Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

Laura K. Field could not have picked a better month for the release of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. At the beginning of November, Kevin Roberts’ defense of Tucker Carlson set off a firestorm in the activist class over whether the “new right” is now too right. There was an ever-flowing stream of “takes” about how now-mainstream movements like national conservatism and postliberalism relate to the seedy underbelly of the right represented by Nick Fuentes or Curtis Yarvin. The basic identity of conservatism and “the right” is the topic du jour. 

Picking up Field’s book in this environment, I hoped that it would provide an interesting framework for understanding where today’s right came from, how it relates to what has gone by the name “conservative” in the past, how it has gained ascendency so quickly across a wide swath of institutions, and how the various strands intersect and potentially clash with one another.

Unfortunately, Furious Minds doesn’t provide much beyond a meandering stroll down memory lane, with some subjective context and judgment thrown in here and there. It recounts some of the “greatest hits” of the new right over the past decade or so: Flight 93; Ahmari-French; liberalism failing; knowing what time it is; common-good constitutionalism; Red Caesar; Nate Hochman’s sonnenrad; and Tucker’s Low-T Special. If none of those sounds familiar, count your blessings. If any do sound familiar, then Furious Minds won’t add much to your understanding aside from serving as a basic, who’s-who manual.

She breaks down the new right into three groups: Claremonters (Straussians), postliberals, and national conservatives. If there is a through-line other than her own moral disapproval, it is the notion that all three reveal the problems with an “Ideas First” mentality, which essentially means they are enamored with grand visions and abstractions, while ignoring empirical reality. There is certainly something to that. But she leaves the concept underdeveloped and ill-defined. Often, it seems that it is merely her way of chastising her subjects for not being attuned to the “realities” of many left-wing shibboleths: “income inequality,” “racial inequities,” “gun violence,” “attacks on the LGBTQ communities,” etc.

That’s not to say that the book isn’t entertaining. We live in a time where one of the most influential ideological movements on the political right has among its ideas-peddlers an online persona named “Raw Egg Nationalist” who seems very, very interested in men. You can’t help but laugh at some of this, and a compendium of a decade’s worth of pseudo-intellectual clickbait inevitably has its moments. Entertainment value aside, though, there are serious questions to ask about emerging right-wing ideologies that ought to be a real cause for concern among those committed to freedom and constitutionalism. Unfortunately, Field doesn’t go very far beyond pointing and scolding. The book is limited in several ways.

First, it is fairly narrowly focused on people who straddle the line between intellectual life and popular political agitation. Podcaster and master of the Liminal Order, Jack Murphy, for instance, gets as much or more coverage than do Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, or Candace Owens—presumably because he can be fitted more neatly into the Claremont circle of influence, and therefore as part of the intellectual side of things. Even Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most influential voice that has shaped the dynamics of the new right, mainly serves only to introduce us to certain “manosphere” types who have more academic backgrounds.

It’s perfectly valid to write only about the more “intellectual” side of things. But that focus does prevent the book from living up to its subtitle, which suggests a wider view. It also cuts off a potential explanatory avenue that is never explored: Perhaps some of the more extreme new right ideas Field chronicles took hold not because of their intellectual pedigree, but simply because there is an audience ready to click on and pay for shocking, transgressive rhetoric. The rise of this new right has, after all, parallelled the rise of monetized social media, which can mean massive payoffs for people—including self-understood “intellectuals”—who are willing to be dancing monkeys. The media personalities who clearly played a big part in the rise of “the MAGA New Right,” but who are nevertheless absent from the book, are primarily entertainers. Just because Bronze Age Pervert has a PhD doesn’t mean he isn’t doing the same thing.

Field ignores perhaps the most important causal explanation for the rise of the new right: the incredibly radicalized left.

In this sense, Field is herself utilizing something of an “Ideas First” approach, which she acknowledges in the introduction. Ironically, this winds up giving her more ridiculous subjects the benefit of the doubt—it treats them as essentially good-faith actors, developing ideas they are committed to. Very little attention is given to the question of grift. On the flip side of the coin, she also leaves the reader without a good sense of whose ideas are worth taking seriously and whose are not. As with most political movements, there are plenty of serious-minded people in these circles, along with some buffoons. Field gestures at such distinctions from time to time (when she discusses Christopher DeMuth, for instance), but she certainly rewards the loudest and most cartoonish voices with her attention, and thus probably lumps in some people who shouldn’t be in the same conversation.

Second, the analysis and judgment the book does contain seems to be heavily focused on Field’s own subjective experiences and ideological inclinations. In tracing out the intellectual roots of new right thinking, for instance, she devotes plenty of attention to Harry Jaffa, Allan Bloom, and (to a lesser extent) Harvey Mansfield—all of whom share the basic intellectual lane that Field was educated in. But there isn’t much about, for instance, the obscure Catholic thinkers that have inspired the new integralism, or the capital-T Traditionalism of Julius Evola and René Guénon that has reportedly been influential on Steven Bannon. The only reason I can surmise for the heavy Straussian focus is that Field is simply more familiar with those thinkers.

Here again, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on what one knows, but it should lead to a narrower thesis. I, for one, would welcome a systematic and critical assessment of Jaffa’s thought to see what if any elements of it might have primed some (though not all) of his acolytes to think of politics as a binary choice between two stark options, to flirt with the idea of an “American Caesar,” and to define away Americans they don’t want to have to deal with.

Jaffa tended to treat the constitutional and legal order in instrumental terms—defensible only insofar as it can be shown to have established the “best regime” that resolves internal tensions through the application of abstract, universal principles. And he approached Lincoln not simply with a healthy respect appropriate for a statesman navigating a time of crisis, but as a messianic figure who, transcending all temptations of power, “refounded” the country around a political religion. When his conservative critics argued that this might encourage perpetual “refoundings” and morally self-assured Caesarism, he often dismissed them—whether or not they had distinctly southern sympathies—by comparing them to Jefferson Davis. All that is to say, there is certainly some fodder there for a profitable study.

Field’s “ideas first” critique touches briefly on some of these aspects of Jaffa’s thought, but she is not particularly focused on teasing out the implications. Rather, she seems more interested in how his preference for abstraction served as cover for him to violate left-liberal pieties, namely, supporting Goldwater and opposing gay rights. Here again, her own ideological commitments seem to be the primary barometer of judgment.

Third, as other reviewers have pointed out, she ignores perhaps the most important causal explanation for the rise of the new right: the incredibly radicalized left. In my own reading and conversation, I have found that the most convincing argument deployed by the new right is some variation of “we’re already there.” The imperial, pen-and-phone presidency? Erosion of constitutional limits on power? Courts that consciously go beyond the established law to impose their particular view of the good? Coercion of citizens by law on matters of conscience and religion? Strategic plans to redirect culture by capturing institutions and stocking them with ideologues? Using civil rights law to impose policy demands on private institutions? The promotion of racial identitarianism? Economic class warfare? All of these things have been characteristic of left-wing activism for generations. And they have been carried out under the approving gaze of respectable liberal opinion.

These sorts of practices—coming from the right or left—are generally self-destructive; they empower demagogues, invite civil strife, and inculcate an attitude of servility among citizens who are told that they are victims of forces beyond their control and in need of a political savior. Far be it from me to engage in “whataboutism.” Most of my writing on such topics “punches right,” as they say, because those are the people I think should know better. But the reason some erstwhile conservative defenders of constitutionalism, decentralization, and limits have embraced radical ideas and strategies is because they have seen left-wing radicalism run rampant over old civil, legal, and constitutional limits already. And, in my own judgement at least, the new right is correct that the movement conservatism that was regnant in the early aughts did not resist this radicalism with much gusto. So people think fighting “fire with fire” is the only way. I think that conclusion is dangerously wrong when you’re trying to put out a fire, but it is not hard to comprehend.

If one wants to understand the “rise of the MAGA new right,” therefore, the most important places to look aren’t Straussian books from fifty years ago, Why Liberalism Failed, or the Collected Writings of Mencius Moldbug. They are Obergefell, Bostock, Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter, and the average university’s equity and inclusion statement from 2020. The ideas promoted by the new right, either its intelligentsia or underbelly, are giving frustrated and overwhelmed conservatives what they want to hear.

Field acknowledges from time to time that some of the purveyors of new right ideas are drawing on left-wing sources, but the criticism suddenly gets muted in those instances, especially when it comes to economic policy. (She lavishes praise on Sohrab Ahmari for his commitment to a planned economy, for instance.) And she never suggests that the radicalism in her sights is only one part of a much broader phenomenon.

Ultimately, Furious Minds seems to be a book written by a center-left academic mostly for other center-left academics. It is certainly not designed to convince anyone tempted toward the new right, nor will it prompt any self-reflection from those on the left who have helped empower it. American civil life right now is in a spiral, and trying to pin it exclusively on the ideas of one side is not particularly enlightening.

We often forget ourselves in this modern age, and one can’t help but feel that the amnesia is by design. For better or worse, the digital revolution has turned attention into a challenge and a commodity. Because of social media’s predominance, brain rot and doomscrolling are now part of everyday vernacular. Moreover, AI has raised serious questions about the nature of human consciousness, and distress about disinformation and polarization in the political sphere is rampant. Given these woes, Emily Katz Anhalt’s latest book, Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times, hopes to remind us what it is to be human by enlisting an unlikely ally: the fifth-century BC historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus.

Herodotus was the father of history—or at least Cicero once granted him that title, and the name has stuck ever since. But more than Herodotus the historian, Anhalt aims to revive Herodotus the storyteller as a salve for our partisan ailments. And to that end, her book is less a tedious and exacting scholarly analysis of Herodotus and more a grand tour of Herodotus’s world, one that is punctuated with references to modern political issues from nuclear armament and gun violence to social media and minority rights. Along the way, Anhalt offers a kaleidoscope of classic stories from the Histories: Gyges’s overthrow of King Candaules, Arion’s miraculous salvation by a dolphin, Solon’s discourse on happiness with the wealthy Croesus, Peisistratus’s rise to tyrannical power in Athens, Themistocles’s trickery at the battle of Salamis, and much more.

The narrative thread or moral lesson that Anhalt finds in each of these stories is the centrality of human agency and the need for individuals to take responsibility for their actions, past, present, and future. But confronting our own choices also requires us to confront the notion of choice itself rather than shift the sorrows of the world off onto the “divine” or some form of unalterable chance. By underscoring the importance of human action throughout these stories, and by inviting us as readers to make judgments about those stories, Anhalt sees Herodotus as dethroning the tyranny of excuses in order to place the human being back at the center of our political considerations.

Anhalt’s book is especially strong when she explains how Herodotus writes and what his aims are. Herodotus has a deceptively simple writing style, and his own methodological comments are scattered throughout the Histories. Anhalt masterfully lays out how Herodotus invites his readers to join in his inquiries rather than simply take his conclusions as certain. For Herodotus, then, history “entails not the constraints of uncritical belief but the freedom of rational investigation and evidence-based ethical judgement.” It requires a constant give and take and a willingness to assess and reassess all opinions and all available evidence. Herodotus, Anhalt argues, saw history as more than just a useful tool for self-examination. It is “humanity’s best chance for survival.”

Anhalt regularly touches on the way in which Herodotus prods us to be better than we are. The ancient historian, she argues, “reminds us that reductive, polarized thinking pits us against one another—at the precise moment when our very survival depends on our ability to face facts, cooperate, and innovate together.” Here is a book that begs to be read and debated in a group or with a few friends rather than alone. Unity, community, and personal interaction are recurring themes throughout the work, most especially as bulwarks to tyrannical rule and a doorway to self-reflection and personal improvement.

Of special concern to Anhalt are “authoritarian falsehoods” of all stripes, be they political fabrications or the weeds of Internet anonymity. But more than that, Anhalt worries about the way in which those falsehoods undermine democratic practices by alienating us from one another and from genuine knowledge about ourselves. In her view, Herodotus’s Histories and the marvelous tales that it preserves provide something of a solution. Since “democratic institutions offer only part of the solution to the problem of good government,” Anhalt explains that “our stories must do the rest,” since the stories we tell necessarily influence “our goals and aspirations and the ways that we treat one another.”

A sober realism, not idealism, must guide our politics—and Herodotus helps to remind us as much.

In short, political life might be able to limp along with good procedures and institutions alone, but Anhalt maintains that it can never thrive without right habits, dispositions, and devotions. Here is where Herodotus the storyteller—a collector of fables, myths, and historical traditions—becomes invaluable. If we are going to rise to meet the problems of today, then we need to find good stories to inform and nourish our character—stories like those found in the Histories. “Now as then,” she explains, “Herodotus’s various stories” cultivate “his readers’ ability to distinguish fact from fiction,” and thereby train us to subject our most cherished commitments and deepest longings to scrutiny.

Of all the profound questions that Anhalt draws out of Herodotus, none is perhaps more pressing than her contention that his stories teach us to seek out “the least bad form of government” rather than “the best form of government.” Thus, a sober realism, not idealism, must guide our politics—and Herodotus helps to remind us as much. And since, as Anhalt contends, Herodotus saw democracy as the least bad regime, she concludes that he must have been an unapologetic democrat who wrote the Histories to support “people power.” Notwithstanding Herodotus’s emphasis on “reality” and “empiricism,” Anhalt still sees the ideal as worth studying and pursuing:

Idealism always forges ahead of reality, and the gap between the actual and the ideal will never close if we give up on the ideals. To ignore or deny crucial distinctions between modern liberal democracies and brutal dictatorships (and terrorist organizations) is to serve the agenda of dictators, racists, misogynists, kleptocrats, and terrorists. The differences may be smaller than optimal and sometimes diminishing. But Herodotus’s portrait of Athenian tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds should inspire us not to abandon the ideal of universal human freedom.

