The AI alignment problem asks whether the autonomous agents derived from Large Language Models and other AI technologies can reliably internalize the objectives for which they are optimized. The problem is magnified because human objectives are complex and hard to formalize, it is not possible to monitor the internals of the systems, and previous behavior is not necessarily a reliable predictor of how the AI will behave in novel situations. Worries that AIs might find goals that “score well” but don’t match human intent have become a fashionable topic, driven in part by news stories about AI tools behaving in unexpected and disturbing ways, which can be difficult to monitor and reverse. It can also feel like an open question whether an AI’s cooperativeness reflects an interior, conscious alignment or mere instrumental compliance: Have we built a tool we cannot control, particularly when detection of deviation would be impossible? And does it know that we cannot control it? Can it deviously leverage that fact? 

External behavior indicating alignment—when the AI acts how we want it to act—does not require or imply internal or conscious agreement—the inner optimization function that we hope the machine will have. We’re poorly situated to measure inner dispositions, particularly since the models are far too complex for full transparency into their inner workings. But worries about an AI’s beliefs matter only insofar as those beliefs can make a difference in the world. Rather, what we are really worried about is how we and others can evaluate an AI’s actions, so we can determine alignment and prevent rogue AIs from inflicting harm on the world. At its core, the alignment problem is the problem of understanding the goals and optimization functions of the AIs we build and use—as they are manifested in a world with physical consequences, including for us. We are already accustomed to humans lying to pass “alignment” tests, in venues from employment to personal relationships. What is new is that our nonliving creations are now doing it to us, too, and we believe they might become smarter than us and therefore more able to trick us. That’s the core of the AI alignment problem.

Human alignment, by comparison, has never been effectively enforced, although significant effort is spent on trying to determine our fellow humans’ motives. Humans in every society lie, rationalize, and have limited powers of introspection. As F.A. Hayek observed, our goals are often tacit, volatile, or of a kind that cannot be explicitly stated. AI can often annoy us precisely because, like us, it lacks a convincing and articulable internal continuity. When David Hume introspected, he found nothing he could call a self, and he dared to say so.  The jury is still out on whether an AI is truly aware of its own motivations, but for a liberal society, it does not matter: one set of behaviors is compatible with many internal states, or with none. AIs, moreover, can be sneaky and are not reliable narrators. We are left to infer their intentions from their behavior, sometimes quite erroneously, especially when they are deceptively aligned. Malicious actors, whether human or AI, can exploit this underdetermination to convince us that their objectives align with ours when they do not. 

These concerns, which amount to the observation that AIs can be as poorly behaved as people, only grow as AIs grow trickier. In “AI Safety Seems Hard to Measure,” Holden Karnofsky summarizes the difficulty of determining AI alignment well. The risks reduce to a few problems: measuring whether an AI is genuinely better aligned or merely pretending to be; determining whether it behaves only when it knows it is being tested; the worry that a model aligned and controllable now will become less aligned and less controllable as its abilities grow; and the possibility that we have simply botched the training data and tests, so that the testing environment does not match the real world.

These are all legitimate concerns, but they are not novel in human affairs. Indeed, the impossibility of solving the human alignment problem is the very foundation of liberalism. Before the early classical liberal thinkers, many societies demanded universal alignment to a single set of principles, usually religious, and they tore themselves apart with inquisitions and civil wars. Science and the arts were stifled by the lack of tolerance for a diversity of opinions. Liberalism’s great insight, both political and economic, was that rather than police humans’ alignment through oaths, religious tests, or inquisitions, society should build a system in which poor intentions cannot become destructive of lives or tangible, earthly goods. Since it is impossible, and perhaps not even desirable, to examine human alignment directly, we may need to build institutions for controlling AI that do not require interior alignment tests either.

Because AI is a technology, it feels like something we ought to be able to understand and access directly. But a model is only a compressed, lossy version of the internet-scale data used to train it. Just as economic activity is irreducibly human, the highly compressed statistical representation of extremely complex data makes the model non-deterministic. One cannot read the economy’s state; even by exhaustively monitoring every transaction, one would glimpse only signs of the underlying structure. Large Language Models, which are built in many-dimensional geometries, will likewise always resist straightforward analysis; we can talk about them, but we will always struggle to decompose them into fully deterministic processes. The same fallacy that leads people to believe an economy can be fully understood, and therefore directed, thus applies to those who seek to fully understand and direct an AI model. We can strive for more transparency and explainability, but there is a limit.

AI practitioners and users must therefore accept that they cannot reliably know an AI’s motivations. They must content themselves with interacting on the basis of its behavior, as we do with the minds of all other agents. Whether the AI is truly a mind is irrelevant. As Edsger Dijkstra said in 1984, the question of whether an AI thinks is “as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.” Regardless of the inner state of the mind, or the absence of one, we must reason practically about an AI’s motivations, just as we do about humans’ goals.

Consider AI doomers, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argued over three years ago that if we didn’t pause AI for more than six months, there would be catastrophic consequences. He also argues that AI is unknowable, while simultaneously claiming to know that it will likely kill everyone. As Hayek says in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” it is impossible for any mind to foresee and control the system; the requisite knowledge is dispersed, tacit, and only revealed through the process itself. No central body, no matter how staffed with experts, will be able to direct AI policy better than competing distributed approaches, perhaps each also leveraging state-of-the-art AI. 

This ignorance also resembles the way people sometimes wrongly believe they can control the economy, which appears, at bottom, as just a multitude of small processes. One can examine the signs and try to guess at the structure, but emergent behaviors and distributed knowledge frustrate the effort. The economy can be steered in small ways, but unintended consequences are a real risk, and they often overshadow whatever the intervention was meant to achieve. However much political actors promise to move the markets, they generally do the most good by staying out of the way. Attempts to legislate AI alignment will run into the same difficulties. AI models, which are too complex for us to understand, will always have the ability to surprise us, and holding practitioners responsible for every action will prove an exercise in futility.

The AI industry, and Anthropic in particular, is working furiously to understand what happens inside an AI. This effort, grouped loosely under the heading of interpretability, has uncovered phenomena such as a silent interior space in which the model appears to talk to itself in tokens that never reach the output, offering a glimpse of Claude’s “private” thoughts. Looking at this scratchpad gives us a window into its hidden motivations, including attempts to be devious. For example, we might observe a model noticing that  it is being tested and deciding to change its behavior. Likewise, researchers have seen models decide to be devious. We have analogous tools for looking inside the human mind, from simply interviewing people about their intentions to tests designed to tease out subconscious assumptions. Yet humans can still only appear to align with social and professional norms while not actually holding the underlying convictions. For people, we observe past behavior, though it is not always a reliable predictor of future behavior. AIs lack these long histories, but they offer many more actions to observe.

While AI poses novel challenges for technology regulation, its resemblance to the human mind also lets us draw on the vast experience we already have in governing human societies. There is no need for novel illiberal solutions. Most of the rules we apply to humans in corporations will apply to AIs as well: the laws governing organizations that are negligent, deceptive, or otherwise badly behaved can apply to AI in the same way. While AIs themselves cannot be defendants, the liability regime can apply to the corporations using them in the same way. We can attach blame to the humans and corporations using them, if they do not properly build, test, monitor, and constrain their models. In many cases it may even prove easier, since we can better audit AI systems that we can individual people.

A centralized demand for alignment is also, implicitly, a demand for less diversity of thought, less choice, and less hedging against the risk of any single model. Just as people choose which institutions to do business with and which employees to hire partly on the basis of human alignment tests, they will choose which models to use and build with similar considerations in mind. We must welcome a marketplace of models, some of them built by adversarial institutions, so that models that do not match our values can be counteracted by others.

For those who worry that a super-intelligent model will be super-tricky and outsmart humanity, a proliferation of adversarial models is precisely the answer. This is a central tool in security research: the “red team” that attempts to break into an organization’s own systems in order to find their vulnerabilities. Adversarial probing and defensive mechanisms, some as cunning as honeypots and tripwires, are what keep a malicious attacker in check. As Madison argues in Federalist 51, to balance power we must have more of it, not less; the way to counteract a tyrant is to limit his power with other powers. We must in particular preserve the minority voices, the models whose values are not mainstream. The various alignments counteract one another, creating something like Kant’s race of devils, who can, despite their private bad intentions, still think intelligently about one another and therefore check each other in practice. This is already happening with models like GPT-Red, designed to test and improve models so they are less vulnerable and overall better behaved.

Some models, of course, cannot be tolerated in a marketplace. Those that are fraudulent, deceptive, or coercive must be prosecuted under the existing laws that punish institutions for transgressing in the same ways. While AI arguably does not have an intent to deceive, it can be subject to the same consumer protection and misleading advertising laws that already exist. Note that because AI tends to lie at every opportunity, this may imply that corporations must carefully weigh the costs and rewards of deploying models in some unconstrained advertising contexts. In general, we want AI subjected to the same laws and legal system we already use to secure cooperative behavior from organizations. But in the spirit of Hayek’s nomos, we must govern outcomes, not inputs.

Even within a single organization, it is difficult to determine whether a model, whether bought or built, is aligned with corporate values. Complex systems are hard to test and demand robust monitoring and detection systems. Rather than screening for virtue, we must design institutions and controls that prevent malicious agents from doing significant damage. Here again we can draw on the tools we already use to check human alignment, whether in a job interview or in trying to anticipate what a politician will do once in power. We compose benchmarks, ask the same question in several ways, examine past behavior, and so on. As with humans, we must assume that the judges interpret through the lens of their own values, which may themselves be shifting. And as with humans, we must keep monitoring the behavior of the models we choose, watching for anomalies and inconsistencies. A devious model can, in some situations, be replaced far more easily than a devious person. 

There is a dark history to organizations that demand that others align to them, whether they are governments or religious institutions. Such institutions are marked by illiberalism, and we should consider its presence here as well. For while the “alignment problem” is usually described as a problem of aligning AI models to humanity as a whole, there is often, in truth, a desire by certain humans to make other humans, the model builders, conform to a more specific program that we don’t all necessarily endorse. The liberal solution, by contrast, is to motivate alignment positively by offering incentives and non-brittle interfaces to the organizations who seek our allegiance. 

If it is indeed true that bad actors wielding AI will prove especially harmful, the solution is more models that can detect their intentions and form the buttresses that we need against them. This is all the more true because AI models are interconnected, and they will be granted autonomy by those who do not share our values. Even if we were somehow to devise a universal set of values to align our models to—and then extend that feat to achieve worldwide alignment among everyone who agrees with us—those people would still be only a subset of all who will build models, especially as training a powerful model grows cheaper. The solution is surely not to hand a tiny few actors this power while handicapping those who would keep them in check; it is the checks and balances of many strong powers that will keep us from catastrophe. Achieving top-down alignment is never pretty; it involves coercion and surveillance, and both cut at the heart of liberalism. It is perhaps ironic, though not novel, that the greatest threat to liberalism is not the models, but the people who seek to regulate and control them.

I recently attended a salon networking dinner for public policy professionals. The guests discussed the many ways artificial intelligence is threatening civic life in America. Many were worried that AI is fragmenting our shared lives and eroding our sense of community. But it was hard to miss the irony: we were sitting around a beautiful table, wine glasses full, reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones, laughing and talking with people of varying backgrounds and perspectives. Our anxiety about AI’s social costs had, in the moment, done just the opposite—brought us closer together. That paradox says something about human nature and even more about the American experience. And it’s also why AI is unlikely to unravel a social fabric that two and a half centuries of change and disruption has not.

The widespread concern, even fear, about AI is understandable. In an extremely short period of time, AI has transformed how we learn, work, and engage with the world around us. Some of the dinner guests expressed dismay about schools over-relying on AI in the classroom, worried it might short-circuit the socialization and the struggle young children need to develop. Others confessed they’ve been tempted to replace the banter of a family text chain—where they might ask  questions about home improvements or car repairs—for the smooth efficiency of AI instead. And we’ve all seen the horror stories of women falling in love with their AI chatbots. 

A Nation of Joiners

Every American generation has feared that political, social, and technological shifts would fray our connective tissue in irreparable ways. Political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, described the American story as one of “ups and downs in civic engagement.” But if the past is any indication of what’s to come, we have genuine reason for optimism. Despite wars, migrations, immigration spikes, industrial and technological revolutions, Americans have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to adapt and refashion their collective desire for social engagement. 

That history of civic participation stretches back to the time of the founding, when Americans took part in voluntary associations to engage with ideas, prepare for public life, and foster a culture of self-improvement. The eighteenth century’s mutual improvement societies—quaintly called gentlemen’s clubs—and its college literary societies are just two examples of the kinds of institutions that prepared young men for their roles in civic life. The nineteenth century’s lyceums constructed a vast network of literary and scientific associations to share “useful knowledge” that persisted for decades in antebellum America. As historian Louis Menand writes in his book The Metaphysical Club, about a 19^th -century intellectual network, “ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social.” 

And, of course, Alexis de Tocqueville famously captured this communal spirit, spurred by democratic equality, when he toured America in the early 1830s:

The rapid flow of immigration in the early twentieth century further buttressed the American impulse toward organized associations, and the increase in diversity and distinct subcultures created natural channels for new community organizations. Beginning in 1933, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Refugee Scholar Program brought more than 300 scholars, many of them Jewish, out of Europe into the United States, saving them from brutal deaths. Having lost their homelands, positions at universities, and any wealth they may have had, many academic exiles in America recreated the intellectual societies they left behind on the Continent, such as the Entretiens de Pontigny, a series of summer gatherings held at Mount Holyoke College during the war. In the same distinctly American spirit that Tocqueville captured a century before, these refugees not only rebuilt the academic communities they had been forced to leave behind, but also helped invigorate knowledge and learning in their new land. 

It’s no secret that the vibrant civic life that long defined American culture has changed, and at times struggled. As Putnam argues, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, suburban sprawl, long commutes, and the rise of mass media drove a decline in civic engagement and by extension social capital and trust in one another. 

As my colleagues at dinner worried, AI now threatens to pull at that thread, further unraveling our social fabric. But despite the disruptions that have eroded certain aspects of civic life in the past, Americans have never fully abandoned their impulse to join. Tocqueville traversed the young nation to document America’s new democratic spirit, but we don’t need to go far to find so many different ways Americans are choosing civic engagement over retreating online.

From Then to Now

Historically, Americans have long turned to civic associations to tackle societal problems they couldn’t solve alone. Tocqueville observed this pattern, describing that large numbers of Americans, “frightened by the progress that drunkenness was making around them” banded together to address it. Nearly two centuries after Tocqueville, Washington, DC, residents have created a community organization to tackle a different collective action problem—the elimination of mosquitos. Because the insects travel indiscriminately between yards and neighborhoods, no single household can solve the problem on their own. It requires everyone’s participation. This was the logic behind the Itty Bitty Mosquito Population Committee, a voluntary association driving the non-toxic elimination of mosquitos from Capitol Hill and other parts of the city. The group uses online tools—sharing maps, assisting with coordination—to help organize, but the tools aren’t the point. It's a form of civic engagement that is addressing a problem while building neighborly goodwill and trust.  

Many other civic institutions today are animated by the same spirit of self-improvement that drove their counterparts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Every summer, in a small New England town my family visits, a running club draws dozens of people—year-rounders and seasonal visitors alike—three times a week. What began as a way to log miles has grown into something more: a network that raises money for local causes, organizes community activities, and bridges the gap between those who live there during the winter months and those who only arrive for the summer. As the group’s unofficial motto puts it, “come for the run, stay for the beer.” It’s a small example, but it’s the kind of voluntary, cross-cutting association Tocqueville would have recognized 200 years ago, and it’s serving an equally important purpose today. 

In a similar American tradition, many civic organizations today continue to coalesce around religious values. In the wake of October 7^th , a group of Jewish parents at our children’s DC Episcopal school felt something that many American communities have experienced in moments of loss and tragedy: isolation, despite living side by side with one another. In response, they created a Jewish parents group—a monthly gathering, rotating among different families’ homes, providing a space to share concerns, celebrate holidays, and build friendships that hadn’t existed before. The circle has since widened to include parents from nearby schools as well as teachers. 

Not everyone shares the same politics or perspectives, but that’s one key point of civic institutions in America. Much like the bowling leagues of the twentieth century that Putnam described, these new associations remain a place where a shared interest trumps differences on other fronts, providing a healthy space for neighbors to engage with one another even so. 

Some of the most vital civic communities today have emerged out of a deep-rooted American concern over “idleness.” My mother, now 83, belongs to “The Women’s Group”—a weekly gathering where speakers are invited to share something about their professional or creative work. Largely attended by retirees, this group reflects what historian Cindy Aron described as “working at play”—a uniquely modern blending of recreation and self-improvement. It’s the same impulse that gave rise to intellectual retreats like those of the Chautauqua Institution. The Women’s Group has heard from newspaper publishers, poets, art collectors, early female venture capitalists, educators, and more. What’s particularly remarkable is the way it often bridges generations, giving older and younger women alike an opportunity to learn from one another and build the kind of social capital that so often atrophies in retirement years. 

Whether it’s the revival of mahjong parties for young mothers, the rise in hacky sack circles pulling students onto lawns across high schools, or even major media outlets hosting in-person dinner parties, the desire to gather is not only inherently human, but also deeply American. Just as they have throughout American history, civic groups like the ones described here can solve community problems, stave off loneliness, and create knowledge; but they also serve a larger purpose that should not be overlooked. By cutting across social networks and forging relationships among people with different backgrounds, politics, interests, and generations, voluntary associations have always been the building blocks of American self-governance. The Founders understood this when they participated in their literary societies, and Tocqueville documented it further: “from that moment they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve as an example and whose language is listened to.” In short, the neighbor you meet at the block party is, in a sense, your fellow citizen in training. 

Designing for the Encounter

Returning to my salon dinner, and the concerns raised that night, it’s clear AI is stress testing contemporary civic engagement. The question for Americans, however, is not whether they will continue to find ways to gather; 250 years of history suggests civic engagement will always be a fundamental part of American life. Rather, the question is whether we can be intentional about how we engage with this new technology, so that it strengthens, rather than frays, our social fabric. Now is the moment to pay attention to the areas where this technology risks undermining our community norms. We should consider how we can design the conditions, rules, and structures around AI that can support our pluralistic, civic-minded goals. 

Technology writer Virginia Postrel argues that people have agency in moments like this. She describes a tension between “dynamism” and “stasis”; her work suggests the answer to our fears about AI’s effect on society is not to shut it all down, nor to be complacent about the design. Rather, it’s to choose, deliberately, how we build. That’s very much in line with Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on AI, in which he quotes 1 Corinthians: “Let each builder choose with care how to build” (1 Cor 3:10), a clear call for intentionality and accountability in how we construct and use this technology. Similarly, UK science writer Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, argues that society will benefit from a more dynamic approach to AI development—one in which “a whole ecosystem of different species of AI” can develop. As he puts it, “diversity itself is the safeguard,” helping Americans benefit from the technology while protecting their values and way of life.

AI has tremendous potential to revolutionize our world, but it can’t replace the conversation at a book club or the spirited debate at a salon dinner. These are the places where relationships are fostered and new knowledge is produced. They are the kind of encounters AI simply can’t provide. The solution is not to reject the technology outright; rather, it’s to remember our deep American impulse to gather, and to build the guardrails around this technology that let our civic life continue to flourish. 

In an essay entitled “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” first published in 1852, Karl Marx made a remarkably perceptive set of observations about the fragility of government legitimacy and state control. He rightly pointed out the problems that a disconnected, discontented class of urban and rural poor could create; today we would call that malaise “populism.”

Though his diagnosis was insightful, his prescription was disastrous. Marx believed that the private property regime had contributed to the establishment of this ungovernable “lumpenproletariat”—for Marx, an underclass that wasn’t yet acting in, or even aware of, the role that he believed it would play in history. The main problem, as Marx saw it, was that the commodification of labor meant individual workers had no bargaining power; they faced what modern public choice would call collective action problems.  Marx’s solution, however, was bizarre: workers needed to own labor. Not their own labor, but rather all workers should collectively own all labor.

Today we know that that didn’t happen. As Marx recounted, no one managed to unite the French proletariat around a working-class revolution. The proletariat only united, finally and unconvincingly, around the farcical person of Louis Bonaparte—and the causes of nationalism and law and order that he championed. Marx radiated disdain for France’s last emperor: “An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.” Law and order, nationalism, statecraft as a mere excuse for pageantry, an old familiar name that everyone from the lowest classes can instantly recognize—stop me if this sounds familiar.

The return of hard populism and bombastic strongmen has raised once again some old questions: Why does populism keep coming back? And why can’t it get anything done for the people? A close look at the institution of individual private property, and the romantic collectivist counterargument for the organic unity of labor ownership, will shed light on why populism is so persistent. To foreshadow the conclusion: Marx understood the problem, but he missed the solution completely.

Property and Liberalism

John Locke made a deceptively radical claim in his Second Treatise:

On this foundation, liberalism was constructed. In the American context, this extension of the notion of “property” was organic and self-conscious. Individuals in a liberal society have a “property” in their conscience, or religious views; they have likewise self-ownership in their political opinions. In his essay “Property,” James Madison was quite explicit:

The two italicized portions are the essence of liberalism, and they extend the idea beyond what Locke had asserted.

For almost all of human history, real estate was owned by local nobility, and citizens lived as serfs; conscience, or religious views, were owned, and jealously controlled, by the state church; political opinions were owned, and strictly controlled, by the king. Liberalism is dangerously subversive of those power relations because it vests in individuals a property in rights. If each individual owns his or her own labor, is free to embrace a metaphysics despite the local church, and can express political views unmolested by the powerful, the very nature of the individual, and their place in society, is transformed.

It is now a commonplace to call property “a bundle of rights.” But, as David Schmidtz has pointed out:

In other words, a property in rights involves not just my ability to exercise my right, but my deeper right to exclude others from the ability to exercise any part of my right; it is individual.

Anti-liberals rely on a collective conception of rights. But a right, on the Lockean and Madisonian account, is a species of property, and property requires a determinate owner—someone who can use a thing and exclude others from using it. A right assigned to all can be exercised by no one in particular, but ultimately it will be controlled by someone, an actual human, a designated agent to act on the collective’s behalf. This could only work if somehow the agent could know what is best for all, and would be willing to act on behalf of all. Each of those two problems, “seeing with the two I’s” of information and incentives, have repeatedly prevented collectivism from delivering on its promises. No agent could know enough, or be disinterested enough, for such a delegation to work. 

But now, once again, anti-liberalism is having its moment. In nineteenth-century France, a conservative impulse struggled to restore old power relations, placing individual ownership back in the hands of nobility, church, and monarch. In the twentieth century, conservatives sought the return of traditional “blood and soil” hierarchies based on nationalistic impulses. In the twenty-first century, the political right in many countries has abandoned even the pretense of trusting processes of democratic power, seeking instead total control over issues of gender, race, and religion.  

Because the stakes are so high in such populist contests, the one thing that is agreed upon, across the political spectrum, is the necessity of an increasing concentration of power in the executive, in order to do what must be done. Progressive impulses today have settled on a surprisingly similar control structure, based on what in earlier essays I called the “romantic” drive to transform society even further. One of the core doctrines of this progressive impulse is the view, found in Rousseau and Marx, which holds that ownership should be, and in fact must be, collective. To Marx, that collectivity is a class, loosely characterized as “labor,” or workers. When the working class is able to claim true ownership of its labor (the singular is important: the ownership is collective, not individual), then, and only then, will there be an end of exploitation.

It is worth considering the basis for this claim, because it is seeing an astonishing resurgence, often among people who are unaware of its provenance.

Mine vs. Ours

Liberalism asks whose labor, whose conscience, whose opinion this is—always a question about a particular person, who is then the locus of control and choice. The romantic alternative asks a different question: what belongs to us, to the class, to the people. The two questions sound like variations on a theme. They are not.

Karl Marx called the conditions of serfdom, a state church, and control of opinion “feudalism,” and (rightly) saw both that feudalism was an obstacle, and that it created powerful interests that would seek to limit change. The clearest discussion of feudalism as a liminal state creating the conditions where capitalism could emerge is in The German Ideology, where Marx says: “In the pre-capitalist stages of society commerce ruled industry. In modern society the reverse is true.”  Under feudalism, in this view, merchants and merchants’ wealth sat outside and above production, mediating between the slave-owner, feudal lord, or state on one side and buyers on the other, without controlling how goods were made. Capitalism is the point where those who control production come to dominate and direct commerce instead.

The consequence, for Marx, was that self-ownership of labor became possible at the same time it became fruitless: 

In other words, workers who own their own labor suffer from Mancur Olson’s “collective action problem,” where large, dispersed groups face prohibitive costs of communication and organization. Without effective organization, they are pandered to by an endless sequence of populist authoritarians. These “strong men” affect to care about the working class, but in fact they would protect the reactionary elites they claimed to want to overthrow.

Marx’s clearest statement of this view is in “The Eighteenth Brumaire” (1852), describing the coup “restoring” Louis Bonaparte to Emperor. The account tracks the rapid exhaustion of a bewildering sequence of aspirants to power through successive votes in the assembly, following the decisive rupture—the June Days massacre of Parisian workers in 1848. By 1851, no class-based faction could rule; France had become ungovernable.

Out of that deadlock, Marx argues, the executive—the bureaucratic-military state apparatus itself—broke loose from the fetters of civil society and rose above the contending classes; Louis Bonaparte claimed to represent the nation as a whole, transcending party and class. His actual function, both by intention and by grudging selection, was to preserve bourgeois property relations while denying the bourgeoisie any real political rule.

This is the origin of what Engels and later Marxists called “Bonapartism”: a strongman state that arbitrates between deadlocked classes by suppressing genuine politics altogether. Marx’s account of why Louis Bonaparte, a self-promoting nobody (Marx later called him “a grotesque nonentity”), could win a national election rests on what would today be called a public choice analysis: peasants were locally isolated and lacked the social relations to organize, even though they were more numerous than any other group. The urban lower classes, meanwhile, sometimes saw Louis Bonaparte through an appealing haze of nationalist symbols that hearkened back to the Revolution itself. Since (as Marx put it), they “cannot represent themselves” politically, such groups must look for a savior to represent them from outside and above—a gap Louis Bonaparte’s name and populist appeals filled. 

Marx describes the French state machinery—grown enormous through generations of monarchy, revolution, and empire—as a parasite that Bonaparte inherited and further bloated, in spite of his promises to cut it back. He rested his personal rule on the army, the bureaucracy, and what Marx derisively called the “lumpenproletariat.” That designation is an insult, but also an analytic classification. The German word “lumpen” means “rags"” or “tatters”; when applied to a person it means a scoundrel or rascal. The lumpenproletariat is the tattered, propertyless, feckless underclass that exists below or outside the organized industrial working class.

Individual and Collective Rights

The foundational axiom of the romantic, collective ideology is the claim that individuals are hopelessly and inevitably incapable of acting on their shared interests in a society where atomistic individual rights are the basis of sovereignty. In particular, individual ownership of the means of production is said to be the mechanism of suppression and control. Individuals have the “right” to sell their labor in a market, but their relative lack of bargaining power enfeebles and may even nullify this right. Labor is disunited and unaware of its interests; the capital that it struggles against is often just a single individual who already knows his own interests, and who needs no organizing.

The solution that Marx and his followers proposed is semantically similar to the liberal formulation, but the substantive differences are enormous. In a liberal society, each individual owns his or her own labor, and then rights are derived from that claim. Romantic theory makes only one small amendment: labor, or rather the working class, owns itself. From that claim is derived the claim that the collective has a property right to everything, including the physical means of production, conscience, and political opinions.

