Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

Congress constructed the edifice of federal environmental regulation atop a pile of misconceptions and mistaken assumptions. Once erected, it has withstood meaningful efforts at reform, and atrophied. However much some existing laws helped address twentieth-century environmental problems, they are increasingly obsolete and ill-suited to today’s environmental challenges.

Steven Hayward is absolutely correct that “it is long past time for something new,” and properly identifies many of the key attributes upon which a “new environmentalism” could be built. The case for greater utilization of property rights and supplementing market incentives for environmental purposes, such as through prizes, is quite strong. Substantial challenges remain, however. The environmental policy establishment shows little sign of altering course, and, at present, right-of-center political leaders show little interest in a serious or substantive approach to environmental policy.

The birth of the modern environmental movement coincided with an explosion of federal environmental legislation. In less than a decade, Congress enacted a raft of statutes seeking to counteract the environmental consequences of industrialization and centralize control of environmental policy in Washington, DC. Yet, as Hayward suggests, the specific contours of the new regulatory regime were premised upon mistaken, and in some contexts quite harmful, assumptions. For many in the nascent political movement, an environmental crisis required a reconsideration of basic liberal ideals, such as the importance of individual liberty and a belief in progress. In reality, it would have been more productive to commit more fully to applying classical liberal principles to ecological concerns—but that was not the road taken.

The statutes enacted in the wake of the first Earth Day sought to limit and control those economic activities identified as the source of environmental harms, often through the imposition of various permitting requirements. The idea behind this approach was that existing market institutions, however efficient they may be as a general matter, fail to account adequately for the “external” consequences of economic activity. The failure to account for such “externalities” thus required governmental intervention, in the form of regulation or other measures, to correct for this “market failure.” The problem is that such “externalities” are everywhere, so this rationale for government intervention can justify control of just about all economic activity.

Under the rationale of controlling “externalities,” regulatory mandates proliferated to the point where, as the late Richard Stewart observed, “it amounts to nothing less than a massive effort at Soviet-style central planning of the economy to achieve environmental goals.” And much like Soviet-style central planning, this approach initially produced some gains, but ultimately began to falter underneath the weight of its own ambitions. Since then, little has changed. Regulations continue to proliferate, and there has been minimal effort to enact reforms. Indeed, most of the major federal environmental statutes have not been reauthorized or meaningfully revised in the twenty-first century.

This could have been avoided. In his influential 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin explained how most environmental problems could be understood as the natural and avoidable consequence of treating ecological resources as open-access commons. In such situations, there is no incentive to conserve or protect the underlying resource, as any benefits from such forbearance are dispersed among all users. On the other hand, each individual can capture the benefits of exploiting the resource for themselves. And as each individual responds to the incentives created by the underlying arrangement, “ruin is the destination toward which all men rush.”

Hardin noted that one way to prevent this tragedy is through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,” and that is the lesson most drew from his essay (in addition to a myopic and somewhat misanthropic fear of population growth). Too often overlooked was Hardin’s other prescription: property rights. The tragedy of the commons can be “averted by private property, or something formally like it,” Hardin noted, but few heeded this advice. Instead of seeking innovative ways to apply property principles to threatened resources, policymakers sought to bring ever more private activity under government control, and the environment was not much better for it.

Hardin’s lesson has been learned in some areas, even if there is a reluctance to expand on the lesson. Fisheries conservation, in particular, has benefitted from the proliferation of “catch shares” and other property-based reforms, coinciding with increased aquaculture production outside of the marine commons altogether. Western water rights have further shown that the recognition and protection of marketable rights in natural resources can foster conservation and encourage sustainable use, allowing users to fulfill economic demands while accommodating and accounting for ecological concerns. Taking a broader view, it is generally those resources most incorporated into market institutions through property rights and market exchange, protected by the rule of law, that are managed most sustainably.

A more principled approach would get the government out of the practice of picking winners and losers altogether, providing for a stable and predictable legal environment.

Beyond conservation in the commons, the economic incentives created by property, prices, and the pursuit of profit have yielded what is simultaneously the most important and least remarked environmental trend of the twenty-first century: dematerialization. In advanced market economies, resource consumption has been decoupled from economic growth, such that material consumption is actually declining as countries continue to grow. This development has been driven not by regulatory mandates or restraints, so much as it is the product of market dynamics, entrepreneurial responses to economic constraints, and permissionless innovation. In the simplest of terms, where markets are most robust, Malthusian prognostications have been most often dispelled.

The architects of federal environmental law also erred in assuming that centralized leadership and direction of environmental policy in Washington, DC, was necessary, or even desirable. When the first federal environmental regulatory statutes were adopted, it was assumed that state and local governments could not be trusted to address local or regional environmental concerns. The prevailing narrative, that the failure of state and local governments and private efforts to prioritize environmental protection was leading to ever-worsening environmental conditions, was but a fable. The same groundswell of environmental concern that led to the enactment of federal environmental laws had already been working at the state and local level, and many key environmental indicators were already pointed in the right direction. Progress continued after the enactment of federal environmental laws, to be sure, but it is far from clear that federal intervention was the cause.

Particularly with the benefit of hindsight, the outlines of an alternative environmental agenda should be visible, one that recognizes property rights as the foundation of effective conservation, embraces the importance of local community input, and encourages technological innovation and market-driven efficiency improvements. Such an alternative is in line with classical liberal principles and would align with constitutional values far more than the sprawling regulatory edifice we currently have in place.

The problem is that few political leaders have been willing to embrace such an alternative vision of environmental progress. As Hayward recounts, the initial wave of environmental lawmaking was a bipartisan enterprise. Over time, Republican lawmakers grew disenchanted with the growth of centralized environmental regulation and the environmentalist movement’s near-unending appetite for further government constraints on productive economic activity. Yet few were willing to consider, let alone embrace, an alternative policy vision.

For most of the past thirty years, conservative political figures have had an easier time deciding what to oppose and what to support. Criticizing regulatory overreach and opposing the enactment of additional controls is relatively easy. Identifying alternative paths toward continued environmental progress has been far more difficult. Thus, the conventional Republican response to Democratic proposals has been to offer a similar agenda at a discount or to deny the need for reform altogether. Neither is particularly satisfying on policy or political grounds. There are real environmental problems and ample reasons to want change from the status quo. Denying the existence of environmental problems is mere avoidance, and it is neither inspiring nor effective to try and solve existing problems on the cheap.

In recent years, the political dynamic may have gotten even worse as tribal loyalties have subsumed policy development. To many, it has become enough to oppose whatever the other side wants, without regard for the merits. So if Democrats like renewable energy projects, Republicans must oppose them. Subsidies and regulatory barriers must thus be adjusted accordingly to align with each tribe’s preferred energy sources and industries.

A more principled approach would get the government out of the practice of picking winners and losers altogether, providing for a stable and predictable legal environment in which firms could invest in promising energy projects of whatever sort without having to navigate mountains of paperwork and rivers of red tape.

Despite the tremendous environmental progress of the past century, serious environmental challenges remain. Meeting such challenges in an effective and efficient way, without sacrificing other societal needs, will require turning away from the environmental paradigms of the past and embracing the sort of new environmental vision Hayward recommends. The real question is whether there are any political leaders willing to embrace such an environmental agenda and push for reform. Looking at Washington, DC these days, the forecast is cloudy.

Many are familiar with Catholic and Protestant flavors of Christian social thought, but little is known about Orthodox iterations. Dylan Pahman joins the podcast to talk about his book The Kingdom of God and the Common Good, which aims to fill that gap. In it, he explores both the thought of Orthodox theologians and social thinkers less-known in the West and explains how the rise of Communism delayed the development of social thought in the Orthodox world.

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The Kingdom of God and the Common Good by Dylan Pahman

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson. Today with me is Dylan Pahman at the Acton Institute. Dylan has written a tremendous compendium of Orthodox social teaching, especially on economics. It’s titled Kingdom of God and the Common Good. Is it “in the Common Good” or “in Common Good”?

Dylan Pahman (01:07):

The Kingdom of God and the Common Good.

James Patterson (01:09):

Okay. My PDF has a slightly abridged title up here. So …

Dylan Pahman (01:14):

Sequel will be Two Kingdom God, two, common Good, and so on. We’ll drop the the’s at some point and be a new title.

James Patterson (01:21):

Please tell me that this is the first time you’ve used that joke. Okay. As some listeners know, when I interview people who are my friends, things tend to be a little bit looser. Dylan and I have known each other for many years and I’m very excited about this project because it is something that I never thought of, but rather than having me explain it, how about we’ll have Dylan. So Dylan, tell us about what inspired you to write this project to maybe give us the elevator pitch for the listeners.

Dylan Pahman (01:54):

Yeah, definitely. So I’ve been working here at Acton for 14 years as a research fellow and as an editor of our academic journal. And I got all my degrees are in theology, so all the economics and political theory I’ve learned on the job. And part of that was reading a lot of great scholarship and hearing a lot of great lectures of people talking about Roman Catholic social thought and Calvinist social thought, and even some Lutherans and other people. And I am Greek Orthodox, and I kept thinking, well, “what’s our perspective on all those stuff?” And for those unfamiliar, the term “Christian social thought” refers to the problem of the working poor in the industrial era and then further issues, social and economic issues beyond that. So it begins in the Roman Catholic tradition with the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. And that was “On the New Things” is literally what it means or on revolutionary change.

(02:50):

So he is looking at the problems of social unrest and the rise of socialism, and he’s trying to come at it from the wealth of, at that point, 1,900 years of Christian tradition while also admitting that the world was very different and trying to engage that. And so that was the, inspiration is I really felt like my tradition needed something like that too. I think there’s a lot we can learn from other traditions and in fact, the first part–the book’s in five parts–the first part is just a survey of here’s what the other Christians are doing. Orthodox tend to like to be special sometimes, and we are special, but we also need to be part of the broader conversation. And I really don’t think we’ll know what our unique contribution is until we’ve actually surveyed, well, here’s what the other Christians are doing, here’s what the common ground is, and here’s maybe some areas of dissonance.

(03:38):

So the goal is to research and figure out what are orthodox principles for engaging our modern world and our modern economies and questions of wealth and poverty today, all the complexities of wages and lending and monetary policy and all that kind of stuff. And so what I wrote was basically the book I wished existed 14 years ago that didn’t exist. It’s a book that walks readers through contemporary Christian social thought, biblical teaching on wealth, poverty and society, orthodox church history, and then a survey of modern economics, which I actually look at historically. So my goal is that each chapter is very short, 2,000 to 3,000 words, like Law & Liberty essay length and people can maybe read one a day, that sort of thing and work their way through the book. And instead of bombarding people with terms, I take this more historical approach where I tell the story of Orthodox social thought and I tell the story of modern economics.

(04:35):

So we get a sense of who were the people; who was Adam Smith; who were the classical political economists; what were they dealing with; what motivated the rise of socialism and Marxism and what was the difference with Christian socialism and social activism and that kind of stuff. And then I finally take readers to contemporary Orthodox contributions, which there have been some, but part of the problem is that history that with the Russian revolution, you have atheistic, militaristic communism, just sweep across Eastern Europe and Russia and other traditionally Orthodox land had for a long time been under the Ottoman Empire and you just don’t really have a space for Orthodox to think freely about this stuff. The thinkers who did escape, and many of them were exiled from Russia, suddenly they find themselves with a very different set of questions that they concern themselves with. So they are wondering, well, how do we be faithful to our Eastern Orthodox tradition while living in the West?

(05:31):

And they start focusing on questions of ecumenism. And those are very good things, but it’s very distant from that question of, well, how do I be a good Orthodox Christian banker or whatever? How do I live in our modern economy as a faithful orthodox Christian? So that’s the goal of the book, is to walk people through that so that they know the story, they know our tradition and they know something of how modern economies work to prevent the kind of unfortunate and sometimes embarrassing statements that you can find on blogs and unfortunately sometimes even in unofficial church documents about the nature of wealth and poverty in our economies today.

James Patterson (06:10):

So I was actually about to ask you about the intervention of Soviet communism because I know a lot of listeners, their probably biggest association with Orthodoxy is going to be Russian Orthodoxy. So what happened with the encounter, not just of Russian Orthodoxy, but of Eastern Orthodox in general with communism? How did they respond to it in their social thought?

Dylan Pahman (06:42):

Yeah, so you can find writings actually as early as Vladimir Solovyov, who is a nineteenth century Russian Orthodox philosopher. He died in 1900. His first book is very metaphysical, but it begins with a critique of socialism. So he’s already seeing it in the kind of mid- to late-nineteenth century. His last book, The Justification of the Good, has a whole section on economics, and again, he sees this kind of danger. And then even more so in the early twentieth century, there’s an excellent volume that I recommend. I think you can find the PDF on archive.org. It’s called Vekhi, which is Russian for landmarks. And it was a collection of authors. It’s probably the most successful edited volume of scholars that I’ve ever heard about because usually they get published and never read, but it brought together, let’s see, S. L. Frank Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, somewhat recognizable names, but they were critiquing the Russian intelligentsia in 1909, so eight years before the revolution.

Dylan Pahman (07:43):

At that time there were storm clouds on the horizon. And there had been a failed revolution, actually. So they were almost taking a victory lab. These were all intellectuals who had had a religious turn in their thought and had realized that the kind of nihilistic and Marxist fervor was very, very much mistaken. And so they were critiquing their peers, their former peers at least. And as you might imagine, it was not well received. There was a huge blowup about this. Even people, Bulgakov was a cadet. He was basically the closest you could find to a liberal at that time. And he was part of the second Duma in Russia and the Russian Empire. But even people in his party didn’t like it, probably most notably Vladimir Lenin wrote a response to it. I mean, it really had that level of impact. And they talk about things that would be very recognizable to readers of Law & Liberty, the importance of rule of law and order and religious and moral culture, all that sort of stuff.