Anhalt thereby acknowledges that the Athenian democracy had flaws, especially when judged by modern standards. Despite their love of freedom, the Athenians “continued to keep people in slavery, subjugate women, enslave conquered peoples, and force allied cities to pay tribute.” Despite all this, she still places Athens on a pedestal throughout her work. At one point, she suggests that democracy simply is the “best” kind of political authority, or at least the only regime capable of becoming the best, and she later goes so far as to suggest that “human excellence” just is “a product of democratic freedoms.” What’s more, every regime other than Athenian democracy, without discrimination or justification, is referred to as an autocracy throughout the book—including Sparta, even though Lacedaemon is one of the only regimes Herodotus says “flourished” because of “good order” and “good laws” (Histories, 1.65-66).

Anhalt is hardly alone in suggesting that Herodotus was a partisan of Athenian democracy. But I wonder, given Anhalt’s own hermeneutic approach, whether the Athenian devotion to popular government and the subsequent degradation of all other regimes is not itself one of those passionate commitments that Herodotus hopes his readers will subject to intense scrutiny. Likewise, I wonder if more of this sort of scrutiny might help to convert our own uninformed political opinions into a truly reflective kind of patriotism. Anhalt, for example, worries that ignoring the real differences between liberal democracies and dictatorships will undermine human excellence—but it’s worth asking whether ignoring the differences between ancient direct democracy and modern representative government doesn’t do the same.

Consider, for example, Anhalt’s recognition that the American republic combines “elements of monarchy (the executive or presidency), oligarchy (the Congress), and rule by the many (one vote per citizen).” If all monarchies and oligarchies are “autocratic” and “destructive” in the way that Anhalt treats them throughout the book, one might question why the Founding Fathers ever dared to mix democracy with two evil forms of rule in the first place. To the contrary, the very fact that the American republic combines elements of all three classical regimes suggests that they each have their virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, and claims to legitimacy and temptations to tyranny.

To understand the real differences between modern republicanism and ancient democracy requires an almost Tocquevillian—or, better yet, Herodotean—openness to other regimes. Herodotus models this kind of openness to political alternatives in the Histories when he praises Persian courage as no worse than Greek (Histories, 9.62-62) and when he notes that legitimate kingship—in contrast to tyranny (5.92-93)—offers real political benefits, such as decisive or energetic action (1.127) and a means of maintaining unity (5.3). Such nuance would seem to be essential for a book that aims, as the title suggests, to offer Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times. This, of course, is not to elevate authoritarianism over popular government, but to ask (just as Publius did in Federalist #9) whether the petty republics of Greece and Italy—just as capable of tyrannical actions in Herodotus as the other regimes (8.111 and 9.5-6, )—can be meaningfully categorized as the same kind of regime as today’s modern representative governments.

Nevertheless, Anhalt’s latest work is guaranteed to rekindle interest in Herodotus. Of special value is the way in which Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times underscores the importance of stories by providing tales drawn directly from Herodotus for the reader to judge and digest. Every chapter contains a well-translated, unadulterated chunk of Herodotus’s Histories embedded within Anhalt’s own analysis and explanation. What’s more, each chapter of Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times is self-contained and can be read without too much worry about what came before. The busy professional may not have time to slog through the whole of Herodotus’s prolix Histories, but Anhalt’s book provides an easy point of access to Herodotus and his wonderful world.

About two weeks after America’s final withdrawal from Kabul, Al-Qaeda issued an open letter praising “the Almighty, the Omnipotent,” the one who “broke America’s back” in Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires.” Al-Qaeda’s boast transformed a self-fulfilling prophecy into the Taliban’s triumphant honorific, according to Choosing Defeat, a new book by Paul D. Miller, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University. A former Army intelligence officer and CIA analyst, Miller was on the ground at Bagram in 2002, just three years after graduating college; he eventually rose to serve as NSC Director for Afghanistan from 2007-2009. In his telling, the phrase “graveyard of empires” haunted U.S. policymaking for twenty years. Every wartime president invoked it, as did American generals, senior civilians, defense intellectuals, and journalists. There’s only one problem: Afghanistan never was known as the graveyard of empires—not until Milt Bearden penned an article in 2001. When asked, Bearden said he “just came up with the name for [his] piece for Foreign Affairs.”

For Miller, American leaders’ perennial incantation of one analyst’s catchy headline typifies a dangerous national security culture in which ahistorical bromides and short-term political calculation ensure Americans learn nothing from their recent humiliation. The phrase has its counterpart in the “shallow, hot-take analysis” that led the Washington Post’s 2018 Afghanistan Papers to condemn “nation building” as a doomed attempt “at imposing democracy on an ancient, tribal society.” In its combination of “overt racism” and “appalling ignorance,” Miller argues, the Post blames a winning strategy – nation building – rather than the bureaucratic culture that failed to implement it. Choosing Defeat documents the failures of that culture in meticulous, yet impassioned detail, but Miller refuses to follow the implications of his own devastating analysis to their evident conclusion. And thus, getting most things right, his central argument goes wrong.

Part research monograph, part memoir, Choosing Defeat examines twenty years of misjudgment, bureaucratic ineptitude, and moral weakness, hoping to prove that American policymakers chose defeat by refusing the very kind of long-term nation-building effort, which post-war analyses now scapegoat as doomed from the start. “Simply put, there was no twenty-year nation-building campaign in Afghanistan,” Miller insists. Rather than implement a coherent nation-building effort that could have secured strategic resolution, American leaders “prioritized killing and capturing jihadist militants while investing just enough in … stability operations to preserve operational freedom for … counterterrorism forces. This was a clear strategy, and it was not the strategy I recommended,” Miller writes.

Choosing Defeat thus expresses the frustration of a man who believes he spent a career watching politicians make bad decisions for stupid reasons. In their preference for quick strikes at the expense of victory, American leaders were like “children learning to play chess for the first time, [who] mount a frontal assault on the opponent’s king, over and over … while ignoring the state of play, the shape of the board, and the future of Afghanistan.” When Miller denies the existence of any twenty-year nation-building campaign, he therefore means that from the first Bush years onward, American efforts were insufficient relative to the problem. He does not refer merely to insufficient financial investments, but also to the policy instability and ineffectiveness that result from political hesitation and bureaucratic incompetence.

In Miller’s telling, the American nation-building effort proceeded in self-defeating fits and starts. His nearly comprehensive narrative of US policy begins in December of 2001, six weeks into the US invasion. Instead of pivoting immediately to stability operations when the Taliban were weakest, Bush’s team outsourced Afghanistan to incompetent international partners and then turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq: “The Bush administration’s hostility to nation building,” in that early period, Miller claims, “was small-minded, historically ignorant, and morally callous—an attitude that, to his credit, Bush eventually repudiated.”

Choosing Defeat exemplifies, but does not resolve, the fundamental dispute over the policy implications of America’s recent loss.

Nonetheless, President Obama undermined Bush’s belated progress. In the Obama team’s debate over the war’s central issue—counterinsurgency or counterterrorism—“the short-term goals of counterterrorism won out over the long-term vision of counterinsurgency.” In the 2009 strategy review, Vice President Joe Biden reversed Senator Biden’s former position and led the charge against further investment in Afghanistan. Double-minded, Obama adopted half-measures. He authorized a too-small troop surge, while simultaneously announcing a timetable for their withdrawal. When the surge predictably failed, the administration blamed the convenient boogeyman of nation-building. In fact, Obama’s arbitrary limitations were guaranteed to produce the “forever war” he most feared.

After the long Obama years, Miller argues, the Trump and Biden administrations rejected the nation-building effort peremptorily: “Trump replicated Obama’s error of withdrawing troops and depriving himself of leverage while supposedly trying to negotiate with the enemy.” President Biden doubled down on Trump’s folly. In rare praise of his predecessor, Biden credited an ephemeral reduction in violent events to Trump’s Doha negotiations and later defended his own withdrawal decision by recycling platitudes first heard from Donald Rumsfeld: “It’s up to the people of Afghanistan to decide on what government they want,” Biden claimed, “not us to impose the government on them.” Biden thus defended American failure by the same misjudgments that led Bush officials to reject crucial investments at the outset.

Despite its passion and detail, Miller’s account of America’s bad choices also documents very substantial efforts at nation-building over an extended period. He acknowledges, for instance, that already in 2002, Bush recognized a real gap between resources and requirements in Afghanistan, invoked the Marshall Plan, and passed the “Afghanistan Freedom Support Act.” That legislation launched the “Accelerating Success” program, by Miller’s account, the “first attempt at a comprehensive plan to invest in Afghan reconstruction.” It doubled US aid to almost $2.6 billion in 2004 and $4.8 billion in 2005—still below the $15 billion required, given Afghanistan’s nearly “bottomless” needs. Even then, Miller explains, the bureaucracy could not implement Bush’s policy skillfully enough to make up for time lost from 2002–04. The realities of strategic policy adjustment, congressional appropriation, and program development could not keep pace with real-world conditions. “A lower level of aid started sooner and sustained more consistently would have been easier to administer over the long run, and thus likelier to achieve results,” he explains. “Having delayed too long, we rushed to catch up and tried to show results too fast, which loosened standards and fueled corruption and waste.” For Miller, the negative consequences show that better planning and execution could have achieved a better outcome.

Miller’s description of US aid efforts under Obama relies on the same sort of reasoning. He argues that the troop surge was too small and the timeline arbitrary, even while conceding that even the little resources provided were poorly administered. Although the troop surge did reduce violent incidents in 2010–11, Miller explains, Obama’s “extra bodies and dollars did not add up to a coherent civilian strategy”—the essential component in counterinsurgency. Instead, “the Obama administration ran into the same buzz saw of bureaucracy, ineptitude, red tape, and infighting that had paralyzed the Bush administration’s reconstruction efforts.” Obama’s half-measures thus recycled infamous New Deal-era absurdities: “The U.S. would build roads that the Afghan Ministry of Transportation could not maintain or repair, for example.” Nonetheless, Miller calls for more and better versions of those policies, even as he explains that the reconstruction bureaucracy became “a self-licking ice cream cone … that came to exist for no other purpose than its own perpetuation.”

Despite his careful narration, Miller’s argument rests on moral and prudential judgments that control his analysis of the history. The book opens with an ostensibly historical argument: “If we are to understand why we lost, we must understand why we were able to get some things right, some of the time, and why we were unable to sustain or expand those successes,” he writes. This apparently historical claim is predicated upon a faulty non-historical axiom: “Getting some things right proves that getting the rest wrong was not inevitable, and policymakers are accountable for their poor choices.” Miller’s syllogism is a fundamental tenet of his analysis. He adds to it the equally dubious axiom that “the only two laws of history are that nothing is impossible, and nothing is inevitable.” These assertions do not rest, however, on any new historical revelation or penetrating analysis, so much as on Miller’s ability to imagine an alternative history of the war, one in which US policymakers exercise just the right judgments at just the right time—deploy the right number of forces here, provide just the right amount of aid there—to overthrow the Taliban and establish the rule-of-law in a representative system of governance, in Afghanistan.

Miller’s confidence notwithstanding, his syllogism does not work: “get[ting] some things right, some of the time” only “proves” that given enough time, blood, and treasure, the US government can get some things right, some of the time, in Afghanistan. Miller might well argue that American leaders could have gotten more things right, more of the time; still, “more right, more of the time” is a far cry from proving that American leaders “chose defeat” where they might have chosen victory. Miller does expressly acknowledge that his own indictment of bureaucratic incompetence provides the strongest argument against his own judgments. But when he confronts this idea, he retreats, once again, to the safe haven of unhistorical dogma: “There was no realistic option other than to try. … If rebuilding Afghanistan seemed impossible, it should have called forth the best of American can-do optimism.” Fifty pages later, he blames that same American spirit for the failure: “Public opinion and Americans’ traditional can-do optimism were not prepared for the massive challenges of operating in Afghanistan with almost universal illiteracy, no infrastructure, and a legacy of war.”

Even Miller’s preferred examples of successful nation-building initiatives—the Kajaki Dam and the Afghan Local Police—point to a more pessimistic conclusion than the one he draws. In Miller’s telling, this public works project partially validates the fundamental logic of counterinsurgency—the idea that “if we can provide the Afghan people with economic opportunities … and some form of security … then the Afghan people will choose to side with the new government.” To vindicate the thought, he cites former Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s claim that Pashtuns in Helmand “remember” the project “with great affection and nostalgia.”

From another perspective, though, the Kajaki Dam illustrates the flawed logic of central planning, which lies at the heart of the nation-building theory. According to Miller, military leaders viewed the dam as a central component of their counterinsurgency effort in Helmand. During the war, however, Helmand’s primary cash crop was opium poppy, which “provided 93% of the global opiate market” for drugs consumed primarily by Americans. Profits from American drug abuse, in turn, funded the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

In other words, to protect Americans, the US government’s nation-building effort provided critical infrastructure that enriched the same insurgents and drug traffickers that US military personnel fought on the battlefield. Miller knows this, of course, but repeats the same justification given back then: there was nothing else to do, since restricting the water or eradicating poppy would undermine the Afghan “nostalgia” that American nation-building efforts fought to cultivate. This was the paradox: by replacing definite military objectives with the nebulous aim of favorable popular sentiment, counterinsurgency strategy could justify any failure and identify no particular success; victory and defeat became interchangeable terms.

By nature, accident, and occasionally by intent, Miller shows how the administrative state reshapes, resists, and simply fails to implement executive policy.

Miller’s account of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) suggests his confidence results, in part, from a vision of the war developed entirely at the strategic level. By 2010, Miller reports, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was “particularly enthusiastic about the ALP initiative.” Likewise, General Stanley McChrystal believed that, by 2011, “We halted the momentum of the Taliban and retook control of the vast majority of Helmand and Kandahar.” But reality on the ground was far different in those years. In 2012, the ALP program in Helmand and Kandahar yielded a major uptick in Green-on-Blue attacks, in which newly trained Afghan police used their US-supplied weapons to murder their American counterparts. All the while, a pervasive threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) limited US movements to planned operations in up-armored tactical vehicles. Miller passes over these events, even as he sees the statistical reduction in violence as evidence that nation-building could eventually deliver a strategic resolution in the war. Sergeants and captains might have left Miller with a very different vision of American progress in those troubled regions.

