Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy

Tibor Rutar

Routledge, 188 pages, 2022

“Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can. But this opinion of mine, like that of every other economist who has pronounced upon the subject, is in itself completely uninteresting. What counts in any attempt at social prognosis is not the Yes or No that sums up the facts and arguments which lead up to it but those facts and arguments themselves. They contain all that is scientific in the final result. Everything else is not science but prophecy.” — Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

It is very doubtful that anyone who reads Tibor Rutar’s short new book Capitalism for Realists will come away agreeing with it, but readers who are even somewhat charitable should find it profitable to wrestle with its thesis and remarkable breadth.

To Marx or Not to Marx

Rutar is that rarest of species: a former Marxist turned social democrat who retains a healthy degree of respect for (non-vulgar) Marxism even as he’s “discovered the joys of freedom, equality, property, and Bentham.”

Capitalism for Realists tries to chart a narrow path between adopting a Marx-inflected critical stance on the modern global economy, while chastising the hard left for not appreciating all the good capitalism has done for the least well off. This includes pointing out that Marx and Engels themselves were not exclusively critical of the capitalist mode of production, consistently describing it as the highest mode of production the world has yet seen. Even highly polemical early works like The Communist Manifesto stress how the

bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

Rutar’s beef is that, despite acknowledging capitalism’s extraordinary productive capacity, many leftist still insist it remains so problematic that it must be destroyed or at least massively reformed.

Rutar runs through what he takes to be the major charges one at a time, acknowledging that some of them have genuine bite while criticizing others for lacking substance.

Simultaneously critiquing and defending contemporary capitalism on all the charges raised against it is a large task, and it is to Rutar’s credit that he undertakes it with courage and analytical integrity. Overall, his assessment is that the record of contemporary capitalism is mixed:

Capitalism reduces exploitation experienced by workers but also at the same time keeps a degree of exploitation in place and is unable to remove it completely. Capitalism most definitely helps reduce poverty, but at the same time it can also contribute to increases in inequality. It unleashes a massive dynamic of job-creation, but also pulls the employment rug for underneath some workers. The modern economy overall strongly promotes human pro-sociality, but in certain aspects does nothing for it or even reduces it somewhat. Capitalism contributes to environmental degradation, especially through industrial production but it also presents us at least with the possibility of having a highly economically developed society that harms the environment less and less the more it develops. All this is, to put it in Marx’s words, an epochal ‘fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.’

Each of the core chapters of the book tackles one of these topics, and throughout it all Rutar marshals a formidable empirical case to support his overarching lukewarm assessment.

Without a doubt some of the chapters are stronger than others, which is partially a consequence of the book being a slim 188 pages while covering a massive scope of highly complex socioeconomic subjects.

For instance, I found the initial chapter on the historical origins of capitalism very brief and somewhat strangely fixated on the United Kingdom. Interestingly, this may be the chapter where Rutar most demonstrates a lingering fidelity to Marxist sociology, describing himself as a “moderate materialist” who thinks the ideational cultural production critiqued by Marx as ideology does indeed largely emerge from changing material conditions and social relations.

Rutar also stresses that there is little denying the violent and highly disruptive origins of capitalism—indeed, even going further than Marxists by arguing it wasn’t the “heavy artillery” of cheap prices which spread markets, but the actual heavy artillery of the imperialist European powers. Yet Rutar never helps us determine what the normative weight should be for these historical observations, or what their impact is on contemporary contexts. This might have shifted his approach to “neoliberalism”—whose vices Rutar downplays—given that many contemporary critics of neoliberalism stress its deep continuity with the very history of imperialism he critiques earlier in the book.

Inequality and Justice

Rutar’s most effective chapter is on poverty, exploitation, and inequality—precisely the chapter that fideistic and unthinking leftists will appreciate the least. In it, Rutar capably critiques the most blithe opponents of capitalism, pointing out that there is little evidence it contributes to absolute immiseration and immense data that markets can lift people out of poverty. This is true even where growth is distributed unequally.

At the same time, Rutar argues that capitalism does indeed exploit workers, since their wage is not equal to the “marginal product” created by the worker. Rutar points out that even though growth is typically aligned with decreases in overall poverty, that doesn’t mean inequality isn’t a problem along that and many other metrics. Rutar isn’t sure that critics like Thomas Piketty are correct in saying that inequality is increasing everywhere, but he does stress that inequality can cause political instability, increased possibility for the rich to engage in rent-seeking and corruption, and rising educational inaccessibility.

I would put the point with considerably greater force than Rutar. Domestically, inequality is problematic for moral reasons of fairness and just concern for the least well off in society. One would have to be naïve to think declining economic productivity would benefit the poor—which was never a point Marx made. As any good Rawlsian can tell you, the incentive structures conducive to growth must be shown to primarily benefit the least well off.

This is not just a matter of distributive justice—it also has a political bearing. Rutar acknowledges that stark inequalities can engender political conflict, and gestures to a few examples. But it would have been helpful to see him look at more comprehensive studies on how inequities of economic power contribute to deepening inequities of political power, or what Rawls would call citizens receiving unequal value from their political rights. For instance, Gilens, Eatwell and Goodwin, and more recent work by Piketty have all demonstrated how citizens in developed states both perceived democratic institutions as being beholden to the interests of the wealthy and that in fact those institutions are primarily beholden to the interests of the wealthy.

More expansively still, Rutar’s book would benefit from discussing how the vast disparities in economic power engendered by markets globally render many states—particularly former colonies—extremely vulnerable to domination and exploitation by the more affluent. This has included the imposition of market friendly social policies even against the wishes of the domestic population, or what Quinn Slobodian called “encasing” the market from democracy through the state and international legal instruments. This is one of the core objections to the “Washington Consensus” Rutar lightly defends on consequentialist grounds, while largely sidelining the problem of geopolitical domination and neocolonialism.

My criticisms should not be taken as a condemnation of the author or his project. Capitalism for Realists is a very thoughtful, well written, and richly analytical book which should provoke a healthy dialogue from across the political spectrum. Rutar’s own conclusion is that markets and capitalism are good if they are paired with a powerful social democratic state which ensures their benefits are available to everyone and works to offset the negative externalities like environmental degradation.

I would go further and argue that the time has come to experiment with the extension of democratic principles to the economy through creating incentives to form competitive worker managed firms accompanied by a very robust welfare state. This idea has a long an eminent pedigree that includes formulations by political scientists like Robert Dahl, and is increasingly subject to popular attention. We should also think seriously about what kind of international institutions will be required to check the global power of particularly sweeping firms, in addition to coordinating efforts to check climate change.

Being a realist about capitalism means being realistic about its all-too-human inadequacies. The experience of totalitarian command economics undoubtedly shows not just anything is fit to replace capitalism. But if there is a social architecture that is fit, then market oriented liberal socialism would be it.

Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future

Patrick Deneen

Sentinel, 288 pages, 2023

The decades around 3200 BC were a momentous time for southern Mesopotamia and for world history. The population of the city of Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, had swelled in the previous centuries to perhaps 50,000 people within the city walls and maybe twice that in the immediate countryside—an unprecedented size. The temple complexes devoted to Anu and Inanna had recently undergone major construction and reconstruction projects. There were Urukian “colonies” up the Tigris and Euphrates as far as away southern Turkey, and to the east on the Iranian plateau. More fatefully, writing was invented as an improvement to the “token” system that had been used for millennia to track the production of grain and wool. Within a century or so of this cultural ferment, the Uruk “world system” was in retreat: most of the “colonies” were abandoned and the large temples in Uruk were razed; the practice of writing persisted, but its development stalled. Life around the city appears to have continued, but it would be centuries yet before the energetic culture of the Dynastic Period, captured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, would come into focus.

In his new book, Regime Change, Patrick Deneen laments for a “world system” that, according to his narrative, has been lost. Picking up from his previous book, Why Liberalism Failed, he argues that the regime governing “The West” needs to be replaced and he offers a snapshot of what its replacement might look like. While not adverse to discussing other countries, both historically and in the present, the focus is not really “The West,” but the American system. The book is framed in reactionary vogue: that secularization makes society decadent and degenerate; that the attrition of “traditional” social roles and cultural practices saps meaning from life; that various flavors of “leftist” ideology are responsible for an equally various array of institutional failures; that a reinvigorated and politicized Christianity is the key to rescuing our decaying culture.

However, his analysis takes an interesting tack. He contends that these problems are largely a function of class conflict, where there are two fundamental classes, the “few” and the “many.” The “few” are the managerial class that constitute a “ruling elite,” and would seem to resemble Marx’s capitalist bourgeoisie. The “many” are the “working class,” a multi-racial volk who, being less sophisticated and more attached to local, “conservative” sensibilities, have been left behind by industrialization. Liberalism is the ideology of the “elite” and it is predicated on a notion of unending “progress.” Nominally, this would entail a persistent effort at technological innovation, the growth of material production, and the scaling up of a globalized economy that erases local cultural difference; but, at a deeper level, “progress” is not aimed at sundry improvements to our material condition or socio-political integration—it intends rather to engineer a new social order through a permanent revolution of the political economy. In Deneen’s view, what liberals have engineered instead is a society who has lost its soul.

The “liberal elites,” therefore, have produced the cultural catastrophe whose traumas reactionary intellectuals so often litanize. He says at the end of the first chapter (p. 25):

While both classes are responsible for this cycle, the ruling class bears the most responsibility, having the most resources. Unfortunately, the current ruling class is uniquely ill equipped for reform, having become one of the worst of its kind produced in history…

Deneen admits that liberalism has been extraordinarily successful in its program; it’s just that its success has imposed tremendous cultural costs on industrialized societies, and he believes that these costs could have been avoided in a counterfactual history where liberalism failed to take root. To counteract liberalism’s disintegration of “The West,” he proposes that a new elite regime replace the “liberal elites” who have failed the common people. He calls this new approach to conservatism, “aristopopulism.”

In a recent profile of Deneen in Politico, he declares provocatively: “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government. I want something far more revolutionary than that.” While he doesn’t spell out what could happen if this new regime doesn’t coalesce, it is easy to surmise, out of the eschatological thinking common among the reactionary set, assorted grim predictions.

One can imagine some distinguished man at the time spinning a tale where the collapse of the Late Uruk system constituted the disintegration of a civilization that had been developing vigorously during the preceding millennium. This fellow might have excoriated the political elites of Uruk and demanded a return to past ways, lest the sacred culture be forever lost. Except that when Alexander died in 323 BC, almost 3000 years later, he died in Babylon, still, then, the center of the ancient world, many of the core Urukian cultural features yet intact, having been maintained continuously over the triumphs and catastrophes of thousands of years.

Aristotle, in the Conservatory, With a Crucifix?

Deneen begins his book by briefly citing well-known social problems, such as the opioid crisis, declines in family formation, and public talk about civil war. While he mentions environmental problems and economic issues later in the book, he seems mainly concerned with social ills of a spiritual nature, where some sense of meaning in life has been absented. He makes no hint that these issues may have complex causes or ambiguous social consequences: he draws a straight line between such cataclysms and liberalism as an ideology embodied by the “liberal elite.” Perhaps he explored these complexities in his previous book (I’ve decided to review this book on its own terms); here, he takes liberalism’s “failure” as an article of faith.

The book’s worries about the ideology of “progress” are not merely conceptual, but structural. We like to think of America as a “meritocracy” where talent and hard work are rewarded by institutions with money, prestige, and power. Deneen feels this works against the “many” in two ways. First, it prioritizes skills involving symbol-manipulation, rather than physical or other kinds of skills, and so it actively devalues the types of jobs most accessible to the “working class.” Second, the “merit” part of “meritocracy” is something of a shell game, where education and social connections mean more than raw talent and a willingness to work hard. This divergence in outcomes along class lines translates into a geographic asymmetry where cosmopolitan, urban locales are centers of the services economy of benefit to the “elite,” while the rural hinterland molders and falls apart. Cities are the locus of a globalized culture where any city is as good as another as long it makes money for urban professionals and has the usual trendy accoutrements; they encourage in the lives of their residents detachment and uniformity. In the countryside, rootedness and localized customs are honored, and this fosters a grounded outlook that prefers common sense over the latest intellectual fashion.

While he spends some time extolling the probity of the “working class,” the book is much more concerned with attacking “liberal elites.” Occasionally, his punches land (p.8):

Today, the essence of elite formation consists of two main objects, irrespective of major or course of study: first, taking part in the disassembling of traditional guardrails through a self-serving redefinition of those remnants as systems of oppression; and second, learning the skills to navigate a world without any guardrails. College—especially at selective institutions—is a place and time in which one experiments in a safe atmosphere where guardrails have been removed, but safety nets have been installed. One learns how to engage in “safe sex,” reactional alcohol and drug use, transgressive identities, cultural self-loathing, how to ostensibly flaunt traditional institutions without bucking the system—all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the “culture” comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods, and not the shaping environment that governs the ambitious and settled alike. Those outside these institutions also have had the guardrails removed—all are to be equally “free”—but without the safety nets in sight.

Interestingly, he emphasizes that Reaganite “conservatives” are actually liberal in the “classical” sense of the word—meaning that much of the politics of the pre-Trump era in the U.S. was an intramural conflict among liberals. Yes, these “classical liberals” have preferred a slower pace of social change, but they have supported many aspects of the liberal program, such as globalization, an aggressively internationalist foreign policy, permissive immigration laws, free markets, and a willingness to embrace new social norms on matters like no-fault divorce, gay marriage, and even abortion. Contending with this “classical liberalism” is a left-leaning variety, which is what we usually label as “liberal,” and this he calls “progressive liberalism.” In contemporary America, this is basically the Democratic Party and its registered constituents.

Deneen puts forward a scheme that includes these two varieties, as well as Marxism and the “conservatism” of his aristopopulist program. He has a nifty little matrix based on two oppositions: A) the “many” as revolutionary versus the “many” as conservative; B) a “liberal” bias towards the “few” versus a “nonliberal” bias towards the “many.” He cites iconic intellectuals for each box in the square (p. 91):

In this telling, “liberalism” in social conflicts sides with the managerial class, as an elite, ruling class, against the throng of working folk. The difference between Reaganesque “classical liberals” and the “progressive liberals” is their characterization of the attitudes of the working class. Are the volk a force for revolution: in which case they need to be put in their place, lest they try to seize power? Or, are they essentially conservative in outlook: in which case they need to be induced by public give-aways and culture war fodder to participate in the ideology of “progress?” On the nonliberal side of the ledger, the Marxists see the “people” as a revolutionary force, and want to encourage their taking of power, rather than suppress it. Deneen’s critique of Marxism is not that the solicitude for the working class is wrong, but that the “people” are actually conservative, and therefore Communist societies have inevitably ended with an entrenched elite of political insiders who abandon their ideals when they become disillusioned by the conservativism of the unwashed masses they had believed or pretended they were attempting to uplift.

Out of these four possibilities, Deneen can only allow “conservatism” as a good way to constitute a society. In his account of “conservatism,” the elite should labor to benefit the working class, not by fomenting revolution on their behalf, but by reinforcing their traditionalism. The “conservative” ideology should value stability, order, continuity, safety, certainty, and it is the responsibility of elites, through cultural products, moral norms, and public policy to provide guidance for the lower orders, such that they follow their inherent inclinations.

His conception of the “people” is oddly passive, and, frankly, incompatible with the American can-doism that has long been noted as a core feature of the country’s character. The “many” are, apparently, unable to form meaning in their lives or adhere to healthy behavioral norms without social conventions enforced by elites and paternalistic policy-making. He says he abhors violence, and so Marxism’s bloody history would seem to be proof of its false conception of the working class. On the hand, he indicts liberalism (p. 146), “not because of its oppressiveness and cruelty, but precisely because of its separation and indifference.”

His solution to all of this is to seek a “mixed constitution.” He appears to mean a “constitution” in the British sense of there being traditional practices and norms within institutions governing the behavior of those operating within it, not a written document of the mechanisms of government. A “mixed constitution” means that the prerogatives of each class are blended together into a harmonious whole. Deneen’s idea of blending is not the “salad” model, where disparate behaviors and bills are tumbled together and then tossed into a pleasing concoction; what comes to mind are various class elements chucked into a food processor and whirred into some hyper-class smoothie. He believes this approach to institution building will create a “common good”—where people of all orders can flourish within what he believes are their natural proclivities.

However, the process for achieving this “mixed constitution” comes across as counterintuitive, if not directly contradictory to the ideals and ends he articulates otherwise. He claims (p. 147):

The prospects for a renewal of culture, the ascendancy of common sense, and a reimagined form of a mixed constitution rest upon the success of a confrontational stance of the people towards the elites—namely, the effort to force the vanguards of progress to work instead on behalf of the aims of ordinary people in preserving stability and continuity. In order to conserve a social order, there must first be a fundamental upheaval of its current revolutionary form.

We rendezvous here with the reactionary moment: a revolution within the revolution.

It is the role of the new aristoi to lead this confrontation, and they need not seek to achieve their ends through a neutral institutional process, but by a will to power, where the will, nevertheless, seeks this “common good.” Surprisingly, he denigrates Donald Trump, describing him as a “deeply flawed narcissist,” but he approvingly cites Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as a model for this new populist conservatism, if we have any questions about how all this is supposed to work.

While he clearly has specific Christian values and predilections in mind, the statist bent of this program may be its most protuberant quality. He says (emphasis Deneen’s) (p. 167):

Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends—the use of powerful political resistance by the populace against the natural advantages of the elite to create a mixed constitution not ultimately of the sort imagined by Machiavelli, but in which genuine common good is the result.