(08:43):

You see these thinkers really wrestling with these issues. And like you said, they kind of see the storm clouds on the horizon. And unfortunately you have this conflict. And that’s part of what I try to answer in the course of the book is to say, “well, what happened?” I mean, the Russian Empire is a mess in a lot of ways, but there’s nothing inevitable about history despite what Marxists will tell you, no un-combatable historical dialectic that we’re all just at the mercy of. People have free will. And why did a nation like that go in that direction? You see, in the early twentieth century, they were moving towards having a constitution with recognizable liberal human rights protections and things like that. But you had just this building and building and building of this class that had been about a hundred years before disenchanted with their role in society.

(09:40):

So the intelligentsia were basically aristocratic young men who ordinarily would’ve entered the civil service. And for the first half of the Russian Empire, there was a liberalizing trend, and it was not without problems from an Orthodox perspective, but it wasn’t all uncritical either. Their interaction with Western ideas and they were moving towards probably having a constitution. But then you get, I believe Czar Nicholas I and things changed upon his succession. You have the Decemberists uprising, the Decemberists murder the Czars negotiator, which was a very bad idea. I think they shot him in the back. They were the moderates as well, among people who wanted a constitution. The Decemberists, the moderates shoot the czars negotiator in the back. And so the czar commands his troops to turn his cannons on the crowd. And that’s kind of the end of that liberalizing trend in the Russian. That’s Russian,

James Patterson (10:34):

Russian politics in 30 seconds right there.

Dylan Pahman (10:36):

And so you have people, if you read Pushkin’s, Eugene Onegin, it’s all about this guy. You get this character in Russian literature called “the superfluous man,” and it’s this disenchanted young aristocrat, and it comes up again and again because it was a common phenomenon of people who thought their role was to reform Russian society and to lift up the former serfs and whatnot. And then they just kind of find themselves listless and directionless. And if they can, they get their hands on books. In fact, one of the reasons you find a lot of people coming out of seminaries being so radical in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, it’s the seminarian who’s the most nihilistic and terrible character in almost the most in the book. And that’s because seminaries were one place where they could still have books that were banned elsewhere. The church was actually trying to protect freedom of speech, but unfortunately that meant there was books like Karl Marx where in the libraries, Joseph Stalin was like a Georgian seminarian as a youth.

(11:40):

And you see that sort of a trend. And so you end up, and then in the midst of all that, the last czar completely bungled military policy in World War I and economic policy at home; people are just losing their jobs standing in long breadlines an absolute disaster, and it’s just ripe for revolution. So you get this conflict, and I mean, frankly, many people at the time, and from an orthodox point of view will also say, and the devil, I mean, read Russian literature. It’s unusual for someone not to have a conversation with the devil at some point. And Bulgakov called it a black miracle that you have this society that is a thoroughly Christian society, has its issues and problems, but it’s moving in this recognizable direction. And then just the most terrible thing happens. I mean, conservative estimates count something like a million people martyred, more liberal ones would be up to 10 million by the Bolsheviks.

(12:44):

So it’s a really, really terrible time. Most of the bishops of the church are replaced by atheist agents of the church or of the state. All but one monastery was completely shut down, turned into a museum or labor camps. So really, really awful thing. And it’s something that you can only understand in part by understanding the history of economics. You have to understand, well, what is it about Marxism that captures people’s imagination? And I talk about that. There’s two chapters in my book where I deal specifically with Marxism, and one, I look at it as a worldview. So Marxism is sort of like the ultimate conspiracy theory. It’s something wrong in your life. Well, here’s the answer: you’re oppressed and there’s an oppressor. And yeah, he’s the bourgeois, but in other ages he would’ve been, there’s again this historical dialectic that suddenly can help people make sense of their reality.

(13:38):

I don’t think it correctly does, but you can see the appeal, right? You’re struggling. You know what? It isn’t your fault. And sometimes it’s not people’s fault, but it’s just this story that suddenly they can, this meta narrative that they can hang in all of their problems, all the problems they see in society and make sense of it all. And we are storytelling people as human beings. We want a story to hang everything on, and Marxism provides that for one and it provides a very powerful one. Yeah, the Communist Manifesto says the history of all societies is the history of class struggle, which I think from a historical perspective is the most ridiculous historical statement I’ve ever read. They say everyone is conspiring this, including Pope and Czar, never mind that the Pope condemned the czar for forcibly converting Catholics to Orthodoxy at the same time. No, they’re conspiring together.

James Patterson (14:31):

That’s right.

Dylan Pahman (14:31):

For the sake of capital. But the reason that works from a Marxist perspective is well, they all have a false consciousness. They all are under the sway of these social forces because it’s ultimately material. There’s no place for human persons in Marxism, for that inherent dignity and freedom. We are the product of a historical equation, even to the point where Engels says the same about Marx, that he discovered this great material, historical, social dialectic. But you know what? The time was right. It was bound to be discovered. If not Marx, someone else. He says this, this is his friend. He gives his friend no credit for his own intellectual achievement. He ultimately kind of worships this as something in the place of God. And that’s a critique you find from Father Sergei Bolgakov, which I draw upon in that chapter. It says, ultimately this is a religious movement and it’s trying to stand in the place of religion for people.

(15:30):

And what does religion do? Among many other things, it gives people a narrative, a meta narrative to make sense of their world. And so that’s the power of Marxism. And then the other side that I look at is the economic analysis of Marxism and why that doesn’t work, why the marginal revolution ended up becoming the mainstream in economics and why it actually better explains reality. I feel like this is a long answer to your question, but I hope it’s still interesting. The example I give about why Marxist analysis doesn’t work, and I try to do this with every chapter, if I can, I have some kind of little attention grabbing hook to help it be relatable. So I talk about how two years ago, Hasbro Company, Wizards of the Coast published a genius crossover product: Magic the Gathering cards that were Lord of the Rings-themed just as J. R. R. Token intended, I’m sure.

(16:25):

And among those cards, they printed a one of a kind printing of the one ring card and card collectors were really stoked to get it. And they’re opening these $12 or $13 packs of little rectangles of cardboard trying to find this one ring card. And eventually a young woman did open the card, she found it, and she sold it at auction to Grammy award-winning musical artist Post Malone for $2 million. Now, according to Marxist analysis, the price of something and the market directly reflects the amount of labor put into producing it. There was no more labor that went into producing that rectangle of cardboard than any of the other ones.

James Patterson (17:11):

Wait, to be clear, it is a card of a ring. It’s not actually,

Dylan Pahman (17:16):

Oh, no, it’s not actually a ring. Nope, it’s not. It’s like a baseball card.

James Patterson (17:20):

With a demonic.

Dylan Pahman (17:23):

Nope.

James Patterson (17:24):

Or power. It’s just a card.

Dylan Pahman (17:25):

Nope, it’s just a card. It might be kind of glossy. There might be some foil on there or something, but nope, just a card, just cardboard. And the young woman who opened the pack didn’t take any more labor for her to open that pack compared to anyone opening any other path. It just doesn’t explain reality at the end of the day, the labor theory of value, the other element being the assumption of equality exchange, but I don’t need to get into that, but that’s kind of the idea.

James Patterson (17:49):

Did Post Malone throw the card into a volcano?

Dylan Pahman (17:53):

Maybe he should. Maybe that’s why our world is so chaotic these days because Post Malone just won’t do the right thing. He’s trying to use it for his own power. I don’t know. I’m sure he’s got it framed and behind a glass case or something like that.

James Patterson (18:07):

It’s either that or the orb, which is, remember when Donald Trump went to Saudi Arabia and put his hands on the orb? We entered a second dimension at that point.

Dylan Pahman (18:17):

That’s one of those news events where I’m just like, I think I’m a smart guy, but I don’t think I really understand the world. End of the day, I didn’t even know they had an orb. Not to mention what its function is. I still don’t know.

James Patterson (18:29):

They haven’t brought it back. Have you noticed the orb is a one and done like the one ring card.

Dylan Pahman (18:35):

Served its purpose, I guess? Yeah, right. Anyway, so that’s a very long route to answering your question of, but it is a big question. How did communism happen? So part of that is just there was the right opportunity. There was a disaffected class of at least pseudo intellectuals, and then there was a really terrible economic and military and national crisis, and people were fed up and they took power into their own hands.

James Patterson (19:02):

So when it comes to the development of modern economics, so the eighteenth century is normally sort of looked at, but when you take a look at where a lot of Orthodox Christians are sort of in the occupied territories of what used to be Byzantium, they’re bearing witness to the silk trade. They see all of this specialization that comes in. Its manufactured, the conveyance of goods and the marking up of prices for risk and discovery. So does that area of orthodoxy, the Greek Orthodox and the Balkan areas, did they develop a greater appreciation for modern economics that maybe doesn’t translate into the same ideas that we have in Western Europe?

Dylan Pahman (19:49):

Well, I mean, it’s hard to find translated treatises on economic issues. I’m actually not convinced they don’t exist. I just don’t think it’s what’s interested scholars for a long time. Usually if you’re looking into that stuff, you’re looking at philosophy or theology, and then you’re into metaphysics or the doctrine of the Trinity or something like that. And if you see a treatise on usury, that’s just not the normal scholar’s interest, and so they’re going to overlook it. But I will say, actually that’s a really good example of a East-West difference is the question of usury. So in the West, partly due to the rediscovery of Aristotle and adopting his definition of money and his definition of usury. For them, all interests on a loan was sinful usury. And this was based on Aristotle saying, well, it’s not the nature of money to reproduce itself.

(20:40):

It’s not like seed that you can plant in the ground and get many more seeds. It’s just money. It’s sterile. Now, he’s not really thinking it through as later scholars even in the West would point out that you use money to create stuff and then you make more money, and that’s how you get more money from your money. But there of course, is the problem of exploitation. There are predatory loans out there, and in the ancient world, that was a real concern. If someone is desperate and coming and asking for a loan, they probably can’t pay it back. And so it amounts to theft and an attempt to completely dispossess them to even give them the loan in the first place. But what you find, because the east was less agrarian and had to be more commercial, as you said, they’re kind of at these trading junctures.

(21:26):

Legally there’s never a ban on usury. I think it was once attempted by Leo the Isaurian, who is known in church history for being one of, I think it was the first emperor to try to impose iconoclasm. So he’s not exactly the most orthodox or popular emperor in the history of our church. And it’s like the law that I’ve read is funny because he is basically chastising everyone, like, well, we tried this, but since everyone’s so sinful, we’re going to go back to having some usury. And if you look at the Justinian code, it just caps the rate of interest at a certain point depending on the kind of loan. And that’s actually really common in the East, including in the Middle East. There’s records of church cannons. Church cannons ban priests from lending at interest, clergy from lending at interest. And that gets a very important theoretical distinction, which does come up in the book starting with the section on the Bible between the law and the gospel.

(22:20):

So the law aims at impartial justice, and you actually see this in Deuteronomy. Ancient Israel was allowed to lend an interest to foreigners. I don’t think that was the poor foreigner they’re always called to care for among them. I think that’s like a traveling merchant, right? Somebody who could be expected to pay back a loan with interest. But among their own people, if someone comes to you and they’re your friend or your family, I mean Jesus is the same thing. Someone comes to you and says, “I need help. Can you give me a loan?” He says, “lend expecting nothing in return.” Well, you have a personal relationship. It’s not at the level of law. It’s at the level of mercy. The gospel focuses on mercy. And so you see, canon law is an organized body of law, but it’s law aimed at a system of mercy that pastoral restoration of a person. Whereas the civil law, it has to be impartial, has to file the rule of law a bit more strictly in a positive sense, and then they just cap the rate of interest because they know that you can’t have commerce without that. They’re trading with Russians and with Persians and with people from all around the world. And the empire wouldn’t have survived a thousand years if they didn’t do that. So there’s a different sensibility just because of a different historical experience there as well.

James Patterson (23:36):

Does there emerge any kind of new understanding of sort of orthodox social thought from its contact and eventual conquest in some ways with Islam? Because Islam has its own kind of Sharia sort of conceptual work here, Sharia here, not meaning the scary stuff, but they have their own system of laws about trade, and it’s usually very favorable to commerce.

Dylan Pahman (24:04):

Right. It is. Although they specifically do have laws about lending, and they have a whole system of ways of getting around their absolute interest prohibitions.

James Patterson (24:13):

Selling someone a token for a very large sum of money and then you giving it back to them,

Dylan Pahman (24:22):

Right, right. You find similar stuff in the early modern West, actually with the triple contract. That was something I do talk about Scholastic economics, actually. That’s where I start the history of economics. I talk about the Jesuit to the School of Salamanca and some Protestant writers as well. But I had to cut the part about the triple contract. It was just too much detail for the sort of book that it is. But yes, I actually have a whole chapter on orthodox Christians and Christians in general in the Middle East after the fall of Jerusalem, basically from the fall of Jerusalem to the Ottoman Empire. And so what you find is not so much different economic thought, although Christians did have a different view of usury. For example, Christians, what you find is a social shift. So suddenly Christians could no longer serve in the military,

(25:10):

But they could serve as administrators, public administrators. For centuries, they were the most competent people and the majority there. So they continued kind of running a lot of society and they dominated the trades. So education, medicine, and there was a ton of Christian merchants. So what you have is this interesting situation where in many cases, Christians were persecuted and they become second class citizens. This is dhimmitude; they have to pay a head tax, but they were often tolerated. So it’s really kind of a mixed bag; it depends on usually the temperaments of the caliphs rather than necessarily anything fundamental to Islam. And what you find is now you’ve suddenly gotten Christianity for the first time since Constantine disentangled from the state, right? And from any kind of state favoritism. So what you see at that time is actually the birth of the Scholastic method. It comes from Christian scholars, and the purpose of it is they want to reasonably debate with one another about things like the nature of Christ.

