true. Every part of the well-known story about the Great Depression isn’t true.

Start with the stock market crash. It is very difficult to find any connection between the stock market crash in October 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression a year later. Stock market crashes still get lots of press, but then nobody pays attention to what happens in the months after the crash. By April 1930, the S&P 500 had risen back to the level it was at in May 1929. (The same bounce back happened after the stock market crash earlier this year.) As Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz documented, the real culprit causing the Great Depression was the wave of bank failures beginning in 1930, leading to a money supply collapse.

What about the cure for the Great Depression? We also should not be too hasty to think the New Deal had a positive impact. As George Selgin argues in his new book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947, the New Deal probably made things worse. An activist government rapidly changing policies seemingly on a whim is not a recipe for success.

What Worked?

Not everything the Roosevelt administration did was counterproductive. Ending the bank runs was the first order of business, and FDR spectacularly tackled that on his second day in office by declaring a national bank holiday. As he explained in his first fireside address (a masterpiece of rhetoric), every single bank in the nation would be closed until federal regulators had vetted the bank and certified that it was sound. Over the following weeks, banks were reopened, and the panic vanished. Coupled with the introduction of deposit insurance, there is no doubt that this is one of the greatest accomplishments of Roosevelt’s administration.

The complete story, though, is a bit more complicated. As Selgin demonstrates, the national bank holiday was not as significant a shock as it appears to us today. In the month before FDR took office, several states had declared their own bank holidays, which caused panic to spread rapidly as depositors feared the same thing might happen in their state. By the time he actually became president, 37 states already had enacted full or partial bank closures. The Federal Reserve Banks closed themselves on the morning of his inauguration. In that environment, the national bank holiday seems predictable.

If, as Selgin argues, the primary fault of the New Deal was the radical uncertainty it created, then the obvious lesson is that government policy should be stable and predictable.

In the face of the complete closure of the entire banking system, how is it possible that the bank holiday lasted such a short time? Selgin argues we should thank Hoover for the speed with which this was all done. When FDR was sworn in, officials from Hoover’s Treasury Department stuck around to help with the transition. The plan to close and reopen the banks had been worked out by the Hoover Administration. Even the outline of Roosevelt’s fireside chat was prepared by Hoover’s Treasury undersecretary. How did the relatively small number of bank examiners vet so many banks in such a short period of time? They didn’t. The vetting relied largely on the bank examinations that had been conducted in the Hoover Administration.

By itself, ending the bank runs would not have been enough to reverse the collapse of the money supply. It was another Roosevelt action that reversed that trend. The Gold Reserve Act in 1934, raising the official price of gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce, resulted in an increase in the money supply, directly from the higher money stock which can be issued per ounce of gold and indirectly from an increased gold inflow into the US as net exports rose. While the resulting increase in the money supply was not enough to induce a quick recovery, it certainly did put the economy on an upward trajectory for a few years.

What Didn’t Work?

So much for the success stories of the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to combat the Great Depression. When we turn our attention away from the monetary side of things, the narrative becomes quite dismal. The lack of success was not from a lack of trying. As every high school history student knows, keeping track of the alphabet soup of New Deal policies involves a lot of memorization.

Selgin meticulously dissects the “twin pillars of Roosevelt’s recovery program.” First, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) aimed to raise the prices of agricultural products, which certainly benefits the farmers who are selling the products, but is not so helpful to those buying the products. The agricultural sector, however, was about a quarter of the population, and it is certainly true that if a sufficient number of farmers went bankrupt, it would result in a noticeable drop in the food supply.

The AAA simultaneously provided direct benefits to farmers and required them to limit the amount of food they produced, causing prices to rise. As a relief measure for farmers, the effect of such a policy is obvious. But, did it help economic recovery? The evidence here is pretty overwhelming that it did not. Transferring money from one set of the population (those who buy food) to another set (those who produce food) is not a net benefit. Even within the agricultural sector, the effect on recovery was negative. While the farm owners benefited from the payments they received and the higher prices for their products, because the farm owners were restricting production, those benefits are offset by the reduction in the number of farm workers employed by the farm owners.

What about the other pillar of the New Deal, the National Recovery Administration (NRA)? It was even worse. An ever-expanding set of rules trying to micromanage just about every aspect of business behavior, the NRA was the clear centerpiece of the Roosevelt Administration’s effort to promote economic recovery. Price and wage controls, production limits, industry codes, business and worker councils, the list goes on and on. As Selgin concludes: “After initially raising hopes, the NRA ended up disappointing almost everyone, including those businessmen who hoped to profit by dominating the code-writing boards. Before the experiment ended, Roosevelt himself felt compelled to admit (privately, to Frances Perkins) that ‘the whole thing is a mess.’”

Perhaps the focus on the details of the individual programs is not the right approach. Isn’t the positive effect of the New Deal the stimulus from increased government spending? Isn’t the idea underlying the New Deal the Keynesian argument that it doesn’t matter how the government spends money (digging ditches and filling them back up is fine) as long as there are large government budget deficits? Isn’t the New Deal the prime example of a Keynesian success story? Not at all.

For most years in the Great Depression, the increased federal government spending was matched by reductions in state and local government spending. There was a large federal deficit in 1936 when Congress passed a veterans’ bonus bill. Since the bill was passed over Roosevelt’s veto, it is hard to sell the 1936 deficit as a part of the New Deal fiscal program.

As Selgin amply documents, far from being someone who brought Keynesian economic policies to the national stage, Roosevelt opposed the Keynesians. He was quite determined to have balanced budgets, matching any increases in spending with new taxes. It was only in 1938 that Roosevelt even made a nod toward Keynesian policies, agreeing to forays into fairly small deficits.