Machiavelli and Aristotle aren’t the right touchpoints for what he is proposing. What’s remarkable about this book is how Marxist it is. As a replacement to liberalism, Deneen tenders a new Communism—just without the lefty vibe.

Benjamin Disraeli, in the Kitchen, With a Spork?

One has to give credit to Deneen for crafting a coherent program, and for writing well. However, if one is to take his ideas seriously as theories, which would assume his book is a sincere attempt at describing reality, there are some major problems that need to be addressed.

His analysis of class is simplistic. He posits that there are just two classes, the “few” and the “many.” He explicitly identifies the “few” as the “managerial class” who constitute a “ruling elite,” a phrase which calls to mind a small group of people with immense power over a whole country or region. According to an estimate in 2022 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics there were 9,860,740 Americans employed in “management occupations” out of 147,886,000 workers. This doesn’t include the people involved in other professional industries generally requiring higher education, 47,843,370 workers in “business and financial operations occupations,” “computer and mathematical occupations,” “architecture and engineering occupations,” “legal occupations,” “education and library occupations,” “healthcare practitioners and technical occupations,” and “arts, design, entertainment, sports and media occupations.” This is a crude division of the country’s workers, but it includes about 1/3 of the whole U.S. workforce. All of these people are not involved in “ruling” the country, even where many of them share a “liberal” political orientation. And the U.S. is not unique among developed countries in these occupational proportions.

Presumably social conflicts along other axes, such as he imagines will happen between the “liberal elite” and his hoped-for aristoi, can only take place within these two major class groupings. But this glosses over considerable differences throughout the population in income, ethnicity, immigration status, region, language, sexual orientation, age, education level, personal disposition. To his credit, he does devote a whole section to castigating racism, but he assumes that differences in race are not germane to differences in class. An exhaustive treatment of “class” would need more than two categories. This is not because modernity has “fragmented” our social structure in some unprecedented way—even Medieval Europe, Deneen’s seeming benchmark for class harmony, had much more class complexity than this, with a florilegium of royals, courtiers, magnates, knights, yeomen, merchants, craftsmen, bishops, clerics, monks, flunkies, servants, rough boys, serfs, and outsider groups, like Gypsies and Jews. His descriptions of contemporary class structure misrepresent how large and varied the U.S. is, much less everywhere else in the industrialized world, and every post-tribal society in the past.

If his idea is to describe how certain class dynamics give rise to corresponding ideological commitments, then there is something to the approach, but, by abstracting to just two rudimentary categories, what follows has severe constraints as a sociological model, which he does not acknowledge. It almost feels as though Deneen doesn’t spend much time with real people, and imagines his fellow beings as androids whose voice boxes continuously spew obnoxious culture war tweets.

Klaus Fuchs, in the Billiard Room, With the Taxidermied Remains of the Family’s Beloved Cat, Whiskers?

His model of society and all its disparate parts is not well defined. “Disintegration” is a major theme throughout Regime Change, and he appears very certain that secularism, by maintaining clean lines of demarcation among different aspects of society, has brought about a shattering of the ties that hold people together. There is a bisecting of the “few” and the “many.” There is a separation of church and state. An atomization of the individual or the nuclear family from the community. An extensive division of labor. A conflict between economic ends and spiritual ones. An incongruity of science and faith. Etc.

His goal is for culture to find a better “integration” of these disparate parts, by which he seems to mean that every social sphere of activity should be involved in every other sphere. There should be laws to regulate religious practice; religious ideas should inform human knowledge; the conclusions that are thus formed should dictate political behaviors; politics should guide economic management; the class structures that result from the economy should be codified into law.

This misunderstands the way that “integration” operates as a concept. In a developmental model, a system has to differentiate its various parts BEFORE these parts can be integrated into a whole. Without a process of differentiation, there is nothing to integrate, just a chaotic, confusing blob of no fixed form. This “separation” of different aspects of culture into each its own self-contained sphere of activity has been a process of differentiation, not of “disintegration,” and it has been brought about the transformation of agrarian societies into industrial ones. Liberalism, insofar as it is an ideology rather than a set of concrete economic structures, is a result of industrialization, not its prime mover.

Perhaps Deneen would disagree with this claim. That cultures develop is self-evident to anyone who studies history. Moreover, we live in a moment when the environment of the earth is rapidly changing, largely due to industrial activity. He mentions environmental problems a few times throughout the text, but has nothing to say about how his postliberal order will react when the conditions for a future economy have dramatically degraded, or what we can do now to mitigate bad outcomes. What is Deneen’s theory of social adaption? How should it be applied to modernity?

Whatever his ideas about this may be, he clearly wants to order his worldview on something deeper than political institutions. He says (p. 188), “…the alternative to a liberal order rests far less on systemic political arrangements, and more on a different way of understanding the human creature in relation to other humans and with the world and cosmos.” He seems to have a view that there is a preferred ideology of human meaning and purpose, and this is what should determine cultural form, something he conceives as static and fixed, not changing or developing.

Liberal order or not, he is right to believe we can better understand our place in the world and the order of the cosmos. All of our current systems of knowledge have major gaps and flaws. But reordering the foundations of contemporary human knowledge is a monumental task. It requires, first, getting a handle on what we have learned about the world heretofore—including the lessons of science and the “liberal order.”

And, then, coming up with original, technical approaches to basic questions: What is his solution for the hard problem of consciousness? What is information? What is the purpose of “poetic” or “artistic” or “mythic” representations of reality? Why do the processes of “living” things appear to differ from “non-living” things? What sets humans apart from other living organisms? What is the purpose of these different aspects of society? How does time work? How does rhythm work? What is the relation between form and function? Are the “laws” of physics static, and where do they come from, and how are they formed? Is the universe, bounded in space and time, fated to heat death? Why is there something rather than nothing?

On the basis of this book, it is safe to assume that Deneen has nothing new to contribute to such topics.

Indira Gandhi, in the Ballroom, With a Nuclear Warhead?

Deneen studiously ignores cultures and histories outside Western Europe and the United States, other than a few cursory references to the Greco-Roman world. His theories about the “mixed constitution” and the “common good” and so forth are presented as culturally and historically neutral—his style of argument is abstract, and one expects that his version of a good society is the universal one. Sometimes, however, his cultural partisanship pokes through. At one point late in the book, he declares (p. 182), “Most importantly, aristopopulism will advance in the Western nations through forthright acknowledgement and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”

The moods and opinions of the lower classes in other cultures often do not accord with the “Christian roots” of Deneen’s imagining. The disconnect gets worse if we look not just at contemporary societies in Asia and Africa, but in the past too. There happens to be a field of study called Anthropology in which a dazzling array of widely divergent cultural practices have been attested over time. If his theory is supposed to be a culturally neutral one, in other words, and he believes he has stumbled upon a “conservative” account of a “good” society, he has to account for any such differences extensively and cite examples. Worse, much of the world experienced the European colonial project from the 16th to the 20th centuries as a profound cultural disaster.

He also assumes, without comment, that the American experience is fundamentally “Western.” While it is popular to use this term to describe NATO countries, we’ve discovered in recent years, particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that “Western” sensibilities seem to also encompass other democratic, highly industrialized countries like Japan and South Korea. In other words, it could be that this term is a shorthand for NATO (possibly with Australia and New Zealand added at the margins), or maybe it’s a shorthand for industrial societies that have opted for democratic governance. In any case, it is disputable whether or not America is intrinsically “Western” or “Christian.”

Even if we confine ourselves to the history of nominally Christian European countries, one wonders what slaves and serfs might have thought about the righteousness of their own “mixed constitution.” In the Americas, in particular, historical accounts of the slave experience were unrelentingly bleak. There is abundant bloodshed and exploitation documented throughout Christian societies in all periods and places before the scourge of modernity.

He extols the nobility of tradition, and this is supposed to connect the new regime to the good things from the past which liberalism has sundered. But what tradition, at what time, in what place, according to whom?

He appears not to have spared a thought about any of this.

Joan of Arc, in the Hall, With a Sex Tape?

What mechanisms does Deneen imagine will lead to the emergence of a new political and cultural regime? He proposes some policy ideas towards the end of the book:

• The U.S. House of Representative should be expanded to 6,000 (!) members.

• Primary elections should be replaced by caucuses.

• Government departments should be moved out of the Washington DC area and be more geographically dispersed throughout the country.

• Illegal immigration should be restricted by targeting employers.

• Pornography should be highly controlled or banned.

• The government should promote better observance of Christian holidays.

He lists other proposals, but none are suggested with much detail, or critical thought about what could go wrong. He pointedly ignores contrary evidence or inconvenient facts. For example, he assumes that immigrants take jobs from native residents, which is by no means a consensus view, especially after almost two years of headlines about worker shortages. He calls for a new era of robust industrial policy, while failing to mention the trifecta of “infrastructure” bills passed last year by the Biden Administration and a Democratic Congress.

Ultimately, the benefits and costs of such measures are debatable. But this mix of policy proposals is paltry. How is this going to turn over the entire “elite” for a country the size of America? All of this talk about a “mixed constitution” and so forth ends as mostly an exercise in abstraction. One suspects that Deneen’s ultimate aim is to express his own status anxiety, being an “outsider” who has nevertheless spent his entire professional career cloistered in the hallways of prestigious universities.

All of this is in service to an indefinite “common good.” The references to stability, continuity, order, family, etc., are also abstractions, easy to peddle as platitudes. Everything gets difficult when you start talking about specifics. For instance, the “popular” position on abortion in the U.S. is that it should be generally legal with restrictions on abortions at some point in the second half of pregnancy. While he doesn’t address abortion directly, it’s hard to imagine Deneen endorsing the objectively popular position on abortion law. This is a man who seems uncomfortable with no-fault divorce!

There are many contentious issues in American society where large blocks of people have conflicting values, preferences, attitudes, objectives, opinions. So, who gets to decide? What is the mechanism for mediating conflict? Liberalism presents a clear solution to this problem. The government has a mandate to balance tolerance and restraint against the obligations that ensure fairness and social coherence; these equities are weighed within democratic institutions that aim for consensus through voting and other forms of civic participation. America’s constitutional order has sustained itself by becoming more liberal and more democratic over time. This model is popular if it’s anything at all.

Deneen is uninterested in the mechanisms of consensus-building. It really seems as though he wants to arrive at his preferred social and political “constitution” by fiat—the emulsion of its parts ensured by the deep wisdom of people like him.

Mr. Quackenbush, in the Study, With a Computer

The book’s obvious sin is its obtuse lack of specificity. It tells us about the “common good” and its relation to the “wisdom of the people,” but is vague about what the “good” consists in. It advocates for a “mixed constitution,” but gives no substantive examples of legal or institutional reforms that rise to the level of a “constitution,” neither in the American nor the British idiom. He champions the rise of a social class who will usher in a new regime, but proposes little in the way of practical schemes by which this might occur among actual institutions and social interest groups. Maybe Deneen wants us to guess about how all of this is supposed work, by induction, as if politics were a game of Clue. Maybe he has other material in mind, but chooses, for whatever reason, not to reference it. More likely, if he were to commit to positions that have to be defended intellectually, this would require actual ideas and some evidence, and he has none of the imagination or the expertise to make good on the book’s assertions.

He has interesting things to say about how certain class dynamics give rise to political and economic ideologies that have downstream effects. And he articulates them well. We should be mindful of his critiques, as these dynamics seems to be an engine for the Culture War that has recently consumed political life and public sense-making. But his points are hardly original, nor are they particularly deep; such analysis does not support Deneen’s Big Conclusions—that the world is disintegrating and worse than ever before, that liberalism has failed, that the “ruling class” is one of the worst in history.

He appears to have started with these opinions, and then worked backward with convenient arguments, cleverly focusing on the hypocrisies and contradictions of certain prominent social sets. In doing so, he studiously avoids contrary arguments and evidence. For example, there have been enormous strides in alleviating the worst echelons of poverty worldwide. Industrialization has consistently and dramatically improved life expectancy and dismantled child mortality from historical norms. Vaccines and antibiotics have eradicated numerous terrifying diseases from daily life, including the worst effects of the COVID pandemic from which we are lately emerging. Historically, the rise of liberalism exactly correlates with slavery and serfdom being criminalized and deemed unconditionally immoral, and consistent with this development are both the liberal ethos and the transformative demands of an industrial economy. Some Americans feel our country, as a liberal democracy, is the best place they could ever want to be.

Worse than this, he ignores the brutality of anti-liberal regimes, such as they have taken shape. Is the managerial class of the United States one of the worst ever seen in the world? What might the Uighurs in Xinxiang say about the political leadership of China? The Ukrainians who have been murdered, tortured and abducted—how do they feel about Putin’s stand against “liberalism”? Does he believe that “pre-liberal” regimes were free from systemic exploitation, cruelty and bloodletting? The Antebellum South? The British in India? The Spanish in the Americas? The Aztecs? The Mongols? Caesar in Gaul? The Siege of Melos? The Assyrians?

The implication is obscene. This is the book’s less obvious sin: that reading it is like watching an R-rated movie on TV where they’ve dubbed out the swear words. He condemns liberalism and its “elites” for disfiguring “normal folk,” but his pastoral fantasy bears no resemblance to real alternatives, present or past. He mostly conceals his ambitions for Christianity, lest the gospels contradict his objectives. His thesis, if actually tried in the world, is the same double-talk he attributes to the “liberal elite;” he is, in fact, advocating for an authoritarian program that delights in sadism and bitterness.

Ultimately, his concept of liberalism is wrong. Liberalism is a necessary condition of an industrialized, global society. It is a political attitude rather than a cultural one, and it fosters moral humility, minimum rather than ideal standards, and democratic engagement within institutions. It accepts the differentiation of society into cultural spheres with their own internal dynamics. Liberalism is not a particular set of policies or even a defined set of cultural values, but an interval of time in which these things can be contested by all and sundry without social breakdown and political violence. It defends the dignity of the individual against the arbitrariness of the social world. America has been a liberal nation since its inception, and the country’s economic strengths, and civil triumphs since the Revolution—the Civil War, the New Deal, World War II, the Civil Rights movement—have all been in service to the core liberal innovations inherent in the Constitution and the moral exertions of those faithful to democratic ideals, continuously, for two and a half centuries. After reading this book, I would not trust any opinions that Patrick Deneen has about what the common good is or should be.

Perhaps he laments the sundering of the agrarian world by industrialization, and its feudal ideas of human subjectivity. But that world is gone. It will not be recovered. There is no metaphysical “proof” that it comprehended the universe around us and our human condition better than what we might discover for ourselves should we look inward and outward—attentively. We are born strangers to the earth, and our attachment to one part of it or another is formed by our travels, as we develop and age, and by the people we meet along the way. These encounters in time and the various landscapes each individual traverses are more wonderful and terrible and beautiful and haphazard than any regime could ever prescribe.

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture

Moshe Safdie

Atlantic Monthly Press, 368 pages, 2022

Moshe Safdie, the decorated and polymathic Israeli-Canadian-American architect and, more recently, the author of a superb memoir, designed two particular buildings of critical importance to my life—and to the lives of many others.

While Rosovsky Hall at Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel and Ben Gurion Airport’s Terminal 3 pale in comparison to Safdie’s more celebrated projects, like Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands or the magnificent Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, they resonate strongly with Safdie’s greater mission.

Rosovsky, built the year before I began college, housed all Jewish communal functions at Harvard, where a pluralistic community of hundreds of Jews gathered daily and, especially, on the Sabbath for meals, classes, and services. The building’s curved, glass-enclosed structure ensured that Orthodox Jews worshiping in one room remained in eyeshot of Reform Jews praying in another, and its open courtyard anchored the entire structure. It was in Rosovsky that I served as president of this diverse, bumptious, but ultimately unified community and first laid eyes on the woman who would become my wife, later announcing our engagement in one of its soaring spaces.

Terminal 3, where, as an Israeli practicing American law, I have spent far more time than I care to admit, ascends, beckons, welcomes, and bids adieu all at once. Its centerpiece is what our family calls the “hello-goodbye corridor”: a high-ceilinged, naturally-lit pair of broad walkways, sloping gently downward in opposite directions and meeting midway at a fulcrum (imagine two parallel seesaws with opposite ends up and down). Departing travelers traverse the corridor from passport control to the central concourse, waving as they go by at arriving passengers making their way from their planes to the baggage carousel. The arrangement underscores the holistic nature of travel, of how everyone in the airport has come and gone and come back again.

Both Rosovsky and Terminal 3 reflect Safdie’s profound commitment to merging function and form, to making public spaces accessible and useful while elevating and inspiring them, to unifying their distinct pieces.

“Architecture,” Safdie writes in his highly readable and lavishly illustrated If Walls Could Speak, “does not exist on some abstract, ethereal plane where demigods wave their wands. It is grounded in actual places filled with actual people.” Over the course of nearly 60 years, he has labored assiduously to serving, creating, and uplifting communities through his extraordinary designs.

Born in 1938 in hilly Haifa in British Mandatory Palestine, Safdie came of age during Israel’s fight for independence. His earliest architectural experiences involved the contrast—still very much evident today—between the sleek, modernist downtown near the port, the vaulted, domed Arab villas of the lower city, and the Bauhaus-inflected buildings higher up the hill. Young Moshe decided that the ideal home

must have its own territory—well-defined and private, even if it small. It must always have a garden or courtyard or some other form of outdoor space—a transition zone, making a connection between the sheltered world indoors and the natural world outdoors.

He soon put this philosophy to work, enrolling at Montreal’s McGill University after his father, a merchant disillusioned by the nascent Israeli government’s oppressive socialism, decamped for Canada. Unlike most schools, which classified architecture under the rubric of the fine art, “architecture at McGill was part of the school of engineering, and deeply influenced by that central fact: architecture was about building, and building required technical expertise in many fields.”