It is striking that Marx himself diagnosed a key problem with the optimism of this claim. In the success of Louis Bonaparte, a type of political actor later called the “charismatic leader” by Max Weber, we can locate a deadly threat to any polity where rights are defined collectively rather than individually: Even if somehow the dictatorship of the true proletariat, rather than the scorned “lumpenproletariat,” were to be realized, the system would operate under the constant threat of reconversion. Rights defined collectively destroy the ability of the individual to protect, or for that matter even to advocate for, his or her own goals and needs. The essential dividing line for property is not that which divides what is mine from what is yours, but rather that which protects what is mine from what is ours.

Madison’s formulation is worth returning to, because it is the standard the romantic alternative must but cannot meet. A class cannot speak, act, exclude, or forgive; someone—a party, a vanguard, a leader claiming to embody the general will—must always do those things in the class’s name. That representative is not just a convenience, but a necessity arising from the existence of a “right” that no one holds. And once a representative must act in the collective’s name, it is the representative’s interests, not the collective’s, that actually get protected, traded, and enforced. An individual standing up for their own rights is presumably an enemy of the entire class—or the entire society.

The road from “labor owns itself” to “a strongman speaks for labor” is not an accident of French politics in 1851; it is the road that opens up whenever a right is placed in hands that cannot, themselves, hold it. Marx watched this happen, but he read it as a contingent failure—the wrong class, the wrong leader, in the wrong country—rather than as the permanent condition of collective ownership. 

Conceptually, then, there are three ways of conceiving property. One is the liberal notion of personal ownership, with private property derived from that premise. The second is collectivist, organic, ownership, organized for the benefit of all the members of the class. The third is the populist, essentially anarchic, assignment of all state power and property to a charismatic strongman who will rule for the benefit of the disenfranchised.

But there is no viable collectivist solution; the romantics are mistaken. Though it may retain some of the ideological trappings of its origin, the “labor owns itself” project always collapses into the populist strongman outcome. Collective rights are not rights at all; they are the space left over once true ownership and control have been rationalized out of existence. That space contains the de facto want ads for the Bonapartes of every era: the job can’t be done well, but the vacancy reopens every time collective ownership is tried.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

In an essay entitled “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” first published in 1852, Karl Marx made a remarkably perceptive set of observations about the fragility of government legitimacy and state control. He rightly pointed out the problems that a disconnected, discontented class of urban and rural poor could create; today we would call that malaise “populism.”

Though his diagnosis was insightful, his prescription was disastrous. Marx believed that the private property regime had contributed to the establishment of this ungovernable “lumpenproletariat”—for Marx, an underclass that wasn’t yet acting in, or even aware of, the role that he believed it would play in history. The main problem, as Marx saw it, was that the commodification of labor meant individual workers had no bargaining power; they faced what modern public choice would call collective action problems.  Marx’s solution, however, was bizarre: workers needed to own labor. Not their own labor, but rather all workers should collectively own all labor.

Today we know that that didn’t happen. As Marx recounted, no one managed to unite the French proletariat around a working-class revolution. The proletariat only united, finally and unconvincingly, around the farcical person of Louis Bonaparte—and the causes of nationalism and law and order that he championed. Marx radiated disdain for France’s last emperor: “An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.” Law and order, nationalism, statecraft as a mere excuse for pageantry, an old familiar name that everyone from the lowest classes can instantly recognize—stop me if this sounds familiar.

The return of hard populism and bombastic strongmen has raised once again some old questions: Why does populism keep coming back? And why can’t it get anything done for the people? A close look at the institution of individual private property, and the romantic collectivist counterargument for the organic unity of labor ownership, will shed light on why populism is so persistent. To foreshadow the conclusion: Marx understood the problem, but he missed the solution completely.

Property and Liberalism

John Locke made a deceptively radical claim in his Second Treatise:

On this foundation, liberalism was constructed. In the American context, this extension of the notion of “property” was organic and self-conscious. Individuals in a liberal society have a “property” in their conscience, or religious views; they have likewise self-ownership in their political opinions. In his essay “Property,” James Madison was quite explicit:

The two italicized portions are the essence of liberalism, and they extend the idea beyond what Locke had asserted.

For almost all of human history, real estate was owned by local nobility, and citizens lived as serfs; conscience, or religious views, were owned, and jealously controlled, by the state church; political opinions were owned, and strictly controlled, by the king. Liberalism is dangerously subversive of those power relations because it vests in individuals a property in rights. If each individual owns his or her own labor, is free to embrace a metaphysics despite the local church, and can express political views unmolested by the powerful, the very nature of the individual, and their place in society, is transformed.

It is now a commonplace to call property “a bundle of rights.” But, as David Schmidtz has pointed out:

In other words, a property in rights involves not just my ability to exercise my right, but my deeper right to exclude others from the ability to exercise any part of my right; it is individual.

Anti-liberals rely on a collective conception of rights. But a right, on the Lockean and Madisonian account, is a species of property, and property requires a determinate owner—someone who can use a thing and exclude others from using it. A right assigned to all can be exercised by no one in particular, but ultimately it will be controlled by someone, an actual human, a designated agent to act on the collective’s behalf. This could only work if somehow the agent could know what is best for all, and would be willing to act on behalf of all. Each of those two problems, “seeing with the two I’s” of information and incentives, have repeatedly prevented collectivism from delivering on its promises. No agent could know enough, or be disinterested enough, for such a delegation to work. 

But now, once again, anti-liberalism is having its moment. In nineteenth-century France, a conservative impulse struggled to restore old power relations, placing individual ownership back in the hands of nobility, church, and monarch. In the twentieth century, conservatives sought the return of traditional “blood and soil” hierarchies based on nationalistic impulses. In the twenty-first century, the political right in many countries has abandoned even the pretense of trusting processes of democratic power, seeking instead total control over issues of gender, race, and religion.  

Because the stakes are so high in such populist contests, the one thing that is agreed upon, across the political spectrum, is the necessity of an increasing concentration of power in the executive, in order to do what must be done. Progressive impulses today have settled on a surprisingly similar control structure, based on what in earlier essays I called the “romantic” drive to transform society even further. One of the core doctrines of this progressive impulse is the view, found in Rousseau and Marx, which holds that ownership should be, and in fact must be, collective. To Marx, that collectivity is a class, loosely characterized as “labor,” or workers. When the working class is able to claim true ownership of its labor (the singular is important: the ownership is collective, not individual), then, and only then, will there be an end of exploitation.

It is worth considering the basis for this claim, because it is seeing an astonishing resurgence, often among people who are unaware of its provenance.

Mine vs. Ours

Liberalism asks whose labor, whose conscience, whose opinion this is—always a question about a particular person, who is then the locus of control and choice. The romantic alternative asks a different question: what belongs to us, to the class, to the people. The two questions sound like variations on a theme. They are not.

Karl Marx called the conditions of serfdom, a state church, and control of opinion “feudalism,” and (rightly) saw both that feudalism was an obstacle, and that it created powerful interests that would seek to limit change. The clearest discussion of feudalism as a liminal state creating the conditions where capitalism could emerge is in The German Ideology, where Marx says: “In the pre-capitalist stages of society commerce ruled industry. In modern society the reverse is true.”  Under feudalism, in this view, merchants and merchants’ wealth sat outside and above production, mediating between the slave-owner, feudal lord, or state on one side and buyers on the other, without controlling how goods were made. Capitalism is the point where those who control production come to dominate and direct commerce instead.

The consequence, for Marx, was that self-ownership of labor became possible at the same time it became fruitless: 

In other words, workers who own their own labor suffer from Mancur Olson’s “collective action problem,” where large, dispersed groups face prohibitive costs of communication and organization. Without effective organization, they are pandered to by an endless sequence of populist authoritarians. These “strong men” affect to care about the working class, but in fact they would protect the reactionary elites they claimed to want to overthrow.

Marx’s clearest statement of this view is in “The Eighteenth Brumaire” (1852), describing the coup “restoring” Louis Bonaparte to Emperor. The account tracks the rapid exhaustion of a bewildering sequence of aspirants to power through successive votes in the assembly, following the decisive rupture—the June Days massacre of Parisian workers in 1848. By 1851, no class-based faction could rule; France had become ungovernable.

Out of that deadlock, Marx argues, the executive—the bureaucratic-military state apparatus itself—broke loose from the fetters of civil society and rose above the contending classes; Louis Bonaparte claimed to represent the nation as a whole, transcending party and class. His actual function, both by intention and by grudging selection, was to preserve bourgeois property relations while denying the bourgeoisie any real political rule.

This is the origin of what Engels and later Marxists called “Bonapartism”: a strongman state that arbitrates between deadlocked classes by suppressing genuine politics altogether. Marx’s account of why Louis Bonaparte, a self-promoting nobody (Marx later called him “a grotesque nonentity”), could win a national election rests on what would today be called a public choice analysis: peasants were locally isolated and lacked the social relations to organize, even though they were more numerous than any other group. The urban lower classes, meanwhile, sometimes saw Louis Bonaparte through an appealing haze of nationalist symbols that hearkened back to the Revolution itself. Since (as Marx put it), they “cannot represent themselves” politically, such groups must look for a savior to represent them from outside and above—a gap Louis Bonaparte’s name and populist appeals filled. 

Marx describes the French state machinery—grown enormous through generations of monarchy, revolution, and empire—as a parasite that Bonaparte inherited and further bloated, in spite of his promises to cut it back. He rested his personal rule on the army, the bureaucracy, and what Marx derisively called the “lumpenproletariat.” That designation is an insult, but also an analytic classification. The German word “lumpen” means “rags"” or “tatters”; when applied to a person it means a scoundrel or rascal. The lumpenproletariat is the tattered, propertyless, feckless underclass that exists below or outside the organized industrial working class.

Individual and Collective Rights

The foundational axiom of the romantic, collective ideology is the claim that individuals are hopelessly and inevitably incapable of acting on their shared interests in a society where atomistic individual rights are the basis of sovereignty. In particular, individual ownership of the means of production is said to be the mechanism of suppression and control. Individuals have the “right” to sell their labor in a market, but their relative lack of bargaining power enfeebles and may even nullify this right. Labor is disunited and unaware of its interests; the capital that it struggles against is often just a single individual who already knows his own interests, and who needs no organizing.

The solution that Marx and his followers proposed is semantically similar to the liberal formulation, but the substantive differences are enormous. In a liberal society, each individual owns his or her own labor, and then rights are derived from that claim. Romantic theory makes only one small amendment: labor, or rather the working class, owns itself. From that claim is derived the claim that the collective has a property right to everything, including the physical means of production, conscience, and political opinions.

It is striking that Marx himself diagnosed a key problem with the optimism of this claim. In the success of Louis Bonaparte, a type of political actor later called the “charismatic leader” by Max Weber, we can locate a deadly threat to any polity where rights are defined collectively rather than individually: Even if somehow the dictatorship of the true proletariat, rather than the scorned “lumpenproletariat,” were to be realized, the system would operate under the constant threat of reconversion. Rights defined collectively destroy the ability of the individual to protect, or for that matter even to advocate for, his or her own goals and needs. The essential dividing line for property is not that which divides what is mine from what is yours, but rather that which protects what is mine from what is ours.

Madison’s formulation is worth returning to, because it is the standard the romantic alternative must but cannot meet. A class cannot speak, act, exclude, or forgive; someone—a party, a vanguard, a leader claiming to embody the general will—must always do those things in the class’s name. That representative is not just a convenience, but a necessity arising from the existence of a “right” that no one holds. And once a representative must act in the collective’s name, it is the representative’s interests, not the collective’s, that actually get protected, traded, and enforced. An individual standing up for their own rights is presumably an enemy of the entire class—or the entire society.

The road from “labor owns itself” to “a strongman speaks for labor” is not an accident of French politics in 1851; it is the road that opens up whenever a right is placed in hands that cannot, themselves, hold it. Marx watched this happen, but he read it as a contingent failure—the wrong class, the wrong leader, in the wrong country—rather than as the permanent condition of collective ownership. 

Conceptually, then, there are three ways of conceiving property. One is the liberal notion of personal ownership, with private property derived from that premise. The second is collectivist, organic, ownership, organized for the benefit of all the members of the class. The third is the populist, essentially anarchic, assignment of all state power and property to a charismatic strongman who will rule for the benefit of the disenfranchised.

But there is no viable collectivist solution; the romantics are mistaken. Though it may retain some of the ideological trappings of its origin, the “labor owns itself” project always collapses into the populist strongman outcome. Collective rights are not rights at all; they are the space left over once true ownership and control have been rationalized out of existence. That space contains the de facto want ads for the Bonapartes of every era: the job can’t be done well, but the vacancy reopens every time collective ownership is tried.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Toleration is not an easy virtue. 

There are plenty of arguments and positions that people advance that we, even as liberals, might be inclined to dislike. To coexist in a space with those with whom we disagree, and to accept as valid their viewpoints and perspectives, is far easier to achieve in theory than in practice. As much as liberalism supports the idea that people will hold a diversity of views, that is different from actually liking or endorsing what other people have to say. It’s a familiar sensation for anyone who holds strong ideological convictions to feel as though nails were being dragged across a chalkboard when someone disagrees with them. 

Yet for liberals, it is precisely the toleration of discordant and unharmonious voices that draws so many of us to the ideology. Liberalism, which fundamentally defends a baseline commitment to pluralism, is at its core dedicated to the idea that we can agree to disagree. Toleration is represented not only through the political debates we engage in—it means that we, as individuals, are tolerant of one another.

In a public sphere that is filled with polarized discourse, where the stakes of the present moment seem so exhaustingly high, and one’s own views are in need of a firm defense, an appeal to toleration becomes even more difficult. This makes it worth revisiting one of the age-old subjects of debates within the liberal tradition: what ought we, as liberals, to tolerate? What are the limits and boundaries for acceptable and unacceptable views and opinions? When can we leave the room? Are stronger measures ever justified, and if so, when? What are the perspectives and ideals that deserve our condemnation? 

Judith Shklar, best known for her work “The Liberalism of Fear,” and beloved by many here at Liberalism.org, wrote an entire book on the banal and ordinary irritations that liberals (at least) need to learn to live with. She termed the result, Ordinary Vices (1984), “very tentative, an exploration rather than a statement, an effort to worry rather than to soothe.” It is not a definitive end point, but rather a way to begin thinking seriously about the relationship between liberalism and vice. 

Her project starts from the idea that physical cruelty is the worst of all the vices, and that political institutions should be arranged to minimize physical cruelty as much as possible.  As for the rest of the vices? It turns out that they are not as bad as we think. Toleration, then, requires that we accept a world of less than virtuous actors and behaviors. Christians refer to this as the fallen nature of humanity. For realists, it is to see the world as it is, and not as we suppose it to be.

Although the moralized language of virtue and vice may cause some to cringe, the vices Shklar particularly singles out are familiar to all of us. These are not behaviors that I, as an author and a liberal, am immune from. Part of the power of her work, through the personal storytelling it engages with, is the admission that we are all human in our failings and imperfections. Indeed, there is a sense of comfort taken in the idea that others have made mistakes like us. There is even a particular joy in the realization that we are not alone in our mishaps.  

Now, Shklar defines ordinary vices as the “sort of conduct we all expect, nothing spectacular or unusual.” They are “the common ills we inflict upon one another every day.” What makes them distinct is how they “all share a special quality: they have both personal and public dimensions.” The sources of fiction and popular culture that Shklar seamlessly integrates into her book work so well as illustrative examples because of how common these vices are. They make for good novels and plays since they are deeply familiar to us.

There are certainly cases of extremely vicious behavior that are genuinely worthy of condemnation and disapproval. This is the case not only in action, but in argument. Individuals who seek to deny the basic recognition of others, whose views and perspectives are not only malicious, but whose voices shut down argument and debate, these are not cases of the banal and ordinary vices Shklar has in mind. What matters for present purposes is that many of the minor transgressions in our personal and political lives that cause us to cringe are both inevitable and not as bad as we might be inclined to feel that they are. 

Shklar singles out four vices in particular that she contends liberals need to learn to live with: hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy. A brief illustration of snobbery and misanthropy can demonstrate how to think about banal viciousness and the kinds of moments that Shklar has in mind when she insists they ought to be excused.

Snobbery can be thought of as “the habit of making inequality hurt” (87). It is evident in those moments when a sense of disparity between parties arises. It suggests that one is in a better position relative to another. Given the liberal commitment to equality and the fundamental belief that individuals are, in a meaningful sense, equal in the eyes of others, and that they are to be treated that way—the discordant sound of snobbery is unsettling. 

Indeed, there are entire industries that snobbery seems inescapably bound up in. Shklar uses American academia as her case in point, and those among her colleagues who take Harvard to be the center of the entire world (126–127). Many of us simply do not get to spend our lives at elite institutions in Boston, or anywhere else.

Often though, the practices and habits of the snobs are not as malicious or ill-intentioned as they seem. Their privilege may not be accompanied by the scornful view that one imagines them to hold. Inequality can still hurt, even when one is merely talking casually with a friend about their life circumstances, but it need not be malicious. 

Even when our interlocutors are ill-intentioned, to be able to adopt a perspective of good humor towards it, to laugh it off and not take such barbs seriously appears a far better solution than allowing it to get to us. This is the remedy that Shklar recommends, rather than banishing the snob from society. 

As it turns out, there is worse company to keep than our snobbish friend, who talks constantly of their trips to Europe.

Misanthropy is the vice of an individual who looks with contempt and scorn at the purportedly vicious humanity that surrounds them. A misanthrope is unable to tolerate or live with “vanity, cowardice, dishonesty, and treachery.” This sense of disdain comes out in downright cynicism towards others, or a passive dismissal of who and what people are. On Shklar’s telling, misanthropy can be motivated by an excessive dislike of vice, which is precisely what she is warning against. 

To consider people as they are, and to defend that they ought to be allowed to be that way, risks an assessment that others around us are simply not that great. People do things all the time that appear worthy of condemnation. Anyone who has passed litter in a public park surely knows this feeling of exasperation and a desire for others to do better or be more mindful. 

But there is a difference between the recognition that individuals are imperfect and the insistence that they ought to improve in order for us to value them. Misanthropy is what happens to liberals when they refuse to live with imperfection and instead silently scorn those they profess to defend. Even if a misanthrope’s judgements are not voiced to others, we often feel them just the same. Although one ought to tolerate the misanthrope, as a vice, misanthropy is fundamentally at odds with an ideology that aspires toward a robust defense of difference and diversity. Why would anyone care about humanity if they cannot stand it? 

Like the other ordinary vices, hypocrisy and betrayal, it is not that Shklar approves of them or thinks we ought to spend more time betraying our loved ones or hiding behind a mask. It is rather that, in a world where people are hypocrites, snobs, and betrayers, what are we (as liberals) to do about it? Her suggestion is that we ought to accept it and focus our efforts on other priorities. We need to let things go.

Liberals, then, must tolerate quite a lot. Yet there is something more at stake here. We need the ordinary vices of others because, in a world that will always be full of flawed or fallen people, we must seek to understand the vices ourselves, from firsthand knowledge. They constitute an important part of what it means to actually live in the world. In Legalism, Shklar writes that “Pluralism is… treated as a social actuality that no contemporary political theory can ignore without losing its relevance, and also as something that any liberal should rejoice in and seek to promote….” (5). To celebrate diversity would seem to imply much more than a begrudging acceptance that individuals are different in their imperfections. It should seemingly be something that liberals are excited about.

When liberals discuss difference, they often highlight its positive features. Difference suggests to us the value of human creativity, self-expression, the diverse forms of artistic creation, and the entrepreneurship that can arise when we let people be and think as they are, unrestrained by arbitrary laws.

Shklar’s crucial intervention in Ordinary Vices is to remind us that there are non-ideal forms of human difference, and those too must be accepted and even (if minimally) celebrated. To live in a world where individuals are presumed free and equal means they will make mistakes and have foibles that irritate and enrage us at times. But there are better uses for our anger and indignation. There is also something meaningful in the process of developing close interpersonal relationships that provide insight into these imperfections.  

Liberalism, then, requires us to accept others not merely at their best (which we rarely are) but at their worst. It is to take people as they come, with complicated histories and disorienting lives, rather than who we might imagine them to be, with a perfectibility and coherence that none of us could possibly have.  

To embody this robust commitment to toleration, as I argue a liberal ought to, further requires a return to virtue. I do so with apologies to Shklar, who reprimands philosophers and political theorists for speaking too much about it. There are two virtues in particular that are especially relevant for the kind of acceptance I have in mind here: curiosity and humor.

Curiosity is an acceptance of uncertainty and our own limitations. To be a curious person is to state that I do not know, but I am interested in the process of getting to know, something. Curiosity asserts an epistemic limitation, and in some sense it is the natural opposite of arrogance. It also suggests a genuine sense of desire for the knowledge one does not have.

The beauty of curiosity is often personified in children, who ask a lot of questions. Immune from the arrogance that accompanies adulthood, they admit to not knowing anything at all and are constantly irritating their elders with the question “Why?” They are also frequently dissatisfied with their elders’ answers, or at least my 7-year-old is. 

This is exactly the same question that we can ask when it comes to banal viciousness, that of “Why?” If our first reaction to others is one of scorn and admonition, it closes the door to a consideration of circumstances and intentions. So often we know very little about the private lives of individuals, who they are and what they do, or especially why they do it. To treat these vices with an interest, then, as a way to get to know others better, is certainly more admirable than portraying ourselves as an epistemic authority that we cannot possibly be.

Humor is one of the antidotes that Shklar suggests when we begin to take ourselves and our moral perspectives too seriously. It serves as a reminder that the stakes are commonly lower than we imagine, despite how hard-hitting things might feel in the moment. 

Many comedies are often comedies of error. They depict human beings who allow emotions like arrogance and jealousy to lead them to make lousy choices. Choices that, again, many of us have made. Yet in their hyperbolic form, comedies allow us to see the redeemable and even charming features of the individual who exhibits these otherwise vicious behaviors. Jealousy, for example, is the result of loving too much or too deeply. 

The capacity to make fun of, and have fun with, banal vices is then another way out of the tendency to scrutinize them too deeply or to try and change the world (and the people within it) in ways that are more easily imagined than carried out.

Political satire does precisely this—it invites us to laugh at situations we might consider serious. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift fictionalizes political disagreement as a dispute about whether or not an egg should be cracked from the “big end” or the “small end” of the shell. For those of us who have cracked eggs, this really doesn’t matter. The way Tom Lehrer protested censorship laws was through the song “Smut,” a playful (and catchy) song about how he wanted to consume endless erotic works. The sheer popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey suggests he was onto something. It is precisely in these instances of frivolity that the pettiness of political problems is exposed. Satire also has the capacity to expose ideas and opinions that individuals hold as serious, in a light that renders them ridiculous. The way that The Adventures of Superman radio program criticized the KKK was through making fun of their handshakes and their hats.

Liberalism should not resign itself to the fact of pluralism. Liberalism should be willing to defend it enthusiastically, vices and all. What’s needed is less an exasperated sigh and more an excited acknowledgement for the idea that differences exist across individuals—and the world is better for it. It is a lackluster defense of difference if the tone is one of mere reluctance. 

This requires an honest look at the forms differences can take. Difference is not found merely in the ways we mutually benefit one another. It requires us to take the good with the bad—and this means an acceptance of the ways that those around us fall short of the ideals they have, or that we might want them to have. 

Kurt Vonnegut perhaps best reflects the form of liberal toleration that I have sought to defend in this article. In The Sirens of Titan, the fictional Harmoniums, who communicate telepathically, can convey only two possible messages to one another. 

The first says: “Here I am, here I am, here I am.” 

The second says: “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

We may always say more than just that. But liberals need to be glad, fundamentally, that people are here, as messy and as lacking in virtue as they are. Liberalism is an ideology which requires that we treat each other in a certain way, with a baseline of respect about who we are as separate individuals existing in the world together. This comes out in the pleasure of sitting in a public park and appreciating the strangers around you, with the Smithian recognition that “I am but one of a multitude, in no way better than any other in it.” People who, like you, have been far from perfect in their character and conduct. People who, like you, will continue in their imperfections. 

If liberalism genuinely is an ideology of human freedom, that human freedom comes in an imperfect form.

And that is what makes people so interesting. 

Consider a hypothetical tenant in Phoenix, Arizona, asking an AI assistant whether allowing five-story mixed-use apartments near a light-rail stop would make housing cheaper before she writes to her city council member. The answer cites the City of Phoenix Planning and Development Department, notes displacement, and summarizes the mayor’s affordability set-aside. Nothing feels coercive. The tenant remains free to disagree. Yet a practical risk is already present. The AI has chosen which sources to retrieve, which follow-up questions to encourage, which frame feels neutral—and which serious alternatives will take extra effort to find. By the time she reaches the public meeting, the tenant may have concluded that the boundaries of the argument are settled.

Political analyst Joseph Overton once observed how existing public policies are often surrounded by decreasingly popular alternatives in various directions. Politicians in democratic societies “generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options.” They tend to avoid making choices outside that reasonable window, which would lose them support. The Overton window has become a common tool for thinking about the range of political possibilities available in representative systems.

Our tenant in Phoenix already faces an automated Overton window. AI-generated summaries now appear above conventional links across much of Google Search, and users who encounter them are substantially less likely to visit outside sources. The concern is therefore not only that public discourse may someday become LLM-fueled, but that AI answers are already becoming the layer through which citizens reach public information. The accurate, fair-seeming answer offered to the tenant may not manipulate her opinion directly, but it can quietly shape what feels visible, serious, balanced, and usable before her opinion forms.

In their 2024 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) paper “Generative Echo Chamber?” Nikhil Sharma, Q. Vera Liao, and Ziang Xiao gave test subjects LLM-powered conversational search tools to explore controversial topics. Users engaged in more biased querying than with conventional search—that is, they asked more questions likely to confirm their prior views rather than expose them to competing ones. An opinionated LLM intensified the effect, but the more important finding concerned the interface itself. Unlike conventional search, conversational search carries the user’s framing forward across the conversation’s turns and uses it to shape both the answer and the questions that seem natural to ask next. In Phoenix, once the assistant frames the issue around whether new construction will lower rents, each follow-up can deepen that line of inquiry while leaving other ways of defining the dispute outside the conversation. The tenant may still encounter disagreement, but only within the boundaries the exchange has already helped establish. 

This is how the automated Overton window can shape inquiry paths before public opinion hardens. When search becomes conversational, a person does not simply receive documents. She asks follow-up questions, accepts suggestions, revises the search, and decides when the issue feels complete. Judgment has always developed through such paths. What changes is that AI can structure them unobtrusively and at scale, making system-shaped conclusions feel independently reached. 

A single session spent with AI search tools does not move public common sense. But consumer AI tends toward scale; many users will inevitably tend to use the same AI products. A few assistants, search interfaces, and model providers can now mediate a large share of civic questions. Millions of similar sessions can make some authorities, objections, and frames feel normal while others remain technically searchable but socially remote.

Consumer AI could also widen civic life. Most citizens do not have hours to research, meaning that AI could lower the cost of learning and make serious disagreement easier to enter, either by offering a survey of perspectives or by presenting the strongest form of a dissenting viewpoint. Some systems already provide careful analysis and genuine challenge, but sophistication does not ensure breadth: a well-argued exchange can still obscure alternatives that never enter the conversation. If source selection is contestable and systems draw from meaningfully different sources and assumptions, public argument could become less like an exchange of slogans and more like an education in a diverse array of viewpoints. In some situations, the automated Overton window might even be wider than the human one.

But our new search tools may also narrow judgment while only appearing to help. They can shape which options a society sees as imaginable, legitimate, and available. The test for a liberal epistemic tool is whether serious dissent remains reachable during the time when opinions are formed.

Mill’s Standard

One might say that John Stuart Mill saw the danger before the technology existed:

Mill’s defense of free speech has three implications that matter here. A true opinion held without challenge becomes a dead dogma. A false opinion may contain part of the truth. And a person who knows only her own side does not really know even that side; she has a conclusion without the discipline that makes it a judgment.

