Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

In “The Long Descent to Unilateralism,” Professor Sarah Burns argues that our nation has ended up at a constitutional place that the Framers did not intend. For much of the nation’s early history, she believes, presidents sought congressional approval before using force; Congress debated and funded or rejected those ventures, and power rebalanced once wars ended. Burns claims this pattern eroded after the Spanish–American War and is virtually absent today, leaving decisions over war almost entirely in the hands of the president.

But Burns finds us at the wrong destination because she begins the voyage from the wrong launch point. Burns’s account goes awry, first, because she mistakenly believes that the Constitution’s Declare War Clause requires Congress to preauthorize every conflict. The Clause, however, does not bear that weight. Second, she believes that presidents have seized this power because executives have continuously waged war without congressional permission. This imagines that the Framers imposed their approach to domestic policy—Congress authorizes first, the president executes second—upon the very different setting of national security and foreign affairs.

But instead of this strict, legalistic understanding of war, the Constitution adopts a flexible, political system for making the decision to go to war. The Framers deliberately separated the power to declare and fund wars from the power to start and direct them. They created a flexible system in which both branches could influence war policy. The Constitution allows Congress to retain an effective check on war-making through its power of the purse, while allowing the president to act with the speed and energy necessary to protect the nation’s security. Rather than a story of presidential usurpation, the American practice of war powers shows a president and Congress that have agreed on the basic structure and purpose of the American armed forces, the grand strategy pursued by the nation over decades, and individual wars throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

It is uncontroversial to observe that Congress has the constitutional authority to check the president on matters of war. The critical question is how. Burns places undue reliance on the Declare War Clause. She claims it was common practice for nineteenth-century presidents to seek Congressional approval before pursuing hostilities and to apologize when they did not. Yet what she takes as evidence of sweeping congressional power is better understood as a reflection of prudence and inter-branch bargaining. Her account assumes that “declare war” requires Congress to authorize military hostilities before presidential action, but history indicates otherwise. The Framers did not demand a legalistic process before the executive could use force; they left such decisions to politics, allowing both the president and Congress to cooperate or contest for primacy over war policy.

By the time the Framers wrote and ratified the Constitution, they would not have understood a declaration of war as necessary to initiate hostilities. The Constitution took the phrase “declare war” from British constitutional practice—Blackstone describes it as one of the powers held by the Crown. In the one hundred years preceding the Constitution, the British waged more than a dozen wars but declared war only once before fighting began. When declarations did appear, they usually came months or years after the start of the conflict. Declarations of war were not understood to serve a domestic function of constitutional authorization, but rather to define the legal status of hostilities under international law. Declarations served as formal notices to other sovereigns of the legal status between countries at war and provided a public recitation of grievances. This would not have been familiar to the Founding generation, who had fought a war in North America (the Seven Years’ War) well before a formal declaration of war was issued. The Declaration of Independence itself was a declaration of war, issued well after fighting had begun at Lexington and Concord.

The Framers created a system in which Congress and the president wield distinct tools within a flexible, political process.

Post-independence history provides no support for reading the Declare War Clause as requiring congressional approval before presidents initiate hostilities. In the initial burst of constitution-making, the revolutionaries rejected the British monarchy and experimented with weakening the executive branch. These state constitutions took simple majoritarian democracy too far by subjecting their governors to legislative selection and control and disrupting their unity by involving councils of state in their decisions. But when the Framers wrote the Constitution eleven years later, they restored an independent, unified chief executive with its own powers—including the authority to wage war as Commander-in-Chief and Chief Executive. In Federalist #74, Alexander Hamilton explained that “the direction of war implies the direction of the common strength,” and that the authority to direct and employ this strength is a fundamental aspect of executive power. The president should lead in wartime because, in Hamilton’s words, he can act with “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.” He emphasized that “energy in the executive is a leading characteristic of good government” and is essential for protecting the community against foreign threats.

Compare the Constitution’s careful delineation of the process for enacting a statute, appointing officers, or making treaties with the lack of procedures for making war. The Constitution divides powers that had formerly resided in the British Crown—the commander-in-Chief stayed with the executive, while declaring war and raising armies were transferred to Congress—but it does not set out how the powers are to interact. The Framers would have expected the executive and legislative branches to use their constitutional powers to struggle over war policy, just as the Crown and Parliament had.

Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution confirms the point. It declares: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, … engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” This provision shows that the Framers knew exactly how to write a text that would require Congress’s authorization before military hostilities could begin. It even contains the implicit exception for sudden attacks that all pro-Congress scholars acknowledge must reside within the Declare War Clause (even though it isn’t there). If Burns and others were right in their reading of the Constitution, it should have contained a parallel clause to Article I, Section 10 that declared “the President shall not, without the Consent of Congress, engage in War, unless the United States is actually invaded or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” Instead, the Framers gave Congress the power to “declare” war and vested the power to conduct military operations in the executive. Chief Justice Marshall properly observed in McCulloch v. Maryland that identical words in the Constitution should carry the same meaning, and different words carry different meanings. By deliberately distinguishing “declare” war from “engage,” the Framers created a system in which Congress and the president wield distinct tools within a flexible, political process.

This is not the time to encourage sweeping, untested changes by stoking fears that Congress has conceded a war power it never possessed.

History confirms this design. For more than two centuries, no president or Congress has acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the United States can engage in military hostilities abroad. Although this nation has used force abroad more than a hundred times, Congress has issued declarations on only five occasions: the War of 1812, the Mexican–American and Spanish–American Wars, and World Wars I and II. Many other conflicts—such as the Persian Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan—received congressional authorization but not declarations of war. And in still others, presidents acted without either, sending troops to oppose the Russian Revolution, intervene in Mexico, remove Manuel Noriega from power in Panama, or prevent human rights disasters in the Balkans.

This record shows continuity, not collapse. From Jefferson’s naval expeditions to Lincoln’s conduct of the Civil War, from Truman’s Korea intervention to the long struggle of the Cold War, presidents have acted with initiative while Congress has retained ultimate control through funding. Far from abandoning its role, Congress has exercised it as the Framers intended: not by preauthorizing every conflict, but by deciding whether to sustain or terminate wars once underway. Unless Congress creates and funds the armed forces, presidents have nothing with which to fight wars.

If Burns were correct and war powers mirrored domestic lawmaking, Congress’s power to declare war should include the right to set war aims and means. In practice, however, neither branch has ever believed Congress’s Article I powers include control over tactics and strategy. Congress’s real strength lies in the purse, not in dictating which units fight when or where. Its size and structure make it too unwieldy for decisions requiring speed, secrecy, and force. Yet its funding power provides a flexible and decisive check: Congress can reduce or cut off resources, shrink the military, or halt supplies. It used these tools to end the Vietnam War and to block James Polk’s attempt to occupy all of Mexico.

The ratification debates further confirm the Framers’ intent to maintain foreign affairs powers in the executive branch, with a check from funding and legislation. At the Virginia convention, anti-Federalist Patrick Henry warned that presidential command of the military would invite reckless wars. Federalist George Nicholas replied that Congress’s regulation and funding powers provided the safeguard. James Madison likewise argued that liberty was preserved so long as “the sword” and “the purse” rested in different hands—just as in Britain, where the King commanded the military and Parliament controlled funding. Even in Virginia, where ratification passed by a narrow 88–80 vote, Madison did not invoke the Declare War Clause as a check on presidential power. He pointed instead to the legislature’s control of funding as the primary restraint on warmaking by the executive.

If presidents lead the nation into disasters, Congress can cut off funds, impeach, or call for the voters’ judgment. The Framers did not expect Congress to preauthorize every use of force or to manage military campaigns. They expected presidents to take the initiative in crises, and Congress to exercise checks afterward, primarily through control of resources. Congress’s use of these tools has always turned on politics—at times asserting its powers forcefully, as in Vietnam, and at times remaining silent. Both approaches fit within the system the Framers designed. When Congress chooses to declare war, fund conflicts, or do nothing after the president has already acted, it is not surrendering authority; it is exercising it.

Presidents have not always judged wisely, and some wars have proved costly mistakes. But errors of policy do not mean the Constitution has failed. They mean the political process must run its course. The Framers built overlapping powers, not a rigid process, and trusted politics to resolve disagreements over war. That design has carried the Republic through its greatest challenges.

In an age of nuclear weapons and resurgent great-power rivalry, the need for an energetic executive is clearer than ever. This is not the time to encourage sweeping, untested changes by stoking fears that Congress has conceded a war power it never possessed.

The author thanks Lauren Weiss for her excellent assistance with this article.

“Charm is a quality which often evades the historian.” So wrote John W. Derry in his biography of Charles James Fox. James Grant’s imaginative attempt to follow the “friendship” between Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke might be seen as an attempt to challenge that deficiency. In Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution, Grant assembles a structure of networks and characters that moves beyond the abstract discussion of ideas and concepts to help explain the temporary alliance between these two giants of politics.

Grant is not a historian by profession, but he offers here a highly accessible account of the relationship between two of the most powerful orators in the British parliament during a period anchored by the turbulent revolutionary events in the American colonies, in India, and in France. Despite the subtitle of his book, he achieves this effect because he covers much more than what the phrase “Age of Revolution” might indicate. Far from a direct focus on the approaches of Fox and Burke to the American and French revolutions, those readers broadly familiar with Burke and, perhaps, Fox, will benefit from the author’s precise discussion of a variety of peripheral, but converging, issues that helped to bring the two figures together: the first steps in the development of an organized political “party” during the years following the Seven Years’ War, through such apparently tangential matters as Admiral Sir George Rodney’s cruel “scourging” of the Jews in St Eustatius, and the imprisonment of the Revolutionary War leader Henry Laurens, to Burke’s pursuit of economic reform as Paymaster General, the shock of the Regency Crisis, and the extended effort to further reform the East India Company, with the consequent impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal.

