American State Myth in the Living Era

Today’s quarter-millennium anniversary of American independence is purely formal, if you read history. The document signed on July 4th, 1776, merely clarified the terms of the Continental Congress’s July 2nd resolution of Independence; the signatories famously didn’t begin signing the Declaration of Independence until August. Besides, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, generally considered the start of the American Revolution, occurred on April 19th, 1775.

What, then, does America celebrate today? We celebrate a story, a myth. Like the Christian Nativity, which almost certainly didn't happen on December 25th, Independence Day celebrations hang a neat date on the otherwise vague, shapeless division between the Before Times and the Age of Salvation. Such divisions create clarity, sequence, and an almost catechistic transition from benightedness to true vision.

The parallels between Christianity and American state mythology deserve further consideration, because they speak to our national identity. I've written before about how the official Thanksgiving story serves the same role in America that the Genesis creation narrative serves in the Bible. But if Jamestown and Plymouth commence America's Hebraic “wandering in the wilderness” epoch, the Declaration of Independence is definitely Christmas in the American story. For good or ill.

Like Christ's ministry, the American “Experiment” involves reams of teachings. John Locke, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine serve the same role as the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables. These teachings come from an era, not an individual, so the parallels are imperfect. But American schools teach simplified, bowdlerized versions of these texts just as Sunday School teaches a paraphrased Bible for kids.

But Sunday School elides the contradictions and nuances that make the Bible frequently difficult, even for scholars. Likewise, schoolbook history removes the conflicts, doubts, and often slippery moral center surrounding the Revolution and what came after. Like reformers today, the Founders fought each other as much as the enemy. But you wouldn't know that from most official schoolbooks.

The Book of Acts records that, without Christ around to resolve questions, the Apostles fell to infighting. But they resolved the most important debates at the Council of Jerusalem. Likewise, Jill Lepore records how the American Constitution represents the Founders’ best available solution to their internal divisions. The Council of Jerusalem has no published proceedings; we know only the conclusions printed in the Bible. The Founders tried to achieve the same effect by refusing to publish the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention until all participants had died.

Then the parallels become loaded. The Gospels record Jesus preaching, teaching, and giving theological interpretations. But when crowds started clamoring for him personally, or tried to make him king, Jesus fled. Only after Jesus was absent, and Paul's Epistles became scripture, did the person of Jesus, rather than his teaching, become prime in Christianity.

Likewise, while the Founders lived, they argued about principle and procedure. How direct should popular control be? How strong can the Executive Branch become before it threatens the nation? Only after the Founders’ deaths do we start seeing the personal veneration of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and latterly Lincoln. The individuals, not the philosophic process, become the source of capital-T Truth.

As Jason Stanley writes, when we venerate old texts and dead persons, debate about how to apply their Truths becomes impossible. Too much American political discourse today focuses on the Founders’ words and persons, the fallacy of Originalism. Changing how we apply the Founders’ principles to real life, becomes seen first as decline, then as blasphemy. Truth becomes a fixed, oracular artifact, not a function of how we live.

The idea that we can Make America Great Again relies on the principle that greatness derives from the past, not from how we live now. Change can never happen, since change grants primacy to the present. Our living, breathing needs become a barrier to Truth, which the dead uncovered in 1776, and which must be treasured and preserved, never used.

Jesus himself hated this veneration of the dead. When challenged on “marriage at the resurrection” in Matthew 22, Jesus replied, “God is lord of the living, not the dead.” Even without a literal God, American state mythology should follow the same values. America is a living nation, not a graveyard of ideals. Any moral Truth that impedes living Americans is a contravention of the philosophic process that Washington, Jefferson, and Paine put in motion.

If today is a day to celebrate the dead, then who cares. But if we recommit ourselves to living Americans, we truly remember what this day is about.

Elegy for the American Imagination

Sophie Turner as Lara Croft

Amazon Prime Video has released first-look promo art for their announced Lara Croft: Tomb Raider TV series. Irish actress Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) has the lead, and appears remarkably like the video game character, though her measurements look more realistic. Turmer becomes the third live-action performer to depict Lara Croft, after Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander. Amazon also becomes the third studio to control the adaptation rights.

I’m sure Amazon’s production will be fine. The mere fact that previous adaptations have received lukewarm reviews and middling revenues, before descending into development hell for the sequels, proves nothing. And audiences’ overwhelming indifference to video game adaptations like Super Mario Brothers, Resident Evil, and Street Fighter tells us nothing worth knowing about yet another adaptation’s likelihood of commercial success. I’ll keep an open mind.

But seriously, who wants another Lara Croft adaptation? What market niche demanded we try this again? Streaming TV services require truly massive audiences to ensure manageable amortized budgets, so Amazon certainly expects enough viewers to show interest. Their willingness to invest in a thirty-year-old franchise, which hasn’t released a new game in eight years, says they want something audiences can snuggle into, like a favorite blanky.

My friends know where I’m going with this, because I’ve said it so frequently. This is another reiteration of Hollywood’s persistent fear of innovation. Tomb Raider joins Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s Carrie, and Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man as franchises which have been adapted three times, not counting sequels. Second adaptations are looming for the Twilight and Harry Potter novels. TV networks keep resurrecting shows like Battlestar Galactica and Hawaii Five-O.

Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft

This partly reflects changes in the media landscape. Sarah Kendzior writes that, as networked computer technology makes it possible for writers and designers to work from anywhere, the Big Five studios have become unreceptive to portfolios from applicants who don’t have a Los Angeles-area return address. Giblin and Doctorow describe how consolidation between studios, agencies, and distributors turn creativity into a package deal, not an artistic exploration.

But recent events have convinced me something deeper is afoot. Those who control the levers of power have so much riding on their decisions that they dare not attempt anything imaginative or risky, because they have too much to lose. The creatives controlling Hollywood, Broadway, and Nashville are highly visible, because we expect their inventive stories to charm our intellect. But the same moribund imagination plagues our politics and economics.

Democratic politicians run on promises to resurrect past economic promise. From President Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In,” to President Biden’s promise of a post-Taco Republican “Epiphany,” to the very existence of  Hilary Clinton, Democrats keep yearning for a storied past, probably in the 1990s. Meanwhile, President Taco’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, locates greatness in a lost era, like King Arthur or Pecos Bill.

Violence is always a failure of imagination. The violence we’ve witnessed this month in Venezuela and Minneapolis reflects a power structure terminally allergic to compromise and innovation. Just as Hollywood can’t imagine new blockbusters, forcing them to revisit Star Wars and Batman, our leaders can’t imagine governance without burning cities like General Sherman. Faced with disagreement, the administration’s deputies can only imagine gunfire on unarmed minivan moms.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft

Eidos Interactive released the first Tomb Raider game in 1996, the same year President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal protection to same-sex marriage, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which placed work requirements on federal poverty protection. There is no causal relationship between these, of course. But Lara Croft’s return definitely calls back to another time when America’s government attacked the defenseless.

Put another way, Lara Croft, Lucasfilm, and the Department of Homeland Security all promise their audiences that they don’t have to think. They allow Americans to subsume themselves into a property they’ve always enjoyed, whether it’s a game, a movie, or a lily-white national complexion. But to maintain that promise, the execution must become increasingly extravagant: more explosions, bigger confrontations, louder guns.

Business, media, and government leaders can’t imagine new approaches—at least without jeopardizing their chokehold on power. They offer the same loud, but ultimately disappointing, options we’ve purchased before. Challenging the monopoly is too costly for working creatives, no matter how imaginative, to even try. So we repeat the same dull, unimaginative techniques, hoping the outcome will somehow be different.