You don’t have to take Selgin’s word for the fact that the New Deal is not even remotely a Keynesian program. Keynes himself routinely criticized economic policy under the New Deal, often in very public ways. Selgin, no fan of Keynesianism, ironically notes, “Keynes had little influence on New Deal policies is only part of the truth too many popular accounts of the New Deal fail to tell. It’s also true that had Roosevelt actually taken Keynes’s advice, the Great Depression might not have been so severe.”

Since it wasn’t Keynesianism, what did motivate the assorted initiatives in the New Deal? Selgin quotes Frances Perkins, who was Secretary of Labor for all four Roosevelt terms: “It is important to repeat, the New Deal was not a plan, not even an agreement, and it was certainly not a plot, as was later charged.” Instead, as Selgin documents, the New Deal was a haphazard collection of unrelated policies without any underlying economic model. Later attempts to portray the New Deal as a cohesive set of polices fly in the face of what Roosevelt’s closest advisors said. For example, Raymond Moley, the originator of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” wrote that a belief that the New Deal was a “unified plan” is akin to the belief “that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools and chemistry sets in a boys bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.”

Was the New Deal Harmless?

The failure of the New Deal policies to effect economic recovery does not necessarily mean the programs were harmful. Even if their direct effects were not positive, perhaps the fact that the government was active just doing something provided encouragement to the population, leading to an indirect positive benefit. After all, in his inaugural address, FDR noted that the national mood matters: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

But Selgin argues forcefully that the New Deal had a very large effect on both the mood of the country and the economy. The effects were negative, however. Taken as a whole, “the New Deal ultimately left business confidence in tatters.” The most important economic effects of the New Deal were not in the specific details of the program or in the fact that the government was spending, but in the effects on how business leaders thought about the future:

The New Deal gave businessmen the willies in two different ways. One was by heightening regime uncertainty in the strict sense: as the Roosevelt administration’s policy experiments multiplied, with no clear end in sight and no telling what might come next, businessmen no longer felt able to plan for the future. The other was by employing rhetoric that vilified those same businessmen or coming up with laws that seemed to deliberately aimed at punishing them.

Why does such a collapse in business confidence matter? Faced with uncertainty, businesses are naturally far less likely to spend funds on investment. If you don’t know what economic policies will exist in six months, why would you choose to spend large sums building a new factory? One of the things which caused the Great Depression to last as long as it did was the unwillingness of businesses to expand their operations in an uncertain environment.

Faced with uncertainty, businesses are naturally far less likely to spend funds on investment.

One of the reasons the economy recovered after World War II was an increased public confidence in business. Selgin argues this is an important bit of evidence demonstrating that the volatility and rhetoric of the New Deal were a large problem. Because of the huge success of American business in producing the instruments of war, officials in Washington had learned that business leaders were not inherently evil. At the same time, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were much less erratic in setting policy. As a result, post-war business investment boomed, and the economy started growing rapidly.

Enduring Lessons from the New Deal

Ben Bernanke once said that understanding the Great Depression is the holy grail of economists. Because things went so horribly wrong for a decade, there are surely important lessons to be learned so that we can avoid the mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, memories are short.

If, as Selgin argues, the primary fault of the New Deal was the radical uncertainty it created, then the obvious lesson is that government policy should be stable and predictable. We can see the shifts in uncertainty about economic policy in the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, which uses a range of measures to gauge how confident people are that they know what government economic policies will be in place going forward.

Recent history suggests this index may be predictive. Since the mid-1980s, there have been three times when the index spiked to over five times the historical average. The first was in September 2008, when Wall Street was melting down, and it was incredibly unclear what the government was going to do. A recession soon followed. The second was in March-May of 2020, dates which are engraved in everyone’s mind, and again a recession followed. The third was in January and June of 2025. The publication of Selgin’s book, demonstrating that uncertainty about future government policy can create large economic harm, could not have been better timed.

Six years after Jack the Ripper terrified the East End of London, a similar criminal appeared in the south-east of France. His method of murder, of an almost incredible savagery, was the same as Jack the Ripper’s, but his victims were young shepherds and shepherdesses in remote rural areas rather than urban prostitutes, appropriately enough for the less industrialised and more agricultural society that France then was. 

The murderer’s name was Joseph Vacher, soon known as Vacher l’éventreur (Vacher the Ripper). He admitted to having killed eleven people, compared to Jack the Ripper’s five, though both are suspected of having killed more, two in the case of Jack, and up to forty in the case of Vacher. Unlike Jack the Ripper, whoever he might have been, Vacher was tried and executed. Whether Vacher was mad, and therefore not responsible for his actions, or whether he merely feigned insanity to escape execution, was hotly debated; but it would be difficult for even the firmest of opponents of the death penalty, on reading accounts of what he did, to feel genuine outrage that he was guillotined. 

Vacher was in some ways ahead of his time, a forerunner of twentieth-century criminological thought, in that he blamed everyone for his crimes but himself. He claimed to have been bitten by a mad dog when he was seven or eight years old, and that either this, or the treatment to which he was subjected at the time for those bites, was responsible for the bad and violent character that he had exhibited ever since. He blamed the terrible things he had seen when he was admitted to a lunatic asylum, and he blamed another such asylum for having released him as cured just before he commenced his killing spree. He blamed his crimes on the fact that even prostitutes refused his advances, largely as a result of a foul-smelling, purulent discharge from his ear from a gunshot wound dating from when he tried to shoot a young woman to death who refused to marry him, and then turned the gun on himself. But most of all, he blamed society. After his arrest, he said to the examining magistrate:

It is society that is to blame. Can’t you see that there are nothing but injustices and inequalities in this low world? 