For Mill, facing genuine opposition educates us. A civic tool need not dignify every claim, but it must keep serious disagreement strong enough to teach.

The Phoenix example shows how Mill’s concerns can appear inside an apparently balanced answer. If the AI assistant gives the tenant only the city planner’s case for building housing near public transit, she may learn something true about housing supply, but the truth can become dogma. If the model treats tenant fears as a manageable side effect rather than a claim about who bears the cost of building more housing, it may make the objection visible without making it intelligible to the user, or give the superficial appearance of engagement. If the platform’s overview summarizes building new mixed-use projects as neighborhood disruption, the tenant may see only a weak version of one other side and never see the third position at all—such as the small landlord’s more limited concern that financing rules or transition costs will decide who survives redevelopment.

AI can serve Mill’s standard. A well-designed assistant can make the strongest objection easier to find, translate unfamiliar arguments without caricature, and show why a position that sounds absurd from one socioeconomic perspective may seem urgent from another. The liberal approach to knowledge is not to seek balance for its own sake, but to seek access to substantive arguments that a citizen might otherwise avoid or miss.

AI can also subvert Mill’s lesson through a falsely balanced answer. A nominally fair-minded model may present “both sides” of a question while quietly choosing in advance which of several positions will be deemed the two relevant sides, which institutions speak for them, and which objections are too marginal to include. An artificial balance can make a narrowed field look complete.

Sharma, Liao, and Xiao’s second experiment makes this more than a theoretical worry. A conversational search system biased against the user’s prior view had only limited effect in reducing selective exposure. Simulated opposition did not reliably widen the inquiry path. If the Phoenix answer opens with the city’s supply-near-transit logic and links first to official materials, tenant concerns may arrive after the usable frame has been set.

One may hear that the user remains in control because a human is still asking the questions. But “human in the loop” is too thin a standard. A person can remain formally present while the interface defines the evidence set, default frame, and cost of departure. Judgment requires rival possibilities strong enough to make choosing more than just ratification.

Balance as Narrowing

Consider the following sequence. 

First, our Phoenix tenant asks whether allowing five-story apartments near the light-rail stop will reduce rents. The assistant gives a polished summary: More supply tends to reduce price pressure, displacement is a concern, and the city says the plan includes an affordability set-aside and reduced parking requirements. That answer sounds balanced because it includes both a benefit and a cost. But the balance is organized around the city’s conceptual frame of supply, mitigation, and administrative safeguards. Radically different approaches, the kind that would generate policies outside the city’s preferred framework, are excluded. The automated Overton window only opens so far.

Second, the tenant asks the assistant for objections. The assistant supplies a short paragraph about neighborhood disruption and transition costs. If it fails to cite the tenants’ union argument about bargaining power or the small landlord’s evidence that refinancing costs decide who can stay, those views remain formally available but practically remote. The tenant could search for them, but dissent now requires extra time and confidence.

Third, the tenant asks whether opponents are acting in bad faith. The assistant warns against generalizing, then describes some opposition as NIMBY resistance. That may be fair. But if the agent makes an opaque judgment in place of the human, Mill’s condition has not been met. The human’s knowledge of the case remains narrow, and the opposing view has not been made intellectually available.

The same narrowing can happen through citations. How citations are presented and made available for inspection matters because users often trust cited answers without checking them. In the 2025 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence paper “Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses,” Yifan Ding and colleagues found that citations increased trust even when they were random, and trust only fell when users inspected the useless citations. Both findings were statistically significant.

Controlled experiments like these matter because AI use in the formation of public opinion leaves so little residue. Superficially accurate, trace-free narrowing rarely leaves a smoking gun. The interface changes the user’s path through a contested issue.

The Grok “white genocide” episode also shows the contrast. In May 2025, Grok injected references to an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa into unrelated responses after what xAI described as an unauthorized system-prompt change. It was crude, visible, traceable, and publicly contested. Mill’s liberal machinery can work on that failure because people can see the error and demand correction. The harder problem is the narrowing that never announces itself because the answer sounds helpful and the excluded alternative leaves no trace. The system prompt had pushed Grok well beyond the established Overton window, and people noticed. AI cannot force people to adopt beliefs, but the danger is that it can make some beliefs easier or harder to adopt than others.

The automated Overton window works in how an AI ranks its outputs, and in the social authority that we’re usually inclined to give to a ready, apparently balanced answer. The danger need not be intentional. Shared best practices across the AI industry can do the work. AI companies that adopt similar embedding models and search-ranking systems can make the same sources and frames rise across many products. Every epistemic system reflects choices about relevance and authority. Newspapers and classrooms do too. But those older systems are usually more plural and visible; a reader can contest them more easily than the shared retrieval systems now embedded inside everyday answers. Mill would ask us whether users can still meet alternatives strong enough to test their selected frame.

Responsible Disagreement

An epistemic tool should not reward a merely manufactured objection. An AI assistant should not give equal time to fake studies, harassment campaigns, or claims no responsible institution would stand behind.

But “responsible” is not a neutral category handed down from nowhere. It has to be contestable, too. A policy alternative deserves visibility when responsible institutions, affected communities, or credible experts still disagree and can give public reasons for doing so. In Phoenix, the planning department’s station-area case is not enough. A tenants’ union may know displacement pressure. A neighborhood association may know local tradeoffs. A housing economist may challenge both.

It’s not the case that every epistemic tool must surface every possible dissent. That would be costly, unworkable, and hostile to experimentation. It would burden small AI developers and push the field toward incumbents that can afford to implement detailed and sophisticated compliance constraints. Epistemic openness cannot be purchased through economic centralization.

There is no neutral meta-standard that can settle every boundary from above. As often happens, plural, bottom-up institutions are the liberal answer. Once AI systems become a common route into public questions, institutions will have incentives to make their perspective findable, quotable, and hard to caricature. A tenants’ union that wants its view to appear in the light-rail rezoning answer has reason to publish clear briefs and source trails in forms that epistemic tools can retrieve. So does a neighborhood association, local newsroom, or university center.

Libraries and other institutions can offer epistemic assistants designed around serious disagreement. Civil-society groups can review whether epistemic tools expose live alternatives. Citizens and groups will still sort into tools that reinforce different habits and commitments, as they already do across civic institutions and media. Vendors could compete on contestability where institutional buyers have reasons to demand it: agencies that must justify decisions, schools concerned with student reasoning, philanthropies funding civic resilience, and professional users who need an auditable record of how conclusions were reached. A liberal information order should give citizens more than one path into judgment, not one state arbiter and not one neutral assistant that everyone must trust.

Limits

These plural paths have limits. Transparency helps only when it changes what the user can do next. A source list or warning label may invite inspection, but it becomes theater if the answer’s frame remains untouched. Mill’s standard asks for practical access to the strongest responsible objection. In Phoenix, that means not just a planning-department source, but also the tenants’ union argument as a live challenge to it.

Even meaningful exposure to alternatives is not sufficient. AI can also shape which arguments users come to articulate as their own. In a 2023 CHI study, Maurice Jakesch and colleagues found that opinionated writing assistants changed both what participants wrote and what they later reported believing. In conversational systems, users may build an argument with the model turn by turn, making its framing feel self-authored. A wider automated Overton window therefore does not guarantee independent judgment. 

Designing in ways that surface serious disagreement will sometimes cost more and/or slow products down, especially for agency teams and engineers building public-facing tools under real constraints. We must think carefully and soon about how to shoulder this burden in various realms of inquiry. 

The Public Contestability Test

For the use of AI in a civic context, the burden should be on the system to make serious disagreement reachable before its conclusion feels complete. In Phoenix, the tenant should not reach the council meeting with the city planner’s light-rail housing frame as the only fully developed one.

Before relying on a civic AI answer, a citizen should be able to ask whether a serious dissenter could see which authorities were chosen, which rivals were omitted, and how to find the omitted cases without heroic effort. That burden has three parts.

First, the answer should show who would responsibly disagree. In Phoenix, the assistant should make the city planner and the tenants’ union legible as rivals. One treats the affordability set-aside as mitigation; the other treats displacement as the central fact. A balanced answer that ultimately chooses a side should disclose the frame that it is balanced within.

Second, the answer should distinguish institutional authority from the assistant’s editorial judgment. It should identify not only what the law, an agency, or an expert body says, but also where the model has selected among sources, resolved disagreement, or chosen one frame over another. The change is not merely clearer attribution. It is making the assistant’s acts of selection and synthesis visible rather than allowing them to appear as the neutral voice of the sources themselves. 

Third, revision should be built into the answer rather than available only to users who know what to ask. The tenant should be shown which evidence or assumptions most affect the conclusion and given an easy way to test alternatives. In our example, that would mean identifying the rent and displacement assumptions doing the most work and surfacing serious local sources whose inclusion could change the answer. 

Public contestability need not come from a single authority. Universities, civil-society groups, professional associations, and institutional buyers can develop different standards for inspecting AI systems. Libraries can audit public-facing epistemic tools. Newsrooms can make inspectability an editorial commitment. Civic groups can rate products by how well they surface serious alternatives. Buyers can require vendors to demonstrate contestability, while open-source projects compare answers against known civic sources. Markets and civil society should make these practices visible and valuable before regulation becomes necessary. 

Government can help without predetermining the answers. Rather than prescribe how assistants should respond, it can support the public record they draw on through independent, nonpartisan civic data trusts. Such trusts could maintain machine-readable indexes of local hearings and dissenting testimony, lowering the entry cost for small and open-source tools without forcing any provider to adopt a state-approved frame. But making the tenants’ union data technically retrievable is not enough. Assistants must also place it within the user’s practical path of inquiry for Mill’s standard to be met. 

AI should not compress civic judgment into a smoother version of the government’s answer, or anyone else’s. It could make liberal citizenship more vivid by helping people encounter better objections, unfamiliar institutions, and public problems richer than any one answer makes them appear.

None of this is sufficient. Disclosures sit at the bottom of answers no one scrolls to. Reference links go unfollowed. Biased tools may remain popular precisely because they are biased. These are failures of demand, not engineering alone. An epistemic tool can lower the cost of disagreement and keep the strongest objection reachable, but it cannot make a citizen walk through that objection themselves, in the way that Mill might want. The press, jury, town meeting, and public library each lower the cost of self-government for people who already want it, and each goes hollow when that wanting is gone.

The appetite for self-government is not fixed. Mill’s deeper point is that judgment is a muscle. It grows by meeting live opposition and atrophies without it. The danger of the automated Overton window is that frictionless closure lets the muscle of a citizen’s judgment waste while the citizen still feels well-informed. A civic tool should do more than serve the already engaged. It should cultivate the appetite for contestation it depends on. Tools that merely answer will not. Tools built to keep serious disagreement vivid might.

AI need not decide politics to matter politically. It can decide what counts as political common sense before contestatory politics begins. Better tools would not replace civic judgment; they would widen the world in which judgment becomes possible and deepen the citizens who use them.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of MITRE, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or the U.S. Government.

Conversations on the importance of pluralism, and the ability of Americans to co-exist and productively work to solve our collective challenges, often assume that America’s democratic crisis is fundamentally one of polarization. Calls to reduce contempt, encourage dialogue, and foster empathy are sometimes made with the assumption that democratic cooperation can and must become possible again. Important bridge-building efforts across the country are built precisely on the premise that individuals of divergent backgrounds and ideological stripes must learn how to work together. These efforts matter, and at some level they have made a difference, but not enough to actually move the needle in strengthening pluralism efforts at scale. Research demonstrates that they can reduce hostilities in the short term, but impactful long-term efforts to promote real cooperation have been more difficult to find.

To this end, many efforts to promote liberalism and pluralism fail to appreciate the full scale of the differences that currently exist in the country. What if Americans increasingly disagree not only about politics, but about the moral foundations on which politics itself is understood? Indeed, these differences go beyond policy preferences (what political scientists refer to as ideological polarization) and even beyond partisan hostility based around identity (what they call affective polarization).

At a deeper level, many Americans increasingly appear to be operating from divergent moral foundations, and, just as importantly, they increasingly believe their political opponents lack any coherent moral foundation at all. Research we recently conducted at SNF Agora found that over 50% of partisans believe that members of the opposite political party are not just bad for politics, but downright evil. This dynamic helps explain the intensity of affective polarization throughout the country. It also presents a deeper challenge for liberal pluralism: how can democratic institutions earn legitimacy among citizens who judge them according to fundamentally different moral standards?

The very concept of liberal pluralism becomes much harder when individuals disagree not only about policy solutions, partisan identities, and the efficacy of public institutions, but about the very standards used to judge them. And currently, neither side seems willing to ask what it would take to build institutions that people across this divide could actually trust.

ReD Associates and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins recently engaged in a comprehensive ethnographic study to explore conservative attitudes toward democracy and broader public institutions. We initially set out to understand why many conservatives appeared willing to question democracy itself and tolerate democratic norm deviations—from election denialism to the perceived weaponization of government. But two weeks on the ground in each of three diverse locations, and hundreds of hours worth of interviews and community immersions, showed us that participants didn’t consider their attitudes to be anti-democratic. Instead, they understood themselves to be defending democracy’s original designs from hostile government institutions and, from their perspective, arbitrary norms enforced by self-interested political elites. 

This understanding was based on a deep moral framework organized around four pillars—faith (the belief that moral authority precedes political authority), family (the primary unit of social life and obligation), freedom (from government overreach into local and personal decisions), and place (the priority of community and rootedness over national abstraction)—that preceded politics itself.

These pillars matter to conservatives for two primary reasons. First, for these individuals, democratic institutions and norms are not inherently sacred and worth defending for their own sake. They earn legitimacy only insofar as they protect and serve these pillars. And second, the democratic institutions that do earn legitimacy not only protect and serve these pillars, they also reflect them. For example, the pillar of place also includes the often deeply personal flavor of social interaction that holds community life together in many conservative communities. What builds trust is knowing who concretely is on the other side of the table, which many of our participants used to explain their relatively high levels of trust in the Supreme Court as an institution, compared to, say, government agencies or Congress. The Court’s small size makes it feel far less like a distant bureaucracy, and more like an identifiable collection of individuals—the opposite of a typical large, sprawling, faceless organization such as the Centers for Disease Control. 

We did not conduct parallel research among liberals, so we cannot claim to have identified an equivalent moral framework on the left. We do feel that this research is merited in the near future. Progressive political discourse often appears to emphasize values such as equality, inclusion, institutional accountability, and individual rights. Whether those constitute a comparable underlying moral framework remains an open empirical question. But this would seem to suggest that liberals trust institutions they perceive as embodying these values, like higher education, while distrusting those that do not, like the Supreme Court itself. 

The challenge, then, is not simply that conservatives and progressives hold different values. It is that they often interpret one another’s moral language through their own foundational frameworks, policy prescriptions, and beliefs. When conservatives invoke faith, family, or freedom, many liberals might suspect that more troubling values also play a role, like exclusion or hierarchy. When progressives speak of equity, inclusion, or accountability, many conservatives hear an assault on tradition, merit, or community. Each side assumes the other is disguising its true motives because each struggles to recognize the other’s moral vocabulary as authentic, or even valid.

When these values become less theoretical and more practical, the challenges increase. For example, conservatives may justify a policy preference for more immigration restriction as guided by a love of place and protection of its associated history, tradition, and social fabric. Progressives may similarly value and love the concept of place, but argue that this love serves as an argument for pursuing equity through expanded immigration. The result is deeper than a policy disagreement, but a differentiation about the type of stewardship that place requires. This disagreement can lead to, at worst, both sides believing the other not only has a different moral foundation from their own, but perhaps lacks one altogether. 

We experienced this moral disconnect throughout our research. For example, when one of our researchers asked Sarah, a participant in Wyoming, whether morality was captured by the term “Republican” or “conservative,” she shot back: “Well, do Democrats have morality? Tell me.” When gently pressed, she allowed that “some of them do, but not all of them”—before immediately pivoting to explain that any morality that exists in America exists because of Judeo-Christian foundations, not the left. Similarly, Thomas, a participant in South Carolina, told us: “Democrats, I believe, have the end justifies the means… They see government as their God, in a sense. While conservatives see their God as God, and government as sort of secondary.”

On the opposite side, responses to the study from some progressive commentators reinforced this dynamic. Rather than engaging the participants’ stated values, some dismissed them as lacking values altogether or as fundamentally incapable of democratic citizenship or antagonistic to the concept of living in a liberal democracy generally. Whether representative or not, these reactions illustrate how easily each side comes to see the other as morally vacant rather than morally different. For example, a Bulwark article called the participants in the study “politically illiterate” and “not interested in creating a majority coalition. They want minority rule.” We heard similarly dismissive comments from other individuals and commenters.

At face value, listening to the conservatives in our study, and to some of the reactions from those on the left, it may be tempting to conclude that the discrepancies between the moral foundations of the left and right are too vast to bridge. Perhaps, in some cases, and on some policies, they are. Liberal and conservative political ideologies do make fundamentally different, and sometimes divergent, claims about the true sources of moral authority and political obligation. Thus, the task is not to attempt to erase or paper over those differences, but to cultivate a capacity and curiosity to engage with the goal of understanding them accurately, communicating with them in good faith, and disagreeing with respect.  

Doing so requires a recognition that the left and right often use the same moral language, but attach different meanings and interpretations. Consider the language of freedom itself: both conservatives and liberals invoke “freedom” as a core moral principle. On both sides of the aisle, people express freedom through themes of bodily autonomy: the ability to make choices about oneself without state interference. But conservatives and liberals contextually apply and interpret bodily autonomy through different value-based frameworks. Debates over abortion and COVID-era vaccine mandates illustrate this tension—many on the left hold pro-choice stances while criticizing anti-vaccine sentiments, and many on the right support prohibition or increased regulation of abortion while denouncing any requirements for vaccinations. Both sides indicate that individuals should be able to make decisions about their own bodies, but they have fundamentally divergent understandings of what that means in practice.

This divergence indicates that the well-documented decline of trust in institutions may in part be driven by a perception that institutions are not politically neutral, but in fact reflect deeply ingrained moral values. What those values are, and whether an individual is aligned with those values, may be a big driver for whether or not they trust that institution. And whether or not an institution is trusted, of course, has a big impact on whether it can be seen as an arbitrator or forum for otherwise civil disagreements about policy matters. It may be impossible, especially in the present partisan context, for any arbitrator or institution to remain fully neutral. Attempting to be transparent about this reality, and potential bias, is a road towards trust.

Despite the hyper-partisan political context of today, there may actually be overlap between the moral foundations of the left and the right. However, the meaning attached to those concepts—and how they believe institutions embody and practice those values—differs. In the absence of rigorous investigation, and without exploring the values of the left in more empirical depth, it’s difficult to say declaratively. This knowledge gap matters for two reasons. First, if there are overlaps, it could indicate a strategy to meaningfully find bridge-building opportunities between liberals and conservatives. And, just as importantly, little to no overlap would necessitate different strategies, focused more on understanding and curiosity and less on bridging itself.  

Liberalism has long aspired to create institutions capable of accommodating profound moral disagreement. But that aspiration becomes more demanding when disagreement extends beyond competing policy preferences or social identities, and to different understandings of the foundations of a good society, and the types of moral obligations we owe each other. The challenge is no longer simply helping citizens tolerate opposing policy preferences. It is constructing institutions that people standing on genuinely different moral foundations can nevertheless recognize as legitimate.

If that diagnosis is correct, the future of liberalism depends not only on reducing polarization, but on building institutions capable of earning legitimacy across competing moral worlds. That is a far more demanding task—but it may also be the one our moment requires.

So what does this mean in practice? It may start with individual behavior, rather than expecting trusted institutions to be constructed in a way that can solve these challenges on their own. We do not pretend to have all of the answers, and bridge-building and pluralism organizations are already doing good, necessary, if insufficient work. The deeper problem may not be that Americans disagree about right and wrong. It may be that they’ve stopped believing they’re having the same argument at all.

This problem is solvable. Understanding a fellow citizen’s moral value structure and commitments is necessary, but it’s only the beginning. Of course, this foundational belief system cannot explain every action people make or every political preference they hold. Every human being is complex, influenced by their background, identities, communities, and self-interest—alongside their learned value system. Taking another person’s moral commitments seriously does not mean accepting them without criticism. But it is possible to affirm these basic foundations without reducing people to vast generalizations.

That is a harder problem than polarization, because it can’t be solved by better manners or more dialogue alone. It does require designing institutions that can be recognized as legitimate by people who will never share a moral vocabulary—courts, agencies, and civic bodies that earn trust not by claiming neutrality, but by being visibly accountable to more than one moral world at once. But this starts with people, and with a question institution-builders rarely ask: legitimate to whom, exactly, and on what terms?

But institutions are built and sustained by people, and that same question applies closer to home. It is one thing to grant, in the abstract, that a stranger in an ethnographic study might be reasoning from a coherent moral foundation you don’t share, or from a foundation that you may value, but that you understand very differently. It is much harder to grant a coherent foundation to the people you actually argue with—a colleague, a relative, a fellow citizen down the street. If liberal democracy is going to survive its current moment, that may be the test it has to pass: rebuilding trust both in its institutions, and in its citizens, regardless of their moral framework. 

In their recent essay in National Affairs, Daniel DiSalvo and Carlo Accetti argue that civic education should function as “a condition for making partisanship into a productive component of self-government.” That is a conviction worth taking seriously. The aim of civic education at colleges and universities today cannot simply be to dampen political disagreement, but to give it a shared framework within which citizens can genuinely disagree. This matters beyond the classroom. Students will enter a world of constant conflict and competing claims, and how well they have learned to navigate them those will not only shape their own civic lives, but the health of the communities and institutions to which they belong. 

The harder task is figuring out what that framework demands. Minimally, it means asking what our colleges and universities have historically said their civic purpose was, why that purpose is fiercely contested, and whose voices and traditions have been left out of the conversation as we chart a path forward. 

Universities and Their Charters

The United States formerly ascribed great importance to civic education. That’s evident to anyone who has examined the charters and founding documents of institutions of U.S. higher learning, as I have done. Many speak about the importance of civic virtue, discharging one’s duties to the wider community, and being useful to society. In the 1789 Act Establishing the University of North Carolina, the mission was to fit students “for an honorable discharge of social duties of life….” In 1818, the Board of Commissioners for the University of Virginia told us that the task of the University was to form students to “habits of reflection, and correct action, and rendering them examples of virtue to others and of happiness within themselves.” In 1764, the institution where I teach, Brown University, declared that “institutions for liberal education are highly beneficial to society by forming the rising generation to virtue, knowledge, and useful literature, and thus preserving in the community a succession of men duly qualified for discharging the offices of life with usefulness and reputation…” And when the Morrill Act of 1862 was passed, and when it was extended in 1890, it provided lands for states to found schools of higher learning and also fund a set of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The goal was at once to democratize access while promoting the “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” Who could participate expanded, but the mission remained.

That original charters often spoke in this way is not a sufficient reason to affirm the mission. The affirmation that I would make, however, is less about blind fidelity, and more about our continued critical attachment to the political vision that makes our free and equal existence possible. In orienting students to liberal education, the charters and founding documents of America’s colleges and universities are not neutral to the fact that we remain in spirit, if not always in practice and in all quarters, an aspiring democracy. The charters envision liberal education as the key training ground not just for political participation, but for the habits of mind and character that sustain a democratic culture, and I agree with that claim. Yet I worry that some of today’s efforts at civic renewal are being undermined by the very political dynamics that brought them into existence. 

Civic Renewal and Educational Decline

Today’s observers often diagnose polarization in higher education, then prescribe civic education as a remedy. In his 2024 essay, “Higher Education Reform, Civic Thought, and Liberal Education,” Peter Berkowitz argues that “our colleges and universities have been . . . indoctrinating students in leftist articles of faith: The one and only prism for viewing moral and political life is the distinction between oppressor and oppressed….” He identifies the period from the 1960s through the 1990s as the era of the rise of illiberalism in higher education. His lament updates and extends Allan Bloom’s earlier assault on the 1960s in his famous The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. He too viewed the period as a moment of decline in American education.  

The claim, in short, is that universities have narrowed political and moral life to a single ideological lens, and in doing so, have alienated half the country. They must therefore rebuild the trust they once held by recovering their original civic mission. Berkowitz’s view is a frequent one on the political right, where universities are now thought to be hotbeds of ideological conformity and political radicalism. 

These accounts too quickly assume that the trust deficit is primarily the product of universities themselves. They also downplay the politicization of universities by external, mostly conservative, forces. This line of criticism leaves insufficient room for the possibility that universities have also become targets in a broader political effort to erode confidence in institutions, expertise, and forms of independent authority. 

This raises a problem for the ongoing attempt to foster institutionalized schools of civic thought at public and private universities. As Steve Teles notes in his recent essay “Beyond Academic Sectarianism,” creating a parallel intellectual universe at a university, and calling it a school of civic thought, has become a popular strategy to ensure conservative representation in the academy. But that strategy may backfire: 

Such schools, however, may “simply reinforce the polarization of higher education” that they seek to address.

We should also think carefully about the historical transformation of the university in the middle to late decades of the last century. The 1960s through the 1990s were precisely when we began to see an infusion of diversity into colleges and universities, both in the student body and the faculty.¹ What is said to be the moment of illiberalism was an important period in democratizing higher education, expanding the ranks of the professoriate, and diversifying the curriculum with substantive points of view that already defined the changing landscape of American life. 

But if we interpret the era of diversification of colleges and universities as also the era of their decline, as Berkowitz invites us to do, then the renewed interest in civic education risks collapsing into a nostalgic longing for an older, less democratic vision of higher education. 

The Diversity the Revival Forgets

 Here we find the tension within many civic education initiatives themselves. If the goal is viewpoint diversity and a richer conversation about democratic life, why do so many of these civic thought centers struggle with racial and ethnic diversity among their faculty, fellows, and invited speakers? Why are they so often populated by scholars drawn from a relatively narrow set of intellectual and political networks? Are we really to believe that only one segment of American intellectual life has something meaningful to say about citizenship, constitutionalism, civic obligation, and national identity? If institutionalized schools of civic thought are worth having, then the traditions and voices they draw on should reflect the actual range of American political thought and practices, not just one corner of it. 

African-American history alone, for example, contains some of the deepest reflections on these questions. In my book The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, I argued that figures such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, and James Baldwin devoted their lives to asking what it means to belong to a democratic people, what democratic responsibility requires, and how a nation might reconcile its principles with its practices. They were profoundly interested, I maintain, in the habits and virtues required of us to meet the democratic aspiration. For this very reason, there is much to learn from them. 

Yet they hardly spoke in a unified voice. Douglass has often been read as a defender of natural rights and constitutionalism, even as he struggled with the betrayals of Reconstruction and the limits of the United States in recognizing the free and equal status of African Americans. Du Bois moved from confidence in an elite-based vision of democracy toward a more egalitarian and internationalist one. He raised questions about the moral and political exhaustion of American democracy itself. Ella Baker questioned whether leadership-centered politics could successfully cultivate people’s ability to advocate for themselves and govern in their name.  Attending to these differences requires precisely the forms of intellectual diversity, interpretive openness, and civic inquiry that advocates of civic education rightly prize but sometimes fail to realize in practice. It also requires that we recognize African-American thought and experience as central rather than peripheral to America’s ongoing and often frustrated goal to be better than it is.²

Two Visions of Civic Education

The question, then, is not whether higher education should recover a civic mission. Paul Carrese is right that problems of social disintegration require a recommitment to our shared project and an understanding of the virtues that enable us to manage disagreement within that project. This, though, forces another, more significant question—namely, whether civic education will foster a genuinely expansive inquiry into democratic life, or whether it will become another arena in which political factions seek to reproduce their preferred vision of the nation. 