(26:14):

There were three different churches actually that had slightly different views about the nature of Christ. And then of course they want to also dialogue with Muslims, with Manicheans, Zoroastrians. There’s this religious pluralism that they encountered. And there’s this kind of amazing wealth of people that, and on one sense it’s a very different context, but in another sense, there’s a lot we can learn that we live in pluralistic societies today, and at least in the United States, there’s no established church or religion. So there’s actually quite a bit that are these amazing treasures that I actually added the chapter to the outline after the book proposal was accepted because Ancient Faith, the publisher is a ministry of the Antiochian church in the United States. And I thought, “boy, I have this whole thing on orthodox history. I should have a chapter that tells their story.” These are Palestinians, Syrian, Lebanese, Orthodox Christians, largely, at least historically.

(27:11):

I was like, “I need a chapter.” And thankfully there has been enough Arab Orthodox sources translated into English as well as some good secondary sources. I was able to write that chapter, and I’m so glad I did because it gave this excellent bridge in terms of natural law and the scholastic method to talking about the early economics of those Jesuits. And it also showed, again, this common ground I get a little tired of. I am Orthodox. I chose to be Orthodox, I’m a convert. I do have some strong convictions about our church, but I do get frustrated with the polemics. There’s a lot out there that’s “Oh, the West is just scholastic and rational and bad, but we’re mystical and good.” And it’s like there’s no scholastic method without us. We invented it. It came through these Christian educators to then Muslim scholars to then the west. And in the Byzantine era, everybody was a scholastic, east or west. It’s a silly sort of thing that I think is an example, that kind of unhelpful, unhelpful rhetoric that actually obscures what’s unique about orthodoxy rather than bringing it to the fore. So I think there’s a lot to learn from Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians and from that experience under Muslim rule.

James Patterson (28:26):

I was actually about to go. You’re anticipating my questions. This is good, Dylan. I don’t know why I’m narrating my thought process into the microphone, but might have something to do with being at Dollywood all day yesterday. The experience in the West is so different from that of the Orthodox. They’re in control of their own regimes, but they’re all fighting each other and they’re not just fighting each other in temporal authority, but also over spiritual authority. You have different popes showing up depending on who was allied with different kings. And this is not as true in Spain for obvious reasons, but when we think about France, Italy, Germany, and to a lesser extent England. And so the result is after the Reformation, there is another sort of attempt for those states to adopt a singular understanding of Christian social thought, but one that is considerably more pro-usury than well just lending, right? It’s not actually considered lending. And so what you end up with is this kind of fractured space of Protestant and Catholic social thought. And as you’ve indicated before, the Orthodox approach has a kind of productive engagement in the book. So why don’t you tell me about the modern version of Orthodox social thought as it confronts the Catholic effort to reckon with the industrial revolution as well as the Protestant?

Dylan Pahman (29:59):

Yeah. Okay. So some of the back history that I think is really interesting, you’re right that in the West there is that difference in the medieval period, but you actually see something similar in the Orthodox East when it comes to the Russ. So Vladimir unites them and baptizes them all, but then they start fighting with each other again. The Mongols show up and they say, out of my cold dead hands, and the Mongols say, okay, and then they conquer just about everybody with the exception of Novgorod and Pskov, who very wisely just preemptively surrender and agree to pay a tax. And they actually are both republics for over 300 years. So similar to you get Northern Italy and German republics, you get Magna Carta in England. So you see a similar Christian progression in the East. There are some differences though. So there’s no guilds in the East, which is an interesting phenomenon.

(30:52):

And what you have in the absence of guilds is a domination of monastic commerce. A lot of the markets were on monastery grounds, monasteries owned factories and bars and all sorts of printing presses, that kind of thing. As far as in the modern era, that’s when you have, well, the fall of Constantinople. So you do lose a lot of the intellectual powerhouse there. But you get the rise of Kiev again this time as part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. So actually technically part of the West, a Catholic kingdom, but one that was uniquely in favor of religious liberty at a time when everyone else was killing each other. It’s like they have, there’s constitutional documents you can find where they actually explicitly mentioned freedom for Greek Christians, meaning Orthodox, but they were also favorable to Protestants.

James Patterson (31:39):

Just to interrupt, that is a policy that makes sense when you have the Germans to your west and the Russians to your east. Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s not find each other guys.

Dylan Pahman

(31:48):

Yes. And they had two kings and they elected, I mean, it’s really fascinating thing. This is a bit of a tangent there. But anyway, you have this rise of Kiev in the first Orthodox theological school in the modern era is Peter Mogila’s Academy. And Peter Mogila was very much just reading Jesuit theology and then trying to make it Orthodox. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He made a catechism that was modeled after the Tridentine catechism, but it was so Catholic that he submitted it to, he said, “Hey, I think the whole church should adopt this.” And they’re like, “Hey, that’s great, but maybe you should take out all this stuff about literal fire and purgatory because we don’t believe in that.” He was just like, “oh, okay, sure, I’ll take it out.” I mean, he didn’t really know any better. So to some degree, you kind of have the Orthodox lagging behind a little bit.

(32:36):

You also have a very different social experience. So in Spain, once it’s re Christianized, one of the first things they do is discover the New World. And the New World means gold, and the Spanish empire is very much gold means being rich, and so we want more gold. And the result, Marjorie Grice Hutchinson notes, is that prices doubled twice in the sixteenth century: inflation. And combine that also with really terrible monetary policy that people were convincing the king to debase the coins in addition to flooding the market with a ton of extra gold. They’re also debasing the purity of their coin, and it just runs havoc. So that’s how you get all these treatises in the West about proper monetary policy in the early modern era. Whereas in the East, they’re just trying to survive under the Ottomans, right? They have a very different experience. So you shouldn’t really expect exactly a parallel, but by the time you get to the modern era, to answer your question, you do have people like Solovyav, Bolgakov, S. L. Frank, and they all take somewhat different approaches, but there are some commonalities.

(33:45):

I mean, one thing I track all throughout Orthodox church history is this idea of catholicity, which you might think, well, your Orthodox not Catholic. Why is that a central principle? But we in our creed, confess the church to be one holy catholic and apostolic just like anyone in the west. And I traced that all the way back to Ignatius of Antioch who was martyred in one 10 AD. He knew the apostles. Basically, if he didn’t know what Christianity is, we’re all in big trouble. And in his letter to the Smyrnaeans, he warns them about Gnostics. He says they care nothing for love. They neglect the orphan, the fatherless, and the widow among them, they deny the incarnation, resurrection of Christ. They deny that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ, and they reject the authority of the bishop. You on the other hand, where the bishop is present, let the people gather just as where Jesus Christ is.

(34:32):

There’s the Catholic church. I don’t think he just means “universal church” when he says that the word Catholic in Greek means through the whole, right? He’s talking about the church that cares for the poor, the orphan, the widow that believes that Christ became a material person in contrast to gnostics, who believes in a literal resurrection, and who believes that the grace of God is present in the sacraments. It’s all of those things together. And you see that kind of again and again, whether it be in Byzantium, that symphony between canon law and civil law, trying to actually address the whole human person, not without flaws, but still that’s at the heart of it. Then in the modern era, especially in Russian thought, because again, that was where the Orthodox were most free and could write about and think about this stuff, you get this idea of sobornos, which it’s a Russian word that just derives from the old Slavonic word for Catholic in the creed.

(35:32):

It’s literally catholicity. That’s what they’re talking about, and they take it in all sorts of interesting philosophical directions. But one person that I focus on who I like a lot is S. L. Frank, and he talks about it in terms of the element of personal relation. So he’s a personalist for anybody familiar with Jacques Maritain or Martin Buber, other people. We have those in the east as well. And he talks about how human beings are not isolated individuals. We all are embedded within relationships. It’s not just he, she, they. It’s you and me. And that’s incredibly important for understanding our social life. And what makes those relationships happen is that we like each other. I mean, it’s a really simple point, but we like and trust each other, and he contrasts this with another even bigger, more obscure Russian word, which is kind of this external unity of society, which he thinks is fine.

(36:30):

That’s okay, but that very much corresponds to impartial justice, this impersonal nature of things. So the state needs to be impersonal, law needs to be impersonal, and a lot of commercial relations need to be impersonal. If I go to the grocery store, it doesn’t really matter who I am. They can’t deny me service unless I’m causing a ruckus and hurting people or breaking the law. I show up, I pay my money, I get my thing, and there’s an agreement there, or you sign a contract and there’s justice once again is a standard: rendering to each what is due. But that is, while essential is a pretty cold society, if that’s all you have, We need relationships of love. We need friends, we need family, and we need that dynamic even in these more impersonal relations. So a country that has no patriotism, no loyalty or love is in crisis, right?

(37:23):

Business where the employers don’t trust the employees. I mean, this is one of his rejoinders to Marxism is like nobody hires anybody unless they trust them not to steal from their shop or whatever, and nobody takes the job unless they actually have some affection for their boss. And in a free society, if they don’t, they go get a new job. And so you actually have to have this as a sort of glue that holds society together. And he relates this to catholicity or to sobornos and to that, the most perfect expression being the church. So you get in all these kind of biblical Christian dichotomies between, or juxtapositions between grace and law or the church and the world. It’s a way of harmonizing these things with attention to these new eras, new realms of life in the modern era. One of the things you find across Christian traditions, even into the early modern era is that the Christian map of society is very simple.

(38:22):

It’s not wrong, but it’s sort of like if you found an old world map, which I found one of these recently from the early 1200s; it’s a circle. They knew the earth was round. It’s got Europe, it’s got Africa, it’s got Asia. Some of the details are a little fuzzy, but there’s actually quite a lot. There’s a lot written in Latin. There’s even a ring of islands all around the outside. But beyond that, it’s like sea monsters. They do not know about the western hemisphere or Antarctica or Australia. That’s fine. It served them well for a time, and then it became obsolete. And that’s a similar sort of thing happened with our social map. So in our catechisms, when you get to the command, “honor your father and mother” basically across traditions, they will all say, this also applies to other legitimate authorities, among which they say there’s the church authorities and the state authorities. So that’s where you get church, state and family.

(39:16):

But in the nineteenth century, suddenly you have business as just another realm of life. It’s not a family business, it’s not a state business, it’s not a church business. All of those existed before; the East India company and that sort of more of a state enterprise, or at least a crony-istic one. But the idea that there’s just someone out there who, they have a project, they have a way in which they want to serve a social need, and they’re going to provide a product and they need to hire people to work for them, and they get the machines and they get the capital and they get it going. This is a new realm of life and we need to theologize about this as well. And so Frank and others like him, they use this concept of catholicity to help build some continuity between that ancient tradition all the way back to the Bible even, and these new emerging realms of life, whether it be, again, business commerce, we could talk about higher education in a similar way or the art world or whatever.

(40:15):

We need to have a more accurate map of social life. So part of it, I do have a little bit of a constructive contribution. Mostly I’m trying to say here’s what other people think throughout the book, but that’s one of my constructive contributions is to say, here’s a more accurate social map. And I have a way of charting that out for people, but it involves this sense of there’s a impersonal and personal realm of life or economy I call ’em, and there’s also materially productive and materially zero sum, and you put those together and you get four different kind of sectors of social life. You have the state which is extractive, not necessarily in a negative way, although we all know about the negative ways, I’m sure, but every law works that way. If you break the law, if you don’t do the good thing, the law says you’re going to receive a bad thing that’s coercive, right?

(41:06):

That’s just the nature of law. Good laws work that way just as well as bad ones. There’s the family and other integrative societies where a baby doesn’t earn its mother’s milk, right? It’s just a matter of mercy. It’s a matter of just this one way gift. And of course, vice versa. I hope my children will obey me out of just the love of their hearts, but sometimes we do need those other dynamics, need a system of rewards and punishments to teach our kids to obey, but it does happen. And I provide for them just because I love them and I care about them. And then you can move into that productive economy, and you have things like friendships, which are very personal, right? Local business. I talk about, actually, I did this last year at the Ciceronian Society Conference. I had a paper on friendship, and I talked about it as the wimpy dynamic of life. This is a reference for all the people our age and older who remember the old Popeye cartoon, but it was the mooch, the character “Wimpy” on Popeye. And his tagline for some reason was he would show up is if I remember right, usually a non-sequitur. But he would just show up and say, “I’ll pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Right? That’s an insane thing to say at a McDonald’s, right? It’s never going to work.

James Patterson (42:22):

Although they did try to make that a thing, right? Remember when Klarna, you could finance your burrito? They were literally doing the “Wimpy,” a model of burger purchasing.

Dylan Pahman (42:32):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would be worried about usury in that case, but somebody can’t, that’s actually a good point. Afford a burrito, but let’s say a local restaurant owner, and you come to the restaurant and you order your food and you say, “Oh, shoot, I forgot my wallet.” You say, “Hey, John, can I pay you Tuesday for this hamburger today?” And they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, you’re good for it. No problem.” That’s a different sector of society. There’s a different nature to that relationship. We see that dynamic throughout everything else. Anyway, all that is to say, I draw that from my own tradition. I think that’s something that every tradition can learn from, and I hope that it’s a book that won’t just appeal to Orthodox Christians, that really, anybody who’s struggling with how to integrate faith in modern society will find something that they can build upon within their own tradition from this book. But that would be the thing that I would center on is those different categories of social life, and then especially that principle of ster Catholicity.