Adopting this modernist approach, Safdei unapologetically rejected both traditionalism and postmodernism. The modernists insisted that architecture “provide housing for masses of people, not just the affluent” and regard cities “as a holistic environment, not just a locus of a few grand public buildings,” in Safdie’s estimation.

It must concern itself with infrastructure—things like transportation and utilities and other services—that encompass and improve society as a whole. All of this resonated with the values I had absorbed as a youth in Israel.

Safdie emerged into the public eye in 1967, not yet 30 years old, when his team won the design competition for that year’s Montreal Expo. Their widely acclaimed Habitat ’67 project comprised a series of pre-fabricated units suspended over one another, each with its own outdoor space, to create a sort of manufactured hilltop structure. The art critic Blake Gopnik, whose family was among the first to take up residence in Habitat, wrote that “every minute in the building felt unlike the next, as space, light, air, and sound danced around you. My parents built a jungle-gym on one of our terraces, but the building was the best climbing frame of all.” Habitat, variations of which Safdie would later re-create on multiple continents, catapulted him to critical and financial success.

Returning to his native Israel, Safdie helped redesign the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, as well as the Mamilla neighborhood just outside its walls, a project that spanned more than three decades and has proved a smashing success. Mamilla has become a gorgeous gateway to the Old City, its terraces trickling down the biblical Valley of Hinnom, its combination of residences, hotels, and shopping representing, in Safdie’s words, “a rare example of a planned public space that performs as anticipated” and one of “the few places in Jerusalem where Arabs and Jews enjoy the city together.” Later, he would also redesign Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum.

Scale posed a unique test for Safdie, as his projects ranged from the relatively modest, e.g., remodeling his own 18th-century colonial home and his three-story studio, to the middling, such as a courthouse in Springfield, Massachusetts or stunning museums in Ottawa and Kansas City, to the truly gargantuan, like the Marina Bay Sands resort, the Raffles City Chongking complex, or the Changi Airport in Singapore. “A world of 10 billion inhabitants [will] present unprecedented challenges,” he muses. “How can architecture promote individual well-being and a balance with nature in the age of megascale?” His own structures provide a helpful answer.

Along the way, Safdie recounts the many unusual experiences that punctuated his storied career, including taking part in designing the Israeli-made Merkavah tank, spending a night in jail in Berkeley during the People’s Park protests, riding in King Hussein’s helicopter with Yo-Yo Ma, debating the merits of angled crucifixes with the archbishop of Cartagena, Colombia, and encountering groupies in rural Saudi Arabia.

Among Safdie’s most endearing traits is his humility, and perhaps the most enduring lesson of his autobiography is its injunction to persist in the face of failure. Safdie notes that his firm has won only about 50 percent of the projects it has pitched, and many of those successes were scrapped before completion. If Walls Could Speak is strewn with the detritus of ambitious, failed endeavors, like a Columbus Circle megaplex far superior to the existing one, a half-built yeshiva in Jerusalem, and the National Museum of China. Then, too, Safdie struggled to clear obstacles posed by petty rivalries with other superstar architects, impossibly difficult clients (Sheldon Adelson prominently among them), and myopic zoning boards allied with NIMBYist locals.

“Given the range of imponderables,” including the legislative mandate that architectural firms provide—and adhere to—a fee estimate, Safdie posits that “architecture is a high-risk profession.” But “it is also a deeply satisfying one,” affecting “the way people work and sleep and travel; the way they consume the planet’s resources; the way they derive aspiration and inspiration from the built environment around them.” That satisfaction radiates from the pages of his memoir, which shimmers with the passion he imparted to all of his projects, big and small.

In the end, Safdie’s legendary career has been typified by the sense of community his spaces have fostered. “People,” he writes, “want entertainment and culture, libraries, civic facilities—all of which also bring everyone into contact with a greater variety of human life and social backgrounds. People want a sense that they are part of a larger communal identity.” As he approaches his 90th birthday, Safdie can justifiably take pride in achieving his lifelong mission.

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War

Phil Klay

Penguin Press, 272 pages, 2022

“Talking about American wars,” Phil Klay writes, is “like talking about Schrodinger’s cat.”

Take this moment—right now, as you’re reading this review. Are we at war? Congress hasn’t declared war in 80 years; the Authorizations for Use of Military Force that sent troops into Afghanistan and Iraq were voted on two decades ago; besides, we’ve now withdrawn from both countries and our “military operations” there, those not-quite-wars, have ended.

But the Global War on Terror remains. Presidents still cite the 2001 AUMF to authorize deploying military force around the world. American drone strikes hit targets in Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan. From time to time, Americans wake up to news that servicemen have been killed in countries—Niger or Syria—in which they weren’t even aware we were fighting. American resources—money, weapons, intelligence—aid central American governments against guerrillas and drug cartels. We continue, in ways both strategized and ad hoc, to “project force,” as the euphemism goes. But force, like war, means violence.

Klay’s answer is simple: “Wherever we’re regularly killing, we’re at war.” So yes, he insists, we’re still at war. But only if you pay attention to it.

There’s an easy version of the book that could follow from this observation: a diatribe against American inattention, 200 pages on the folly of believing you can support the troops by going to the mall. That isn’t Uncertain Ground—Klay, after all, is neither a polemicist nor a pundit. A former information officer in the Marines, he’s best known for his fiction: Redeployment, a debut collection of stories about soldiers in or after Iraq and Afghanistan, won the National Book Award. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, turns to the intertangled wars on drugs and terror in Colombia and Afghanistan.

As an essayist, his interest is primarily on the consequences of American military force at home. There are limits to individual attention—he acknowledges this with a hopeful irony in “The Warrior at the Mall”—we can’t always pay attention to everything. But we need to reckon with the consequences of that inattention, he argues, singling out a Jonah Goldberg quip for criticism: “No one cares if Americans aren’t being killed, nor should they care if Americans aren’t being killed.” It’s the passive voice that reveals the flaw: American soldiers aren’t simply killed, but kill others on behalf of American citizens—and we should care whenever this happens.

Doing so is challenging, he acknowledges: “How to speak meaningfully of a conflict that has lasted so long, and at such a low ebb that most Americans can pretend it isn’t happening?” What effect does it have on us as citizens and as moral beings when we don’t pay attention to “the killing done in our name”? What does that inattention do to the men and women who kill for us?

The essays in Uncertain Ground don’t offer more than partial answers. Klay approaches them glancingly, incompletely, and in overlapping, sometimes contradictory ways. This uncertainty is not a flaw: these essays were written over the course of a decade; even within its four sections (Soldiers, Citizens, Writing, Faith), they’re organized non-chronologically. Losing one’s place in time reinforces the neverendingness of the War on Terror—almost all the essays feel like they could have been written as easily in 2010 as in 2020. The effect places us, as readers, on the title’s “uncertain ground.” This uncertainty is temporal, spatial—and moral.

It’s less important, he suggests, to find certain answers than to grant these questions our attention—to consider them and observe. The book’s final essay, on the fall of Kabul in August 2021, ends with a condemnation of the moral certainty that guided the early days of the War on Terror, “the warm glow of victimization” that united and gave purpose to the nation but which was “catastrophically destructive.” Even then, we were on uncertain ground. We just wouldn’t let ourselves see it.

So what do we see when we pay attention the killing done in our name? The answer varies based on the vantage from which we look. Klay’s four sections offer thematic groupings for his essays. But these are also roles through which he looks at war, paying attention as a soldier, as a citizen, as a writer, as a man of faith.

The first neither asks us to playact nor to defer to veterans—indeed, deferring to veterans on matters of war, Klay argues, is an abdication of a citizen’s moral duty, just another way of not paying attention. Rather, he draws our attention to the things, not always expected, that a soldier might attend to. In stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, these are sometimes uplifting, sometimes brutal, sometimes ironic. An essay on former Missouri governor Eric Greitens’s transformation from whistleblowing good soldier to disgraced fraud—and Greitens’s cameos elsewhere—highlight this uncertainty.

To look at the killing done in our name as citizens is to truly grapple with the moral risk involved in citizenship itself. Joining the Marines meant exposing himself to greater moral risk than he would otherwise have encountered—but this, ultimately, is what helps Klay to recognize that which all citizens share. The difference between innocence and responsibility is simply that between seeming and being: Unlike a civilian, it’s “impossible for a veteran to pretend he has clean hands.” But none of our hands stay spotless when others kill for us.

War’s changing shapes and innovations allow citizens to separate themselves from this reality. Observing that few Americans know a serviceman is a cliché by now. But even fewer know a Special Forces officer or a drone pilot, Klay notes—and these are the dominant ways we fight today’s wars. “You can’t embed a reporter with a drone or SEAL Team Six,” he comments drily: out of sight, out of mind. The result is a public “insulated from considering the consequences.”

This inattention spills across the political sphere, from a lack of congressional oversight, to erratic, incoherent presidential policies (a criticism implicating four administrations), to withdrawal plans that come across as attempts to avoid reckoning with war’s consequences for Iraqis and Afghanis. Perhaps, Klay made me wonder, this was what was most galling, even if unconsciously, about the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan: in its sloppy, ill-planned callousness, it expressed our desire as a nation to never think about Afghanistan or its people again—a wish we never quite murmured out loud, but one not so different from how we had spent much of the previous two decades already not thinking about the consequences of a war fought in our name, on our behalf, on this place and its people.

The moral risks of war matter because they do not limit themselves to war. This, at least, is the implication of “A History of Violence,” one of the collections longest essays—and one which makes no mention our 21st-century wars. It begins with the first recorded gun death in American history, the 1630 murder of John Newcomen by John Billington, who had arrived on the Mayflower. It would have taken Newcomen between 12 and 28 steps to reload his musket and fire again had his first shot gone awry. Compare this, Klay suggests, with the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, in which 58 were killed and 422 wounded in 10 minutes. The shooter fired over 1,100 rounds in that time—Billington would have needed six hours. “Billington might have had a tool suitable for murder,” Klay concludes, “but not mass murder.”

The story of that transformation is one of technological and strategic innovations born in military conflicts: simplifying and automating reloading, accepting that volume of fire might be more effective (and, in some circumstances, more lethal) than accuracy, more detailed knowledge of what bullets do on impact with the human body.

Moral risk spills outward from the use of military force: there is the moral risk of combat, and of asking others to engage in combat on your behalf, but also that of the technology of combat, the new or more refined tools that we build with each war. These trend toward distance and invisibility. In the Iliad, killing is as intimate as sex. In drone warfare as Klay’s fiction depicts it, it’s disconcertingly like a video game with poor graphics. In Las Vegas, the shooter need never have opened his eyes once he began firing: the gun itself was fully capable of creating a chaotic, deadly, “beaten zone” without human guidance.

This isn’t just about blowback to the home front or debates about gun violence. In Missionaries, Klay charts the consequences of overlapping conflicts, each sending ripples outward. The lines between Colombia’s internal conflicts, a joint Colombian-American war on drug cartels, and the Global War on Terror blur uncomfortably, until Central America begins to look like just another overlooked front: Afghan veterans provide training and strategic guidance; others appear as “military contractors”; technology developed for the War on Terror stalks their targets. Our military involvement in Colombia spans the War on Terror’s two decades. In November 2002, the United States began sending military advisors; this past May, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reaffirmed our security and defense ties with this “major non-NATO ally.”

If a novel’s suggestions are still too speculative, consider Ukraine, to which my mind turned repeatedly while reading Uncertain Ground. I don’t mean this as a comment on whether supporting Ukraine, whether financial or with arms, technology, and military intelligence is just or right. But the technological innovations of the War on Terror have tended toward the invisibility of war, at least stateside. How certain are we that a proxy war really so different? It’s a question Klay poses in Missionaries—and so I wonder: when we arm and supply the Ukrainian military in a conflict cast as a defense of shared civilization as well as Ukrainian sovereignty, are we in fact asking Ukrainians to kill in our names as well as their own?

As a matter of politics and law, this question is not new. How to negotiate the fine line between supporting Ukraine and being viewed as a combatant nation has guided public debate and administration action. But the moral question still looms: have we decided, in the quickness of our righteousness, to ask others to kill on our behalf without quite realizing it? The answer matters. Even a just cause can reveal how little we’ve learned—or how comfortably blind we’ve grown to citizenship’s most uncomfortable demands.

“What I did not expect,” Klay writes about the birth of his first child, “was how much he’d deepen the sadness with which I view the world.” Still, Klay’s essays do not despair. This sorrow leads him to something very different, a stubborn hope that perseveres even in the absence of optimism. If you accept responsibility for the mortality and survival of others, Klay writes, thinking of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “it must necessarily change your life—and not simply because it provides you with onerous, unfulfillable obligations toward a suffering world, but because it connects you in a real way to that world and becomes the means by which you might find transcendent joy.” Klay continues:

To take our obligations to our fellow man seriously means knowing we will never be able to adequately respond. It means knowing, at all times, that we should be moving toward a revolutionary change of heart, for the strength to act more fully, directly, and powerfully in relation to the agony existing not just overseas, but in the divided communities where we live. It means knowing we will fail, and knowing the glory of creation is there for us anyway. It means accepting that being responsive to suffering and attuned to joy are not different things, but one and the same.

The moral stakes of war matter not because of any quest for purity—I doubt Klay believes there is such thing as moral purity, in practice—but because they are the stakes that give meaning to life.

This isn’t to say that war only, or primarily, or best gives meaning. Quite the opposite: it’s that the stakes of fighting to defend your nation, or even just your platoonmates, might differ in intensity from those of being a parent, or a sibling, or a husband, neighbor, citizen, but not in category. Every act of responsibility for another involves moral risk. Whenever we ignore it, we ignore not just culpability but possibility.

The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy

Knopf, 400 pages, 2022

Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy

Knopf, 208 pages, 2022

The Passenger and Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy’s first novels in 16 years, share a premise with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: the first atomic detonation in the deserts of New Mexico loosed something unstoppable into the world—and, whatever else it has caused, or will cause, this event destroyed the life of a young woman decades later.

The experience of reading these novels is also a little like watching Lynch’s work: it’s hard to know what to make of them. Just what exactly are you reading: two novels or a single work? Are they really, as reviews and publicity materials have insisted, about religion, theoretical physics, and advanced mathematics? Is the occasional incoherence, buffered by moments of deep beauty and unexpected humor, deliberate or a story coming apart at its seams?

You can think of The Passenger and Stella Maris as thematic prequels to the apparent nuclear devastation McCarthy describes in The Road. The events that lead to that book’s waste lands are also those that lead to the births of the new works’ protagonists, Bobby and Alicia Western, whose parents meet during work on the Manhattan Project.

The Bomb haunts their family. The elder Westerns each die, young, of cancer.  The children struggle to comprehend and to live with what they’ve inherited: mathematical talent—genius, in Alicia’s case—500,000 dollars each, in gold coins, that proves ruinous; a vague understanding of themselves as wandering Jews; feelings of unrelenting guilt in search of a cause.

Father, son, and daughter glimpse an evil they aren’t meant to and are consumed by it. It’s Alicia who sees most knowingly. Near the end of Stella Maris she describes a vision she had at age 12—what her psychiatrist might consider her first hallucination—the discovery of a hidden presence she calls the Archatron:

I saw through something like a judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me. … A being. A presence. And that the search for shelter and for a covenant among us was simply to elude this baleful thing of which we were in endless fear and yet of which we had no knowledge.

“The keepers at the gate,” she concludes, “saw me and they gestured among themselves and then all of that went away and I never saw it again.” This was not a dream, she insists:

I had no reason to believe that what I saw did not exist and that if that realm was unknown to us that didnt make it less threatening but more.

Alicia may have hallucinated her vision of the Archatron. Bobby seems to dream his, visitations from his father’s ghost. What their father saw, however, was quite real: he watched the Trinity test from the safety of a bunker, through goggles. Something in that moment became newly, immanently physical. The question with which McCarthy and his characters grapple, indirectly, is what that was: the expression and manifestation of mathematic equations? Or some old evil (or a new twisting of the soul), grown to new powers?

Readers meet Bobby Western, nearing 40, as a salvage diver in the Gulf coast states. When he’s not working, he lurks the barrooms of 1980 New Orleans, talking and worrying. As The Passenger opens, he and his team work to recover a 12-seat jet that’s crashed into the Gulf. The plane’s doors and windows are still sealed and the drowned bodies of nine passengers and two pilots float around them. But a passenger is missing, as is the plane’s black box. Bobby, too intelligent for his own good, keeps wondering about this after they resurface: someone must have been there already. Could the passengers have been dead before the plane hit the water? Could the plane have been planted there to make it look like a crash? The others are more content to take their money and not ask questions. But then—who had hired them, exactly? The client was unnamed, never seen, and paid cash.

He suspects some kind of dark conspiracy and begins to find it everywhere.  No matter where he moves, his apartments are searched, first by two government agents in suits; then, he determines, by more nefarious (though unseen) figures. One member of the crew dies in a diving accident. His cat gets out and never returns. The suits keep coming by his bar haunts, looking for him. Bobby feels chased—and he seems chased—though it’s never clear by whom, or for what. The feds freeze his bank account and seize his Maserati. He thinks it’s for knowing about the plane crash; more plausibly, it’s what they say: tax evasion. Even the burglary of his grandmother’s home years before must be connected. Thieves took guns, but also family papers—his sister’s sparse written work and the notebooks his father kept as a Manhattan Project physicist.

The pursuit is Kafkaesque, McCarthy’s version of The Trial: neither Bobby nor readers ever know with certainty who pursues him, though he seems pursued; nor what crime he’s accused of, though he seems accused; nor what he’s guilty of, though he certainly believes himself guilty of something.