He even posed as some kind of humanitarian, insofar as he claimed that he killed his victims quickly, so that their suffering did not last long—unlike other types of suffering. Society, according to Vacher, was a hypocrite. 

I suspect that Jack the Ripper, if he had been caught, might have said much the same. 

The stories of Jack the Ripper and Vacher l’éventreur underline the fact that two countries, Britain and France, that think of themselves as very different, as chalk and cheese or oil and water, often follow similar trajectories in certain, often important, respects. Apart from the fact that it is in either French or in English, an editorial that appears in one of the conservative newspapers, Le Figaro or the Daily Telegraph, about the current state of its respective country, is almost exactly the same and completely interchangeable: for the very good reason that in many respects, the two countries are in the same predicament or situation, in which reform is both absolutely essential and absolutely impossible. 

The formation of a truly legitimate government is now almost inconceivable in both countries. The problem is not electoral fraud, or procedures that are not adhered to; the problem is that the political systems of both countries work and result in legitimacy only if there are two predominant parties, which is no longer the case. Both the president of France and the prime minister of Britain, though elected according to the rules, were unpopular even before they began to rule, being the choice of only a small minority of the population. 

In the absence of two predominant parties, France’s two-stage election almost guarantees a majority will be dissatisfied, not merely with a government’s performance, but with its very existence in the first place.

Britain’s first-past-the-post system has resulted in a near-monolithic parliament of almost dictatorial proportions, although only 20 percent of the eligible voters, and 34 percent of those who actually cast their vote, voted for the winning party. It took 34 times as many votes to elect a member of parliament for the Reform Party as for the Labour Party—not a situation from which a government can honestly proclaim its democratic rather than its legal legitimacy. 

In France, with its two-stage election, the second stage being a choice of the two (of many) candidates who received the most votes in the first stage, the winner can be deeply unpopular, though slightly less unpopular than the candidate he defeats. In the absence of two predominant parties, this almost guarantees a majority will be dissatisfied, not merely with a government’s performance, but with its very existence in the first place. There is a return to the instability of the Third and Fourth Republics.

There are similar social problems in both countries. Both have witnessed a precipitous decline in the level of education and a rise in crime and insecurity. Both exhibit deep anxiety about the presence and increase of Islamist separatism and the fear that unscrupulous electoral considerations will lead to continuous surrender to Islamist demands (the majority of young Muslims in both countries think that they would rather live under sharia law). There is in both countries the fear of a loss of national identity brought about by mass immigration. 

The economic outlook for both countries is poor. Before long, it is likely that both countries will have to borrow merely to be able to service their debt (and they already spend more on interest than on education), a spiral that can only lead downwards. The problem for any reformer is that a high proportion of the population has been rendered dependent for its subsistence on the government, and the maintenance of its standard of living absorbs the majority of government expenditure. This means that a serious reduction of government expenditure is politically almost impossible. When the French and British prime ministers made even feeble proposals in that direction, they were stymied by their own parliaments. Once again, it would seem that “society” is to blame for the situation; the injustices of this world never cease.

France is in a slightly better condition than Britain. Its level of government debt is higher, but there is considerably more to show for the expenditure in the way of infrastructure and services. French labour is 25 percent more efficient than British, so the quality of life is better in France than in Britain (the French have to work fewer hours to produce the same). It also helps that France is 2 and a half times the size of Britain, which means that it is easier to cut oneself off from the problems besetting the country. 

Are the similarities more important than the differences? Importance is not a natural quality, and so no definitive answer can be given. But that there are similarities, often deeply alarming ones, cannot be denied—though denial is a specialty of the political class of both countries.

We find ourselves at a rather curious moment in conservative intellectual life, witnessing what can only be described as an increasingly pronounced divide between those who practice economics and those who champion cultural tradition. Having spent considerable time at economic conferences and contributing to economics journals, I confess to understanding why cultural conservatives have grown frustrated with economists’ seeming endorsement of morally questionable behavior on the grounds that it’s voluntary and consensual.

The difficulty is that economics, properly understood, neither prescribes nor endorses such behavior; it merely observes and analyzes human action with relative detachment. Cultural conservatives, not unreasonably, find themselves troubled by what appears to be the profession’s moral indifference. Consider the remarkable tone-deafness displayed by my beloved Association of Private Enterprise Education—through which, happily, I have formed lasting friendships and professional fulfillment—in deciding to hold its next conference in Las Vegas during Easter. One can hardly imagine a more perfect example of cultural insensitivity: convening in America’s capital of vice (“Sin City”) during Christianity’s holiest observance.

On the other side of this divide, I observe a troubling misunderstanding of basic economic principles at various Christian and conservative gatherings I attend. If properly grasped, these principles would advance the very causes these groups champion. The irony is that those most eager to strengthen civil society often embrace industrial policies that achieve precisely the opposite effect.

So, Jeffrey L. Degner’s new book, Inflation and the Family: Monetary Policy’s Impact on Household Life, is both timely and important. Degner, himself a conservative Christian, examines through the lens of Austrian economics how inflationary policies create what he calls “inflation culture,” which contributes to weakening the traditional family unit. Here is a scholar who understands that sound economics and cultural conservatism need not be adversaries but can serve as natural allies in preserving and extending the fundamental institutions of civilized society.

Degner examines how central banking’s inflationary policies systematically undermine the very foundations of stable family life. The statistical portrait he paints is nothing short of alarming. Consider that “nearly 16 of every 1000 persons formed a newly married household in 1945,” a robust figure reflecting the natural human inclination toward pair-bonding and family formation in a relatively sound monetary environment. Yet by 2018, this number plummeted dramatically: “marriage rates within the US have receded since the mid-80s, where 10.5 marriages per 1000 occurred, down to 6.5 in 2018.”