Each episode Grant covers is well-sourced, both from contemporary correspondence and from the works of highly reputable historians. It was good, for example, to see Jonathan Clark’s critical edition of Reflections on the Revolution in France employed, and references to the most recent work from P. J. Marshall, the outstanding scholar on Burke and his connections to the Caribbean and to India. (What a pity, though, to be reminded how publishers still set themselves against placing footnotes where they belong—at the foot of their appropriate page.)

While the intention of the work inclines away from this next point, it is also very good to see such contextual description supported by lucid and plausible (if necessarily brief) assessments of key figures who helped, intentionally or not, to engineer the friendship between Fox and Burke: John Wilkes, the Marquis of Rockingham, Lord North, William Pitt the Younger, Edmund Burke’s younger brother Richard, Warren Hastings’ nemesis Philip Francis, among others.

That intention itself—the charting of an improbable “friendship” between two statesmen (the ultimate consequence of which appears to have been, primarily, the sundering of Whiggery at the end of the eighteenth century) is an intriguing one, and Grant is not hesitant about highlighting the character differences that intruded into such a “friendship.” In matters of character, while they shared a love of literature and the classics, a talent for oratory, and “a chronic shortage of ready money,” as Grant observes, “one was a happily married family man, the other, a definitely dissolute bachelor; the one, an Irish émigré, the other, a descendant (down an illegitimate line) of Charles II. They were farmer and horse player; home-rooted Briton and Francophile man of the world; devout member of the Church of England and no churchman at all.”

Indeed, though Cicero stated that “he who looks upon a true friend, looks, as it were, upon a sort of image of himself,” it could be argued that the similarities between the men hardly keep pace with the contrasts, and that is no different when we turn to ideas and political principles. Here Grant identifies the similarities as “a devotion to justice especially for the downtrodden[,] … an abhorrence of the American war and, more broadly, of the North government[, and] jealousy of the encroaching power of the crown over Parliament.” The first of these cries out for greater clarification. The other principles were clearly bound by time and events, and so it lies with the author to explain how the issues raised by the unanticipated revolution in France exposed under these apparent similarities a deeper level of divergence that brought about the dramatic, public, and final split between the two statesmen in the House of Commons on May 6, 1791.

In that concatenation of events, “Whiggery” itself is strained beyond breaking point. Burke’s Whig principles, which were firmly rooted in preserving the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and the Revolution Settlement that followed, have been described succinctly by Peter Stanlis as designed to preserve and confirm England’s “constitutional hereditary monarchy limited in its powers and prerogatives by the balanced orders of the Commons and Lords.” Fox was similarly committed to the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, but to a more malleable legacy that followed burgeoning theories of the primacy of popular liberty while holding fast to an enduring suspicion of monarchical overreach.

Burke’s animosities could be seen to have arisen out of his grasp of fundamental principles, whereas Fox’s principles, as described by Grant, seem rather to have emerged from his attempt to order his animosities.

Burke and Fox were “friends until the end”—but, then, what kind of friendship? And until the end of what—since it was clearly not until the end of their lives? While Fox, who was the younger by some twenty years, met and came to admire Burke before he ever entered parliament himself, Grant argues that it was the American Revolution that first brought the two together in political alliance. Through Burke’s agitation for a party “based on principle,” presented in his Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770) and brought to reality under Lord Rockingham, there seemed to emerge between the two a concurrence of common principles which might be carried on, after the fall of Lord North’s administration, through vital matters such as economic reform, the impeachment of Hastings, and the Regency Crisis.

But while the two worked to produce a method of effective opposition in parliament, they had differing views of the significance of principles and association in that process. Fox looked at party as, in the words of Leslie Mitchell, “often an extension of friendship,” whereas Burke stretched for “principles and integrity” within a “general scheme” of common action that extended beyond the vagaries of foreign affairs. Both appeared in agreement on the essential preservation of liberty and on protecting the constitution, although Fox’s early defense of the revolutionaries in France indicated how both had different views of the relationship between the two. Could Burke, who appears to have understood the British constitution as emanating from a higher constitution of humankind, ever have accepted Fox’s assertion in the debate on the Quebec bill of 1791 that “the rights of man … were in fact the basis and foundation of … the British constitution itself”? Both defended the hereditary principle, but, in fact, they understood its significance in the context of natural justice quite differently, as Fox’s conflation of privilege and inalienable right in his support for Prince George’s claim for the regency would seem to suggest.

Perhaps most significant of all, both Fox and Burke were energized by particular animosities. In this narrative, Burke’s somewhat puzzling obsession with condemning Hastings carries similar weight to Grant’s comment that “hatred of Pitt was [Fox’s] eternal flame”; yet even here, the evidence suggests that there was an important difference. Burke’s animosities could be seen to have arisen out of his grasp of fundamental principles, whereas Fox’s principles, as described here, seem rather to have emerged from his attempt to order his animosities.

In his treatise On Friendship (which we can assume was well known to both Burke and Fox), Cicero wrote that, “Friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection.” Given that Fox was not of a religious disposition (and I would place more significance on this than on all the other comparisons), one might think that a word like “fellowship” would be a more accurate description for their relationship. In any case, the split in 1791 comes as no surprise (and can, as Grant does, be traced back to tensions shortly after the early death of Lord Rockingham). Indeed, the contours of their friendship appear in many ways to have been carved out by the ambitions and actions of others—of Rockingham and Pitt, in particular. With Rockingham dead, and Pitt a (largely fortunate) beneficiary of the Regency Crisis seven years later, it is hard to see what was left to hold Fox and Burke together much longer.

The three points of focus indicated in the book’s subtitle the “Age of Revolution”—the American Revolution, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and the French Revolution—fade somewhat in their significance through the narrative structure of the format, and this is not necessarily a problem unless one was wishing to see the author plumb the conceptual differences that the narrative exposes more deeply. Grant does usefully highlight some of the issues that helped to define the split in 1791: Fox’s persistent reference to the Glorious Revolution as a hopeful precedent for events in France, and to an unfavorable comparison of the Bourbons and the Hanoverians over a general fear of the expansion of monarchical power; differences in an understanding of the words prescription and innovation; Burke’s reaching for a transcendent plane in his criticism of the French revolutionary program; and indeed, despite his less-travelled life, Burke’s superior knowledge of many aspects of the condition of society in France.

The publishers claim in their blurb that the book will suggest “lessons for our divided present.” That would seem to rest upon greater imagination than I can muster, except that the moral of Grant’s engrossing presentation of this unlikely friendship between Fox and Burke is not that it was meant forever but simply that it happened at all. In that spirit, let us pray for a modern imitation of one of the great alliances of British parliamentary history.

Public murder tends to push existential questions to the forefront of people’s minds. It is so deeply malicious, so shockingly depraved, that it snatches away the sense of normalcy that sustains most people in the day-to-day. We are jolted into an awful awareness of civilization’s fragility. That’s terrifying, so we grasp frantically at solutions. What will it take to end the malice, restore normalcy, preserve civilization from the lunatics and monsters? We’ve been having a lot of those conversations of late.

Charlie Kirk’s murder was a terrible thing. It’s obvious, but still healthy to keep repeating it, affirming the visceral outrage. Oddly, it is partly because so many people have echoed this obvious-but-crucial sentiment, that the ensuing conversation has in some respects been unusually uplifting, even despite the depraved minority that openly celebrated his death. More than usual, in the aftermath of a tragedy, there is a palpable willingness to discuss the deeper cultural maladies that spawn such malevolence. Some even seem to feel chastened. 

It’s interesting to consider the reasons. Usually, public shootings send the political left racing to their mental safe space: gun control. There must be a way to dramatically reduce violent death through gun-related legislation. Although the overwhelming obstacles to this strategy (both constitutional and practical) have been explained again and again, a large share of the population still seems to believe that the magical lever marked “No More Guns” is out there somewhere, presumably heavily guarded by representatives of the NRA. In any case, that debate is familiar, and frightened people crave familiarity. By the time we’ve finished discussing the definition of “assault weapon,” examining data from Switzerland and Finland, and revisiting the 1996 Australia buyback program, the aura of horror has dissipated somewhat, and most people go back to their lives. It’s not a fitting way to honor slain innocents, but then, these are not decorous times.

Kirk’s killing was different. In its aftermath, the gun debate has been comparatively muted, more of an undertone to a significant public discussion of political violence, radicalization, and the value of civil discourse. It could be relevant that Kirk was murdered with a bolt-action rifle (clearly not an assault weapon by anyone’s standards). It’s almost certainly true that the awfulness of the people who cheered Kirk’s murder as a case of “poetic justice for gun nuts,” deterred the humane and decent from even approaching the subject. But give Kirk credit. The main difference-maker was truly the man himself. In a time when most people slide into comfortable bubbles of the like-minded, he made it his life’s work to engage the not-like-minded in civil debate. It was his passion. Then one of them murdered him. 

At such a moment, one does not object to endless iterations of the same obvious message. It’s good that so many influencers converged on this point, condemning the killing, begging for decency and restraint, and reminding all Americans that violence isn’t the answer. I agree. But I do have a follow-up. What’s the question?

We’ve reached the point where we hardly probe a public killer’s motive in any depth; we only look for the source of derangement.