Alicia has been dead eight years by the time all this begins. Shortly before Christmas, 1972, she hanged herself in the woods outside the Wisconsin mental hospital to which she’d voluntarily committed herself, Stella Maris (also the second volume’s namesake). His younger sister’s death haunts Bobby; it’s among the things for which he holds himself responsible, though he was lying comatose in a German hospital at the time after wrecking a Formula 2 racecar.

Alicia was a mathematical prodigy; a high school graduate at 12, college at 16. Over the next four years, she began and abandoned doctoral work in mathematics—not because she couldn’t do it, but because she could do it too well. She sought to understand math’s nature—and couldn’t prove that any of it exists. She’s also been diagnosed as schizophrenic, though both Alicia and her counselor at Stella Maris, Dr. Cohen, doubt this: she, because she insists the figures she sees are real; he, because she doesn’t exactly meet the diagnostic criteria. Indeed, in Stella Maris, covering the last weeks of her life, she’s banished these visions—not with medication, but simply by telling them to depart.

These are the “Horts” (from “cohort”), a morally ambiguous group of bumbling vaudeville grotesques who begin to visit her not long after her vision of the Archatron. Their chief, the Thalidomide Kid, is a short, bald, papery-skinned figure with misshapen flippers for arms and a habit of comic malapropism in his verbose, cynical lectures—he’s the subject of Alicia’s conversations with her psychiatrist in Stella Maris and her discussions with The Kid pepper The Passenger, otherwise focused exclusively on Bobby. It’s not clear to her what the Horts or their motives are: they seem intent on distracting her, amusing her, perhaps protecting her. Later, she wonders if they were meant “to keep something at bay.” They seem to be hallucinations, but the novels posit other alternatives: supernatural beings; real, material creatures somehow unseen by most; aliens.

Alicia’s sessions with Cohen are built on intellectual gamesmanship. He’s trying to understand an atypical case for the sake of a research paper; she’s trying to push him to concede that he can’t, in fact, prove the truth of his (or any) reality over her own. In this world—the one you and I share outside the pages of the novel—I’d react as Cohen does. But The Passenger and Stella Maris exist in their own world, and here the Horts feel real. They are, Alicia insists, at least as real as mathematics.

Take geometry, she suggests. Like all math, it must start with an act of belief, postulating a reality that can’t be proven: “You begin with a point which has no dimension and therefore no reality and extend it into a line. Can an extension of nothing eventuate into something? You have to say so. You can’t show so.” Neither Euclid nor Riemann could reason their way out of this.

She’s discussing math and metaphysics, but McCarthy is discussing fiction itself.  The act of imagination and belief on which Alicia insists geometry rests is as apt a description of both writing and reading fiction as I’ve encountered. E. M. Forster spoke of “flat” and “round” characters; walk into any writing workshop and you’re still likely to hear the task described in geometric language: depth, verticality, horizontals. To take an extension of nothing and eventuate it into something is the task of the novelist.

Something even stranger occurs in the minds of that novel’s readers. Seemingly without effort or even conscious thought, we manage to begin with points that have no dimension and extend them into lines, those lines into shapes. Alicia makes a similar point, but in narrative terms, when talking to The Kid:

I know that the characters in the story can be either real or imaginary and that after they are all dead it wont make any difference. If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless.

This is true of Alicia herself from the beginning of The Passenger—on its first page, a hunter discovers her body in the snow. Another scene, in which she explains why she chose not to drown herself in Lake Tahoe, makes it viscerally true. At great length, she describes the effects of water pressure, near-freezing temperatures, and drowning reflexes in difficult-to-read detail. This is an imaginary character imagining an imaginary death. I was nauseated. In a way that not even Blood Meridian could, this depiction of death nearly made me vomit. My reaction was probably extreme. But my brain had taken this nothingness, these bits of ink on wood pulp, and transformed them into something momentarily real, forcing me to watch this young woman who has never existed die in slow motion, each of us fully aware of what nature was doing to her body.

Even if The Passenger and Stella Maris aren’t the final works the 89-year-old McCarthy offers us, they’ll still serve as a challenging coda to and commentary on what came before. That oeuvre is nothing if not a series of glimpses of the Archatron, from the near-supernatural figures of The Judge, Anton Chigurh, and all the demonic horrors of Outer Dark to the more mundane but deeply human violence his characters endure and inflict. McCarthy famously prefers the company of scientists to his fellow artists and, perhaps, his literary career has been its own, alternative kind of science, exploring the dark much as Alicia does: in notes, never finished, toward proofs and theorems, still unresolved.

On one level, then, you might say that The Passenger and Stella Maris offer a defense of the novel. Its inquiries are as equal and valid as those of mathematics and the sciences. Novels and math alike begin with axioms and posited ideas about reality that allow the rest to fall into place. You can no more prove the existence of a point, or a line, than you can the Archatron.

Or the soul. Bobby, on the lam and hiding in an abandoned shack, begins to have nightmares of childbirth—a stillborn, or perhaps extremely premature, or perhaps doomed, or perhaps monstrous infant. He asks of the doctor, “Does it have a brain?” “Rudimentary.” And then, a question to which no response is given: “Does it have a soul?”

Science can tell us a great deal about the human brain; mathematics can explore the workings of the physical space in which we exist. Neither can tell us much at all about the reality or the nature of the soul. That’s a task of no less importance, but perhaps one better suited to the tools of the novelist.

And yet: the same logic that suggests a novel might be a kind of alternative scientific inquiry also suggests it’s only as real, or truthful, as the Horts. Fiction, that is to say, might be just as misguided, distracting, and hallucinatory as the Horts—something we mistake as insightful when, in the end, it’s merely entertainment meant to redirect our attention from the truth of “an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world”—as Alicia puts it, that “at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium.” Bobby’s view of this truth is disenchanted, materialist: that there might simply be nothing, just chance followed by nonexistence in which no one and no thing is remembered.

Unless, of course, it’s math that’s the vaudeville act. The question we’d rather not think about, but which McCarthy won’t ignore, is whether any of our quests for knowledge can be anything but mere entertainment and distractions in a world capable of annihilating itself. Or if they ever were, or could have been, anything different.

Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization

Byung-Chul Han

Polity, 106 pages, 2022

If there’s one provocation that solidifies social theorist Byung-Chul Han as the countercultural figure of our time, it’s his praise of boredom.

“If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation” he writes in his seminal text The Burnout Society.

Limits, self-sacrifice, and difference—the themes within Han’s work are a clapback against the dizzying ego overstimulation of contemporary society, where duty and taboo have been replaced with a hedonistic injunction to ‘enjoy.’

Born in South Korea, but based in Germany, Han’s influence within the Anglosphere has yet to be fully realized, mostly due to the slow-drip of English translations of his many books and essays. With the translation of Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization, Han provides a timeless critique of globalized consumer culture.

To understand Han’s work, you need to grasp his critique of what he calls our “achievement society.” First outlined in The Burnout Society, Han describes how the rise of technocapitalism and the destruction of traditional social mores have given rise to a new kind of subjectivity: the self-motivated achievement-subject:

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories.

What we have been sold as progress and freedom going into the 21st century is simply a new ego-centric form of control.

For Han, the bio-politics of the achievement society are a “violence of positivity” where the absence of limits (or ‘negation’) have given rise to maladies of depression, obsessive-compulsive habits, borderline personalities, and exhaustion.

A meaningful life is barely graspable in an “anything goes” world where tradition, place, and social roles are framed as obstacles to self-actualized personal projects—more often than not fed to us through algorithms reifying our own precarious identities.

As social theorist Jean Baudrillard succinctly puts it, we live in an age with “more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

The identities constructed by the achievement-subject cannot hold, as there is no big Other to define oneself against: ‘anything goes’ means no identity can fully crystalize. Meaning is something bestowed on the individual by the world, not the other way around.

The achievement-subject works quite well as a consumer, however, as the subject is desperately trying to define itself through external commodities.

“Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself. It wallows in its own shadow everywhere until it drowns—in itself” notes Han.

Against the achievement society, Han has called for an embrace of vita contemplativa—the Ancient philosophical virtue of a contemplative life. This inevitably leads to a call for the reinstatement of life-affirming rituals and taboos—as well as the slowing down of the cultural pace caused by technocapitalism.

Han has utilized this model of the achievement society to skewer many aspects of modern culture including contemporary “pornographic” relationships (The Agony of Eros), the absence of history (The Scent of Time), slick techno aesthetics (Saving Beauty), and the impetus for disclosure (The Transparency Society).

In Hyperculture, originally published in German in 2005, Han looks at cultural place in the face of globalization, particularly the effect of de-limiting information technologies and the economic liberalization of labor and capital across the globe.

The book begins with a rather dismal prediction by British ethnologist Nigel Barley that “fundamental concepts such as culture will cease to exist” in the near future, rendering us all “more or less tourists in Hawaiian shirts.”

The rise of the cosmopolitan is a common theme in discussions of globalization, as we move beyond a sense of national cultural heritage. This is a state of “hyperculture” for Han.

Today, an American can be a fan of French New Wave cinema, play Japanese video games, listen to Korean pop, have a taste for Ethiopian cuisine, and follow the spiritual teachings of ancient Indian yogis.

“Hyperculture does not know the ‘radically Other’ that is the source of timidity or terror,” notes Han.

The “hypercultural tourist” identified by Han is commonly viewed as a progressive development: the breaking down of national boundaries. However, Han argues it is merely the globalized projection of the achievement-subject: “Being a tourist does not necessarily mean being physically on the move. Already at home, the hypercultural tourist is either somewhere else or on the go.”

Han describes the downside of our globalized world as a “de-facticization: of being or the inability to settle in place. The hypercultural tourist is free to be anywhere or anyone, but not in any meaningful sense ever ‘home.’”

“National happiness’, the ‘song’ of the ‘soul’ that creates happiness, is probably unknown to the tourists in Hawaiian shirts.” writes Han.

What’s left in our hypercultural environment is the miserable free-floating subject of technocapitalism, that of Microsoft’s early 2000s slogan “Where do you want to go today?”

No wonder then we have seen a reactionary turn across the globe seeking to re-establish some lost sense of national unity—usually in the form of vulgar, racist ethno-nationalist movements.

Han, a Swiss-German-Korean, is of course no reactionary and wishes to make a case for both multiculturalism and national happiness.

He notes Hegel’s view in his Lectures in the Philosophy of History that enviable Greek civilization was the result of a melting pot, with Hegel criticizing the “superficial and absurd idea that such a beautiful and truly free life can be produced by a process so incomplex as the development of a race keeping within the limits of blood relationship and friendship.”

Heterogeneity (in ethnicity and culture) is a crucial pillar of a flourishing culture, argues Han, but an extra step is required for national happiness—an ‘overcoming’ of heterogeneity which requires a foreign Other upon which to distinguish oneself. 

Overcoming difference is the founding myth of a happy national culture. Han calls for a ritualized ignorance of intra-cultural difference through the recognition of inter-cultural Otherness:

Culture has increasingly lost the kind of structure familiar to us from conventional texts or books. There are no stories, no theology, no teleology to give it the appearance of a meaningful homogenous unity. The borders or enclosures that convey a semblance of cultural authenticity or genuineness are dissolving.

What’s required is the ability to view the foreign as Other again, not in a xenophobic sense of ‘lesser’ but merely different. This Otherness can then proceed to a cultural dialogue characterized not by limited “tolerance” or “politeness” but by friendliness.

“Unlike politeness, friendliness acts without rules. Precisely because of this irregularity, it can have far-reaching effects. It produces maximum cohesion with minimum connectedness” he writes.

What we are left with at the end of Hyperculture is some hope that both national happiness and cultural dialogue are possible, through the mutual perception of difference.

Byung-Chul Han once again shows he is willing to speak some difficult truths in order to counteract the harms of achievement society. His work deserves greater attention in the Anglosphere for being a true countercultural force in reestablishing meaning, despite increasingly nihilistic disintegration.

The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now

Anya Kamenetz

PublicAffairs, 352 pages, 2022

Three years into the Covid era, we suffer from a passive voice problem. The true sin of passive sentences isn’t wordiness or lack of precision, but evasion: they offer a way to hint at a problem but back off at the last second, never quite taking a stand, never quite risking being wrong—or being thought wrong.

The passive voice problem, in its purest form, is a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It’s the difference between the person who says, “Mistakes were made,” and the one who says, “I screwed up, and here’s how.” One is specific, honest, and reflective; the other evades responsibility and introspection while signaling that the next thousand words will say as little as humanly possible.

We’re all guilty of the passive voice problem, of course—and, mostly, in less deliberate ways than that example. It’s part of being human. But that doesn’t mean we should surrender to it.

The passive-voice problem can strike even the well-intended. I want to believe that’s what happened with Anya Kamenetz. To give her credit where it’s due, she sees—and saw, early on—the very real problems with how America treated its children during 2020 and 2021. Too often, children were afterthoughts, asked to sacrifice (or to have their childhood sacrificed) for the vague, impulse-driven comfort of others. Children were isolated, hampering social and emotional development. School closures led to learning loss, particularly among lower-income, black, and Latino families—but also to the loss of social services that schools provide beyond education. Our policy-level responses to Covid—in particular, shutting the doors of public schools for, on average, more than a year—caused specific, concrete harms to children. These losses varied from child to child, depending on their circumstances, but a good rule-of-thumb might be: the more vulnerable a child was, the more our policy decisions harmed that child. In The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now, she seeks, stridently, to persuade her fellow progressives to set aside the partisan logic of the Trump era and to acknowledge the need for repair along with her.

But Kamenetz, too, suffers from the passive-voice problem. She can’t bring herself to acknowledge whom this account holds responsible: liberal and progressive political leaders, public health and education experts, and the very voters she seeks to persuade. A year of children’s lives was stolen—but the thieves go unnamed.

Kamenetz is an education reporter for NPR, but The Stolen Year isn’t really a work of reporting. Her goal is not to provide an account, or an accounting, of that first pandemic year, but to convince her readers that three things are true: First, that Covid stole childhood from children, especially (though not exclusively) through school closures. Second, that public schools aren’t merely important, but are, in fact, the most important part of the United States’ welfare system. Third, that the ways to repair the damage done in 2020 and 2021—or to prevent its recurrence—point toward a long list of progressive policy goals, from increased spending on public school and childcare to large-scale reforms of welfare programs, the health care system, immigration law, and environmental policy.

It’s convenient that the solutions map so neatly onto what progressives already call for. I realize, of course, that Kamenetz doesn’t write for me: I’m not a progressive and, even if I were, I wouldn’t need to be persuaded that Covid school closures were a deeply misguided policy. But if she’d ended by simply listing a series of choice-oriented education reforms to which I’d be more instinctively amenable, I’d still be wary. If all that Covid has shown you is that your team has (and always had) all the right answers, then you’re almost certainly doing it wrong. Regardless of intention, this is the kind of thinking that only continues the political weaponization of children.

That brings us back to the passive-voice problem. Mistakes were made, Kamenetz urges her fellow progressives to concede. But which mistakes? By whom? It’s far easier to land on solutions which fit easily within what you’d otherwise desire, had there been no Covid-19, no school closures, no learning loss—whatever your heart longed for in December 2019—when you don’t address questions of responsibility. They’d lead you, potentially, to uncomfortable truths, or to places where policies you’re amenable to failed, or simply to the facts and details that, like stray pebbles on the infield dirt, can transform the routine play to catastrophic error.

So Kamenetz largely avoids her primary contention, that closing schools for in-person learning during the 2020-2021 school year was the central error of child policy, one that unnecessarily removed the most important cog of America’s welfare system, injuring the most vulnerable disproportionately. Only one of the book’s 11 chapters—the eighth—discusses this policy error and its aftermath in detail. Indeed, The Stolen Year struggles to keep its focus on the Covid era: a little more than half actually discusses anything from 2020 on. The rest is a simplified, politically-conditioned history of American public schools, child protective services, and social welfare programs. Kamenetz offers an account that blames historic racism, sexism, and xenophobia for the policy errors of 2020-2021 more than those who called for school closures or the leaders who enacted and then refused to end them: “The decisions that led us here,” she contends, “were made by powerful adults over centuries.”

Maybe it’s an effective rhetorical strategy to tell readers that the legacy of slavery was as much to blame for the damage done by school closures as were the progressive school boards, union leaders, mayors, and governors who decided to close schools and then declined to reopen them. It’s easier, after all, to concede the error if there’s no one, really, to blame.

But that’s not exactly Kamenetz’s contention. “All of this was not inevitable,” she declares early on, quoting an interviewee: “it was ‘super fucking evitable.’” The recognition that school policies were chosen and the refusal to blame those who made those choices is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of The Stolen Year. Those she chooses to hold responsible are long-dead ancestors whose bigotry set us on tracks leading to Covid disasters—or, among the living, easily-predicted boogiemen.

For example, in an early chapter, Kamenetz observes that Covid-era school policies—not just closures, but also de-emphasizing grades and evaluating student work—meant that “the social contract of school was broken.” And it’s not that we went into this blind: “In March 2020, in the United States, people in power knew, or should have known, that keeping schools closed for even a few weeks would have serious, long-term, inequitable consequences.” American Covid closures, she notes, “stood out globally”: for the most part, American classrooms were closed for over a year; in European and Asian countries, the length was far, far shorter.