James Patterson (43:34):

Dylan Pahman, thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast. The book is The Kingdom of God and the Common Good: Orthodox Christian Social Thought.

Dylan Pahman:

Thank you for having me.

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.

The New Right has been an influential force in American politics for about a decade. Spurred by the political success of Donald Trump’s populism, this band of Euro-centric right-wing ideologues has become difficult to ignore. They gain trust by defending Trump and critiquing elite absurdities, then use that platform to normalize formerly fringe ideas and thinkers. The most famous of these figures, like Tucker Carlson, have gradually introduced their viewers to antisemitic conspiracy theorists, stans of foreign autocrats, and World War II contrarians. 

Especially prominent in New Right conversations are thinkers of the right-wing European continental tradition like De Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés, Maurras, and Carl Schmitt. The latter, we are told, has profound insights into politics despite his membership in the Nazi Party, and thus we should not dismiss him outright because of ideological puritanism. That was a common response to a recent article about the New Right by Phil Magness and Jack Nicastro.

There are indeed academics like Adrian Vermeule who are genuinely attracted to Schmitt’s criticisms of liberalism, his theory of history, and his views on the economic-technical rationality of liberalism, which they consider to be on the point of collapse. They also appreciate how Schmitt paints a picture of liberalism that makes it seem morally on par with the more authoritarian regimes they prefer. The rest of us may not be convinced or impressed (I certainly am not), but these Schmittian academics sincerely disagree.

Let’s not fool ourselves, however, about why the non-academic New Right appeals to Schmitt. It’s not about theoretical illumination. In popular politics, people push Carl Schmitt because he helps them rationalize their tribal politics, especially through his “friend-enemy distinction,” an idea that was elaborated most extensively in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political.

There, Schmitt makes the bold claim that while the fundamental distinction in morality is good-bad, in economics profitable-unprofitable, and in aesthetics beautiful-ugly, in politics it is the distinction between friend and enemy. He argues that the political is present wherever there is the possibility of a community to declare for itself friends and enemies:

The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.

It is not my purpose here to critique Schmitt’s account from a purely descriptive level. In my opinion, the analogy with those other domains distorts the fact that what is most fundamental to politics normatively is the political community itself and the common good of its members. Any distinction between friends and enemies, or any capacity of a political community to distinguish between them for the whole community, even if useful for identifying political phenomena, is derivative from an evaluative standpoint.

And yet, none of the cheerleaders for Schmitt’s distinction care much about it as a descriptive theory. They care only, in their view, for what it justifies at a prescriptive level. Schmitt himself saw it as a reason for critiquing the attempts of modern liberal democracy to neutralize conflict, thus leaving itself open to internal or external dangers, and perhaps, in the case of successful liberal hegemony that pacifies the world, removing what he takes to be truly meaningful. I hope that most of us can think of sources of meaning outside political contention, but what do I know? 

As ideologues come to care less and less about the Constitution, and more and more about winning a total war for America’s future, we risk losing what made America great in the first place.

In any event, Schmitt does not persuasively justify the New Right’s application of this distinction. They support a kind of tribal politics that sees in the American constitutionalist framework a barrier to winning a war with the enemies of the community. “Don’t you know what time it is?” they ask rhetorically whenever someone appeals to principle. Some might see that as unfair, unprincipled, or just stupid, but they see it as an appeal to “realism” about the nature of politics, an act of rebellion against an elite class they now resent, and an opportunity to cast aside what they see as the tired platitudes of liberals. In reality, it is just a rationalization for good old-fashioned tribal politics.

Their view of Schmitt is also superficial. It is a half-understood slogan that more sophisticated Schmittians like Adrian Vermeule rightly ridicule: 

An infallible sign of superficial understanding [of Schmitt], whether from liberal critics or from the New Right, is that the author appears to have read only “Political Theology” and “The Concept of the Political.” Those aren’t even Schmitt’s most interesting books.

It’s tempting to dismiss them as sophomoric idiots unlikely to do real harm, but Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, even if poorly understood, now informs practical politics outside the ivory tower. It can be genuinely dangerous. 

As ideologues come to care less and less about the Constitution, and more and more about winning a total war for America’s future, we risk losing what made America great in the first place: its constitutional-republican order, an order that requires a basic respect for reciprocal norms and processes. The New Right has seized upon popular resentment against what they sometimes call the “uniparty” or “establishment.” This resentment developed over years of frustration because of the political class’s inability to respond to what they cared about most. But in truth, much of that rigidity reflected the constraint of the median voter (e.g., the median voter does not actually want to reform entitlements); and in other cases, the obstacle was domain knowledge of the political class (e.g., knowledge of foreign affairs and national intelligence); and in still others, it was just ordinary bureaucratic incompetence. In the minds of the New Right, however, these failures are best explained by hidden actors, a cabal of the “deep state” or “globalists,” which, along with the left, is an enemy to be defeated, and by any means necessary.

What is most troubling is that these tribalists, whether on the left or right, are gaining more converts among the youth than either constitutional conservatives or old-school civil libertarians. The division and polarization are growing, not lessening, and it will get a lot worse before it gets better. So yes, we should criticize the tools of rationalizing tribal and authoritarian politics, such as Schmitt and his friend-enemy distinction, even without considering his sketchy history, character, and party affiliation. We should also be clear about what is really going on. Today’s tribalists on the far-right and far-left have allowed their resentment to dictate their politics—Schmittian slogans are just a rationalization for that. But it is most important that we do not get pulled into it. Tribalists on the right and left are wrong, but we will not preserve the blessing of constitutional democracy by behaving in a tribalist manner ourselves. Therefore, we should forget point-scoring; this isn’t sports. And a tit-for-tat strategy will not work here because it will only serve to radicalize the non-tribalists on the other party, thus escalating the problem. 

Instead, we must continue to build and educate without retaliation. We must dedicate ourselves to social entrepreneurship, civic participation, voting in primaries and general elections, and encouraging others to do the same. This problem will not fix itself. We also need more emphasis in our schools and media on the blessings of constitutional democracy. We should not be feeding our youth a steady diet of resentment politics, whether it is the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn, on the left, or Carl Schmitt and Why Liberalism Failed on the right. The best antidote to resentment is, and always has been, gratitude, and our educational priorities should reflect that.

During his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his concerns about the growth and political power of the American military-industrial complex. Fueled by massive federal spending in the years following WWII, defense contractors dominated an entire sector of the American economy, created tens of thousands of jobs, and generated billions of dollars in revenues and profits. The defense industry became not a wartime necessity, the so-called “arsenal of democracy” during WWII, but a permanent addition to the national security state that emerged during the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War, however, never yielded a “peace dividend” from reduced defense spending. The US defense budget, $295 billion in 1991, now tops $841 billion—more than the next nine countries’ defense outlays combined. American procurement contracts, financial assistance, and research and development in FY25 total more than $300 billion. While defense spending as a percentage of GDP has declined, it remains the single largest discretionary outlay of government funds.

Today, US defense procurement is expensive, increasingly concentrated, strained, and inefficient: dogged by schedule delays, saddled with legacy platforms, and unable—perhaps unwilling—to adapt to the changing nature of modern warfare.

Costs, Delays, and the Cost of Delay

Defense procurement across several sectors is concentrated in a handful of major corporations (i.e., Boeing, General Dynamics, HII, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX). Normally, concentrated manufacturing creates specialization, resulting in greater economy and efficiency. This has not been the case for US defense procurement. Both cost overruns and scheduling delays are common. Acquisition of major weapons systems and upgrades to existing platforms are stalled and overbudget. A few examples show these problems well.

For a variety of reasons, CVN-79—the new USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier—will not join the fleet until at least March 2027. This is two years later than the first re-scheduled date, and nearly three years later than the original delivery date of June 2024. Every planned delivery of future Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear-power supercarriers has been delayed, and costs are climbing. The Navy has already requested an additional $2.75 billion in cost-to-complete funding for Ford-class carriers.

The program to re-engine the US Air Force’s aging (one might say ageless) B-52 Stratofortress bombers is also behind schedule. Construction of the original 744 bombers took ten years (1952–62). New engines (and electronics) for the remaining 76 B-52H bombers were to be built and installed over a fifteen-year period, with full conversion completed in 2030. Now the target date is 2036, and the cost has risen from eight to nine billion dollars.

In a similar vein, replacements for the Minuteman III—first fielded in the 1970s and now the oldest deployed strategic ballistic missile in the world—are more than a decade behind schedule. The new LGM-35 Sentinel missiles are also coming in over budget; the original 2020 cost of $78 billion has ballooned to $160 billion.

The issues here are not simply those of delay and cost overruns in Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAP). Years-long delays force the military to fall back on older equipment and compromise operational readiness. This degrades the nation’s ability to quickly respond with full force to the exigencies of contingencies, crises, and war. Aging weapons and platforms that outlive their supplies of maintenance and replacement parts undercut the strength, readiness, and capabilities of combat units.

In addition, the ability to project power and the deterrent value of forward-deployed forces is further compromised by failures to bring replacements into service. With continued delays to the completion and delivery of Ford-class carriers, for example, the Navy will eventually be forced to conduct operations with only ten carriers. Navy planners have argued (and statute, 10 USC 8062, requires) that a minimum of eleven aircraft carriers must be maintained.

Procurement delays also undermine America’s alliances and partnerships. The latest AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) agreement, for example, calls for a British-Australian partnership to build a new class of nuclear-powered submarines beginning in 2032. Before those new subs come on-line, the United States agreed to sell second-hand Virginia-class attack submarines to Australia. Production of Virginias, however, has fallen behind schedule to complete two boats a year. The shipyard is straining to produce just more than one submarine a year. This shortfall casts into doubt plans to sell submarines to Australia, shakes confidence in the AUKUS partnership, and jeopardizes Australian and Indo-Pacific security. 

More worrisome is the outright degradation of the US nuclear deterrent. Be it a shortage of submarines, benched nuclear-capable bombers, or aging intercontinental ballistic missiles—all point to real strategic vulnerabilities that will be exploited by America’s adversaries. While US nuclear weapons delivery capabilities atrophy, China is committed to a long-term plan to grow its nuclear arsenal and modernize its nuclear delivery systems. Beijing plans to double its number of warheads from 300 to 600 in 2025 and to 1,000 by 2030. Most recently, at its Victory Day Parade, China displayed its air-launched, subsurface-launched, and land-based intercontinental missiles. This purposefully staged demonstration showcased the modernization and diversification of Beijing’s nuclear triad and unveiled a new ICBM intended to stock the network of hardened, below-ground missile silos in Western China.

Legacy Platform Deadweight

For the better part of eight decades, American aircraft carriers conducted missions in support of the national interest in largely uncontested waters. That all changed beginning in 2023 when Houthi rebels, armed by Iran, targeted commercial and naval traffic in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Houthi forces have since launched drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at US Navy ships and claimed to have targeted the carrier USS Harry Truman.

This is a foretaste of things to come. In future wars, American aircraft carriers will face adversaries, like China, loaded with anti-access and area denial (A2AD) missiles and drones. Those A2AD weapons cost a small fraction of the $13 billion cost of a Ford-class supercarrier. The asymmetrical advantage now belongs to nations that can mass-produce and equip their forces with these weapons and arm their proxies. Ukraine, for example, sank 15 of 36 Russian vessels (including the guided missile cruiser Moskva) with anti-ship missiles and naval drones. With no fleet of its own, the Ukrainians drove the Russian Navy from the Black Sea.

The United States is in a defense spending trap of its own making.

The US Navy’s response to this changing threat environment, backed by corporate lobbying, has been to double down on legacy systems and capabilities. For example, the Navy’s efforts to develop robotic and autonomous systems (RAS), which include surface and subsurface drones, took a back seat to continued procurement of existing surface platforms. RAS, until recently, was aligned to a single Program Executive Officer (PEO) for both unmanned and small combatants. Critics say that the Navy’s troubled littoral combat ship and frigate programs drained time, attention, and resources away from RAS, and set the unmanned vehicle program back years. Now Navy is scrambling to reset RAS development with a new PEO and a temporary halt to all acquisition and contracting.

It’s also telling that shortly after successful aircraft carrier trials of the Northrup Grumman X-47B in 2013, the Navy scrapped plans for further development of this unmanned strike aircraft. Instead, the service placed its bets on an unmanned aerial tanker (Boeing’s MQ-25A Stingray) to increase the range of manned aircraft launching from ever-increasing stand-off distances outside A2AD envelopes. Production delays have pushed the operational debut of Stingray to 2026.

If the supercarrier has become too big and too expensive to risk in war at sea against missiles and drones, the death knell is also tolling for large (and costly) armored vehicles on the battlefield. In less than six months, 20 of the 31 Abrams M1A1 tanks that the US furnished to Ukraine were lost in battle. Both cheap anti-tank missiles and camera-operated drones (first-person view, FPVs) on kamikaze missions proved successful in crippling or destroying the 63-ton, eight-million-dollar-a-piece Abrams tanks. Now, France has developed an autonomous anti-tank vehicle that can launch missiles outside the line of sight to the target; no FPV needed.

Despite these rapid advances in anti-tank capabilities, the US Army intends to keep the Abrams production line operating even as it plans a new armor design with features for upgraded “survivability.” These new tanks will likely not replace all existing Abrams tanks until at least 2030.