Political violence is terrible, for reasons that have been articulated so well over the past several days. It attacks not just a particular victim, but also society at large, undercutting the very conditions that make it possible for people to live together. In this sense, Kirk’s assassination seems like a quintessential example of political violence. He was literally killed by an angry detractor who wanted to silence him. And there have been other public murders in recent months that likewise seem “political” in an obvious sense. Elias Rodriguez killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim “for Gaza”; his victims were presumably selected because they were Jewish. Vance Luther Boelter appears to have murdered Minnesota’s House Speaker Melissa Hortman for the crime of being a Democrat. Luigi Mangioni killed a corporate CEO because he was enraged about the state of insurance and healthcare. Thomas Matthew Crooks had almost no political profile until he shot a presidential candidate at a campaign rally, but if that’s not “political violence,” what is? Truly, all those murders seem clearly “political” in the sense that the killers’ worldviews were deeply shaped by political paradigms. They themselves would undoubtedly explain their motives in political terms. 

Nevertheless, there is another sense in which these killings are very much atypical of what we might, in other contexts, understand “political violence” to be. In some eras, people would assume that “political violence” is committed in the service of a political cause or end. The end could be sympathetic or not, of course, and the violence itself may or may not be an effective mechanism for reaching it. Most of us could probably find at least some sympathetic strands in the rhetoric of the IRA, while the Weather Underground were basically radical communists out for blood. Both, though, had some notion of where they wanted to go. The efficacy of different strategies is likewise variable: Religious fundamentalists presumably factor supernatural help into their broader narrative, while others, like ecoterrorists or anarchists, may see the collapse of civil society itself as a step towards the desired end. But they all seem to have some sort of manifesto or creed. All had some idea (even if deranged and utopian) of what they hoped to achieve. Did Thomas Matthew Crooks have that? Did Tyler Robinson? 

Looked at from a certain angle, the space between Robinson (a top high school student from a good family), or Boelter (a successful middle-aged professional), and more obviously-unstable assassins like Robert Westman or Decarlos Brown Jr., doesn’t necessarily look so large. Nor do these figures look particularly “political,” at least not in the way that IRA terrorists or Weather Underground members would. Several of them seem to have killed for very recently acquired beliefs. Their own friends or nearest relations are quoted saying, in shocked confusion, “I have no idea why he did this.” These are not men of purpose and conviction. They are alienated misfits, and everyone knows it. 

I think everyone does really know, even the ghastly cheer squads that pop up online after each atrocity. We’ve reached the point where we hardly probe a public killer’s motive in any depth; we only look for the source of derangement. We want to know what kind of household they grew up in, how they voted, how their parents voted, which rallies they attended, which websites they retweeted. Once that’s been aired, most people are satisfied that that’s all there is to know. We don’t go looking for some deeper credo, or expect to uncover a cloak-and-dagger initiation into a secret brotherhood. These aren’t “brotherhood” sorts of people. The Feds tell us that a killer “probably acted alone,” and we nod and shrug, because what else would we expect? Our modern-day killers always seem to be alone.

Some time back, I had a conversation with one of my sons, who was asking me questions about what I remembered of the violent outbreaks of my own middle and high school years. Stacked up together, there were really a shocking number: the LA riots, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, all the unrest surrounding the O. J. Simpson trials. In my junior year, my native Boulder was rocked by the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, and then I went off to college, and almost immediately, a school I used to rub shoulders with at debate tournaments was devastated by a horrific massacre. (Yes, that was Columbine High School.) My young life was scarred by appalling violence, apparently! My son commented on how “the world sure was crazy” back in my day, which prompted a grim laugh. 

It’s a tiny bit comforting, perhaps, to be reminded of earlier periods when I had that “peering over into the abyss” feeling, and came through it. But there are still interesting contrasts. The events of my teen years prompted endless angst and speculation about shadowy connections, conspiracies, and underground networks of domestic terrorists. Could Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols really have acted alone? Were racist miscreants cooperating to frame O. J.? Vigilante groups, white nationalists, religious zealots, Black Panthers, ecoterrorists, and the like flitted through our dystopian nightmares. We had some sizzling conversations about them on the school bus.

Today’s killers already know violence isn’t the answer, at least not to a question a healthy person would ask. Their murders are more like malicious suicides.

Today we have Antifa, Proud Boys, conspiracies like QAnon, and so on, but these are not our main sources of terror. When someone bars a church door and starts murdering children at prayer, we hardly consider that he might be part of a terrorist group. He was alone. Obviously.

There’s no simple solution to this kind of violence. Gun laws certainly won’t fix it. Condemnations of political violence are good, but it’s hard to say how much impact they will have, given that today’s public assassins aren’t really looking for solutions. They already know violence isn’t the answer, at least not to a question a healthy person would ask. These murders are more like malicious suicides. The killers want to destroy themselves—and hurt others along the way. 

One thing at least we should resolve: First, do no harm. Hardly any of our present troubles can be effectively addressed through tighter state control. There is always a temptation demand this when people are angry and afraid, and the past few days have unsurprisingly seen many calls, from different corners, to crack down on this or that movement or ideological camp. The reasoning is obvious, but it’s a mistake. If alienated rage is the core problem, we can’t expect to fix it by shutting down dangerous ideas or disrupting ground-level associations. We need people to talk and associate more, not less; a loveless nihilist can be radicalized by a thousand different things, while meaningful activity and healthy human relationships are protective against all manner of ideological evils. Meanwhile, a quick glance at our British friends across the Atlantic should amply illustrate how things are likely to go when a society tries to turn down the temperature by getting tough on thoughtcrime. 

If we really want less violence, we need to renew our efforts to build up civil society, creating more common spaces where conversation can happen. Even more, we need to do better by our kids, perhaps especially our sons, who clearly need more direction, purpose, and community. This is not primarily a question for public policy; it has far more to do with the bedtime stories, the camping trips, and more broadly, making a higher priority of building the kinds of communities that are good for our kids. Communities shouldn’t just be outlets for our own projects and pet causes. It’s a big ask in a busy, breathless world, but we have to find a way. 

“When you stop having a human connection with people you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.” That was Charlie Kirk, in a clip widely circulated after his death. I personally had paid very little attention to him before his murder, but he certainly looks large in hindsight: firm, magnanimous, a man of conviction. His killer looks small, weak, pitiful. But that is the modern public killer.

We can hope, at least, that that stark contrast will inspire young men to imitate Kirk and not Robinson. If so, much good could flow from it. Kirk valued faith and family. He loved freedom. And he championed civil conversation, not just in rhetoric but in action. We should honor his memory by holding tighter to all of those things. 

There is a basic, underlying logic to what Alexis de Tocqueville termed the “complex constitution” of the United States. The lower case “c” is important; Tocqueville used “constitution” in its broader signification, referring to state governments as well as the national government. In particular, he discussed how the national government was constituted to fit with the state governments, and vice versa.

While Tocqueville labeled the constitution of the United States “complex,” it’s actually simple to summarize. Publius put it this way in Federalist #14:

The [national] government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any. The subordinate governments, which can extend their care to all those other subjects which can be separately provided for, will retain their due authority and activity.

To be sure, while the broad outline is simple to trace, filling in the details requires a bit more attention. The trick that judges, legislators, and citizens have been wrestling with for over 200 years is drawing the boundary between policy areas that “can be separately provided for” by the states, and the “limited” set of objects that cannot be provided for by the separate actions of the states and so were delegated to the national government.

One recent approach seeking to explain the logic regarding which policy domains the federal Constitution leaves to the states and which are delegated to the national government is termed the “collective action Constitution.” This explanation locates the logic of the Constitution’s delegated powers in the Founders’ responses to interstate incentive structures that prevent states separately from being able to provide for the common good. Unfortunately, some of the scholars extolling the theory don’t seem to place much actual trust in their theory, and habitually deflect in favor of suboptimally expansive national authority when the theory would point to optimal resolution at the state level.

Justifying Delegations to the National Government

Publius argues in Federalist #14, quoted above, that power is retained by state governments on all matters which “can” be provided for separately by the states; power is delegated to the national government on matters which states cannot provide for separately.

This is the thread tying together the arguments for the grant of national power throughout The Federalist. Diffuse state action is accepted as the baseline; each grant of power to the national government is justified by a reason to depart from diffuse state policies. Publius reflects this mode of argument in Federalist #41 when he frames his discussion with the question, “Whether any part of the powers transferred to the general government be unnecessary or improper?”

Again and again the writers of The Federalist appealed to the basic logic of collective-action design. Madison, for example, observes in Federalist #10 that “the federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.” So, too, in Federalist #3, John Jay underscores the need for a national government “vested with sufficient powers for all general and national purposes.” He specifies an application in the next paper, discussing the need to nationalize defense policy given that separate state provisions of defense would be in “want of concert and unit of system.”

Later in The Federalist, Hamilton laments the “competitions of commerce” between the states and motivates the contracts clause by asserting an interstate justification. Madison similarly justifies national authority over patents and copyright because states recognized that they “cannot separately make effectual provision for either.”

Neil Siegel simply does not seem to believe his own analysis regarding the collective action Constitution.

At the Constitutional Convention, the assembly adopted Resolution VI of the Virginia Plan. The Resolution sketched the aspiration that Congress under the new Constitution would be empowered “to legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation.”

Despite repeated appeals to the single principle, however, the question remained just where the boundary would be located that sorted a set of appropriate matters to the national government while reserving other matters to the states.

Chief Justice Marshall, writing for the Court in Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824, moved the needle on the question of what remained subject to state regulation (writing specifically about the Commerce Clause):

The genius and character of the whole government seem to be that its action is to be applied to all the external concerns of the nation, and to those internal concerns which affect the States generally, but not to those which are completely within a particular State, which do not affect other States, and with which it is not necessary to interfere for the purpose of executing some of the general powers of the government.

The last clause in the quotation, which is critical to Marshall’s argument, is typically neglected in commentary on the case. Significantly, Marshall identifies that the Constitution delegates authority to the national government based not only on the criterion that the matter affects states generally—that is, that the matter is not limited to a particular state but affects other states—but also provided that it is “necessary” for the national government to legislate in the stead of states.