The strength of Miller’s account is its careful reconstruction of American policy over the entirety of the war. In that effort, Choosing Defeat exposes deep failures in American strategic culture, and frankly, in America’s broader civil society. Despite the valuable historical work, Miller’s real dispute with the critics of nation-building arises from crucial disagreements about the first principles of politics. For him, the fundamental dilemma that confronted American policy was how to avoid the pitfalls of underinvestment without falling into the moral hazard of “imperialism.”

Miller embraces nation-building as the golden mean between these two avoidable wrongs. In his telling, from the beginning, some argued that Afghanistan lacked the political culture necessary to sustain the constitutional rule of law in a system of representative institutions. He rejects that position out of hand, since “arguments that start from the premise that nation building … is intrinsically impossible” are “not very insightful.” Nonetheless, others will argue that the ever-elusive character of even small successes in nation building validates their prudential judgment that representative self-government cannot be exported through federal central planning to any country, much less one so troubled as Afghanistan. Miller chastises that view for its latent racism and ignorance. He insists that a more efficient, more determined, morally improved administration could theoretically nourish the education, social cohesion, and economic prosperity necessary for civic order in Afghanistan. Choosing Defeat thus exemplifies, but does not resolve, the fundamental dispute over the policy implications of America’s recent loss. Nonetheless, Miller’s narration of the policy history will improve serious arguments on both sides of the question.

Choosing Defeat embodies the fundamental divisions of contemporary American politics. Miller censures the pervasive incompetence of American bureaucracy and its cowardly administrative class. By nature, accident, and occasionally by intent, the administrative state reshapes, resists, and simply fails to implement executive policy. Many would cheer his honest criticism. Miller offers a deeper moral reflection. Animating that bureaucracy is a “generation of policymakers” steeped in the cynical doctrine of “realism,” the kind of people who learned to incant “graveyard of empires” by hastily “skim[ming] one or two books and a clutch of articles on the internet.” He is right to denounce those habits as incapable of producing the virtues necessary “to take the long view” of grave matters. Miller thus calls for fundamental reform of our leaders’ moral and intellectual formation—and who could object to the necessity? And yet, he rejects the idea that a political order in such desperate need to reform its own character might be incapable of engineering the civic order of others. America “can be an exemplar of freedom and equality; it can put its enormous power in the service of justice and peace; it can align its national interest with the international common good,” he urges.

That may all be possible, more of the time; it does not prove that US leaders could have chosen victory in Afghanistan. As a veteran, a public servant, and scholar, Miller has put in the hard work and earned the right to be heard; his own scholarship provides the best evidence against his major judgment. Miller is aware of the possibility and disagrees. To his credit, Choosing Defeat will remain an essential guide to the argument for years to come.

Postliberalism has been a hot topic recently on social media and in subsequent web-based publications. Originally, the discussion focused on the level of responsibility postliberals bore for the rise of “groypers,” or the young neo-Nazi movement associated with Nick Fuentes. David French insisted that there was a direct relationship, affirming on X that postliberals, “taught the groypers that the classical liberalism of the founding was a fool’s game, and that the way forward is through punching and attacking, through insults, derision, and mockery.” He concluded, “Once you’ve demolished respect for liberal democracy and demolished any real value in rectitude and character in public life, it’s a short trip to nihilism and fascism.”

Opposing this view was Michael Brendan Dougherty, who argued that there is no clear definition to distinguish “postliberals” and that there are no real examples of postliberal states to examine for comparisons. Joining him was Ross Douthat, although he made a somewhat strange distinction between intellectual and political postliberalism. Sohrab Ahmari also chimed in to say that postliberalism is defined by its commitment to the common good, which also therefore makes it “fiercely and consistently opposed the politics of race and IQ.” 

Jonah Goldberg then stepped in with an extended piece on the subject at The Dispatch, which helpfully defined postliberalism for Dougherty:

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

His definition is broad enough to include the Catholic postliberals among white nationalists, national conservatives, and other groups that Goldberg opposes. The point is not that they oppose liberalism for the same reasons or envision the same alternatives, but that the term “postliberal” is more a way of identifying one’s factional affiliation. Oddly enough, leading postliberal Adrian Vermeule agrees with him on that point at least, calling postliberalism a “negative category” in which “all members of the genus reject the central premises of liberalism.” Therefore, Vermeule seems to set himself against Ahmari and Dougherty, and with Goldberg. What is one to make of all this?

Postliberals want the term “postliberalism” to remain vague, so that debates about it will center on definitions rather than the ideas and their implications. Debating definitions is much pleasanter than acknowledging that postliberalism opens up its adherents to a tradition that has historically embraced antisemitism and made common cause with fascism and Nazism.

What Is Postliberalism?

Establishing clear definitions can be important, but often defenders of postliberalism revel in vagueness, as a safeguard against serious discussion of their movement’s many defects. Let it suffice, then, to accept a definition from two authorities. The first comes from the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre. This past October, Cardinal Pierre penned a pastoral correction to those advocating postliberalism, defining it as the following:

the so-called post-liberal movement seeks to transcend the liberal order, denouncing the insufficiency of individualism and the corrosive power of deregulated markets, and proposing instead economic protectionism, as a revaluation of the community, of tradition and, in some cases, of a confessional role of religion in public life.

The other is scholar Julian Waller, who notes three forms of postliberalism in academic and political discourse. The most relevant to the present discussion is Waller’s second school of thought, an ideological project that “is built around rejecting midcentury and post-Cold War claims of Catholic compatibilities with market capitalism and the secular, socially liberal, individualized and atomized form of the political regime we call liberal democracy.” This form of postliberalism “asserts the necessary and inevitable connection between religion and politics, largely grounded in the Catholic tradition, and asserts a counter-framework that moves away from a strict secular reading of the idea of church-state separation in favor of greater integration and between the two.” There is also “an emphasis on the use of assertive government activity to pursue ideological goals.”

As one can see, these two definitions overlap quite well, revealing that postliberalism is comprehensible enough a project to secure definitions from the Vatican to the American academy. We can skip over the postliberal effort to conceal what postliberalism means. 

Before moving on, however, I want to explain why postliberals are cagey about their political project. “Postliberalism” as a term is really a rebranding of Catholic integralism. From its first real interest in 2015 until 2020, proponents of Catholic integralism used the term “integralism” as the core identity for their form of right-wing ideological movement, with its “integralism in three sentences” being something many of its proponents could rattle off in conversation or copy and paste in online debates. The rebranding to “postliberalism” became necessary with the publication of Alan Fimister and Thomas Crean’s 2020 volume Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy. Fimister and Crean brought to the surface the subtext of integralist positions. They rather infamously insisted that integralists hold that the unbaptized (meaning especially Jews and Muslims) cannot be citizens, that political authorities can coerce the baptized to obey the Catholic Church, that some forms of slavery are permitted, and that women lack any political independence from their male head of household. No sooner did this book appear on digital shelves than did the most prominent Catholic integralists begin immediately searching for different “brands” for their more discreet ideology. After toying with “political Catholicism” and “Christian realism,” they settled for “postliberalism.” By 2021, Vermeule, Deneen, Pecknold, and Pappin had launched “The Postliberal Order” Substack, thus completing the rebrand.

Darker Historical Associations

With this definition established, let us answer the question of whether there is any substantial connection between postliberalism and either fascism or Nazism. 

Historically speaking, Catholic integralism was a product of nineteenth-century France, attracting traditionalists who worried that the Church was growing too soft on modernity. From the beginning, its ideology was deeply antisemitic. I have covered this elsewhere, so I will give the short version. Catholic integralists stipulated that the French Revolution was the result of a conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews to overturn Catholic monarchies in favor of secular republics. To foment revolution for these republics, the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy promoted “liberalism” as an ideology of freedom from arbitrary constraint. These republics would then target the Catholic Church as their chief enemy. Therefore, for Catholic integralists, the only permissible political course was to restore Catholic monarchies and extirpate the shadowy forces that seek to destroy all that is good and right. 

The First World War saw the end of the hopes for restoration and transformed Catholic integralism into a revolutionary ideology whose adherents regarded a fascist style of politics as a possible pathway to a Catholic authoritarian state. It is no accident that Mussolini was subsidizing their efforts and that Hitler found them to be willing partners in his Final Solution.

Even if contemporary postliberals do not promote the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, their students are put on the course to rediscovering it, and not all of them are averse to embracing it directly.

As Thomas D. Howes and I will show in greater detail in our forthcoming book, Catholic integralists historically collaborated with fascists and Nazis. Brazilian Catholic integralist Plínio Salgado led an integralist party from 1930 until 1939, with financial support from Benito Mussolini, until the Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas hung Salgado out to dry. After a nearly successful armed coup against Vargas, Salgado fled to Portugal, where in the spring of 1942, he sought support from Nazi agents there to install himself as dictator until the British foreign service publicized his efforts. 

In 1935, Léon Degrelle founded the Catholic integralist Christus Rex Party in Belgium. After making some inroads in the Belgian Parliament in the 1936 elections, he met with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler and subsequently began receiving a stipend from Mussolini. However, Degrelle never persuaded the Germans that he had either the popular support or the personal talents to be useful to them. After the German conquest of Belgium in 1940, the Nazis handed local control over to the more secular fascist Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond. To prove himself, Degrelle fully endorsed Nazism and joined the SS, served on the eastern front, and returned to Belgium to leverage his service into a political career, just in time to have his plans dashed by D-Day. He ended up in Franco’s Spain and spent the rest of his life fostering the Holocaust Denial genre, while his home became a pilgrimage site for Nazis and neo-Nazis.

Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše of Croatia used Catholic integralism to defend their genocide of Orthodox Serbs, while sending Jews and Roma to Nazi concentration camps. Pavelić had spent much of his time as a potential political ally for Mussolini, living in an Italian villa in Pesaro until Mussolini put him in jail, for a time, after the Ustaše were implicated in the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934. In 1941, Mussolini consulted with Paveliċ and, after the conquest of Yugoslavia, SS General and Holocaust perpetrator Edmund Veesenmayer commanded Pavelić to be made dictator of an independent Croatia as a direct collaborator with the Axis powers, which he remained until his ouster by Tito’s Partisans in 1945. Paveliċ fled to the Vatican and then to Argentina, and finally, after a nearly successful assassination, to Franco’s Spain. Further examples will be recounted in the book.

Darker Contemporary Associations

In contemporary discourse, Catholic integralism has a different valence, one that Patrick Deneen charts in Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen presents liberalism as a blind historical force, similar to what Karl Marx saw in forces like feudalism and capitalism. Also like Marx, Deneen saw liberalism’s failure as structural, with its contradictions laid bare in the politics of the early twenty-first century. The benefit of this critique is that it lacks any of the paranoid, unsubstantiated attributions of agency to disparate groups. Instead, the agency belongs to the ideology, and even liberals are directed by it until liberalism itself collapses. 

However, the conspiratorial tendency still haunts the “structural” approach that Deneen pioneered. It still relies on a story that our social and political life has been secretly molded by a small group of nefarious elites, even if they wear the innocuous moniker “liberals,” where previous generations of integralists would have blamed Jews or Masons. Moreover, when today’s integralists explore the intellectual origins of their movement, it is hard to avoid the more directly antisemitic conspiracies. For instance, Deneen, probably without realizing it, recommended antisemitic and authoritarian critics of liberalism in his discussion with Bishop Robert Barron. In an episode of my podcast, Victoria Holmes mentioned that many of the young professional Catholics she talks to are integralists, and they will refer to century-old English-language Catholic integralist sources that identify Jews and Freemasons as the authors of liberalism. Hence, even if contemporary postliberals do not promote the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, their students are put on the course to rediscover it, and not all of them are averse to embracing it directly. As Jason Hart has repeatedly pointed out, the original lineup of the student-run American Postliberal featured antisemitic ideas, even as Deneen was promoting the group.

Whistling Past the Mass Graveyard

In his recent conversation with Goldberg, George Weigel insisted that this movement is small and unrepresentative of the Catholic Church in America, saying that no one at his parish ever talks about it. One is immediately reminded of the apocryphal story of Pauline Kael stating that “no one I know voted for Nixon,” but regardless, Weigel is right and wrong. He may be right that most Catholics do not talk about integralism, but he is wrong to imply that they do not know what it is or that it does not matter. I recall spending time shooting the breeze with a parishioner I had known for some time when he idly brought up the virtues of Fr. Charles Coughlin. Postliberalism may have a deeper impact on American Catholics than Weigel realizes.

Whether or not that’s true, it’s important to recognize that the central strategy for Catholic integralists has never in any case been to win over Catholic clergy and laity, building the new coalition out of the churches. The strategy has been one of co-opting elites to impose integralist ideas onto a relatively indifferent public. Vermeule explains as much in his writing on the institutional approach with the slogan of “integration from within” and the rationale he borrows from Joseph de Maistre:

The people count for nothing in revolutions, or at most count only as a passive instrument. Four or five persons, perhaps will give France a king. Letters from Paris will announce to the provinces that France has a king, and the provinces will cry, “Long live the king.”

Rather than install a monarch, however, Catholic integralists want to install a Catholic bureaucracy, meaning that theirs is a longer-term project. Perhaps Weigel is right that fewer than a thousand Catholics are aware of Fr. Edmund Waldstein, but if those thousand Catholics were staffing a future presidential administration, Waldstein would then have considerable influence. This might sound like alarmism, but Vermeule is simply deploying the same strategy that more radical figures on the Left have used to introduce their own ideological priorities, such as DEI initiatives in state governments and in the Biden White House. 

