“Romantic” once simply meant “of Rome.” Later it came to mean common language tales of knights, chivalry, and idealized heroes. The Romantic Movement (roughly 1770–1850) took up this meaning as a deliberate reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and the rapid changes then happening in commerce and society.

Thinkers as diverse as Rousseau, Herder, Schiller, and Burke applied “romance” to social institutions, economics, and political philosophy. They idealized pre-modern, organic communities (guilds, village life, feudal bonds), and nurtured nostalgia for agrarian life and artisanal economies as a way of critiquing industrial capitalism, which they found dehumanizing. 

Conservative romantics, like Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle, looked back in time to idealized medieval or agrarian social orders as a golden age. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke praised custom and described loyalty to nations as if they were families with inherited traditions:

Burke claimed that “prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit,” defending people’s cherished but untaught emotional prejudices. The longer those habits had lasted, and the more generally they had prevailed, the more he valued them. Later romantic nationalists called these shared prejudices the Volksgeist, or national spirit.

Romantics of the left, especially early socialists, similarly criticized industrial capitalism, but they imagined utopian futures rather than idealizing the past. Karl Polanyi explicitly invoked the “romantic reaction” to commercial society—a defense of social embeddedness against the abstraction and alienation of market relations.

When “romantic” is applied to institutions or economics, it means an idealized, organic, pre-rational impulse that resists reason—nostalgia for an imagined communal past, or hope for an imagined communal future. It carries the original literary sense of “like a romance”—elevated, beautiful, but possibly impractical or illusory—and applies it to visions of how society should be organized.

I work in a branch of political economy called “public choice.” Public choice is politics without romance.

Hell is Other People

Near the end of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play Huis Clos, Garcin comes to a realization: “Hell is—other people!” Not because we have to depend on others, but because we must live with their apprehensions and judgments of us, “devoured” by their views.

Sartre could have been a public choice theorist. We romanticize the state and the process of government, but that’s a mistake. The state is just a particular technology—limited but powerful. As discussed in my previous essay, and as Jason Kuznicki laid out in Technology and the End of Authority, the mythologizing that moralizes and justifies state power has misled society for generations.

The power of choosing in groups is that it benefits group members; individual rights are not given by the state, but they are the justification for entrusting the state with limited powers. Much of public choice investigates the limits of group choice and collective solutions to social problems. 

The first step is removing the romanticized moral status of “us.” Imagine the members of a group want to go to lunch. We enjoy each other’s company, but we have different tastes and dietary restrictions. This simple problem illustrates the core notion in public choice: politics as exchange. If we can make a choice we all like, we get to have a good lunch and a nice conversation. That’s a valuable goal, because we value doing things together more than doing things—even the same things—alone. This could be on the consumption side, like going to lunch, or on the production side, like national defense. In both, groups must choose.

The decision to “choose in groups” has three parts. In the lunch example, we have (1) Are we going to eat together or alone? (2) Which restaurant will we pick? (3) Once at the restaurant, what will we order? The order is crucial, because choosing to choose in a group determines many important aspects of what happens next. Our liking of any given restaurant could come down to the distance, the wait, the atmosphere, or the cost, as well as the menu. Membership in the group therefore matters: A given group will choose a particular restaurant. But if we add or subtract several people, quite a different choice is made, even if we follow the same procedures for choosing. And one of the core results of public choice is contingency: what we choose may depend heavily on how we choose. We could take turns—Alice chooses on Monday, Bob decides on Tuesday, and so on—or we could draw restaurant names out of a hat. We could vote, and different ways of voting also would “pick” different outcomes. This contingency matters more than is commonly recognized, and it’s important: method matters, and there is no obvious basis for saying one method is better than another.

But then, once the choice of a method for choosing is made, a restaurant is selected, and  all those other factors are fixed: the only remaining choice is over menu items. And maybe how to pay.

This example illustrates the method of public choice: The choice of rules is a different choice from the options decided under those rules. Our “preferences” over different rules may be contingent on the actions we expect to take given those rules, just as choice of a restaurant is driven by what I will order if that restaurant is chosen.

Exit, or “going it alone,” is always an option, but many people prefer a group lunch at an acceptable restaurant over a solitary lunch at their favorite restaurant. That’s why choosing in groups is different from choosing as an individual: each person is simultaneously deciding whether to be a member of the group, and choosing to decide as part of the group. The romantic conception of the group requires only membership, as for example in Che Guevara’s “Socialism and Man in Cuba”; in this view, submerging individual wants into the identity of the group is just natural, because that is what any good person would want.