Somebody must be first to break the cycle. But without guaranteed returns, the establishment will remain too scared to try.

Venezuela, and the Death of Old-Fashioned Romance

Deposed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro being extradited in handcuffs

You already know that, in the small hours of January 3^rd, 2026, American forces invaded Venezuela and arrested President Nicolas Maduro. The situation immediately got worse when Taco Administration spokespeople hinted darkly that this was a test run. Other states, including Cuba and Greenland, are potentially next. This action announces both a disdain for United Nations treaties, and America’s potential withdrawal from NATO.

Three days later, a young Threads user with the sign-on handle “josselocks” posted a query. It read, in part, “Do guys like even talk to girls in real life anymore? Like you see them in bookstore and decide to go up and start a conversation.” The poster’s bio indicates she’s 19, and therefore prime age to search for a spouse or long-term partner, perhaps yearning for the old-fashioned “meet cute” that populates romance novels and romantic comedy movies.

Poor “josselocks” got quickly ratioed. Multiple posters, mostly men, including me, reminded her that a decade of public messaging has asserted that women are sick of unsolicited male attention, and that men shouldn’t approach women unprompted in public places. The discussion was more nuanced, of course. But the consensus held that social mores have shifted, and approaching women in public has become insuperably risky for many men.

These two events seemingly exist in different spheres, a Venn diagram with no overlap. Yet upon consideration, I spotted more going on than my initial, flippant response admitted. These two events represent a breakdown in shared social values that makes trust between strangers possible. With it, this failure of trust threatens more than one country or one big-hearted teenager’s ability to audition a mate. Western civilization is threatened.

I’ve written recently that our understanding of social organization has evolved. Nation-states were once the private property of their monarchs, or whatever warlord could hold the throne against challengers, foreign or domestic. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers have attempted to assign moral purpose to states retrospectively. But these attempts are always provisional, changing, and inconsistent. We agree what role states serve for now.

Less obviously, but more pertinent for daily life, we’ve likewise reevaluated what families are for. No longer do people marry to ensure legitimate inheritance, as medieval aristocrats did, or to bind working families in mutual indebtedness, as peasants did. We choose voluntarily when and whether to marry or procreate. Men choose wives, not for the likelihood of hardy offspring, but because relationships serve moral values and bring emotional satisfaction.

Families and nations thus serve concrete purposes. These purposes may be economic, moral, social, or whatever, but in organizing societies or households, we start by understanding that all participants agree on that purpose. We needn’t agree on everything constantly, but we at least share core principles. For instance, a relationship might flourish over a love of books. A state might flourish over a commitment to hemispherical peace.

Somehow, too many Americans seem surprised that a President elected on his supposed merits as a billionaire, thinks America should exist to serve billionaires. While we’ve watched Republicans kick the poor for their poverty, and Democrats fold like wet rags, the Taco Administration has invaded an OPEC nation without Congressional authorization. They’ve shown paltry interest in Venezuelan democracy or civil rights, but are aggressively expropriating its oil reserves.

For this Administration, “trust” exists only between the wealthy and the strong. The greatest masses of people, American or international, don’t deserve respect, consideration, or trust. This administration regards poverty protection, labor rights, and public schools as theft from the wealthy, and strength as the only moral imperative. So they’ve deployed troops into their own cities while invading abroad.

This top-level dick-swinging machismo corresponds with the rise of “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, flexing their literal muscles performatively. The entire MeToo movement happened because some men proved themselves untrustworthy. Sure, not all men, but how many does it need to be? But the counter-push has been real: the ubiquity of TikTok “creep-shaming” videos altered the landscape so men can’t trust women who can’t trust men.

Taken together, on the personal and national levels, we’ve created a culture that no longer includes trust. From national borders to personal boundaries, from checks and balances to love and marriage, all our social arrangements have relied on the expectation that we can trust one another to behave honorably without constant supervision. Right now, all around us, in real time, we’re witnessing that trust wither on the vine.

Without that trust, all social philosophy is empty talk, and the experiment of freedom fails.

Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto

Elinor Ostrum, 1933-2012

When Italian-English explorer John Cabot “discovered” the island of Newfoundland in 1497, he marveled at the ocean’s abundance of North Atlantic cod. Cabot’s journals claim his men could fill their stocks by simply dangling baskets overboard. When English printers published news of Cabot’s discovery, commercial fishers flocked to what became Canada. But, as Cabot sailed with Bristol seamen, some historians suspect that Bristol fishers harvested the waters now called the Grand Banks even before Columbus.

Elinor Ostrum is the only woman to date to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Her reputation rests mainly on her first book, 1990’s Governing the Commons. In this book, Ostrum demonstrates how traditional agrarian societies manage commonly owned resources, like pastureland. She commences the book by describing how a Turkish fishing village partitioned access to their patch in the Aegean Sea, ensuring everybody has equal access to prime waters without depriving anyone else.

I remember reading Ostrum’s description of folk governance and thinking: that sounds great, but one diesel-powered trawler with a five-mile line could ruin that arrangement for everyone. Ostrum wrote her book to refute Garrett Hardin’s 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons, which postulates that humans will inevitably exhaust commonly held property. Generations of economists, like Ostrum, rebut Hardin’s claim by noting that, for centuries, humans didn’t exhaust the commons; that’s a Twentieth Century phenomenon.

Archeological evidence suggests that Newfoundland was the last part of the Americas to receive permanent human settlement. But the Maritime Archaic people, a lost culture known only by their artifacts, settled the island around 9,000 years ago, and humans have occupied the island ever since. Humans, both indigenous nations and European colonists, survived side-by-side with Newfoundland’s caribou herds, abundant timber, and Grand Banks fisheries for centuries, and all four flourished. The relationship seems highly reciprocal.

Now the timber, caribou, and fisheries are critically endangered. Deep-water fishing, once an artisanal trade conducted with hand tools in wooden vessels, is now performed commercially by steel-hulled ships with diesel engines and massive refrigerator compartments. Those who could afford these massive pollution machines could haul enough catch to feed the lucrative European and North American markets, while artisans lost revenue on scale. This became an embodiment of that capitalist truism: Them that has, gets.

Garrett Hardin, 1915-2003

Garrett Hardin based his treatise on the theories of Thomas Malthus and the behavior of single-celled organisms in laboratories. Malthus claimed that humans’ ability to procreate will inevitably exceed nature’s ability to grow food, leading to resource depletion and catastrophic die-offs, which Hardin verified among paramecia, which exhaust all their food, then starve. Malthus (a former clergyman) believed the most charitable action was to let the poor die. Hardin preferred benevolent intrusions into market economics.

These conclusions contain stacked assumptions. Malthus assumed that conditions he observed among Surrey peasant farmers, in a historically unique time of economic upheaval, represented humanity overall. Hardin assumed that microorganisms in laboratories behaved like wild microfauna. Both are wrong for comically obvious reasons. Surrey was heavily impoverished by aristocrats adjusting poorly to the rapid transition to industrial capitalism, while lab samples don’t reflect wild conditions, where food replenishes itself, while predators thin the wild microbiome.

For centuries, humans managed natural resources fairly responsibly. This includes indigenous American populations, which (generally) regarded land husbandry as sacred duty, and Europeans, who simply lived on the land they worked. Then the Enclosure Movement happened. Once-shared resources, like Hardin’s hypothetical pastureland, became private property, which one could license to exploit. Same with mineral resources, wild game, and even residential land. Communities, which once governed resources jointly, became atomized, competing for access to scarce staples.