Therefore, the hour is later than many like Weigel want to believe. It could be a bad mistake to believe Weigel instead of our lying eyes.

It’s not quite true that 10/7 was Israel’s 9/11. There are stark similarities, to be sure: on both days, jihadists murdered thousands of civilians; both were days of sharp trauma followed by a forgotten national unity in the victim country; both days were “events” in the sense that they seemed to temporarily pause the rhythm and course of civilization before changing it rapidly. But there was one very crucial difference. After 9/11, the Western world was united in its support for the United States in a way it simply was not for Israel following 10/7. 

After al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and DC, memorials were erected across the world. Leaders and populations from London to Moscow were united by a common sense that murdering thousands of civilians in the name of God was evil, whatever the sins of their country. The world reacted differently when 1,200 Israelis were murdered two years ago. Within hours of the news breaking, there were demonstrations in London and Berlin expressing solidarity with Hamas. Ivy League professors were “excited” and found the invasion “awesome.” Before there was a national march in support of Israel in Washington, DC (which remains the only such march in which this author has participated), hundreds of thousands gathered in support of Palestine.

Things got worse from there. On college campuses across the country, students engaged in massive and often vitriolic protests. Some protesters were narrowly critical of how Israel conducted the war in Gaza, but many took issue with the state of Israel as such, glorifying Hamas as a valiant resistance movement and revealing an astounding level of antisemitism. “From the river to the sea” was suddenly ubiquitous on college campuses.

Why is it that so much of the West immediately expressed support for Hamas after 10/7? Why, instead of offering unqualified sympathy with Israel, did so many of our citizens—and particularly our students—rush to condemn the Jewish state when the bodies were still being counted? This is the question animating Douglas Murray’s book, On Democracies and Death Cults. It is a deeply personal and (in true Murray fashion) highly combative testimony to the virtues of the Israeli people. More importantly, it is a plea for the West to regain civilizational confidence and the courage to speak again in terms of “good” and “evil.” It is a plea to which I am sympathetic, but Murray’s polemical approach will persuade few who do not already agree with him.

Description

It’s important to note at the outset that Murray’s book is not a historical account of why Westerners have become more sympathetic to Gazan “resistance.” Animated by this question, it never submits a systematic answer. It accepts the premise that Western youth have lost the capacity to identify good and evil in a case that calls for little qualification. Neither is the book an assessment of Israel’s war against Hamas (though Murray is resolutely supportive of the war). Murray cares much more about whether the aims of Israel’s war are just rather than how the war is being executed. 

The book is instead a forceful attempt to persuade readers that Israel is a force for good, that it represents and embodies the life-affirming values of civilization as such, and that it is engaged in war against death-worshipping nihilists. Understanding the justness and appropriateness of war against Hamas is crucial for the West, Murray maintains. “The right of Israel to fight and win such a war is vital not just for the sake of that country, but so Britain, America, and every other Western country will be able to fight such a war if—or when—it comes.”

Murray makes no systematic effort to explain how Israel embodies civilization; he treats it as obvious at every level. At the social and political level, Israel is ethnically diverse, economically developed, and proudly democratic despite generations of war. It is a place where the religiously orthodox live side-by-side with secular hippies, gay ravers, and Arab Muslims. Far from being an apartheid state, Israel’s non-Jewish population has mushroomed, enjoys the same political rights as Jews, and is economically vibrant. Gaza, by contrast, is (or was) ruled by a mixture of corrupt authoritarians and religious fanatics who’ve become grossly wealthy while their citizens live in poverty. In Gaza, billions in foreign aid have been diverted from economic development and used instead to invest in military equipment and a now infamous tunnel infrastructure. Where Israelis treasure life, Hamas’s leaders are doggedly obsessed with destroying Israel. The former pays a steep price to save a single hostage; the latter hides weapons in nurseries and supports families of terrorists who’ve “martyred” themselves.

If these broad strokes aren’t enough to convince readers, Murray provides plenty of narrative accounts of Hamas’s barbarism and Israeli heroism. One noteworthy case is that of Tamir Adar, a nephew of the Israeli doctor who saved Yahya Sinwar’s life while the latter was in captivity. Tamir was a farmer who lived in Nir Oz, one of the kibbutzim Hamas attacked on 10/7. Noticing that the Israeli army was not arriving, Tamir secured his family in their safe room and rushed out to fight off the invaders. His body was found in Gaza in January 2024. It turned out that he died in the kibbutz on 10/7, and the terrorists took his body as a bargaining chip. Incidentally, his eighty-five-year-old grandmother, Yaffa Adar, was also kidnapped from her home. Readers may recognize her from the viral photo of an old woman sitting stoically in a golf cart as it drives into Gaza.

The gallantry of Tamir and the stoicism of Yaffa stand in stark contrast with the behavior of Hamas soldiers. They engaged in all sorts of heinous acts now well-documented: mass rape, torture, executions, burning families alive. Murray notes on a couple of occasions that, where the Nazis had enough residual decency to hide their war crimes, Hamas and its partners gleefully recorded and disseminated their acts.

With this in mind, Murray maintains, it is pure hysteria to chastise Israel as a force of oppression or imperialism, to say nothing of genocide. So glaring are the holes in critics’ arguments, so eager is the condemnation of Israel that he chalks up the outrage to pure, unadorned antisemitism.

But when speaking of Israel and Palestine, it is irresponsible to ignore that there are those west of the Jordan who deliberately make peace difficult and would settle all the way to the Euphrates if given the chance.

In one of the few passages offering an answer to his guiding question, Murray quotes the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman, who saw antisemitism both as a sign of civilizational decline and as a mirror for diagnosing one’s sins: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” Cosplay revolutionaries who march against Israel, who call it a “genocidal, apartheid state,” reveal more about themselves than any truth about Israel. The garb of their antisemitism shows they feel guilty about their own societies’ experience with imperialism and genocide that they project onto the Jews. Their desperation is no more than an attempt at atonement for their own misguided shame.

Assessment

The book’s strongest contribution is its collection of stories about Israelis during and after 10/7. Some are simple testimonies, efforts of the writer to make sure that the victims’ story is heard. They are often difficult to read. The reader can sense that Murray felt a passionate urge to give a voice to the victims. As he writes in the introduction, “I decided, in short, not just to work out what happened, but to become a witness.” Murray does a great service in capturing the human toll of 10/7 and should be applauded for doing so.

Other vignettes serve simply to show how impressive Israelis are. Anyone who has spent time in the country knows this. There is a quiet, unassuming courage in the average Israeli’s life, an organic toughness that only necessity can yield. As one kibbutz resident casually said to Murray, “Yeah, okay we have missiles … but it’s a very good place to raise kids.” Murray is right to contrast this with Westerners who, having lived without a real threat for two generations, take their security for granted. In an increasingly combustible world, we could benefit from a touch of Spartan grit.

But on the level of argument, Murray overstates his case, often in glaring ways. A revealing example is when he alleges hypocrisy at leftists who scream of Israel’s crimes but say very little in the face of other atrocities. For example, where was the outrage during Bashar al-Assad’s siege of Aleppo, or the plight of women in Iran, or the horrors in Sudan? He’s right, of course, the outrage against men like al-Assad or Ayatollah Khamenei is muted when compared to anti-Israel sentiments. But then, this is hardly surprising; these men are (or were) authoritarians. Israel, by contrast, is a democracy that enjoys substantial American aid. The fact that the country receives greater scrutiny is expected, and a testimony to the high standards citizens in a democracy expect of their friends.

I am not of the opinion that when speaking of a country, we must be sure to reference all of its sins, to check off the list of injustices, to try and please the jackboots. But when speaking of Israel and Palestine, it is irresponsible to ignore that there are those west of the Jordan who deliberately make peace difficult and would settle all the way to the Euphrates if given the chance. When the justification for this behavior is no more than a willful assertion of divine right, we are far away from civilized behavior.

Murray says nothing about West Bank settlers whose continued (and accelerated) expansion causes the most consternation among young Westerners. This is an amazing omission precisely because Murray will persuade no one who does not already submit to his broad characterization if he doesn’t acknowledge and address the serious problems in Israeli government and society fueling this expansion. He will certainly not persuade any confused, historically ignorant students who think Israel is guilty of imperialism. At a time when we should be engaging in serious, even heartfelt conversations with youth who are confused about a region rife with complexity and historical grievance, Murray opts for red meat.

I share much of Murray’s frustration and think his intention is laudable. Moreover, I admire his unflinching stance against antisemites of all kinds and especially his voiceful opposition to those emerging fringes on the right. Israel is rightfully an ally, one wrongly dragged through the muck at every turn by academics and activists who know little of its history and who have the strategic depth and empathy of a fish. 

But if friends of Israel want to counter the youth’s growing aversion to the Jewish state, they must be willing to discuss Israel’s sins head-on. Murray doesn’t do that. He contents himself with showing how the other side is a death cult and rests his case. In the end, his book will make those who uncritically love Israel cheer, and those most in need of a change of heart roll their eyes.

The history of the twentieth century is, in large part, the story of competing totalitarian ideas put into practice, and the destruction, immiseration, and death they produced. It is a rarity in human history, perhaps unprecedented, that the lives of four generations could be told primarily through the lens of a clash of ideas that touched every corner of the globe and every facet of society, politics, and economics. That contest was fought in the pages of journals and newspapers, at the ballot box, and in wars both traditional and undeclared.

Most of these ideas, of course, were bad ones. An optimistic or perhaps Whiggish interpretation of twentieth-century intellectual history would highlight how Marxism, Communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism, postmodernism, and Islamism all rose up and were brought down, at times by their own failures and internal contradictions, and at others by the moral and martial forces of freedom.

None of these ideas were small or for the faint of heart. All sought to reorder society along radical lines, fundamentally change human nature, and extirpate root-and-branch the evolved institutions of private life and the liberal democratic order. The grandiosity of these ideas and their totalizing tendency stirred the souls of their followers, calling them to a mission to build a new society—and to destroy an existing one.

A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, the difference between then and now could not be more stark. While ours is a moment racked by popular discontent, the diminution and desecration of formal and informal institutions (often at the hands of these institutions’ ostensible leaders), and a significant increase in the breadth of ideas in circulation, there has been very little in the way of legitimately new ideas this century, either at the level of ideology or public policy. Indeed, most of the bad ideas in circulation today are old bad ideas, not new bad ideas.

For those of us who care about a free society, this is a reason for optimism. During the long twentieth century, when anti-liberal ideas from Marxism through fascism were new, liberals faced four challenges. First, responses to these challenges were under-theorized, and it took decades of work by thinkers like F. A. Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke to address them head-on. Second, liberals had a thin intellectual bench, and aside from a few times and places like fin de siècle Vienna, they were seldom found in close regular contact. Third, the empirical record of high modern illiberalism had yet to develop. And fourth, the opponents of liberalism had the energy of true believers who believed they could remake the world anew.

Today the story is quite different. We have a much more thorough theory of a free society and its attendant institutions; put simply, the task of updating those principles and their applications, while significant and challenging, is of a qualitatively different scale than the problem facing our forebears. We have robust polycentric networks of scholars, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and philanthropists dedicated to advancing a free society. And we have a hard-earned century of data from grand social experiments that resulted in historically unprecedented human tragedy.

Put simply, fighting old bad ideas is a very different task in terms of scale, scope, and challenge than fighting new bad ideas.

The online new right is awash with intellectual energy, but it is almost entirely placed into service of revanchist efforts to re-popularize old bad ideas, or in the American context, to take various strains of foreign conservatism that have never had purchase in the United States and bring them to our shores. Among the more prominent of the online right philosophers is Curtis Yarvin, the Pied Piper of the so-called Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin has certainly been prolific over his decades of blogging and popular writing. But his underlying idea—that America needs to replace the Constitutional order with an unelected CEO-king—is simply a pre-modern absolutist, non-hereditary monarchy with twenty-first-century characteristics.

Yarvin’s affect is novel, no doubt. Rather than writing for clarity, he seems to relish purple prose, non-sequiturs, and halting transitions. As John Horvat wrote for Law & Liberty, “He is brash, sarcastic, skeptical, and cynical. His style is irreverent and vulgar. He cares little for rules and formality.” No doubt he’s a good marketer to the very online set. But adopting the cocky, rebellious mien of a very online twenty-first-century Mick Jagger doesn’t make his ideas original.

The Catholic integralists similarly embrace an explicitly medieval view of the relationship between temporal authorities and religious ones; to wit, they believe as a normative proposition that the former should be directed by the latter. Not only is there nothing new about this idea (it was, of course, the pre-modern status quo throughout most of Europe), but it is also, as Law & Liberty contributing editor James Patterson has shown, based on a conception of Catholicism with no historical background in the United States. The story of modern Christian nationalism, to the extent it’s even a discernible ideology, is largely the same.

It may be easier to repudiate bad ideas in their second and third comings than when they were truly novel, but it is still a task that requires diligence and persistence.

The less intellectual corners of the new right offer something even less novel; ideologically, they present a grab bag of racial essentialism, ethnic grievance, and antisemitism of varying degrees of gentility. As with Yarvin, novelty here is restricted to the realm of presentation and promotion, in particular, a delight in subverting social norms of decency.

The left is likewise in thrall to old bad ideas occasionally gussied up in ambitious rhetoric. Doctrinaire Marxism having fallen out of favor, the body count of communism still too fresh in historical memory, the left’s economic ideology is primarily a kinder, gentler “democratic socialism” or “social democracy.” On questions of identity (which now regrettably carry more political salience than do matters of political economy), there’s the same mishmash of postcolonialism, critical theory, third-worldism, anti-white racial resentment, and anti-Americanism that characterized much of leftism in the twentieth century. “Wokeism,” the only significant left-wing ideological innovation of the past quarter-century, had no new intellectual underpinnings; it was novel only in its rhetoric and Internet-optimized political tactics.