In earlier essays, I took up the theme of “seeing with two I’s”: information and incentives. The rules we choose dictate how we gather and use information, and they also determine the incentives that shape people’s actions. Collective, coercive choice is sometimes necessary. The problem is the temptation to extend it beyond the domain where such choices are required. In my restaurant example, we could decide, as a group, which restaurant to patronize, and then we could also “achieve consensus” on which menu item to order—we could make proposals, apply our rule for choosing, and enforce a single binding choice on everyone: liver and onions for all!  Because “we” chose that.  

That’s why Hell is other people:  we want to be together, but making collective judgements imposes externalities. I am choosing for me, but I’m choosing for you, too. And vice versa. It can be a mess, and it’s very often unnecessary.

If we romanticize the collective, we risk having majorities decide that majorities can decide everything. That danger is not hypothetical: reproductive rights, marriage rights, and freedoms of speech, religion, and the press are all examples where, in just the last twenty years, American majorities have tried to pick one menu item and force everyone to eat from the same dish. But there is nothing about the bundle of technologies that make up government that forces us to use it to decide everything, or even most things, collectively. We need a way of judging when we should decide individually, and when we should choose in groups. That’s where public choice comes in.

The Public Choice Approach

Public choice rests on three interconnected premises: methodological individualism, behavioral symmetry, and politics as exchange. Together, they constitute not an ideology but a method—a way of thinking about how political institutions actually perform rather than how we imagine they might serve us.

Methodological individualism is the insistence that social phenomena can only be understood as the result of choices made by specific, identifiable people. Governments do not decide; people in governments decide. Bureaucracies do not act; bureaucrats act. These aggregated choices and acts may be impossible to untangle, in any given policy choice, but it is important to keep the base distinction in mind.

Methodological individualism is not ethical individualism; there is no claim that individuals are selfish, or that communities do not shape individual preferences—they obviously do. It is simply the requirement that any explanation of political outcomes must eventually cash out in terms of human beings with motives, constraints, and information. As Max Weber put it, social collectivities “must be treated as solely the resultants and context of the particular acts of individual persons.” Treating “the state” or “the market” or “society” as a unified actor with coherent goals is a kind of lazy metaphysics that obscures more than it reveals.

Behavioral symmetry rules out the assumption—dominant in mid-century welfare economics—that market actors are purely selfish, while state officials are purely altruistic. This is the “benevolent despot” model, in which we identify a market failure and hand the problem to a government presumed to be both perfectly motivated and perfectly informed. That model was never empirically defensible. Knut Wicksell, whose work James M. Buchanan credited as a key inspiration, put it plainly more than a century ago: legislators and executives “are not pure organs of the community with no thought other than to promote the common weal.” They are “in the overwhelming majority of cases, precisely as interested in the general welfare as are their constituents, neither more nor less.”

If you tell me markets fail because people are selfish, but that governments succeed because officials are altruistic, you have not done political economy; you have written a morality play, and you are trying to import romance into politics. Stop it.

The third premise, politics as exchange, is the most important, because it defines the reason why we want to tolerate the hell of “other people” in the first place. Politics is not a romantic goal to be pursued for its own sake, but neither is it simply predation. At its best, choosing in groups is an enterprise to obtain mutual benefit. People enter political arrangements for the same reason that they enter commercial ones: because the arrangement makes each of them better off than they could be alone. Without this premise, public choice degenerates into what Buchanan called “a counsel of despair.” We would have nothing to offer except a catalog of the ways political processes disappoint us.

The idea of politics as exchange does not mean that political bargains are always legitimate, or that majorities cannot oppress minorities, or that the outcomes of political competition are always good. It means that the reason for having politics at all—the reason even self-interested actors would choose to submit themselves to a common set of rules enforced by coercive authority—is that the alternative is worse. Covenants without the sword are but words, as Hobbes observed. Buchanan’s insight was that accepting this Hobbesian baseline does not require accepting the Hobbesian conclusion. The sword that enforces agreements can itself be constrained by constitutional rules, and those rules can reconcile coercion with liberty—if, but only if, they reflect genuine consent.

The Two I’s, Applied

This is where the “two I’s” framework becomes indispensable: the first choice is whether to make a decision collectively or individually. Any institutional arrangement—state or market, club or commune—must solve two problems at once: it must gather and process information about what people need and what resources are available, and it must align incentives so that those doing the gathering have reason to do it well.