What makes Degner’s analysis particularly compelling is his recognition that these trends aren’t random social phenomena but predictable consequences of monetary manipulation. The Austrian school has long understood that artificial credit expansion distorts economic calculation and creates perverse incentives throughout society. Degner extends this insight to its logical conclusion: if fiat currency regimes corrupt market signals in every other sphere of human activity, why would family formation be immune?

The data on family dissolution are equally sobering. While “since the 1980s there has been a steady decline in divorces, in part due to fewer Americans being married to begin with,” this apparent improvement masks a deeper crisis. When fewer people are entering marriage in the first place, a declining divorce rate becomes a hollow victory—like celebrating fewer shipwrecks while noting the precipitous decline in seafaring itself. More tellingly, “live childbirths per woman have been cut in half from 1960 and are down to 1.78 as of 2020,” a figure that falls well below replacement level and signals demographic catastrophe.

The breakdown of the nuclear family has been particularly devastating for children, with profound implications for social stability and economic prosperity. Degner notes that “from 1960 to 2016 the percentage of children living with both their biological parents declined from 87.7% to 68.7%.” Such a drop suggests that millions of young Americans lack the stability and security that intact families provide.

Perhaps most significantly, Degner demonstrates how these family pathologies disproportionately affect working-class Americans, precisely those whom inflationary monetary policy hits hardest through the Cantillon effect (a phenomenon whereby a single, small policy change or market nudge ripples outward, triggering a cascade of unintended consequences far beyond its original scope).

The wealthy, who receive newly created money first through their proximity to financial markets and higher education, can adapt to and even benefit from inflationary conditions. Meanwhile, working families face a cruel squeeze: their wages lose purchasing power, while asset prices—such as homes, education, and healthcare—soar beyond their reach.

Degner’s central thesis deserves careful consideration: namely, that monetary policy plays a role not just in evolving economic conditions but also in changing family dynamics. He contends persuasively that “inflationary monetary interventions lead to the institutions of an inflation culture that are characterized by rising indebtedness, increases in wealth inequality, and augmented moral hazard.” This inflation culture, in turn, creates “incentives and habits” that “contribute to the changes in family life” we observe across American society.

Under a fiat currency regime, according to Degner, “money creation is understood to be exogenous to the social economy,” creating artificial privileges for banks and their favored borrowers while distorting price signals throughout the economy. This situation leads to what he calls “the financialization of the social economy that comes with expansionary monetary policy,” where real productive activity becomes subordinated to financial engineering and speculation.

The human cost of this financialization extends far beyond Wall Street. As Degner observes, “everyday decisions about debt, labor, and leisure, savings and investment, personal ethics, and even spiritual matters are mundane features of life that are altered, depending on the family’s experience of inflationary monetary policy.” When the very medium of exchange becomes unreliable, it corrupts not merely economic calculation but the moral foundations upon which stable family life depends.

The gender dynamics Degner explores reveal how monetary policy has contributed to what many conservatives identify as a crisis of masculinity. He notes that “while female economic prospects have generally improved, there has been a simultaneous worsening of wages and opportunities in traditionally male roles in the manufacturing and heavy industrial sectors.” This decline isn’t the result of natural market forces but of deliberate policy choices that favor financial services and government-connected industries over productive manufacturing work. The result is predictably destabilizing, producing “increased male job instability” and contributing to women’s “rising distrust of males’ ability to earn more over time.”

Restoring sound money is a prerequisite for rebuilding the social fabric.

When monetary policy systematically undermines the economic foundation of traditional male roles while subsidizing sectors that employ primarily college-educated professionals, it’s hardly surprising that working-class men struggle to fulfill their traditional role as providers and protectors.

Degner’s analysis of how easy credit distorts life decisions demonstrates how artificially low interest rates encourage young people to take on massive educational debts, delaying marriage and family formation. “This inflationary credit creation process,” he says, “also serves to drive the prices for college education higher than they otherwise would have been,” creating a vicious cycle wherein students must borrow ever-larger sums to afford credentials that become increasingly necessary for middle-class employment.

The resulting social stratification is profound and troubling. Those with access to cheap credit for education and housing become “more marriageable” and “more likely to get married and stay married,” while those without such access find themselves increasingly excluded from stable family life. The consequence is what Degner rightly identifies as a two-tiered society in which “fewer and later marriages are taking place over time” among the financially disadvantaged.

What of fertility decline? Degner argues that the “habits of consumerism and materialism” fostered by an inflation culture cause people to adopt “more of the homo economicus attitude that pays much more attention to material matters in life.” In such an environment, children become luxury goods rather than natural expressions of human flourishing, leading to “the secular decline of fertility rates—despite the incentives created by the welfare state.”

This analysis cuts to the heart of why well-intentioned government family policies often fail. No amount of child tax credits or subsidized childcare can overcome the fundamental economic incentives created by monetary inflation. When artificial credit expansion makes material consumption seem urgent while making long-term commitments appear risky, it’s rational for individuals to prioritize immediate gratification over family formation.

Degner resists an economically deterministic framework and avoids attributing every transformation of the family to monetary policy. Attention is given instead to the complexity of social change, including “other confounding variables impact family life” such as “educational and labor force participation among women in the US, the normalization of contraception, its low cost, broad and expensive access to abortion and no-fault divorce, declines in religiosity, and the general cultural acceptance of cohabitation.” Elsewhere the text acknowledges that “changes in sexual behavior, infant mortality, and birth control are factors.” Thus, his argument declines to reduce fluctuations in fertility rates or family disruption exclusively to economics, while also suggesting that a renewal of religious commitment would reinforce the cultural foundations of the family in ways that would carry salutary economic effects. This framework points toward the kind of synthesis we need: one that integrates market-based economics with cultural conservatism.