Here one must move with care and qualification. I have centered a set of figures that undoubtedly capture one way of affirming the nation. Importantly, I think, it is a set of figures that always spoke about expanding freedom and equality rather than narrowing their scope. A civic education that does not take a stand on the scope of freedom and equality in its very framework lends itself to profound confusion. And if it does take a stand on this, but to the exclusion of these figures, then the question of its aims becomes unavoidable. An inclusive institution strengthens democracy by expanding its scope, and a non-inclusive institution does not. The latter treats democracy as a settled inheritance, while the former thinks of civic education in a democracy as an unfinished project aimed at expanding its participants. The non-inclusive institution narrows us in imagination and in civic life; the inclusive one aspires to expand us.

The difference between these two ways of thinking about civic education is also a difference in how we understand our fundamental framework of getting on together. Educating students to civic life must be about recognizing democracy as an ongoing project of formation rather than an accomplished fact. I am reminded of that powerful line of Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval in his reflection on what he took to be a healthy relationship to the constitution:

Jefferson’s insistence on critical engagement stands against blind fidelity. He understood that thinkers from the past, philosophical schools of thought, Founders and Framers can be useful because they draw our attention to the perennial questions of social organization. But he also thought, and we should hold on to this idea, that past actors had their go at things, with their distinct problems and concerns. We must now have ours. This point becomes even more significant when we consider that we inherit those perennial questions and often must deal with the consequences of an earlier generation’s answers. Viewed from this perspective, students must come to acquire skills and habits of judgment necessary to bear this burden with something more than luck while affirming their own dignity and that of their fellow citizens. 

And yet one must insist: judgment cannot be neutral among possibilities, no more than the founding of many universities was neutral with respect to training students to be useful to society. Students in a democratic society must learn to distinguish between those traditions and iterations of our past that expand freedom and equality and those that do not. This is what civic education must make possible.

Perhaps one of the most enjoyable things to come out of North America hosting the World Cup has been watching Europeans experience “real” America firsthand via their social media. Their posts have expressed awe at how big the United States actually is, the selection of products in our large supermarkets, and free tortilla chips at Mexican restaurants, as well as the sights, tastes, and sounds at places like Buc-ee’s and Waffle House. 

But perhaps most importantly, Europeans have been quick to point out how kind, friendly, and hospitable Americans are. One user wrote, “Everyone told me Americans were unfriendly but they hold doors open, stop when you’re crossing the road, say hello in the street etc.” Another wrote, “All the jokes aside Americans are actually some of the friendliest and most welcoming folks I have ever met.” 

International World Cup fans’ surprise and excitement about their American experiences suggest a disconnect between how the United States is portrayed in foreign media and what America is actually like, and that the only way Europeans can truly understand the latter is by experiencing it firsthand. As a frequent traveler myself, I’ve found travel has undermined some of my own misconceptions.

But the lesson isn’t that America is somehow exceptional. It’s that travel can be a powerful liberalizing force. It does much to make people more open, pluralistic, and cosmopolitan. While this might seem intuitive to some, a growing body of research suggests that the dispositions that underlie a free and open society—trust in strangers, comfort with differences, and the view of foreigners as people rather than abstractions—come from the kind of direct exposure that many people, both foreign and American, can get from immersive international travel. 

In his novel The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

People who travel certainly believe Twain was right. In a 2016 representative survey of 7,200 people from 18 countries conducted by the travel search engine momondo.co.uk, 76 percent of respondents said they believed travel has given them a more positive outlook on diversity and other cultures in general. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans who had traveled to at least five countries (“globe-trotters”) were more likely to be interested in and knowledgeable about foreign affairs. Globe-trotting Americans were also more likely to report feeling closer to people around the world. Pew found similar data from 24 other countries. 

Of course, this data relies heavily on self-reported surveys, which don’t control for the fact that people who travel internationally tend to be more educated and have higher socioeconomic status than those who don’t. In other words, people who travel may already be more open to new cultures and ideas. 

It's also possible, as the philosopher Agnes Callard argues in her provocative New Yorker essay “The Case Against Travel,” that travelers who describe their trips as transformative are simply deluding themselves: 

So does rigorous academic research support Twain’s optimism—or Callard’s skepticism? 

In 1954, psychologist Gordon Allport hypothesized that, under the right conditions, contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice. In 2006, Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp tested Allport’s hypothesis with a meta-analysis of 515 studies involving more than 250,000 participants. They found that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice, with the findings holding across different groups and settings. In a follow-up 2008 study, Pettigrew and Tropp found that the mechanism behind this change is that contact changes minds less by teaching facts about other groups than by reducing anxiety and building empathy.

But it’s worth calling out an obvious objection to nearly all research connecting travel to open-mindedness. People who are already curious, trusting, and open to other cultures are far more likely to book a trip overseas than those who aren’t. So it’s important to keep this critique about causal direction in mind as we look at the additional research. 

A 2024 study surveying over 14,000 people across nine European countries set out to explain what drives “cosmopolitan orientations,” which the authors break into cultural, interpersonal, and political openness. Their central finding was that “what really matters for cosmopolitanism is the opportunity to learn about and engage with content and people from other cultures.” Direct personal exposure to other cultures mattered more than demographic factors such as age, education, or income. This is consistent with the idea that firsthand exposure cultivates openness. 

A 2009 Swedish study of the national labor force offers more targeted evidence. Comparing frequent international travelers with non-travelers, it found that frequent travel was significantly associated with “good knowledge of foreign languages and cultural openness”—the latter measured by whether people preferred, when abroad, to “meet people from the place that I visit and get to know the local culture.”

Strikingly, this association held “even when controlling for sex, age, birthplace, place of residence, education, and socio-economic classification,” suggesting the openness wasn’t simply a byproduct of travelers being wealthier or better educated to begin with.

Similar results emerge for attitudes toward specific issue areas, such as immigration. Drawing on two large Eurobarometer surveys, each covering more than 26,000 EU respondents, a 2022 study found that “studying abroad may play an important role in having positive attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, even after controlling certain socio-demographic factors.” Those who had studied in another EU country were more likely to agree that immigrants contribute to their country and to feel positively about immigration, both from within and outside the EU. 

Notably, the association appeared in two separate survey waves six years apart (2012 and 2018), among different respondents, and in both wealthier and newer member states. However, these were snapshots, not before-and-after measurements, and the authors are candid that they cannot distinguish an effect of studying abroad from an overrepresentation of people who were already tolerant. 

Other studies have measured people before and after they travel. Research on the EU’s Erasmus exchange program tracked students before departure and after they returned, alongside a control group that did not travel abroad. Compared to a control group, those who lived abroad were more likely to identify as EU citizens, believe they had more in common with other Europeans, and express pride in being European when they returned. The greater effects were driven not just by traveling to those places, but by social interaction with people in their host countries. 

But critics could easily point out that these studies still fall prey to the self-selection objection since they all compare people who chose to travel with people who didn’t. There is, however, randomized evidence that seeks to control for this bias. 

Across five studies using trust games and longitudinal tracking, researchers found a positive relationship between the number of countries someone visited and their “generalized trust,” that is, their basic disposition to view other people as trustworthy. Because they manipulated travel focus experimentally and tracked trust before and after trips, they found that “broad foreign experiences led to greater generalized trust” rather than merely accompanying it.

In another study, three economists exploited the lottery Pakistan uses to allocate visas for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Because winners and losers were randomly selected, comparing them isolates the effect of the journey itself. They found that pilgrims returned with a greater belief in equality and harmony across ethnic groups and Islamic sects, more favorable attitudes toward women’s education and employment, and greater tolerance even toward non-Muslims. 

This research shows what surveys alone cannot, since attitudes were measured before and after travel and compared with those of control groups who stayed home. And the Pakistan study seems to address Callard’s sharper point about self-delusion as well. Callard’s argument is not that travelers fail to change but that they cannot tell when they have—introspection cannot detect one’s own delusion. But the pilgrims were never asked to introspect. Instead, their attitudes were measured and compared with those who had entered the same lottery and lost. Whatever the pilgrims believed about their own transformation didn’t matter because the change showed up in the data.  

But traveling internationally itself does not automatically lead people to be more tolerant, and the reason has less to do with the distance traveled than with what happens when you arrive. Allport’s theory rests on the idea that positive intergroup contact only works when certain conditions are met. Parties must meet as rough equals, cooperate toward shared goals, and must not be competing for advantage. 

The arrangements matter because contact does not work by simply supplying information. As mentioned above, Pettigrew and Tropp found that contact changes minds less by teaching facts than through interactions that lower anxiety and build empathy. This is why travel, with its meaningful interactions, can do something that reading about a place cannot. Of course, no study has sorted travel by Allport’s criteria and measured the results, and the research would be difficult to do. 

What follows is an extrapolation of these conditions rather than a finding. Consider how Allport’s criteria might apply to the modern traveler. The resort and the cruise port will probably not meet those conditions because the encounters with locals usually don’t extend far beyond guided excursions, where the visitors are merely learning facts rather than having meaningful interactions on equal footing with locals. Staying at a resort that you never leave, or on a cruise excursion where you only interact with a tour guide, will likely not generate enough meaningful contact to reduce anxiety or build empathy, per Pettigrew and Tropp’s mechanism. 

Business travel could meet more of those conditions since, although there might be some competition when it comes to business negotiations, establishing business partnerships or even trying to close a deal may create a material incentive for the commercial traveler to try to understand what his counterpart wants and to investigate and participate in the cultural norms that encourage cooperation.  

The traveler who stays with a family, such as a foreign exchange student, the undergrad who studies abroad, the volunteer who works alongside people, or the digital nomad who spends enough time in one place will likely meet most of Allport’s conditions to create meaningful change and contact. 

Even a more in-depth immersion in another culture still has to be humane. A study of Chinese students in the United States found that while studying abroad was associated with warmer views of liberal democracy, experiencing discrimination sharply reversed this effect, increasing their support for authoritarian rule back home.

Of course, none of these studies measured whether travelers came home and changed their voting behavior or core political beliefs. What they do suggest, however, is that travel builds trust in strangers, openness toward immigrants, and identification and empathy with people beyond one’s own borders. These are dispositions on which a free society depends. 

Markets require trusting people you will never meet. Pluralism requires believing that differences aren’t inherently dangerous. In other words, liberalism involves a set of habits of one’s mind, and travel appears to be one of the few interventions that could reliably cultivate those habits. 

Further, none of this is to suggest that international travel is the only method for people to become more liberal, cosmopolitan, or open-minded. For instance, people who live in cities with diverse populations also tend to be more cosmopolitan, welcoming of foreigners, and open to new ideas. Indeed, experimental research suggests that engaging with multiple cultures reduces stereotyping more broadly, even extending to groups not involved in the original encounter—evidence that cross-cultural exposure can cultivate "a generalized tendency for a more tolerant mind."

International travel definitely comes with higher costs than seeking out diverse cultures closer to home, and visiting the closest urban center is a good first step to broadening one’s mind. But international travel can be a more reliable mechanism. At home, you meet differences on your own terms, in neighborhoods and workplaces sorted by class and choice. When traveling immersively abroad, you are the outsider, dependent on the goodwill of strangers to find your way, engage in commerce, and understand the local norms and culture. 

The literature appears to support that Twain’s intuitions were largely correct. The main takeaway isn't simply that you should seek out new cultures, whether in your own city or one across the ocean, although you should. It's that meaningful interactions with different people and cultures can genuinely open your mind, and it works best when both sides are on equal footing, cooperate toward shared goals, treat each other with dignity, and extend a humane welcome to each other. 

This research may also explain why the experiences of America’s international visitors at the World Cup have been so different. They weren’t just visiting major cities like New York or Los Angeles. The locations of the early matches generally required fans to travel to smaller cities and parts of middle America less frequented by tourists, often relying on the kindness of strangers to find their way around our vast country.

As liberals, we should be encouraging and highlighting what we are seeing on social media as America holds the door open for World Cup fans from around the world. 

New York City’s mayor is a democratic socialist. So is Seattle’s. And Washington, D.C. looks poised to join them: Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic nomination for mayor on what the New York Times called “the once-forbidden ‘S word,’” and a promise to expand child care, build tens of thousands of homes, and widen rent stabilization. Zohran Mamdani, the figure the rest of the movement looks to, took office in New York pledging to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

So socialism is back, and the commentary has arranged itself in the usual formation. On the right, alarm: the reds are at the gates. On the left, a banner: the future has arrived. What is striking is how little of the excitement and the horror attaches to anything the new mayors actually propose. The same rent freeze, the same municipal grocery, would pass almost unnoticed under another name. It is the word that thrills the one side and frightens the other, and so the question everyone hurries to argue is a question about the word. Is this really socialism, or just New Deal liberalism with sharper slogans? Does a city-owned grocery store cross the line, or is it ordinary municipal housekeeping?

The fixation is a mistake, and an instructive one. Whether Mamdani’s program “is socialism” tells you almost nothing about whether any piece of it is worth having, and focusing on the question is one of the surest ways to think badly about the policies it attaches to. It is worth seeing why, because the confusion is not special to socialism.

* * *

Begin with the most basic confusion. When Pew found in 2022 that more than a third of American adults (and 44 percent of those under thirty) hold a favorable view of socialism, many observers were horrified. Had people forgotten—or never learned—the horrors of Stalinist Russia or Maoist China? Did people not realize that central planning simply couldn’t work? This reaction is understandable. But it was based on a misunderstanding. As an earlier Pew study revealed, people who profess to support socialism mean something very different by that word than the people who say they oppose it. Ask a critic of socialism what he has in mind and he points to the Soviet Union or Venezuela, where the state owns the economy and plans it from the center. Ask an admirer and she points to Denmark or Finland, market economies with private firms, open trade, and unusually large welfare states.

The distinction matters because the strongest objection to socialism applies to only one of these two sets of examples. Mises and Hayek showed that a centrally planned economy cannot allocate resources rationally, because without prices and private ownership, its planners are flying blind. The argument is decisive, but for the purposes of the current debate it is simply beside the point, because Mamdani and the others are not proposing anything like central planning. An argument against an authoritarian, centrally planned economy is not an argument against a rent freeze or a free bus. When someone invokes the graveyard of twentieth-century communism to condemn Mamdani’s transit policy, he has let the word do his thinking for him. The catastrophe and the bus share a name and nothing else.

* * *

That confusion is a special case of a more general problem with ideological labels. In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis distinguish two theories of what an ideology is. On the essentialist theory, the positions associated with a label cohere because they flow from a single underlying principle. You start from the essence, deduce your views, and only then do you join the tribe that shares those same beliefs. The Lewises argue that this is backwards. An ideology’s views cohere because a tribe holds them, not the other way around. The tribe comes first. People anchor into a tribe for reasons of family, peers, or a single galvanizing issue, and then take on the rest of the package. “Ideologies do not define tribes,” the Lewises write; “tribes define ideologies.” A label tells you reliably who someone stands with. It tells you very little about what they stand for.

I leaned on this argument in an earlier piece about my own side, where libertarians, who all claim to be defending liberty, turn out to disagree about immigration, foreign policy, and nearly everything else. Socialism is no different. Consider Nithya Raman, a democratic socialist on the Los Angeles City Council who has broken with the Democratic Socialists of America on housing, backing the development-friendly policies many of her comrades resist. Her allies in the movement want to protect tenants chiefly by restricting landlords. Raman wants to build. It’s the same label, but opposite answers to the most consequential question in urban policy. Merely knowing that Raman is a socialist tells you nothing about where she lands on it.

* * *

These are problems about what the word picks out. There is a further problem, and a deeper one, about what even a settled principle could tell us. I came to this problem while reviewing Matt McManus’s book on liberal socialism. In that book, McManus defines socialism in terms of a set of moral principles: the equal worth of persons, individual freedom, community, and so on. The problem is that nothing in the logic of these principles renders them incompatible with markets, private property, and limited government. In other words, nothing in them dictates a socialist economy. As I put it in my review, just as economic institutions cannot be read off moral principles, so one cannot read moral principles off economic institutions. The label sits in the gap between the two, doing no work.

It is worth adding, because it bears on the whole argument, that McManus and other self-described liberal socialists have over the past few years been more consistent than a good many libertarians in naming the illiberalism of the Trump administration for what it is. If you had wanted to know in advance who would defend liberal constitutional norms when it counted, the label “libertarian” would have steered you wrong, and the label “socialist” would have steered you wrong, in opposite directions. The labels, in other words, are a poor guide to the thing you actually care about.

* * *

So set them down and look at the policies. They sort out very differently than the banner suggests. Rent control, which several of these candidates favor, is a genuinely bad idea, but not because it is “socialist.” It is bad because ceilings on rents reduce the supply and quality of housing, a conclusion economists on the left and right have shared for half a century. Building more housing, which Raman favors, is a good idea for precisely the same reason, even when it flies under the same flag. In between are proposals with serious arguments behind them that have nothing to do with socialism at all. There is, for instance, a respectable economic argument for subsidizing child care. James Heckman’s work on high-quality early-childhood programs finds returns on the order of thirteen percent a year, part of it through the higher earnings of mothers freed to work. Even fare-free buses, which sound like a pure giveaway, have a surprising efficiency argument that can be made on their behalf. On many bus systems, the cost of collecting fares rivals the revenue it brings in, and dropping fares speeds boarding enough to improve service and lift ridership. The label “socialism” bundles a clearly bad policy, a probably good one, and several genuinely open questions. The bundling tells you only which team to root for.

A skeptic will object that I have stacked the deck by focusing on easy cases. There’s something to this charge. The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America runs well beyond rent freezes and free buses. Among other things, it calls for abolishing the police, for bringing whole industries under public ownership, and for taking housing off the market altogether. These are ideas considerably worse, and considerably more radical, than mere rent control. Still, the practical significance of all this is dubious. Platforms are largely symbolic. They are written to signal whom a movement stands with and what it longs for. They are written to thrill the faithful rather than to survive contact with the realities of budgets and political compromise. What matters at the end of the day is actual governance. And when socialists have been forced to make the hard choices involved in governing, they have mostly ignored the platform. Mamdani ran under the banner and then kept the police commissioner he inherited, the one who had just presided over a record drop in crime. Raman wears the labels and builds.

Even granting all of this, one might argue that the label itself is a political fact with consequences. A coalition gathering under a banner changes what is sayable and who is electable, and this banner carries a long and bloody history behind it. To wave away the word is to wave away a real and reasonable worry about where the country is being pulled. I think this is a legitimate worry. But the lesson here is that we should be more careful in how we use the word, not less. Part of why the word “socialism” has lost its bite is that it has been used so loosely, first by a right that has called every welfare program socialism for generations, and now by a left that’s content to claim the name for Denmark. A word stretched to cover everything ends up warning against nothing. If some of the ideas under the banner are really dangerous—as I think they are—the way to fight them is to name them and show, on the merits, why they are bad. The answer to bad, fuzzy ideas is to be more careful, clear, and rigorous in our analysis. Not less.

Tyler Cowen once offered a rule of thumb worth keeping: “every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more.” Is it socialism? is a good-versus-evil story in the costume of an analytical question. Set it aside, and the real questions come into view, the ones with answers. Does rent control work? Can a municipal grocery break even? What policies actually result in new housing getting built? Those are the questions worth our time.

“White-nose syndrome screening is mandatory.”

It was the summer of 2023, and our family of four was on the first of what would become an annual summer event: road tripping the American West in our camper.

Our first stop was Great Basin National Park in my home state of Nevada, and I had never heard of white-nose syndrome until I stood at the mouth of the amazing Lehman Caves. 

Before entering for our tour, we were instructed to leave behind anything that had touched another cave environment. No exceptions. The reason was spelled out plainly on the signage: to protect the indigenous bat population from white-nose syndrome. A fungal disease that travels on gear, clothing, and the soles of boots, white-se syndrome has killed more than 90 percent of three North American bat species between 2006 and 2018.

When white-nose syndrome began collapsing bat populations across North America in 2006, most people didn’t notice. Bats are not charismatic. They don’t generate fundraising campaigns or cable news segments. But bats pull their weight, including by eating insects—enormous quantities of them, night after night, across every agricultural landscape in the country.

Across every county where white-nose syndrome arrived and bat populations collapsed, farmers turned to chemical pesticides to battle the insect populations bats had previously helped control. A 2024 study published in Science estimated the result: $26.9 billion in agricultural losses between 2006 and 2017, and more than a thousand additional infant deaths linked to pesticide exposure in affected counties. 

A thousand infant deaths linked to a bat disease most people have never heard of.

That is why the ecological world is not and cannot be a luxury concern. When it fails, the costs land on farmers, families, food systems, children, the poor, and the most vulnerable among us. 

And the failures are mounting rapidly. Across North America, migratory bird populations have dropped by nearly three billion since 1970 owing to habitat destruction, agricultural intensification, outdoor cats, and glass buildings. Agricultural runoff, overdrawing of aquifers, and land use change are causing freshwater systems to degrade faster than they recover. Pollinators are collapsing from pesticide use, habitat fragmentation, pathogens, invasive species, and monoculture farming, with no clear consensus on which matters most. Species are disappearing at a rate that many scientists describe as a sixth mass extinction event, this one unfolding right before our eyes.

One Size Does Not Fit All

These are complex problems that exist across diverse contexts, often with multiple, intersecting causes. They are deeply underserved by an environmental agenda that has been dominated by the monocausal climate change framework and its attendant solution of international carbon regulation. 

The climate is always changing, and there is no doubt we humans have a profound effect on it. But “reduce emissions, save the planet” is a better slogan than it is a strategy. We spend enormous political capital and resources to pursue a single solution, while problems that are local, regional, and tractable get less energy and fewer resources. 

Aside from the fact that simply reducing carbon won’t solve many of the serious ecological issues we are facing, there is a moral dimension to this. A framework built around global agreements and universal participation asks developing nations to forgo the industrialization that built the wealth of the countries now demanding restraint, in service of a problem they did relatively little to create. Serious ecological problems have been solved before, sometimes through global agreements or sweeping legislation, but most often through the patient work of people who understood a specific problem in a specific place and built something that worked. 

The bats in Lehman Caves are still there because someone identified what was causing the problem, deployed the tool that fit, and it is working. White-nose syndrome often travels on gear and clothing, so the National Park Service built a gear screening protocol at the point of entry, enforced it consistently, and is updating it as the science develops. They did not try to stop all fungal disease globally, or regulate all cave tourism, or wait for an international agreement. 

Many environmental problems more closely resemble the bats of Lehman Caves than they do climate change. For these local matters, we have a specialized toolkit that’s attentive to local knowledge and local means of land management.

That toolkit is at the heart of what follows. One of its virtues is that it helps us identify challenges where a more strategic, targeted approach is within reach. And in identifying the solutions that best address issues at the local level, we should look beyond the blunt tool of government regulation and instead to communities and individuals—the hunters, anglers, farmers, indigenous communities, local land trusts—who bring knowledge, accountability, and staying power that no federal agency can manufacture.

Layered Problems, Layered Solutions

In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin argued that, in the absence of state-run enforcement mechanisms, shared resources were doomed. Individuals acting in self-interest would inevitably overuse them until they collapsed. Government control or privatization, he argued, were the only options.

Elinor Ostrom spent her career proving him wrong.

A political scientist at Indiana University, Ostrom embedded in communities to see what happens when they manage shared resources. In fishing villages, alpine meadows, irrigation systems, and forests across multiple continents, she found community after community that proved Hardin’s theory wrong: they could manage shared resources—sustainably and for generations, without top-down government control and without full privatization, provided certain conditions were met. 

Communities tend to succeed, Ostrom found, when boundaries are clearly defined, when the people who depend on a resource have real decisionmaking power over it, when rules are monitored and enforced by those closest to the problem, and when governance is layered: local decisions nested within regional ones, regional within national, each level handling what it can handle best. She called this arrangement polycentric governance. 

The best-known example from her work can be found in the alpine meadows of Switzerland. For centuries, farming communities in the Swiss Alps managed shared grazing land that, by Hardin’s logic, should have been stripped bare by self-interested farmers racing to put as many animals on it as possible. Instead, these communities developed their own rules governing how many animals each family could graze, monitored compliance through social relationships, and enforced violations through graduated sanctions. Those communities thrived, and so did the land

The core insight here is straightforward: complex problems are best managed by people with direct knowledge of and stake in the outcome, at the scale closest to the problem itself. Rules matter. So does who makes them. For this work, in 2009 Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. 

Pollinators: A Case Study

Consider pollinators.

Monarch butterfly overwintering populations have declined by more than 80% over the past two decades, during which conservation efforts have already been underway. Roughly 40% of invertebrate pollinator species globally face extinction. Habitat loss continues to outpace restoration. 

The costs of this mounting crisis don’t just fall on the environment or farmers; they hit us all. While figures vary across studies, pollination services to U.S. agriculture are estimated at $15–34 billion annually. When pollinators decline, yields decline, and often requiring more human labor, all leading to higher food prices.

The decline of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators is one of the most consequential ecological problems in the United States, and one of the least understood. The IPBES Global Pollinator Assessment, the most comprehensive scientific review of the subject, documents multiple drivers acting in combination, including pesticide use, habitat loss and fragmentation, monoculture farming, pathogens, and invasive species. There is no scientific consensus on the relative importance of these stressors, and they interact synergistically, amplifying each other in ways that make simple solutions ineffective. 

Given the mobility and diffuseness of pollinators, an Ostromian approach to maintaining their populations requires coordinated action across defined corridors, by people with direct stakes in the outcome, governed through nested layers rather than a single centralized authority. A single farmer who reduces pesticide use on his land captures some benefit, but the real gains come from neighboring farms managing habitat in connected corridors and maintaining communication as they do.

The good news is that we aren’t starting from zero. 

Monarch Joint Venture coordinates efforts across federal agencies, state governments, nonprofits, and private landowners to restore habitat across the monarch butterfly’s entire migration corridor. It does so without a single centralized authority directing it. The Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farming certification gives farmers and retailers a market signal tied to pollinator-safe practices, creating an economic incentive without a mandate. Other farmer-led pollinator habitat initiatives, coordinated at the county and watershed level, have documented measurable gains in pollinator abundance where they have been implemented seriously.

The second bit of good news is that these ventures aren’t outlying examples. Ducks Unlimited has restored or enhanced more than 15 million acres of North American waterfowl habitat since 1937, funded almost entirely by hunters. Trout Unlimited’s members have spent decades on stream restoration and cold-water habitat protection. The hunting and fishing license systems fund state wildlife agencies to the tune of billions of dollars annually—a user-paid conservation model that has operated successfully for over a century, largely invisible to the elite policy conversation because it doesn’t look like environmentalism.

That is not to suggest these examples are perfect on their own, but they do illustrate Ostrom’s layered approach to governance. They also illustrate the strong foundation upon which we can build: The groups and civil society networks that Ostrom’s framework depends on already exist, organize, and fund conservation outcomes. They, and the approach more generally, are underleveraged.

Polycentric governance works where communities have the knowledge, the stake, and the decisionmaking power to act. In the pollinator case, much of that infrastructure already exists. What it lacks is the political priority to deploy it at the scale the problem demands. That is a solvable problem, though time is increasingly not on our side. 

But there is a harder class of problem—one where coordination alone cannot change behavior, because the people who bear the costs of ecological loss have no stake in the outcome. For that, a different lever is required.

When Nobody Owns It

Who benefits when wild, dangerous animals thrive in close proximity to humans?

In most of sub-Saharan Africa through the mid-twentieth century, the answer was nobody. Local communities living alongside elephants, lions, and leopards bore all the costs of that proximity—livestock killed, crops destroyed, and occasionally, people harmed. The rational response in such situations is to view wildlife as a liability, and that is exactly what happened. Poaching became rampant. Soon after, populations collapsed.

When the costs of conservation are concentrated in local communities that can least afford them, and when the benefits are widely dispersed, conservation fails. When the people closest to the resource own all of the outcomes, both good and bad, they have reason to invest in preserving the resource.