Newfoundland fisheries didn’t collapse because “fishers” depleted the ecosystem; they collapsed because industrial trawlers depleted the ecosystem. And industrial trawlers happened because the government distributed fishing licenses, subsidized oil extraction, and collected taxes in ways that disadvantaged small operators. The Grand Banks yielded a record haul in 1968, then fell precipitously; yields tumbled around ninety percent in five years. A two-year federal fishing moratorium, introduced in 1992, has been extended indefinitely for over thirty years.

In other words, technology and policy combined to endanger the once-lush Grand Banks. Because humans assumed the trend lines would continue forever, they made no transitional plans; Newfoundland’s economy collapsed overnight. This bears consideration, not just for Hardin and Ostrum’s debates, but because it can happen again. As America has recently drawn in its own record harvests, powered by million-dollar equipment and ammonia-based fertilizer, we must think carefully about whether we’re following the same path.

The chain of thought continues in Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto, Part 2

Are Nation-States Obsolete?

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

The President Taco Administration has performed elaborate gymnastics to preserve its adherents’ notions about American identity. Within its first few weeks, it mistakenly deported a refugee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom America was supposed to protect. It’s spent the subsequent months desperately excluding him, and others of a similar complexion, from the country. This has included snatching veterans and citizens in its absurdly wide net.

This emphasizes a question underpinning America’s foundation, a question that remains unresolved 250 years later: what is a nation-state for? Not a government, which exists to make and enforce laws, but the state itself, which exists irrespective of who holds power. Why do nation-states exist? Closely related, what purpose do borders serve? Why do we draw hypothetical lines, then demand citizens stay on their side, under penalty of law?

The Taco Administration clearly sees states as ordained to sort humanity into protected and unprotected classes. The protected class is apparently White, English-speaking, and at least implicitly Protestant Christian. Critics have documented the administration targeting suspects by superficial characteristics, like skin melanin and speaking Spanish in public. These standards of insidership are irrational and inconsistent, but serve a nationalist narrative.

If your 11^th-grade American Civics course resembled mine, you probably heard fuzzy bromides about “government by consent of the governed” and “rule of law in a free society.” Textbook writers cherry-pick these sayings from philosophers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Baron Montesquieu. Armchair political theorists browse these writers to justifiy a moral nation-state the way religious scholars once selectively read the Bible and Talmud.

Yet these Enlightenment-era thinkers worked backward to attribute purpose to the state. They mostly worked between the Thirty Years’ War in the 17^th Century, and the Seven Years’ War in the 18^th. During that century, old definitions of nationhood, founded on ethnicity or religion, seemed increasingly phony, as European states expanded beyond their homelands to claim vast overseas colonies. Nations needed new justifications simply to exist.

Charles, Baron de Montesquieu

Before this Enlightenment interregnum, states were the monarchs’ private property. Kings owned the military and the treasury, and commenced wars to gather riches, power, and personal glory. Longstanding wars, such as those between the English Plantagenets and the French Valois, were driven not by principles but by personalities. Monarchic dynasties didn’t influence ordinary people much, provided their battles didn’t happen on peasant farmland.

I’ve written about this before. If you dig back far enough, states basically existed as vessels to contain the military. “King” and “Emperor” are, in their origins, not political titles, but military ranks. When theoreticians like Rousseau postulate a “social contract” to justify the state, they’re imposing later moral expectations that simply don’t apply. States didn’t organize themselves to protect the hoi polloi, they fought for the sake of fighting.

Later thinkers, especially John Rawls and David Gauthier, further extend the social contract experiment. Their theories attempt to recreate primordial social selection, when states first organized themselves, and question how we can recapture that supposed purity. (I’m oversimplifying; stick with me.) But anybody who’s read Edward Gibbon knows that states didn’t emerge from social agreements, they arose from swordsmithing and horsemanship.

Modern attempts to repurpose the nation-state for moral ends create frequent slapstick outcomes. My personal favorite is when Paul Robeson—actor, activist, legend—couldn’t cross international borders during the Red Scare. So, he mounted a sound truck along the U.S.-Canadian border and sang to a multinational audience, while nominally honoring the law. The product highlighted borders’ inherent absurdity.

States invent laws to justify themselves, then draw invisible lines across the globe, demanding that people stay inside whatever lines they’re born into. Instead of the cultural flourishing that we regularly see where borders are loosely enforced, in places like Miami or New Orleans, modern borders become absolute walls that ordinary people must never, ever cross. Literal walls now, in Taco’s America.

Conservatives, especially American religious conservatives, are frequently terrified of a one-world state. Organizations like the United Nations, or even cooperation pacts like the USMCA, reduce them to pants-wetting terror. But I suggest we consider something else: a no-state world. Instead of inventing moralistic justifications for boundaries drawn during the horse-and-buggy era or earlier, maybe states themselves are outdated.

I can’t speculate what comes after nation-states. Future predictions consistently go sideways behind the forecasters’ personal blind spots. But the chaos emerging from the Administration’s attempt to define America’s purpose, shows we need to move beyond this medieval model. We don’t do polity for ancient reasons, so we can’t do it within ancient boundaries.

Party Politics and the Art of Forgiveness

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

This weekend, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the Democrats “a big tent…. that’s got room for Marjorie Taylor Greene.” This statement deserved the immediate blowback, as Greene’s history of race-baiting, antisemitism, and harassing school shooting survivors doesn’t just go away. But it exemplifies two problems with American politics. First, that our parties have been reduced to the Trump and anti-Trump parties, without underlying principles. Second, we keep steadily eroding the relationship between forgiveness and repentance.

Raskin’s invitation is only the latest Democratic effort to dilute their brand. The Democrats continue providing a nurturing cocoon to aggressive nationalists like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, simply because they personally refuse President Taco. Former Representative Joe Walsh, who holds truly noxious views, has become a resistance leader. Yet the party leadership, including Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, still haven’t endorsed Zohran Mamdani, even after he won the party primary and the majority vote.

Throughout the last decade, we’ve watched America’s mainstream parties reorganize themselves around one man. Republicans, who had legitimate policies in the 1990s when I was one of them, have become the party that endorses whatever dribbles out of President Taco’s mouth. Those who disagree, the party deems “traitors.” Meanwhile, Democrats, once the party of Civil Rights and the New Deal, have jettisoned all principles to pursue whatever and whoever opposes this President. This isn’t sustainable.

To accomplish their agenda, Democrats have ushered their onetime opponents up the leadership ladder. Although professional pundits claimed Kamala Harris lost last year’s election behind issues like queer, trans, and racial rights, Harris actively avoided those issues. Instead, she spent the campaign’s final weeks touring as a double-act with Liz Cheney, whom observers have described as “arch-conservative.” Democrats have pivoted away from their base, including labor, minorities, and queer voters, to chase the ever-shifting center.

Democrats have made conservatives like Cheney, Walsh, and now Greene their preferred leaders, despite their voting base’s opposition. This rush to promote former enemies makes sense if, like I suspect many Democrats did, you read Clausewitz in high school, without prior context. Many military strategists contend that former enemies make the best allies. Which is probably true, if your only interest is winning. But because the Democratic base has certain principles, winning alone isn’t enough.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

“Forgiveness” has become the defining stain of contemporary American life. News reeks with commentators who demand forgiveness, not as a culmination of a penitent journey, but as a precondition. From ordinary criminals who want forgiveness without facing consequences, to widespread abuse in religious congregations, to loyalists eager to excuse treason, we’ve witnessed a reversal of the forgiveness process. It’s become something powerful people demand from their perches, not something the wronged offer from God-given mercy.