Building a New Arsenal

The United States is in a defense spending trap of its own making. Lack of competition, a powerful lobby with entrenched political constituencies, years of risk-adverse leadership, and even federal law, encourage resistance to change and discourage innovation. As a result, defense procurement is locked into buying ever more expensive but modest, linear improvements to increasingly vulnerable legacy weapons systems and platforms. Moreover, the lessons of modern battlefields and the innovations fielded there—from Ukraine to Iran—are not shaping new defense acquisition plans.

Simply expanding, modernizing, and making the existing defense industrial base more efficient will not resolve its systemic problems. What is needed is a comprehensive approach that can only be accomplished with leadership, legislation, innovation, and oversight.

To that end, there are signs that changes are forthcoming. President Trump’s executive order Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance, calls for a Maritime Action Plan to revitalize the US maritime industry and enhance national security. More recently, Secretary of War Hegseth issued his own memorandum to leadership. This unambiguous and overdue directive, “Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance,” recognizes “modern battlefield innovation demands a new procurement strategy.” Battlefield innovation today will also increasingly rely on expanded and integrated AI in weapon systems and platforms, adding another dimension to defense procurement.

The United States can no longer be the sole arsenal of democracy.

These changes to policy ought to be coupled with reviews of current MDAPs and existing Multiyear Procurement (MYP) vehicles to free up defense spending for new initiatives. This “divest to invest” strategy has been endorsed by the Defense Innovation Board. Efforts to amend procurement contracts for aircraft carriers, tanks, planes, and other weapons—much like long-overdue Base Realignment and Closing (BRAC) proposals—however, always face stiff “pork barrel” opposition. Congress also needs to rescind laws and modify budgetary provisions that force the War Department to maintain legacy systems in the face of growing obsolescence and, worse, new technologies that render US platforms defenseless.

Congress must reaffirm its “power of the purse,” and demand accountability and performance for every MDAP. The Nunn-McCrudy Act (1982)—intended to put the brake on defense acquisition program overspending—brings to bear too little oversight too late. Congressional notification is only triggered when an MDAP is 15 percent over budget (for a $13 billion Ford-class carrier, this is already a $1.5 billion overrun), and can only be cancelled when it runs 25 percent over budget. A revised act with real teeth would require notification anytime an MDAP is over budget and suspension of that program until it is reauthorized by Congress.

All these efforts will come to naught, however, unless US leadership also recognizes the global nature of supply and innovation. Current law that requires US defense products to consist of 50 percent wholly American-made parts is misguided protectionism. The United States can no longer be the sole arsenal of democracy. What is needed are strong partnerships with allies to build and maintain mutually supporting arsenals of democracies.

NATO, for example, has long maintained standards for small arms ammunition. The looming shortfall of munitions in Western nations, occasioned by the massive consumption of ammunition in Ukraine, can be a strategic opportunity. The reduction of ammunition stockpiles in the United States and Europe ought to be leveraged to recapitalize and modernize common ammunition production capabilities on a multinational level. This could be the prototype for geo-political partnerships and defense alliances to build a broader and more cost-effective defense industrial base for development and production of everything from drones to fast combat support ships.

All these initiatives should be launched with wartime urgency; the rehabilitation and revitalization of American defense procurement is overdue. The sluggishness, inefficiency, and resistance to change that hamstrings procurement have been more than 60 years in the making. Today, this legacy military-industrial complex puts at risk America’s nuclear deterrent and the warfighting and war-winning capabilities of its air, land, and sea forces.

These are risks the United States cannot afford to take.

Matthew Lynn has written a powerful essay in which he chastises the economics profession for being so clearly wrong when it came to the effects of Donald Trump’s tariffs. According to him, when President Trump imposed sweeping and massive tariffs in April, the “mainstream economic establishment” predicted inflation would surge, supply chains would crash, and the economy would be plunged into a deep recession. The world would “resemble a post-apocalypse Netflix series, with survivors dodging zombies and fighting one another for the last few items at the mall.”

Six months later, Lynn argues, none of this came to pass. Inflation is around 3 percent, the stock market hasn’t tanked, and we’re not rationing toilet paper or fending off zombie hordes at the grocery store. For our sins, Lynn insists that we economists must repent, acknowledge our mistake, and address why we “big thinkers got this one wrong.”

At a time when experts have been called into question on many fronts, it’s a compelling indictment. There’s just one problem. It’s built on a foundation of selective reading, convenient timing, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what economists actually said and what the evidence actually shows.

First, let’s look at Lynn’s accusations more closely. The Goldman Sachs report that he provides was issued on April 17, 2025, says “we … see a 45% probability of a recession over the next 12 months” [emphasis added]. Being that it is October, there are still six months to go before this particular prediction expires. Likewise, the Torsten Sløk analysis he is likely pointing to, which claimed a 90 percent probability of a “Voluntary Trade Reset Recession” over an unspecified timeline, was released on April 19, 2025.

It’s useful to keep in mind the context within which these were written. April, which already feels so long ago, was a busy month in terms of international trade policy. We saw the “Liberation Day” tariffs announced, stock markets around the world crash, retaliatory tariffs announced by countries around the world, and the famed 90-day pause. It was also right at the beginning of the short-lived but seriously damaging United States-China “trade war” which saw tariff rates as high as 145 percent, grinding trade between the two nations almost to a halt.

Second, Lynn fails to acknowledge that both Goldman Sachs and Torsten Sløk have since revised their recession predictions. In June, Goldman Sachs revised their recession probability downward to 20 percent between June 2025 and June 2026. Similarly, in September, Sløk noted that “recession probability [is] declining” and put the odds of a recession over the next 12 months (September 2025 to September 2026) at 30 percent.

Upon closer inspection, Lynn’s accusations about economists’ predictions simply do not hold water. But what of his specific claims about the efficacy of tariffs?

Year-over-year inflation is indeed at about 3 percent, which is markedly lower than it was during the Biden administration. But notice that the inflation rate is ticking upward, not downward, and that this still remains well above the Fed’s 2 percent target and is drifting further away from it. Still, trotting out “inflation” is odd. Economists have been very clear that tariffs don’t cause inflation the same way that printing money, which consistently pushes prices higher month after month, does. Instead, tariffs cause what’s known as a “level effect” in that they work like a sales tax that gets added to the price tag once and stays there until it is changed. The washing machine that used to cost $500, for example, now costs $625 thanks to a 25 percent tariff. Technically, this isn’t “inflation” by the Fed’s definition, but tell that to the family looking to replace their broken washing machine and is out an extra $125. “Actually, that’s not inflation,” is not only insensitive but also unnecessarily obtuse.

Looking at more granular data than the BLS does reveals a more detailed picture, and one that comports with the lived experiences of everyday Americans. Harvard’s Pricing Lab analyzed 350,000 different products. Their findings are stunning. Not only are imported goods getting more expensive, but so are domestically produced goods. Coffee prices, for example, are up almost 9 percent relative to their pre-tariff trend. Furniture, almost 6 percent, and that’s before the new 25 percent tariff on furniture takes effect.

Matthew Lynn would have us believe that tariffs are being paid almost entirely by foreign countries, but really, tariff revenues come straight from the American people.

Manufacturing, while rebounding in some sectors, remains depressed and particularly so in sectors most exposed to the tariffs. Reports from the Federal Reserve branches, usefully summarized and collated in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Beige Book, are all pointing in the same direction: tariffs are not helping the American people. While these aggregate statistics are alarming enough, the specific examples tell the story in ways that numbers alone could never do. The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond provides the example of a glass manufacturer whose supplier was driven out of business because of the tariffs. Their remaining suppliers have all consolidated, eliminating jobs in the region and driving their prices higher. In Cleveland, “some manufacturers and auto dealers reported passing along 100 percent of tariff increases to customers, while others said they were slowly raising prices in response to tariffs,” and are thus eating the tariffs in the form of reduced profits. In Chicago, “manufacturers attributed higher raw materials prices to tariffs and several said that they had passed on those increases to customers.”

Lynn would have us believe that tariffs are being paid almost entirely by foreign countries. He writes, “the extra $30 billion a month in revenue the tariffs are already generating is not exactly ‘free money.’ But it’s as close to it as anything we have seen for a long time.” The problem with his analysis is that this claim was not true during the first Trump administration, and it’s not true during the second, either.

Tariff revenues come straight from the American people. In Cleveland, 87 percent of manufacturing firms report that their costs have increased because of tariffs and the surrounding uncertainty of their implementation. Looking at import shares and tariff pass-throughs, for firms that receive at least half of their materials from imports, 25 percent report that they will pass all the tariff along, 50 percent report that they will pass at least a majority along, and only 25 percent report that they plan to pass only “some” of the cost increases along to customers. None reported that they will not pass at least some of the cost along to consumers.

Unfortunately, this isn’t news, even in the White House. President Trump himself publicly chastised Walmart when they were considering raising prices in response to tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent himself said that American firms are paying the tariffs out of their profits, which are allegedly still elevated from COVID. If tariffs are paid by foreign countries, what is there for Walmart to “eat” and why are American firms’ profits being decreased?

But even setting this aside, we still have to question the fiscal wisdom of the proposed tax rebates from all the “extra tax revenue.” Giving each of the roughly 160 million taxpayers $1,000 would cost $160 billion, which would be 40 percent of the entire projected $400 billion in revenue that tariffs could raise. It’s difficult to see how we could give up 40 percent of the revenue from tariffs in the form of rebates, bail out farmers, and still pay off the $1.8 trillion in deficit spending from 2025 alone, which would need to be addressed before the staggering $37.86 trillion in national debt could even begin to be paid down.

If economists made any mistake in the past six months, it’s that we believed that Trump was sincere in his months-long proclamation that “tariff is the most beautiful word,” that he would live up to the “Tariff Man” moniker he gave himself, and that the April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs were just “the beginning.” As we’ve found out, between pauses, reductions, and exemptions (all of which are available to companies or countries that say big enough numbers), the tariffs are really just a sticker price, not unlike college tuition before the heavy discounts that are given to students in the form of “scholarships.”

The difference, however, is that college scholarships and aid packages are generally given out based on merit and need. Not so with tariff exemptions. Big companies, with their armies of lawyers and lobbyists who can secure meetings with top officials in the administration, will pay lower tariffs. Just look at Apple, which effectively bought an exemption from the tariffs with the promise of increased investments in American facilities. But when a small manufacturing start-up believes (rightly) that they deserve a break on tariffs, all they can do is fill out an online form and hope that some junior staffer empathizes with their application and passes it dispassionately up the chain of command. This isn’t competition, it’s cronyism, through and through.

World leaders can effectively buy their way out of paying higher tariffs, too. The European Union, for example, promised $600 billion in “extra investments” to secure a trade deal. They’ve since admitted, however, that their ability to deliver on those promises is dubious at best. The United Arab Emirates has pledged $1.4 trillion in US investments. This seems unlikely, though, seeing as their entire GDP last year was $537 billion. Should we really believe that they are going to give us almost three years’ worth of their country’s entire output as an investment?

Finally, there is also the immense legal uncertainty surrounding the implementation of tariffs through IEEPA. With the Supreme Court set to hear arguments next month, it could also be the case that tariffs have not caused pain because firms and countries are betting that they will be struck down. Still, administration officials have acknowledged that they have alternative strategies by which they could impose tariffs. As Pete Navarro said of the Court of International Trade’s ruling that the IEEPA tariffs were unconstitutional, “this did not catch us by surprise.”

These tariffs are not a “win” for the American people. Whether they will cause a recession is anyone’s guess, and Lynn is correct to point out the resiliency of the American economy, which is really a reflection of the resiliency of the American people. The American people are, on a per-capita basis, the most industrious and productive people on the planet, bar none. Even the supposed economic superpower that is China only produces three times as much output as we do, despite having over six times as many workers.

American workers do not need “protection” from the rest of the world’s economic prowess. They need empowerment in the form of deregulation, incentives in the form of reduced taxes, and opportunity in the form of lowered barriers to trade.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, is tailor-made for this moment of our culture war. As far-left protesters and agitators clash with federal troops and law enforcement in cities across the country, some of its scenes even seem ripped from nightly news segments. And to be clear, the movie’s politics are decidedly leftist—Anderson certainly believes in the romance of revolution.

And yet despite this streak of “radical chic,” the film is something more than the “ode to radical terrorism” some right-wing critics assert it to be. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it follows one ex-revolutionary, Pat Calhoun/Bob Ferguson (brilliantly played by Leonardo DiCaprio), as he races to rescue his daughter from an old enemy from his radical youth. His mission reveals that the passionate abstraction of revolution, and the terrible violence it breeds, cannot fulfill the deepest longings of the human soul.

The film begins with a sequence depicting Pat’s salad days of revolutionary action. He is a member of a terrorist collective called the “French 75,” a group of Marxists and Black Power radicals committed to the violent overthrow of the United States. Pat, going by the nom de guerre “Rocket Man,” rigs explosives for his militant comrades. He is seduced by the erotic zeal of the uprising, and becomes lovers with one of its leaders, Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor).

Pat’s idealism at the outset of the revolution reminded me of Whittaker Chambers’s description of his turn to communism in his memoir Witness. “The Communist Party represents itself as the one organization of the will to survive in the crisis of civilization where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering, or absent,” he wrote. “It is in the name of that will to survive the crisis, which is not theoretical but closes in from all sides, that the Communist first justifies the use of terror and tyranny, which are repugnant to most men.” Like Chambers in the 1920s and ‘30s, Pat sees revolutionary action as the path to a new birth—and Perfidia’s intense radicalism is the emblem of this strength he admires the most.