This ideological stagnation leads to policy stagnation. The mayor-elect of New York City, a self-described democratic socialist who during the campaign clearly relished his portrayal as a radical and never missed an opportunity to take a swipe at the successful, has little economically to offer besides slogans about government-run grocery stores, rent control, and free bus passes. His promises of free child care and $30 minimum wages are unlikely to go anywhere in Albany, meaning his actual fiscal impact may not be that significant.

This in itself does not counsel optimism: Zohran Mamdani’s policy ideas are terrible and will be deleterious to New York as a city, especially its less well-off. Nor should we discount Hizzonor’s bully pulpit; the vibes and pronouncements from mayors and governors matter more than cold rationality may admit.

But Mamdani’s bad ideas are also old bad ideas, not new ones. What he proposes is simply rehashing policies that have been tried and found wanting again and again. As with Yarvin, a slick front man and an affect custom-made for the zeitgeist can’t overcome the underlying poverty of the ideas. Socialism, even in its more urbane manifestations, doesn’t have a marketing problem; it has a reality problem.

The right is suffering from a similar policy stagnation. Tariffs, industrial policy, welfare statism, clientalism, protecting incumbent firms and favored sectors, and nostalgia-based grievance rhetoric all have significant purchase among elected officials. All are ideas that have been tried and failed.

When ideas have been tried and they succeed, societies do well to continue them. When they are tried and found wanting, however, it is seldom a good idea to resuscitate them and see if they work better on a second go. Yet that is what too many societies across the West are engaged in today. Their expositors and advocates are ensconcing these old ideas in new rhetoric and marketing them through digital channels that are distinctively twenty-first century. But the underlying ideas remain essentially unchanged—and unimproved.

None of this is to say that there won’t be a new intellectual or ideological innovation on the order of Marxism that emerges in the coming years or decades. The first quarter of the twenty-first century may yet be seen as an ideological lacuna, after which we could resume our regularly scheduled programming. Nor does this argue for complacency; after all, old bad ideas put into practice are no less harmful than new bad ideas put into practice, even if their consequences are more predictable.

It does however serve as a reminder that no ideas are ever truly so disreputed as to be placed permanently out of circulation. Those with sufficient wisdom and erudition may see through the disguises donned by old bad ideas and see the simulacrum of originality for what it is. It may be easier to repudiate bad ideas in their second and third comings than when they were truly novel, but it is still a task that requires diligence and persistence.

F. A. Hayek wrote that “old truths … must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations.” So too must the critiques of the old falsities. In this regard, we find ourselves at least somewhat fortunate: old bad ideas may be making a comeback, but we stand on the shoulders of giants as we square up to the task of placing them back on the ash-heap of history. We cannot desist from the battle of ideas, but our task is qualitatively different than when we were facing genuine intellectual innovation and foment from illiberals on the left and right.

Concern that Congress is unable to fulfill its basic constitutional responsibilities has reached an unprecedented degree of mainstream acceptance. Writers on the left and the right bemoan diminished Congressional capacity, the body’s general disinterest in defending its own institutional prerogatives or reaching bipartisan agreements on looming policy issues (e.g., Social Security solvency, deficit reduction, etc.). There is no shortage of explanations for—surely overdetermined—Congressional dysfunction and gridlock, from increasing elite polarization to bicameral disagreements to the centralization of power in party leadership in Congress and so on.

One common argument blames increases in the transparency of Congress’s internal workings for the lack of bipartisan compromise on major policy issues. According to this argument, Congress’s committees for most of the institution’s history were allowed to negotiate and vote in secret, hiding their activities not only from the public but from lobbyists, other members of Congress, and the media. Even the rules of some committees were kept under wraps. In these backrooms, partisans of different stripes would build interpersonal, cross-partisan connections and ultimately deliver policy compromises. The secrecy of these committees enabled compromise in the process of partisan negotiation.

Then, over the course of the twentieth century, following the Second World War, Congress eroded the secrecy of committee hearings through a series of enactments and rule changes, most importantly the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. This act, along with subsequent rule changes, removed the secrecy of committee roll call votes and shifted away from secret convenings as the norm in the committee system. Adding to these rule changes, beginning in 1979, C-SPAN cameras were introduced for floor debates in the House and later in the Senate. C-SPAN coverage further expanded to cover many committee hearings as well, illuminating previously undisclosed committee negotiations.

Taken together, all this new sunshine allowed lobbyists for special interest groups, members of Congress outside a given committee, the media, and the mass public to grapple directly with the policymaking process. This increase in transparency coincided with the transformation of Congress’s committees. Committee hearings that were once the nexus of policy development and information acquisition became stages for partisan kabuki theatre. Moreover, power in the policymaking process has shifted away from once-powerful committee chairs to party leadership offices. Proponents of the pro-secrecy story point the finger at these changes as a cause for broader legislative dysfunction.

The case against transparency is facially plausible. Formal, game-theoretic models of bargaining often separately consider public and private negotiations, given the different incentives the players face when negotiating in front of an audience. This is particularly true when the audience is your boss, the electorate, and other actors who can directly influence your ability to keep your job (e.g., special interest groups who make campaign donations). And while most of the public doesn’t pay attention to the fine details of Congress’s inner workings, outside groups and partisan actors can easily rewind the tape of committee hearings and replay selective, out-of-context moments of electoral interest for members’ constituents. It would be very surprising indeed if fully exposing previously secret policy negotiations to public view had no effect on the committees’ ability to reach a compromise, or the nature of the resulting policy outputs.

So should we once again close Congress’s committees, turn off the C-SPAN cameras, and expect a rapid return to Congress’s golden age of committee bargaining? If only it were so simple. A subtle and difficult challenge for secrecy as a reform mechanism is the threat of leaks.

A recent article explores the problem of leaks in depth, asking what we can expect from committees negotiating in three different institutional settings: in public, in secret, and in secret but with the possibility of leaks. Using a formal model, the authors demonstrate two key results. First, committees negotiating in total secrecy (no threat of leaks) achieve the best outcomes, and committees negotiating in public exhibit status-quo bias. Second, and counterintuitively, committees negotiating in public reach the same outcomes as committees negotiating in secret but under the threat of leaks. That is to say, committees that operate in secret but under the threat of leaks are predicted to fail, in equilibrium, to produce better outcomes than committees negotiating in full public view.

How could this be the case? The basic strategic problem that underlies this result is called dynamic inconsistency. At the beginning of a bipartisan committee negotiation, assume both parties want to reach a policy compromise, and enacting a durable compromise is their best-case scenario. However, once the negotiations commence, both parties will be tempted to leak information from the committee proceedings to damage their opponent. For example, imagine a bipartisan committee negotiating Social Security reform. This committee would need to consider reforms that, on their own, are highly unpopular and could be damaging if attributed to one party alone (e.g., raising the retirement age, increasing payroll taxes, etc.). Members of either party would be tempted during the negotiation to leak that the other side floated an unpopular reform to gain an electoral advantage, thus damaging the prospect that the committee will reach a compromise.

Nothing’s to stop a rogue committee member or staffer from calling up a reporter after a secret meeting and spilling the beans.

This dynamic inconsistency problem, where the parties agree at time 1 that compromise is good but can’t commit to not double-crossing their opponent at time 2, undermines the efficacy of secret committee governance. In the authors’ model, both negotiating parties are incentivized to hold back information that could lead to compromise for fear of leakage. If somehow the two parties could tie themselves to the mast and commit to each other in advance that they won’t leak, then it would be possible to reach a compromise. But left to their own devices, the temptation to deviate during the negotiations and attack their opponent is too strong, overriding their interest in reaching a compromise. 

To be sure, game theoretic models of politics are stylized, reducing the strategic environment in ways that are somewhat unrealistic. In this case, we might worry, for example, that leaks of verifiable and non-verifiable information might induce different strategic behavior, or that interpersonal factors like trust could affect the probability of a successful compromise (as some former members of Congress suggest). But the fundamental intuition and strategic tradeoff in this case is clear enough, and it is easy to find examples of secret committee negotiations that failed due, at least in part, to leaks. Moreover, a subtle implication of the model is that when the threat of leaks is present, we might expect bipartisan negotiations not to begin in the first place. Why participate in a bipartisan negotiation at all if you believe your counterparty will betray you in public at the first opportunity? There is also technological variation over time that contributes to the threat of leaks. In the age of the Internet, it is easier than ever to leak documents, recordings, etc. 

Of course, the policy being debated also matters. In some areas, the parties can “expand the pie” to reach an agreement, for example, by increasing both defense and nondefense discretionary spending. This is sometimes called integrative bargaining, where the two parties try to reach an agreement that incorporates aspects both parties care about, typically over multiple dimensions. In other policy domains, bargaining is necessarily zero-sum (i.e., if I win, you must lose). These are often situations with a binary outcome: a judge is confirmed or not, a trade agreement is approved or not, etc. In the spending case, if the federal government had a balanced budget requirement, then any new spending would come at the immediate expense of other spending, or new taxes. In lieu of such an amendment, members of Congress often happily borrow to cover new spending, converting a zero-sum case into an integrative one. In theory, secrecy is useful in the integrative, multidimensional case—where members can imagine a range of mutually beneficial compromises—and less helpful for zero-sum negotiations, where at the end of the day, someone loses.

This model also helps explain why so much integrative policy development happens outside of Capitol Hill in the myriad think tanks and non-profit organizations around Washington, DC. These institutions serve a vital role in the policymaking process by granting policymakers (more often their proxies) a forum for developing compromise proposals—or searching for integrative solutions—that is largely inaccessible to the public. Leaks from these forums would be of little electoral or political consequence given the degrees of separation between these outside deliberations and actual elected officials. 

Whether or not this ecosystem of third places for policy negotiation is a net public good is hard to know. Policy non-profits are themselves funded and operated with money from large grant-giving organizations and special interest groups. One might reasonably worry that these financial interests affect the policy development that goes on in these places. For what it’s worth, in the modern Congress, special interest groups and donors have direct access to the policymaking process as well. Counterintuitively, it’s possible that negotiations that happen off the Hill may in some sense decrease the policy influence of special interests, since electoral accountability in these spaces is out of reach. 

While leaks undermine secret committee negotiations, employing secret ballots for more votes in Congress is worth considering. Many votes in both chambers are carried out by voice vote, but under the Constitution, final roll call votes on the floor of either chamber must be recorded if one-fifth of present members demand it. However, there is no such constitutional provision for committees. Regardless, many committees follow the one-fifth rule for disclosing roll calls. Even more extreme, in some committees, a single member can request a recorded vote. We could convert some portion of votes, say all committee-level and below, either to total secrecy or to a teller system where individual members’ votes are not recorded (i.e., only the count is disclosed). Secret ballots are already employed for some other votes in Congress. For example, Senate Republicans elected Majority Leader John Thune by secret ballot last year.

If Congress’s committees were to again turn away from public view, they might also consider creating a small institution to enforce information security. This would hardly be unheard of, given Congress’s proclivity to create non-partisan support offices and agencies like the Senate Parliamentarian or the Congressional Budget Office. As we’ve already established, members from both parties would often be made better off if they could somehow commit to not leaking. A third party, call them the “Congressional Paper Shredder,” with preferences orthogonal to partisan politics, could credibly play such a role.

Even still, nothing’s to stop a rogue committee member or staffer from calling up a reporter after a secret meeting and spilling the beans. If negotiations involve the president, which on major topics they almost always eventually do, then the executive branch becomes yet another potential source of leaks. It’s difficult to imagine institutional tweaks that could address these avenues for leaks, making the continued substitution to outside groups or other venues for policy development and compromise even more likely. On the other hand, making non-floor votes secret is entirely feasible in principle. One can’t leak information that doesn’t exist!

What is Christian Zionism? Is it, as figures like Tucker Carlson claim, a relatively recent development in America’s cultural history, or does a general support for the Jewish state have a longer history in America? The answer partly depends on how “Christian Zionism” is defined, but in this conversation, Sam Goldman explains to host James Patterson why support for Jewish political aspirations is part of a long tradition of Christian philosemitism that reaches back even to America’s colonial period.

Related Links

“Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Christian Zionism,” Compact, Samuel Goldman
God’s Country by Samuel Goldman
Tri-Faith America by Kevin Schultz

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

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

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty and associate professor of public affairs at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee. With me, again, is my friend, Dr. Samuel Goldman. He is associate professor of humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. And today we’re going to be talking about both a newly-in-paperback book of his called God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America. As well as an article he wrote once again for Compact, “Tucker Carlson is Wrong about Christian Zionism.” And this has all been inspired by some of the contretemps of the moment over some of these issues. So we’ll get into those, but also some of the intellectual background that people may not know. Dr. Goldman, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Sam Goldman (01:37):

Always a pleasure to speak, Dr. Patterson.

James Patterson (01:42):

I always feel a little guilty about being informal on these podcasts, so I’m going by honorifics at least at first. Now, before we started recording, we were just talking about how many people have offered commentary on Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes. And your comment was never before in your life have you felt so middle aged. I feel the same way! So we are not going to talk about the ins and outs of all that business. We’re going to be talking about what was motivating them to talk, and that’s this idea of Christian nationalism. I mean Christian Zionism, excuse me, not Christian nationalism. Totally different show. So what is Christian Zionism and what does Tucker Carlson get wrong about it?