I can’t unpack the full underpinnings of forgiveness in 750 words. In brief, “forgiveness” is half of the continuum, one face of a coin. The other half is “repentance,” the process of taking account and changing one’s life. This isn’t merely verbal contrition, as I learned in White Protestant Sunday school. Repentance, or metanoia in Greek, means literally walking a new path. We know somebody’s repented, not by their words, but by their changed life.

Cheney, Walsh, and especially Greene have shown no inclination toward changed lives. Though Greene has verbally apologized for past violent rhetoric, observant critics claim her manner hasn’t shown signs of authenticity. More important, this change in Greene’s loyalties has happened too suddenly to reflect in her actions. Perhaps Greene has literally reversed herself, and she’ll demonstrate a more cooperative, nonviolent, and restrained manner. But it’s too soon to know whether her words match her actions.

Please don’t misunderstand me: verbal apologies matter. Humans are language-driven creatures, and speaking with one another is a necessary part of bond-building. But who among us hasn’t known somebody who says they’re sorry, while showing no acts of repentance? This may be innocent—small children think “I’m sorry” is a blanket ticket to forgiveness—or malicious—abusive spouses love voicing their regrets. But only when words and actions come together do they make a difference.

Part of repentance includes asking whether one will handle power better in the future. Current or former elected officials, including Greene, Walsh, and Cheney, want the Democratic Party to offer them unconditional leadership, like they had before. But from my vantage point, they’ve shown no signs that they’ll use that leadership to uplift the downtrodden, heal the hurting, or support large-D Democratic principles. They haven’t shown a new life, so they haven’t yet earned forgiveness.

Opening the Door to Violence

Charlie Kirk

Nobody cares what I think about Charlie Kirk’s recent public assassination, nor should they. Thanks to the internet, our public discourse is littered with opinionated cranks whose ad hoc platforms give them space to spew unbaked viewpoints and soak up citizens’ dwindling attention. Kirk himself might’ve become one such purveyor, had marketing copywriter Bill Montgomery not mentored and bankrolled him. Also, Kirk might still be alive.

I face two conflicting impulses regarding Kirk’s death. Historically, I’ve been a longtime advocate of nonviolent resistance, believing that shows of force only give powerful people the justification they need to instigate draconian crackdowns. Therefore, I would never advocate anyone actively assassinating Charlie Kirk, no matter how reprehensible I find his opinions. Anyway, that’s my longstanding historical opinion, which I still broadly believe.

Recent political trends, however, force me to evaluate my position. We saw, during the summer protests of 2020 and after, how the police used routine, lawful protests as justification for attacking American citizens like a Greek hoplite phalanx. More recently, we’ve seen ICE agents swarming over workplaces, businesses, and whole communities, in such number that Gandhi-like responses would be thoroughly impotent, and possibly even get people killed.

Concisely, you can’t hug it out with the fash.

Nonviolent resistance always contains within it the prospect of violence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reached the point where he objectively needed to participate in the plot to assassinate Der Führer. Dr. King’s resistance to state authority always implicitly held groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam in reserve. Whenever we assert the primacy of nonviolent resistance, we tacitly also say: “For as long as that works.”

Demonstrations, language, and semiotics won’t work under current conditions. We can’t afford the time necessary to convince a critical number of Americans to withhold their support from an administration that shows thorough disrespect for the law. Not only the upper echelons of power, the White House or the complicit Congress, but also the boots-on-the-ground functionaries who get their limited scraps of social capital from helping enforce the administration’s goals.

Thus we hit my first impulse: the necessity, in dire times, for direct action. We must do something. Not just generating symbols or waving placards; these only work under normal conditions. Rather, we must strike at those who misuse their power for selfish, harmful, or venal ends. When the Einstatzgruppen invade, you don’t inaugurate a committee to build consensus. You shoot back.

But there’s my second impulse. Who or what gives us the authority to exercise violence? Under whose orders to we fire and reload? Mine? I’d make a terrible generalissimo; I can easily imagine getting so lost in my personal mythology that I forget the cause or ignore my allies. As Brian Klaas writes, power corrupts good people, but power also attracts those already vulnerable to corruption. And I’m Christian enough to know my vulnerability to Original Sin.

Revolutionary violence frequently starts well, but it seldom ends that way. Robespierre, the rhetorician of the French Revolution, couldn’t accept that he’d won, and launched the Reign of Terror. Chairman Mao called for perpetual revolution, which precipitated sectarian infighting after the Kuomintang collapsed. Contra Marx’s trust in collective wisdom, there’s no evidence that the next revolution will resolve any better.

Whenever we commence a campaign, we cannot anticipate where it will conclude. Society has too many moving parts to allow simple point-to-point planning. We can, at best, try to anticipate contingencies and make allowances. But the more people involved, and the more sweeping the social consequences we pursue, the more likely it becomes that we’ll unleash a monster we cannot control. The likelihood of that beast consuming us is high.

As I was drafting this essay, news broke that law enforcement had apprehended the probable shooter. Far from a leftist revolutionary, Tyler Robinson is apparently a conservative and a Nick Fuentes follower, who felt Kirk was too accommodationist. All reports are preliminary, and the accused deserves a fair trial, notwithstanding today’s political currents. But this only supports my belief that once you permit violence, you don’t get to stop it.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that strongman dictators generally only leave power in chains, or in a coffin. Either way, they require somebody, inside the country or outside, to oppose them. Nobody outside America can challenge our military, suggesting we’ll need insiders to take initiative. But history isn’t on our side; once we allow violence into politics, we can’t eject it easily, and the price may be steeper than we anticipate.

The “Epstein Files” and Conservative Economics

One of hundreds of photos of Donald
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein

If I despise one product of contemporary journalism most, it’s the “think piece” written by editorialists trying to keep neutral. In order to make meaning from ongoing events, like the Jeffrey Epstein “files” controversy, they want to appear cool, dispassionate, above the fray. Six years after Epstein’s spurious death in custody, the Trump administration refuses to release the files which Trump’s voters absolutely know exists. The first factional rifts have opened in Trump’s electoral base.

Too many “think pieces” have promised to explain to us outside Trump’s base why the Epstein files have proved capable of dividing the faithful. But I’m reminded of Duncan J. Watts, who observed that explanations must first explain things. Especially when dealing with unique or unexpected conditions, commentators fail to explain, and simply describe. I keep seeing journalists describing the controversy, the participants, the unanswered questions, but failing to explain anything, lest they appear partisan.

Explaining these events means first understanding the participants, especially the base. I grew up in a deep-red household, and internalized longstanding conservative beliefs. Let’s start with the core conservative economic principle: that hard work, honesty, and dedication lead to financial reward. Whether that means working hard as an entrepreneur to cultivate your business, or working hard as an employee to advance your boss’s goals, self-sacrificing labor is the only key to economic freedom and self-reliance.

Of course, if hard work were enough, then farmers would be America’s richest laborers. In Aristotelean terms, hard work is necessary—if you sit on your hands, you certainly won’t flourish—but it isn’t sufficient. Generations of conservative Americans got their first jobs and realized they saw no reward, no matter how hard they worked. When this happened, I changed my prior beliefs. Other conservatives refused to change, insisting that the world must be wrong.