The criterion of “necessity” need not be taken in a strict sense (no need to replicate Maryland’s argument in McCulloch v. Maryland). Nonetheless, Marshall’s criterion of “necessity” stands on its own as a separate criterion that needs to be met to justify national action; this is particularly true in discussing the collective action Constitution.

Note the upshot of Marshall’s analysis: There are some matters that do affect the states generally, yet continue to be reserved for state action because it is not necessary to assign the policy domain to the national government to achieve an optimal outcome.

To put the point in the language of the collective action Constitution: that separate state policies can impose externalities for other states is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for nationalizing a policy domain.

State policies of all sorts frequently affect other states as a matter of course. But the existence of states’ policies that affect other states does not mean that the interaction of these state policies reflects pathological incentive structures that induce states to adopt suboptimal policies.

A concrete example might help. Consider the law at issue in United States v. Lopez, the 1995 case in which, for the first time since the Great Depression, the Supreme Court struck down a national law as beyond Congress’s Commerce Clause authority. Congress had adopted the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, effectively nationalizing a policy domain that had previously been reserved to the states.

Consider the impact of diverse state laws regulating guns in school zones, and ask Marshall’s first question: Do the laws that states adopt regulating guns near school zones affect other states? The answer is obviously yes, with pertinent interstate effects being discussed at length in the case. Hence, if the question of whether states were “incompetent” to regulate guns in school zones depended solely on whether state choices “affected” other states, then the answer would be that the policy domain should be nationalized. (Recall that the majority’s response to these effects was to adopt an infelicitously formalistic economic/non-economic distinction.)

Marshall’s analysis does not end here; it considers a second criterion: Is it necessary for the national government to regulate guns near school zones? The collective-action Constitution version of Marshall’s question is this: Do states face pathological interstate incentive structures that systematically induce states to underregulate guns near school zones?

That is, granting that state choices in the policy domain will naturally affect other states, does, say, Texas’s choice of regulating guns in school zones change the incentives other states face to regulate the matter as they see fit? And there the natural answer is just as obviously “no.” States may differ regarding the level of regulation they choose, but those choices do not create pathological interstate incentives that induce or pressure other states to change the level of regulation they choose.

In this area, different state policies simply reflect different state policy preferences and do not interact in such a way as to undermine the policies that other states adopt.

To illustrate the difference between interstate incentive structures in which state policies merely affect other states and interstate incentive structures that undermine other state policies, consider the game illustrated below. It shows a simplified and highly stylized version of a prisoner’s dilemma game between states.

Prisoner’s dilemmas exist in numerous policy areas, but for concreteness, let’s consider the policy domain of child labor. Each state has the choice of either banning child labor or permitting child labor. The voters of both states prefer to ban child labor rather than to permit it. The problem, however, is that if only one state bans child labor while the other state permits it, mobile capital will move to the non-banning state, causing significant economic contraction in the banning state and economic growth in the non-banning state.

As a result of the pathological incentive structure that exists between the states, and despite unanimous support for banning child labor, without the ability of coordinate policy jointly, the states nonetheless both permit child labor in equilibrium; both states choose to implement the outcome that they regard as suboptimal. (Note that both states prefer the outcome in which both states ban child labor.) As a result of the pathological interstate incentive structure between the states, separated state policy choices result in states being “incompetent” to regulate child labor.

Not only do the actions of one state affect the other state, in order to regulate child labor, it is “necessary” for the national government to implement the regulation. Separate state actions cannot realize the outcome. (Or, at least, the nature of the interstate game creates pressures for states that deter them from banning child labor, though they unanimously regard a universal ban as optimal.)

The Cost of Promiscuously Nationalizing Policy Domains

It is important to underscore that, just as it is costly not to nationalize a policy domain in which states face a pathological incentive structure preventing them from separately adopting optimal policies, so too it is costly to nationalize policy domains in which states do not face pathological incentive structures. That is, the general welfare of the nation is reduced by nationalizing policy domains that should not be nationalized.

Hamilton noted the optimality of diffused state action (in the absence of pathological interstate incentives) in Federalist #32. He wrote of “the utility and necessity of local administrations for local purposes.” That is, he recognized the positive value of reserving appropriately state matters to state governments. Nationalizing these policy matters would represent a net loss of “utility” (in Hamilton’s phrase).

The general welfare of the nation is reduced by nationalizing policy domains that should not be nationalized.

Just as there is a loss to the general welfare when the nation fails to nationalize policy matters where states cannot provide for the general welfare, there is also a loss when the nation nationalizes policy matters in which separate state action does provide for the general welfare.

The illustration below depicts a simple game in which uncoordinated state activity maximizes national welfare. In the game, voters in two states have different preferences over which policy they prefer. Each state adopts the different policy its voters prefer. (State 1 implements Policy A, State 2 implements Policy B, the payoff across the two states is (2,2).)

If the policy decision these states make were to be nationalized, only one of the two policy options would be adopted and implemented uniformly across both states. Irrespective of which policy was adopted, the voters of one state would be left worse off than they were with uncoordinated policy implementation.

When we talk about policy diffusion and federalism, scholars emphasize the possibility of informational advantages of policy implementation at lower levels rather than at higher levels. Those may exist, but presumably less in the informationally-rich policy environment of the modern era relative to earlier periods. Often overlooked in the focus on informational advantages, however, is that voters in different states may simply have different preferences over policy content. These preferences may reflect not just preferences over substance, but different preferences between state populations over risk, different preferences over the relative weighting of law and liberty, different preferences for spending on public goods relative to private goods, and more.

These differences in preferences make hash out of the simple aggregation-of-preference rationale that, for example, Neil Siegel adds to his otherwise careful discussion of how the Constitution was designed to solve interstate collective action problems. He consequently would have the national government improperly usurp state policies when those policies do not reflect collective action problems.

State policies that he would nationalize that are not justified by the actual collective action part of his analysis are Covid-19 policies (and future pandemic policies), infrastructure investment, responses to opioid addiction, and gun violence (despite providing a tepid defense of the Supreme Court’s Lopez decision as consistent with his theory).

Simply consider pandemic policies. As I’ve pointed out before, states can take draconian action at their borders to prevent disease from crossing in from neighboring states. The national government can assist with policing borders if states have difficulty doing so. Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that differing state preferences over liberty and lockups, over continuing school and economic activity versus the ordering of the confinement of massive proportions of state populations, and more, were optimal or necessary.

In this policy domain and others, Siegel simply does not seem to believe his own analysis regarding the collective action Constitution. The addition of aggregating preferences across states makes his version of the collective action Constitution all but indistinguishable from a national government that faces few limits to usurping state policies.

The irony is that these examples are at variance with much of Siegel’s exposition of the basic collective action Constitution. That is, there is an inherent logic to the US small-c constitution, to how national power and state power fit together and complement each other. The nation’s welfare is promoted when we recognize the Constitution’s collective action logic, and when judges enforce it.

In 1788, Thomas Jefferson sent a letter from Paris to an American, his partner in a business venture importing fine French wines to Virginia. That letter would change constitutional history almost a century later. In fact, the “wall of separation between church and state” would never have entered our legal lexicon but for Thomas Jefferson’s love of what the Founders called “claret”—red wines from the Bordeaux region of France. 

This is just one example of how focusing on the Founders and their wines can offer striking insights into constitutional meaning. We thought we would share both those observations and some recommendations for wines to go along with them. Think of it as an exercise in discovering constitutional veritas in vino.

Today’s essay is a Constitution Day appetizer featuring church, state, and claret. Here is how the vineyards of Bordeaux led to the wall of separation between church and state.

Well after the Civil War—and exactly four score and seven years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights—the Supreme Court heard its first case involving the First Amendment’s religion clauses. The case, Reynolds v. United States, involved a twice-married Mormon leader seeking a religious exemption from a federal anti-bigamy law under the Free Exercise Clause. The religion clauses do not mention exemptions, or, for that matter, the separation of church and state. Instead, they say “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Chief Justice Morison Waite was not sure what that meant, so he reached out to his friend George Bancroft, the most famous historian in America. Bancroft pointed to Jefferson, but did not explain why Jefferson held the key to the religion clauses. So the Chief Justice dug into Jefferson’s recently published collected works.

The index directed Waite to a then-obscure, but now-famous 1802 letter. Writing to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, Jefferson declared that the religion clauses built “a wall of separation between church and state.”

But Waite still had a problem if he wanted to invoke this Jeffersonian quotation. During the entire time the religion clauses were being drafted, debated, and ratified, Jefferson was Minister to France. What could make Jefferson so important to the First Amendment that his wall-of-separation letter should be the official interpretation of the religion clauses?

Delving further into Jefferson’s works in hopes of finding a way to highlight Jefferson’s importance as a constitutional spokesman, Waite found a lengthy correspondence with Alexander Donald, a well-connected Virginian in the import-export business. Most of their letters dealt with Jefferson’s advice on the best of Bordeaux, especially the four wines still considered among the finest in the world: Châteaux Margaux, Haut-Brion, Latour, and Lafite. In one 1788 letter, for example, Jefferson alerted Donald to an upcoming shipment of Château Margaux 1784, which he hailed as the best vintage in nine years.

But a second 1788 letter to Donald is the subject of today’s story. It would end up building the wall of separation between church and state. 

Commenting on the process of ratifying the Constitution, Jefferson wrote, “I wish with all my soul that the nine first Conventions may accept the new Constitution, because this will secure to us the good it contains.” Nevertheless, Jefferson hoped for a few amendments, writing, “I equally wish that the four latest conventions … may refuse to accede to it till a declaration of rights be annexed … which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press,” and so on.