But Pat is not Perfidia’s only lover. Through an admittedly ridiculous series of events, she becomes entangled with Steve Lockjaw (played with surprising humor by Sean Penn), an agent of the fascist regime she is supposedly resisting. Later in the movie, Lockjaw explains that, despite the gulf between their politics, he, too, admired Perfidia for her strength. In his own sickening way, he loved her because she was a “righteous warrior for freedom” even if he disagreed with her definition of it.

In his confused and drug-addled way, One Battle After Another’s protagonist seeks to preserve the flawed reality that is his family.

Although the film is far more explicit about the villainy of its fascist antagonists, beneath the surface Anderson draws subtle parallels between them and their left-wing terrorist enemies. Both sides are pilloried for the ridiculous ideological shibboleths they use to justify shocking violence, from “Black Power” to “racial purity.” In the end, a discerning viewer will no doubt see that Perfidia and Lockjaw really are not that different from one another. Extremists, no matter the political valence of their ideologies, are all just seeking power, with no regard for who gets hurt in the pursuit.

Eventually, Perfidia becomes pregnant by Lockjaw, but Pat assumes the child is his. After the baby is born, Pat begs Perfidia to stand back from the frontlines of revolution for their daughter’s sake. “We’re a family now,” he implores as Perfidia marches off to commit further acts of terror. She does not heed him, and in a bank heist gone wrong, brutally shoots and kills a black security guard—a member of the very working class she is supposedly trying to liberate. In the fallout, she is captured and persuaded by Lockjaw to inform on her comrades, forcing the French 75 underground.

Pat flees with his daughter, given new identities as “Bob and Willa Ferguson.” He raises her in a remote Northern California forest, slipping into an alcohol- and drug-fueled paranoia. Willa (played by Chase Infiniti) feels constrained by the extreme measures Bob implements to keep them hidden from the ghosts of his past. They live more or less off the grid, until Lockjaw raids their town searching for them. He wants to join a white nationalist secret society, the absurdly-named “Christmas Adventurers’ Club,” and therefore must cover up the existence of his mixed-race daughter. Bob and Willa get separated, and the rest of the movie essentially is a long and exceptionally well-filmed chase sequence as he tries to rescue her from a succession of perils.

As part of his mission, Bob has to reenter the revolutionary underground he abandoned. Much of the film’s brilliant humor comes from his generational clash with the young revolutionaries who took up the French 75’s cause. At one point, he calls the rebellion’s headquarters and cannot remember the passwords he needs to get through to its leadership. The operator derides him for insufficiently studying the “texts of the revolution,” and when Bob argues back accuses him of “violating my safe space.” Bob’s older style of revolutionary action is out of joint with the pronoun declarations and land acknowledgments of the new radical vanguard because their emphasis on identity and theoretical purity hinder his pursuit of practical goods.

But at a deeper level, the tensions between Bob and the resistance go beyond competing styles of radical politics. In the sixteen years he spent in hiding, Bob’s priorities have simply changed. No longer is his highest goal revolution. However much he may still affirm his comrades’ ideology, at the end of the day, he just wants to make sure his daughter is safe. Opposing fascism or ending oppression are merely abstractions; in his confused and drug-addled way, Bob is now instead seeking to preserve the flawed reality that is his family.

Whittaker Chambers went through a similar experience in his days serving the communist underground, although it wrought a far more profound change in his own soul. In the introduction to Witness, he describes a quiet domestic moment simply watching his infant daughter eating in a highchair:

My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.

For Chambers, that epiphany led him out of communism and into conservatism. As he put it later on in the memoir, every ex-communist’s “break is the political expression of the perpetual need of the soul whose first faint stirring he has felt within him, years, months or days before he breaks … because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites—God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.” Radicalism and revolution promise strength to overcome oppression and crisis, but, in the end, they just foster a cycle of violence that can redeem no one.

Bob never gets as far as Chambers did, of course. Even in the closing scenes of the movie, he encourages his daughter’s own turn to radical activism. But his journey nonetheless shows that revolution is ultimately empty. The humanitarian glory ideologues seek manning the barricades pales in comparison to the permanent things, such as family, to which the human soul aspires. Radicalism does not lift Bob up from the stupor of his life—his love for Willa does.

Paul Thomas Anderson certainly did not set out to make an anti-revolutionary movie, and it would be ridiculous to say that One Battle After Another is a classic of conservative cinema. But in satirizing the follies of radicalism and affirming the things which make life most worth living, perhaps it does indicate an essential truth Americans need to learn if we are to avoid the dystopian future the film envisions.

One of the most potent documents a teacher can teach to a history class studying France in the late nineteenth century is Émile Zola’s open letter to L’Aurore, published in January 1898. Few other primary sources lend themselves to such drama and action in the classroom the way that Zola’s “J’Accuse … !” does for students. Reaching that point in the narrative of the Dreyfus Affair, students know the injustice that has played out. The French government used Alfred Dreyfus as the scapegoat for a military scandal that involved the selling of military secrets to the Germans. The controversy consumed France as it questioned the honor and reliability of the Republic and the French military. Students know that, within the story, other historical figures have gotten away with framing Dreyfus and condemning him to life on Devil’s Island. Yet, here arises a hero in France, calling out the institutions that have led the nation into scandal, and that hero is Émile Zola.

But, students may ask, who is this man who has come out in defense of Dreyfus and defied most of France? Who is this man that Anatole France declared “a moment in the history of the human conscience?” In his new biography, Émile Zola: A Determined Life, Robert Lethbridge sheds light on the writer who was to become the conscience of a nation in the midst of tumult. He skillfully and adeptly shows that Zola lived a full, determined life that encompassed so much in nineteenth-century France. The biography paints a portrait of one of the most active and creative lives to ever be lived.

Zola lived from 1840 to 1902, spending most of his life in France, writing novels and publishing articles on various subjects in many different newspapers. His father died when he was very young, and Lethbridge shows how Zola worked hard throughout the rest of his life to establish his father as a good man and his family name as a great name. After his father’s death, the writer and his mother lived in Aix-en-Provence, a place he grew to dislike. Eventually, the two of them moved to Paris. As a young man, Zola lived in relative poverty in Paris as he worked to find his place in the world. He worked a clerical job at the Paris docks before finding a place at the publishing firm of Hachette in March 1862. As Lethbridge shows, it was the four years working at Hachette that taught Zola many lessons regarding publishing, marketing, “the importance of making direct contact with reviewers, drafting enticing blurbs and exploiting opportunities for controversy.”

As Hachette published many of “the latest scientific and philosophical works” of the time, Zola met all the authors of these works as he worked for the firm. Generally, the writers attached to the publisher were liberal critics of Napoleon III and the Second French Empire—their views would greatly influence Zola’s. From Hachette, he went on to work in journalism, writing columns for most of his life after getting his start with the liberal outlets L’Événement, Le Petit Journal, and Le Figaro. Lethbridge, therefore, argues against misperceptions that Zola did not fully emerge as a writer until the Dreyfus Affair, that his work in these early years marked “a lifelong engagement with the political and cultural issues of his time.” Zola wrote scores of novels, plays, articles, criticism, and operas, and left behind a monumental legacy that Lethbridge beautifully uncovers.

Lethbridge goes to great lengths in his work to show the importance of Zola’s realism, as this is the lens through which Zola critiques every aspect of French life. Zola’s realism, as Lethbridge shows, comes without any of the radicalism that haunts France during the period in which Zola writes. Whether it was the Second Empire and Napoleon III or the Third Republic, Zola writes with the ability to hold a mirror up to the French people to show them their blemishes: government corruption, immorality, violence, extreme poverty, political extremism, and so on. His work found ways to exploit “opportunities for controversy” while maintaining a detachment that allowed him to create a realism without radicalism.

As Lethbridge shows, Zola’s political journalism was strong and opinionated as he espoused many of the ideas of a European liberal in the late eighteenth century. For all this fire in his political journalism, Zola never gave in to the radicalism of the age—socialism, communism, or anarchism. His realist experiments in literature tempered his political views, even if he expressed them strongly. As Lethbridge points out, for example, Zola refused to support universal manhood suffrage in France—a position which cut against his otherwise strong liberal views. But this again points to his lack of extremism in any direction.

Zola’s realism without radicalism can be seen in almost all of his novels. In Germinal, it can be seen in the poverty and hatred of capitalism by the mine workers, combined with the horrible excesses of communism and the workers’ strike, and its consequences. In Le Bête Humaine, it can be seen in the government corruption and horrible violence that fails to end the corruption in government. Lethbridge shows how Zola tried to use realist literature to guide France away from the extremism that was so prevalent in the Second Empire and the Third Republic.

Zola lived a determined life—not in the sense of fatalism, but rather as a man truly determined to do something great for his beloved country.

As Lethbridge draws this out, he weaves together the political and social events of nineteenth-century France and their connections to Zola’s fiction. He demonstrates through journal entries, notes, and letters that Zola was involved in every part of the life of France—and that this is what made him a master of literary realism. He masterfully shows what reality was like for every category of person, and this is why Zola was such a master at the realism that he wanted to portray in his work.

Two of Zola’s works in particular demonstrate his commitment to providing a complete image of how people truly lived in his time. In L’Assommoir, Lethbridge writes, Zola used “dictionaries of proletarian slang” to create “a vocabulary so colorful, vulgar and otherwise incomprehensible that modern editions of the novel have to provide a lexical appendix.” And in Germinal, Lethbridge points out, readers “are virtually saturated with prosaic information: about mineshafts, tunnelling techniques, the price of coal, wages, accidents, respiratory diseases, the sleeping and eating habits of miners.” To get this information, Zola kept hundreds of pages of notes from his research trips, which included going deep into a mine shaft at a coal mine in France, in spite of his deeply seated claustrophobia.

Given this historical texture, Lethbridge paints an intricate portrait of Zola’s life as an author and participant in the life of France as it went through the tumultuous times of the Second French Empire, the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune of Paris, and then finally the Dreyfus Affair. Lethbridge writes, “The time he [Zola] devoted to his writing for the press can be measured by the bare figures of his output: 109 articles in La Cloche in 1872; 21 in L’Avenir national the following year; some 250 in Le Bien public and Le Voltaire in 1876–7; 52 in Le Figaro in 1881. More occasional pieces were published elsewhere.”

Zola, while writing all those articles for the press, was at the same time writing his series of Rougon-Macquart novels. They required extensive research and travel, and yet, he was still able to produce an unfathomable amount of work for the press with his political and art criticism. He also knew and interacted with the major artists in France, and created a country retreat for them at his home in Médan. Lethbridge shows that in this place, Zola was able to become the conscience of culture in France through his influence, not only in literature, but also in painting. This country haven also helped play a role in Zola’s removal from the radicalism that so dominated the age in France.

Lethbridge is clearly a master of the documents when it comes to Zola. This is true of the literary works, the political articles, the art criticism, the journals, and the novel notes. The drawback here, of course, is that readers—especially those not familiar with Zola’s more obscure works—might get lost in Lethbridge’s analysis of all the intricate twists and turns of the novels. There are twenty in the Rougon-Macquart series alone, and some of them are hard to find in English translation, meaning that many readers will certainly not have read most of these books. That said, the biography still gives a sense of the feats of literary engineering that went into Zola’s work.

At the end of the biography, Lethbridge returns to his question about whether Zola determined the France he lived in or whether the France of Zola’s time determined him. In the end, the answer to this question seems not to ultimately matter. Lethbridge concludes that “Zola was either the victim of chance, subject to a set of arbitrary circumstances so inexplicable as to personalize insights in his fiction at odds with deterministic principles; or, as was his life, his death too was indirectly determined by the social and political forces of his time.” In the end, it seems more of a give-and-take. Zola played a strong role in forming the France that he lived in through his unbelievable number of publications, both fiction and nonfiction. But France, in all of its tumult from 1852 to 1902, played a hand in shaping Zola and his work.

Lethbridge’s final analysis of Zola and the Dreyfus Affair amounts to the Affair being a singular moment that was significant but not more or less significant than Zola’s other contributions to his beloved France, especially his art: novels, plays, operas, and the realism that was the foundation of those works. As important as the Dreyfus Affair was for France and as important as Zola believed his actions to be, there was so much more to the determined life of Emile Zola than the Affair. Lethbridge does a great service in showing this with his work.

The ultimate conclusion is that Zola lived a determined life—not in the sense of fatalism, but rather as a man truly determined to do something great for his beloved country. The portrait that Lethbridge so skillfully paints is one of a writer, determined to portray reality in his fiction at all costs and to call France to something higher in his political journalism and criticism. Lethbridge shows Zola at his best, criticizing the corruption of the Second French Empire with his fiction. The reader is left with a sense of awe at the determination of Zola to create a beautiful legacy with his words, and the reader will ultimately have a desire to go read those words after reading Lethbridge’s work.

Liberalism is embattled today. On the left, “neoliberalism” has become a catch-all epithet. It is held responsible for ills from poverty to climate change to war, with policy answers that run to steep taxation, aggressive price regulation, and renewed flirtations with state ownership. On the right, critics level an even more comprehensive charge: that liberalism exalts individualism over community, freedom over duty, and cool rationalism over sustaining faith. Their program often turns to forms of extreme nationalism, characterized by high tariffs, extremely tight immigration restrictions, and government-policing of cultural conformity.

A defense of big-tent liberalism that attracts the beleaguered band of liberals on both the right and left, therefore, would be most welcome. That is what Cass Sunstein, the distinguished professor of law at Harvard University, promises in his introduction to On Liberalism: A Defense of Freedom. He does one crucial thing right: although he is himself a left-liberal, he emphatically counts right-liberals, like Hayek, Friedman, and Mises, as fellow liberals.