Growing up Republican, so much political discourse I observed reduced to one underlying question: who’s stopping me from getting rich? If core beliefs can’t be wrong, then their failure to bear fruit must come from someone causing that failure. Immigrants undercut wage values, queer people change the social fabric, welfare recipients separate survival from work, Jewish bankers distort the value of money, or whatever. My poverty proves someone else’s culpability, failure is always externally caused.

Sexual perversion provides a useful metaphor to understand this external blame. From the medieval blood libel, to the Satanic Panic, to QAnon, “they” identify the people destroying our society by their sexual abuse of children. Jeffrey Epstein gives us something these prior blame points didn’t, because Epstein’s sexual abuse of children happened. We have named victims, sworn testimony from reliable adults, and a lawful chain of evidence, something almost no prior child sex scandal had.

But something else is also happening with Epstein. Conservative scaremongers have settled on a list that includes people whom progressives regularly hold responsible for society’s ills. Epstein’s list, if it exists, includes billionaires, financiers, hedge fund operators, landlords, and others who make their living off other people’s work. Conservatives seeking someone to blame usually land on small, powerless outgroups. This time, they’ve turned their ire on a cadre of powerful people who actually cause harm.

No wonder Trump’s administration submarined the investigation, despite having campaigned on it. The groups previously blamed for conservatives’ failure to flourish, including immigrants, Jews, and “welfare mothers,” were too poor and marginal to fight back, and it served powerful people’s interests to let the out-groups fight. For the first time in meaningful numbers, conservatives are tuning their attention to a list that includes lawmakers, landlords, and others. The powerful find themselves forced to close ranks.

I doubt whether the “Epstein files” really exist. When conservatives decided that somebody must be culpable for their poverty, they assumed that documents and paper trails must exist. Conspiracy nuts like Dan Bongino and Alex Jones reassured audiences that evidence surely, definitely existed, and would surface any minute now. Pam Bondi’s famous “It’s on my desk” claim was probably a utilitarian lie, like “the check is in the mail,” to defer consequences onto the future.

Trump’s True Believers ginned themselves to believe this list existed, and would provide the vindication they’ve spent their adult lives seeking. Then the administration committed a rug-pull. Whether officials were lying then, or are lying now, hardly matters. What matters is that, for the first time within my lifetime, conservatives have more than circumstantial evidence and innuendo of who, exactly, is keeping them poor. And for the first time, their outrage may hasten some consequences.

Don’t Pretend To Be Stupid, Senator Ernst

A still from Senator Ernst’s notorious
graveyard “apology” video

Reputable news outlets called Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) graveyard rebuttal last week “sarcastic” because, I think, they deemed it ideologically neutral. Accurate descriptors like “condescending,” “mean-spirited,” or “unbecoming of an elected official” might sound partisan. And mainstream media outlets today will perform elaborate contortions to avoid appearing even accidentally liberal. Better to call her “sarcastic,” from the corporate overlords’ perspective, than analyze Ernst’s motivations.

I have no such compunctions. I’ll eagerly call Ernst’s argument what I consider it: deeply dishonest, predicated on bad faith. For those who need a refresher, Ernst’s constituents expressed outrage at her support for a budget bill which included severe Medicaid cuts. At a Parkersburg town hall, a constituent shouted “People are going to die!” After stammering a bit, Ernst replied: “We are all going to die.” When that comment drew national attention, Ernst responded by doubling down.

Let’s postpone the substance of the debate now. We all already have our opinions on the moral and legal motivations for steep Medicaid cuts; my regular readers probably share my disdain for these cuts. Rather, let’s focus on Ernst’s rhetorical approach. Specifically, I’d like to emphasize Ernst’s decision to pretend she doesn’t understand the accusation. The audience member, in saying people will die, meant people will die needlessly and preventably. Ernst chose to explain that people will die at all.

In classical rhetoric, we speak of the “stasis of argument,” the point of real contention when people disagree on important points. In general, we speak of four stases of argument, that is:

• Fact (will people die?)
• Definition (what does it mean for people to die?)
• Quality (is this death necessary, acceptable, or moral?)
• Jurisdiction (who bears responsibility for this death?)

In saying people are going to die, Ernst’s constituent argues from a stasis of quality, that cutting Medicaid and other programs will result in needless and morally unacceptable deaths. Ernst attempts to shift focus and claim that death, being inevitable, shouldn’t be resisted. Death is just a fact.

The stases listed in sequence above move from lowest to highest. Rhetoricians consider facts simple and, usually, easy to demonstrate. When facts become ambiguous, we move upward into definitions, then further up into moral considerations, and finally into the realm of responsibility. Moving upward usually means acceding the prior stasis. We cannot argue the morality or responsibility of facts without first acknowledging their reality.

Sometimes, shifting the stasis of argument makes sense. When the state of Tennessee prosecuted John Scopes for teaching evolution in public schools, the prosecution proceeded from a stasis of fact: did Scopes break the law? Defense attorney Clarence Darrow redirected the argument to a stasis of quality: did Scopes do anything morally unacceptable? Darrow essentially admitted the fact, but claimed a higher point of contention existed.

Plato and Aristotle, as painted by Raphael

However, the reverse seldom applies. Moving up the ladder means adding nuance and complexity to arguments, and moving down means simplifying. By shifting the stasis onto the physical reality of death, which all humans face inevitably, Ernst removes the complexity of whether it’s good or acceptable for someone to die now. If an accused murderer used “We’re all going to die” as a courtroom defense, that would be laughable.

Ernst knows this. As a law-n-order Republican, Ernst has a strict voting record on criminal justice, border enforcement, and national defense. She knows not all deaths are equal. By shifting her stasis of argument from whether deaths are acceptable to whether deaths are real, she’s pretending an ignorance of nuance she hasn’t presented anywhere else. She knows she’s moving the goalpoasts, and assumes we’re too stupid, or perhaps too dazzled by rapid wordplay, to notice she’s done it.

I’ve complained about this before. For instance, when people try to dismiss arguments against synthetic chemicals by pretending to misunderstand the word “chemical,” they perform a similar movement. Moving the stasis down the ladder is a bad-faith argument tactic that bogs debate down in searches through the dictionary or Wikipedia to prove that blueberries aren’t chemical compounds, an that human mortality doesn’t make murder okay.

Moreover, this tactic means the person isn’t worth talking to. If Senator Ernst believes that human mortality negates our responsibility to prevent needless premature death, then we have two choices. She’s either too stupid to understand the stakes, which I doubt, or she’s too dishonest to debate. We must humor her while she’s in office. But her term is up next year, and honest, moral voters must remove her, because this rhetorical maneuver proves her untrustworthy for office.

Stephen King and the Monsters of Modernity

Stephen King

I understand the desire to get ahead of the story of Stephen King and his massively unfunny “joke.” After once-beloved authors like Orson Scott Card, J.K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman have been uncovered as truly horrible human beings with repellent opinions, we’re naturally fearful of another seemingly progressive voice blindsiding us. Such preparation only makes sense. But it’s possible to swing to the opposite extreme, at our own expense.

Surely even Stephen King fans would acknowledge that his anti-Trump joke didn’t land. His dig at “Haitians eating pets” resurrects a months-old campaign gaffe that, amidst the mass extradition of legal American residents, appears outdated and tone-deaf. The specific reference to Haitians revives a racist trope, and as we know, this creates the illusion that the racist claims have any basis. The “joke,” by humor standards, was definitely ill-considered.