Alexander Donald passed this letter along to his friend Patrick Henry, and it was one of the many things mentioned during the debates at the Virginia ratifying convention. That is the only link Waite found between Jefferson and the adoption of the First Amendment.

Based on that stunningly flimsy connection—a letter to a business partner saying that Jefferson hoped that a few states, but not too many, would recommend amendments—Chief Justice Waite deemed Jefferson “an acknowledged leader of the advocates” of the religion clauses. Therefore, he concluded, Jefferson’s wall-of-separation letter “may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the amendment.” 

In the end, Mr. Reynolds did not get his exemption, with the Chief Justice simply declaring that to allow someone to “excuse his practices … because of his religious belief” would be to “make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and, in effect, to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

From that point forward, Jefferson’s wall would constantly reappear as an authoritative gloss on the text of the Establishment Clause.

While Jefferson’s wall of separation turned out not to be critical for the decision in the Reynolds Free Exercise case, Chief Justice Waite’s historical arguments would become essential for the Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Citing only the Reynolds case, Justice Black’s majority opinion declared that, in “the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between church and State.” From that point forward, Jefferson’s wall would constantly reappear as an authoritative gloss on the text of the Establishment Clause.

Constitutional history would have been quite different if Chief Justice Waite had not focused on Jefferson, but instead had asked those who, as Alexander Hamilton might have put it, were in the room where it happened. There, they would have heard James Madison and other Framers say that the goal of the religion clauses was to ensure “that congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God … contrary to their conscience.” But Waite turned instead to the wine-loving Minister to France, and ever since, few discussions of the religion clauses have failed to mention a Jeffersonian wall that owes its origins much more to claret than the Constitution.

A Bordeaux Tasting

Perhaps the best way to mark this pivotal constitutional moment would be to open a bottle of Château Margaux, the wine Jefferson sent to his partner Alexander Donald in 1788. But, at about $600 a bottle for the 2021 vintage—which will not be ready to drink for at least a decade or two—it may be too expensive for all but the most devoted admirers of the wall of separation.

A somewhat more affordable (⁓$70) red wine from the same Bordeaux neighborhood is Ségla. It is an earlier drinking, “second” wine from the famous Château Rauzan-Ségla, which was founded in the 1600s. Jefferson spoke highly of this historic wine producer, enigmatically telling Donald that, if he were to visit “Madame Rozan,” mentioning Jefferson’s name would be helpful. 

But since this is a Constitution Day appetizer course, we are recommending white Bordeaux wines, which pair exceptionally well with goat cheese salads. In another note to his wine partner Donald, Jefferson cited Châteaux Carbonnieux’s Sauvignon Blanc-based wine as one of Bordeaux’s best. It is a blend that incorporates Sémillon, which, along with some time aging in oak, softens the aroma and feel of the wine in your mouth. La Croix de Carbonnieux (⁓$25) or Châteaux Carbonnieux Blanc (⁓$50) are both great choices.

For an excellent Constitution Day appetizer course, pair a Château Carbonnieux or another Bordeaux Blanc with this recipe for a prosciutto-wrapped goat cheese salad.

While you are sipping your claret or Bordeaux Blanc, take a moment on this Constitution Day to reflect on how this snippet of wine history has helped us see just how badly the Supreme Court has misread constitutional history. In the future, we look forward to sharing more places where, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul, a little wine knowledge can be good for your Constitution.

Across the Western world, right-leaning postliberal groups are proliferating. Postliberals do not agree about everything, and their criticisms of what they call liberalism vary. But if there is anything they share, it is deep skepticism about free markets.

Throughout their writings, postliberals insist that the state needs to orient the economy towards the realization of specific goals. The ends that they have in mind range from the broad and vague (“more localism,” “greater community,” etc.) to specific objectives like forcing a sectoral adjustment away from services and towards manufacturing. Depending on which postliberal you talk to, the means might include increased welfare spending, bigger unions, higher tariffs, more regulation and industrial policy, subsidies to incentivize demographic growth, and the government taking stakes in publicly traded companies, to name just a few.

Unfortunately for postliberals, all these measures come with well-established problems. Tariffs, for instance, undermine the competitiveness of businesses and economies and raise prices for everyone. Industrial policy breeds cronyism and assumes knowledge about the future that humans do not possess. Big welfare states produce dependency and enormous public debt. Big unions severely compromise labor market flexibility.

Whenever these points are made, few postliberals express much willingness to rethink their position. For postliberalism is characterized by a disinterest in understanding economic truths and, to that extent, is marked by a freely chosen economic obliviousness.

Factually Blind

This conscious blindness becomes obvious when one examines postliberal portraits of our present economic circumstances. Listening to contemporary postliberals, one would think that, until recently, economic policy throughout the West has been dominated by market liberals since the 1980s.

It’s difficult to understate how inaccurate such claims are. Take, for instance, government spending. In 2024, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s average for general government spending as a percentage of GDP was a shocking 43 percent. No one will be surprised that France had the highest number, clocking in at just under 60 percent. But America’s latest recorded number (2023) of 39 percent should cause some people to pause before labelling the United States as the land of unfettered markets. The question for postliberals is this: in what universe do such figures show that Western nations were overrun by a capitalisme sauvage from 1980 onwards?

The proliferation of regulation and welfare supplies further evidence of just how thoroughly government is immersed in everyday Western economic life. In the United States, for example, the Code of Federal Regulations grew from under 10,000 pages in 1950 to an astronomical 190,260 pages in 2023. Incidentally, that growth continued unabated in the heyday of “neoliberalism” during the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. As for welfare, across the Atlantic, approximately 23 percent of Britain’s working-age population receives some form of government benefits. So much for the triumph of Thatcherism.

These and many other details illustrate that we do not live in laissez-faire economies. They also underscore that, in many respects, market liberals have been spectacularly unsuccessful at rolling back the state’s steady encroachment into Western economies that began over a century ago. 

Whenever I have made these points to postliberals, the answers have been revealing. They include statements of polite indifference (“that’s interesting”) or non-sequiturs such as the ubiquitous “you don’t know what time it is.” Most revealingly, however, many responses have reflected a general skepticism about economics per se. One prominent postliberal once described economics to me as a “great mystery.” Another dismissed it as “glorified materialism.”

Therein lies a basic problem with postliberal commentaries on economic topics. Much of it is unconcerned about the insights that economics offers us into reality, not least because such knowledge raises awkward questions about the wisdom of many postliberal economic schemes. At best, this amounts to imprudence on postliberals’ part. At worst, it constitutes arrogance and a determination to stigmatize any idea that might obstruct implementation of some demonstrably flawed policies.

Willed Ignorance

If good economic policy is to be politically viable, you have to consider many factors, including how much you are willing to make compromises. But anyone serious about developing sound economic policies must first grasp some basic and empirically verified economic truths about the relevant subject matter, be it taxation, trade, wages, or interest rates.

To be sure, economists disagree about many policy questions. These often reflect different normative priorities or technical disagreements. But whether they are a neo-Keynesian or a committed Friedmanite, few economists will claim that “incentives don’t matter,” or “market prices should be ignored,” or “there are no unintended consequences,” or “we can disregard the relationship between supply and demand,” or “comparative advantage isn’t real,” or “we can live in a trade-off free world.”

Yet postliberals—and their progressive equivalents like modern monetary theory (MMT) proponents—do regularly propose policies that seem either unaware or deliberately heedless of such things. Take, for example, one postliberal’s recent proposition, “We’ve got to solve the home affordability crisis in America. The market can’t do that, but the state can. We need a 3 percent fixed-rate 30-year mortgage for American citizens who are married filing jointly under 30. Call it the New American Homestead Act.”

One problem with this proposal concerns its diagnosis. The supply of housing is tight in many parts of America (especially major urban areas) because of the underbuilding, which flows from zoning restrictions and other forms of regulatory restraints. In other words, government intervention—not the market—is a major contributor to housing shortages and growing unaffordability. That should make anyone wary of imagining that more government intervention can fix America’s housing challenges.

Anyone, postliberal or otherwise, who disdains the realities to which economics insistently directs us should refrain from commenting on topics like interest rates, trade policy, or finance.

A more general problem with this postliberal scheme is that (like any state-mandated price) a state-mandated interest rate (price) for mortgages for one category of people would distort the housing market’s ability to reflect what’s really going on in this economic sector. When prices are allowed to adjust naturally, they transmit vital information about consumer preferences (demand in the form of borrowers seeking mortgages) and resource availability (supply in the form of available homes or loanable funds). High mortgage rates signal scarcity. This encourages suppliers to produce more, and consumers to reduce their consumption of other goods so that they can save for down-payments. Low mortgage rates signify an abundance of supply and weak demand, prompting the opposite reaction.

By contrast, a state-mandated 3 percent mortgage rate that is significantly below market rates (6-7 percent in recent years) would artificially lower the cost of borrowing for eligible buyers. But this garbles price signals by making borrowing appear cheaper than the market’s assessment of consumer preferences and the available housing supply. The increased demand that would flow from what would effectively be subsidized mortgages would likely outstrip supply, thereby driving housing prices higher, especially if no zoning deregulation occurs.

The Price of Disinterest

That the United States has an affordable housing problem is not in dispute. But the above case illustrates how insufficient attention on postliberals’ part to something as elemental as basic price theory shows up in policy proposals that, if enacted, would exacerbate the problems they want to solve.

Underlying all this is a deeper intellectual problem that afflicts postliberal economic commentary. In his famous Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932), the British economist Lionel Robbins emphasized how critics of economics “inspect with supererogatory zeal the external façade, but they shrink from the intellectual labor of examining the inner structure.” In other words, they are unwilling to do the demanding work of acquainting themselves with the specific form of logic that underpins economics as a social science.