Markets solve these problems imperfectly, but the degree of imperfection can be hard to see. We’d like to measure the real world against an ideal, the perfectly efficient alternative that would be produced by an omniscient, benevolent dictator. But that hypothetical alternative (1) can’t be identified, because the government is not omniscient, and (2) probably wouldn’t be selected anyway, because the state is not benevolent, but is composed of self-interested individuals. The standard welfare model compares markets as they are to a romantic vision of a state, one that is profoundly misleading, even fraudulent. Romantic politics gets around the “pretty pig problem” by imagining a different situation altogether.

Prices aggregate dispersed information in a form no central authority could replicate. In a democracy, the alternative source of information is voting. In the romantic vision of “epistemic democracy,” voter-supplied information will be more accurate than prices, and electoral incentives—plus bureaucratic insulation from being fired—will outperform the system of profit and loss.

Austrian School economists have focused on the information failure of centralized direction, and it is real and serious. Public choice scholars acknowledge this, but they focus more on incentives. Even if a central planner could somehow obtain all relevant information, she would face a principal-agent problem of staggering proportions. Those charged with implementing the plan are not those who designed it, and their private interests diverge from the public goal in ways that are difficult to monitor and nearly impossible to correct. Political incentives also compress time horizons severely: politicians must produce visible results before the next election. For members of the U.S. House of Representatives, that means caring only about the next two years, beginning on the day after the election.

None of this means state action always fails. It means that the drawbacks of choosing in groups are real, systematic, and predictable. Romantics put their faith—literally, faith—in the claim that “we just need to elect better people!” They don’t recognize that the problem is a product of information and incentives, not one of setting the right intentions.

When I hear a friend make a romantic claim that “the state should be able to make people do _________,” I suggest what I call the “Munger Test.” It’s simple: I take out the word “state” and replace it with “Trump” (or “Harris”; I’m not trying to make a partisan point). Then I ask if they still believe their claim.

Many romantics, of course, simply deny the premise: “We shouldn’t elect bad people! That’s the problem!” Of course, your “bad person” may be my hero. “Politics without romance” requires that we design institutions so that even the wrong people, pursuing their own interests, are channeled in directions that serve the public.

If we use the state as the technology to solve human social problems, the consequence—without romance—is that we may all have to have the same thing for lunch. Even if it is something you don’t like.

All Americans, and especially American liberals, should respond to our current civic crisis by elevating civic education as crucial to sustaining our democratic republic. 

Serious preparation for citizenship is indispensable for the American idea: self-rule by We the People in a complex, constitutional politics. We must develop Americans with the civic knowledge and civic virtues required to operate our political and civic order, so that all citizens consider self-government as crucial for their pursuit of happiness—whether unfolding in private life, civil society, or public affairs. 

Our founding principles entail self-government; per the Declaration of Independence, legitimate government rests upon consent of the governed as well as universal principles of justice. This implicitly calls for citizens to be active in registering consent or its absence, thus participating in the existing modes of government. 

This chain of reasoning isn’t natural; it requires a farsighted sense of one’s self-interest in issues of justice. Partly in response, American political and educational leaders held for hundreds of years that education in such citizenship is simply necessary—that is, civic education was understood as the American civic knowledge and civic virtues (demanding civic skills) needed to be a self-governing citizen in our complex constitutional order. Yet across the past sixty years and more, academia largely has been skeptical about citizenship education in any form other than a “democracy education” emphasizing civic participation and engagement. 

Who could object to democracy education? An emphasis on equal participation of all citizens, so that all voices are heard, certainly fits with the ideal of equality in the Declaration of Independence. But the democracy education movement, pioneered by philosopher John Dewey, put too low a value on education in our founding and constitutionalism, in American civic knowledge and civic history, thus in the civic virtues needed to operate our complex politics. Rather, “the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy.” Dewey called for an ambitious program of greater citizen participation and a refining, even a replacing, of the “machinery” of government to empower all citizens more effectively. The Constitution, he wrote, should not be treated as “holy.” The new approach of “civic engagement,” widely adopted in higher education in subsequent decades, has emphasized just such progress toward new vistas: the re-creation of politics by a mass public of active, engaged citizens via the electoral and policy processes. 