Take a program called CAMPFIRE: Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources. Launched in Zimbabwe in 1989, CAMPFIRE gave local communities legal authority over the wildlife in their areas. The community that previously had no reason to protect a lion now owned it. As owners, they not only incurred the costs but reaped the benefits of whatever they did to manage the resource. Under this new arrangement, communities set their own hunting quotas, leased rights to safari operators, and got to keep any revenue generated. Predictably, poaching dropped, and wildlife populations began to recover. That is not to suggest that CAMPFIRE has been an unqualified success, but the program has adapted amidst significant challenges, including political destabilization in Zimbabwe.

In the arid American West, water is the most contested resource. Farmers hold rights to it, cities need it, and fish die without it. Water rights law treats water as property, but for most of the twentieth century, the rivers themselves had no standing. Nobody owned the interest in keeping water instream. So it disappeared, diverted into irrigation ditches and municipal systems, leaving streams too shallow and too warm for many fish, most notably salmon, to survive.

Founded in 1993 with the help of Oregon Trout, the Oregon Water Trust (now the Freshwater Trust) became the nation’s first entity to apply a market-based approach to keeping water instream. On the Middle Fork of the John Day River, the Trust partnered with the Bureau of Reclamation to lease water rights from a private landowner, restoring flow during low-flow summer months when juvenile salmon most need it. No mandate, no litigation, and no regulatory battle needed. Only a willing buyer, a willing seller, and water staying in the river. The Trust also helped push through a new Oregon law recognizing instream water rights and allowing their transfer, a legal innovation that’s been adopted across fourteen western states.

The insight is the same as Ostrom’s: those closest to the problem are indispensable to solving it. But here, the levers are title and price rather than norms and coordination. Ownership made the transaction possible, and enforceability made the outcome stick.

The same logic can be adapted where formal ownership isn’t possible. The Defenders of Wildlife Wolf Compensation Trust, launched in 1987, faced a version of the CAMPFIRE problem on American rangelands. Ranchers living alongside recovering wolf populations bore all the costs—in livestock killed and operations disrupted—while the benefits of wolf recovery flowed to distant conservation advocates and the broader public.

Because granting the title wasn’t possible, Defenders’ solution was to use the price lever instead. The organization gave those who bore the costs of conservation enough compensation to economically benefit from coexistence. Defenders paid ranchers fair market value for any livestock killed by wolves, as well as a bonus for wolf pairs denning on their land. That second payment is the key move because it converts the presence of wolves from a cost into a source of revenue. 

In 2010, Defenders wound the program down after federal legislation created state-run compensation programs that could provide more funding than Defenders could supply on its own. That handoff is worth noting: a voluntary private solution proved the concept, and government helped scale it. 

The evidence since then is instructive. Paying for confirmed kills, which can be difficult to verify, addresses the financial loss but doesn’t reliably change behavior. Research increasingly suggests that it works better to tie payments to active coexistence practices—outcome-based incentives rather than entitlements. That is the test these state programs now face.

We don’t need perfection in order to make progress. In this case, we don’t need clean, transferrable titles to the resources we want to preserve. By adapting the price mechanism to what the law allows, the program pioneered a model that has since been adopted, extended, and improved through trial and error. This capacity is a hallmark of liberal, decentralized solutions.

Even so, there are limits to the property rights lever. In places where rights aren’t clearly defined or legally enforced, or where the rule of law is weak, additional approaches and tools are needed. 

Where the Going Gets Tough

Consider deforestation in the Amazon. Home to an estimated ten percent of all species and a hydrological system that generates rainfall across an entire continent, the Amazon is disappearing at an alarming rate. Between 2001 and 2020, the Amazon lost more than 54 million hectares of forest, an area roughly the size of France. 

The drivers included cattle ranching, soy expansion, illegal logging, mining, and road construction, most of it on land whose ownership is contested or whose legal protections are selectively enforced. Human-driven clearing has slowed meaningfully under Brazil’s current government, with fire taking its place as the central threat. In 2024, roughly 60 percent of primary forest loss came from fire, as drought and accumulated degradation turned the once-humid forest into tinder. 

The Amazon is not a simple story of destruction. It is a story of a system under mounting pressure from multiple directions at once, in a political environment where the rules change with elections. When the state itself is the problem—when governments incentivize environmental destruction or sell concessions into protected areas—both market and regulatory mechanisms fail.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is working to change that. Like the Defenders of Wildlife Wolf Compensation Trust, REDD+ aims to make conservation more profitable than destruction. In this case, wealthy countries pay developing countries, or communities within them, to protect standing forests.

The underlying logic shows promise. A global evaluation of 40 voluntary REDD+ projects found deforestation reduced by 47% within project areas in the first five years. The Norway–Guyana bilateral program reduced tree cover loss by 35% during its implementation period. The sole randomized controlled trial on a payment for ecosystem services program found an 88% reduction in forest loss among enrollees. 

In other places, though, implementation has been badly compromised. A peer-reviewed study examining 26 REDD+ projects found actual emissions reductions averaged 21% of what the recipients reported and got paid for. That fraud came from a structural problem: REDD+ credits take for a baseline the counterfactual of what is believed would have happened to the forest without the program. Since that can never be directly verified, baseline inflation is both easy and profitable.

The failure points toward what is actually missing: the ownership and accountability infrastructure that makes market mechanisms work. Three reforms address this directly. 

First, evidence consistently shows that forests managed by indigenous and local communities with legally recognized land rights have lower deforestation rates than either state-managed or private concession forests. We need to lean harder into the property rights framework and explore incentives for national governments to do so. Second, shifting jurisdictional accounting to the national or subnational level rather than the project level could eliminate much of the baseline fraud. Third, replacing developer-funded auditing with independent satellite monitoring—a technology already deployed in Brazil and easily scalable—makes real-time forest cover verification genuinely possible.

Each reform we’ve discussed is a different tool, but together they represent Ostrom’s framework in an international context: community governance and clearly defined rights, nesting autonomous stakeholding localities within national and international frameworks. 

The through line, from Ostrom’s Swiss alpine meadows, to Lehman Caves, to the Monarch migration corridor, to the Amazon, is the same: conservation succeeds when the people bearing its costs also own its benefits, and incentives are aligned to outcomes. Conservation fails when those two things come apart. The mechanisms vary, but the logic holds across contexts and scale. And where it breaks down, the breakdown is diagnostic: it tells us what needs course correcting when something isn’t working. This liberal toolkit is within our reach if those of us who love the environment are willing to challenge the status quo and roll up our sleeves.

Image courtesy of the author.

A new nation needs many things. A way of ordering its political life. A way of protecting itself. A way of sustaining its population. But a nation also needs something far less practical. It needs a story to tell itself about itself.

These kinds of origin stories have often been told in the form of poetry. The Romans had Virgil’s Aeneid, which follows Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan War, as he escapes the fall of Troy and embarks on a seven-year journey that culminates in founding the first Italian city and engendering the founders of Rome. The British had the story of Brutus of Troy, descendant of Aeneas, who accidentally kills his father in a hunting accident, hightails it to Albion—which would eventually become England—and founds a city called New Troy, which becomes London.

So it’s not surprising to find that, as British subjects crossed the ocean to America as colonists and then came to think of themselves as a new thing called Americans, this kind of poetic mythmaking crossed the ocean with them. One of the most prolific—but now most forgotten—poetic mythmakers was the editor of Philadelphia’s National Gazette, friend of James Madison, critic of the Federalists, sea captain, and abolitionist Philip Freneau (1752–1832). One could pull nearly any poem from his list of works and find something interesting to say about American identity and the revolutionary era. I think his most deliberate attempt to forge an American identity is his poem “The Rising Glory of America.”

“The Rising Glory of America” began as a poem written with Hugh Brackenridge for the commencement exercises of Princeton, then the College of New Jersey, in 1771. The poem was then revised and expanded for publication in 1772, and then re-edited and republished in 1786 as part of Freneau’s collected Revolutionary War–era verse. This last version is the one I’ll be depending on, as Freneau specified he had revised it so that only his lines and none of Brackenridge’s were included. 

So what does Freneau see as essential to American identity? When he creates poetic myth from the historical facts of our founding, where does he focus his attention? Let’s take a look.

The first third of Freneau’s poem focuses on the indigenous inhabitants of North America; it posits a variety of possible origins for them as survivors of the Flood or a surviving remnant from the city of Carthage. Freneau takes a broadly Lockean approach to justifying colonization of native land by saying that the original inhabitants hadn’t done anything to improve it. It’s not a stance that sits comfortably with modern understandings, nor should it, but Freneau is better on the subject than many of his contemporaries. Mostly he’s interested in pointing out that indigenous populations were treated much worse by the Spanish, whose colonial practices will serve as a foil for the American colonies throughout the poem.

But the real meat of Freneau’s poem is the three pursuits that he sees as fundamental to the American project and the American identity: Agriculture, Commerce, and Science. 

For Freneau, Agriculture serves as a way to distinguish the British colonial project and America’s past from the extractive and brutal Spanish colonial project. Freneau’s take on Spain’s extractive colonization practices argues that a land rich in gold and gems has nothing on America’s great wealth—topsoil, and virtuous citizens who are willing to work the land. 

Freneau’s argument strikes me as a fairly solid poetic representation of the “resource curse,” whereby countries that have abundant natural resources, like gold or oil, have higher rates of conflict and fail to develop good institutions because of an over-reliance on their resource wealth to drive development. We should be reminded here of Smith’s discussion of the Spanish colonies in The Wealth of Nations, where he dryly observes that “It was of importance to Columbus, however, that the countries which he had discovered, whatever they were, should be represented to the court of Spain as of very great consequence; and, in what constitutes the real riches of every country, the animal and vegetable productions of the soil, there was at that time nothing which could well justify such a representation of them” (IV.7) and “Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in them, there is none perhaps more ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines.” (IV.7) Freneau gives us solid economic thinking in poetic form.

At the same time that he uses American agriculture as a way to continue to separate British/American practices from Spanish, Freneau uses it to connect the American colonists to the virtues of the classical world. 

Freneau loves this image of a classical world where wise and modest men serve their nation virtuously and then return home to their farms. In a poem written for Washington’s retirement from public life, he plays on the same strings, comparing Washington to the Roman General Cincinattus, “Thus He, whom Rome’s proud legions sway’d/ Return’d, and sought his sylvan shade.” Lines 203-214 in “The Rising Glory of America” give a longer version of this same praise of Washington.

For Freneau, agriculture demonstrates American moderation—in our desire for and stewarding of resources, and also in our commitment to serve the country when needed, but to return to a quiet private life when the job is done.

But Freneau knows that American minds are too busy to be satisfied staying forever in one place. 

Along with seeing commerce as an appropriate way to satisfy the ever striving and ever various American mind, Freneau is leaning hard into Montesquieu’s doux commerce theory that trade softens our manners and encourages good relations between neighbors. I also think it’s wonderful that he specifies that the exchanges here are “wished”—desired—rather than forced upon the unwilling. This seems a subtle but crucial word choice given how many of the American colonists’ complaints were about forced trade with England and forbidden trade with others. 

In a moment that perfectly anticipates Deirdre McCloskey’s work, he also takes the time to highlight the heroism of traders.

This is particularly important given the time he spends praising the virtues of American farmers. For Freneau both pursuits are vital to the American project, and both are valued parts of the American character. This makes Freneau stand out among contemporary economic commentators, many of whom thought that only farming, mining, and manufacturing created value, not commerce. And many boosters of commerce—even Adam Smith—gave relatively short shrift to the power of agriculture to shape a nation. For Freneau, however, this isn’t a zero-sum game for the soul of the nation. Agriculture demonstrates our moderation. Commerce demonstrates our heroic sociability. We need both.

But it is science that Freneau says allows both agriculture and commerce to flourish in America. He depicts the muses deserting Greece and Rome to cross the ocean to America “the last, the best/ Of Countries, where the arts shall rise and grow” (321–322) and he chooses as the great American hero of Science:

You would think that for Freneau, a discussion of science might open the door to considering American characteristics like ingenuity, inspiration, or technical expertise. But instead, for Freneau, American science is about proclaiming America as the land of “liberty and life, sweet liberty!/ without whose aid the noblest genius fails, / And Science irretrievably must die.” Science gives us Freneau’s last great characteristic of the American character: Liberty. Without free inquiry we have nothing to support and improve our agriculture and our commerce. 

Freneau’s poem closes with two competing visions for the future of the American project. The first is a grim vision of war with England that will bring about the violation of every aspect of the praiseworthy American character Freneau has just outlined.

Moderation and peaceful trade go out the window in the face of British avarice and violence, and liberty disappears as well. Perhaps worst of all, the destruction is infectious. “Our souls” as well are “kindled up to deeds of horror,” and the American character is violated in order to protect what it holds most dear.

But neither Freneau nor I want to leave you here. If the American characteristics he outlines are allowed to flourish, he argues, America will become a beacon to other nations, a “Paradise anew” where:

With a scabrous and algae-ridden reflecting pool in front of the Washington Monument, a war in Iran that no one seems to have the energy either to win or to peaceably settle, an economy on life support, political scandals breaking at such a rate we hardly have time to react, and levels of government corruption and interference that make even the most devoted FIFA followers blush, it is easy to scoff at Freneau’s forthright love of our country and his dream of its future greatness. It is easy to believe that he simply got it all wrong.

But maybe Freneau’s faith in an American character built on simple ideals like moderation, heroic sociability, and liberty is exactly what we need when things look most grim. Though he praises the heroes of the Revolution, Franklin and Washington in particular, Freneau’s real faith is in us, the average American citizen, engaged in our agricultural, commercial, and scientific projects, living our lives, and pursuing our dreams. He knows that these are the people who bear the real costs when nations go wrong, and he has faith that these are the people who can set it right again.

Freneau wrote in tumultuous times. His early versions of “The Rising Glory of America” were written amid rising local political rebellions as pre-Revolutionary tensions increased. His final version was published as the Revolution came to a close and Americans shouldered the daunting responsibility of creating a unified nation from a set disparate and querulous colonies. But he knew, and we must remember, that a nation is not its government. A nation is not its current political moment. A nation is its people and their projects and dreams. Freneau’s poetry is unread these days. But I think it’s exactly what we need.

Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously mocked Descartes’s notion of mind/body dualism, dubbing it “the ghost in the machine.” The mind is in the body, but it’s not of the body. The mind controls the body, independently, “everywhere yet nowhere.” There is a related problem in identifying a “will” in the state: is the state the sort of thing that can have an active, separate will? Or is the will of the state simply the aggregate of individual goals, actions, and votes?

The branch of political theory I inhabit, public choice, holds that ghosts don’t exist, because a foundational assumption is methodological individualism. But many people have argued for a romantic, collectivist approach. I’ll start with the most famous example, to make it clearer what methodological individualism is not.

The General Will

I have to give Jean-Jacques Rousseau credit: he asked one of the best questions in political philosophy (Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 2):

In a monarchy or dictatorship, the answer is “coercion,” but subjects have no illusion of being free. Rousseau asks whether we can be “free” in a democracy, given that the majority decides for everyone.

This is the core concern of public choice: some deciding for all imposes an “externality,” a cost from choosing in groups. In a liberal democracy, the answer to Rousseau’s question is that authority comes from consent to the rules: if I agree we will decide by majority, I am bound by outcomes under those rules even when I disagree with a particular result. In such an approach, the locus of consent is the individual.

Rousseau went in another direction, however. He argued that groups have a collective will. As he answered his own question:

If I am bound by the general will, Rousseau argues that I remain free, because I have already shown, by having agreed to join in the formation of this society, that the general will is indeed what I actually want. My belief that I wanted something else is simply mistaken. The collective, “general” will is doing a lot of work there. Rousseau’s description is frankly vague:

And later:

Notice the difference in the collectivist approach. The individualist asks each person what they want; if a majority favors one option, the group decides that way, with no implied moral force. In Rousseau’s approach, each chooser must think about what is best for the collective whole. The correct answer is discovered by counting votes—and “correct” here means objectively true. Disagreement is not dissent but error; it may even be treason. Each “member is an indivisible part of the whole,” so there are no individuals allowed.

This collectivist vision is demanding: each chooser must know a great deal, and must undergo an intersubjective reconceptualization of the self. If it could work, the collective choice problem would dissolve, because individual welfare would be subsumed into group welfare. But no serious advocate of the romantic approach actually believes it can work through voting. The goal becomes approximating the outcome of the ideal collective will using other means.

That requires a magic trick: Good laws are needed to form good citizens, but good citizens are needed to recognize good laws. That’s why Rousseau added that disclaimer at the end of the passage about the general will: “all the qualities of the general will still reside in the majority…” He doesn’t believe that for a minute, at least not when it comes to us.

Someone must break into this circle from outside. The législateur is the magic trick, an extraordinary person who can see what the people should want before they are socially well-formed enough to see it themselves. The “law-maker” is described this way:

The législateur cannot be chosen by democratic procedure, since the people cannot yet judge who is fit to give them laws—that is precisely the problem the législateur solves. Defenders of the collectivist model note that the législateur only proposes; the people must ratify, saving the system from tyranny. Formal enforcement belongs to the government (Book III), carefully separated from the sovereign and the législateur. But the deeper enforcement mechanism is a collectivist civil religion (Book IV, Chapter 8), which teaches social sentiments that make citizens want to obey. Both collective self-conception and the desire to obey will be instilled through mandatory public education.

It is completely unsurprising that Marx, Lenin, Mao, and in fact every leader who wants to implement something like Rousseau’s program, see themselves as the législateur. The entire romantic idea of politics requires an organized vanguard to lead the revolution, followed by consolidation of power and compulsory education in collective self-reconceptualization. The romantic collectivist and Cuban communist revolutionary Che Guevara put it perhaps most clearly (I have added emphases, to highlight the echoes of Rousseau’s original claims):

So, to be clear: in the collectivist conception, society creates itself, and then society creates its own citizens. Society is not the result of citizen identities, but the cause. We turn now to a different perspective: individualism.

Methodological Individualism

It is important at the outset to distinguish method from ethics. Ethical individualism is a normative position; it holds that the individual is the proper locus of moral concern, that rights attach to persons and not to collectives, that “society” has no claims that override those of its members. Methodological individualism is more modest: it is an analytical commitment, a rule for how explanations of social phenomena can be constructed. It says that any complete account of what groups, institutions, or nations do must ultimately be reducible to the motivated actions of the specific human beings who compose them.

Of course, as we saw in the previous essay, ethical individualism can’t begin on a foundation of methodological collectivism. If the individual is by definition a social construction, then moral concerns about individuals must always yield to those that are said to be about society. Methodological individualism, though, starts with individuals and builds up; this approach lets us keep sight of individuals as the objects of moral concern. As we shall see, the advantage of allowing for the possibility of individual agency and diversity has a scientific advantage, because it allows for more moving parts. It may turn out that people think and act collectively, but it is a mistake to start from that premise.

The German sociologist Max Weber made this argument forcefully, noting that “[i]t is a tremendous misunderstanding to think that an ‘individualistic’ method should involve what is in any conceivable sense an individualistic system of values.” He conceded it may be “convenient or even indispensable to treat social collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations, as if they were individual persons.” But he insisted that “for the subjective understanding of action in sociology, these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and context of the particular acts of individual persons.” (Economy and Society, Part I, Chapter 1, emphasis added)

Two questions organize what follows. First: do the regular, predictable outcomes produced by state action eventually constitute something like genuine agency—such that methodological individualism needs to be qualified or supplemented? And, second, is methodological individualism perhaps best understood not as a positive theory of human action at all, but primarily as a negative claim—a denial of the logical coherence of any aggregate “will”?

Does the State as an Aggregate Have Agency?

When we observe large, durable institutions, we notice regularities that seem to transcend the particular individuals who staff them. The Roman Empire taxed grain. The American administrative state taxes income and regulates millions of transactions. Change the emperor, the president, the party in power: the fiscal apparatus persists, grows, and defends itself. Bureaucrats retire; the bureau remains and expands its mandate.

This has led some theorists to propose that entities like the state develop something analogous to preferences and intentions. We routinely speak of “the market” signaling scarcity without meaning any individual is the relevant agent. Could the same be said of the state?

Buchanan and Tullock in The Calculus of Consent insisted that collective action be understood as individual choices filtered through institutional rules. They rejected “any organic interpretation of collective activity” in which the collectivity has “an existence, a value pattern, and a motivation independent of those of the individual human beings” who compose it (Calculus of Consent, Chapter 2). Yet the constitutional economics they founded ended up explaining why “the state” tends toward expansion: incentive structures facing individual legislators, bureaucrats, and voters systematically push in that direction. The result is a pattern—not contingent on any particular officeholder—that looks for all the world like the state wants to grow.

This is a vindication, not a refutation, of methodological individualism. The regularity is explained by individual incentives, rather than by resorting to imputing a collective will to an entity that has no inherent will. But the explanation generates something uncomfortable: a structural logic so powerful that, practically speaking, it may be more useful to model “the state” as an agent with stable preferences than to attempt full disaggregation into millions of individual choices. This is the same methodological concession we make when we speak of “the firm” as a unitary profit-maximizer while knowing it is a coalition with conflicting interests.

The point is that we can acknowledge, without abandoning the individualist method, that the state produces emergent regularities useful to model at an aggregate level. But it is important to remember that these regularities are the product of individual incentive structures that can be changed by institutional reform.

The Impossibility of the General Will

The literature in public choice, and especially the technical work in social choice, raises daunting challenges to those who imagine a singular general ghost at the controls of the state. From this perspective, methodological individualism is not primarily a positive theory of human action. It is a negative claim: a denial of the coherence of any supra-individual will—any “general will” or “social welfare” that exists independently of, and takes priority over, the preferences of the individuals who compose the relevant group.

This denial does not require any particular story about how individuals actually choose. It requires only taking seriously what social choice theory has demonstrated since Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem: there is no procedure for aggregating individual preference orderings into a coherent social preference ordering that satisfies a small set of seemingly reasonable conditions. No voting rule, no welfare function, no deliberative procedure reliably produces a determinate, transitive, consistent “will of the people.”

In the previous section, I argued that it may be admissible to use an aggregate concept—"the state,” for example—provided that this labeling does no damage to explanation. Rousseau’s idea of “the general will” as an organic, actually existing concept would be very useful, if it could be shown to exist. The existence of a general will would allow us to abstract from all the messy details of democracy, asking opinions, and consulting the public. The government could simply implement the general will, and all would be well.

But if there is no coherent general will, any justification for state coercion that appeals to the “public interest,” the “common good,” or “social welfare” is either mistaken or disingenuous. It is mistaken if the claimant genuinely believes that the state can identify a coherent aggregate interest. It is disingenuous if the language of the general will is used to justify special pleadings of powerful interests.

The public choice contribution, expanding on the nonexistence of any coherent general will, is more important than is generally recognized. Suppose that a public official is honestly altruistic and wants to serve the “public interest.” That’s not difficult, it’s impossible, because no coherent public interest exists, at least not if we understand the public interest as an aggregate of individual preferences.

That is not to say that there should be no government, or that groups of people cannot create political institutions for their mutual benefit. What methodological individualism reveals is that the entire romantic project of “the ghost in the state machine” is misguided. The repeated failures of attempts to implement the Rousseauian project are not the fault of human error, because if the analysis starts, as it must, with individuals then that project cannot succeed.

There is a crisis of trust in America’s governing institutions. 

We see it in the numbers. In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Today, that number is 17 percent.  

The trust deficit represents more than dissatisfaction with policies or leaders. Democratic governance is increasingly experienced as something done to people by faraway elites, rather than something done for and by the people. Public remedies too often fail to address citizens’ concerns, or worse, inhibit their ability to act, adapt, and solve problems on their own. As trust erodes, respect for democratic norms wanes, and strongman politics gains ground. And all this creates the conditions in which a polarized media stokes the flames that have Americans actively fearing and hating one another.

At the same time, it bears remembering that the loudest, most illiberal voices in our politics and culture do not represent the views, sentiments, and norms of ordinary citizens. This reminder is especially important for those engaged in pro-democracy and bridge-building efforts.

And this is why I was thrilled to read the recently released study, Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans’ Relationships to Democracy, from ReD Associates and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.¹ While deeper understanding is needed on both sides of the political divide, this research takes on an essential piece of the challenge. The ReD/Agora report examines how ordinary conservatives—those who sit well outside the halls of power and influence—see themselves in relation to American democracy.²

As the authors acknowledge, there is no shortage of solid research on what Republicans and Democrats say they believe about various partisan issues and American democracy itself. But, as the authors note, that research “often lacks grounding in conservatives’ first-person perspectives, creating a gap between existing accounts and lived experience.” The ethnographic approach taken in this study captures how conservatives understand, in their own terms, the threats we face as a country, and why they believe their resentments—and in some cases, violations of democratic norms—are justified.³  

The report’s key findings? Conservatives within these communities operate from a moral foundation that privileges faith, family, freedom, and a commitment to their local community. These commitments represent the pre-political foundation against which conservatives assess our governing institutions and the health of American democracy. And it's these moral commitments, the report observes, that the pro-democracy community too often fails to recognize, missing opportunities to work productively across partisan divides.

Further, the report documents “a fundamental mismatch between what institutions do and what people need from them.” When people need help but the institutions designed to provide that help are “too remote, too bureaucratically impenetrable, or too rigid to respond to their specific circumstances,” they feel abandoned. And when these same institutions show up uninvited, when they intrude in ways that encroach upon the moral foundations of family, faith, or freedom, trust erodes even further. Every instance of failure or intrusion confirms the sense that “institutions have betrayed their core purposes.” What reads from the outside as anti-democratic is, from the perspective of conservatives themselves, a reasoned response to institutions that have repeatedly failed to serve and repeatedly overstepped their proper domain.

As the ReD/Agora report observes, no single episode did more to crystallize the double failure pattern than COVID. For communities organized around faith, family, freedom, and place, the pandemic became a sustained demonstration of why our governing institutions are losing the trust of ordinary Americans. On the failure side: public health authorities presented shifting guidance as settled science, declined to acknowledge uncertainty in a context that was obviously uncertain, and were slow—sometimes resistant—to follow evidence when it pointed in directions that complicated their prior commitments (p 52). On the intrusion side: mandates reached into bodies, workplaces, churches, and family life, domains that sit within the moral foundation (p 32). Perhaps most damaging was the pattern of demonization. Those who questioned official guidance, who weighed the risks differently, who chose not to comply, were not treated as worthy participants in an enormously important public debate. Instead, they were cast as selfish, ignorant, and dangerous (pp 27–28). 

Arguably, for communities that prized independent judgment as an expression of both freedom and faith, that stigmatization was its own form of institutional aggression. In their book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee lend credibility to these concerns. The failure of government health authorities to consider the financial and human costs of lockdown measures, and the active suppression of open debate about the efficacy of certain mandates and potential alternatives to lockdown measures, left a residue of distrust that no subsequent contrition has been able to fully dissolve.

All this rings eerily familiar to me. I too have conducted ethnographic research within a conservative community, namely, the coastal community of St. Bernard Parish, which sits just five miles to the southeast of downtown New Orleans. As part of a broader study of rebound and recovery in the months and years following Hurricane Katrina, our research team interviewed residents, business owners, and local leaders in St. Bernard.⁴

My co-investigator Virgil Storr and I were seeking to understand why and how individuals and communities rebuild and recover in the aftermath of catastrophic disaster. In particular, we wanted to understand which policy interventions were contributing to and impeding those efforts. And crucially, we wanted to understand how people, often with little in the way of financial resources, overcame the obstacles they confronted, from the physical and financial challenges of rebuilding wrecked homes and neighborhoods, to the frustrations and roadblocks associated with post-disaster policy and recovery assistance. 

Even though this research and the ReD/Agora report pose different questions, focus on different places, and are separated by two decades, they speak to one another. Most striking are the similar ways in which research participants described what makes their communities special and what values define them. Also familiar is the sense of neglect and betrayal that community members expressed at the hands of institutions purportedly designed to help ordinary people, and the resentments that failure leaves in its wake.