The German economist Wilhelm Röpke—who was deeply interested in many of the questions that absorb postliberals—was fond of stressing economics’ attention to what he called in his 1937 book, Economics of the Free Society, “the logic of relationships.” Economics’ focus on these interdependencies was, Röpke believed, one of the most important things for non-economists to understand.

It was “second nature,” Röpke maintained, for the economist to think in terms of empirically verifiable relationships; to know, for example, that wages and employment levels are reciprocally related, or that certain economic choices have identifiable side-effects (e.g., minimum-wage laws tend to price low-skilled workers out of labor markets). Consistent study over time of these relationships and the achievement of a high degree of predictability about the side-effects of specific decisions was, Röpke stated, economics’ great gift to the growth of human knowledge. As the legal philosopher John Finnis observes, much of economics’ explanatory power is derived from the way that it “systematically calls attention to the side-effects of individual choices and actions and behavior.”

Once you grasp that point, the difficulties with many postliberal economic proposals soon become evident. You recognize, for example, that a well-intended proposal to help young couples buy a house via a state-mandated mortgage interest rate has unintended but foreseeable consequences that make matters worse for the very people you want to assist. The logical next step would be for postliberals to disown such ideas. The fact that many won’t do so suggests that they are driven more by ideology than reason.

Dark Postliberalism

Indifference to basic economic concepts has manifested itself in past expressions of postliberalism—including the darkest variety. In the 1930s, Röpke found himself confronting specific expressions of postliberal economics, specifically the economic policies pursued by fascist regimes in Italy and Germany. The results of his reflections were published in a 1935 Economia article titled “Fascist Economics.” Many of his observations are as applicable to the postliberal economics of the present as they were to those of the past.

Having read through fascist intellectuals’ economic writings, Röpke was struck by the sheer nebulousness of their ideas. Röpke was as fiercely anti-communist as he was anti-fascist, but he considered the “anti-capitalistic program of Communism” to be “at least clear and unequivocal.” Conversely, Röpke wrote, the economic commentary of Italian fascists and German national socialists was characterized by a “loquacious vagueness which irritates the admirer of lucidity in style and thought as much as it seems to attract the masses.” He found himself “bewildered by an atmosphere of lyrical unreality and of terminological futility” that permeated these texts. But, Röpke added, “What else can we expect from a combination with so many and largely elusive variables, where the leading ideas are of a nebulous character, easily changeable and interwoven?”

There was little concern, Röpke noted, in books like Werner Sombart’s Deutscher Sozialismus (1934) for economic theory or even the presentation of “a fixed and clear-cut program.” Instead, there was rampant romanticism and nostalgia about the past, combined with “philosophizing about the alleged superiority of so-called political considerations over economic ones—‘der Primat der Politik uber die Wirtschaft’ in the terminology of German literature.” That went together with a “haughty attitude” towards the “bread-and-butter questions” with which economists typically concerned themselves, and that no amount of talk about national greatness could disguise.

By no means am I suggesting that today’s postliberals are proto-fascists. But the parallels between their attitudes toward economics and those described by Röpke are unmistakable. This suggests a strong connection between rejecting liberalism and a refusal to take economics seriously. And that in turn points to a postliberal disinclination to accept certain realities concerning the human condition, whether it is the workings of self-interest, the function of prices and incentives, or the melancholy fact that good intentions are not enough.

Not everyone needs to be an economist, and the economist F. A. Hayek’s admonition that “an economist who is nothing but an economist cannot be a good economist” cannot be repeated enough. But anyone, postliberal or otherwise, who disdains the realities to which economics insistently directs us should refrain from commenting on topics like interest rates, trade policy, or finance. Our knowledge may be limited, but ignorance is not always bliss. And economic ignorance is downright destructive.

In the world of generative artificial intelligence, things are moving fast, and they could start moving a lot faster. Assuming that current data and design barriers can be overcome, this technological acceleration may deliver either unimaginable benefits or pose one of the greatest adaptive challenges humanity has ever faced. Or perhaps both.

If you haven’t heard about “recursive” artificial intelligence, you might want to bone up. Simply put, a recursive AI can improve itself through iterative testing, evaluation, and self-modification. Advancements that might have previously taken months or years for human researchers to achieve could instead be done by AI in hours or days. While still in its infancy, fully developed recursion would have a massive effect on the pace of technological development, economics, employment, and society more broadly. 

Admittedly, there is a great deal of volatility in the way AI is developing, so all predictions are uncertain. The purpose of this analysis is not to predict any specific future development but to raise some informed questions about the way emerging recursive AI behaviors might affect society and the workforce. 

The Dawn of Recursive AI

We’ve been here before—or at least we think we have. The machine age didn’t just give us steam engines—it produced child labor, dangerous urban factories, decades of worker agitation, and, out of that unrest, contributed to the rise of dangerous new ideologies like communism and fascism. Electrification remade cities but also displaced trades and reshaped social and economic rhythms. This is the pattern: change, uncertainty, social adaptation.

Most recently, robotic automation displaced millions of manufacturing workers, setting off new crises for non-college-educated workers in the US and abroad. Each leap forward solves problems and advances economic well-being, but also creates new, hard-to-predict frictions and challenges. So it is likely to be in a world of recursive AI, which belongs in the lineage of transformational change, but with a critical difference: pace. Steam engines, electricity, and even the Internet, all took decades to diffuse fully. Recursive AI could collapse diffusion into years, leaving us precious little time to come to terms with it.

Two recent papers illustrate what this transformation might look like. One reports on an AI system that generated, tested, and evaluated 1,773 new neural network architectures, yielding 106 state-of-the-art linear-attention models. These models provide the basic physical and analytical frameworks for large language models (LLMs). The AI selected the most successful new architectures for incorporation into subsequent generations of algorithmic development.

Depending on what type of processor was used (the paper didn’t specify whether it was the fast ones or the really fast ones), the project’s ~20,000 GPU-hours represent roughly 10²²–10²³ arithmetic operations, costing between $36,000 and $180,000, again depending on the chips used. Traditional neural architecture design typically involves human researchers proposing, designing, and testing architectures one at a time over months. A recursive AI system compresses what would otherwise be 3–5 years of human research into days of computation. It also demonstrates how novel AI approaches can spin out hundreds of candidates overnight, prune the failures, and refine the successes into the next generation of models. Of particular note is that recursive LLM improvements upgraded the foundational tech on which practical AI applications are based. This is the pivot point for dramatically accelerated and self-reinforcing innovation.

The second paper projects this scenario into the future, positing a theoretical structure for building AI systems that can formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret results autonomously across scientific disciplines. Imagine an AI capable of running virtual experiments at a scale no lab could ever hope to match. It might propose a new antibiotic, simulate its effectiveness across millions of biological models, discard the failures, and hand a human researcher a fully vetted drug candidate for clinical trials. Applying that principle to every field of scientific endeavor gives a sense of just how profound the developmental speed-up might become.

This is not simply faster science, but a quantum acceleration in the scientific method—not in the sense of quantum mechanics, but in the sense of a discontinuous leap to a new timescale. Questions that once took decades to answer could be resolved in days through millions of parallelized virtual experiments. Such an acceleration would be like having the chance to go from horse and buggy to discovering nuclear power and landing on the moon, but in a handful of years rather than a century. 

History suggests that when machines take over tasks previously reserved for human beings, our sense of purpose requires recalibration.

Critics of this view rightly point out that physical constraints and computational limitations currently do not permit such an acceleration. Any future recursive AI is bounded by the need for vast new data, immense energy and semiconductor resources, and corrections to persistent problems like hallucinations, edge-case failure, and data corruption. True breakthroughs will require not just faster models, but advances in efficiency, validation, and interpretability to turn simulated discoveries into a trusted scientific advancement. It bears noting, however, that recursive AI may itself turn out to be a critical ally in finding solutions to these problems. What looks insoluble today is likely to be remedied over time through the same process of AI-driven experimentation. 

From Carbon-Based Intelligence to Silicon

The conceptual foundations of generative artificial intelligence are rooted in the work of the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in physics, Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton deliberately sought to pattern AI neural networks on the way the human brain operates through vast networks of neurons. In other words, AI systems are designed explicitly to mimic our brains, linking disparate nodes of knowledge and behavior to create consciousness and intelligence. The brain as it exists today evolved over millions of years, while AI’s cognitive evolution is occurring on the timescale of years—or, optimistically, decades—and operating in ways even its engineers struggle to understand.

The results are already astounding. For example, Caltech scientists recently reported that an AI cracked a stubborn physics problem that had defied the work of dozens of human researchers for decades. Unencumbered by the human aesthetic preference for elegant solutions and the received intellectual traditions of physics, the AI solved the challenge through “brute force” means: it simply ignored prior methods and conventions. As the scientists reviewed the AI’s results, they at first thought it was “nonsense” and “a mess”—that is, until it worked. It turned out the AI wasn’t nonsensical; it was using a logic and approach so different from prior attempts that it was initially opaque to humans. The key achievement was not computational speed per se, but the ability to explore architectural design space systematically at a scale that would be impractical for human researchers. Despite its human origins, AI intelligence increasingly looks like a difference in type rather than degree. 

The Consequences of Lived AI

At scale, this expanded and novel experimental-developmental capacity over compressed timelines would likely deliver enormous benefits to human well-being (e.g., cure diseases, extend lifespans, solve the energy-climate change conundrum). It also entails the risk of maladaptive AI developments, also known as “technical debt,” that accumulates over time and, in the highly integrated AI ecosphere of the future, could be shared instantaneously across networks. How confident are we that human beings working with the old-style, carbon-based hardware and low-voltage software would be able to manage the new, silicon-based, fast-as-light intelligence? The implications of recursive AI tend to spill into every corner of human concerns. Take global security. If autonomous systems can design and deploy new real-world and cyberworld weapons or destabilize financial markets, they might end up creating vast instability in economic and social arrangements. AI systems could upend the logic of nuclear deterrence by reducing already frighteningly short decision times in a world already balanced precariously on the nuclear threshold. 