Sam Goldman (02:28):

So Christian Zionism is one of these annoying terms that can be defined in different ways. And one of the frustrating things about the discussion that I entered with my Compact piece and carried on in social media and elsewhere is that people sort of mean different things by “Christian Zionism” and unless you can settle on one definition, it’s hard to have a productive discussion. So I’ll give you two definitions. One is the one that I think Carlson had in mind, which is common and which I think is wrong or at least only partial. And then I’ll give you my correct definition, which is the one that I advance in my book. So one way of understanding Christian Zionism is as the affection of modern Christians, mostly evangelical Protestants, for the current state of Israel, and usually that is associated with a set of eschatological beliefs that involve the return of the Jews to the Biblical Promised Land, the establishment of a state there, increasing turmoil in the region and the world,

(03:49):

and finally a sort of apocalyptic narrative in which Christ returns to rule in person. That’s a definition that has been common for at least 40 years, and I think it’s probably the one that Carlson has in mind, although it’s not clear that everyone whom he mentioned, George W. Bush among others, is a Christian Zionist in that sense. But my contention in the article and the book is that that’s really just too narrow. I would say that Christian Zionism should be defined as something like the idea that God has a continuing concern for the people and land of Israel, that that concern is reflected perhaps imperfectly or mysteriously in the modern Zionist movement and the state of Israel, and because Christians profess to worship and serve the God of Israel, they have some responsibility for supporting or promoting those goals. That is a much broader definition of what it means to be a Christian Zionist.

(05:09):

And it’s also one that extends back a lot deeper in history. So Carlson in that show and on other episodes has suggested that Christian Zionism can be derived from the nineteenth century Anglo Irish theologian, John Nelson Darby. I think it really goes quite a long way farther back, really back to the Protestant Reformation. And what I suggest in my book is that this idea was brought to what became the United States by the Puritans. It became a recurring feature of American political and religious life. It was never uncontroversial or unanimously accepted; I wouldn’t suggest that for a moment. But it was a popular and fairly normal idea really throughout both the history of the republic and colonial history. So when people like Carlson said as he did in the interview with Fuentes, that this is a brain virus that’s somehow taken over the Republican party in America as a result of Darby or the so-called Scofield Bible, which included notes that were influenced by Darby’s ideas, I just don’t think that’s true. Christian Zionism in a broad sense is an old and powerful feature of American thought. And when we talk about its influence and value, I think we should approach it on those terms.

James Patterson (06:58):

During a now leaked video from the Heritage Foundation meeting over some of the fallout from their involvement with Tucker Carlson, one of the participants said that they regarded Christian Zionism as a heresy and they associated this with being either Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. We’re not going to speculate what they mean by that, but there is a kind of odd proximity of Protestantism to Christian Zionism that you don’t find in Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Why is it that Protestantism is so much friendlier to this way of thinking?

Sam Goldman (07:44):

So Protestantism emerges in part out of the idea that scripture is the ultimate authority for Christians. You know better than I do, as a Catholic, that it’s more complicated than that, and there’s a whole range of arguments, but one of the central ideas in what becomes Protestantism is that if you want to know what God wants, you have to go back to the Bible and you have to read it yourself. Which doesn’t mean that everyone’s interpretation is equally valid; particularly early forms of Protestantism had strong interpretive and theological authorities that were supposed to guide people. But you’re supposed to, you know, you read the book and you see what it says. So what happens if you do that?

James Patterson (08:28):

I have never read the Bible before, Sam,

Sam Goldman (08:31):

Well, I’ve seen on Twitter accusations that this is true of all Catholics. So I leave that for others to judge. So you pick up the Bible and what do you find? Well, first of all, you find that it has these two parts: if you are a Christian an Old and New Testament, or for Jews the Hebrew Bible and the other stuff, and then you have to answer the question of what these things have to do with each other. And one of the innovations of Protestant theologians was to say, well, look, when you read the Old Testament as it was for them, you see that it is replete with references to Israel, to the people and land of Israel. And some of those references they suggested are pre-figurations of the Church. They’re metaphors for the community of believers that would be fulfilled in Christ.

(09:40):

But some of them are references to what was called the seed of Abraham, the descendants of Abraham, and to the Biblical Promised Land. And from this turn to scripture and to the Old Testament, which for them was of equal authority to the New Testament, there developed a sense that God was not finished with the people or land of Israel. And through reading, especially some of the prophecies that occur later in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, many Protestants expected that one day in the fullness of time, God would bring together the scattered Jews of the world, would restore them to residence in at least some portion of the Biblical Promised Land, and would set up some kind of political community there. And all of this was vague and argument by way of implication, if not insinuation, but you can see in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries something that looks like a precursor to Zionism emerging not among Jews and not in Eastern and Central Europe, but rather among English speaking Protestants in Britain and then in what would become the United States.

James Patterson (11:16):

So we see this and contemporary scholarship that’s come up, Eric Nelson’s book, The Hebrew Republic. I know we’re selling your book today, Sam.

Sam Goldman (11:27):

People should also buy Nelson’s book.

James Patterson (11:30):

Yeah, God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America of course. And I have this political Hebraism, which is a wonderful compilation. So this is sort of well known in scholarly circles or at least being better established than maybe it was before. And the thing about this political Hebraism is that it was not unfamiliar to the American Founders at the time of the founding of the colonies, or to the framers of the Constitution. So how is it that Christian Zionism makes its way to the US?

Sam Goldman (12:10):

Well, it becomes embedded in the religious traditions that shape the political culture of the founding period. Not equally or to the same degree everywhere, so one sort of current, where it’s especially powerful is the Puritan traditions that then become congregationalism in the eighteenth, late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Presbyterians have a strong tradition of this. It’s especially the religious communities that are influenced by Calvinism that seem to have this affinity. And that then gets picked up by many founders and framers, I think not in a sort of fully committed and explicit way. There are figures who did that; I talk in the book about a guy named Elias Buodinot who served as president of the Continental Congress and was an important aid to Washington, who actually wrote a couple of books making this case. But for some of the more familiar figures, it was sort of in the background.

(13:25):

So I am not an archival scholar. I don’t claim to have found things that other people haven’t found, but to the extent that I have any discoveries, I located a diary entry by John Adams from when he was riding the circuit in Massachusetts in the late 1760s. So in those days, as some listeners may know, the court moved so people could do their legal business and then all the lawyers would follow the court around the colony. So they spent a lot of time hanging out in taverns talking because they were away from home and didn’t have anything else to do. And Adams reports that one night in the tavern, he and his colleagues were talking about the restoration of the Jews. So this was an idea that people were aware of. It was something they heard referred to in the pulpit. It was a subject of sort of lay religious discussion.

(14:32):

And I think that created a climate in which many leading political figures, even if they were not particularly orthodox or even particularly pious, were sympathetic in principle to the idea that Jews were a nation, and that like other nations, it would be good for them to have their own state. So there’s a famous letter that Adams writes many years later to Mordecai Manuel Noah, who is the most prominent Jewish politician in the early republic. And he says to Noah, I really wish to see the Jews again in Judea, a state. And he goes on to say: And yourself at the head of an army of 100,000. And I don’t take that too literally. In part–and people who quote the letter don’t always say this–Noah had been bothering Adams for a blurb for his book, basically. So he’s sort of sending him away with this nice sentiment that he can use for promotional purposes. For Adams–he wouldn’t say anything that he didn’t really believe, either. And there are lots of statements by prominent founders and framers that express this sort of sympathy, again, for something that looks a lot or sounds a lot like Zionism, a century before the emergence of the organized Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century.

James Patterson (16:13):

One of my favorite places to go in the United States is Savannah, Georgia. There’s a synagogue there called Congregation Mickve Israel, I think the oldest or one of the oldest synagogues, 1735 is the founding. And it was Sephardic Jews escaping the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. So in a way, when they came to Savannah, they didn’t realize that they were going to be bordering the Spanish to their south, and immediately became very good friends with the Anglicans there, because of this common threat from the Catholic Church. So sometimes the Christian Zionism is complicated and its history…

Sam Goldman (16:58):

And one of the complicating factors is that this is a time when there are very, very few Jews in the United States. Nobody really knows for certain because the census didn’t count in those days, but in 1800 there were almost certainly fewer than 10,000 Jews in the United States. And even that may be high because I can’t remember exactly where that estimate includes. So part of the complication in this story has to do with the relation between this idealization of the national Israel and the encounter with actually existing Jews in the United States or elsewhere.

James Patterson (17:49):

The Scofield Bible that you mentioned earlier is a major inspiration for what eventually becomes known as pre-millennial dispensationalism, and that’s very strongly associated with contemporary Christian Zionism as Tucker Carlson misuses it, as you explained. And what’s really great about your book is how you illustrate that a lot of the early sympathies for Jewish inclusion in the American project, as well as for the Zionist project, was not from fundamentalists, it was from mainline Protestants of the Presbyterian and Episcopalian and Methodist sort of variety. What is it about post-millenarianism, which gets less attention, that drove them to that?

Sam Goldman (18:41):

Well, so maybe we should step back first and talk about the differences in these theories. So the classic way of doing this is saying there are people who are pre-millennial or pre-millenarian and they believe that Christ is going to return in person and then set up the millennial kingdom. And it is said that these people are waiting for a catastrophe. Things are going to get worse before they get better, and then there’ll be this miraculous intervention in history. And that’s an idea that has come to be associated with Christian Zionism, as we said earlier, partly through the influence of people like Darby and Scofield. Against that is so-called post millennialism, post-millenarianism, which is the idea that first human beings will establish the millennial kingdom, which is this, sort of, not exactly utopian but vastly improved condition that the New Testament describes. And then Christ will come back at the end.

(19:55):

And it is sometimes said that people who hold this set of eschatological views are more inclined to campaigns of political and social improvement. They want to make things better. They believe that’s how you build up the Kingdom of God. There is something to that distinction, but I don’t think it is quite as sharp as people sometimes suggest. So right up to roughly the end of the nineteenth century, you can find, and I cite in my book examples of both pre-millennial and post-millennial thinkers who see the establishment of some kind of Jewish political entity in the Biblical Promised Land as part of the progress toward the millennial kingdom. The big division in the first half of the nineteenth century is not so much whether Christ comes before or after the millennium, but whether Christ is going to come in person. And there were plenty of post-millennial theologians who expected a personal and literal return of Christ after the establishment of the millennium.

(21:07):

And they tended to be quite sympathetic to this proto Christian Zionism, or as it’s sometimes called Christian restorationism. That changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as post millennialism becomes associated with what was known as the social gospel. The idea that what God and Christ want Christians to do is go and work on behalf of the poor and suffering and build earthly institutions that will reflect the teachings of charity and mercy and justice that are enjoined upon believers. And that understanding of the religious task becomes a major element in the liberal theology of the twentieth century. Now, let me bring it back to Christian Zionism. It is often suggested, especially for those who have this narrow definition of Christian Zionism and this stylized lineage going back to Scofield and Moody and Darby and others, that you didn’t find support for what is now the organized Zionist movement and eventually the state of Israel among these liberal post-millennial, social gospel type Christians, that it was concentrated in what by the 1920s were called fundamentalists.

(22:45):

But it turns out that that’s actually not true. A number of prominent social gospel figures were at least interested, although in some ways critical of the Zionist movement and the so-called Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish settlements in mandatory Palestine. And in the 1930s and especially during the Second World War, a group of Christian thinkers and activists associated with Reinhold Niebuhr tries to sort of extract that from what they see as the pacifism and the naivete of the social gospel. So by the late 1940s and early 1950s, so the immediate period of state founding, it was more common or at least more prominent to find advocates and defenders of the modern state of Israel among what were then called mainline Protestants and to some extent liberal Catholics, rather than fundamentalists or evangelicals. Once again, this was not universal. This was a source of major dispute in many churches, but those disputes go both ways.

(24:11):

So there were liberal Protestants, especially those associated with the ecumenical movement and the Federal and later World Council of Churches, who were very suspicious of Zionism and in no less a platform than Time Magazine, which was a big deal in those days. They fought that out with people like Niebuhr. But the same was true in fundamentalist and evangelical circles where many people did have this sort of eschatological belief that the establishment of the state of Israel was a step toward the second coming, but they were also very concerned about its socialist character. Remember that the state of Israel was nominally socialist and did not really firmly align with the West and the Cold War until the Korean War. So it took a little while. And also for the evangelical movement associated with Billy Graham that starts to emerge in the late forties and early fifties, there was a lot of concern about the restraints on proselytizing that the state of Israel imposed on Christians and not only on Christians. So you really see advocates of both sides of the question in both, for lack of a better term, liberal and conservative forms of Protestantism. And it’s not until quite a bit later than that, really the 1970s, that these categories start to get ironed out in ways that feel very obvious and familiar now, but again, as I suggest in my book, are a pretty recent development.

James Patterson (25:59):

The shaking out of those two categories is something that people like maybe Tucker Carlson’s age and younger sort of take for granted. They take for granted The Late Great Planet Earth and Left Behind and these kinds of resolutions that, as you say, take a century to resolve. And one of the causes for mainline churches to engage so much on this question was that, and this is something of a generalization, but in many cases, they are more proximate to large Jewish populations that have immigrated to the United States primarily in eastern coast areas. That’s as far as some Jewish immigrants could afford to arrive, right? They got off the boat with nothing, right? They became rag pickers…

Sam Goldman (26:48):

You mean they didn’t show up in Brooklyn and decide it was the greatest place on earth? There’s no reason to move on?

James Patterson (26:56):

Surprisingly, very few matcha latte vendors in Brooklyn at the time. The story of the liberal Protestant engagement with Zionism is often in terms with dealing with Jewish leaders that they became associated with. You even mentioned the ecumenical movement, which is the subject of Kevin Schultz’s book Tri-Faith America. How is it that they’re able to hash out some kind of consensus that eventually becomes known as the Judeo-Christian consensus, especially given that the third party incorporated was the Catholic Church, which as you mentioned, has very different considerations of eschatology and the nature of Israel?

Sam Goldman (27:44):

Yeah. So let me answer the second part first about Catholics and then circle back to your earlier question. So as you say, Catholics have historically a very different understanding of the relation of Israel to the Church, and standard Catholic doctrine very, very generally, certainly before Vatican II, is that the Church is the fulfillment of all the promises to Israel. So when (or I should say, if and when) you read the Old Testament and you see God promising these things directly or through prophets to Israel, they’re really talking about the Church. And this is the idea that the Protestants had challenged back in the sixteenth century. In addition to that theological position, the Catholic Church also claimed authority over the holy places in Jerusalem. It’s not uncontested; to this day you can see representatives of different churches and sects brawling in the streets of the Old City over control of certain shrines or holy places.