Degner’s work represents a significant contribution to both Austrian economics and family studies. By demonstrating how “the adoption of fiat currency and expansionary monetary policy lead to an inflation culture whose institutions and habits tend to deinstitutionalize traditional family life,” he provides social conservatives with a rigorous economic framework for understanding family decline while offering Austrian economists a compelling application of their theoretical insights to urgent social problems.

The policy implications are clear, if politically difficult. Restoring sound money—whether through a return to the gold standard, competitive currencies, or other Austrian-inspired reforms—is a prerequisite for rebuilding the social fabric that makes civilization possible. Until we address the monetary foundations of our current crisis, attempts to restore traditional family life could be futile, swimming against the artificial currents created by central banking.

Degner has performed an invaluable service by illuminating these connections. His book deserves serious attention from anyone concerned about America’s demographic future and the economic conditions necessary for human flourishing. While the spectrum of economic ideas accepted by self-proclaimed conservatives has widened, Degner has provided a unifying analysis that should appeal to social traditionalists and free-market champions who value both sound economics and strong families.

New York is an intense city. Even a short-time visitor will undoubtedly experience the jolt, speed, and sheer rudeness that is unique to New York. Some like it, some hate it, some come to depend on that energy and thrive in it. It takes a certain personality to want to be part of this chaotic urban landscape, but to some, it was a reason for being and, most of all, working. 

For a certain set of writers and intellectuals, the city fostered a particular kind of masculinity that manifested itself in their intellectual and literary output. Many were Jewish. The literary world of Jewish New Yorkers is explored in Ronnie A. Grinberg’s Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals. 

Grinberg focuses especially on a group of Jewish intellectuals following the end of World War II, and the creation of what she calls a “secular Jewish masculinity”—not just an ethnic or religious trait but a state of being. Grinberg paints portraits of various intellectual giants, both liberal and conservative, such as Norman Mailer, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and even some non-Jews, like Mary McCarthy.

Intellect, ideology, sexuality, intellectual eroticism, confrontation, aggression—these are just some of the elements Grinberg singles out in order to illustrate what this “Jewish masculinity” is. She describes these intense figures superbly with ample and meticulous research. In addition, Grinberg has a wonderful gift for storytelling, and Write Like a Man flows beautifully and energetically.

“Secular Jewish Masculinity”

Grinberg posits that there was something unique about Jewish masculinity and its development in New York’s intellectual circles. It wasn’t necessarily only linked to men or to Jews. She writes, “Jews and non-Jews in the group all came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo. This evolved into an ideology of secular Jewish masculinity. Those who developed and embraced this ideology prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Hard-hitting and impassioned arguments, especially in print, undergirded their understanding of a new kind of masculinity.”

This was more than just a performative exercise in personal aesthetics. It had a profound impact on American culture, and perhaps especially on American conservatism. New York culture already has a kind of masculine cast, but New York Jews didn’t simply assimilate into it. They developed their own response to the wider culture. As Grinberg writes, “Intellectual prowess was often seen as a sign of effeminacy—the scholar was the opposite of the virile male athlete. But it also was not merely bound by traditional gender ideals as embodied in the Talmudic scholar. Rather, secular American Jewish masculinity, as the New York intellectuals came to define it, was an amalgam of Jewish and Anglo-American ideals that formed something new: the combative secular intellectual.”

This may sound like the 1940s and 1950s version of “revenge of the nerds” but there is nothing vengeful about the power that these writers and intellectuals exhibited. The entire enterprise was predicated on the notion and defense of particular ideas. In the American context, this is especially important. After all, America as we know it would not exist without an idea. 

The “Jewishness” of a New York Jewish intellectual went beyond Judaism. As Grinberg writes, “There were non-Jews in the group.” She quotes Podhoretz on this matter: “The term ‘Jewish’ can be allowed to stand by clear majority rule and by various peculiarities of temper.” There is something deeply metaphysical about this—this is not merely a matter of religion or ethnicity but a matter of attitude, disposition, and a way of being. In this sense, there is a universality to being Jewish that any human being can embrace. 

Anti-Communism and Jewish Masculinity

There are several strands in this phenomenon that Grinberg explores. One of them is the fight against communism and the creation of “neo-conservatism.” Many Jewish intellectuals align themselves with leftist thought, even Marxism. But for people like Podhoretz, fighting communism was one of the priorities of a New York intellectual. As Grinberg writes, “For the New York intellectuals, disassociating Jews from communism involved proving the masculinity of American Jews.”

This was a particularly important mission for the magazine, such as Commentary, which is more than just a series of intellectual essays arguing against communism and Marxism. Founded in November 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine’s first editor, Elliot E. Cohen, “first helped mold the New York intellectuals’ ideology of secular Jewish masculinity as managing editor of the Menorah Journal … [and] worked to make a virile and ‘hard’ anti-communism central to the magazine and the meaning of postwar American Jewish masculinity.”

The development of this brand of conservatism came about naturally from organic questioning by its adherents. The story of Podhoretz, in particular, proves this point. He considered himself a radical before embracing the principles of conservatism. Unlike many of his peers (on the left or right), Podhoretz did not receive his intellectual training at CCNY. He “came of age after World War II” and “attended Columbia University where he studied under Lionel Trilling,” another seminal figure in the Jewish intellectual circles. 

Intellectual battles that Podhoretz would engage in later in life were correlative to his childhood in Brooklyn, where he was born in 1930. He was a child of Eastern European immigrants, and this was already a ticket to a difficult life in New York. His neighborhood was that of working-class Jews, Italians, and Blacks. Podhoretz recalled many times how he was bullied by Black kids in school for being a good student. He was beaten up and regularly called a “sissy.” For a boy who does not engage in physical fights because he is not strong enough, that kind of treatment can leave its marks, both physically and metaphysically. It is no wonder that Podhoretz, and many others like him, learned to use brains instead of brawn in order to win. 