The first nations to harness recursive AI at scale could seize enormous first-mover advantages in defense, technology, and economic strength. The US, China, and the European Union are already investing heavily, but a recursive breakthrough would intensify that competition, creating the risk of an AI arms race with few rules, little restraint, and potentially existential consequences.

This is why the current research into AI alignment, reliability, and predictability matters so much. Researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind are experimenting with techniques like “constitutional AI” and mechanistic interpretability (reverse engineering AI outputs to discover how the model produces them) to give humans better control over and visibility into how these systems think and how they can be kept on track as data sets change and unanticipated edge cases emerge. But even those working on the frontier admit their windows into the operations of their creations are limited. The simple truth is that our governance frameworks—the FDA for drugs, the FAA for aviation, and so on—will be severely taxed by technologies that evolve in weeks rather than decades. Again, what may be required are governor AIs that can quickly assess emerging technologies for safety.

Human Meaning in a Machine World

Finally, recursive AI also raises questions that cut to the core of human identity. History suggests that when machines take over tasks previously reserved for humans, our sense of purpose requires recalibration. The rise of industrial weaving displaced artisans; the calculator diminished the economic value of manual computation; and digital photography abruptly ended centuries of darkroom craft. Robots moved workers off assembly lines. In each case, human meaning shifted, sometimes painfully, from the pride of doing a task well to the challenge of finding new domains where human skill, creativity, and judgment still mattered. Recursive AI could force a similar reckoning, this time not for a trade or an industry but for basic research and other intellectual tasks. Human beings as the apex intelligence might be supplanted.

Meaning and purpose—perennial, nonnegotiable human needs—are often linked to the sense of satisfaction we derive from shaping and contributing to the world. Since we are a thinking, self-reflective species, those needs occupy the top of Maslow’s hierarchy; with AI, the top could suddenly get more crowded, setting off competition—not for material goods but for the remaining opportunities to explore meaning, purpose, and satisfaction. It is hard to predict what an AI-driven existential crisis, scaled across the globe, would mean for individuals, communities, and nations.

Not everyone agrees that this future is close. Skeptics argue that current systems lack the stability or autonomy to achieve true recursion. They may be right, which means we will have more time to consider strategies for adaptation. But betting against technological acceleration does not seem wise. Even if recursive AI falls short of the most far-reaching forecasts, its trajectory forces us to confront what it might mean to no longer be the smartest or most creative intelligence in the evolutionary room. 

The central policy dilemma is pacing innovation without smothering it. Every time we move to limit the freedom of science to whether and how we explore, we are potentially depriving ourselves of beneficial breakthroughs. At the same time, the “tragedy of the commons” is also in play, as the temptation of profits or dominance trumps thoughtful regulatory fencing. As we’ve seen with social media, the rush to tap new markets can put some segments of the population, like children and adolescents, at risk. Caution (if not precaution) with AI seems more than warranted.

At the same time, excessive, prevention-oriented regulation could drive recursive AI underground, offshore, or into the arms of authoritarian systems, leaving democratic societies vulnerable to regimes unchecked by negative outcomes or voters. Striking the right balance will require new governance models that are anticipatory of and responsive to developing threats while not stifling innovation.

Core adaptation strategies should emerge from intensive dialogue between those advocating for precautionary regulation and those who take a more accelerationist view. This kind of liberal democratic debate structure has the virtue of forcing “steelman” exchanges where experts from both sides grapple with the best arguments of their opposites rather than the weakest. This is an extraordinarily difficult assignment in our highly polarized society, where questions are coded either “left” or “right” and adjudicated largely on that basis. Somehow, we must allow more space for evidence, philosophical reflection, and the weighing of trade-offs while we still have time to do so.

When it comes to AI, our challenge is to ensure that when (not if) this new intelligence grows beyond us, it still benefits human flourishing in ways that outweigh the risks it will inevitably bring.

 Raphael Colard, a research associate at AEI, contributed to the writing of this article.

It has been about four decades now since courses on Western Civilization began to disappear from American high schools and colleges. In retrospect, the golden age of the Western Civ textbook fell in the decades from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Courses on the subject were a standard curricular offering, often required, for most of the Cold War period. The typical survey course covered Western history from the ancient Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ending with the Enlightenment and the contemporary West. In our parents’ and grandparents’ time, the Western Civ survey was commonly the linchpin for other humanities courses, providing a framework for deeper study of Western literature, philosophy, and the arts.

Starting in the mid-1980s, however, the requirement began to disappear. A 2011 report by the National Association of Scholars noted a sharp decline in mandatory courses in Western history since 1989. By 2010, none of the top 50 US universities required Western Civ, and only 16 of them even offered it as an option. Only 2 percent of all US colleges at that time required a Western history survey, even for history majors. By then, the subject had also been abolished as a required social studies course for public high schools by most Departments of Education throughout the 50 states.

Why did this happen? At the time, four decades ago, getting rid of Western civ courses looked like a no-brainer to many academics and administrators. After the turbulence of 1968, elite universities had set themselves the goal of becoming more international, and the ethnic and national origins of the student body were changing rapidly. The percentages of college students of European origin and of those having English as their first language grew smaller. Businesses were globalizing, and international NGOs were multiplying. Professors were becoming ever more specialized in their research and resented the burden of teaching general surveys. The cost of college was rising dramatically, which made students less biddable about required courses. They were paying top dollar, and they were going to study whatever they wanted to study.

Moreover, the generation of academics that grew to adulthood during the Vietnam War had been radicalized politically. Younger profs tended to see the whole subject of Western civilization as hopelessly tainted by American imperialism. Many radicals, their zeal outrunning their knowledge, denounced the West as uniquely racist, sexist, colonialist, or homophobic. Even the term “civilization” itself was problematic, as it implied that some societies might be more civilized than others. The new generation of “tenured radicals” preferred the term “culture” in its anthropological sense. Radical democrats themselves promulgated the dubious doctrine that all cultures were created equal.

Suddenly, outside a few bastions like Columbia and the University of Chicago, no college faculties were willing to identify specific texts or periods of history that students needed to know in order to qualify as educated people. Core courses were replaced with less controversial distribution requirements. Western civ courses were replaced with world history courses, where the naive assumption was often made that the West was the principal aggressor in a world filled with innocent victims of Western greed and violence. The Western past for Americans had always been, to some extent, a foreign country. Now it has become an enemy country.

About the same time, the false narrative was being spread that courses on Western civilization, or even the whole idea of Western civilization itself, were a recent artifact, an invented tradition put about by war-mongering propagandists. During the First World War, it was said, militarists were eager to seduce young men into joining the armed forces. The Western civ course was originally designed to manufacture loyalty to foreign countries that most Americans cared little about. Western Civ, it was claimed, had been revived again during the Cold War for the same insidious purpose—to justify the American empire.

We must lift the pall of negativity that now hangs over Western civilization in the minds of the young.

To those who bothered to inform themselves about the history of education, of course, all this was perfect nonsense. The term “Western civilization” became current, not during the First World War, but in the mid-nineteenth century. Its emergence as a concept was originally in the service of an anti-imperial program and had nothing to do with the racist discourse of the time. The same subject matter covered in twentieth-century Western civ courses—Greek and Roman history, medieval and modern European history—had been the backbone of historical study in schools and colleges since the Renaissance. Early America read about ancient, medieval, and modern European history in the pages of William Robertson’s A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (1769). These same fields of study were required of Harvard gentlemen after Jared Sparks’s reform of the history curriculum in the 1820s. They formed the subject matter of François Guizot’s brilliant History of Civilization in Europe (1828, translated by William Hazlitt in 1846). In 1887, the historian of education Charles Baxter Adams, basing himself on extensive surveys, declared Guizot’s book to be the most widely used history text in American colleges.

Thus, the revolt against Western Civ of the last forty years blithely swept away a tradition that was in fact centuries older than most people at the time recognized. As usual with sudden preference cascades, nobody in the academic herd stopped to ask what might be the result of joining the stampede away from the study of the Western tradition. Now, however, forty years later, the downside of our willful plunge into ignorance of the Western past has become all too visible.

Most obviously, students today have next to nothing between their ears to block the negative stories being told them about the Western past. Yes, the Western past is marred by racist and sexist beliefs, by the practice of chattel slavery, and by exploitative forms of colonialism. But no, it’s not true that these civilizational failures are unique to the West. In fact, the West is more enlightened (by modern standards) when compared to other world civilizations. It was in the West, after all, that modern efforts to remove these ugly blemishes began, spreading from Britain, America, and Europe to the rest of the world.

Students today also know next to nothing about the positive achievements of the West. The learning loss is not trivial. Without understanding the struggle in the West over millennia to preserve liberty; without understanding the uniquely rich development of the Roman law tradition; without appreciating the roles that argument, hypothesis, mathematical modeling, and replicable experiment have had in Western science since the Greeks, the young are more likely to acquire the frivolous state of mind, now common, that thinks great civilizational achievements can be jettisoned without loss, once found guilty of “white supremacy.” Without a grasp of the frightful history of religious warfare and the tyrannical abuses of lordly power; without understanding how unproductive and even harmful science can be when it becomes dogmatic; without understanding the centuries of violence and oppression that led to the Western embrace of religious freedom, freedom of expression, and economic freedom—without understanding all that, the young will never comprehend the reasons why it is so vital to preserve the Western tradition. It should come as no surprise that the recent generations of Westerners who believe that the West is uniquely evil have been taught nothing at all about it.