James Patterson (29:00):

There’s a ladder, right? Is it the church of Holy Sepulcher that no one moves because…

Sam Goldman (29:05):

Yeah, something like that.

James Patterson (29:07):

Nobody wants to say it’s their ladder or who can move it. As you say, you’ll have Franciscans in the street beating Greek Orthodox nuns, and nobody wants that.

Sam Goldman (29:19):

And the Catholic Church up to the establishment of the state of Israel had really hoped that Jerusalem would be declared an international city in which the Church would have religious custody over the holy places. So they did not like the outcome, the establishment of state of Israel and partition. Remember, people forget now, that most of Jerusalem, including almost all of the significant religious locations, were under Jordanian control, not Israeli control. But that starts to change in the late forties and early fifties for a couple of reasons. And one of them, which I think is more sort of global, is that a major political concern, the major political concern of the Catholic Church at that point was anti-communism. And it became clear, not immediately, but by say 10 years after the foundation of the state of Israel, that it was going to be part of the anti-Communist Alliance.

(30:30):

And that went some way in reconciling certainly high level Catholic officials, people who were thinking about geopolitics to the state of Israel in a way they weren’t at the time of its establishment. They were much more nervous about what it was going to turn out to be. The other cause, which is more specific to the United States, is the emergence of much stronger Catholic Jewish interfaith relations that really comes out of the American immigrant urban experience. The Jews and the Italians and the Irish all live together in these cities, and they have a long and complicated history of rivalry and tension. But in the twentieth century, there are a number of members of the Catholic clergy, Cardinal Cushing in Boston is probably the leading one, who are really trying to mend those relations. And one of the ways that they do that is through support, at least nominally for Israel and Zionism, which is a cause that’s very important to many American Jews.

(31:50):

And it provides a way for Catholics to say, look, we are on your side. That then turns into a theological argument. Some of these figures end up at the Second Vatican Council where the Church is reevaluating its stance on Jews and by the implication on Israel. And these more–here, I’m using the term very, very loosely, so everyone forgive me if you’re offended–“liberal” in a very broad sense, sentiments that come out of twentieth century America that are then sort of reflected back into Church doctrine. So it’s not a full rapprochement. I don’t think there’s been a full rapprochement to this day. This is more your field than mine. But by Vatican II, the Catholic Church, and many Catholics especially in the American hierarchy, see Israel as perfectly compatible with their religious and social and political commitments, rather than being at odds with it. Now, to return to your previous question, this is all very long-winded. This is the problem when you interview professors.

James Patterson (33:13):

No, but the thing is, I have as a pet peeve when the interviewer has on a person to listen to them. So I’ve always very self-consciously trying to make sure that when people come on the podcast that they get to talk about their stuff rather than hearing me. I’ve already felt like I’ve said too much.

Sam Goldman (33:34):

So you mentioned the idea of Tri-Faith or Judeo-Christian America or Judeo-Christian civilization. This is in my view, a much older idea. So having done this annoying thing with Christian Zionism and said, no, it’s older, it’s more complicated, it’s more deeply rooted, I have in mind maybe to write a book about Judeo-Christian civilization and do sort of the same thing. But certainly it’s an idea that becomes prominent in the 1930s as a way of describing a broad front. I mean, it’s like the religious popular front, all the churches, all the groups united together first against Nazism and later against communism. And this gets picked up in America in a particularly powerful way because it intersects with the American tradition of religious liberty and civic equality. So before World War II, and especially before World War I, it was completely normal to think of America, not just as a Christian nation, but as a Protestant nation, as a specifically Protestant nation that might tolerate non Protestants, but as having Protestantism at its core. During and after World War II, that kind of rhetoric doesn’t disappear, but it is marginalized. And instead, political figures and religious leaders start talking in very broad terms about Tri-Faith or Judeo-Christian America to create as broad a civic identity as possible, and that makes it much, much easier to think of Zionism and then the state of Israel as compatible with American aspirations and interests rather than outside or contrary to them.

James Patterson (35:46):

Yeah, when it comes to the Catholic Jewish story there, one of my favorites, I think I got this right, it’s from Machine Made, which is a book from 2014 by Terry Galway. I may be wrong about this, but it was a Tammany Hall thing where Irish Catholics during prohibition wanted to get alcohol. Now, there was no way to do that legally except through a religious dispensation, and they didn’t want to imitate being Catholic priests because they’re good Irish Catholics. So in Tammany, there are lots of Jews that have moved there recently, and the Jews don’t care if the Irish Catholics pretend to be rabbis because no one’s going to be fooled by Rabbi Ohanahan. And so they make them rabbis so they can get alcohol. They end up with Manischewitz. I’m not sure if it’s worth it!

Sam Goldman (36:39):

Well, this is also, by the way, the period when Italian food becomes America’s favorite foreign cuisine. Previously it had been German food, but after World War I, German things are very unpopular, but also at Italian restaurants, they would make wine in the basement, and suddenly Americans discovered a new affection for pasta that they hadn’t had before.

James Patterson (37:06):

Amazing, amazing how that works. The other story about this is that there was this very old continental European tradition of antisemitism, and it’s kind of represented in Charles Coughlin. He’s a radio priest in the thirties, and he’s sort of rivaled by Fulton Sheen, who’s very Philosemitic, refers to Jews as our elder brothers in faith. And the American bishops are so contemptuous of Coughlin, but they can’t get him off the air for reasons that are sort of beyond the scope of this. And then he finally says that Pearl Harbor was a Jewish conspiracy, which is hilarious to think of Emperor Hirohito on the phone with, I don’t know, the Elders of Zion. And because of that, he’s pulled off the air for seditious speech. So it is a close run thing at a certain point in mass media, but that gets us almost to the present now, where we start to see, as I mentioned already, The late Great Planet Earth and Jerry Falwell. That’s when we start to see the Christian Zionism that I think Tucker’s thinking about, and that this kid at the Heritage Foundation’s thinking about. What makes it kind of distinct from the stuff we’ve already described?

Sam Goldman (38:24):

Well, I would say the turning point is probably 1967, or the Six Day War, however you choose to describe it. And that’s where this sort of disaggregation of liberal and conservative, biblical and theological, to some extent, Protestant and Catholic tendencies begin, and you start getting something that looks much more like the kind of Christian Zionism that Carlson probably has in mind. So what happens in 1967? Well, Israel wins this extraordinary victory in a short time. OK, but what does it win? It wins control once again of the Old City, which had not been under Israeli authority previously. So there seems to be a moment in which God has reentered history and biblical prophecies are occurring. Once again, you go back to your Bible, it talks about the return to Jerusalem. Well, here are the Jews returning to Jerusalem.

(39:50):

And you can see it happening on TV. So I think that for a lot of Protestants, particularly in so-called evangelical and fundamentalist communities that sort of reawakened their sense that something was happening, that God was acting in history and big things were coming in the Holy Land. It didn’t create it. They sort of believed that in a general sense before. But again, here it was on TV in this remarkably dramatic context. But also, what else is happening in the world in 1967? It’s the peak or the nadir, if you prefer, of the Vietnam War. And what’s happening in Vietnam is that the great superpower is being fought to a stalemate, or seems to be fought to a stalemate, by these peasants in flip flops. So the juxtaposition is really powerful. America is Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians. It’s supposed to have all of this power but can’t do anything.

(41:00):

Meanwhile, Israel is David fighting Goliath (which is the rhetoric that you find everywhere in descriptions of this period) and it wins. So that suggests to some American Christians that, again, it’s not just that God is reentering history, but there’s a contrast between the biblically chosen nation, which is winning wars and getting things done, and an America that seems to be falling away from righteousness. So we’re being beaten in Vietnam, and you turn on the TV and there are hippies and kids are smoking dope. In Israel, as it seems, you have a disciplined, religious, sober people achieving their goal. So that’s really appealing to conservative Protestants. At the same time, some of the things that had once been appealing about Israel to liberal Protestants begin to recede. So it had been David, this plucky outsider, but now it’s won its war. Now it’s indisputably powerful. It starts to get harder to see it as the underdog there.

(42:22):

The Israelis are fighting with Western weaponry, mostly French, by the way. The United States had not yet become a major military supplier to Israel, but they’re fighting with Western weapons, and against whom? Against, as they see it, oppressed brown people who are parallel to the Vietnamese or the other anti-colonial movements of the world being suppressed by imperialism. Finally, the United States is beginning, if not a process of secularization exactly then a period of religious polarization. Before the late sixties, early seventies, knowing how religiously observant someone was didn’t really tell you very much about their politics. They could be liberals by the standards of the day or conservatives. They could be Republicans or Democrats. A sorting process is beginning where liberals, progressives and Democrats are more likely to be secular, and conservatives and Republicans are more likely to be religious. So what had been this sort of religious left even of Niebuhr’s period starts getting eroded and becoming more left and less religious in ways that are contrary to an enthusiasm for Israel.

(43:53):

So this doesn’t happen overnight. Really, into the 1970s, liberal Protestants like Franklin Littell, who is a Methodist, are sort of the face of Christian support for Israel in the United States. But by the late seventies and early eighties, roughly the Reagan in era, that’s changed. And it is people like Jerry Falwell, like Oral Roberts, later like Pat Robertson, who are much more consistently and explicitly conservative in their politics, are much more as they see it–obviously this is questionable, but as they see it–literalists in their reading of scripture, and who are also much more uncritical in their attitude toward Israel, which sometimes seems to interest them (this is less true of Falwell, I think, in that group) less as a real place with real people who have real interests in peace and security and normal life, and more as the aircraft carrier where Jesus is going to land. And as you’ve said and as we began the conversation, I think that is really what people have in mind now when they talk about Christian Zionism. And it’s understandable to some degree because that has been the public face of Christian Zionism now for at least 40 years.

James Patterson (45:31):

Yeah, the aircraft carrier where Jesus is going to land, that’s going to stay with me. With a Mission Accomplished banner, and gets out in a fighter jet. That is too great. The issue that I wanted to raise just as at the end here, is that Tucker Carlson tries to represent a particular kind of new version of the GOP that’s pivoting away from internationalism and what he regards as uncritical support for things like Israel or for Ukraine for that matter. But what’s weird is that what gave rise to this idea was that Donald Trump was going to be the figure that would initiate this break. And has there been a more pro-Israel president? Maybe Harry Truman? So I don’t understand why they think this is the moment to do that.

Sam Goldman (46:19):

Well, I can’t speculate. I don’t know what people imagine, but my impression is that there’s actually a lot of frustration with Trump for failing to execute this, if not break with Israel, sort of distancing from Israel. I think it is not surprising that Trump has failed to do this. His disposition in foreign policy is not non-interventionist or toward restraint. I think it’s basically what Walter Mead, who wrote a very good book about US-Israel relations calls “Jacksonian.” The Jacksonian disposition, as Mead describes it, has always had an affinity for Israel because these are tough guys defending themselves. They don’t take prisoners. They’re not hemmed in by lawyers and moral scruples. Whether or not this is true, I think that’s a big part of the appeal of Israel to a lot of Americans. And we should say as we’re having this conversation, according to polls, Israel and Jews remain pretty popular among the public at large. There has been some change in attitudes towards Israel, especially among younger Americans. But on the whole, it’s still doing reasonably well. And I think even apart from these religious considerations that Jacksonian quality is part of the reason. So Trump, as I think is often the case, is probably better attuned to his actual supporters than the social media political intelligentsia or sub intelligentsia. And at least for the moment, support for Israel is consistent with that.

James Patterson (48:30):

Trump’s not known for being terribly devout, but he’s at least probably been in the milieu for so long. He’s from New York. He grew up at a Protestant church. It’s probably beyond him; a lot of this stuff that’s coming out today just sort of doesn’t register. But I’m imagining now, because I’ve seen them already at events before, Tucker Carlson sort of beseeching Donald Trump at this side of a UFC fight, asking him to reconsider. Because I’ve seen them both together at a UFC fight before. It’s strange days, Sam.

Sam Goldman (49:15):

Every day is interesting.

James Patterson (49:18):

Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast, Sam. Your book is God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America. The article at Compact “Tucker Carlson is Wrong about Christian Zionism.” Thank you so much for coming on, Sam.

Sam Goldman:

Thanks James.

James Patterson:

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

In California, and on the left wing of the political spectrum, there has been a lot of chatter about abundance, the theme (and title) of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling new book. The book—praised by Governor Gavin Newsom—argues that progressives have been hurt by “well-intentioned” politicians with “blind spots” on economic issues like housing, especially in big cities where Democrats have embraced “scarcity politics” and heavy regulation.

Savvy observers such as Nate Silver have noted that Abundance, published after Democrats’ historic losses in 2024, was “carefully calibrated to persuade insiders” that progressives have been hurting themselves with heavy-handed economic policies that are doing more harm than good, particularly in US cities where progressives dominate the political scene. 

Alas, it seems that many Californians didn’t get the memo (much like New Yorkers). One week after voters in the Big Apple elected Zohran Mamdani mayor, the city council of Los Angeles took its own leftward lurch, voting by a 12–2 margin to ramp up the city’s rent control law.

Under the change, which was supported by LA Mayor Karen Bass, most Los Angeles landlords covered by the city’s rent-control system—about 75 percent of all rentals—will face much tighter limits on what they can charge for rent. Instead of being able to raise rents by 3 to 8 percent a year, they’ll now be restricted to increases of only 1 to 4 percent.

Members of the council said the goal was to make rent affordable for the more than 2 million people in the city’s rental market. “What we have before us right now is an opportunity to make L.A. more affordable,” said City Councilmember Nithya Raman, another supporter of the measure. “Because when people can afford to stay in Los Angeles this entire city thrives.”