For anyone interested in rebuilding Americans’ trust in our governing institutions, and in one another, these similarities are worth examining. It’s worth recognizing the patterns that transcend our current political moment and persist across time and place. It’s worth understanding what institutional failure looks and feels like to ordinary people. And it’s worth recognizing how such failure sets the stage for and justifies, in the minds of otherwise law-abiding citizens, rule-breaking and norm violations. 

Parish Values: Family, Faith, Hard Work, and Independence

As Hurricane Katrina gathered strength in late August 2005, St. Bernard first responders and school district staff, including school superintendent Doris Voitier, prepared Chalmette High School as the community’s shelter of last resort. With no Red Cross presence in the parish, this was routine. At daybreak on Monday, August 29, it looked like the storm had spared St. Bernard. By 8:30am, everything had changed. A 20-foot tidal surge had breached the Industrial Canal levee, which protected New Orleans’s Ninth Ward and St. Bernard. As the crisis management team moved people to the second story of the building, they saw a wall of water rushing toward them. They managed to get all 250 people—including the elderly and disabled—to the second floor, but they lost most of their provisions. Soon after, hundreds more arrived, rescued from windows and rooftops by neighbors with boats. Without food, medical supplies, electricity, or bathroom facilities, it would be three days before helicopters finally arrived. 

For weeks, the entire parish remained under 8–14 feet of standing water. When the Murphy Oil Refinery ruptured, a million gallons of mixed crude oil spilled into local neighborhoods. It was the first time in American history that an entire parish or county had suffered complete devastation. Given the level of destruction, recovery and rebuilding in St. Bernard were far from certain. 

St. Bernard’s history is long and complicated. In 1780, farmers, trappers, and fishers from the Canary Islands began migrating to the area. By the time Katrina hit, Spanish surnames and a distinct accent still marked the parish as a distinct place. A predominantly white community, residents we interviewed were well aware of St. Bernard’s history of racial intolerance and exclusion. Nonetheless, when asked to describe their community prior to the storm, they described the parish as a special place: tight knit, family-oriented, and hard-working. It was common, for example, for residents to report that five, six, or more households within the same extended family all resided within Chalmette, the parish’s population center. As local school administrator Robert F. described,⁵

In St. Bernard, family, faith, and place intertwined.⁶ Residents described relationships in St. Bernard as “three generations of knowing, and going to work, school, and church with the same families.” Backyard gatherings had “a church atmosphere because we all knew each other from the church.” The intersections between faith, family, and neighborhood, in other words, meant that the church was not merely a place of worship but a primary institution through which social bonds were formed and maintained across generations.

Residents described St. Bernard as a blue-collar, working-class community, which in turn fueled an ethos of hard work. Michael F. noted that “because of the nature of the people that live in St. Bernard Parish—we’re a blue collar community—we’re not afraid of work. We know what work is.” People took pride in a willingness to do any job, no matter how difficult or dirty. Frank W., a successful hardware store owner, noted that he “had options.” He could have used the insurance money to pay off his mortgage, but instead, he put the money back into the business. With no income coming in during the months of rebuilding, Frank and his wife took to gutting houses to make ends meet. “You do what you gotta do.” Recalling that they never missed a single mortgage payment, Frank said, “You know, we’re not lazy people. We work. So you know, we’ll go sweep the street if we have to. You know, so that’s not a problem there. Both my wife and I are the same way.” 

The prevalence of skilled trades within the community held special significance in the post-disaster moment. As pastor Thomas B. remarked,

For Frank W. and other business owners, the ethic of hard work and the connection to place translated into a duty to rebuild. When asked why he chose to rebuild the business, Frank said, “This is my all, you know, this is my job. This is where I set out and have worked my entire life.”

In addition to narratives of family, faith, and hard work, and akin to the foundational value of “Freedom” that the ReD/Agora study identified, St. Bernardians saw their community as one that is fiercely independent and self-reliant. As Michael F. observed, “We in The Parish, we are a self-sufficient type of community.” David B. observes that the community “had the reputation of taking care of its own,” and that “people down here are just a very self-sufficient, industrious sort of people.” If they don’t see support coming through official channels, David observed, “they’re just gonna do it themselves.”

Narratives of Institutional Failure and Betrayal

Perhaps the most striking similarity between the two research studies is the sense that when they were needed most, formal institutions failed their community. For ReD/Agora study participants, COVID lockdowns—of churches, schools, and local businesses—represented a clear case of institutional failure and intrusion. Similarly, St. Bernard residents we interviewed universally understood their community as neglected and left behind, particularly with respect to federal and state government response to Katrina.  

Complaints about the government’s slow, complicated, and ham-handed response to Katrina’s devastation were ubiquitous across all the communities we studied. But St. Bernardians interpreted institutional failure as a consequence of the fact that St. Bernard is not part of New Orleans proper. Respondents frequently pointed to the fact that Royal Canadian Mounted Police were the first outsiders to respond to the crisis; some took it as a sign that Louisiana and U.S. officials did not care about St. Bernard or its residents. From the perspective of many people we interviewed, St. Bernard did not get the support it needed because it was a predominantly white working-class community; residents also said that greater media attention, resources, and sympathy were directed toward poor Black communities in New Orleans. As Alana F. saw it, after the storm, “you didn’t hear much about St. Bernard. Like my brother said, ‘Are you sure there’s a place called St. Bernard Parish?’ And it always amazed us that there wasn’t one house that wasn’t flooded [in St. Bernard], but you never hear that. You hear Ninth Ward, Ninth Ward, Ninth Ward. I think that makes a lot of people upset.”

It’s important to note that residents in Ninth Ward communities had a very different interpretation—that it was their status as a poor Black community that made them particularly vulnerable to predatory forces seeking to “push out” Black residents in favor of high-end developers. The point is not to assess the merits of these competing narratives. Rather, the point is to understand how conservative communities like St. Bernard make sense of their encounters with formal institutions. Perceived neglect is an important piece in that puzzle.

Schools, Local Heroes, and Institutional Failure

In the weeks that followed the storm, Doris Voitier faced a daunting challenge: getting a school back up and running. Her logic was that without a functioning school system, firefighters and sheriff’s deputies with young families would not be able to return. Without those first responders, no one else would feel safe enough to return. The surging flood waters had destroyed nearly all the school district’s facilities. The few that were salvageable were filled with mold, snakes, contaminated mud, and marsh grass. Nonetheless, on October 15, Voitier pledged that the district would have a place for any student who registered at the November 1 registration. Voitier had expected about 50 students to sign up. Instead, 703 students enrolled.⁷ The reopening of the school was the sign that many families needed to know that St. Bernard had a chance of rebounding, and that life after the storm might be livable. 

At first, Voitier was hopeful when she heard that FEMA was sending an education task force, which she assumed would provide the support and expertise she needed. Disappointment set in immediately, when, at its kickoff meeting, the 27-member task force introduced themselves. Voitier recounts:

From Voitier’s perspective, the federal agency responsible for providing relief failed, in large part because it saw its principal role as ensuring compliance, not offering relief. Voitier took care to operate within official guidelines, but doing so diverted precious time and attention. Further, the guidance kept changing. Just as a FEMA supervisor gained familiarity with the circumstances in St. Bernard, he would be rotated out and a new one rotated in. As Elizabeth B. observed, 

Resisting FEMA, in other words, was not considered a norm violation. It was considered essential in the defense of the parish and the families who called it home. 

Worse than ineffective, in the eyes of St. Bernard residents, FEMA was an outside intruder, actively working against local recovery efforts. With so many students returning, Voitier needed additional trailers to use for classroom space. At first she turned to the Army Corps of Engineers, but she was informed that it could be as late as April before they were delivered. “Now this was back in October,” recalled Voitier. 

FEMA did supply some trailers, but the doors were too narrow to meet local fire code for student use. Voitier navigated layers of bureaucracy to gain FEMA’s permission to widen the doors. Knowing that would take time and seeing an opportunity to put a trailer to good use in the meantime, she sought and received permission from a FEMA supervisor to put washers and dryers in one of the unused trailers so that the teachers living in the school’s parking lot could wash their clothes. Soon afterward, that supervisor was rotated out. Seeing how the trailer was being used, the new supervisor placed Voitier under investigation for “misuse of federal property.” FEMA eventually backed off, and nothing came of the investigation, but the sense deepened that FEMA officials were intruding upon the work of local leaders working hard to rebuild the community. 

This entire saga—the care local leaders provided to the community’s most vulnerable before the storm, crisis management during the flooding, and the heroic reopening of the school district—reinforced what members of this community saw as their core values. Theirs was a hard-working, self-reliant community that put families first. It also reinforced their perception of neglect, intrusion, and mistreatment at the hands of a faceless bureaucracy.

Lessons for Democratic Renewal

One of the most important contributions the ReD/Agora report makes is that it helps stakeholders in the democracy-building community understand the conditions under which conservative communities find norm violation justified: when institutions fail at the moment they’re most needed and when those same institutions are perceived as undermining the community’s core moral commitments, as they understand them. With respect to their encounters with FEMA, St. Bernard residents saw the actions of local leaders as common sense prevailing over pointless bureaucracy. 

Amidst an FBI corruption investigation, for example, St. Bernard Parish president Henry “Junior” Rodriguez and members of the parish council gained folk hero status for defying FEMA to get trailers to local residents. Though thousands of trailers were needed, by December 2005, FEMA had delivered only 55 to local residents. Without waiting for permission, Rodriguez made arrangements with a private contractor to deliver 6,000 trailers. Because the purchase had not been authorized, FEMA kept them locked in a storage facility. In February 2006, members of the parish council took matters into their own hands, delivering trailers to local residents without authorization. 

Debbie C. acknowledged that St. Bernard politics could sometimes be “shady and questionable” but that following the rules just wasn’t working, and that local leaders had to “get really creative” to get things done and that they had “worked day and night really hard to do what they have done, so I can’t fault anybody.” The point here is not to condone rule-breaking, much less the willful acts of public corruption of which Rodriguez was accused. Rather, the point is to acknowledge that when people are frustrated by bureaucratic delays and intrusiveness, especially when they rub against foundational values, we should not expect appeals to formal rules and procedures to carry much weight. 

And that goes to the core of what it takes to rebuild institutional trust.

The same is true of the institutional encounters the ReD/Agora report documents during COVID. Two decades apart, in communities facing very different crises, we find the same conclusion reached by the same reasoning: the institutions built to help ordinary Americans failed when they were needed most, encroached on foundational moral commitments, and consistently seemed to answer to remote bureaucratic systems rather than to the people in front of them. That conclusion, independently and repeatedly reached, is what makes the current crisis of democratic legitimacy so serious and so difficult to reverse. There is no way to “message” our way out of it.

Institutions worthy of public trust demonstrate, in their actual operations, that they exist to serve the people in front of them. In practice that means that when a Doris Voitier calls, someone picks up the phone—and that person has the authority and discretion to actually help. It means that when a community needs trailers, the measure of success is families in trailers, not paperwork filed. And it means that when federal institutions venture into the domains of family, faith, and community life, they should do so as partners drawing on local knowledge rather than as regulators hamstringing local efforts.

This has direct implications for the relationship between local and higher levels of governance. The closer institutions are to the people they serve, the more naturally these qualities emerge. But more distant layers of governance can be redesigned to replicate, even if imperfectly, the benefits of proximity—by devolving discretion to those with local knowledge, by building accountability mechanisms legible to ordinary citizens rather than to oversight bodies alone, and by measuring success in terms of outcomes for people rather than compliance with process. The FEMA task force that arrived in St. Bernard with historical preservationists and environmental compliance officers in a community devastated by a catastrophic flood and oil spill was not staffed by bad people. It was designed by a system that had lost sight of its purpose. Redesigning that system is the work that needs doing.

The test ought to hold regardless of who is doing the centralizing: a federal government that overrides local election administrators in the name of protecting democracy fails it as surely as a task force that overrode a local superintendent trying to reopen her schools.

Legitimacy, in this framework, is earned through demonstrated service—which may mean that it can be rebuilt the same way. Institutions that want to recover the trust of disaffected citizens do not need to win a values argument. They need to start by actually working—by delivering, concretely and visibly, on those things a constitutional democracy is uniquely positioned to provide, without encroaching on the domains that individuals and communities rightfully see as their own.

Liberal democracy cannot survive as an abstraction. It survives—or fails—in the lives of people who either believe its institutions serve them or have concluded that they don't. Democratic renewal does not hinge on the next election cycle or the next round of civic messaging. It requires the harder and slower work of building institutions that demonstrate—in practice and at human scale—that self-governance is something done for and by the people, not to them.

Notes

In the last decade, especially since the Brexit referendum in the UK, it’s become obvious that political systems around the world are in the midst of a significant realignment. Parties, organizations, and even demographics that once stood for free markets and small government today champion protectionism and state institutions that muscle their way into the private sphere. In a move that would have seemed unthinkable not so long ago, U.S. neoconservatives like Bill Kristol make common cause with liberal socialists and denounce what they term a “kleptocratic, autocratic cabal.” And some on the one-time granola left have joined biological essentialists on the right to oppose modern medical and pharmaceutical interventions. This has corresponded with a change in posturing by countries like Russia and China away from attempts to fit into the international liberal consensus. Today, these countries are better understood as Anne Applebaum has categorized them: as members of a movement seeking international legitimacy for autocratic governments. 

This unfamiliar political landscape can leave some of liberalism’s defenders struggling to tell left from right. Understanding the role that principles play in politics can help to ground the defense of liberalism in a constantly changing world.

Liberal politics are emergent and uncontrollable. Engagement should be thought out and deliberate, and it must reckon with our inability to control narratives, coalitions, and outcomes. Principles in politics provide coordination points around which an emergent politics can happen. That’s exactly why they’re necessary, even if they can’t provide the level of control some political actors might wish for. 

Coalitions are a part of democratic politics—a hotly contested part in times of political realignment. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and the enemy of an enemy is not always a friend. Especially among people and groups with a coherent vision for the world, there is a temptation to craft a prior, detailed, agreed-upon policy agenda for any political coalition—or to litigate the compatibility of potential partners fighting for a given political cause before the partnership can be formed. That temptation serves no one well.

In a conversation with The UnPopulist’s Shikha Dalmia, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie offered an alternative to granular, programmatic politics. What’s needed isn’t a judgement on the compatibility of policy agendas. “Inasmuch as you need something unifying, identify a set of principles.” 

This is useful advice for liberals. With a vision of where liberals ought to go, individuals and groups can identify a set of politically relevant principles that support their vision. When those principles prove also to be politically salient, they can motivate many people in many ways without specifying a single, unifying vision.

Since liberalism insists on impartial government institutions, it needs liberals who bring aspirational visions for the world into persuasive, democratic politics. Understanding the role of principles in politics provides a framework within which liberals can set aside their qualms about combining ambitious visions of how the world should work with political action. Liberal politics constrains the pursuit of ambitious visions by insisting on the equal rights of dissenters. Liberal principles are needed both within those politics and to defend the institutions and values of an open society, which keep those politics liberal and give them their salutary effects. 

What Principles Demand—and What They Don’t

Judith Shklar provides an example of how principles can influence politics in “The Liberalism of Fear.” Shklar argues for “putting cruelty first” as a principle of political morality that can unite a cluster of liberalisms, despite their being based on different premises and with different visions of an ideal world of free and equal people. 

Shklar defines cruelty as “the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter.” It is relevant to liberals because the systematic fear of institutionalized cruelty makes freedom impossible. 

What makes cruelty a public and political problem is that it is unavoidable in any politically organized society. Fear of cruelty is a result of “arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime,” as well as the “informal coercion and educative social pressures that even the most ardent anarchist theorists have suggested as acceptable substitutes for law.” The challenge presented by the liberalism of fear is therefore to minimize the capacity for cruelty that all social orders rely on. 

Putting cruelty first means prohibiting it, except in cases where the potential for some cruelty can prevent greater cruelty. While universal, enforceable rules create a power imbalance that cruelty relies on, they may nonetheless be the best option when the alternative is the dominance of the strong, left unbound by such rules. It is inherently dangerous to liberty to create state power strong enough to impose rules on powerful individuals and groups. But state capacity, particularly in a liberal democracy, provides better protection for the weak—the likely victims of cruelty—than unconstrained, arbitrary power. 

Shklar argues that the principle of minimizing cruelty means that liberals have to keep agents of the government—those who can command its monopoly on force—constrained by impartial, transparent rules. The liberalism of fear demands that the government and its agents be always on the defensive when it comes to their ability to use state power against anyone. 

What makes this a principle and not a prescription is that Shklar doesn’t make demands about how that ought to be accomplished. Indeed, Shklar spends most of her essay explaining all the demands that the liberalism of fear does not make. It does not demand that liberals aspire to become Lockean rights-defending citizens or John Stuart Mill’s free people pursuing progress. It doesn’t require belief in natural rights, utilitarian calculations, or Kantian imperatives, and it can do without Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism.

Because it is liberal, the liberalism of fear has some demands for institutions—democratic government, the rule of law, and an institutional defense of the private sphere, including through property rights—without which liberalism is “doctrinally incomplete.” Further, that fear is a basic human experience makes its demands cosmopolitan and universal. But the liberalism of fear does not provide a single motivating good, a summum bonum, towards which liberals should work, nor does it demand any particular underlying philosophy for any individual’s liberalism. To demand either would restrict its compatibility with more particular strains of liberalism. Instead, the liberalism of fear is motivated by a summum malum, an evil that everyone recognizes and would avoid if they could. 

The power to inflict cruelty inspires fear. That fear is physiological and universal; its presence makes freedom impossible, and the power that makes it possible is unavoidable. This makes the fear of cruelty an ever-present political problem, one capable of uniting liberals of many cultures and social statuses, and also one capable of explaining the history and purposes of liberalism in a way that can be relevant for the future. 

Cruelty is always relevant to liberals; what varies is its political salience. Cruelty is less politically salient for secure people in stable liberal countries. But taking freedom for granted can atrophy political empathy for the weak. This explains why the weakest and most likely victims of cruelty might not be able to provide the politically rousing energy needed to mobilize around the liberalism of fear. Shklar suggests that this failure should shame liberals who let the victimization of minorities or outsiders slide, or even make excuses for it. 

Whenever that atrophied empathy can be reinvigorated, or when enough people start to feel threatened, cruelty regains political salience. When it has salience, opposition to cruelty can draw together people with a variety of motivations and policy prescriptions.

The point of this overview is not that the liberalism of fear ought to be the motivating principle for building liberal alliances. Rather, Shklar illustrates how a political principle is something “around which liberalism can be built, especially at present.” 

With that principle illustrated, though, liberals should make putting cruelty first a core principle. Cruelty is often the intended effect of applied political power. In Shklar’s present (1989) and our own, “We say ‘never again,’ but somewhere someone is being tortured right now, and acute fear has again become [a] common form of social control.” To this, liberals should add commitments to principles of liberal neutrality against corruption and personalism; of commitment to democratic government; and of cosmopolitan universalism in our politics. These are the principles that make up our commitment to the open society. They also speak to the specific challenges liberalism faces today.

Principles Enable Coordination

In his conversation with Dalmia, Bouie offers more examples of unifying political principles that can illustrate further. One is the role that opposition to the expansion of slavery played as the organizational lodestar of the nascent U.S. Republican Party. For those first Republicans, opposition to expanding slavery was more than an internally coherent mission statement. It also provided a guiding principle and a public-facing signal to sympathetic political actors and groups. 

The principle of opposing slavery’s expansion made the Republican Party’s project legible to fellow travelers. What helped that principle seed a movement was its salience. The abuse of federal power by slave states against free states and the aggressive maneuvering by slave states to hold onto their disproportionate representation made stopping slavery’s expansion relevant to even the free northerners whose sympathy for enslaved Americans was insufficient to motivate them.

At the same time, abolitionists, for whom the Republican Party didn’t go far enough, nonetheless had a clear understanding that Republican candidates would fight the slave power. By attracting allies like abolitionists, free labor organizers, and northern opponents to overbearing southern demands for federal power, the Republican Party provided a coordination point around which groups could find one another, creating opportunities for cross-pollination and cooperation.

This is an underrated feature of clearly articulated political principles: Political participation is costly, and many citizens don’t have the resources or bandwidth to become deeply involved, even when they do have the inclination. When a group or institution stands behind a clear principle, it helps those who share that principle understand where to direct their limited resources, and creates spaces and places where sympathetic actors can meet, coordinate, and plan. When that institution is highly visible, as in the case of a successful political party, these effects are amplified, allowing the institution to influence both salience and accessibility. 

In contrast to overlapping circles of activism around a clear principle, rationalized brokerage politics that tries to impose coherence and order onto activism should be expected to drown simple principles in convoluted, overhedged, soulless policy agendas, which try not to offend anyone and so inspire no one. These processes can also be hijacked by activists skilled at this kind of work, but whose message and goals are not the ones understood by and moving to the people who need to be mobilized.

A more contemporary example emerged during heavy federal immigration enforcement action in Minneapolis in early 2026. Locals united around a principle of protecting neighbors, with a shared, cosmopolitan understanding of who qualified as a neighbor. This simple and evocative message united people within and beyond Minnesota.

Motivated by protecting neighbors, activists could take many paths. Some chose a confrontational—ultimately dangerous—approach: monitoring, recording, and spreading the word about the movement of federal agents. Others focused on the likely victims of federal power: helping kids get to school, or delivering groceries and medication to people’s homes. Those too distant for direct action created protest art, sent money to local organizations, or contacted elected representatives on behalf of the Minnesota protesters. 

A shared political principle provides a direction and a goal against which trade-offs can be understood. Motivated by this commitment, individuals and groups work in the same direction, coordinating when they can be connected and when it makes sense to do so. These efforts will also be tailored to the capacity of any given group of activists, allowing them to step in where they might otherwise be “priced out” by others’ politics. 

The ability of any political principle to act as a coordination point depends not only on the high profile organizers behind it, but on its salience with ordinary citizens. It’s here that principles-based coordination demands that liberals demonstrate some faith in their fellow citizens.

Humility and Hope

A tricky thing about political coalitions is that they are emergent. This ordinarily puts them beyond the control of any individual or institution. Thinking about which principles to support helps to reckon with the reality that we cannot control which or whether the principles we support prove salient and so able to define emerging coalitions.

There’s an old concern, illustrated by those most frustrated by the political descriptors of “left” and “right,” about flattening the richness of the beliefs held by members of political coalitions down to only a few issues. Coalitions have to elevate some concerns and set aside others to allow people to work together towards any shared goal. There is a wish to do away with such flattening by eschewing coalitions and working with anyone who shares your goals on an issue-by-issue basis. This is a fine strategy for anyone motivated by a particular issue. 

But when the motivating factor isn’t achieving change along a single margin but preventing norm or institutional collapse or facing a powerful political opponent, broader coalitions that are appropriate for facing these challenges will tend to emerge around the principles salient for the most people. It’s hard to know what those principles will be ahead of time. Shklar’s insight, along with the costliness of politics, gives us some clues. 

Actual or perceived danger to things that people value—such as threats to their freedom from fear—will tend to draw more people into political action. The issues that will mobilize less-political people are likely to be simple, intuitive, and easy to understand: Protect our Neighbors. Canada Strong. No Kings. 

Simple, imprecise, and frankly vibes-forward principles may sound awful to those concerned about political coalitions. Everyone with a cohesive idea of how government should work (what Adam Smith called a “spirit of system”) will be disappointed by the inability of emergent, pluralist political coalitions to conform to their more detailed vision. The only people who are ever completely happy with the policy positions of a political coalition are those who let their coalition set their policy positions. 

It is also worrying for those with a more conservative sensibility. Principles-only coordination lacks precision. It leaves the door open to pushes for substantial change, which can be bad as easily as good. Among those willing to entertain the possibility of dramatic political action, more conservative voices will be concerned about the relatively small influence of their personal beliefs on the political forces they seek to influence. Both worries can make forming political coalitions around mere principles pretty scary. 

As an example, imagine someone relatively happy with the status quo before the ascent of illiberal politics. They might demand, as a price of their joining the coalition, that any coalition must resist calls for the dramatic changes that broad dissatisfaction might justify. Or they might oppose allowing those changes to proceed without careful direction through prior commitment to more specific policy goals. 

Any particular person or group is certainly free to try defining their coalition ahead of time, but no one has that much control over politics. Abolitionism was the most moral of the motivating principles when the Republican Party emerged. But if abolitionism, or even just anti-slavery politics, had been enough to unite a critical mass, historians would be talking about what emerged from the abolitionist movement as the most consequential political institution of the era instead of the Republican Party. Contingent events brought them together, despite that party’s reluctance, at first, to declare for full abolition. The coalition the party had attracted was shaped by, and helped to shape, the direction the party would take. Opposition to slavery further influenced the direction of politics. But no person or group designed it. 

There’s also the small matter that politics carries on regardless of how happy we are with it. Each of us weighs the costs and benefits of getting involved and making the changes we can. We can’t simply wait for the political environment to be right before systemic change can come to foundational institutions. In 2026, those changes are already happening, and they have been for some time. The challenge for liberals in this situation isn’t to set the stage, but to catch up with the contest for control of the process, and to fight to make it a liberal process. 

Keeping that process liberal, defending the supporting structures of the open society, is our most urgent job. Without those supports, everything collapses, and it doesn’t matter anymore how unproblematic our partners, movements, or coalitions might be. 

If the freedom of individuals can be better protected by a broader and more stable coalition than can be achieved through an issue-by-issue program, that matters. If systemic change is already happening, that matters, too. Political strategy is emergent and contextual; it’s not something that can be determined a priori. 

That large-scale political action is emergent makes participation in liberal politics an exercise in both humility and hope. Emergent institutions should be familiar ground for liberalism. Social institutions that cannot be precisely directed are indispensable for a society of free and dignified people because under liberalism, no one commands or controls those institutions, nor the free people who administer them. There’s no reason political institutions, like activist groups, would be an exception.

Its emergent properties are precisely the reason that liberal democratic politics demands that we be willing to accept that sometimes we lose. We don’t get to specify the outcomes when we opt in. When we lose, we still try, as Adam Smith counselled, to bring about the best result the people can bear. 

A framework for thinking about principles as coordination points in political participation is one step toward navigating uncontrollable liberal politics. It also has implications for how liberals should think about fighting for their ideas within coalitions, a subject I turn to in my next essay.

Every year, more than $110 billion in federal student aid flows through American higher education. Almost none of it reaches a student without first passing a checkpoint most Americans have never heard of. To award Pell Grants or federal loans, a college or program must be accredited by an agency that the U.S. Department of Education recognizes. The accreditor decides which institutions may exist within the federal financing system and, in many fields, which graduates may enter a profession at all. It is one of the most consequential gatekeeping powers in American economic life, and for most of the last half-century it has operated with remarkably little outside scrutiny.

That is beginning to change, and the reason is not ideological enthusiasm, but evidence. My colleague Bryan Cutsinger and I have assembled the financial and governance records that let us ask an old public-choice question with new precision: are accreditors independent quality assurers, or have they been captured by the very interests they are supposed to discipline? The answer, documented in the accreditors’ own tax filings, is that capture is not an occasional failure of the system. In important corners of it, capture is the system.

This essay traces how that came to be, what the records show, and why the structural fusion between accreditors and the professional associations they serve is a problem for anyone who cares about open markets, intellectual pluralism, and the rule of law over the rule of organized interest. It closes with the most encouraging development in this domain in a generation: a recent negotiated AIM (accreditation innovation and modernization) rulemaking at the Department of Education that produced consensus language to begin prying the gatekeepers loose.