We who live now in Western countries, from whatever part of the world our parents and grandparents came, have received an extraordinary—and yes, unique—inheritance from the Western tradition. If we want our children and grandchildren to understand and enrich themselves by reading Western literature and philosophy, if we want them to understand the architectural languages of the buildings that surround them, if we want them to love the great art and music on offer in our museums and concert halls, built at great cost by past generations, we must lift the pall of negativity that now hangs over Western civilization in the minds of the young. And the best way we can do that is by actually studying it.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? The reasons are complex and manifold, and it is not clear which, if any, may have been more decisive than others. The answers fall into two broad categories, the “realist” and the “ideational.” The former maintains that the Soviet Union, unable to maintain parity with the US and working within a centralized economic structure, imploded economically, or that Gorbachev’s attempted reforms guided by Glasnost (“openness”) and Perestroika (restructuring) produced centrifugal political instability in various Warsaw Pact nations, especially Poland. 

Proponents of the latter category, the ideational, argue that throughout the Soviet Bloc, to varying degrees, nationalist sentiments were never extinguished and began to revive. The illegitimacy of the ideas that rationalized Soviet repression became increasingly apparent, and religious sentiment also grew, especially in Poland, where communist repression made the country not less, but more fiercely Roman Catholic. In June of 1979, Pope John Paul II undertook a nine-day visit to his native Poland, and approximately 11 million of the population of 36 million greeted him, celebrated Mass, and absorbed his homilies. One year later, Solidarity, the non-communist Polish labor union, was born.  

There is yet another ideational phenomenon, “wholly unnoticed in the West during the Cold War,” which may have played a decisive role. This was the CIA-sponsored book program in which the US coordinated the distribution of books to key individuals, libraries, research institutes, cultural organizations, and universities and schools, in six Warsaw Pact countries (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and late in the program, the Soviet Union) from mid-1956 through 1991. That material, over time, found its way to much of the general public. The program, according to one CIA officer, was “perhaps the most successful covert action program, regardless of [any] standard of measure.” Or, as a program participant put it, the book program was “ideological, political, cultural, and psychological warfare all wrapped up in one.” According to one testimony, “those books in the hands of the intellectual elites of Central and Eastern Europe might rival or even exceed Radio Free Europe in influencing the course of history.”

This program is the subject of two books, one published in 2013 and the other in 2025, that reveal the hidden story of the secret book distribution program to Eastern Europe during the Cold War. At its height between 1957 and 1970, the book program was one of the least known but, arguably, most effective methods of penetrating the Iron Curtain. This is the subject of Charlie English’s The CIA Book Club, released earlier this year, which offers a focused narrative of the dynamics of the program, principally in Poland, the most crucial of the five countries that served as targets for the program. This work adds to a short-but-worthy list of books on this subject, most important among them Alfred Reisch’s 2013 Hot Books in the Cold War. As someone intimately involved in the program in Hungary for fifteen years, Reisch offers the more comprehensive study, but English, a former correspondent for the London-based Guardian, knows how to tell a story. 

The Program and Material

Though there are leading personalities, Reisch explains, “To sum up the story of the origins of the Cold War covert book project, the idea came to a lot of people at the same time, with the CIA in on the project from the beginning.” It is estimated that the program reached at least ten million people behind the Iron Curtain as it extended beyond targeted elites to the general population. English reports that by 1962, the program involved coordination with “500 organizations” that were sending books on the CIA’s behalf. They included “Doubleday, Barnes & Noble, the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, Allen and Unwin, Faber and Faber, MacMillan and Hachette—among hundreds more. Somehow, and against all odds, even into the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the CIA came under unfavorable scrutiny, the book program remained a secret. 

The material fell into several categories. The first consisted of explicit political propaganda, which, preceding the book program, had been delivered by hot air balloons that indiscriminately littered the Soviet Bloc countries where tracts were dropped. The balloon program was suspended in 1957 at the behest of the West German government, which objected, not to the message, but to the means of delivery. The material continued to be distributed by other methods for a time, but the shape of the program eventually shifted as many people came to believe that stoking popular uprisings was less prudent than trying to achieve change gradually by a change in the hearts and minds of the citizenry and the elite leadership. 

Books were a means of “breaking down the ideological and cultural Iron Curtain … opening wide a window on the culture and achievements of the free Western world.”

The latter, it was hoped, might lead to a gradual internal reform. Revolution, it was feared, would produce political instability; or, public protests and popular agitation might provoke greater repression, as happened in Poland in 1981, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Hungary in 1956. In this later phase, the program distributed periodicals, especially émigré publications like the Polish Kultura, published in Paris, and the Czech Svědectví; also, weeklies: principally News from Czechoslovakia, News from Hungary, and News from Poland. Some of these periodicals contained literary and scientific articles, easing the suspicion of censors. In at least one instance, select clippings from Kultura were sent to 500 strategically chosen individuals, with the expectation that some would be shared, or better yet, disseminated. Sent as well were “the original texts of protests against Soviet hegemony raised in Yugoslavia and East Germany, and unpurged history books and ethnic literature otherwise not available,” as well as critiques by intellectual defectors of the Communist system.

A second category had to do with explicitly anti-totalitarian political fiction, the most prominent of which was George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Although not as explicitly political, Dr. Zhivago was popular; a copy was even requested by a member of the Sejm (Polish Parliament). 

The third category was a potpourri of fiction and non-fiction, ranging from manuals on engineering, art history, medical references, literature, philosophy, architecture, music, and film and theater guides. Little of this is explicitly political but was chosen to rouse the curiosity and expand the imagination of readers—and, once again, to lull the censors into complacency. Over half of the books smuggled through the Iron Curtain fall into this category. Emphasis was put on the “popularization of unfamiliar aspects of Western cultural achievements and of general works on the history of Western ideas, philosophy, and traditions. All of this was intended to remedy the “lack of humanistic thinking” and to foster in the target countries “a feeling of communion in this world” and “integration into the intellectual and spiritual life of our age.”

It is this latter category that might be the most fascinating for contemporary advocates of the liberal arts. These books included Albert Camus’ The Rebel, Alexander Eliott’s Three Hundred Years of American Painting, the Anthology of English and American Poetry, and mysteries by Agatha Christie. Other authors were William Faulkner, Hannah Arendt, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, Gunnar Myrdal, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jean-Paul Sartre, and José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses. More fiction came from authors Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as the plays of Václav Havel. John le Carré’s spy thrillers were popular. Even writing advice from Virginia Woolf made it from West to East. 

Dominos Falling 

By organizing his book around the activity in Poland, English provides the best description of the intricate mechanics of how the books were smuggled into the communist-led countries. At times, his book reads like a spy thriller. The stakes were high as those involved risked lengthy sentences in communist-run jails. Meeting locations rotated, conversations were packed with ever-changing code words, surveillance was constant, and anyone could be an informant. It was high-stakes intrigue. Over the years of the program, Poland received far more books than any other country, and more books were requested by the Polish elite and other citizens. Indeed, one of the most important features of the program was correspondence and material shipments from the West to the East. Those behind the Iron Curtain were able to communicate with their benefactors, requesting certain books, and expressing their thanks for the program’s patronage. 

English asserts, “The impact of this literary tide was huge. Poland was the most crucial of Eastern Bloc nations: when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall, and it was literature that won the war here.” English quotes Polish dissident Adam Michnik, who asserted,

I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad. (English, p. 343)

Clearly, the program had a deep impact on many people. How much credit, though, should the program get for the fall of communism generally? In his lengthy and careful introduction to the Reisch book, Professor Mark Kramer, current director of the Cold War Institute at Harvard University, explains that proving the success of the book program requires addressing multiple and complicated variables. That said, the evidence that Reisch presents, and the careful narrative that English reconstructs, are convincing, and their conclusions are persuasive. For example, Reisch argues that books were a means of “breaking down the ideological and cultural Iron Curtain … opening wide a window on the culture and achievements of the free Western world.”

The program’s manager, George Minden, explains,

All book distribution is politically significant because all books—political and literary—accomplish the political task of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult and thus frustrate one of the communists’ main political objectives. For the communists, too, all Western books, whether political or non-political, are politically significant and feared as such. (Reisch, p. 522)

A beneficiary of the program later wrote, 

Books gave us the tools to understand this world. … We read poetry and literature. It showed us that there are likeminded people who … we can empathize with, who admire beauty, who admire virtue. (English, p. 281)

All of this speaks importantly to the current state of the liberal arts. First, it affirms the power of a liberal arts education, both formal instruction in youth and the cultivated habit of reading and participation in artistic and musical culture. It is evident that among the many benefits of the liberal arts is a quest for freedom and a love of liberty.

Secondly, it illuminates a red flashing light in response to the denigration of a Western liberal arts education—by those in the West. There exist at least two fronts in the war on this side of the Atlantic: one is ideological as detractors promote cultural relativism, discounting “Western-centric” learning. Rap is as good as Tchaikovsky. “Who am I to judge?” Secondly, sweeping through education today is a complaint—not so much from students as from their educators—that symphonies and novels are just too long and difficult for today’s students. 

In fairness, parents may be as guilty as educators when they complain that reading Dostoevsky is just too tough—and besides, what’s the use? Reisch and English put the lie to the “too difficult” complaint: English, for example, explains in excruciating detail the danger and convoluted logistics in smuggling and reprinting material in Poland on typewriters, printing presses, offset presses, and copy machines. Sometimes, the only edition of Solzhenitsyn’s works available to Polish readers was microscopic copies of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago clandestinely nestled in a baby’s diapers. 

At the very least, these two books ensure that the book distribution program will now be included in the history of the Cold War as it should.

Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

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