These are statements that, she correctly notes, were controversial to say aloud during 2020 and 2021. Indeed, they became near-heresies if you valued your status in good-standing as an anti-Trump progressive. And yet, in the same chapter from which I’ve been quoting, Grover Norquist comes in for greater criticism than those who actually decided school policy. Kamenetz’s villains are familiar and predictable: Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos are Public Enemies No. 1 & 2. School-choice advocates like Corey DeAngelis—a vociferous critic of public school closures during 2020 and 2021—also make sinister cameos.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph from Donald Trump: some obnoxious, bloviating line that has something to do with Covid, but isn’t really related to schools. The purpose is obvious. Kamenetz worries that it is still heretical to point out that prolonged school closures were a disastrous policy choice that sacrificed American children in order to ease the unfounded anxieties of the adults who should have known better. So she must remind her readers that, like a good progressive, she too blames Donald Trump above all others.

It’s not unfair to say that Trump helped cause prolonged school closures—just not for the reasons Kamenetz implies. It was, in fact, his support for in-person schooling beginning in the summer of 2020 that polarized the issue and made it politically toxic on the left.

Take the case of the American Academy of Pediatrics school guidance leading up to the 2020-2021 school year. In late June, the AAP called for a return to in-person classes in the fall, emphasizing the negative educational, developmental, and psychological consequences of continued remote school. The following week, Trump and administration officials began to cite the AAP report in calls for schools to reopen for in-person learning in the fall. On July 10, the AAP issued a joint statement with the nation’s two largest teacher’s unions walking back the earlier guidance. From here, there was no turning back: the issue had been touched by Trump.

But that second AAP statement also points us toward those who should be held responsible. School re-openings, it insisted, should be made by public health agencies, school administrators, and local officials. Indeed, this is largely what we got: a hodge-podge of policies determined along partisan lines. The deeper blue your school district, the more likely you were to remain out of the building; the redder, the more likely to be in-person.

Kamenetz hints, at times, that these leaders may have made mistakes. In spring 2020, she reports, unions in Los Angeles County negotiated “just a twenty-hour workweek for remote teaching.” But she stops short of casting blame, just as she does, later, when examining union resistance to re-opening schools throughout the 2020-2021 school year. It’s more important to note that conservatives blamed them too much than to measure precisely how much blame they deserve.

The book’s very structure allows Kamenetz to stop short of assigning responsibility. Individual chapters are broken into short sections and subsections—nothing unusual for a work of contemporary nonfiction. But these sections are largely less than a page long, often only one or two paragraphs, and the jumps allow Kamenetz to consistently avoid the implications of her claims and instead redirect—sometimes to the past, sometimes to another example, sometimes just to a new heading that makes claims unsupported by the actual text and reported evidence.

Consider this example, drawn from that lone chapter on school closures in 2020-2021. Here’s the section, in its entirety, under the sub-head, “Health Authorities Recommended Opening Schools in the Fall”:

In the spring of 2020, schools were closed out of caution. It was relatively uncontroversial. It happened almost everywhere in the world—although European countries started opening up within several weeks, and Sweden’s never closed.

The 2020-2021 school year, the subject of this chapter, was a whole different animal. Our peer countries committed to opening schools whenever possible. Politics held sway over science in the United States’ weak, decentralized, inequitably funded school system.

Beyond brevity, you’ll notice a few things. For instance, the text itself provides no evidence for the sub-head’s claim. The section title makes an assertion requiring support—followed by tangentially-related text that provides relatively uncontroversial background facts. It ignores the fact that American health authorities were markedly less supportive of in-person schooling in 2020, 2021, and even 2022 than their European counterparts. Take, for example, the CDC’s February 2021 revisions to its school reopening guidelines (issued far too late to affect the 2020-2021 school year). Framed as a plan to prioritize in-person learning, they nonetheless recommended that the 90 percent of American middle and high schools then in “High” transmission areas stay remote indefinitely, rather than return to the classroom. Elementary schools received a slightly different guidance: to employ reduced attendance or hybrid learning, modes that (as Kamenetz elsewhere observes) were linked to worse learning outcomes than fully-remote classes.

Kamenetz knows the facts I’ve offered in the previous paragraph; she co-authored the article I’ve linked to as a source. But pushing forward, making connections, assigning blame—all this would require alienating those she wants to persuade. It would require admitting that her own political allies were, largely, wrong on this issue. She would need to cast blame not only on Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, whose responses were indeed deeply flawed, but also at union leaders and the relatively anonymous local politicians and school board members in deep-blue college towns and majority-minority urban districts—and, of course, on nationally-recognized figures including Anthony Fauci, Andrew Cuomo, Gretchen Whitmer, Kathy Hochul, Phil Murphy, and Gavin Newsom. They were, to borrow a phrase from Bush 43, “the deciders.” They decided poorly.

It would also mean admitting who chose correctly. Sometimes progressives: Bill DeBlasio’s resistance to closing schools in March 2020 looked, by that fall, deeply prescient. But it would also mean conceding that those who chose to open schools or advocated for them were correct, despite the (R) frequently attached to their names: Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp, and other red state governors; the activists for in-person schooling she dismisses as “angry mobs of anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, ant those opposed to schools teaching about racism and LGBTQ rights.” Tellingly, when comparing conditions in Florida and California schools, Kamenetz goes out of her way to avoid using DeSantis’s name; what readers need to know about this nameless figure is not his advocacy for the in-person classes she praises, but his opposition to school mask mandates.

Admitting all this would mean saying: “You, my political allies—you and your heroes, dear readers, were wrong; our opponents were right more often than we were, at least on this issue. Our choices had consequences that hurt children, and we should reflect on the way negative partisanship led us to set aside our true convictions for over a year.”

That probably wouldn’t be very persuasive. But at least it would be honest.

Getting Lost

Annie Ernaux

Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, 2022

Even translated into English, contemporary France puts out far better books than America or Britain. Perhaps this is because of a higher cultural standard, or a greater general appreciation for literature, or simply random chance; whatever the reason, the average French novel or memoir contains richer themes, more beautiful imagery, and more deftly crafted prose than the native-English average. Michel Houellebecq? So brilliant that “greatest living literary satirist” seems like an understatement (but who can compete, now that we’ve lost P. J. O'Rourke?). Find me a better recent literary trilogy than the Vernon Subutex series by Virginie Despentes; or a memoir better written than Phillipe Lancon’s Disturbance. It’s one of a few books whose prose is so beautifully written that I almost loath the writer’s talent. And this doesn’t mention Nina Leger, Édouard Louis, David Diop, and the mysterious Antoine Laurain.

And so it was little surprise when, on October 6th, the celebrated Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The timing couldn’t be better, barely a few weeks after the translated release of her latest book, Getting Lost, which is a collection of journal entries she wrote during the relationship at the center of her most famous book, Simple Passion. That romantic auto-fiction masterpiece birthed the ‘sex-positive, woman-centric’ novel trend, spending eight months on the French best-seller charts, and opened the door to the Sally Rooneys of the world (but don’t hold that against her). Within her slim volume, Ernaux opened up a whole new subgenre of “hot girl” writing, talking frankly and beautifully about sex, from a distinctly female position; and Getting Lost is where that all started.

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Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkeman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, 2021

If Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals could be cheekily put in a single sentence, it might read: You’re going to die, start wasting time. As Burkeman sees it, the pressure to get more done—a pressure present both in our professional and our personal lives—should be shunned in favor of living within the bounds of our human limitations. Burkeman’s contention is that these limitations actually enrich our lives. It turns out that relentless optimization is a recipe for burnout, while appreciating that not every action has to be productive is a posture considerably more conducive to life satisfaction.

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The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

Matthew Continetti

Basic Books, 496, 2022

Studying conservatism’s past, declares Matthew Continetti in the introduction to his new history of the conservative movement, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, is enough to convince one “that it has a future.” After reading the rest of it, I’m inclined to agree. Yet having done so, I can’t help but wonder if the reason it does is because conservatism’s future has so often been a matter of reliving its past.

The K-Pg Boundary

The conflict between the establishment and the rank and file seems to be the defining feature of conservative politics at the moment. But as Continetti amply documents, it is a defining feature of conservative politics at any moment. Wendell Willkie’s nomination in 1940 would not be the last time those on the right decried the tendency of “GOP elites to embrace whatever reforms liberal Democrats had come up with.” Nor was Kevin Phillips’s dismissal of conservative intellectuals three decades later as “too interested in maintaining respectability among liberals” the first. The unceasing nature of this strife is one of Continetti’s organizing themes. The right’s inability to forge a lasting settlement between these two elements and the consequent fragility of its coalition and impermanence of its victories is another. In his own words, his “framework is the endless competition and occasional collaboration between populism and elitism.” Some histories are about change, but continuity is the name of Continetti’s game.

Because it is, his account begins somewhere few readers might expect it to: at Warren Harding’s inauguration. American conservatism as most people understand it today is a product of the postwar era. By starting in 1921, Continetti accomplishes two things. First, he shows what conservatism looked like before it was obliterated by the asteroid that was the New Deal. Second, he draws the reader’s attention to the fact that even though it was superseded by a more dominant species, the older taxon survived the extinction event.

The conservatism of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge “stood for a popular mix of untrammeled commerce, high tariffs, disarmament, foreign policy restraint, and devotion to” the nation’s constitutional foundations. What it wasn’t was adventurist or ambitious at home or abroad. “Normalcy” was the byword after the dislocations of Woodrow Wilson’s tenure. Not for the last time, the function of the GOP was to serve as oil to calm the waters after a period of progressive ascendance.

The Republican Party shattered on the rocks of the Depression. What survived of the wreckage was barely seaworthy to navigate a pond, let alone the turbulent waters of the 1930s. With no vessel to carry it, the right drifted. Conservatism in this period has all the characteristics of a fossil. Not an impressive one like a dinosaur, but one of the small ones, an ammonite or trilobite.

A “mix of nostalgia, melancholy, and pessimism became a constant temptation for the American Right,” one which proved too alluring for the group that came to be known as the Southern Agrarians. They railed against the depredations of industrial development, mass media, and their threat to a distinctly Southern culture. With its emphasis on preserving “ancient social patterns against the upheavals” of the modern age, agrarianism had more in common with European conservatism. But its refusal to acknowledge the main source of the uniqueness of Southern culture, the existence of slavery, made it inescapably American. The Agrarians were one of several groups critical of the New Deal which “opposed the fluidity, creative destruction, secularism, and individualism of modern society.”

Not every philosophical and intellectual avenue conservatism took in the 1930s was a dead end. But though it began showing some signs of brain activity, politically it remained as moribund as ever. Amidst its ongoing rout, however, conservatism was being remade in ways that would define it for decades. FDR’s expansion of the federal government “became the central topic of debate between conservatives and liberals,” something it arguably remains to this day. Unfortunately, in this crucible the right “adopted an adversarial and catastrophizing attitude toward government that it never quite shook off.” Congressional Republicans had made little headway in turning Americans against the New Deal, wrote a member of one anti-New Deal group in 1939. “Eight decades later, the situation had not changed,” Continetti notes drily. Whether ruefully as well, he does not say.

Conservatism on the eve of World War II was at its nadir, the province of intellectuals espousing a rebarbative flight into the past and politicians espousing equally unpalatable antagonism to the New Deal at home and isolationism abroad. Conservatism couldn’t get any lower. It had nowhere to go but up.

The Conservazoic

That eventually it would attain the heights of power, few would have imagined. The core of Continetti’s book is a 200 page narrative tracing the modern conservative movement from its emergence in the early 1950s to its triumph in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Though he devotes ample space to political figures—Reagan, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater—he focuses on the intellectuals who spent this period resurrecting and redefining conservatism in order to make it once more a viable force.

The two most important were discovered more or less straight out of college by the Chicago businessman Henry Regnery, who’d helped found the magazine Human Events in 1944 and in 1947 created the publishing house that still bears his name. In 1952, Regnery received a letter from an American graduate student at the University of St. Andrews asking if he’d be interested in publishing the student’s doctoral dissertation. After perusing the 450-page manuscript, Regnery decided he would be and duly did the next year.

The Conservative Mind was as idiosyncratic as its author, Russell Kirk, a “young fogey” from Michigan who fell in love with the South while studying at Duke. The book was an immediate sensation. More important, Kirk’s tome “gave conservatives an identity, an intellectual genealogy, and a point of view.” Without him, Continetti avers, “there would be no conservative movement.” But Kirk’s traditionalism was not the stuff on which to build a mass movement. Something less recondite and more palatable to other blocs on the right was needed.

Two years before Kirk’s book, Regnery had published God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley had just graduated from Yale, where one of his classmates was L. Brent Bozell, Jr., who himself became a prominent conservative figure (and husband to Buckley’s sister, Patricia).

Buckley’s “ability to see where the joints of the American Right lined up” was crucial to the success of his leadership. He is arguably the central figure of Continetti’s narrative, and in the arc of his career from enfant terrible to eminence grise one can trace the trajectory of postwar conservatism.

Buckley made many contributions to the conservative movement, but none was more decisive than his founding in 1955 of National Review, the most important American conservative publication of the second half of the 20th century. Its founders “envisioned themselves the leaders of an intellectual army that could compete on the same battlefield as the best troops of the academic Left.” The conservatism they championed is one few would associate it with today. For Buckley and his cohorts, conservatism was “the set of beliefs dominant” in the 1920s. Yet the new magazine’s credo was syncretic, molding libertarian opposition to big government, strong anti-communism, “elitism in education and culture,” antiunionism, and antipathy to the UN.

The act of definition is also one of exclusion. One of Buckley’s vital roles was deciding what would and would not belong to the conservative movement. He attacked the antisemitism of one-time Huey Long surrogate Gerald L. K. Smith. He also ostracized the Birchers and condemned Ayn Rand to the fringes.

This gatekeeping was a signal service, yet it didn’t go far enough. In attempting to enfold as many existing elements into the conservative movement as he could, Buckley let in Southern Agrarianism, which made its hostility to civil rights his magazine’s, and thereby associated conservatism with the forces of segregation. Buckley would repudiate his defense of the indefensible, but not before crippling “the argument for limited government,” a fundamental principle of conservatism, “by equating federal inactivity with the maintenance of white supremacy.” Thus, despite all he did for conservatism at this time, Buckley also harmed it in ways it still hasn’t recovered from.

Buckley, Kirk, and co. had put conservatism back on a sound intellectual footing. But it remained a political runt. That changed with the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. No one expected Goldwater to defeat Lyndon Johnson, least of all Goldwater. But the Arizona senator, who’d galvanized conservatives with the publication of Conscience of a Conservative (ghostwritten by Bozell) in 1960 decided to go through with it anyway. His campaign was a who’s who of future stars on the right: Milton Friedman was an economic adviser; William Rehnquist was its counsel; Kirk wrote some speeches; and a young Yale law prof named Robert Bork provided legal advice. About the only group not associated with it was the National Review masthead. Goldwater was duly crushed, but his campaign allowed the intellectual right to “make its presence felt in presidential politics for the first time since the Great Depression.”

Four years later Richard Nixon was elected. By the time he was forced to resign in 1974 the GOP had made inroads with several “sectors of the New Deal coalition, including Catholics, ethnic voters, and blue-collar workers.” But perhaps the biggest development over this period was the rightward drift of leftwing thinkers repelled by the social chaos of the period and a weakening of the Democratic Party’s resolve to combat the Soviets. Among these “neoconservatives,” as they would soon be known, were Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol.

There’s no growth without growing pains. Brent Bozell, who’d left Buckley’s magazine in 1966 to found his own, Triumph, railed against his brother-in-law’s endorsement of Nixon over Ronald Reagan and mourned “the death of the Constitution.” Bozell’s disaffection and the expulsion of the libertarian faction from the Young Americans for Freedom at its 1969 annual convention, writes Continetti, “reinforced the integral role of hawkish anticommunism in the self-understanding of the American Right.” It was also proof that Buckley’s circle was becoming part of the mainstream it “had ridiculed for so long.”

Conservative activism and organizing continued apace throughout the 1970s to supplement and challenge the new establishment. Richard Viguerie, who had transformed his direct-marketing company into a right-wing behemoth, described “the increasing number of political activists fighting lax divorce and abortion laws, the gay rights movement, ERA, school busing, tax increases,” and various other causes as the “New Right.” The New Right was as willing to challenge Buckley as it was the left. From their perspective, there was no difference. Buckley backed the Panama Canal Treaty. This put the one-time “enfant terrible of the Eisenhower era” on the same side as Jimmy Carter. “Buckley had mainstreamed American conservatism,” but as it became less philosophical and more political and partisan, “it was now flowing in directions he often would not follow.” The treaty was the subject of a debate on Buckley’s PBS program Firing Line. Buckley’s—and the treaty’s—chief opponent that night? Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s landslide victory over Jimmy Carter and his two terms as president have been long regarded as not merely the triumph, but the apotheosis of modern conservatism. That Reagan should succeed where Goldwater failed was no shock. While the Arizonan was dour and pessimistic, the Californian was sunny and optimistic. Moreover, America was ready to embrace a conservative Republican in 1980 in a way it wasn’t in 1964. The right had grown and matured, and the country itself had moved to the right as it became fed up with the excesses of the left. It was, in a word, time.

Yet as Continetti shows, conservatives back then often did not see it that way. They didn’t care for Nixon’s overtures to China or his expansion of government, and they weren’t always fans of Reagan, either. Though he continued advocating conservative first principles, movement conservatives were rare among his staff. His primary confidante, Nancy Reagan, looked askance at the right. Hence Reagan’s presidency was filled with “tussles, regrets, and recriminations,” first over his economic polices, then later over his overtures to the Soviets during his second term.