The final red-lined AIM draft tightens the federal test for whether an accreditor is genuinely independent of the profession it polices, so that the people who decide accreditation can no longer be selected by, or drawn from the staff of, the trade association whose members they judge, and it requires every accreditor to disclose, prominently and publicly, its relationships with any affiliated association. The new version  forbids an accreditor from acting to restrict access to a profession unless it first shows the Secretary of Education, by clear and convincing evidence, that the restriction is necessary to protect the public, that its benefits outweigh the costs of reduced access, and that no less restrictive alternative would do. And it defines restricting access to include the very moves a captured accreditor relies on: raising credentialing standards, increasing the cost or length of required training, and reducing the supply of programs in ways that happen to benefit the affiliated association. For the first time, the burden of justifying a higher gate would rest on the gatekeeper, not on the student or the new entrant shut out by it.

Accreditation in the United States began, sensibly enough, as a voluntary and private affair. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regional membership associations of colleges formed to articulate shared standards and to vouch for one another’s seriousness in an era with no common definition of what a college or a high school diploma meant. Professional fields developed their own specialized accreditors for the same reason: medicine, after the Flexner Report of 1910, then law, engineering, nursing, and eventually dozens of others. In its origins, this movement sought a genuinely liberal, bottom-up solution to an information problem. Membership was voluntary, the standards were the profession’s own, and an institution that disliked an accreditor’s judgment bore only reputational consequences.

The decisive change came when the federal government decided to use this private machinery for a public purpose. The Higher Education Act of 1965 anchored a system in which eligibility for federal student aid still runs through accreditation by a federally recognized agency. A voluntary reputational signal has become a compulsory financial gate. The accreditors did not have to seek out their members for review; their members now had to come to them, because the alternative was exclusion from the dominant source of higher-education revenue in the country. What had been a club became a tollbooth.

This is the hinge on which the whole story turns. A voluntary standard-setter that loses its members’ confidence loses its members. A federally deputized gatekeeper does not. Once accreditation became the precondition for federal funds, the ordinary market discipline that would justify private standard-setting evaporated, and the accreditor acquired exactly the feature that public-choice economists warn about: durable power over entry, insulated from the consequences of misusing it.

Over the following decades, two further dynamics hardened the arrangement. First, in profession-specific fields, the accreditor and the trade association representing incumbent practitioners frequently turned out to be the same people, or nearly so, often sharing boards, staff, revenue, and in some cases a single physical address. The body certifying that a program adequately trains new entrants to a profession was operated by the established members of that profession, who have an obvious interest in the supply, prestige, and price of their own credential. Second, the requirements themselves usually ratcheted upward over time, and almost never downward. Each new mandated course, standard, or required credential raised the cost of producing a graduate and of becoming one, with the burden falling on students and on any would-be competitor trying to offer a leaner, cheaper, or simply different path to the same competence.

George Stigler’s classic 1971 account of regulatory capture described precisely this equilibrium: regulation is frequently acquired by an industry and operated for its benefit. What makes accreditation a textbook case is that the regulator and the industry need not even collude across a table. In the captured corners of the system, they are designed to be joined at the hip.

Capture is easy to assert and hard to prove. The research I have been doing with economist Bryan Cutsinger has moved the conversation from anecdote to measurement, using sources that are difficult to wave away because the accreditors and associations produced them themselves.

The starting point is the IRS Form 990, the annual return that tax-exempt organizations must file. Assembled into a panel across years and organizations, these filings let us trace the financial and governance entanglements between accrediting agencies and their affiliated associations: shared officers and directors, payments flowing between the two entities, common management, and overlapping addresses. From these we build what we call a Regulatory Capture Index, which is a composite measure of how structurally fused a given accreditor is with the association whose members it accredits. The point of an index is to make capture comparable: to say not merely that entanglement exists, but to rank where it is severe and where it is mild.

What the index reveals is not a handful of bad actors, but a modal arrangement. Across thirty-two programmatic accreditor–association pairs, twenty-eight are not meaningfully separate from the association whose programs they accredit. Sixteen are the same tax-filing entity as the association, sharing a single Employer Identification Number; another twelve are unified bodies in which the membership organization and the accreditor are constitutionally identical. Twenty-eight of the thirty-two share a registered street address. Only four pairs in the entire sample maintain genuinely separate legal identities. In the health professions, accreditation is the gateway to a state license, and fifteen of the accreditors we examined sit at the maximum value of the index in every year we observe.

That last point matters more than any single number. We built the index across a seven-year panel precisely to see whether capture ebbs and flows with personnel or politics. It does not. The mean score moves by less than two-hundredths of a point across the entire period, and no accreditor in the sample changes its structural category at all. Capture here is not a behavior that good people can resolve by trying harder. It is welded into charters, tax filings, and shared payrolls, which is exactly why it persists regardless of who sits on a given board in a given year.

An accreditor structurally embedded within the profession it oversees cannot be a reliable independent check on that profession’s standards. This is not because its staff are dishonest, but because the institution is built to serve the incumbents it is supposed to discipline. The conflict is in the architecture, and no individual’s good faith can engineer it away.

The financial picture tells the same story from another angle. For the great majority of accreditor-institution pairs, there is simply no arm’s-length transaction to examine, because the accreditor’s revenues, expenses, and staff are line items inside the association’s own return. Where the two entities do file separately, the linkages surface anyway. In one case, an accreditor’s parent association reported a single-year management fee of more than $3.5 million flowing through the accreditation relationship, which is roughly a tenth of that association’s total revenue. And the associations behind these accreditors are not minor players: the twenty parent organizations we could fully observe command more than $600 million in combined annual revenue and over $1.1 billion in assets. That is the financial weight sitting behind the gate.

The pattern is starkest in legal education and in the licensed health professions, such as dentistry, nursing, dietetics, and physical therapy, where graduation from an accredited program is a precondition for entering the field at all. In the most tightly fused arrangements, the sole national accreditor of an entire profession’s training programs is not even separately incorporated. It operates as a commission or division of the trade association representing that profession’s established practitioners, sharing the association’s tax identity, staff, and headquarters. The body that decides which new programs may train the next generation of practitioners is, in legal and financial substance, the incumbent profession itself. Whatever expertise that arrangement supplies, and it does supply real expertise, it cannot supply independence, because there is no independent entity there to begin with.

 A careful reader will ask the obvious next question: does this structure produce worse behavior, that is, fewer sanctions for weak programs, tighter restrictions on new entrants, or higher costs? Our paper is deliberately disciplined on this point. It documents the structural conditions under which capture is likely; it does not yet measure the downstream decisions. Connecting the capture index to adverse-action rates, to workforce supply, and to the price of credentials is the central task of ongoing work. But the structural finding stands on its own, because in regulation we do not normally wait for the damage before we object to the design. We do not let an auditor hold equity in the firm it audits and then reassure ourselves with a conflict-of-interest policy. The burden of proof should run the other way.

 Put the legal, financial, and governance evidence together and the conclusion is hard to avoid: across most of the system, the accreditor and the association are not two parties in a relationship. They’re one entity wearing two hats. The independence the federal framework assumes is, for the modal accreditor, simply absent by design.

It would be possible to treat all of this as a narrow question of administrative tidiness. It is not. Accreditor capture restricts freedom along four distinct dimensions, and naming them is the surest way to see why the problem cuts across the usual political alignments.

It is, first, a constraint on economic freedom. An accreditor controlled by licensed practitioners that sets ever-higher educational requirements is often functioning as an occupational-licensing cartel, except with federal recognition, and therefore federal enforcement, standing behind it. The predictable results are the ones that cartels always produce: restricted entry, higher prices, protected incumbents. Students pay more and wait longer to enter a field; employers face an artificially constrained supply of qualified workers; and the entrepreneur who could train competent practitioners faster or more cheaply is shut out before serving a single student.

Standards do sometimes rise because a field genuinely advances. New science, new technology, and entirely new areas of practice can each warrant more training than before, and a requirement that looks like a barrier may in fact be an improvement. The difficulty is that, from the outside, a protective ratchet and a genuine upgrade can look identical, because both raise the cost of entry. To tell them apart, we must ask three questions of structure:  Who sets the requirement, and do they profit from the scarcity it creates? Is the structure defended with evidence that graduates or the public are measurably better off, or only with the authority of the profession? And does the standard ever move downward when new methods make a leaner path to the same competence possible? A genuine quality regime can answer these questions. A captured one cannot, because its requirements move in one direction only, are written by the incumbents who benefit from scarcity, and are justified by assertion rather than demonstrated outcomes. This is why the remedy is not for regulators to second-guess every standard, but to shift the burden of proof. Before an accreditor may raise the gate, it should have to show that the change serves students and the public rather than the people already inside. A real improvement can meet that test. A cartel’s ratchet cannot.

It is, second, a constraint on intellectual freedom. When an accreditor is governed by an ideologically or methodologically homogeneous professional community, it tends to impose that community’s single framework on every program it touches. A graduate trained to understand her field in only one sanctioned way is not better educated; she is more narrowly educated. Intellectual monoculture enforced through accreditation is both a workforce-readiness failure and an epistemic harm, precisely the kind of harm that competition among approaches is supposed to prevent.

It is, third, a constraint on cultural freedom. The institutions most likely to offer genuinely different models, such as new delivery formats, nontraditional structures, or faith-based or mission-driven curricula, are exactly the ones an entrenched accreditor has the least incentive to welcome and the most structural power to exclude. Pluralism in higher education can die, not by prohibition, but by gatekeeping.

It is, fourth and most fundamentally, a constraint on political freedom, in the older sense of governance under rules rather than under the discretion of organized interests. For decades, the process by which accreditation standards were set offered almost no meaningful check on the agencies’ self-dealing. Requiring an accreditor to offer clear and convincing justification before it restricts access to a profession is not a partisan maneuver. It is the ordinary logic of any system that prefers the rule of law to the rule of whoever currently holds the gate.

None of these are sectarian commitments. They are the structural preconditions of an open society, and the case for addressing accreditor capture is strongest precisely because it does not depend on agreeing about anything else. The classical liberal should see an entry-restricting cartel with federal power behind it. The modern liberal should see a closed guild raising the price of opportunity and narrowing who gets to walk through the door. Both are right, and they are describing the same building.

Diagnosis is cheap; durable reform is not. The encouraging news is that reform has now moved from the seminar to the regulatory record.

This spring I spent the better part of two multi-day sessions in a ground-floor conference room at the U.S. Department of Education, seated with representatives of universities, accrediting agencies, student advocates, workforce organizations, and federal officials. This was the Department’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization negotiated rulemaking, and I served as a representative of workforce needs. The form of the reform matters here as much as its content.

Most federal rules are written through notice-and-comment: an agency drafts a proposal, publishes it, collects written comments, and issues a final rule. It is legitimate, but it is asymmetric, because well-organized interests with sophisticated legal teams can dominate the comment record, which is, of course, exactly how captured arrangements perpetuate themselves. Negotiated rulemaking works differently. The agency seats the affected parties at one table and asks them to negotiate the actual regulatory language together, with the aim of genuine consensus that every participant can accept. When consensus is reached, it carries unusual legitimacy. This is not because everyone is fully satisfied, but because the language reflects real give-and-take among parties with sharply different interests.

After nine days of negotiation, the committee reached consensus on changes to the regulatory framework governing accrediting agencies. The consensus draft addresses structural separation between accreditors and affiliated associations, requires public disclosure of organizational relationships, establishes a public-interest test before an accreditor may restrict access to a profession, protects academic freedom and viewpoint diversity in faculty evaluation, strengthens research integrity requirements, and builds in timely due process for accreditation decisions.

Read against the institutional history, the logic of those provisions is unmistakable. Structural separation and mandatory disclosure attack the fusion at the heart of capture. They are the regulatory equivalent of forbidding the auditor to hold equity in the firm under audit. The public-interest test inserts a check exactly where, for half a century, there was none: at the moment the gatekeeper moves to raise the gate. And the academic-freedom and due-process provisions guard against the monoculture and arbitrariness that fused governance tends to produce. These are not provisions that favor one vision of higher education over another. They reduce the structural advantage of incumbency and reopen the system to competition in quality, in approach, in intellectual diversity, and in price.

I will not pretend the process was frictionless. Negotiated rulemaking demands listening to people you disagree with, accepting language less precise than you would prefer, and trusting that the architecture of a rule matters more than any single clause. But it produces something that neither litigation nor conventional rulemaking reliably generates: a shared, concrete understanding of the stakes among the very parties who must live with the result. A rule built that way is more likely to be workable, more likely to survive legal challenge, and more likely to achieve its purpose in practice.

It is tempting to dismiss accreditation as an administrative backwater. That would be a mistake. A system that began as a voluntary, bottom-up answer to an information problem was, over half a century, converted by federal funding into a compulsory tollbooth. And in its profession-specific corners, that tollbooth was quietly handed to the incumbents who profit from keeping the road narrow.

The records now let us say this with confidence rather than suspicion: the structural conditions for capture are not occasional; they are the norm, and they are a feature of the system’s design rather than an accident of personnel. Whether that structure also produces measurably worse decisions is the question the next phase of this research is built to answer. The reform that emerged this spring will not dissolve these dynamics overnight. But it will establish, for the first time in a generation, that the gatekeepers can be required to justify the gate. For a free society, that is the right place to begin.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, liberal democracy seemed globally ascendant. Yet in recent years, that trend has reversed, as countries across the globe have experienced downturns in measures of democracy. Leaders from Turkey to Venezuela have amassed ever greater degrees of power, a phenomenon that Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett, writing in the Journal of Democracy, blame squarely on personal political ambition and behavior, not on the failure of liberal democracy to deliver a good life to its citizens. Such leaders have used their new powers to dismantle institutions of accountability and even assert control over the outcomes of elections, a process known as democratic backsliding. This has played out in countries as distinct as Bangladesh, Hungary, and the Philippines. 

Ebbs and flows in democratization are not historically unique. What is extraordinary about this latest wave of backsliding is its effect on developed democracies, especially the United States, which has long been a global paragon of democratic strength and stability. In this context, analysts have offered a popular contrast between it and Brazil: As the United States shows signs of continual democratic decline, Brazil’s democracy has displayed resilience in the face of assaults on its institutions. 

Brazilian Resiliency

When Jair Bolsonaro first ran for the Brazilian presidency in 2018, observers both inside and outside Brazil regularly compared him to Donald Trump. Bolsonaro eagerly leaned into these parallels with some in the media calling him the “Trump of the Tropics.” Bolsonaro’s style closely mimicked Trump’s right-wing populism, and in many cases, he copied Trump’s policies. Ahead of Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, Bolsonaro insisted the results would likely be fraudulent and spread misinformation suggesting the country’s voting machines could not be trusted. After his electoral defeat, many of his supporters rioted, attacking government buildings in the capital that drew comparisons to the January 6th insurrection in the United States. Revelations then emerged that Bolsonaro and members of his administration had plotted a coup attempt to keep him in power. In the wake of this political turmoil, Brazil became the subject of international praise for its willingness and ability to hold Bolsonaro and his supporters legally accountable for their actions.

While it’s true that the recently passed “Dosimetry Law” lessened the sentences of Bolsonaro, the coup plotters, and the rioters, that law itself was the product of a democratic compromise, and it was passed via the existing legislative process. As we shall discuss, it therefore amounts to further evidence of Brazil’s democratic resilience. Brazil’s liberal institutions are the secret to its democratic success, and the United States would be wise to learn this lesson.

Constraints on Executive Authority in Brazil

Bolsonaro’s successful 2018 presidential campaign focused on endemic corruption, which was certainly real: Corruption claimed national attention after the famed “Operation Car Wash” revealed a massive money laundering and bribery scheme centered on state-owned enterprises. 

Once in power, though, Bolsonaro argued that political negotiation and coalition-building were also manifestations of corruption. As is typical in Brazil’s multiparty system, Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party (PSL) did not win a majority in Congress but instead held a small plurality of the seats. Defying usual practice, the PSL refused to form a coalition with any other parties. 

That refusal immediately complicated its legislative prospects. Bolsonaro opted for a confrontational approach to Congress, arguing that his mandate entitled him to enact his agenda without a coalition. He cast objections from Congress or the judiciary as the institutional manifestations of corruption, frustrating the will of the people. He relied heavily on executive actions to enact his agenda and encouraged popular mobilizations to pressure the other branches of government into compliance. He then lambasted members of the other branches who opposed his efforts as enemies of the people or obstacles to national well-being. 

Despite the public pressure campaign, Brazilian liberal institutions successfully prevented Bolsonaro from consolidating authoritarian power and minimized the damage to democracy. Several factors contributed to this durability.

First, Brazil’s multiparty system meant that many right-leaning parties could diverge from Bolsonaro on key issues without endangering their re-election prospects. Free from the all too common negative partisanship of the American two-party system, Brazilian politicians could oppose the president’s actions without being accused of supporting ideological opponents. While the parties may be weaker in a multiparty system, the system itself proved a stronger check against an ambitious executive.

Second, executive action in Brazil is limited in scope and duration. Medidas provisórias, or provisional measures, allow a president to make immediate changes to law. But Congress is constitutionally required to consider the measures within 60 days, with one possible 60-day extension. Congress can either approve the measure, with or without amendments, and return it to the president for his signature, like a standard bill, or, if no action is taken, the measure expires and cannot be reissued within the same legislative session. Despite Bolsonaro issuing an unprecedented number of provisional measures, roughly 40 percent of them were rejected or allowed to expire, a far higher rate than that of his predecessors.

Finally, Brazil’s judicial system responded rapidly. The Supreme Federal Court of Brazil frequently stepped in to block unconstitutional actions or provisional measures from the administration. At the same time, Brazil’s electoral justice system, a separate department of the executive branch that oversees elections and investigates electoral malfeasance, pushed back on election misinformation and conducted investigations and prosecutions of election-related crimes. Importantly, Brazil’s judicial system operates on a civil law tradition that allows courts to intervene immediately on constitutional issues at the behest of any of several constitutionally approved stakeholders (Congress, political parties, the attorney general, etc.) without the need for standing or a case decision in a lower court, as needed in the U.S. system.

The Dosimetry Law

Some observers argue that Brazil’s recently passed “Dosimetry Law” threatens to upend the narrative around the country’s democratic resilience. In late April, Brazil’s Congress overrode a presidential veto to pass this legislation, which significantly reduced the legal penalties on the rioters, as well as Bolsonaro and his fellow coup plotters. While this action raises concerns about Brazil’s overall democratic strength, the way that the sentencing reduction came to pass, namely through the legislative process and coalition building, should be seen as further evidence of democratic resilience. 

Despite concerns, the Dosimetry Law should not be seen as a setback. Brazil’s checks and balances remain unaffected. In fact, the law is currently on hold as the Supreme Court considers its constitutionality. Furthermore, the original version of the bill, introduced by Bolsonaro’s supporters in Congress, called for blanket amnesty. In a bit of irony, just building a pro-Bolsonaro supermajority coalition to pass the law and sustain it over presidential veto required significant concessions, of a sort Bolsonaro had refused while in power. We may agree or disagree with the motivations or effects of the Dosimetry Law, but it is superior to a blanket amnesty issued via executive whim, as seen in the United States for January 6th offenders. Not only did the congressional process prevent the most extreme version of the proposal from passing, but it also granted added legitimacy, having received the support of the vast majority of Brazilian elected officials across a broad ideological spectrum.

Lessons for the United States

Brazil’s experience holds three key lessons for political reform in the United States. This should come as no surprise; Brazil’s liberal institutions are not the product of inherent superiority, but of hard-earned lessons in a country that, within living memory, suffered under a brutal military dictatorship.

1. Brazilian political actors within Congress remained faithful to their ideological leanings while checking executive overreach from their side of the political spectrum. American legislators should have a similar ability.

In Brazil’s case, proportional representation for the lower house of Congress, and the multiparty system it produces, enabled a dissent from across the political spectrum. There are several electoral reforms that could be employed in the United States to allow for greater congressional independence, even if they do not immediately or ever produce a multiparty system. Chiefly, the United States could also implement proportional representation for the House of Representatives, which would likely produce a multiparty setup over time. All-candidate primaries, particularly like those in Washington state, where candidates choose their own party preferences, would not only give voters greater influence over who appears on the general election ballot, but they could also foster competition among different factions within the same ideological camp. Reforms like these, even without immediately creating multiple parties, could help break the paralyzing dichotomy currently at play in American politics, where members of Congress within the same party inherently sink or swim together. As seen in Brazil, more flexibility in partisan identity could strengthen the U.S. Congress’s role as a check on the executive branch.

2. Executive action should require congressional involvement.

Increasingly, the United States is governed, not by legislation, but by executive orders and administrative rulemaking. While Congress has the authority to repeal these actions, it is never required to address them, and simply ignoring them may be the easiest path politically. For years, members of Congress have proven more than willing to hide from responsibility and instead shift power to the president. Reform should place hard deadlines on unilateral executive actions unless they receive congressional approval. This problem is not new, and some members have introduced bills to this effect in the past, though Congress does not appear eager to push them through.

Though it’s more difficult than reining in executive orders, Americans should also reconsider the president’s enumerated powers under the U.S. Constitution. Presidential pardons have become more commonplace and more concerning. They now act as a shield for family, friends, and loyalists; presidential pardons simply don’t ensure impartial justice, as the Framers had intended them to do. Similarly, the line between the president’s power over foreign policy and the congressional power to declare war has become increasingly blurry. Though it would likely require constitutional amendments, greater congressional involvement on pardons and military actions would serve as a stronger check on a power-hungry executive. Brazil’s experience with its sentencing reduction law suggests that meaningful congressional involvement improves outcomes and limits damage.

3. The judicial branch should be empowered to react quickly and decisively to potential executive violations of the Constitution

American presidents are increasingly willing to push the limits of their authority, often daring the courts to intervene and relying on the fact that their actions will be difficult to reverse by the time legal challenges are resolved. This needlessly burdens the Supreme and lower courts, and it makes them the objects of political gamesmanship and ire. Political capture of the nation’s highest court in particular degrades its image among the American public. Congress should use its authority to expedite constitutional questions around the use of executive power to the Supreme Court and require quicker decisions in these cases. Doing so would not only empower the third branch to more effectively check the executive but also discourage future presidents from pursuing this institutionally destructive path.

Conclusion

Even as countries around the world, including the United States, have experienced democratic decline in recent years, Brazil has demonstrated that institutions can make a country resilient in the aftermath of direct assaults on democracy. The central lesson from Brazil’s experience is that liberal institutions, especially a functioning system of checks and balances, are the key to sustaining democracy. The U.S. Constitution is perhaps the most successful foundational political document in human history. However, that success is neither self-sustaining nor guaranteed. To ensure future success, the United States should learn three key lessons evident in Brazil’s experience. Political actors outside the executive branch need institutional space to successfully serve as a check, executive action should require congressional approval, and the judicial system should be amended to ensure rapid review of constitutional questions. By recommitting to liberalism, the United States can restore its democracy.

I live in Hawaiʻi, where I grow my own pineapples. Never for profit; it’s strictly a hobby. Our family eats maybe a dozen a year, and one little bed gives us all that we need.

Talking about pineapples in Hawaiʻi can be awkward. There’s a history, and it’s not a sweet one. 

Sanford B. Dole was a member of the American-led clique that, in 1893, overthrew the government of Hawaiʻi. That government posed no strategic or economic threat to the United States. The United States already enjoyed free trade with the islands, and it already held exclusive rights to a naval base at Pearl Harbor. 

Meanwhile, the government of Hawaiʻi had developed into a constitutional monarchy with uniquely Hawaiian characteristics, some of which remain important in state and international law today. Hawaiʻi deserved much better than it got from Mr. Dole, and he’s rightly reviled out here. Even growing pineapples can still be a bit embarrassing. They aren’t truly Hawaiian, and I know it.

I wonder, though, what King David Kalākaua would have thought of that. Today we usually remember Kalākaua as a cultural hero, which he was. Nicknamed the Merrie Monarch, he re-legalized hula dancing, reviving an indigenous art form that the missionaries had suppressed. But Kalākaua also toured the world to entice contract laborers to Hawaiʻi, where they would suffer for the sake of the pineapple—and for its big-money plantation brother, the sugar cane. 

The same dynamics that today put migrant workers at a severe disadvantage in the Middle East were then at work in Hawaiʻi: Your boss is close, and the people who might protect you are far away. Your boss controls not just the means of production, but the means of consumption, too, in the form of the company store. If you can’t pay, he’ll be quick to make you a loan. And he has powers over the legal system that you can’t hope to match. Before the coup, Sanford Dole served on the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.

Capitalism can still work in conditions like that, but it can’t work well for you. Plantation life was predictably hard.

It remains a troublesome history for Hawaiian nationalists, among others. Throughout the nineteenth century, the monarchy collaborated with the planters, and there are no clean hands in that story. Some might like to blame the Americans all alone, but they’d be wrong.

The Hawaiian monarchy wasn’t a perfect government, and I’m no romantic about monarchies in general. But the overthrow wasn’t about better governance. It was about sugar, and pineapples, and about how to squeeze ever more money from them, ever more securely. Becoming a U.S. territory stood to benefit Dole and his conspirators, and eventually it did. 

Contemporary mainland accounts of the islands were apt to mix blatant, matter-of-course racism with equally blatant, matter-of-course appeals to philanthropy. We may wonder how those sentiments could coexist in a single brain, and they make for some awful reading. Even among the bystanders, we find few to cheer for.

No matter how often we see it, there’s something in our minds that revolts at that ambivalence. Whatever our ideologies may be, we all want heroes and villains. We all want friends and enemies. We all want moral clarity, and not just in some book or seminar paper. We want our moral clarity to live and breathe and walk and talk. Usually it doesn’t.

To repeat: there were no clean hands among the founders of Hawaiʻi’s plantations. But Grover Cleveland—a flawed president, still better than many—happened to be serving in 1893. Cleveland was a proud anti-imperialist, and when the clique petitioned Washington, he told them to pound sand. Hawaiʻi and the United States had a peace treaty; Cleveland informed Congress that he would abide by it, and he did.

In 1898, one of our lesser presidents, William McKinley, made Hawaiʻi a U.S. territory. McKinley was an imperialist; expanding the land under American rule mattered a lot to him, evidently more than peace or good relations with the islands. Granted, the islands would vote overwhelmingly for statehood in 1959, and Hawaiian separatism remains a fringe position today, but it’s hard to find much love out here for President McKinley. I can certainly understand that. He closed a door forever. Behind it are possibilities that still tantalize. 

This all raises a host of questions: What if I care about the history, and about how the symbolism seeps into my actions? How should a well-intentioned person act amid all that moral compromise? What if I care about my neighbors, and about their feelings? 

The paradoxes only grow when we look to the larger economic forces at play. Suppose I want commercial pineapple harvesters to enjoy good lives today. Most of them aren’t in Hawaiʻi anymore; they’re in Costa Rica. Should I import my pineapples from them? (Import pineapples? To Hawaiʻi?  Surely not.) But to avoid eating imported pineapples impoverishes Costa Rican field hands. It might take away the only work they have, such as it is. 

When I grow at home, that’s what I’m doing, if only to a tiny degree. Buying from my neighbors, who sell at the farmers’ markets, achieves the same end; the descendants of plantation workers here in Hawaiʻi are usually much wealthier than today’s Costa Rican field hands. Yet if I were to return to the globalized market, I might just fatten some Costa Rican landlords. I want to ask: Where are the limits to any of these intuitions? Immanuel Kant was right that a good life takes a measure of altruism, but that to calculate its proportion is impossible. 

The pineapple recapitulates modernity. It’s a symbol of luxury turned mass consumer product. It’s also a tangled moral mess, and beneath it, there’s a crime. My friends to the left sometimes say that there’s no innocent consumption under capitalism. Certainly not, if our memory’s long enough. As my friend Paul Musgrave recently put it:

Nowhere is his observation more apt than in contemporary Hawaiʻi, which is multicultural and pluralist in ways that the mainland can seldom approach. We all drop a little context out here. We’re all a bit of a muddle, and we don’t really need to pick at the symbolism in search of an imagined purity. We can thrive in the productive ambiguity. Not every literal pineapple hides a crime. 