Given the widespread influence of academic thought in American culture, Dewey’s view has triumphed. Most citizens and aspiring citizens, certainly among younger cohorts, don’t understand or appreciate America’s founding principles, our constitutional forms, our centuries of political development, nor the civilizational tradition that yielded America. Democracy education has tended to produce frustration with our complex forms of separated powers and federalism, and a focus on advocacy for one’s own conception of progress—without the civic virtues fostering appreciation for the slow, hard work of civil disagreement and constructive debate, aiming toward the achievement of governing compromises. 

Put another way, after a century of this educational revolution, we mostly don’t understand or appreciate the civic education required for sustaining the American experiment. We don’t much like the word “civics”—and we’re not doing it well.

We should look around at the current state of our polity and grasp the reality that civics, properly understood, is now a matter of political survival.

Recovering a Reflective Patriotism

American educators long understood civics as indispensable, and indeed America’s leading founders wrote seriously and regularly about citizen education. Yet our deteriorating civic culture today, together with the neglected, inadequate state of our programs of civic education in both schools and colleges, now makes this a matter of great urgency. One crucial component of a renewal of American civics, therefore, must be recovery of the rational patriotism vital to both civic learning and perpetuating the American experiment: a blending of gratitude for America with an understanding of—and civil disagreement about—what America means, how we should self-govern, and how to improve. 

“Reflective patriotism” (patriotisme réfléchi) is Alexis de Tocqueville’s term, in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), for the public spirit he observed here in the 1830s. Americans love their country but also argue about it, assessing whether politics is serving their rights and interests, given that America is grounded in principles and ideals. Further, he observes that the pragmatic American spirit that moves from ideals about equal natural rights to a realization of one’s self-interest can only be secured through participation in the civic duties of self-government. Common, everyday American citizens calculate, Tocqueville notes, that their civic participation supports a healthy, successful political order, which in turn will benefit their own family and friends. 

Tocqueville admired the American spirit of commitment to both liberty and equality. Yet he was concerned that a spirit of self-governing liberty and the discursive, rational patriotism entwined with it would be difficult to sustain. Our egalitarian concern with material prosperity yields a propensity for pragmatic and technological thinking, and a devotion to economic affairs. Tocqueville would thus be dismayed, yet not entirely surprised, by the poor condition of our civic education nearly two centuries later and by the low importance so many citizens assign to self-governing liberty. Tocqueville had described America as a busy, dynamic place that tempts citizens to leave the work of governing to others. He might say that today we’ve succumbed to the temptation.

Anyone who enjoys the relative security, freedom, and equality of American life today should soberly assess the extremes of polarization and passivity that dominate our politics: angry and polarized partisans, especially in national politics, yet also the passivity and civic apathy among so many citizens who’ve given up on the idea of genuine citizenship. That review should lead us to a Tocquevillian call for renewing a robust civic education, including a rational patriotism, in classrooms and in our civic culture, if we are to save our self-government and the idea of America.

Indeed, we must ask: Is it too late for America? Our republic is now commemorating the 250th anniversary of its founding in 1776. Are we now too fractured, too overwhelmed by extremes of anger and regular political violence at one end and civic apathy at the other, and generally too civically ignorant, to restore any consensus on renewing a patriotic, inclusive, and discursive civic education for all citizens and aspiring citizens? We need a renewal of civic culture and civic education that reinstates not only the civic virtue of reflective patriotism but its analogue of civil disagreement. We will need the polarized combatants to be better educated in both civic knowledge and these civic virtues, which likely will produce more light along with the inescapable heat and contention of free self-government. This more constructive spirit of disagreement and discourse might in turn pull some of the apathetic back into thinking of themselves as citizens in a genuine sense. 

Compounding these questions is the reality that our new information technologies turn many citizens inward, toward themselves, and to simulacra of communities. These “advances” tend to cut us off from the naturally human communities of family, local community, and civil society, let alone the reality of state and political communities. A renewed priority for civic education, especially in face-to-face learning environments, whether in classrooms or beyond, is thus all the more crucial in reviving a healthy culture of self-government with its perpetual discussions, debates, disagreements, and calls for governing compromises.

The honorable exceptions today of spirited yet civil disagreement and debate, especially in national-level politics, indicate the depths of our problem. America largely is caught between an angry few who drive our further civic fracturing and a large population of the civically apathetic, especially our youth, who are neither informed toward nor committed to citizenship. We have put ourselves into a perilous predicament. Is it too late to forge a consensus on teaching America about America, in our schools, colleges, and culture? Is it too late  for such teaching to avert our self-destruction—or our collapse if attacked by a foreign power?