No one was less pleased with the new dispensation than a conservative old guard which viewed the newly prominent neoconservatives as “interlopers.” These “paleoconservatives”  indicted the neoconservatives with two of the oldest charges in the book: being soft on communism and soft on the New Deal. The paleocons weren’t necessarily wrong that the neocons cared “more about liberal democracy than conservative dogma,” says Continetti, “but the antagonism went deeper.” The neocons were comfortable with modern America and the paleocons hated it. They defended Lost Cause revanchism, “despised Lincoln, and rejected the natural rights philosophy of” the Founding. Most of all they couldn’t abide the country’s rising racial and ethnic diversity, its transformation into a service and information economy, and its global hegemony, which “made it a country that the paleoconservatives did not recognize.”

The recrudescence of immigration skepticism was not the only development in the 1980s that would play a significant role in conservatism after Reagan. The conservative legal movement, which originated in the 1970s, “took a quantum leap” with his reelection. Textualism and originalism became the watchwords for any aspiring lawyer with a conservative bent. Reagan’s nomination in 1986 of Antonin Scalia, a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals who had helped found the Federalist Society while a law professor at the University of Chicago, was a sign of this new faction’s clout. The Senate’s rejection a year later of the nomination of Robert Bork, Scalia’s colleague on the DC Circuit Court and the leading legal mind on the right, was a sign of its limitations.

The end of the decade saw the advent of a new kind of conservative “who challenged regnant opinion through” incitement. It emerged from—where else?—college. But this new incarnation of the campus right was “more provocative, more combative, and more irresponsible” than its predecessors. Its avatars were Dartmouth students Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, who used the Dartmouth Review to launch outrageous and often crudely stereotypical fusillades against the left. They “carried this model of confrontation and polarization into their professional careers.” In 1991, D’Souza expounded his critique of collegiate political correctness at book length in Illiberal Education. By this time Reagan was already out of office. His absence wasn’t the only reason Reaganism was decaying. The Soviet Union was on the verge of imploding. The pillars that held conservatism together were weakening. “In the coming decades, politics would be less about the distribution of wealth and more about the hierarchy of values. The culture war had begun.”

From Triumph to Trump

From the top there’s nowhere to go but down. So it would be easy to tell the story of American conservatism after Ronald Reagan as one of decline and decadence. Yet even before he departed the White House there was already “widespread angst on the right” as it ran “up against the limits of politics,” unable to roll back the government and locked out of a culture controlled by liberals. Nor was Reagan’s vice president and successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, anyone’s idea of Goldwater’s second coming.

Nonetheless, his presidency and Bill Clinton’s witnessed the consolidation of Reagan’s legacy. But it also saw the right lose what had been its “gravitational force”: anticommunism, “the one thing that united economic, religious, and national security conservatives.” The conservative movement “turned inward,” becoming “more southern, more religious, more nationalistic.”

Bush’s success in the Gulf War didn’t shield him from the attacks of paleoconservatives. The old Nixon hand Patrick Buchanan dipped more than a toe into the waters of antisemitism when he claimed that only those in thrall to Israel favored American intervention against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Buchanan’s primary challenge to Bush in 1992 wasn’t victorious, but his strong showing in New Hampshire exposed cracks on the right.

By the time Clinton took the presidential oath, “Reagan’s true successor” had been revealed. It was not, contends Continetti, one man but rather “the conservative institutional and media superstructure” that had solidified during a dozen years of GOP occupancy of the White House. The complex of think tanks, activists, foundations, interest groups, and publications of all shape and sizes “had grown beyond reckoning.” Conservatism was on TV in the form of The McLaughlin Group. Above all, it was on the radio in the voice of Rush Limbaugh, whose “importance to the conservative movement cannot be overstated.”

Conservative, Inc. was even becoming a multi-generation affair. Irving Kristol’s son, Bill, teamed up with Norman Podhoretz’s son, John, and the journalist Fred Barnes to start The Weekly Standard. Kristol fils had served in the Bush White House as Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. His new magazine “became known for its maximalist vision of American foreign policy.” Kristol pushed for higher defense budgets and “the global promotion of American principles of freedom and democracy.”

1995, the year the Standard debuted, was also the year Republicans reclaimed the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The new speaker was a bomb-throwing former history professor from Georgia, Newt Gingrich. His initial missteps and greater interest in being an ideas man than legislator undermined his effectiveness. Ironically, President Clinton wound up “having more of an impact” on 1990s conservatism than Gingrich. Clinton pushed through the treaty establishing a North American free-trade zone. He also “signed into law the greatest conservative domestic” policy of the century: welfare reform. There was a lot for conservatives to like in the Clinton presidency. “They never forgave him for it.”

Any prospect that the right would transition to a “theologically minded politics of domestic reform” under George Walker Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, was immolated in the ruins of the World Trade Center on 9/11. The “crusading internationalism of the Weekly Standard” would be the order of the next few years as America sought to crush the forces of Islamic terrorism and the so-called Axis of Evil.

The fissures in conservatism, patched by the cement of patriotism, couldn’t stay bound forever. They began fracturing again in Bush’s second term due to the debacles of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. And old issues like immigration had only been ignored, they’d never gone away. Once it resurfaced, it “divided Bush from the populist grass roots.” Pat Buchanan, now a pariah from polite conservative company, told Fred Barnes in 2006 that if he ran for president, he’d do so on a platform of securing America’s borders, stopping the exportation of jobs, and bringing the troops home. “He spoke a decade too soon.”

By the time Barack Obama took office the country felt exhausted. Conservatism certainly was. Many on the right could barely contain their contempt for the junior senator from Illinois, whom they regarded as an exotic, even foreign influence who would undermine American institutions. That conservative elites like Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks were willing to break bread with him at George Will’s house on the eve of his inauguration made them equally suspect in the eyes of the populist, talk radio right. But Obama was no Muslim, Kenyan communist. He was simply, in Continetti’s correct assessment, “a conventional academic liberal” with the tastes and beliefs of his urban, urbane milieu.

Establishment conservatism may have been downtrodden, but the grassroots continued to grow. The Obama years were the years of the Tea Party. These populists channeled the nation’s longstanding tradition of “‘folk libertarianism’: a widespread oppositional attitude” to all forms of authority.” It was against government spending and bailouts, foreign intervention, and immigration. The 2012 GOP ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan seemed almost a caricature of the caricature of Republicans as plutocratic fat cats who wanted to cut taxes for the rich and entitlements for the poor.

The frustrated, put upon working class which made up an increasing share of the GOP was not going to hand the 2016 presidential nomination to a “next-in-line” candidate who offered more of the same, no matter how hard the donor class and establishment tried to foist Jeb Bush (son of Bush 41 and brother of Bush 43) onto the base. Instead, they turned to someone more attuned to their sensibilities: the billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV impresario, Donald Trump.

Trump was crass, vulgar, and delighted in his lack of a filter. He was a celebrity. What he was not, was a conservative. At least not as National Review defined it. But when its editors dedicated an issue to opposing him, many readers let them know in no uncertain terms that they were with him all the way. “What might have been a laudable stand for principle inadvertently revealed both the ineffectuality of opinion journalism and the widening gulf between conservative intellectuals and the movement they sought to lead.” Not that he needed them, with talk radio and the Fox News Channel in his corner. Moreover, he had figures with impeccable conservative credentials on his side, such as supply-siders Larry Kudlow and Steven Moore. Trump also tried to win over skeptics by teaming up with the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation to release a list of potential Supreme Court nominees after Justice Scalia died.

Trump was not the candidate of the conservative establishment, but he was unmistakably a candidate of the right. Specifically, the New Right of the 1970s, which provided him his strongest institutional support. Phyllis Schlafly was an ardent devotee before her death in early 2016. Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell were fully behind him. Ten years later, Trump ran on the platform Buchanan had adumbrated to Fred Barnes: opposition to outsourcing and free trade, the Iraq War, and above all immigration. That he “chose illegal immigration as his main issue made him all the more polarizing, visceral, contentious, and spiteful.” Immigration had become a third rail of American politics. Trump didn’t just reach a tentative finger to it; he wrapped his arms around it. The charge powered him all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.

By winning, Trump “altered the direction not only of the country but of the American Right.” For all the establishment’s attempts to disown him, he was the authentic expression of an authentic strain of American conservatism, one which had lain long dormant and which many conservatives therefore did not recognize. That is the thrust of Continetti’s short treatment of the “viral president,” as he calls him. Trump, “the latest manifestation of a recurring antiestablishment spirit in America,” was the bearer of a conservatism that traced its genealogy to the 1920s. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were back in. There was one difference. “Trump was a populist demagogue.” Nothing new here, either. Joe McCarthy was back in, too. As Continetti puts it, in his marriage of Coolidge’s policies and McCarthy’s rabble-rousing, “Donald Trump was the return of a repressed memory.” One it’s not only conservatives who wish had stayed that way.

Right, Now

Anyone who conceives of conservatism as a postwar phenomenon “would be forced to conclude that by the spring of 2021,” the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan variety “was at an impasse.” Continetti, however, knows this folk wisdom is incorrect. There’s more to the right than movement conservatism. Donald Trump would be inexplicable otherwise. Which is why he begins his story not with Buckley or Kirk, but with Warren Harding. “To understand the American Right in the third decade of the twenty-first century, you have to go back to the third decade of the twentieth.” Donald Trump’s brand of conservatism may seem alien, but that’s only because no one had seen it taking pride of place on the right in nearly a hundred years.

Trump’s authenticity is one of the main takeaways from Continetti’s account. A related one is that “there is not one American Right; there are several.” There have always been dissident traditions on the right. Even during movement conservatism’s long reign, its primacy never went unchallenged. This was true even during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the peak of postwar American conservatism. Reagan was a big part of the story, but he wasn’t the whole of it. Continetti insists that his larger-than-life presence “obscured the larger history of the American Right of which he was just one part.”

What alternative currents might be bubbling to the surface in the Trump era? Continetti focuses on one, postliberalism. As elucidated by writers and thinkers such as R. R. Reno, Adrian Vermeule, and Patrick Deneen, postliberal thought “revealed both the revulsion of religious conservatives at the direction of American society and the willingness of the rising generation of conservative intellectuals to abandon the ideas of political and economic freedom that had been so important to the movement since its beginnings.” Continetti is correct that postliberalism is “out of step with American politics.” But it’s hardly the first time a group of conservatives were self-consciously proud to be so.

The Right went to press before the fight over Florida’s parental rights in education bill occurred, but if Continetti were still writing he could’ve used Ron DeSantis’s fight with Disney as another example of the way Trump’s, like previous Republican presidencies, “catalyzed long-standing debates within American conservatism.” Parts of the GOP, once so friendly to big business, have become increasingly hostile to it. Some conservatives accused Florida Republicans of violating the party’s commitment to limited government when they passed a bill stripping Disney World of its self-governing authority in response to its opposition to the education bill. But others saw the move as necessary and long overdue retaliation against “woke” corporations that have becoming increasingly hostile to conservatives. As early as the late 1980s, Fred Barnes had written that since “we’re going to have big government anyway,” it might as well be conservative big government. Not for the first time, conservatism’s future may simply be a matter of doing now what it didn’t 30 years earlier.

One of Continetti’s strengths is the way he dusts off and bring back to the light these forgotten byways and ideas. He does the same for many figures who have been forgotten now, such as Albert Jay Nock, Michael Novak, Frank Meyer, James Burnham, and Peter Viereck. He also reminds the reader why those like Buckley and Kirk, who today may only be remembered as names, became prominent in the first place. I’d have appreciated pictures, though. There are none, and it would’ve been nice to put faces to names, especially with the many names that were new to me.

Another strong point is his emphasis on anti-communism as the glue that held conservatism together. So too is the case he makes that although Donald Trump wasn’t a movement conservative as that term is usually understood, he didn’t come from nowhere. He was the manifestation of a genuine tradition of conservatism, one that bubbles to the surface periodically but had mostly remained inactive as the dominant trend in American conservatism since the 1920s.

Perhaps the thing I liked most is how full the book is with facts and information that readers may not know. For example, I had no idea that Christian fundamentalism derives its name from The Fundamentals, a series of theological tracts published in the 1910s. Nor was I aware that Buckley and Bozell wrote a book defending Joseph McCarthy, or that Newt Gingrich attempted a preliminary version of the Contract with America in 1980.

This isn’t to say Continetti’s attempt to synthesize a century’s worth of history is flawless. He doesn’t pay sufficient attention to abortion and its central role in organizing and motivating the right over the last 50 years. He mentions Roe v. Wade only a couple of times, while Planned Parenthood v. Casey doesn’t appear at all. (Though if he’d been writing after the Supreme Court overturned Roe earlier this year he’d surely have spent more time on it.) Continetti opted for breadth over depth, a choice he amply justifies by squeezing so much into 400+ pages. But something is inevitably squeezed out, and it is unfortunate that a topic as essential as abortion (and with it the right’s long march to capture the judiciary) was shortchanged.

Nor does Continetti adequately address a basic contradiction at the heart of American conservatism: its innate liberalism. He alludes to this fundamental tension, that American conservatives are trying to preserve an essentially liberal order, but doesn’t really grapple with it.

Continetti was well-positioned to write this book. After spending a decade at the Weekly Standard, he founded the conservative website the Washington Free Beacon. He’s also Bill Kristol’s son-in law (which, like his paternity of the WFB, he only acknowledges once). He’s an insider’s insider. Yet he doesn’t write that way. Save some reminiscences about how he came to be involved in conservatism in the early 2000s, his account is detached, impersonal.

But not overly so. At least, not so much that he can’t furnish in the conclusion some tentative remarks about where he thinks conservatism should go. Studying its entire hundred-year history confirms, he asserts, “that its defeats and setbacks have been temporary.” Conservatism rises up to shield “the essential moderation of the American political system against liberal excess.” It always has and there is every reason to presume it always will. “The question then becomes what form that Right will take and whence it will originate.”

Like many of his predecessors, Continetti has a better grasp on what it shouldn’t be than what it should. Conservatives, he posits, need to realize “that mainstream acceptance of their ideas [is] the prerequisite for electoral success and lasting reform.” Once they do, they can “forge a new consensus, based on the particularly American idea of individual liberty exercised within a constitutional order, that addresses the challenges of our time.” Easier said than done! Incorporation of some elements of Trumpism, such as “a belief in secure borders and national sovereignty,” is inevitable. But, Continetti insists, conservatism cannot, must not be “anchored in Trump the man,” because if it is it “will face insurmountable obstacles in attaining policy coherence, government competence, and intellectual credibility.” However it happens, a “depersonalization of the Right” is a necessity. As it so often is, time may be the only solution. For now, Donald Trump looms large on the horizon. But his stature will diminish as we move further away from him. Just as Harding’s and Hoover’s have, and Ronald Reagan’s, too. The further away the past, the nearer the future.

Continetti is not the first conservative to look to conservatism’s past to seek its future, nor will he be the last. It is, after all, where they find what is most dear to them. “One cannot be an American patriot without reverence for the nation’s enabling documents,” nor can one “be an American conservative without regard for the American tradition of liberty those charters inaugurated.” Above all, a conservative cannot

abandon America. The preservation of the American idea of liberty and the familial, communal, religious, and political institutions that incarnate it and sustain it—that is what makes American conservatism distinctly American. The Right betrays itself when it forgets this truth.

Why? Because the job of a conservative is to remember.

Continetti completes his journey with this admonition. This job he performs well, if imperfectly. But after returning from his tour of its past, I can’t help feeling that if conservatism is truly to have a future, it will have to do some forgetting, too.

Common Good Constitutionalism

Adrian Vermeule

Polity, 270 pages, 2022

“Some of the men of this age seem to raise themselves at moments to a hatred for Divinity, but … the neglect of, let alone scorn for, the great Being brings an irrevocable curse on the human works stained by it. Every conceivable institution either rests on a religious idea or is ephemeral. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they partake of the Divinity.” — Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France

American political theory has recently seen the emergence of so-called “post-liberal” thinkers, whose clout is sufficiently large to warrant both critical and fawning appraisals in high profile outlets. Mostly coming from a right-wing Catholic background, the basic philosophical argument of the post-liberal thinkers is probably best summarized in Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. In effect, it failed because it succeeded. Liberalism was committed to a nominalistic metaphysics which conceived of reality as little more than matter in motion. Lacking any belief in intrinsic goods or beauty, liberalism held that the only reasonable political system would be one where each individual was free to do as they wished within the lightly circumscribed limitations of liberal law. Initially this led liberals to support an allegedly “small” night watchman state. But as the cultural spread of liberal values overturned older religious and communitarian rivals, there was increasing pressure on the state to do more. Rather than referee the interactions of free individuals, the liberal state was to be proactive in eradicating the socio-cultural and even natural barriers to the exercise of amoral freedom. The result was the emergence of a nihilistic world where individuals were free to do anything, and apparently believed in next to nothing.

Despite the “post” prefix attached to their movement, it has never been clear that these authors are offering much more than a swift return to a more illiberal authoritarian social conservatism of the type a growing majority are happy to the see the back of; one of the reasons Sam Adler Bell cheekily pointed out “conservative elites, not unlike their progressive counterparts, are too weird to lead their revolution by democratic means.” This perhaps explains the ongoing attraction of post-liberals and so-called traditionalists to authoritarian states like Hungary (well analyzed by Paul Lendvai in his book Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman), Poland, and (until recently) even Russia. In each of these circumstances there is no doubt that a transition to such a state might be a novel experience; though rather like lung cancer, it might not be a pleasant one.

Given that they’re unlikely to implement that program through riding a wave of democratic popularity, some post-liberals have openly flirted with the idea of imposing their will juridically through a compliant justice system. This has provoked a scandal not just among liberals and the left, but even among conservatives committed to the ideal of a neutral and constitutionally bound system of law backed up by originalist interpretations of legal texts. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard Law professor and polemicist associated with the (largely online) push for integralism, caused a minor scandal several years ago when he openly claimed that originalism was little more than a screen for advancing conservative causes, has served its purpose, and should now be abandoned for an openly right-wing approach to constitutional interpretation.