There’s no question that the City of Angels is facing a housing crisis. She currently has a homeless population of some 44,000. The average rent for all homes is $2,750, according to Zillow—nearly 40 percent higher than the national average. Unfortunately, the city’s new rent-control policy is all but certain to make Los Angeles’s housing crisis much worse.

Economists don’t always agree, but one thing virtually all economists agree on is that rent control doesn’t make people better off. A 2024 University of Chicago survey of 45 leading economists showed striking agreement on two core questions: None of the economists agreed that a 5 percent rent-control cap would substantially reduce income inequality, while just one said a rent cap would make middle-income Americans better off over the next decade.

Rent control laws have many flaws, but the biggest is that they discourage the one thing that most effectively lowers housing prices: building new homes. By making it harder for landlords to turn a profit, rent control discourages the creation of new housing units (and disincentivizes maintenance of current units). Whether you’re looking at recent rent-control results in Europe and the US or historic examples in Latin America, the research tells a similar story: rent control makes housing affordability worse.

Lawmakers in my home state of Minnesota recently discovered this. In 2021, voters in St. Paul, the state capital, approved one of the toughest rent-control laws in the country. The following year, data showed building permits were down 80 percent—which prompted the city’s Democratic mayor to urge the city council to amend the law. Two years later, the St. Paul city council quietly gutted the measure.

California doesn’t need a complicated housing bill or a new stack of regulatory “solutions.” It simply needs to start respecting property rights again.

A simple glance at Los Angeles’s housing stock reveals the city’s real problem. Los Angeles has seen a steady decline in residential property permits in recent years, which largely stems from the city’s four-year “rent freeze” and aggressive tenant-rights laws that make it extremely difficult to evict tenants, even if they’re not paying rent or are destroying property. “It’s really hard to tell investors, ‘Let’s take all this risk,’ in a city that hates landlords and developers,” developer John Gregorchuk told Politico.

If you doubt Gregorchuk, consider that earlier this year, California lawmakers rejected a proposal to make it easier for property owners to remove squatters and trespassers. Many readers may not be familiar with California’s squatting problem, but perusing local media coverage reveals its scope and brazenness.

Online testimonials also abound. Benjamin Miller, the CEO of Fundrise, a company that operates in real estate and venture capital, recently described his experience of managing properties in Los Angeles. “The LA system is so insanely tenant friendly that a tenant has literally started bonfires in one of our unit living rooms and we still couldn’t evict them,” Miller wrote. “We had tenants who hadn’t paid rent in years. We had squatters who broke into the houses and dealt drugs from the house, and we couldn’t evict them.”

Progressives like to talk about abundance, but most of them don’t seem particularly interested in pursuing policies that lead to abundance. All too often it seems their real priority is preserving an ideological model of government-led solutions. The appearance of serving the “public good” outweighs actual public benefits, while their agenda conveniently serves entrenched interests—unions, contractors, and bureaucracies. The phenomenon—classic public choice in action—explains how you end up with $80 billion high-speed rail projects that go nowhere and $1.7 million public toilets.

Americans of all political stripes would do well to remember that the path to prosperity isn’t complicated. Adam Smith pointed out the formula centuries ago.

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice,” Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

The last part of Smith’s famous quote is often overlooked. His phrase “tolerable administration of justice” is admittedly vague, but it plainly includes basic property rights. At minimum, that means the freedom to sell one’s property at a chosen price and the authority to remove those who trespass.

California doesn’t need a complicated housing bill or a new stack of regulatory “solutions”; it simply needs to start respecting property rights again. If you doubt this, consider how Argentina recently solved its own housing-affordability crisis. President Javier Milei didn’t pass a high-profile five-point plan; he simply rescinded the country’s harmful rent-control law, which had disincentivized housing construction. The result was immediate: the cost of housing fell roughly 40 percent, and the supply of available units surged by 180 percent.

Many people, myself included, had hoped Klein and Thompson’s book would be a wake-up call for Democrats, whose favorability hit historic lows in 2025. With the Trump administration embracing its own command-and-control style of economics, there is an opening for an abundance and reform movement in the center or, as Klein has observed, on the center-left. 

If California is any indication, it unfortunately looks like progressives will chart a different course. Instead of choosing the abundance path—removing regulatory barriers and protecting property rights—leaders appear intent on doubling down on scarcity.

This is an ominous sign. If progressives in blue states and America’s largest cities remain hostile to property rights even as their cities fail, abundance will remain just a slogan—and the costs will be high.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, federal regulatory agencies have their own court system for adjudicating disputes that businesses and citizens have with regulators. These agencies rely on special courts headed by administrative law judges (ALJs). One big problem with this system is that it operates independently of legitimate Article III courts. Another problem is that agency-housed tribunals have a strong tendency to favor regulators over the regulated. And yet another problem is how these judges (which I call “transitory”) get loaned out between agencies. Inter-agency borrowing of ALJs may not immediately stand out to the average citizen as problematic, but it raises serious questions about constitutionality, executive transparency, and bureaucratic oversight.

In a new report for the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), I offer a systematic review of how federal agencies exchange their judges, analyzing a sample of 960 ALJs across forty-two federal agencies. In fact, agencies have likely lent and borrowed ALJs over the past ninety years, predating the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

The APA is considered the constitution for the administrative state. It outlines important procedures for agencies to adhere to when conducting rulemaking, rendering adjudication, and issuing statements of public policy. The APA requires select agencies containing statutory permission to conduct formal adjudication on the record (and often in public) under the oversight of an ALJ. Yet, the phenomenon of interagency borrowing of ALJs was born entirely outside of the APA’s requirements.

How did this controversial practice come to be? Several agencies managed pre-APA tribunals to adjudicate their legal matters. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has one of the oldest recorded instances of adjudicating public hearings within the federal government. The 1914 FTC Act enabled agency hearing officers (ALJs) to resolve disputes over unfair or deceptive acts and anti-competitive business transactions.

While ALJ borrowing formally began in the 1960s with the first documented instance at the NLRB, it may have begun decades earlier with the FTC in 1914 and the US Civil Service Commission in 1871. The Civil Service Commission is the predecessor to both the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

My report cites a 2014 case, Berlin v. Department of Labor, in which the MSPB borrowed a Coast Guard ALJ to conduct a two-day hearing for the Department of Labor. MSPB also borrows judges from the FTC through a special interagency system, adjudicating cases arising from other agencies. MSPB likely derived this power from the Civil Service Commission, which formally authorized ALJ borrowing at the National Labor Relations Board (NRLB) in the 1960s. While the NRLB’s historical report documents its internally hired or “stationary” ALJs, it keeps the identity of the agencies that lend ALJs hidden. This lack of transparency is concerning.

In addition to the above, the Department of Labor has a documented history of using pre-APA hearing examiners in the early 1900s. Examiners adjudicated public contracts for the manufacture and supply of materials under the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act (1936). In response to concerns over ex parte communications between Labor Department attorneys and examiners, its Division of Public Contracts kept them separated when traveling for work. Other agencies, like the Securities and Exchange Commission and NLRB, also took early steps to insulate their examiners from prosecutorial influence during the 1930s and 1940s. Most agencies today provide some degree of insulation for their judges after Congress amended the US Code in 1989 to provide ALJs with two layers of statutory removal protection.

Despite the above, Joanna Grisinger cites widespread concern over adjudicatory misconduct from a 1941 study by the Attorney General’s Committee on Administrative Procedure. According to the report, “parties confronted administrative officials not in formal courtrooms but in the agencies’ own offices, in space borrowed from other agencies, or in the field.” It is also very likely that agencies borrowed hearing examiners to conduct cases at these offices as well.

This early twentieth-century practice of agencies borrowing office space for hearings resembles a similar practice mentioned in my PLF report. My report reveals how the Surface Transportation Board borrows conference rooms at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to conduct its hearings. Not only that, but the Surface Transportation Board continually borrows most of its ALJs from FERC to this day.

In my report, I argue that ALJ borrowing is constitutionally suspect, however convenient for the agencies themselves, circumventing normal constitutional removal and appropriations processes.

Specifically, ALJ sharing can undermine the president’s Article II power to remove inferior officers for cause. If the ALJ is being lent to another agency, this process prevents the head of the appointing agency from removing that ALJ for work conducted at the borrowing agency. Such a predicament creates a legal gray area for the transitory ALJ to operate without being under the control of the appointing agency, lending agency, or the president. In reality, ALJs are federal officials who should always remain politically accountable to their superiors. Interagency sharing of ALJs undermines this accountability.

External agency officials cannot re-appoint ALJs to work at a separate agency without violating the Constitution.

Another constitutional concern with ALJ sharing is that agencies have obscured the source of funding for borrowed judges. My research has found that no borrowing agency provides a paper trail or budgetary justification for how they are paying their judges. The only agency that provides some financial detail is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, listing the terms of its agreement and the stipend for borrowing ALJs from the Department of Energy.

Despite this, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, like all other participating agencies, fails to justify where the money is coming from. Is it being siphoned from the budget reserved for hearings and appeals? Or perhaps ALJs are secretly paid from their enforcement fees, akin to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) procedure? In either case, Congress did not authorize such a circuitous funding process. These black-box methods fly in the face of the Article I Appropriations Clause. Agencies should be limited to spending only the money appropriated to them for their hired ALJs and staff, not for borrowing another agency’s judges.

Beyond the constitutional conflicts, ALJ borrowing circumvents the APA itself. We see this in APA § 556, where it requires an ALJ appointed by the president or the presiding agency head to be present during the taking of evidence. According to APA § 3105, ALJs are to be appointed by the agency employing them. This Appointment Clause requirement was later upheld in the Supreme Court’s decision in Lucia v. SEC (2018).

While an agency can hire and appoint as many ALJs as it wants under the APA, it cannot accept ALJ appointments made from separate agencies. In other words, external agency officials cannot re-appoint ALJs to work at a separate agency without violating the Constitution. The ALJ Loan Program supersedes the Appointments Clause by empowering OPM to authorize temporary ALJ appointments (loans). However, OPM is constitutionally precluded from acting in place of the agency head or the president when authorizing such ALJ loans. Courts reviewing challenges to agency adjudication should properly treat ALJ loans as duplicative appointments that are unauthorized under the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s Lucia opinion.

The only exception the APA recognizes for this in § 556 is those “specified classes of proceedings” that are “specially provided for by or designated under statute.” While the OPM’s 2007 rule—“ALJ Loan Program”—relies on a legislative amendment to the APA, the statute doesn’t provide for any specified or special proceedings that borrowed ALJs must oversee. There is no distinction between the cases that transitory ALJs and stationary ALJs review.

Another issue with the ALJ Loan Program is that some forms of ALJ borrowing violate this statute. According to the 1978 amendment, only agencies that are “occasionally or temporarily” short-staffed with ALJs may petition OPM to borrow another agency’s judge. However, as my PLF report demonstrates, several agencies like the Internal Revenue Service IRS, NOAA, Surface Transportation Board, Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and for a time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) each lacked any office of hearings. This means they did not employ any of their own ALJs during the time they borrowed from other agencies, contrary to statute.

The CPSC employed only one chief ALJ from 1975–80 and has since not hired any other judges internally. And while the CFPB appointed its first ALJ in 2016, it relied entirely on borrowed judges from its conception in 2011. This presents a major statutory breach to the 1978 amendment in 5 U.S.C. § 334, which does not permit agencies without their own office of ALJs to borrow from other agencies. The text of OPM’s ALJ Loan program also confirms this.

In addition to the above, section §557 of the APA requires each agency’s ALJ to conduct formal adjudication on the record in accordance with the organic statute of the agency. It, however, does not permit one agency to transfer quasi-judicial power to another.

Only agencies that are statutorily qualified to hear cases “on the record” can conduct formal adjudication under the APA. If the agency’s organic statute does not recognize such a function, an agency cannot inherit this power from a peer agency through an ALJ loan.

Section § 554 of the APA is quite clear in stating that agencies can only conduct evidentiary proceedings when “required by statute to be determined on the record after opportunity for an agency hearing.” This point is reiterated by Law Professor Kristin E. Hickman in her text, Understanding Administrative Law. Agencies are free to establish an internal tribunal to conduct such formal adjudication so long as their organic statute or enabling act permits this. Agencies like the IRS, CPSC, and NOAA fail to adhere to this requirement.

Agencies borrow and lend ALJs for two major reasons. First, some agencies are ALJ-deficient. They either have no ALJs or have limited judges relative to their annual docket of cases. The NLRB, for example, has a storied history of lending its ALJs during times of low-to-normal caseloads and borrowing ALJs when it experiences a surge in cases.

Second, agencies lend ALJs to peers who lack funding. Many of the borrowing agencies suffered lapses in funding for ALJs or never appropriated funding for an office of hearings and appeals in the first place. As previously discussed, at least five agencies without an internal office of judges have conducted adjudication entirely through borrowed judges.

This interagency exchange of ALJs and its inherent problems are widespread. Large agencies like the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration are among the top lenders of personnel. By contrast, some of the biggest borrowers of transitory ALJs vary in size, like the small Surface Transportation Board and mid-sized Small Business Administration. Interestingly, independent agencies occupy the most transitory ALJs relative to total agency headcount, while transportation policy was the largest domain for transitory ALJs.

The way this secret system works is that some judges move from agency to agency on a long-term basis (transfer), rather than on a short-term basis (loans). Most agencies tend to engage in a mix of ALJ borrowing, lending, and long-term transfers.

All told, agency adjudication remains an important, entrenched exercise of administrative power. Yet, such a privilege has been abused by the pervasive process of ALJ sharing. Congress and the executive office of the president should launch investigations into this problematic practice and consider reforms that restore power and accountability to constitutionally authorized institutions. Reforming this unaccountable practice would be one way to curtail the runaway power wielded by the administrative state.