It’s interesting to look back on this “secular, Jewish masculinity,” which had so much energy and verve, seeking to demolish political correctness through arguments and not just through memes. 

Of course, it wasn’t only American Jewish masculinity that was being revisited culturally. Postwar consciousness was firm (from the annihilation of the enemy), but at the same time, the possibilities of a postwar world presented a certain level of uncertainty. Americans were wrestling with that combination of possibility and uncertainty, and the need to redefine American culture presented a fertile ground for exploration. This also applied to intellectual life. 

There was a need to create, yet at the same time, defense was still an important priority. Another enemy had emerged just as one was destroyed. Communism was a real threat to American life, and it captured the attention of Jewish intellectuals. Grinberg writes, “For the New York intellectuals, dissociating Jews from communism involved proving the masculinity of American Jews.” Some figures of the American right viewed both Judaism and intellectual life as effete and weak, a pejorative picture that sometimes had homosexual overtones as well. For example, writers like Nathan Glazer “marveled how the senator (Joseph McCarthy) had combined ‘the image of the homosexual with the image of the intellectual’ … while ‘the Jew becomes merely one variant of the intellectual sissy—actually less important than the Eastern-educated snob!’”

One of the ways that the Jewish conservative, anti-communist intelligentsia sought to dismantle communism and separate Jews from Marxism was through the attack on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The couple was arrested in 1950 for anti-American espionage, and were executed in 1953. According to Grinberg, Julius’ guilt was fully established much later through the declassification of government documents. Although Ethel’s involvement in espionage appears to be questionable, their acts and arrest divided the public. As Grinberg writes, “Many leftists and American Jews believed they were innocent, and that anti-Semitism undergirded the case.”

This was not the opinion of conservative Jews, who saw the Rosenbergs as guilty. In particular, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Warshow wrote and published essays that asserted the Rosenbergs’ guilt and anti-American actions. Fiedler and Warshow saw Julius Rosenberg as a fake, and, as Grinberg writes, “highlighted his [Julius’] most conspicuous shortcomings aside from being a communist—his simple-mindedness. As part of a cohort that viewed intellectuality as masculine, Warshow and Fiedler were effectively saying that cooperation with communists did not just make you a traitor, it exposed you as a ‘sissy.’” 

People like Fiedler and Warshow understood what was at stake culturally precisely because they saw what Communist ideology represented for American culture. For the Jewish anti-Communist conservatives, it was necessary in every possible way to “counteract” the connection between Jews and Communism, and Commentary was “central to this initiative.”

“Lady Writers”

Where do women fit into this whole picture of “secular Jewish masculinity”? Many women writers were rejected by their male counterparts. Some criticisms were warranted: many women could not compete with the towering intellect of these men, but this certainly was not true of all women who were part of the New York intelligentsia. 

Is there such a thing as a female genius? The question naturally arises in light of Grinberg’s subject. If a woman is a good writer, shouldn’t she simply be known as a “writer” and not a “woman writer?” This seems obvious to many, but culture in America rarely permits such conclusions. It was the feminists then who demanded recognition beyond merit or talent. To call a woman “a lady” in an intellectual world was an insult. New York Jewish male intellectuals were not always kind to women. 

Although a man of the left, Mailer had things in common with Podhoretz. Mailer was a literary genius with an oversized personality. Both men eviscerated Mary McCarthy’s novel, The Group, and called it “trivial.” Widely regarded as “the first woman” New York intellectual, McCarthy’s novels found critical acclaim, and “she held her own in this male milieu from the beginning.” She was even dubbed a “Valkyrie maiden” by a junior editor of Partisan Review, William Barrett. 

Mailer was known for his bravado and machismo, always trying to prove his manhood to the point of comedy. But nothing about McCarthy’s success was funny to Mailer. Grinberg presents him as obsessed with the symbolism of the Jewish phallus, to the point where his fixation with it became banal. Restraint was never in Mailer’s repertoire, but even so, his criticism was so excessive that it seems to call for some further explanation. Was McCarthy admired and desired by the Jewish intellectuals, Grinberg wonders, in part because she was both an intellectual and not Jewish? Was there a certain fascinating tension in being a shiksa in that environment, which a man like Mailer was unable to tolerate? Or did his reaction mainly stem from jealousy at seeing another novelist admired?

In the Jewish conservative world, it was Midge Decter—the wife of Podhoretz—who focused on family values as a way to affirm both the masculine and the feminine. The husband and wife aligned with each other well, and were consistent in their conservative principles. Both had concerns about gender, and saw feminism as an obstacle to conservatism. 

Grinberg, however, feels that Decter’s work was underappreciated by male peers and even her own husband. “Podhoretz rarely gave his wife credit for her pioneering work in post-World War II sexual conservatism. Rather, he ruminated on his own history of personal affronts and slights upon his masculinity as a boy and young man. But we should never forget that the project was a joint one. Decter … was crucial to integrating the neoconservatives into the larger conservative movement.” This is especially true in Decter’s work and emphasis on “mature and distinct sex roles.” 

Grinberg shows an admirable objectivity throughout the book, moving beyond familiar divisions between left and right. This is what makes her book strong and interesting. Grinberg maintains enough distance between herself and the subjects, clearly led by genuine curiosity rather than ideology. 

Regarding Decter’s role, Grinberg clearly admires the strengths of Podhoretz or other men within the conservative movement, while at the same time raising important questions: can women in this kind of intellectual world be as successful as men, and can they be taken as seriously? Are women already at a disadvantage because they are women? What kind of choices do they have to make in order to succeed? 