In his latest book, Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule offers a more robust defense of this position, taking aim at the sacred calves of right and left and arguing for full-bodied socially conservative interpretation of American law. In terms of the book’s quality as a legal argument, it makes some compelling criticisms. From a normative standpoint, whether you’re attracted to Vermeule’s common good constitutionalism will depend on whether you want to live in a proto-authoritarian regime where the demands of mass electoral democracy have “no special privilege,” because a democracy “may or may not be oriented towards the common good; one has to see whether it is, and the answer will depend on the circumstances.” And where rights are to be understood not so much as freedoms enjoyed by individuals or even groups, but always “ordered” [re: subordinated] or “tailored” to the common good because “that common good is itself the highest individual interest.”

If that is what it takes to save us from the vulgarity of liberalism, then I say bring on the Cardi B videos.

Positivism and Ronald Dworkin

What is intriguing about Vermuele’s position is how heavily and respectfully it leans on the arguments of Ronald Dworkin, the most influential Anglo-American legal theorist of the late 20th century and a profound defender of exactly the kind of egalitarian and permissive liberalism opposed by common good constitutionalism. While this might appear ill-advised or even paradoxical, Vermeule does an excellent job of articulating and reinforcing Dworkin’s seminal critiques of legal positivism generally and American originalism in particular. 

When Dworkin was writing, the dominant tradition in Anglo-American legal theory was, and to a large extent remains, legal positivism. Its most important figure was the philosopher H. L. A. Hart, whose seminal book The Concept of Law was a vital foil for Dworkin’s early work. Hart described law as a “union of primary and secondary rules,” which simply means rules that directly govern social conduct and rules which confer powers. He also claimed that the concept of law could be analytically distinguished from morality, except for a “minimal content” of natural law required for any legal system to function. Consequently, when judges make decisions, they may very well be applying laws which many would consider unjust but which still count effectively as law. This is because their job wasn’t to be standard bearers for justice but to apply the law as impartially as possible. However, Hart conceded problems might emerge in what he termed “penumbral” cases. These are circumstances where the language of the law doesn’t seem to extend to new cases which it should nevertheless cover. In those circumstances Hart conceded that judges might have to be creative in their interpretation of the legal language to extend the rule to the new case.

In Taking Rights Seriously Dworkin exploits this and other tensions within Hart’s work to argue that in fact the positivist conception of law doesn’t give us a good sense of what judges are doing when ruling in hard cases. In Law’s Empire he criticizes Hart and other positivists for fixating myopically on legal language, what Dworkin called the “semantic sting.” Dworkin claimed that for many of the cases which most interested us as a society, the core controversies turned not on linguistic but moral issues. When considering how to interpret and apply the 14th Amendment—guaranteeing all American citizens “equal protection” under the law—Dworkin thought it absurd to argue that judges were just engaged in a “semantic” dispute over what the word equality really meant. This is in part because settling on the best definition of equality required one to move beyond linguistics and into the realm of political philosophy, seeing equality less as a word and more as a “principle.” We move from pedantic arguments about what the word equality means towards far more important questions about what is in fact the most compelling theory of equality under the law.

Most importantly, Dworkin actually thought it was possible to answer the question of what is the most compelling theory of principles like equality through philosophy; although an egalitarian left-liberal he had little patience for more skeptical flavors of radical thinking like critical legal theory. In his 1996 paper “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It,” he condemned moral relativism and postmodern skepticism as incoherent, and by the time he published his career-capping Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin situated his arguments about the best moral interpretation of law in a vast theory arguing for an egalitarian liberal approach to morality, politics, and more. He also criticized conservative approaches to the law as largely unprincipled; particularly originalism, which offered both a deficient take on what judges in fact did and a profoundly unattractive—though often obfuscated—vision of what American law should be. In his analysis of Antonin Scalia’s defense of textualism, Dworkin claimed Scalia had “seriously misunderstood the implications of his general account for constitutional law, and that his lectures therefore have a schizophrenic character. He begins with a general theory that entails a style of constitutional adjudication which he ends by denouncing.” In other words Scalia was continuously compelled to draw on extra-textual resources to reach legal decisions, even if he often obscured that fact or perhaps was unwilling to admit that even to himself.

Vermeule’s Critique of Originalism

Throughout Common Good Constitutionalism Vermeule consistently states his agreement with Dworkin’s basic approach to law, even characterizing him as “the unsurpassed modern critic of positivism and originalism in Anglophone legal theory” whose “withering criticisms have never been successfully answered.” Of course he immediately adds that his use of Dworkin is purely going to be “negative” since Vermeule is repelled by Dworkin’s egalitarian liberal political philosophy. Nevertheless, Vermeule ruthlessly pushes Dworkin’s critique against his originalist rivals, subtly describing their convictions as an “illusion.”

Vermeule states at the outset that he resents how “allegiance to the constitutional theory known as originalism has become all but mandatory for American legal conservatives.” He also correctly diagnoses it as a species of legal positivism—sub par, I might add, next to the far more convincing versions articulated by figures like Hart, Joseph Raz, and, more recently, Scott Shapiro. After running through a description of originalist approaches to interpretation turning on the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification,” he launches “Dworkin’s critique” against them. Vermeule reiterates that Dworkin’s criticisms of Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia have “never been successfully answered.” Dworkin criticized Bork’s intentionalism and Scalia’s textualism by highlighting that both intention and “public meaning” are inherently ambiguous. Both legislators and the public often disagree on the meaning of many of the terms saturating the American constitution, such as “freedom,” “rights,” “equal protection,” “cruel and unusual punishment,” and others. So when judges claim to be interpreting the strict “original” meaning of these words, they’re either being disingenuous or lapsing into illusion. While history can obviously inform a judge’s opinion about what “cruel and unusual” punishment means, they wouldn’t be able to decide whether this should be construed narrowly or broadly without appealing to certain normative principles of political morality which are external to the originalist outlook.

Vermeule goes on to ridicule originalists like Jack Balkin who have tried to get away from these kind of problems by incorporating broader interpretive criteria into a self-described “living originalism,” claiming, for instance, that the text of the constitution shouldn’t be construed as consisting of words whose meaning is fixed once and for all but instead as a set of “general principles” which are sufficiently abstract to shift in application over time. He points out that by this point originalists have effectively ceded the entire point of their project. If the “original” intention of originalism becomes so watered down it becomes little more than a reverence for abstract principles, then what is the point in calling it originalism anymore?

As far as it goes I completely agree with Vermeule’s criticisms, and think he’s right to say they cannot be answered. As I’ve pointed out myself various times, originalism suffers from such a wide array of inconsistencies it is intellectually dead in the water; kept on cushy life support by massive injections of cash from the conservative legal establishment. I think that Hart is largely right that in plenty of cases it is possible to conceive of law as a set of rules whose meaning is semantically determined enough to apply them rigidly to the facts of a case; many reverse onus cases and Article II of the Constitution requiring the president to be over the age 35 are examples. But these are rarely the kind of cases originalists care about; you don’t see the Federalist Society pumping out op-eds about how we need to be more rigorous when making decisions about speeding tickets. The major constitutional questions in hard cases will always be settled in the manner Dworkin and Vermeule describe; though as I’ll explain, I derive very different conclusions from them on this point.

Vermeule’s Post-Liberal Critique of Liberalism and Liberal Law

Contrary to my expectations, for much of Common Good Constitutionalism I found myself cheering Vermeule on. This lasted until Vermeule launched his criticisms of liberal legalism, which have a fundamentally different flavor than the objections to originalism. The latter were close to a (rather bitter) family squabble over whose conservative theory of constitutional interpretation will prevail. So we have the odd phenomena of a deeply illiberal conservative commentator leaning heavily on a liberal icon to criticize his conservative peers, and who largely endorses Dworkin’s view that judges should be active in interpreting the law to bring it in line with the best political philosophy. But Vermeule’s disagreements with liberal legalism reflects a far deeper animosity than his rejection of originalism and positivism; Vermeule has made no secret of his disdain for the liberal tradition. Indeed, at points he even outdoes comparable critics like Deneen, who at least acknowledged there were redeemable and even necessary facets to liberalism; in his paper “Liturgy of Liberalism,” Vermeule venomously attacks “its inconsistencies and hypocrisies, its vehement commitments that seem out of step with liberalism’s own professed principles.”

Beneath all his devastating technical objections to originalism is his conviction that it has already conceded too much to the modernist liberal project. While originalists like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from waffly “living tree” constitutionalists, Vermeule thinks the distinction is more of emphasis than type. Originalists largely accept a certain liberal view of law as a neutral arbiter created by democratic sovereigns, to be applied by impartial and technocratic judges. This is also why they’ll sometimes pump out progressive decisions, as with Neil Gorsuch’s affirmation that sexual orientation is a prohibited ground of discrimination in Bostock v Clayton County. Gorsuch claimed to simply be applying the letter of the law in its most literal meaning; a claim Vermeule thinks is nonsensical since no judge can avoid bringing their normative principles into cases like this. Since Vermeule thinks homosexuality is immoral—challenging the “settled mores of millennia” and a violation of “natural law”—judges should have decided to allow homophobes to continue discriminating against LGBTQ individuals if they so wish. Which, for that matter, is what judges guided by “common good” constitutionalism would have decided. If this requires playing down the more liberal dimensions of American law, Vermeule admitted in a recent paper that Catholic integralists like himself “work within a liberal order towards the long-term goal, not of reaching a stable accommodation with liberalism, even in a baptized form, but rather with a view to eventually superseding it altogether.”

This is where we run into some real disappointments, and where the comparative problems with Vermeule’s reasoning become clear. The difference between him and someone like Dworkin is the latter spent a tremendous amount of time and effort meticulously defending his argument that egalitarian liberalism constituted the best possible political theory, and the one best fitted to the founding principles of American law. By contrast, Vermeule offers us next to nothing as a positive justification for his right-Catholic political philosophy, which is simply asserted in manifesto-like form at the beginning of the book and in a discussion of applications at the conclusion. There are a handful of references to the authority of classical natural law and the occasional Burkean flourish of appealing to the settled “wisdom” of millennia, but no attempt to argue for the cogency of either. This is remarkably thin stuff given we’re talking about viewpoints a majority of Americans and legal officials reject, not to mention the by now centuries worth of critiques launched against the teleological and theological underpinnings of classical natural law. It may be the case that God has revealed higher truths to Vermeule that are not explicable to mortal men, but I suppose the rest of us are supposed to take it on faith that living in an authoritarian Catholic state would be a blessed condition. Given the violent historical track record of these regimes, ranging from the repression of Estado Novo to the outright brutality of Francoism, I have my doubts.

In the absence of positive arguments what we get are negative criticisms directed against the ideological hegemony of liberalism. This gives the book an appropriately Nietzschean air of ressentiment against being unable to tolerate or to overcome the modernist present, especially in long passages in which Vermeule affects withering disdain towards the “sacramental” pieties of liberalism’s claims to be “overcoming … the unreason and darkness of the traditional past.”

One of Vermeule’s criticisms is the by now mechanically wheeled out objection that liberalism lacks a “substantive vision of the good,” being solely committed to liberating individuals from any kind of constraint—including those constituted and imposed by “legitimate authority [and] respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function.” This is a caricature of liberalism by now too cliché to even elicit anger. While Vermeule may claim to be “impatient” with critics who argue he isn’t responding to this or that technical detail of liberal political theory, what one actually suspects is he just doesn’t want to be bothered with responding to the actual arguments they put forward. But as I pointed out recently, every liberal thinker puts forward a vision of the good life. Rawls and Nussbaum link their liberal commitment to freedom to overtly “Aristotelian” conceptions of human flourishing; Kant foregrounds the importance of the good will’s duty to obey the moral law; Adam Smith and David Hume mix Stoic and communitarian principles to highlight our sociability; and so on. Indeed, there is a sense in which liberals take the question of the good life far more seriously than Vermeule does. For liberals, the question of the good life is so complex and important we should never rest easy that we’ve discovered the answer. One of the justifications for something like Millsian experimentalism is to gather as much data on what lives are worth living by allowing as many experiments as possible. Moreover, no liberal thinker has ever argued that we should be liberated from all constraints—only those considered illegitimate. Vermuele’s objection is simply to assert that many of these constraints would in fact be legitimate, but without putting forward any argument to that effect. 

One might strengthen Vermeule’s argument by suggesting that liberals certainly do have a substantive view of the good life—but one that is ultimately incoherent and nihilistic. This was of course the claim made most effectively by Alasdair MacIntyre in his classic book After Virtue, where he argued that without a sufficient metaphysical grounding in something like teleology liberal modernity winds itself into emotivist relativism in its more banal moments and the Nietzschean will to power in others. However, as others have pointed out, MacIntyre himself is unable to fully extricate himself from modernity by offering a genuinely robust metaphysical alternative that returns to the scholastic grandeur that died with scientific materialism. Instead he settles for arguing a kind of Aristotelian traditionalism wherein the horizon of meaning is undeniably immanent within finite human life.

There is much to be said in favor of this position, and I think some left-commentators have made good use of it. Nevertheless, it is subject to considerable weaknesses. In his great book A Secular Age, the sympathetic left-Hegelian philosopher Charles Taylor takes issue with these kinds of MacIntyrean arguments. He rightly points out that the presumption of a “fall” into modernity itself left Christianity off the hook for its own role in engendering a transition to the “Age of Authenticity” circa the Reformation and even the Augustinian emphasis on interiority and purity of soul found in the Confessions. From this perspective the kind of genealogies of modernity offered by figures like MacIntyre are too totalizing and undialectical. 

Moreover, MacIntyre and his followers like Vermeule dramatically underestimate how the expressive individualism of the liberal Age of Authenticity is meaningful on its own merits, and that attempts to check it through the restoration of authoritarian traditionalism risk bringing about the state of inauthenticity warned about by Soren Kierkegaard, among others. In his extraordinary Attack on Christendom, Kierkegaard pointed out how the demand for a social and conservative Christianity precludes and even pollutes the possibility of real spirituality by making the existence of God turn on the needs of humankind, rather than vice versa. By transforming spirituality into a means of achieving social solidarity, it warps the individual’s religious relationship to God by making faith into a functionalist glue authoritatively imposed by the merely ethical. It forgets that the way is always to be made harder, not easier; Vermeule and others want their religion on the cheap. In the end they would end up creating a world of idolatry.

The second main argument Vermeule makes, consciously echoing the fascist jurist Carl Schmitt, is that liberalism’s vaunted respect for personal and political freedom through the careful division of powers and legal neutrality is in fact a failed attempt to avoid the political—which, for Schmitt, meant the fundamentally existential decisions about which theological views we are to adopt. This is because liberalism is a substantial political theology which imposes itself across society and precludes competitors from gaining or exercising power. This can be seen in the multiple ways that liberal activists and jurists impose constraints on conservatives, often hypocritically in the name of liberating people from illegitimate constraints. Of course Vermeule doesn’t have a problem with the state imposing constraints for conservative purposes; the problem is that right now it is liberals who are in the driver’s seat. The point of this objection is to make the distance between liberalism and Vermuele’s integralism seem less stark, and to make his view appear more honest and less hypocritical since at least he acknowledges a willingness to use force to impose his preferred political theology. In contrast to wishy-washy liberals who talk a big game about tolerance but shut down conservative movements whenever they can. 

This Schmittian objection does have real force, and liberal theorists have often been flummoxed in response to it. The “freedoms” guaranteed by liberalism should by no means be perceived as neutral, nor should the state be considered their impartial guarantor. To give just one example, one of the foundational difficulties with the right-liberal emphasis in asserting “natural” property rights against the state is that property is not a natural concept. It signifies a legal entitlement to exclusive use guaranteed by the coercive apparatus of the state, which enforces its own preferred scheme of property entitlements to the exclusion of others. This seriously inhibits the social freedom of members of a political community who may wish to distribute property entitlements in a manner different from the scheme backed by state violence.

The problem with Vermeule’s use of this argument is that political and personal freedom isn’t an either/or issue. There are gradations of political and personal freedom. Liberal theorists have strived to find the proper balance between constraint and freedom that allows people the most agency without destroying the social conditions which would make such freedom possible. This is where those detailed theoretical arguments Vermeule is so impatient with become important. Would that he had bothered to engage with Rawls’s large book about just how tolerant “political liberalism” should be and where constraint is acceptable. The scope of freedom provided by both liberal theorists and states is typically far wider than that of the kind of integralist authoritarian regimes supported by Vermeule, who doesn’t even believe that much in freedom anyways. To give a typical example, conservative commentators like Sohrab Ahmari (who praises Common Good Constitutionalism on its jacket) have complained that liberal law limits the freedom of right-wing groups by not allowing them the political right to impose their vision of the good life on society. And he is absolutely right. But the reason is that allowing conservatives the freedom to impose their vision of the good life on society through law would lead to far more serious constraints being imposed on LGBTQ individuals, religious minorities, and anyone else they think Thomas Aquinas would have a problem with. Vermeule and Ahmari may feel their agency is tremendously constrained by not being allowed to discriminate against gays to their hearts’ content, but most of us think the freedom of consenting adults to love whomever they wish is more important—not to mention more conducive to their living a good life of human flourishing of the sort Aristotle and others would appreciate.