However, much of the early outrage seemingly assumes that King believes the anti-Haitian stereotypes. That suggests a total lack of situational literacy: King clearly means that Trump is racist, not that he’s racist himself. Online discourse is often dominated by what British journalist Mick Hume calls “full-time professional offense takers” who sustain the discussion by finding the worst possible interpretation, and then deploying it in bad faith.

Reading the most aggressive anti-King criticisms, I’m reminded of the feeding frenzy, over nine years ago, against Calvin Trillin. Like with King’s joke, the anti-Trillin swarm required the most uncharitable, situationally illiterate interpretation of Trillin’s writing. Online outrage follows a predictable script comparable to religious liturgy, and for largely the same reason, to reassure fellow believers that we are good people who share a reliable moral footing.

But before I can dismiss the anti-King sentiment as meaningless ritual, I have a counter-consideration: King himself often displays unquestioned racism. Characters like Dick Halloran (The Shining) and Mother Abigail (The Stand) reflect an unexamined presumption that Black people live, and usually die, to advance White characters’ stories. His Black characters often rely upon outdated, bigoted boilerplates that feel leaden nowadays.

We might dismiss this as an oversight on King’s part. He lives in northern Maine, an overwhelmingly White region of a substantially White state, and it’s entirely possible that he doesn’t know many Black people. I recall characters like Mike Hanlon, whose largest contribution to the group dynamic in It is to be Black. I’ve written before that King seemingly writes about people groups without bothering to speak with them.

Rather than asking whether King is “racist” or “not racist,” a dichotomy that Ibram X. Kendi notes isn’t useful, we might consider what kind of racism King demonstrates. We all absorb certain attitudes about race from our families, culture, mass media, and education. Nobody lives completely free of racial prejudice, any more than prejudice around sex, class, and nationality. Even Dr. Kendi admits needing to purge racist attitudes from himself.

By that standard, King shows no particular sign of out-and-out bigotry. Indeed, he shows a bog-standard White liberal attitude of progressivism, by which he supplants Jim Crow stereotypes with more benevolent generalizations. In other words, he doesn’t hate Black people, but he also doesn’t know them particularly well, either. He replaces malignant suppositions with benign ones, but he never stops relying on wheezy vulgarisms.

Therefore, though a clear-eyed reading of King’s unfunny “joke” shows that he targets his scorn upon Trump, he uses Haitians to deliver that scorn. He falls back on his shopworn tendency to have Black characters carry water for him, in service to his White purposes. This leaden joke isn’t bigoted, but that doesn’t make it any less racist. His joke’s lack of humor ultimately comes second to his lack of agency.

In his book Danse Macabre, King notes that horror often stems from a lily-white, orderly vision of society. Michael Myers’ savagery exists as a necessary contrast to Haddonfield’s suburban harmlessness. Pennywise is most terrifying to the exact degree that Derry is anodyne. For King, evidently, that means that Whiteness is an anonymous background from which horrifying monsters, like President Trump, arise. Haitians, in that worldview, are an exception.

I fear the implications which arise from calling Stephen King “racist,” because that word has baggage. But if we apply the nuance that Dr. Kendi encourages us to utilize, then that word applies. Putting it to use requires far more detail than a BLM protest placard or a hasty tweet can encompass; and his variety of racism is the kind most receptive to correction and repentance. But that doesn’t make it any less racist.

Sorry, Dad, I Can’t Do Politics Anymore

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

My father thinks I should run for elective office. Because I strive to stay informed on local, national, and world affairs, and base my opinions on solid facts and information, he thinks I’m potential leadership material. Me, I thought I only took seriously the 11^th-grade American Civics warning to be an involved citizen and voter. But too few people share that value today, and Dad thinks that makes me electable.

This week’s unfolding events demonstrate why I could never hold elective office. We learned Monday that a squadron of Executive Branch bureaucrats, including the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense, and the Vice President, were conducting classified government business by smartphone app. For those sleeping through the story (or reading it later), we know because National Security Adviser Mike Waltz dialed Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into the group chat.

Unfortunately, Dad is wrong; I’m no better informed than anyone else on unfolding events. I’ve watched the highlights of senators questioning Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA head John Ratcliffe, but even then, I’m incapable of watching without collapsing into spitting rage. Gabbard’s vague, evasive answers on simple questions like “were you included in the group chat” indicate an unwillingness to conduct business in an honest, forthright manner.

Not one person on this group chat—and, because Goldberg in his honesty removed himself after verifying the chat’s accuracy, we don’t know everyone on the chat—thought to double-check the roster of participants. This despite using an unsecured app with a history of hacking. That’s the level of baseline security we’d expect from coworkers organizing a surprise party, not Cabinet secretaries conducting an overseas military strike.

The Administration compounded its unforced errors by lying. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pretended that Goldberg’s chat contained no national security information; on Wednesday, Goldberg published the information. Millions of Americans who share my dedication to competent citizenship couldn’t get our jaws off the floor. Hegseth knew not only that Goldberg had that information, but that he could produce it. And he lied anyway.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz

In a matter of weeks, we’ve witnessed the devaluation of competence in American society. Trump, who had no government experience before 2016, has peopled his second administration with telegenic muppets who similarly lack either book learning or hands-on proficiency. But then, no wonder, since studies indicate that willingness to vote for Trump correlates broadly with being ill-informed or wrong about facts. We’ve conceived a government by, and for, the ignorant.

Small-d democratic government relies upon two presumptions: that everyone involved is informed on the facts, to the extent that non-specialists could possibly keep informed, and that everyone involved acts in good faith. Both have clearly vanished. The notorious claim that, according to Google Analytics, searches for the word “tariffs” spiked the day after Trump’s election, apparently aren’t true: they spiked the day before. But even that’s embarrassingly late./p>

Either way, though, it reveals the uncomfortable truth that Americans don’t value competence anymore, not in themselves, and not in elected decision-makers. This Administration’s systemic lack of qualifications among its senior staff demonstrates the belief that obliviousness equals honesty. Though the President has installed a handful of serious statesmen in his Cabinet, people like Hegseth, Gabbard, and Kash Patel are unburdened by practical experience or tedious ol’ book larnin’.

Now admittedly, I appreciate when voters express their disgust at business-as-usual Democrats. Democratic leadership’s recent willingness to fold like origami cranes when facing even insignificant pushback, helps convince cocksure voters that competence and experience are overrated. The GOP Administration’s recent activities have maybe been cack-handed, incompetent, and borderline illegal, but they’re doing something. To the uninitiated, that looks bold and authoritative.

But Dad, that’s exactly why I can’t run for office. Because I’ve lived enough, and read enough, to know that rapid changes and quick reforms usually turn to saltpeter and ash. Changes made quickly, get snatched back quickly, especially in a political environment conditioned by digital rage. Rooting out corruption, waste, and bureaucratic intransigence is a slow, painstaking process. Voters today apparently want street theatre. I’m unwilling to do that.

My father might counter by noting that the Administration’s popularity is historically low, that its own voting base is turning away, and that this controversy might be weighty enough to bring them to heel. I say: maybe. But unless voters are willing to recommit themselves to being informed, following events, and knowing better than yesterday, the underlying problem will remain. The next quick-ix demagogue will deceive them the same way.