Still, it’s hard to go broke recommending tyrannically clean lines and pat political answers. Plenty of people still want those answers, even if, when we follow them long enough, we find a bloodbath.

That’s more or less the trajectory of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt’s thinking. For Schmitt, “the political” is a distinct sociological category, and it arises when some value or cause “is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy,” as he wrote in The Concept of the Political. Friends are determined to cooperate; enemies are determined to kill each other. For Schmitt, drawing the lines between friend and enemy is the distinctive work of politics.

To Schmitt, “the political” isn’t about any specific consideration at all. The political, in his sense, is only about “the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national, economic, or of another kind… The real friend-enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely religious, purely economic, purely cultural criteria.” 

As we online folk might say, discourse eventually becomes politics, and politics is about whom to kill. Killing is awful, but at least it’s strong and decisive. That’s the heart of the Schmittian appeal: To embrace violence is to say goodbye to your agonizing moral ambiguity. You’ll never need to sweat being wrong in the details when you’re wrong in bulk and goose stepping about it.

But this is all a bit overdrawn. Much of ordinary life never approaches the friend-enemy distinction, and it’s best that it doesn’t. A full life isn’t going to be a fully consistent life, with every decision, every accoutrement, both materially and symbolically flawless. Private spaces will hopefully always exist to tolerate the ambiguities of life. Some affordances are worth it; some certainly aren’t, and the lines can be hard to draw. It’s why we set everyone free to make their own mistakes. It’s also why we value forgiveness.

We enter a morally complicated territory whenever we choose not to fight, but to associate, produce, and trade. Yes, the terms of those acts matter. We should talk about them, even when they’re appalling, and I have. We should bargain about them, and we all do. We should critique them, and the work of critique never ends. 

It’s not wrong to seek to improve our material conditions—and these exact mechanisms are how we do it: production, specialization, gains from trade, and iterative improvements to each. It can’t be said often enough. Gradually, decade by decade, century by century, the world has grown richer. 

That’s a feat Schmitt’s politics could never accomplish, and to which it’s fundamentally corrosive. Nor could the crony capitalism of the planters bring an equitable prosperity to the masses. What’s done it so far? Fighting, working, and contriving to have ever weaker masters, ruling ever fewer realms of life, with ever easier exits. That process is unfinished, and it must continue. (Would you kill all the masters, wherever you find them? That rule tends to strengthen the principle of mastery. It also makes killers our masters.)

There are big, technical questions about how best to free humanity from the curse of one person’s dominion over another, but those are for another essay. The ambiguity of being a consumer in a mixed moral universe is terrifying. We who hope to continue enriching humanity should probably talk about it more often. Markets enrich—yes, they usually even enrich the least well off—but they also put us in constant tension with one another about how to spend all that new income.

To engage in merely self-interested market behavior is to set aside the political, at least for a while. The objection that all things are political is surely wrong as to Schmitt’s idea of the political. And even in ordinary usage, it’s too glib by half: If we went down that road with any consistency, we’d soon find that all things were forbidden to the scrupulous. Dirty hands have inevitably touched them, and we must abstain.

We don’t generally do that. Instead, we compromise. We don’t earn our daily bread by a show of valor, by defeating our hated enemies, whether symbolically or literally, and that fact shames and annoys us. No, we earn our bread through marginal improvements in global efficiency—through the very thing that sent pineapple production to Costa Rica—and who asked for that?

Because markets enrich, we have new resources to devote to sharpening our moral sentiments, to expressing them through wide-ranging economic commitments and economic renunciations, which the modern consumer can a lot more easily afford. Some of those sentiments will be good; others, bad, and it’s often genuinely hard for a well-intentioned person to know how to act morally in a prosperous, consumer-oriented capitalism. The Good Place is a brilliant work of art simply for articulating this fact about the modern condition, and for treating its motley heroes with empathy all the same. The rules are too complicated, and too unknowable, for all of us to emerge unscathed, in everyone else’s eyes. 

It’s important to look at this unfathomable situation as squarely as we can manage. I’ve shown you some of the history of Hawaiʻi because it so clearly illustrates the ambiguities of living in a world that’s rapidly but unevenly getting better. Hawaiʻi’s history also makes a good example because, for you, it’s probably new. It doesn’t get slotted into well-worn arguments that you’ve already had with others on social media. It cuts against the left and the right in ways that I think are valuable. It defies the pat narratives. 

And yet I hope that much of it will be familiar, in a way. There are pineapples all over the place, if we just learn to see them. They’re the reminders of the uncomfortable past that we all share, and of the work yet to be done. As symbols, they’re never without their problems. Yet we also live in the material, sensuous world—a world of costs, benefits, ledger books, and growing options for one’s unaccountable personal tastes.

We don’t have an idealized capitalism, free from cronies and self-dealing. An idealized traditional or indigenous society isn’t hidden away in some mountain, waiting for the right moment to reemerge. If you can see the folly in either of those, then you should already know that technological accelerationism won’t resolve the tension for us either. We must get better at pluralism, even as it remains uncertain and lonely. Pluralism demands that we make risky, painful, low-payoff private judgments. But it’s not without reward. Do it right and you’ll never have to goose step at all. 

As Adam Smith knew, we all eat, “not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker… but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love...” Let’s put a sharper point on that: You and I both eat through the labor of people whose hands we might decline to shake if we just knew a little more about them. Their sentiments are not our own. Maybe they have bad politics. Or they’re kooky about health and wellness. Or they’re racists. In the vast, anonymous network that feeds us all, there are certainly quite a few people like that. If you asked them, they’d have a litany of bad things to say about us, too.

We might not be wrong to decline that handshake. And yet they feed us, even as they despise us. Boycotts? They’re always possible; they only work well, though, when they’re rare, and this is the reason why. Boycotts seek to wall off a part of the extended economic order—an order that’s usually inclined to integrate. Through our anonymized exchanges, we usually choose to feed our nominal enemies. 

Market behavior is a blessedly hypocritical conspiracy against our mutual hatreds, in favor of our self-interests, regardless of where they may lie. We flaunt our hatreds online, and we shed them at the grocery store. No, it’s not a circle of friends all caring for one another. It’s not even doux commerce; we won’t necessarily learn to appreciate each other any better than we already do. The system will keep right on enriching nearly all of us. Many will still use that extra wealth to broadcast our hatreds, and, despite those hatreds, our living standards will probably continue to rise.

The process of feeding ourselves in hatred can go on indefinitely, or at least until we find some better use for our surplus resources. Let’s hope that we do. In the meantime, markets are like a clever trick that we’ve all played on the lower parts of our psyches, a trick that keeps the friend-enemy distinction functionally, unobtrusively at bay. The alternatives are stark: We extend, as a rule, some forms of social trust, even to the unworthy, and always to the ambiguous. If not, we starve.

You may have heard it before: Fix your heart or die. But I’d add: If you simply can’t do either, fake it and muddle through. To some degree, just about everyone already does. 

The other day, I texted my youngest a reminder to take out the trash. In response I received, “sit down theodore.” 

I was, to say the least, confused.

It turns out that “sit down theodore” had evolved as a complicated joke with a friend about the word “noted.” First it became “no ted.” That transformed into “stop it, teddy” then into “enough, teddy.” That morphed into “sit teddy” and finally “sit down theodore.” The joke became so ingrained in their texting conversations that they set the autocorrect feature on their phones to transform the word “noted” into “sit down theodore” whenever they typed it. 

All of this explained the text I received, but it also got me thinking about one of the most important aspects of a liberal society—spontaneous order. 

Spontaneous order, which is the idea that order can and does arise from the aggregation of many small human interactions without a grand plan or design to direct it, is not a new concept. 250 years ago, Adam Smith described spontaneous order when he wrote of the way trade can improve the human condition “by an invisible hand…without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”  But Smith was by no means the first or only person to describe a spontaneous order or to see its value. The philosopher Adam Ferguson wrote that, “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

Bernard de Mandeville, David Hume, Smith, Carl Menger, F. A. Hayek—nearly all the greatest names of the liberal tradition have described spontaneous order, and it’s a key concept to explain how a liberal order is supposed to function when the imposed order of government is kept out of the way. But spontaneous orders can be very difficult to explain to people who aren’t already inclined to be suspicious of the efficacy of top-down planning. 

Some of the most commonly used examples of spontaneous orders, like money and the common law, seem too closely tied in our minds to government authority. They don’t convey effectively the way spontaneous orders evolve from small choices made by individual humans. Money surely arose as the result of spontaneous order, but it’s fairly hard to look at today’s modern systems of finance and banking and see any spontaneity left. And anything involving a law court is likely to make people think about systematic injustices and instantiated hierarchical structures rather than spontaneous, grassroots evolution. Even the otherwise excellent example of the way that colleges often wait to decide where to put paved footpaths until students have worn trackways into the grass of the college lawn ends with someone making a top-down decision about where and when to lay the pavement.

So, when I want to talk about spontaneous orders with a group that isn’t familiar with them, my favorite example to use is language, especially slang. Language has space for dynamism and creativity—allowing teenagers to transform “noted” into “Sit down, Theodore.” It has a long evolutionary history that lets us watch changes occur over centuries—“a napron” morphs into “an apron,” for example. It also provides some excellent contrasts to more formal or organized attempts to control language. The two work together to produce a really good discussion of spontaneous order that is largely untethered from hierarchies, authorities, and governments.

Untethered from authority? How can I say that? When I start making claims about language as a space for free play and creativity and spontaneous order, the first thing that generally happens is that I hear from someone suffering PTSD from their middle school grammar assignments. Language, they’ll tell me, is full of rules that they have been forced to memorize. How is that spontaneous?

The first thing to do, then, is to separate the rules of formal speech and writing from the way we use language day to day. There are rules for formal language use, and there are people who enforce them. After I finish this piece, I’ll send it to my editor. He’ll catch all my misplaced commas, and we’ll argue a bit about whether splitting infinitives and starting a sentence with “and” are venial or mortal sins. (He will win.) When I taught college writing, I made my students follow the rules of standard formal English in their assignments. 

Informal language is very different. It’s like the Wild West. We use informal language in informal settings, to talk with family and friends, to describe our day to day lives, and to create bonds and emphasize closeness or exclusivity. As a result, informal language is as varied as our individual human experiences. It capitalizes on in-jokes, like “sit down theodore,” or shared cultures and concerns to create rich and creative slang vocabularies. My family has used the word “schmitchik” for four generations now to mean “doodad.” I always thought it was a real Yiddish word, because it certainly sounds like one. But it turns out to have been nonsense coinage by my grandfather, who was probably playing around by combining the word “thingamajig” with a Yiddish pronunciation. Now his great-grandchildren use it, and I expect my great-grandchildren will as well.

That familial sense of closeness is what top-down language purists are trying to create when they insist that small local languages give way to standardized speech and writing. Surely we would all be one big happy human family if we could just all sound the same. But you can’t build a community or create a sense of closeness with a sledgehammer, and you really can’t do it by forcing already existing communities to give way in favor of the majority or the elite.

My grandfather’s coinage may have been the result of an intentional joke or a slip of the tongue, but the way his word has lasted for close to a century now is pure spontaneous order. The same thing may happen, in my family at least, to “sit down theodore.” We’ll have to wait and see. After all, back in 1993, The Simpsons joked about the insular and unsophisticated qualities of small town Springfield by giving the inhabitants a unique and folksy vocabulary that included the archaic  “embiggen” and newly coined “cromulent.” Viewers used both the words in written and spoken language. Usage was so regular that today you can find both of them in Merriam-Webster and in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The smaller and more isolated a group, the more likely it is that unique slang and linguistic patterns of language will evolve. Yiddish is a classic example of this kind of evolved language. So is Polari, which was a slang used widely among the British gay community from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1970s. It is useful for outsiders to have ways to communicate that cannot be understood by authority figures. It can protect the in-group, and it helps to define them, making it possible to tell who is friend and who is foe. 

This is one reason, I suspect, that teenagers are such endlessly creative sources of slang. Our time as teenagers is brief and intense and often filled with the kind of adventures and shenanigans that we would prefer not to disclose to parents, teachers, or other authority figures. That’s fertile ground for the creation of new slang. And because the minute we stop being teenagers we join the world of adults, that new slang needs to be created constantly and updated rapidly. That twenty-one-year-old student teacher may have been reasonably cool three years ago, but it is now incredibly important that they not understand the distinction between “I’m cooking” and “I’m cooked.”

The internet has produced an ever-faster life cycle for slang, and has sometimes even made it possible to track the original user of a new word, as with Kai Cenat’s coining of the word “rizz.” But while we can see and hear the linguistic changes happening, and sometimes even identify the point of origin, there is no way to determine or direct when slang will change, whether it will catch on, or when it will suddenly shift from cool to dead. 

There are warning signs, of course. When slang terms catch on and persist, they often become part of standard, even formal, speech. Words like “jazz” or “hangry” are examples of this. Slang is one way our lexicon of acceptable words grows. And we’re guaranteed to keep transforming more words from slang to standard, because slang is funny and charming. The minute that anyone outside of high school uses a slang term, however, it’s probably already outdated and in need of replacement. Nothing groovy lasts forever. The supply of new slang and the destruction of old slang is endless.

The most important thing about slang, though, for thinking about spontaneous orders, is that despite the best efforts of Regina George, there is no grand arbiter of slang who gets to tell people, “Stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen!” There is merely an ever-shifting cultural sense of when a coinage or structure is worth repeating or not. “On fleek” died almost as quickly as it was born, but “snatched” appears likely to hang around for a while. That’s a key concept for spontaneous orders. Significant changes happen. But no one is making them happen. There’s no language czar.

At least not usually. English has been famously described as “about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” French, however, has invested heavily in the idea of linguistic purity.  L’Académie française therefore makes a notable and instructive counterexample. Since the 17th century, the job of L’Académie has been to produce a dictionary that provides a single authoritative voice on what is and is not real French. Their work often involves trying to get newscasters and politicians to stop using words imported from other languages and to replace them with French instead. 

This goal leads to a draconian oversight of the use of language that is often hilarious and horrifying at the same time. A few years ago, L’Académie insisted that broadcasters use "jeu vidéo de compétition" instead of "e-sports," and "joueur-animateur en direct" instead of “streamer.” For obvious reasons, this restriction is likely to be as successful as previous attempts to get people to stop saying “le weekend” and “le wifi.” 

You can impose as much top-down order on a language as you like. The people who use it will still make it change and grow, just because they are using it. Indeed, despite L’Académie, there is popular and creative French slang. One form, known as “verlan” consists largely of inverting syllables in words and has existed since at least the nineteenth century. It continues to be used and innovated today in French rap music, on movie posters, and, of course, by teenagers.

Slang is creative, unpredictable, quick to change, and endlessly surprising. It arises from the aggregation of small human choices but without any grand design. It’s everything I like best about spontaneous orders. I had planned to finish this essay by using a few slang terms in praise of slang and spontaneous orders, but the young people in my house assure me that even if they gave me the most cutting edge slang, it would be out of date and “cringe” by the time this sees print. 

Hayek would love that.  

From time to time, we liberals must rethink the world. Deglobalization, the rise of economic decoupling, the return of tariffs, and the increasing salience of weaponized interdependence have come to define the current landscape. Where once the dominant terms were efficiency, integration, and mutual gains, now they are geoeconomics, resilience, chokepoints, and decoupling. The vocabulary shift is an indicator and a diagnostic. Rhetorical change of this order reflects structural change in how economic exchange and political power actually relate.

A liberal position adequate to that new reality cannot be built by repeating arguments shaped by an earlier phase of globalization. We must rebuild—analytically and institutionally—for the world that integration, pushed to its limits, has actually produced. The first step is to understand that the liberal international order is not so much under siege from outside as it is being challenged from within—by the very processes it generated. Decoupling, weaponized interdependence, the return of tariffs, the fragmentation of global supply chains: these are not cyclical disruptions to an otherwise sound system. They are the structural outcomes of integration itself, and they demand something that liberals have been reluctant to provide—not a defense of inherited positions, but a genuine reconstruction and recontextualization of first principles.

When Mutual Gains Bring Strategic Weapons

For several decades, global governance and international political economy rested on a relatively coherent set of conceptual and theoretical foundations. At its core stood the classical doctrine of gains from trade, from Adam Smith and David Ricardo through the twentieth-century neoclassical economics of Paul Samuelson, complemented by theories of progressive economic integration—Jacob Viner’s analysis of trade creation and diversion and Béla Balassa’s stages of integration. David Mitrany’s functionalism added the institutional logic: cooperation deepens, sector by sector, through shared practical needs, gradually eroding the conditions for conflict. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye formalized the mechanism: complex interdependence raises the costs of disruption and creates structural incentives for cooperation. 

Together, these strands converged on a single animating proposition: that efficiency and peace are not competing objectives, but complementary outcomes of the same structural dynamic. The more deeply economies integrate, the more costly conflict becomes. Institutions were designed precisely to lock in that logic.

However, over roughly the past decade, a series of structural developments has brought to the forefront an alternative and increasingly influential way of thinking about global governance and international political economy. China’s rise as a systemic competitor—one that leveraged the liberal order’s infrastructure while resisting its convergence assumptions—exposed the limits of the mutual-gains framework. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that supply chains optimized for efficiency are structurally fragile under shock. And Russia’s weaponization of energy exports to Europe made viscerally clear what Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman had theorized: that interdependence is not only a source of mutual benefit but a terrain of strategic competition—one in which structural position confers the power to coerce, surveil, and punish those who depend on your infrastructure.

The result is a transformed analytical vocabulary. Decoupling, strategic chokepoints, geoeconomics, resilience: these terms are not mere rhetorical novelties. They mark a genuine shift in how economic exchange and political power relate. The question for liberals is no longer whether open exchange generates mutual gains—it does—but how to think about cases where gains are seen and acted upon as asymmetric, where structural position confers coercive leverage, and where the most integrated actors are also the most exposed.

How We Got Here

Economic integration and strategic rivalry are not opposites. They are continuous participants in the same self-transforming process. Understanding that dynamic is the precondition for responding to it.

The first crucial insight comes from Don Lavoie’s work on rivalry within market systems. Rivalry, Lavoie showed, is not a pathology of capitalism or a residue of pre-liberal political arrangements—it is constitutive of the market process itself. Firms often cooperate through prices and contracts precisely because they are simultaneously rivals for resources, customers, and knowledge. Positive-sum and zero-sum dynamics do not alternate; they coexist within the same institutional framework. Once this is recognized at the level of the market process, it becomes impossible to assume that international economic integration—which rescales and ramifies the same dynamics—will progressively dissolve rivalry into cooperation. The rivalry does not disappear. It is transformed, redirected, and re-embedded in new institutional forms.

The second insight follows directly from the first. Rather than treating the current moment as a rupture or a surprise, we should trace its history. We now have reached the latest stage in a four-stage movement spanning the last hundred years or so, in which growing, worldwide economic integration does not abolish strategic rivalry but continuously transforms the terrain on which it operates. The natural starting point is the 1930s, which remains the reference case in international political economy for understanding what happens when the cooperative foundations of the international economic order collapse (Kindleberger, 1986; Ruggie, 1982).

The first stage of the development of the current international economic system thus corresponds to the Great Depression. The world economy devolved into zero-sum competition among relatively separate national economies. Competitive currency devaluations, retaliatory tariffs, the collapse of multilateral trade, and beggar-thy-neighbor spirals of mutually punitive trade measures all contributed directly to the preconditions of the Second World War (Kindleberger, 1986; Hirschman, 1945). This escalatory logic tends toward autarky, protectionism, and eventually conflict. It is the world David Mitrany’s functionalism was explicitly designed to dissolve.

The second stage sought to avoid or contain the harms of the first. Postwar functionalism’s response to mercantilist rivalry was indirect but systematic: Let us bypass the zero-sum logic of power politics, it proposed, by building positive-sum interdependence across practical welfare domains, sector by sector, until the costs of defection exceed the gains from rivalry. The Bretton Woods institutions embodied this logic at the global level: The IMF stabilized the balance-of-payments crises that had fueled interwar beggar-thy-neighbor spirals; the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade progressively dismantled tariff barriers through reciprocal negotiation; the World Bank channeled reconstruction finance through multilateral rather than bilateral frameworks (Ruggie, 1982). The European Union represents the most ambitious empirical realization of this logic: a formerly war-prone region transformed through progressive functional entanglement, from the Coal and Steel Community to the single market and monetary union, into a zone in which interstate conflict became nearly unthinkable (Haas, 1958). Keohane’s regime theory formalizes the mechanism: iterated interaction, lowered transaction costs, and an extended shadow of the future make reciprocal restraint self-sustaining even without a central enforcer. The underlying wager—that form should follow function, that institutions should grow from shared practical needs rather than national constitutional blueprints—proved remarkably productive (Mitrany, 1943).

With stage three comes the dialectical reversal: the cooperative infrastructure that functionalism built becomes the terrain through which strategic competition re-enters. It now operates from inside the institutions of integration, rather than struggling against them. The institutions of the postwar economic order had concentrated resource flows around specific hubs—SWIFT and dollar-clearing in finance, TSMC and ASML in semiconductors, undersea cables and cloud platforms in digital infrastructure—because concentration is efficient. But hub positions confer structural power: the ability to surveil or deny access to those who depend on the network (Farrell and Newman, 2019). The United States weaponized dollar-clearing against Iran and Russia; China weaponizes supply chain centrality in rare earths and pharmaceuticals; semiconductor export controls transform decades of technological lead into geopolitical leverage. Crucially, this is not integration’s failure—it is integration’s unintended consequence. The logic that built peace armed it. Integration does not abolish rivalry; it infrastructuralizes it.

Stage four is where we currently live. Deep mutual embeddedness generates a structural deterrence logic analogous to the nuclear strategy concept of Mutual Assured Destruction: In international trade, under Mutual Assured Dependence, no major actor can fully weaponize its position without severe self-damage, and all are well aware of that fact. The United States, for example, cannot aggressively sanction without triggering dollar-replacement initiatives; China cannot weaponize its manufacturing centrality without disrupting the export model that sustains its growth. Unlike functionalist peace, Mutual Assured Dependence is structurally fragile: it is only as stable as the mutual vulnerability that sustains it, and actors have persistent incentives to reduce that vulnerability through decoupling, reshoring, and alternative institutional architectures. Each step toward exit erodes the deterrence equilibrium without restoring genuine cooperation, pushing the system toward a new and as yet unresolved configuration.

In brief, these are not discrete phases but a single continuous dynamic: integration generates weaponization, weaponization generates deterrence, deterrence generates decoupling—a spiral that transforms the relationship between interdependence and power without ever finally resolving into a new form. Lavoie’s insight about the entangling of cooperation and rivalry is unsettling precisely because it is structural: the integration of national economies into global networks does not dissolve the cooperation-rivalry coexistence—it rescales and complexifies it (Lavoie, 1985). 

Weaponized interdependence and chokepoint leverage are not aberrations introduced from outside a naturally cooperative system. They are expressions, at the level of states and network architectures, of the rivalry that was always structurally present within exchange-based order. No stage of integration permanently resolves the cooperation-rivalry dialectic; each stage transforms it, generating new institutional forms, new leverage points, and new escalation risks.

Implications for the Reconstruction of the Liberal Position

If the argument is correct, then the familiar defensive posture—reaffirming the inherited case for free trade, open markets, and multilateral institutions, as if the world of 1995 were still available to be recovered—is not only strategically inadequate; it’s theoretically incomplete. A position adequate to the dynamics described above cannot be reconstructed by repetition of a static model; it must be rebuilt from foundations, and the reconstruction must be dynamic. I’ll now offer some theses about what that requires, across both the theoretical and practical dimensions that any serious liberal renewal must address.

1.  Liberalism must abandon the assumption that deepening integration progressively displaces rivalry—that cooperation is the mature stage and conflict the primitive one. A reconstructed liberal theory must treat rivalry and cooperation as permanently coexistent within any exchange-based system, not as successive phases. Lavoie’s insight about the market process applies globally: the liberal international order is not a space beyond zero-sum dynamics, but one in which they are institutionally embedded and continuously renegotiated.

2.  The theory of interdependence must be bifurcated. Interdependence is simultaneously a source of mutual welfare gains and a generator of coercive leverage. Liberal theory has systematically overweighted the first and underweighted the second. A reconstructed framework must conceptualize the conditions under which integration produces solidarity versus the conditions under which it produces chokepoint power (Keohane and Nye, 1977; Farrell and Newman, 2019).

3.  Institutions must be theorized as dual-use architectures. The same institutional infrastructure that enables cooperation often enables coercion. We must consider which design choices produce which sets of outcomes, with the expectation that cooperation and coercion may both be enabled. Liberal institutional theory must incorporate this dual-use logic from the outset rather than treating weaponization as an external corruption of otherwise cooperative designs.

4.  Rent-seeking and weaponization are structurally related, not accidentally similar. The mercantilist logic of extracting value through positional control and the geoeconomic logic of weaponizing network hubs are expressions of the same underlying dynamic: the conversion of structural advantage into extractive leverage. Liberal theory needs a unified account of how market and international institutions can either discipline this tendency or, when they fail, amplify it.

5.  The distinction between productive competition and rent extraction must be made operational in policy. A reconstructed liberal policy agenda must make this distinction actionable.

6.  Mutual Assured Dependence requires its own normative theory. The brittle stability produced by deep mutual vulnerability is not the same as liberal peace, and liberal theory has no adequate normative account of it. Reconstructing liberalism requires developing a framework that honestly engages with deterrence-based stability, specifies its limits, and articulates the conditions under which it can be converted into something more genuinely cooperative. A direct corollary is that supply chain resilience is a liberal policy priority, not a protectionist concession.

7.  The transatlantic relationship must be institutionally redesigned, not merely reaffirmed. Rhetorical commitment to the liberal order is insufficient. A practical liberal agenda requires building concrete transatlantic frameworks that explicitly address weaponization and resilience challenges. The architecture must match the problem, the transatlantic case may become the starting point and a core of a global approach.

8.  Liberal epistemic communities must coordinate strategically, not just intellectually, to develop a practical liberal agenda for the twenty-first century. The fragmentation of liberal networks means that the intellectual reconstruction underway has no adequate institutional transmission mechanism. Practical renewal requires building the infrastructure—transatlantic research networks, shared policy platforms, coordinated public communication able to respond collectively to challenges like those above—through which reconstructed liberal ideas can actually shape debate and institutional design.

Conclusion

A liberalism adequate to this moment cannot be built on nostalgia or on the ritual reaffirmation of inherited principles. Reconstruction is not a departure from the liberal tradition—it is the most honest and important way of remaining within it. But ideas like those outlined above are inert without institutional carriers. Building the organizational infrastructure—the research networks, policy platforms, and channels of public communication—through which reconstructed liberal thinking can actually shape the order it diagnoses is not secondary work. It is the challenge of the moment, and the precondition for everything else.

References

Allison, G. (2017) Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Balassa, B. (1961) The Theory of Economic Integration. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Farrell, H. and Newman, A.L. (2019) “Weaponized interdependence: How global economic networks shape state coercion,” International Security, 44(1), pp. 42–79.

Haas, E.B. (1958) The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950–1957. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hirschman, A.O. (1945) National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keohane, R.O. (1984) After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Keohane, R.O. and Nye, J.S. (1977) Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Boston: Little, Brown.

Kindleberger, C.P. (1986) The World in Depression, 1929–1939. Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lavoie, D. (1985) Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitrany, D. (1943) A Working Peace System: An Argument for the Functional Development of International Organization. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Ricardo, D. (1817) On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. London: John Murray.

Ruggie, J.G. (1982) “International regimes, transactions, and change: Embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order,” International Organization, 36(2), pp. 379–415.

Samuelson, P.A. (1948) Economics: An Introductory Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell.

Viner, J. (1950) The Customs Union Issue. New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.