What remains of this intellectual movement today? In some ways, it feels like a thing of the past. We do not argue today about Jewish masculinity per se, but about masculinity itself. We don’t defend writers but men in general because we are facing different cultural battles, such as the reality of gender. But it’s interesting to look back on this “secular, Jewish masculinity,” which had so much energy and verve, seeking to demolish political correctness through arguments and not just through memes. There is something to be learned from the past about authenticity and fortitude in intellectual debate. Hopefully, it can serve as an inspiration, connecting to the roots that can grow new movements that reflect the order of things.

In Federalist #51, James Madison reflected on the need for checks and balances in the new republican government, precisely because “government itself … [is] the greatest of all reflections on human nature.” The Founders recognized the moral corruption of man; he cannot be trusted to do what is right or good in all situations and circumstances. Thus, there is a need for institutional checks on man’s ability to effectively govern. As Madison noted, “In framing a government … you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

In The Assault on the State, political scientists Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue that the modern administrative state is under attack. At least since Nixon’s attempt to reorganize the federal bureaucracy, Republicans and conservatives have consistently sought to reduce the size of government. But the authors argue that today, under Trump, it has reached a dangerous level: the dismantling of the modern state for personal gain.

The authors concur that the modern administrative or bureaucratic state was established by Congress for implementing laws, accompanied by the development of rules and regulations, and oriented by procedural due process. It is made up of departments, organizations, and programs, supported by millions of personnel at all levels of government, who, by way of their knowledge, skills, and abilities, perform functions and make decisions, using discretionary authority, that lead to the implementation of effective public services. The modern bureaucratic state forms the backbone of our democratic republic. They argue, however, that three cultural factors, acting independently of each other, contribute to denigrating the core commitment of the modern state: to govern effectively. The factors include libertarianism, Christian nationalism, and the unitary executive theory.

Modern libertarianism is rooted in Ayn Rand’s “objectivism” and the Austrian economic school of thought, led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, where the protagonist, Howard Roark, made his way through corporate America, “rejecting all forms of social conformity,” while achieving “greatness solely through personal efforts,” certified the dominance of capitalism.

Likewise, economic libertarianism, spurred by Hayek’s post-World War II The Road to Serfdom argued that the private sector could not achieve economic freedom, largely because of high taxes, burdensome regulations, and stifling bureaucratic processes—all the products of the modern administrative state. This economic mindset, claims the authors, undermines the role of civil servants, leads to increasing levels of public distrust, and repudiation of the modern state apparatus.

A second factor is Christian nationalism. While the authors contend that “libertarians may be natural candidates for deep state conspiracies,” they contend that Christian nationalists also believe “that a hidden power within the state, a state-within-the-state, is aiming to thwart God’s will” for America. For example, like libertarians “white Christian nationalists” loath socialism, but not as a matter of “economic redistribution between classes,” but as a “redistribution from the ethnically advantaged to the disadvantaged, welfare transfers … between races.” Thus, the authors argue that Christian nationalists “who wish to preserve their ethnic group’s historic advantages,” both ethnically and religiously, “frequently speak of religious and economic freedom from the government in the same breath.”

Protecting this freedom is the goal for Christian nationalists. So, when they see the administrative state acting contrary to their needs, whether it is “administering welfare programs” for the low income, or “devising public health and vaccine requirements” for all citizens, then the administrative state is the enemy, and it must be dismantled or “deconstructed.” To carry out this “anti-state” objective, Hanson and Kopstein claim that the Federalist Society is working on behalf of both libertarians and Christian nationalists, raising money through private donors, focusing “its energies on restaffing the United States judiciary at all levels, in the hopes of removing impediments to the restoration of the ‘constitutional order’ underpinned by the ‘free market’ and ethnoreligious traditionalism.” In the end, for both libertarians and Christian nationalists, the modern state is the barrier to achieving their economic and religious ends.

The third element is unitary executive theory. This theory argues that Article II grants the president unlimited authority to exercise executive powers, including dictating what the administrative state can or cannot do, or even if executive departments and programs should exist. The effect of the theory has led some political leadership scholars, for example, to assess it as a “danger to constitutional government.” Richard Nixon, for example, claimed executive privilege on his right to protect private communications concerning Watergate. In the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration invoked the theory when wiretapping American citizens’ phones and labeling some US citizens as “enemy combatants.” Later, Barack Obama and Joe Biden employed undisguised executive authority to promote favorable foreign and domestic policy initiatives.

Hanson and Kopstein declare the modern administrative state as a marvel of both human ingenuity and cultural and organizational progress.

Yet, the authors contend that while the aforementioned factors contribute to the denigration of the modern state, there is an even greater threat, one that supersedes the United States, that is part of a “larger phenomenon: a global wave of rebellion” against the modern state and democracy itself. According to Max Weber, the key to this type of political order is either a personal “sense of duty” or loyalty to the leader, or a commitment to the rule of law. If it is the latter, then procedure and process are key to an effective governance structure, but if it is the former, then it is led by chief executive “strongmen,” such as Donald Trump, who, after elected to office, often following a populist wave of support, establish themselves as patrimonial leaders, dismissing their constitutional duties and responsibilities, and surrounding themselves with loyalist sycophants. According to the authors, by the mid-twentieth century, patrimonial rule manifested in many countries around the world, like Ethiopia (Haile Selassie), the Dominican Republic (Rafael Trujillo), and the Philippines (Ferdinand Marcos). Today, patrimonial rule ranges from Russia (Vladimir Putin), Hungary (Viktor Orban), India (Narendra Modi), and, they argue, the United States (Donald Trump).