The Stains of Politics Don’t Wash Off

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 120
Lawrence O’Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

Those of us born afterward—which, over half a century later, is most of us—probably know the 1968 presidential election for LBJ’s abrupt withdrawal, or for Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. As this highly contested election recedes from living memory, we risk losing important context that helped define a generation’s relationship with politics. Just as important, without that knowledge, we’re vulnerable to those who would exploit weaknesses that still exist.

Lawrence O’Donnell is a journalist, not an historian; but some of the best history for mass-market readers in recent years has come from journalists. Names like David Zucchino and Joe Starita have returned lost history to Americans, sometimes redefining our self-image in the process. Unconstrained by the necessities of academic writing, journalists can deep-dive into primary sources and spin them into vernacular English. Which is exactly what O’Donnell does here.

As 1968 began, the Democratic party split over Lyndon Johnson. The President’s civil rights legislation alienated old-line conservative Dixiecrats, but his deepening commitments in Vietnam left White progressives politically homeless. This led not one, but two sitting senators to challenge Johnson in the Democratic primary. Bobby Kennedy, son of a political dynasty, moved slowly and strategically, but Eugene McCarthy, a former professor, mustered the enthusiasm of college students and Yippies.

Republicans faced substantially similar problems. George Romney, a center-right maven, failed to muster much enthusiasm, so the question became whom the Republicans would embrace. That old anti-communist firebrand Richard Nixon told Cold War Americans what they wanted to hear, and whom they should fear. But New York governor Nelson Rockefeller offered a relatively optimistic, liberal option. 1968 would be the final knell for Republican liberalism.

But then as now, the presidential election wasn’t only about the political maneuvering. In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was ramping his “Poor People’s Campaign” to new heights. That fateful day in Memphis, he’d visited to help organize the city’s striking sanitation workers. When an assassin’s bullet struck him, it basically exposed an entire generation’s bottled rage. The resulting nationwide explosion redefined the terms for would-be presidential candidates.

Lawrence O’Donnell

Back then, the primary system didn’t matter like it does now. Kennedy, McCarthy, Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan led aggressive ground campaigns to garner votes, but Nixon and Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey played internal party politics. Their aggressive gladhanding secured party nominations for two candidates who didn’t necessarily have deep grass roots. Both parties would have to change future nominating processes to address this injustice.

Even more than the individual candidates, 1968 would redefine party identities. Before the Sixties, party loyalty had more to do with community and geography than issues and platforms. That’s why Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, could shepherd multiple civil rights bills through a historically divided Congress. It’s also why a liberal like Rockefeller, and moderate like Romney, and a conservative like Nixon could compete for the Republican nomination.

But new alignments based on domestic issues changed these alignments. Over the course of 1968, the Nixon contingent, backed by that old segregationist Strom Thurmond, squeezed the liberal Republicans out. Meanwhile, as two anti-war candidates vied for the Democratic nomination, party regulars closed ranks to preserve the Johnson wing’s privilege. Thus, throughout the 1968 primary campaign, the Republican Party became increasingly conservative, and so did the Democrats.

O’Donnell wrote this book directly after the 2016 election, and comments liberally on how the Nixon/Humphrey contest presaged the Trump presidency. As always, history is about what happened, but it’s also about us, the contemporary readers. Presidential campaigns, once scholarly affairs based on debate and communication, became increasingly oriented toward television. Vibes became more important than policies—and Democratic Party vibes were so authoritarian, they made Nixon look amiable.

At the same time, O’Donnell omits information his audience could learn from. He never names the assassins who killed Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, and never mentions their motivations; James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan don’t even merit index entries. Therefore, Ray’s connection to organized bigotry gets erased, as does Sirhan’s anger over the Six-Day War. O’Donnell pores over living candidates’ policies extensively, but assassins’ bullets apparently just happen.

In O’Donnell’s telling, the 1968 election serves as a fable to explain Trump-era politics. By examining the partisan extremes that calcified during this campaign, we gain the vocabulary to understand what happened in 2016. And though O’Donnell couldn’t have anticipated it, his words became more necessary, his vocabulary more trenchant, after the disaster of 2024. It’s often difficult to examine the present dispassionately, but the past offers us useful tools.

Time For the 28th Amendment

How old were you when you discovered that the right to vote isn’t protected in the United States Constitution?

Like most Americans, I studied the Constitution, in different ways and different forms of depth, through high school, into college, and later in various books, seminars, and media deep-dives throughout my life. Teachers and commentators gushed lovingly over how the 15^th Amendment extended voting to former slaves, the 19^th Amendment gave women the vote, and the 26^th Amendment gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote.

All of these are good. But they establish that the government cannot withhold the right to vote based on certain protected categories. Not once does the Constitution state who does have the voting franchise; the issue remains airy-fairy and undefined. And I didn’t know that until I read Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority, which I read when I was 49. Only when they pointed it out did I realize this information was missing.

Throughout much of American history, the question of what makes someone a “real” American has loomed large. The Philadelphia Convention of 1789, which drafted the kernel of our current Constitution, was dominated by slaveholders, who wanted their human property counted on the Census, but didn’t want slaves having any vote. These White male aristocrats, whom we dub the “Founders,” handled the problem by punting it onto the states.

As you’d imagine, this created a patchwork of standards. States have, at times, made land ownership a criterion—which created problems when rising industrialization pushed more Americans into cities. Old-fashioned bigotry encouraged many states, overtly or covertly to disenfranchise Black Americans, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned it. Since the Shelby County ruling, states have competed to find innovative new ways to make voting harder.

Many attempts to increase the voting franchise are doomed to fail. Because less populous states, which skew conservative, gain a tactical advantage from the status quo, many common suggestions, like ending the Electoral College or disestablishing the Senate, are non-starters. The Constitution sets the threshold for amendments so high that, in times of bitter polarization like we have now, changing the system is unlikely at best.

But I propose that it’s politically possible to start with something simple: just establish that American citizens have a right to vote, irrespective of state laws. This has multiple advantages. It will set the default for American voting as “opt-out,” rather than the current “opt-in.” It will capitalize on the American fervor for treating everyone equally, since setting a standard baseline of simply letting people vote is, facially, completely equal.

With that in mind, I propose a movement to pressure our lawmakers to create a 28^th Amendment. Since I’m not an attorney or Constitutional scholar, I don’t want to create a binding text for such an amendment; that exceeds my skills. But I propose the following as a starting point:

1. All persons who have been born citizens of the United States, or who have been naturalized as citizens under the standards of this Constitution, and having achieved no less than eighteen years of age, shall have the right to vote and to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the states in which they reside.

2. All persons who have the voting franchise under the standards of this Constitution, but who shall reside outside the United States for military deployment, lawful students studying abroad, citizens working abroad under a lawful visa, or for any other reasons which Congress shall protect by legislation, shall be permitted to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the most recent jurisdiction for which they were most recently resident.

3. The Executive Branch, under terms which Congress shall set by legislation, shall maintain a permanent roster of lawful registered voters in the United States, and shall take responsibility for maintaining the currency of that roster, and shall protect the voting rights of all persons who have the right to participate in the electoral process in the United States.

We voters can pressure American lawmakers to rally behind this straightforward, facially neutral action statement. Sure, I know anti-democracy activists like Peter Thiel exist in America, but I believe they’re controllable, while our system remains tractable to public pressure. We can organize to pressure our lawmakers to support this change by threatening them with the shame of being seen as anti-voting.

This won’t solve all of America’s problems. But it will at least get all Americans involved in the problem-solving process.

