In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of commentary.
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Whenever starting a new job, a piece of sound advice is “don’t complain.” You’re new. The system pre-dates you. You don’t want to get a reputation for being difficult, as the perception will likely haunt you for years. At the same time, you have ideas of your own. You approach the system with fresh eyes. Being the outsider looking in, you may have useful suggestions. The key is to know when your suggestions will be welcomed, and when you will be poking a beehive. In my case, when starting a…
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It is always gratifying for a student when a teacher compliments his work. That is why I am flattered by Donald Devine’s engagement with recent writings of mine in The American Spectator. Assessing two essays I wrote about a year apart, he reminds us of the importance of a moral vision to sustain republican self-government. Devine contends that the two chief threats to that vision are a small and ineffective cadre of far-right extremists on the one hand, and a much more dangerous “rationalist left” on the other. Yet it seems to me that Devine is…
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A few years ago, I met the economist Robin Hanson, one of the architects of prediction markets. Over lunch, Hanson made a remark that I have not been able to shake: stock markets punish insider trading; prediction markets reward it. The line sounded, at first, like an admission of something nefarious. Insider trading is normally frowned upon, and even punished, because it can distort markets and disincentivize investing by outsiders. But after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that insider knowledge is the whole point of prediction markets. Unlike…
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The closing paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is among the most theologically elevated prose in American public life. The fifth installment in Casey Spinks’s series is a serious attempt to read it as such. His reading of the “we”—representative, covenantal, theological—insists that the Declaration ends not with a political theory but with a covenant, and that republics, as Augustine said, are founded on their loves. I find myself largely persuaded. What follows is not a refutation but an attempt to follow Spinks’s argument where it leads: above all, the…
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Prosperity rests not on intentions, but on foundations. In Germany’s case, those foundations were historically not only institutional and industrial, but energetic: the stable supply of power that made production, exports, and growth possible. Otto von Bismarck and Konrad Adenauer represent very different German traditions—one rooted in the iron-and-blood Realpolitik of the 1870s and the other in the international cooperation of the 1950s. Yet both understood a truth modern Germany has forgotten: economic strength rests on energy stability. For Bismarck, that meant industry, steel, and state capacity; for Adenauer, it meant embedding those…
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In Western countries, the rise of the “post-liberal right” has ushered in renewed popularity of German political theorist Carl Schmitt, especially among younger generations. At the heart of Schmitt’s philosophy is the friend/enemy distinction, which identifies the ever-present possibility that political communities may confront one another as public enemies in an existential struggle. While not embracing Schmitt himself, the American left embraces the idea of politics as an existential struggle against the right. Many of Schmitt’s contemporary interpreters emphasize that the friend/enemy distinction is an empirical observation about how people actually behave. Some go further, arguing that liberalism is an illusion. All…
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Over the last eight weeks of war with Iran, America’s two deliberative institutions, Congress and the media, have largely abandoned their duty to sustain public debate on the most important question a republic can face—the choice between war and peace. Neither institution performed perfectly during the Global War on Terror. Yet on Capitol Hill there was debate before the initiation of hostilities, and the media made considerable efforts to manufacture consent. By today’s standard, these activities seem almost admirable. The Iran War may be the first genuinely “post-deliberative” war in…
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Earlier this year, following orders from President Donald Trump, National Guard troops began arriving in Los Angeles to assist federal and local law enforcement in restoring order after protests and riots erupted in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the city. By Tuesday, approximately 2,100 members of the California National Guard had been deployed, followed shortly by the arrival of roughly 700 U.S. Marines assigned to a support and security role, primarily tasked with protecting federal buildings and personnel. Almost immediately, the deployment ignited fierce debate. Critics questioned not only the legality of the…
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In 1929, two California eugenicists named Ezra Gosney and Paul Popenoe published a book called Sterilization for Human Betterment. It was a careful, data-rich account of California’s compulsory sterilization program: how many people had been processed, under what legal authority, with what results. Copies reached Germany, where officials in the emerging Nazi movement studied them closely. German sterilization advocates later stated openly that their own legislation had been modeled on the California experiment as Gosney and Popenoe had described it. In 1934, a California eugenicist named C.M. Goethe returned from a visit…
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On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court made one of the most consequential and controversial rulings of the twenty-first century. After decades of public debate, Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. While this historic moment is interesting in and of itself, the arguments the justices deployed to defend their respective opinions reveal a deeper disagreement about the very nature of the Constitution. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy grounded the right to marriage, and the government benefits that accompany it, in the idea that marriage is vital to…