Unfortunately, the book ultimately fails as a case for encompassing liberalism for three reasons. First, despite his respect for some right-liberals, it is sometimes an unnecessarily parochial defense of left-liberalism, even suggesting wrongly that originalism—the favored form of constitutional interpretation of most right-liberals—is inconsistent with liberalism. Second, he folds an extensive list of social “goods,” including democracy and even laughter, into liberalism without sufficiently detailing the precise nature of their connection to liberty—liberalism’s lodestar. Finally, the book, while consistently engaging and well-written, is disjointed. Chapters range over a variety of subjects, including Hayek’s views on John Stuart Mill’s marriage and the folk singer Connie Converse’s failure to become famous in her lifetime. It is more a collection of disparate essays than a focused defense of liberalism. Sunstein is a brilliant public intellectual, but the rate of his production (over thirty books and counting) may harm the coherence and power of some of them.

First, take Sunstein’s claim that liberalism implies a particular theory of constitutional interpretation—“experiments in living constitutionalism”—a jurisprudence he sharply contrasts with originalism. It derives its name from John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of “experiments in living”—ways of living that go against tradition and convention but that may reveal new opportunities for the flourishing of the human spirit. Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that if the federal judiciary’s job is to create constitutional rights that allow people to try the experiments they deem fit, originalism will not do the interpretive trick. The Constitution does not contain an “Experiments-in-living Clause.” And even the provision that some treat as a font of rights not otherwise enumerated—the Due Process Clause—protects only rights deeply rooted in American traditions, hardly a mandate for constitutionalizing contemporary experiments.

But Mill also recognized that the experiments in living should not harm others. And Sunstein himself concedes that not all experiments in living should necessarily get constitutional endorsement. What about polygamy, hard drug use, or assisted suicide (better defined as an experiment in dying!)? Once one recognizes how contestable “harm” is—and thus how hard it is to distinguish permissible from impermissible experiments—the central question becomes which institution is best designed to draw those lines. Why aren’t legislators better than justices at making judgments that cannot be reduced to a formula?

Indeed, Sunstein himself praises democracy as an essential part of liberalism, seeing an analogy between the government of the self, a premise of liberalism, and self-government, the premise of democracy. And Sunstein also argues that the rule of law is essential to liberalism, even going as far as to cite Antonin Scalia’s famous essay, The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules. But how can experiment-in-living constitutionalism reflect the rule of law when there is no clear line to decide which experiments to bless, particularly when the text of the Constitution provides few, if any, materials with which to draw one?

Liberalism must be clear about liberty’s priority, candid about institutional limits, and capable of winning converts on both left and right.

Along with Nelson Lund, I have argued that the Constitution interpreted according to originalism has a much better structure to promote experiments-in-living—its combination of federalism and the First Amendment. Different states strike different policy balances between liberty and what might be considered dangerous license. The First Amendment then protects national debate over those state experiments. The free interstate movement of federalism also assures that citizens elsewhere can move to take advantage of the new experiments. This structure has worked to promote experiments in living. Places like New York City and California permitted looser social and sexual morals. Writers then publicized these experiments through books and entertainment until most of the nation accepted them. To be clear, I do not personally have such a high opinion of the results because most people benefit from more traditional moral frameworks. Nor do I think one has to be an originalist to be a liberal. But if liberalism is to be a big tent, it cannot be confined to the production of the precise social mores of which I approve or the interpretative theories that I defend.

Sunstein’s failure to confront the tensions between his embrace of democracy and the rule of law as essential features of liberalism and his preferred constitutional theory exposes a deeper problem: an under-theorized account of liberty’s relation to adjacent concepts such as democracy and the rule of law. Democracy properly structured is a social good, but it is not a conceptual component of liberty as Sunstein implies with the analogy between governance of self and self-government.

Indeed, democracy and liberty exist in some tension. Liberty is about empowering individuals to make their own decisions. Democracy is about empowering the community or its representatives to make decisions on its behalf. To be sure, there may be an empirical connection between the concepts. Frequent elections in a democracy may diffuse power and thus make it harder for any one group to dominate individuals: for liberalism, democracy could be, as Winston Churchill once said, “the worst form of government except for all the others.” But the connection remains empirical and contingent. Whether democracy actually advances liberty depends again on institutional design, including appropriate limitations on government.

Similarly, Sunstein is far too blithe in declaring that large-scale redistribution of wealth is compatible with liberalism. Even if one believes it is conceptually compatible (and he makes no arguments against those like Robert Nozick, who argue that it is not), it is likely not empirically compatible. Large-scale redistribution necessarily empowers the state by reducing an independent center of power—the rich. And given that Sunstein is also at pains to suggest that his kind of liberalism prizes nonconformism against existing social mores, large-scale redistribution makes overturning these conventions less likely, because it is the rich who often have the independence to break with tradition or fund institutions that encourage such departures.

We must also remember that large-scale redistribution places substantial amounts of money and thus power in the hands of the government. Even with the best of motivations, government will often deploy these funds counterproductively, and given the rent seeking of many who seek a greater share of unearned wealth, the motivations may well prove terrible. Given these empirical problems, Sunstein should do far more to demonstrate that redistribution beyond the modest level, which prevents deprivation, is compatible with liberalism.

Finally, Sunstein has an extravagant view of liberalism’s obligation to provide equal opportunity. In one of the more unusual chapters of the book, he recounts the life of Connie Converse, a talented folk singer who nevertheless failed to make a musical living during her lifetime and whose songs were only widely known after her death. Sunstein appears to use her as an example of one who failed to enjoy a fair opportunity—in this case, to be a singer whose fame was commensurate with her enormous talent. He implies that liberalism should at least eventually address such injustices.

But Sunstein himself provides the facts that show the implausibility of this view. Whether songs succeed in breaking through is not just a product of their own abstract merit, but of their resonance with the times. Based on the evidence of the lyrics presented, Converse focused inwardly when many famous folk singers, like Joan Baez, focused outwardly on protest. Moreover, Converse was a troubled person, choosing to disappear from society and likely even to commit suicide. People are much more likely to succeed in entertainment if they have a personality better primed to seize the main chance. Any effort to reorder society so that the Connie Converses of the world have greater chances of “making it” in an inherently uncertain field like popular music would not only miss its mark but also concentrate so much power in the state as to endanger the liberal order.

In short, Sunstein sometimes presents an overly romanticized version of liberalism. Liberalism cannot abolish chance, equalize natural endowments, or ensure virtue. A more level-headed version can be nested within a disciplined democracy and the rule of law to enlarge the space in which individuals and associations can pursue the good as they understand it. That and not a court-managed catalogue of ever-new rights or a program of sweeping redistribution is the big-tent liberalism worth defending. It must be clear about liberty’s priority, candid about institutional limits, and capable of winning converts on both left and right.

Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, which escalated into a full-scale invasion in February 2022, shows no sign of stopping. Putin’s strategy seems to be based on the premise that he can outlast Western support for Ukraine, expose NATO as a feckless alliance, and restore control over what used to be a Russian/Soviet sphere of influence.

The Trump Administration deserves credit for pushing European allies to increase their defense spending and to take a larger role in supporting Ukraine. But it would be a mistake to conclude that the United States can or should leave European security and the problem of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Europeans alone. That includes the idea of a European-led security arrangement for Ukraine. To be taken seriously by Putin, the United States would have to be involved in such security guarantees one way or another.

The Growing Russian Threat

For nearly two decades, Russia has engaged in a hybrid warfare campaign against the West with interference in various elections in Europe and the United States; disinformation; airspace and naval violations; assassinations (both plotted and successful) of Kremlin critics on European soil; economic sabotage that includes cutting vital undersea cables; and explosions of arms depots in the Czech Republic and elsewhere. Russia has paid little price for these acts of aggression.

Ukraine, of course, has been the principal focus of Russian brutality, starting with Putin’s first invasion of the country in February 2014. Russia killed more than 14,000 Ukrainians between that time and the full-scale invasion eight years later.

By February 2022, emboldened by America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Putin thought he would get away with an easy victory over Ukraine. He expected to topple the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, occupy most of Ukraine, and for Russians to be welcomed as liberators in a matter of days, weeks at most—all without paying much of a price from the West.

Instead, despite being significantly outnumbered and outgunned, Ukrainian forces defied Kremlin expectations and have inflicted more than a million casualties on the Russian side, regained more than 50 percent of the territory Russian forces initially seized, and essentially destroyed Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Ukrainians have also developed their own drone technology and production that enable Ukraine to strike Russian military and energy targets deep inside Russian territory. This success is entirely homegrown: Ukraine now domestically produces well over a million drones per year, and these drones are responsible for over 80 percent of battlefield damage against Russian targets.

With more assistance from the West, Ukraine would be in an even stronger position today, and we might see Russia in retreat not by choice but out of necessity. Any diminution in assistance now would leave Ukraine more vulnerable, but Ukrainians will not give up, for they are fighting for their land, their freedom, and their lives.

Despite Ukrainian resilience, Putin is only escalating his aggression toward the West. Moscow is testing the West and the NATO Alliance in particular.

For the first time ever, a NATO member state had to engage militarily with Russian assets over its own territory earlier this month when 19 Russian drones violated Polish airspace over a period of seven hours. It marked the worst violation of the Alliance’s airspace since its founding in 1949. Since then, Russian aircraft have entered Romanian and Estonian (both NATO allies) airspaces. German and Swedish jets also intercepted a Russian military plane in neutral airspace over the Baltic Sea. And drones, likely from Russia, have caused havoc in the skies over Denmark and Germany.

In addition, Russian strikes have damaged the offices of the European Commission and British Council in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a Danish Refugee Council demining operation in eastern Ukraine, killing two people.

In response to these Russian provocations, Poland and Estonia each invoked consultations under Article 4 of the NATO charter, something any member can do when it determines its territorial integrity, political independence, or security is threatened. NATO, in tur,n launched operation “Eastern Sentry” to provide Poland protection against further Russian incursions.

Most Americans favor strong transatlantic ties and want to see the United States adopt a tougher stance toward Russia.

“In these times, we must act firmly, and, if violations occur, we must respond accordingly, including militarily,” Czech President Petr Pavel said in an interview with public broadcaster Czech Television. President Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, speaking separately, agreed. “You have to look at Putin and Russia as an expansionist power,” Kellogg said in a recent interview with Lord Ashcroft, the former deputy chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party. “He wants to reestablish the Russian Empire—just look at history. Give him an inch, he’ll take a mile.”

Trump, Kellogg’s boss, was less assuring initially. “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones?” he wrote on Truth Social. “Here we go!” When asked more recently whether the United States would back its allies if Russia continues to escalate, Trump’s reply was better: “Yeah, I would. I would.”

Yet when a Russian drone struck a US factory in western Ukraine in late August, the Ukrainian expressions of outrage were much louder than those coming from Washington. A minerals deal signed between Ukraine and the United States earlier this year was intended in part to demonstrate US support for Ukraine and discourage Russia from hitting where Americans might be present. That didn’t work. 

Americans Support Ukraine and View Russia as a Threat

Contrary to the noise generated by isolationist factions within both Republican and Democratic circles, most Americans favor strong transatlantic ties and want to see the United States adopt a tougher stance toward Russia for its invasion and ongoing brutal aggression against Ukraine, recent surveys show.

About 86 percent of Trump voters view Russia as a threat to US security, according to a recent survey conducted by the Vandenberg Coalition. Nearly 80 percent of those same voters support stronger sanctions on Russian oil “due to Putin’s refusal to pursue peace negotiations in good faith.”

In a separate survey of a broader cross-section of Americans conducted by the Ronald Reagan Institute, 55 percent opposed a US withdrawal from NATO, 59 percent supported increasing the US troop presence in Eastern Europe, and 71 percent (including majorities of both parties) “support using American military force to defend NATO allies if attacked.”

These numbers reinforce the importance of US leadership when it comes to tackling threats from Russia.

Signals from the Trump administration, however, have been mixed. In mid-September, it approved its first European-financed foreign military sales to Ukraine through the Prioritized Ukrainian Requirements List (PURL) initiative. The sales are worth some $1 billion and include Patriot interceptor missiles and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS.

Some 85 US senators support legislation to impose punishing tariffs and sanctions on purchasers of Russian energy, but Senate leadership has placed the bill on hold pending a green light from the Trump White House. The same is true for a new bipartisan REPO Act, which would “repurpose frozen Russian sovereign assets held in the United States for transfer to Ukraine every 90 days.”

The administration still has not imposed new sanctions on Russia for Putin’s refusal to engage in serious negotiations with his Ukrainian counterpart. It has conditioned any new sanctions and tariffs on seeing European countries end their import of Russian energy and impose their own tariffs on India and China.

In a serious blow to morale among the Baltic states, the Pentagon reportedly decided to end funding for the Baltic Security Initiative, which provides vital assistance for those countries along Russia’s border. That triggered bipartisan opposition from Congress. Rumors of US troop withdrawals from positions in Europe and reports that the administration’s new national security strategy focuses on defense of the homeland and the Western Hemisphere risk signaling to Russia that America is looking elsewhere. This feeds Putin’s thinking that he can prevail in Ukraine and get away with challenging NATO.

Ukraine Needs and Deserves Western (Including US) Assistance

The best way to prove Putin wrong is to help Ukraine defeat Russia. This would likely require significantly increasing military assistance to Ukraine; tightening sanctions on Russia, especially its “shadow fleet” and its energy and banking sectors; lowering the price cap on Russian oil; imposing tariffs on countries that prop up Russia financially by importing Russian energy (already imposed by the United States on India but not yet on China); and seizing the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets and making those funds available to Ukraine. Such policies would reduce the burden on Western countries and hold Russia financially accountable for some of the tremendous damage it has inflicted on Ukraine.