Hanging Onto Hope While Everything Around Me Is On Fire

Back in the 1980s, my father used to collect aluminum cans as a form of exercise. In those days, people regularly just chucked cans, food wrappers, and other litter out of moving car windows. Anyone old enough to personally remember the Reagan era will recall that American roadsides, especially urban roadsides, were consistently choked with post-consumer waste.

So my father would take a lawn-and-leaf bag and go walking aimlessly. The walk gave him necessary low-impact exercise and time to clear his head. And he knew it was time to start home when the bag approached full of the aluminum cans he collected. He would take the full bags to the local recyclery for cash, and use the proceeds to take us kids out for burgers.

After eating, he insisted we dispose of our wrappers correctly.

Once upon a time, American attitudes toward waste were, by today's standards, appalling. A New York PR professional coined the term “litterbug” in the 1940s, but the notion that post-consumer waste was “disposable” created the persistent idea that we could just pitch waste anywhere and trust the Lord to handle it. And way too many of us just did. Part of America's anti-urban sentiment in the 1970s and 1980s referred to the trash on every street and sidewalk.

I was too young to understand when things changed, but they did. In the early 1990s, my dad's walks took much longer, and our burger runs became less frequent. At some point, he started coming home with his bag only half-full. Around the time I finished high school, these walks stopped being worth the effort for him. He stopped carrying the bag with him, and he walked much more predictable, programmatic routes.

That was a loss for Dad, of course. His litter-collecting ambles had been an important part of his exercise regime since before I was born. But even he acknowledged that it was a net good. He couldn't find recyclable litter because fewer people were creating litter; more people accepted that they had individual responsibility for the common good. And streets were far cleaner.

Such changes in public morality don't happen in a vacuum. A combination of public education, media campaigns, and changing local laws overpowered the notion that litter was a “victimless” offense. The more people who accepted their responsibility for clean streets, the more pressure on those who dragged their heels. Eventually the momentum became irresistible.

Not that nobody tried to resist. Some people absolutely insisted on their right to litter; some still do. When I was in college, the campus conservative student group sold t-shirts with a disfigured recycling symbol and the logo “Environmentally Unsafe And Proud Of It!” They turned their sloppiness into a political status and a social identity.

Yet the very fact that they did so proved that they were just fighting the tide, and they knew it. Even while wearing that t-shirt, I watched several of them throw their food wrappers in the trash, and their soda-pop bottles in the recycling. The shirts had a brief, voguish popularity, then vanished as the wearers realized they didn't look brave, they looked like dickheads.

We saw similar fates for other once-popular actions: smoking, for instance, or driving with ethylated gasoline. Or racism, or hating on LGBTQ+ populations. These were once commonplace to the point of being bland, then they became agitated political positions, then finally identities. Because the more obvious it became that these were unsustainable behaviors, the more momentum built against them.

As I write, we're witnessing rapid reversal on some of these positions. The incoming administration has passed sweeping revisions that empower racists, homophobes, and irresponsible environmental attitudes. It's easy to think that, because these actions have government approval, it's impossible to stop them.

But I take comfort in their militant aggression. The administration has to fight so viciously because they know they don't have the momentum on their side. I will admit that losing government support for a more just, more responsible society is a massive setback. But they're fighting so hard because, fundamentally, they know they're losing.

Please don't get me wrong. Victory is far from a forgone conclusion. If we get discouraged and squander the energy, we will lose momentum. To win, we need to keep standing up for a just society and a broad, inclusive definition of citizenship. But I still believe the weight of history is on our side. Victory is ours for the demanding, as long as we remain mindful of the moment.

The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy, Part Two

This is a re-review of a prior book. The original review appears at The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

When Levitsky and Ziblatt published this book in 2023, it seemed reasonable to discuss the Trump Administration in the past tense. The once and future President lost his midterm election overwhelmingly, then became the first sitting president to lose his reelection bid in nearly thirty years. He left office with the lowest approval rating in polling history. Although Trump retained a loyal following, reasonable observers and political pundits assumed history had passed its final judgment.

The forces Levitsky and Ziblatt describe have, unfortunately, become relevant again. A plurality of American voters compared Donald Trump to an accomplished, eloquent, public-spirited Woman of Color, and decided they wanted Trump back. At this writing, Americans prepare to see which of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian promises he intends to follow through on, and which will fall victim to sectarian infighting. American democracy really depends, now, on how incompetent the incoming administration actually promises to be.

Our authors describe how prior democracies shuddered and died. Their descriptions of France between the World Wars, and the anti-democratic forces that halted the legislature, seem chillingly like the swarms of angry insurgents who invaded and vandalized the Capitol Building on January 6^th, 2021. The Peronists’ inability to comprehend their electoral loss in Argentina in 1983, despite their concrete pro-worker platform, remind readers of the Democrats’ inability to comprehend their loss in November of 2024.

But it’s difficult to avoid noticing that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t delve much into the strong anti-democratic tendency in American politics. Not that it’s absent: they do mention, say, Joseph McCarthy, who would’ve gladly overturned the entire government to purge Communist influences. They excoriate the filibuster rule, which allows only one or two Senators—in a legislative house that already protects poorer, less populous—to stop debate and kill bills with just a quick email.

But America has always had an aggressive anti-democratic contingent in its electorate. Around the same time Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote this book, Rachel Maddow wrote that a number of non-profit and civic organizations took money from the German government before World War II. These groups campaigned actively to weaken America’s small-D democratic institutions, bolster White supremacist government, and join the wrong side of the looming war. As with Trump himself, most pro-Reich conspirators went unprosecuted.

Steven Levitsky (left) and Daniel Ziblatt (via Harvard University)

It’s not that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t address anti-democratictendencies preceding Donald Trump. Quite the opposite, they run out quite a laundry list. The way that, for instance, the Klan arose in direct opposition to the Reconstruction effort to enfranchise newly freed Black Americans. The way White leaders in Wilmington, North Carolina, overthrew the city government and installed their loyalists, the only successful coup d’etat in American history so far. Our authors acknowledge these happened.

Rather, they treat these events as atomized, existing within their own sphere. They don’t go beyond events to draw conclusions about why this happens, why every attempt to increase American democracy consistently generates violent resistance. Whenever Americans have attempted to give People of Color the right to vote, we’ve witnessed a countervailing move to make voting harder and more exclusive. It keeps happening, because it represents something deeper and more fundamental than the event itself.

In no small part, it represents a deification of the past because it’s the past. As Jason Stanley writes, great thinkers of prior eras—including the authors of America’s Constitution—have much to teach us. But we can only learn when we regard them as askers of important questions. When past masters become too important to question, their accomplishments sacrosanct and beyond the domain of doubt, a different dynamic sets in. We ourselves become fossilized.

America’s Constitution is approaching 250 years old, and at this writing, hasn’t been amended in 32 years. It’s become an artifact, something that demands preservation simply because it’s old, not because it provides us meaningful guidance in answering today’s questions. A major contingent of American lawmaking believes we need to preserve the vision of White slaveholders in powdered wigs and knee breeches simply because that which is older is necessarily more valuable than the present.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are responsible social scientists, limiting themselves to what happened, and what they can quantify. They trust readers to draw conclusions. But the 2024 electoral results, when a plurality of Americans chose the anti-democratic Presidential candidate, demonstrate that Americans broadly can’t identify patterns and draw conclusions. Real-world evidence shows that Americans don’t need scientists, we need pop philosophers, like Tocqueville and Burke, to go beyond the evidence and draw out the deeper story.