Post-liberals have strained very hard to present themselves as edgy contrarians resisting the hegemony of the liberal state and its tyrannical bathroom policies. In fact, they’re not much more than the latest batch of reactionaries wheeling out the same hoary objections to liberalism that have been around since Joseph de Maistre screamed himself hoarse over the uppity peasants who just didn’t appreciate the sacred honor of dying so the house of Bourbon could occupy a new duchy in Germany. At some point it’s tempting to tell them “the Enlightenment happened. Get over it.”

Among the bunch, Vermeule has presented the most intellectually intriguing project so far—and he’s done so by turning the weapons of liberal jurisprudence against originalism and progressivism for the sake of social conservatism. There is much in his book that warrants admiration and even praise, particularly his critiques of originalism and pricking at the rhetorical excesses of liberal conceits. But the political philosophy underpinning common good constitutionalism is not just unattractive, but barely existent. It amounts to a brief program and a sequence of complaints, backed up by a deep misconstrual of liberal political theories Vermeule seems uninterested in rebutting seriously unless they can be reappropriated for his purposes. Just saying Ronald Dworkin has a “bad” theory of rights is remarkable in the face of thousands of rigorous pages defending just that theory. In the end, the problem with Common Good Constitutionalism is that it argues for a conception of the good that is neither common nor actually good.

The Nineties: A Book

Chuck Klosterman

Penguin Press, 384 pages, 2022

I celebrated my bar mitzvah in Jerusalem on September 1, 1990, as American troops mustered nearby in Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm, and I began high school in California one week later. By the end of the decade, in June 1999, I had graduated college, taken the LSAT, and proposed to my wife (she said yes!). Suffice it to say, the nineties, which encapsulated the entirety of my adolescence, were a profoundly eventful and formative period for me.

But it’s rather more difficult to assess exactly how this enigmatic decade fits into the larger symphony of American and world history, and quite how resonant its political, cultural, and economic strains remain some 30 years later.

Were the nineties little more than the “slacker decade,” when (my) Generation X emerged as a force for studied apathy, when high and low art were “about nothing,” and when the world took a well-deserved break from history? Or was the period from 1990-99 instead when the seeds of astonishing global economic growth were sown and nurtured, when technology became a force of its own, for better or for worse, and when triumphant liberal democracies pressed their advantage, triggering a backlash still felt today?

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The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness and Beauty in the Western Tradition

James Matthew Wilson

Catholic University of America Press, 352 pages, 2017

“Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.” —St. Thomas Aquinas

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, much like there is nothing good nor evil but thinking makes it so. This belief, that beauty and goodness are inherently the product of human reason, and not intrinsic qualities to things, is a very modern one. It would have been exceptionally strange to Plato, for whom the transient and often amoral world we perceive is like a simulacrum of the eternally beautiful and just world of the Forms. St. Augustine agreed, often lamenting in the Confessions that his mind and soul struggles to understand the relationship of time to eternity as he beautifully chronicled a life drawn continuously downwards from the holy to the profane by weakness of spirit.

These examples reflect how many ancient philosophers understood the most fundamental human task: to see beyond the immediacy of experience and desire in order to comprehend a transcendent order, one which invests our otherwise banal strutting and fretting upon the stage of life with immense significance beyond temporary material gratification. One feature of the modern world has been a tremendous sense of loss at the slow decay of belief in this transcendent order and the realization that there is nothing external to us which gives life its meaning. Rather, “meaning” is merely a product of the human will.

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Saturday marks the centenary of Jack Kerouac’s birth, March 12, 1922. I never forget it, or miss it, because it’s also my birthday. And now, because Ti-Jean (as he was known to loved ones) is hitting his hundred, I’ve thought about him and me, and just how well I fit into a generation for whom his impact was both removed and diluted.

I’ve felt the ebb ti…

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Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters

Ben Burgis

Zero Books, 160 pages, 2022

In an ancient Indian parable, a group of blind men come across an elephant. One takes hold of the trunk and concludes this creature must be like a snake, another puts his hands around a leg and decides it must be like a tree, yet another presses against its side and concludes it must be like a wall, and so on. They get into an argument which doesn’t end, because they are all, in a sense, right.

Writers with diverse interests and lengthy careers in the public spotlight can be like this elephant. Many of George Orwell’s 21st-century fans know him only as the icy satirist of Stalinist Communism in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. His nearly two decades of novels, literary criticism, social commentary, and advocacy of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist causes is surprisingly easy to overlook. But, as Christopher Hitchens observed in Why Orwell Matters, “without an understanding of his other motives and promptings, this legacy [of anti-Stalinism] is decidedly incomplete.”

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How the Force Can Fix the World: Lessons on Life, Liberty, and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Stephen Kent

Center Street, 256 pages, 2021

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People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present

Dara Horn

W. W. Norton, 272 pages, 2021

America has a Jewish problem.

It’s strange to write that sentence, but the numbers are plain. Ninety percent of American Jews say antisemitism is a problem in the United States. Eighty-two percent say it has increased in the last five years. And this isn’t simply a Trump-era phenomenon: those who say American Jews are less secure now than a year ago outnumber those who say conditions are better by three-to-one.

These numbers pre-date the January 15 hostage crisis in a Colleyville, Texas synagogue. They represent something that’s been in progress much longer: the resettling of scenery after the American Jewish community’s pre-pandemic annus horribilis. One crisis supplanted another, but the worry continued to simmer: that the post-war story of Jews in America was simply a happy chapter in a longer and more complicated relationship.

In October 2018, a gunman murdered 11 Jews at prayer in Pittsburgh; the following April, another shooter entered a synagogue outside San Diego. All the while, greater New York endured a spike in targeted street violence against Haredi Jews that culminated when, in December, attackers sought out Jews to murder at a kosher supermarket in New Jersey (but only because they couldn’t get into the Jewish elementary school next door, where dozens of children hid) and, two weeks later, at a Chanukah party in upstate New York.

Covid made that year’s sheer awfulness surprisingly easy to forget (or at least set aside), even for me, pressed into service to chair my synagogue’s hastily-formed security committee. I spent the second half of 2019 designing and explaining emergency procedures, meeting with security consultants, memorizing the locations of panic buttons and emergency medical kits, and learning how to pack gauze into a bullet wound (keep packing).

Dara Horn was pressed into a different kind of service. A talented and award-winning novelist, she became one of the country’s go-to experts to explain violence against Jews, past and present.

This led to an unsettling epiphany and the genesis of her new collection of essays: dead Jews were the kind of Jews publishers, editors, and readers wanted her to discuss. “People love dead Jews,” she explains in the first sentence of the first essay. “Living Jews, not so much.”

Horn’s essays on these murders form the collection’s three-part backbone. The first two appeared originally in The New York Times. The third didn’t. No one asked her to write about December’s dead. Instead, the coverage—on NBC or in The Washington Post, New York Times, and New Jersey Star Ledger—veered toward “contextualization” which, she writes, was “breathtaking in its cruelty.”

These dead Jews weren’t murdered by white supremacists or gunmen with ties to the far right, you see. And they weren’t like the other victims, either.  Gentrifiers who shouldn’t have ever bothered to try to make homes or buy property where they lived, they’d caused “tensions” in the community. They wore black hats and black coats and shopped in their own supermarkets and didn’t get in their cars on Saturdays. They weren’t like you and me; they weren’t like their neighbors. They had it coming.

Yes, America has a Jewish problem, Horn confirms. And, in its distinctly American way, it’s because of precisely how and why Americans love Jews.  Dead Jews are “people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something”—something “about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption.”

Another way of putting this is that post-Holocaust philosemitism failed not as a program but as a concept. It valued living Jews not in themselves but for the sake of the dead: for forgiveness, redemption, and progress. As an American and European self-help project, it was never about learning how to live with Jews, especially Jews who publicly mark themselves as visibly different from the culture around them. Instead, it’s about how learning from dead Jews could help the West be its best self.

Maybe this is why there are so many Jewish museums. 

After all, the dead Jews of Horn’s essays mostly aren’t the dead of 2018-19 but those remembered and memorialized by Holocaust museums and Jewish heritage sites across the world. She’s not out to understand why some people kill Jews, but to investigate how the living, Jew and Gentile alike, remember and think about them.

She takes readers on a grand tour of these museums, from the Anne Frank House to the unexpected Jewish Heritage Sites of Harbin, an industrial city in northeastern China best known for its annual Ice Festival, to the immersive, “blockbuster” traveling exhibit “Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away.” It’s a theme so unifying, so apparent, that I’m surprised Horn doesn’t mention it directly.

But Jewish museums aren’t only physical spaces—not with digitalization and not after the widespread destruction of Jewish communities in World War Two (in Europe) and since the 1950s (in the Middle East). So her tour also takes us through the efforts of non-profit workers and scholars to recreate lost buildings and documentarians to capture living memory before it vanishes—virtual museums, if you will. In this context, her sharp-witted and sharp-eyed essay on listening to The Merchant of Venice with her 10-year-old son casts Shakespeare’s play as, itself, a kind of museum from Elizabethan England.

What do we do with all these museums? They share something in common: they’re all memorials to Jewish communities that no longer exist—even Merchant of Venice, written in an England that had already expelled its Jews but remained obsessed with them. Visit Jewish museums or heritage sites and, “instead of traveling the world and visiting Jews, you are visiting their graves.”

It’s for that reason I’ve always found Jewish museums, especially in the U.S. … not unsettling, exactly—just uncanny. I’m a flyover-country Jew, born-and-raised, so I should be happy to see cities like Omaha and Tucson build institutions that insist on their role in the American Jewish story. But these are museums housed, like their fellows in far off and largely Judenrein cities, in synagogues that have outlived their congregations. I note this, and shiver.

There’s a tension, maybe related, between the dead Jews of Horn’s museums and the living Jews around them: at the Anne Frank House, a staff member is asked to hide or remove his yarmulke while at work as it might “interfere” with the museum’s operations. Harbin’s heritage sites make no mention of the decades-long campaign of harassment that led every member of its 20,000-person community to leave between 1940 and 1962. And while everyone in Horn’s community was abuzz about the big Auschwitz exhibit, they told themselves that the swastikas appearing in nearby public middle schools weren’t really a big deal.

“Perhaps,” she worries, “we are giving people ideas.”

Of course, one is supposed to get ideas, or at least to learn something, from a museum. But what these are matters. Horn doesn’t discuss the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C.—an institution which to its credit largely avoids connecting dead Jews to some bigger yet somehow, always, easier moral lesson. What you’re supposed to learn is little more than the nausea you should feel on leaving. 

Horn finds—and she is not wrong—a tendency in Holocaust museums and discussions of Jewish history to treat the horror as “a fancy metaphor for the limits of Western civilization.” Ph.D.-holding SS officers at Auschwitz listened to Mozart and read Goethe but did not love their fellow man enough. Well, obviously.

But the truest “moral” of the Holocaust might be something very different—not a moral at all but a fear that persistently ripples even through my affluent and enlightened college town. “The problem,” as Horn puts it, “is that for us, dead Jews aren’t a metaphor, but rather actual people that we do not want our children to become.”

There’s a way in which this fear becomes a temptation—just another way of focusing on Jewish death rather than Jewish life. That’s a difficult prospect for a parent and a potentially disastrous one for a community. Choose life, Moses charged the Israelites, that you might live. The prospect has always been more challenging than we like to admit.

So Horn ends with a surprising turn away from the news of more and more dead Jews, the growing attempts to explain away violence and harassment. “I was done with this sort of thing,” she notes, “which amounted to politely persuading people of one’s right to exist.”

Instead of joining New York City’s “No Fear, No Hate” march at the end of 2019, she drove her children to and from Hebrew School as usual. It’s one of the more mundane rituals of American Jewish culture but, she noticed, this choice wasn’t unlike the much larger gathering of New York’s Jews a few days later. Ninety-thousand people—four times as many as attended the march against antisemitism, nearly all of them from the visible and frequently-targeted Haredi community—gathered in MetLife Stadium not to mourn or protest, but to celebrate the end of a seven-year cycle of daily Talmud study.

As her book closes, Horn begins to use her phone not to doomscroll through videos of Jews being accosted or attacked on city streets in America and Europe, but to study Talmud herself. It’s a moving evocation not just of Jewish tradition, but of the power of tradition itself to be something like the opposite of a museum or a haunted house: not a place that preserves relics and replicas of the dead, but a space in which they somehow never die, where we can argue with them and they with us, and where these debates aren’t ethereal but build the substrate of life.

“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead,” W. H. Auden once declared, but for Jews it has always been study that plays this role.

Yet the world keeps spinning. So 2019 may have been the annus horribilis, but it wasn’t isolated, or the end. The Texas hostage crisis was revealing: it followed a pattern familiar from the Jersey City and Monsey attacks of 2019.  Once again, America’s leading institutions either didn’t know what to say or wanted to say nothing about antisemitic violence that couldn’t be linked to white nationalism.

The FBI, for instance, initially announced that the hostage-taker’s motivations were “not connected to the Jewish community.” They were. We now have audio of him before and during the attack making his hatred for Jews clear; he had been reported to British police a year ago for threatening to kill Jews. (They declined to investigate.)

Although the agency eventually walked back their claim, conceding that the hostage-taking was, in fact, “a terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was targeted,” it had already fed headlines at the Associated Press, Boston Globe, BBC, and others effectively denying reality: Jews had been taken hostage, their lives threatened, for the simple fact that they were Jews gathered in a synagogue.

Just as worrisome are the ways the Covid-era brought the dynamics Horn describes to the surface of political discourse.

Jews as vectors of death and pestilence is an old lie, one used, as the bubonic plague ravaged medieval Europe, to justify the destruction of entire communities. American politicians were more tame—but they, too, began to openly blame Jews for Covid-19 spread by the end of summer 2020. They were also more selective, singling out Haredi Jews from the broader community, much as they have been (and still are) for antisemitic violence.

Bill de Blasio, for instance, merely targeted New York’s Orthodox Jews for admonition that “the time for warning has passed” and the threat of mass arrests, welded shut parks and playgrounds in Haredi neighborhoods while others remained open, and sent caravans of police cruisers through Crown Heights during Jewish holidays—not to protect the community that bore the brunt of the antisemitic violence he only reluctantly acknowledged as it spiked during his tenure as mayor, but to show the world how seriously he took Covid.

Andrew Cuomo was little different. Before his fall from grace, while pundits and politicians hailed him as the exemplar of Covid-era leadership, he too turned to Jews as his scapegoat. With one hand: a cover-up of the number of nursing home deaths caused by policies he refused to change. With the other: regulations openly designed to target Orthodox neighborhoods for the closure of schools, businesses, and synagogues on the eve of Jewish holidays. (And, on the screen beside him, a decade-old picture of a crowded funeral as evidence of Jews flouting Covid rules.) Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; direct your fury at the man with the forelocks or the woman in a wig and ankle-length skirt.

What’s burbled up from the anti-vaccine right, on the other hand, can appear like an insulting but mostly innocuous embrace of Holocaust kitsch. But there is, in fact, something darker in the yellow stars pinned to their shirts, the periodic attempts to cast Anthony Fauci as some kind of modern-day Mengele, comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi-era race laws, or implying that Nazi “hygiene” laws invest public health as a field with genocidal intentions.

Indeed, the eye-rolling stupidity of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ability to compare vaccine mandates to the Holocaust while also speculating that California wildfires have, somehow, been set by Rothschild-funded space lasers in order to (somehow) turn a profit reveals something obscured when the characters are less cartoonish: the temptation, both left and right, to shroud oneself or one’s cause in the redemptive and Christ-like innocence of dead Jews while finding the living, breathing ones at large in the world rather more suspect.

Its allure is old and widespread, Dara Horn shows. And, as our political discourse has grown increasingly exhausted, anti-social, and conspiratorial in the last two years, more and more willingly give themselves over to the simple—and false—answers it promises.

There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America

Amy Argetsinger

Atria/One Signal, 384 pages, 2021

The Red Menace: How Lipstick Changed the Face of American History

Ilise S. Carter

Prometheus, 226 pages, 2021

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The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What To Do About It

Mike Watson

Zero Books, 121 pages, 2021

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Conservatism

Edmund Neill

Polity, 180 pages, 2021

Ask any political theorist and they will tell you that conservatism is a strange doctrine. Conservatives often claim to be speaking on behalf of the old against the new and faddish; only changing what they must to conserve what they can. Yet instead of being as old as the traditions it seeks to conserve, conservatism emerged after both liberalism and even progressive radicalism, mainly as a response to the violent egalitarianism of the revolutionary era. Many understand conservatism to be about support for a set of policies: immigration restriction, encoding various religious values into legislation, pro-capitalism, pro-military, and pro-police. Yet conservative parties and movements have simultaneously declared that “government is the problem” and instituted some of the world’s first welfare reforms; they have prescribed international intervention to remake the world and also pursued strict isolationism; they have declared themselves both pious defenders and critics of freedom. These ideological tensions sometimes play out in real time, such as when conservative activists articulate the importance of free speech but later flirt with making critical race theory illegal.

One might instead take a philosophical reading and see conservatism as less about preserving traditions, or support for a specific set of policies, and more about honoring certain enduring principles. But what are the enduring principles supposed to be? For example, many American conservatives claim to support classical liberalism, which is decidedly not a conservative doctrine. Also, do illiberal right-wing movements in Europe count as conservative? If so, what conservative principles are they honoring that conservatives of a more liberal stripe are not? Some have tried to avoid these problems by following Russell Kirk in arguing that conservatism is less a political creed than an attitude or disposition. But if that is the case then why have conservatives been optimists and pessimists, stodgy uncles insisting we clean our rooms and emulate the lobster and countercultural trolls seeking to own liberal elites, radicals willing to stage counterrevolutions and incrementalists favoring measured politics and even more measured tones?

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