While each country’s politics and culture differ, Hanson and Kopstein argue that the trappings of patrimonialism, aimed at tearing down the modern state, are similar. In Hungary, for instance, Orban attacked the media, tinkered with the electoral system, and engaged in “crony capitalism,” where “oligarchic and political power are closely related.” In Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu called for a series of judicial changes “that would not only undermine judicial independence but threaten to politicize … [Israel’s] civil service.” And since returning to power in 2012, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has cracked down on “independent journalists,” subjected NGO activity to “increasingly harsh penalties,” and “nullified” any vocal opposition to his authority (i.e., Boris Nemtsov and Aleksei Navalny).

To counter this “patrimonial wave and restore the modern state,” the authors offer four steps. First, clarify the problem, and educate the public about what will happen if the modern administrative state is abandoned. Second, resist “utopian schemes for replacing the liberal state.” Third, garner support for civil servants, such as issuing a “global call to public service.” Fourth, “reorient foreign policy to include (the) defense of rule-of-law states.” Collectively, they contend, these four steps mark the beginning of protecting the validity of the modern state, recognizing it is “embedded in our culture, in our educational institutions, and in our broader societies.”

Hanson and Kopstein declare the modern administrative state as a marvel of both human ingenuity and cultural and organizational progress. Humanity, they argue, would be incapable of living and working effectively and humanely without the institutional accouterments of the modern administrative state. Not only does the modern state exhibit procedural functionality, shown both through “civil servants, impartial judiciaries, and professional experts,” but also in providing the rewards of public services. Therefore, they agree it must be preserved and protected.

In Federalist #70, Alexander Hamilton recognized the worth of “good government.” He wrote, “It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks … to the steady administration of the laws, to the protection of property … to justice; [and] to the security of liberty.” Historically, at least in the United States, the modern state has grown somewhat proportionately with the needs, not just wants, of a progressive society. And democracy has flourished in the United States and propagated globally.

Still, Hanson and Kopstein approach the efficaciousness of the modern state as suspect, even fragile, where too much of a patrimonial leader like Trump, Modi, or Netanyahu, and their disdain for the modern state, will soon lead to its demise. On the contrary, though, the modern state, and by default democracy, are constitutionally sustainable and politically resilient.

Elaine Karmack of Brookings, for example, contends the first Trump administration did not “inflict permanent damage on our democracy.” Instead, she notes, “The guardrails of democracy held.” Congress, federalism, the judiciary, free press, and the civil service remained strong. And despite a landslide election in 2024, including the emergence of Elon Musk and DOGE, the downsizing of the Department of Education, and the laying off of thousands of federal workers, public schools remained open, planes continued to fly, hospitals stayed open, and Social Security checks were still deposited.

Presidential scholars Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney Milkis insist that Trump’s “presidentialism” raised genuine concerns about the escalation of “executive-centered partisanship,” particularly during the first 100 days of his second administration. However, even though Trump worked at breakneck speed, writing executive orders, enacting tariffs, deregulating programs and policies, and laying off federal workers, he was still checked by a contrarian press, a stubborn judiciary that slowed down executive actions, such as the deportation of illegal immigrants, and a civil service that remained steadfast. And despite the insipid and dysfunctional national party system, the Democrats continued to lob challenges against the “Big Beautiful Bill,” while the Republicans could barely keep their own party coalitions in check to back Trump policies.

Our government and nation are only as strong as the commitment of its people to the principles it espouses.

The “redeployment of administrative power” is critical not only for the development of “conservative Republicanism,” forged in the Nixonian era, but also for the continuation of the modern state. Richard Nixon, for example, adroitly used the administrative state to address his key political aims. For example, Jacobs and Milkis note that Nixon did not do away with LBJ’s “signature antipoverty program but … reconstituted it to give business interests greater influence over deployment of federal funds.” More importantly, Nixon converted the Bureau of Budget into the Office of Management and Budget, “adding a cadre of presidentially appointed assistant directors of policy” who effectively ran administrative and policy interference between the OMB director and merit-based civil servants. In other words, according to Jacobs and Milkis, neither Democrats nor Republicans want to see the retraction, and certainly not the elimination, of the modern state, primarily because it aids both parties in promoting and implementing their political agendas.

All presidents, to one degree or another, from the founding to the present, regardless of party, engaged in some type of political oversight marked by loyalty and executive-centered authority, all while pushing the limits of constitutional fidelity. This did not mean, however, the end of the modern state, and the beginning of patrimonial rule. It simply meant there was and continues to be an imbalance of executive power.

Congress’s abdication of the “Madisonian vision” is more troubling. Madison was more concerned about the possibility of “legislative tyranny” than the misuse of executive authority. In Federalist #48, for example, he writes, “The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments.” Establishing “public trust” in the legislature is critical to affirming not only constitutional checks, but in elevating “reasoned” debate over “passioned” cacophony between and among the people, and their representatives.

Yet, with the breakdown in the political party system, coupled with the increasing demand for and requisite influence of strong executive leadership, the likelihood of returning to legislative dominance will not happen. However, this does not excuse Congress from seeking ways to reform itself, recognizing that its incremental abdication of authority to the regulatory state over the last century was not in the best interest of either institution.

Where do we as a nation and people go from here? How do we approach the problems that plague us and threaten, according to Hanson and Kopstein, the destruction of the modern state? Is it a reverence for the hard-working and dutiful civil servants that form the core of the modern state? Is it reconstructing Madison’s vision? Is it reasserting a “vigilant and engaged citizenry that rededicates itself to representative democracy?” Regardless of how we continue, we must seek ways and embrace values that unite us rather than divide us. Our government and nation are only as strong as the commitment of its people to the principles it espouses.