After his meeting with Zelenskyy on the margins of the UN General Assembly on September 23, Trump posted, “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe, and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option.” The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump approved providing Ukraine with US intelligence to help Ukrainian strikes with “long-range missiles against energy targets deep inside Russian territory.” In addition, the administration is considering sending Ukraine Tomahawk missiles, which would be a big boost to Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities.

Ukraine has performed courageously in defending itself against a much larger military. But it remains dependent on the West for Patriot missile defense systems, long-range missiles, and financial support. Under the new arrangement worked out between the Trump Administration and NATO, European member states are purchasing American weapons and making them available to Ukraine.

Ukraine has indicated its readiness to observe a ceasefire and end the war in a just and sustainable manner. Putin, by contrast, has shown no such interest. Understandably, Ukraine seeks security guarantees to avoid having Russia, reinvigorated after a pause in fighting, invade the country again. Both the Biden Administration and the current Trump Administration have ruled out the deployment of US forces on the ground in Ukraine. President Trump, however, has hinted at the possibility of providing intelligence and even air cover for a still undefined European-led security arrangement. That will be critical for any hope of ending the war.

If Europe is to take the lead in some way, it must not be in such a manner that conveys Western weakness in the face of Putin’s aggression.

In addition to stepping up its purchases of American weapons for Ukraine, European nations have also increased transfers of their own weapons systems to Ukraine, including Patriot missile systems. They could do more to help Ukraine blunt Russia’s reliance on drones for strikes against Ukraine with cheaper weapons, such as netting, than those used against drones that violated Polish airspace. Germany still has not agreed to provide its Taurus missiles, which, like the American Tomahawks, would enhance Ukraine’s strike capabilities significantly. 

Security Guarantees for Ukraine?

Days after Trump met with Putin in Alaska, the US president held talks in Washington with Zelenskyy and a handful of European leaders. The idea of a European-led “reassurance force” picked up momentum, as the leaders discussed “Article 5-like” security guarantees for Ukraine—a reference to Article 5 of the NATO charter, which considers an attack on one an attack against all—but without actual NATO membership for Ukraine.

A few weeks later, European allies met in Paris, and according to French President Emmanuel Macron, 26 countries committed to providing security assistance to Ukraine that would cover land, sea, and air. Questions abound about the reassurance force’s ability to deter further Russian aggression: Troops would not be deployed to the front line, where the heaviest fighting occurs. Nor would they be sent to Ukraine until a truce or ceasefire is in place. Alas, that gives Putin an incentive to reject any end to the war, absent a tightening of sanctions on Russia, imposition of secondary sanctions and tariffs on countries that import Russian energy, and a vast scaling up of military assistance to Ukraine. Indeed, sending European troops to Ukraine without taking those other steps would be reckless.

In an attempt to discourage any country from sending troops to Ukraine, Putin has argued that they would be “legitimate targets” for Russian attack. Even the very idea of providing military assistance to Ukraine would mean NATO countries are “at war” with Russia, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian journalists during a September 15 briefing.

The West must not allow Putin a de facto veto over Ukraine’s interest in NATO membership, nor in Ukraine’s right to seek security guarantees and military assistance against further Russian aggression. This is the time for the transatlantic alliance to show Putin that it will not back down in the face of his muscle-flexing nor abandon Ukraine. As The Economist warned recently, “If NATO signals timidity, the risk of sleepwalking into a larger war will grow.”

Retired US Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt put it well when he wrote, “The most difficult part, of course, will be convincing European voters of the importance of forming and deploying such a force, as they will be putting their sons and daughters in harm’s way. But this is the cost of providing a security guarantee, ensuring an enduring peace and, if that peace should fail, being ready to defend not only Ukraine but the whole of Europe.”

The United States needs to do its part, too. In addition to applying significantly more pressure on Putin to end the war, the Trump Administration should reassure nervous European allies that, while we will not have troops on the ground ourselves, we will be there to provide critical intelligence and air support.

Finally, it would help for NATO members, starting with the United States, to reconsider the Alliance’s opposition to Ukraine’s membership. This would remove the confusion surrounding “Article 5-like” security guarantees and make clear for all NATO member states—and for Russia—that an attack on NATO member Ukraine would be considered an attack on all.

If Europe is to take the lead in some way, it must not be in such a manner that conveys Western weakness in the face of Putin’s aggression. Nor should it be Europe on its own without American involvement. Whatever form it takes, the transatlantic alliance will need to strongly signal its commitment to Ukraine.

Caleb Nelson has recently weighed in with a long and thoughtful blog post on the so-called unitary executive debates and whether the president of the United States has a constitutional right to remove principal executive officers. Nelson is a famous and prominent originalist who is usually right about everything. His foray into this debate has caused something of a stir.

With all due respect to Nelson—and I mean it, since he’s absolutely right about the public rights doctrine, about sovereign immunity, and about much more besides—he has not quite considered all the arguments for the proposition that the president has a constitutional right to remove. His intervention, though, is critically important because he discounts, probably correctly, many of the older, standard theories of executive power and removal. He relies on works from Julian Mortenson and Jed Shugerman, among others. I have learned much from Professors Mortenson and Shugerman, too—and as I shall explain presently, I agree with Mortenson about the meaning of executive power and with Shugerman about the uncertainty regarding the so-called “Decision of 1789.” I do not, however, think that either of them has shown as a consequence that the president does not have a constitutional right to remove principal executive officers.

Much of the following will summarize the argument of my own longer article in the Journal of Legal Analysis, entitled “The Original Presidency: A Conception of Administrative Control.” As an initial matter, though, it is important to establish what that article doesn’t argue, and where I agree with Nelson.

Congress can no more restrict the president’s power to remove—once it is acknowledged he has that power—than it can restrict his power to pardon.

The conventional view of executive power among formalists is that the Vesting Clause grants a “residuum” of executive powers, including, for example, foreign affairs-related powers traditionally exercised by the British monarch. If removal is executive in nature, and the Constitution does not assign that power elsewhere or otherwise limit the president’s exercise of it, then it vests in the president by virtue of the residuum.

As I have written elsewhere, I agree with Nelson and Mortenson that this account of the Vesting Clause is likely incorrect. My view is that “the executive power” is a substantive grant of power, but of only one: the power to oversee the execution of the laws. But that power, I argue, includes removal—not because removal was a freestanding executive prerogative, but rather because it was part and parcel of the power to oversee the execution of the laws. (More on all this presently.)

I also agree with Nelson that nothing about Article II supports the strong version of the so-called unitary executive thesis that the president must “be in charge of all exercises of executive power by the federal government.” But, as I argue in my Journal of Legal Analysis paper, one can believe—and many did at the time—that the president has no constitutional right to interfere with the duties of subordinate officers in whom Congress has vested discretion (unless Congress has said otherwise), but also believe the president always has the right to remove, for any reason, if he thinks those officers have not exercised their discretion well. This view would also make sense of the Opinions Clause, which Nelson, along with many others, suggests is otherwise superfluous. That clause would be necessary to impose a constitutional obligation on the principal officers to obey the president in this one respect—to provide written opinions about their duties—so that the president may receive information so that he may intelligently exercise the power to remove.

Whatever the Vesting Clause might otherwise grant the president—that is, regardless of whether the president can direct officers or has some other residuum of power—the executive power is, at a minimum, the power to oversee the execution of the laws by others. Because the king, a governor, or the president could not possibly execute the laws alone, the executive power was understood to include the power to appoint officers to assist. One need not accept the royal-prerogative-residuum-vesting thesis to accept this proposition. Here is Mortenson himself: “The executive power was often viewed as either logically entailing or functionally implying the appointment of ‘assistances.’”

The evidence for this proposition is legion. For example, George Mason thought that the Senate should have no role in “the appointment” of “public officers” because it was an executive power. James Wilson thought similarly: “There can be no good Executive without a responsible appointment of officers to execute.” In the Constitutional Convention, Madison argued that the “extent of the Executive authority” was the “power to carry into effect[] the national laws” and “to appoint to offices in cases not otherwise provided for.”

The Antifederalist writer Hampden wrote that “the most important and most influential portion of the executive power” was “the appointment of all officers.” Brutus, Centinel, and Richard Henry Lee, among others, agreed. As did Publius: “the appointment to offices … is in its nature an executive function.”

The more controversial question is the connection between appointment and removal. Giles Jacob’s law dictionary—the most prominent in America at the Founding—stated plainly that the king “names, creates, makes and removes the great officers of the government.” As Shugerman has written, however, it is “rare to find much discussion of removal power on the Founders’ bookshelf.” But there is an explanation for such silence: the power to remove was incident to the power to appoint. Thus, the appointment power included removal by default because an officer could be removed by the very act of appointing someone new.

Shugerman himself has canvassed numerous authorities for this proposition. This tradition was “enshrined in Latin” maxims, “unumquoque dissolvitur, eodem modo, quo ligatur” and “cujus est instituere ejus abrogate,” translating to “every obligation is dissolved by the same method with which it is created” and “whose right it is to institute, his right it is to abrogate.”

In 1780, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private note: “The power of appointing and removing executive officers inherent in Executive. Executive inadequate to every thing. Appoint deputies. … He who appoints may remove.” On this point, Alexander Hamilton agreed. When he appointed Tench Coxe as the assistant secretary of the Treasury pursuant to the act establishing the Treasury Department, he noted in the commission that he could remove Coxe even though the statute was silent.

The Supreme Court subsequently adopted this proposition. At least “in the absence of all constitutional provision, or statutory regulation,” the Court held early on, “it would seem to be a sound and necessary rule, to consider the power of removal as incident to the power of appointment.” As did other prominent antebellum Americans. Chancellor Kent wrote in a letter to Daniel Webster that “the power to appoint and reappoint, when all else is silent, is the power to remove.” And Daniel Webster wrote in another letter, the power to remove is “incident to the power of appointment.”

As the Kent and Webster letters suggest, however, the real question is whether the Constitution derogates from the default rule. It does with respect to appointments, at least, because of the Appointments Clause. But what of removal? The reason the Constitutional Convention did not talk about removal was because the initial drafts to come out of the Committee of Detail assigned the appointment power over ambassadors and Supreme Court judges entirely to the Senate, and the appointment of other officers to the president alone. There was no need to think about removal at all; the Senate, acting alone, would remove ambassadors, and the president, acting alone, would remove other officers. The appointment power was not shared between the president and the Senate until the Committee of Postponed Matters in the final days of the Convention on September 4. The Framers had no time to think about the implications that sharing the appointment power would have for removal.

The power to remove may follow from the power to appoint, but the power to appoint is—as noted previously—ultimately an incident of executive power.

Thus, in the famous debates over the removal power in 1789, when Congress established the first executive departments, representatives could draw different conclusions from this maxim. Several representatives believed that, because of this maxim, the president and Senate together had the power to remove, as both together had the power to appoint.

Even James Madison agreed that in general “the power to annul an appointment is, in the nature of things, incidental to the power which makes the appointment.” He argued that if all the Constitution said on this score was that the president and Senate shall appoint, then he would agree that the president and Senate together must remove. Because the Constitution included both the Executive Vesting Clause and the Take Care Clause, however, he thought otherwise. The power to remove may follow from the power to appoint, but the power to appoint is—as noted previously—ultimately an incident of executive power. “If any thing in its nature is executive,” Madison stated, “it must be that power which is employed in superintending and seeing that the laws are faithfully executed.”

Thus, Madison argued, both appointment and removal were ultimately incidents of the executive power. The Constitution then derogates from that principle with respect to appointments, but not for removals. The “association of the Senate with the President in exercising” the appointment function, Madison argued, “is an exception to this general rule” that the executive power is vested in the president, which exception does not apply to removal.

The Take Care Clause further supports this proposition, Madison argued, because it implied that the president has the power “necessary to accomplish” the duty of faithful execution. That is, giving the Senate a check on removal effectively transfers the take care duty from the president to the Senate. Importantly, Caleb Nelson agrees with all of this. He writes in his post that he agrees that a senatorial check would be equivalent to an impermissible legislative veto. But that gives away the whole game because that is a recognition that the removal power is in fact the president’s.

The question then becomes whether Congress can, pursuant to its Necessary and Proper Clause, limit the reasons why the president can remove a principal officer. Nelson doesn’t see why it couldn’t, if it can establish the offices. But just because Congress can establish, say, federal crimes, it does not give Congress a “lesser” power to limit the reasons why the president can pardon individuals convicted of those crimes. It is true that Congress establishes offices, and doing so furthers the president’s ability to oversee faithful execution. Even tenure rules, qualifications for office, bipartisanship requirements, and the like can help the president carry law into execution. But Congress can no more restrict the president’s power to remove—once it is acknowledged he has that power—than it can restrict his power to pardon.

To repeat, it doesn’t follow that the president must have a constitutional right to control the exercise of an officer’s discretion, although many executive power theorists do seem to think so. As I’ve written, however, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, and even Taft—who subsequently authored the Myers v. United States opinion—thought Congress could insulate the individual decisions of an officer. But, Taft wrote, the president “may consider the decision after its rendition as a reason for removing the officer, on the ground that the discretion regularly entrusted to that officer by statute has not been on the whole intelligently or wisely exercised.”

Nelson’s intervention in this field is welcome, but it seems to me he hasn’t sufficiently shown why Taft was wrong about the bottom line.