A Pre-partisan, National-Consensus Civics

In Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture, I elaborate this diagnosis and the national-consensus remedies we should pursue. A discursive patriotism toward America points to a civics that embraces the American political project while embodying civil disagreement about both the larger meaning of America and particular issues. This is a pre-partisan approach, embracing the perpetual reality of disagreement and partisan conflict, yet educating toward a standard of civil disagreement. 

In fact, this approach is my elaboration of a national report on K-12 civics, which I was asked to join in 2019, as the lone classical liberal and academic conservative among the lead authors. It was released in 2021 as Educating for American Democracy, and the most prominent of the co-authors was Harvard’s Danielle Allen. She reached out to me precisely because she was seeking a non-ideological, trans-partisan, national-consensus study.

Our final report emphasizes crucial historical, constitutional, and civic content, yet it also features reflective patriotism and civil disagreement as two of the crucial civic virtues in a serious civic education, across schools and higher education. The final draft already had included the civic virtues of reflective patriotism, civil disagreement, and civic friendship across partisan differences as crucial elements of American civics, yet the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol led us to sharpen some of our phrases in the final version released a few weeks later:

The America250 period is a perfect time to remember that the founders of our democratic constitutional republic knew civic education must be a priority because our form of politics is difficult to achieve and to sustain. America more or less heeded this lesson across its first two centuries, through the 1950s; but in the name of progressive democratic reform and progress, we largely have repudiated or neglected this crucial insight. It is striking to consider that in 1954 the National Education Association—then and now the nation’s largest teachers and school workers union—could produce national guidelines for schools, Educating for American Citizenship, that showed a bit of Dewey’s influence regarding participation and democracy, but which mostly emphasized the traditional blend of civic knowledge and civic virtues. An early chapter highlights “ideals we live by,” especially commitment to the Declaration and individual rights, the rule of law, and the Constitution and Bill of Rights—to include equality regardless of race, status, or religion. A further separate chapter on ideals includes “the right to be different,” encompassing the free market of ideas, the right to dissent, and the balance of unity and diversity. A prefatory statement “to the reader” asks for “the devoted consecration of each citizen to the basic ideals and values of American life.”

We must renew this comprehensive, balanced approach to the civics of our republic and representative democracy, in both formal schooling and also in civic culture, if we are to shape the souls of our fellow citizens and aspiring citizens so that they care about the demanding yet fulfilling work of self-government. Citizens must be competent as to the knowledge and character needed for their important office. In schools, in colleges, and in civic culture, we need to assess our deficits. Through reasonable argument, we must then forge the compromises and plans of action necessary to restore a robust civic education and a healthier, happier civic culture.

We owe this to ourselves, as a matter of our own dignity and sacred honor. As the Declaration argues, at stake are the equal natural rights endowed to all human beings. We also owe it to our forebears, including our great civic exemplars, and all those who made possible this extraordinary American experiment in constitutional liberty. Further, as the preamble to our Constitution states, we owe to our posterity these efforts to secure the blessings of liberty. 

Our republic is imperfect, as all human things are, but it’s worthy of gratitude and of our renewed efforts to live up to its founding principles. Teaching America devotes particular attention to those civic exemplars who were American reformers, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr. They believed in the common ground of our founding documents and principles, but they insisted that serious reform was needed in our laws or in the Constitution to live up to our essential ideals of justice. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” address of 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., embodies reflective patriotism by praising Lincoln, and “the architects of our republic” who wrote “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” yet it demands reform to live up to these ideals. Even after several years of more strident, even bitter criticism of America, given the Vietnam War and the slow pace of enacting the reforms mandated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, King didn’t lose hope in America. In his final public address the night before he was assassinated in 1968, he noted that “when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters” he knew “they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”   

Restoring Civics through Civic Hope

Across the two years of preparing the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) report, the lead authors consulted with over three hundred contributors in various committees, sessions, and drafting reviews. We sought to forge an e pluribus unum across philosophical, demographic, geographic, and institutional dimensions. In retrospect I began to think of the report as akin to the great American art form jazz. Only in America did jazz develop, and arguably it could have arisen only here: a blend of African and European civilizational traditions, of the blues and Christian spirituals with Black gospel music, of order and improvisation, altogether turning sorrow to joy, expressing and seeking truths about humanity and divinity. 

Perhaps we EAD coauthors were singing the blues about America, especially about the sorry state of our civic education and reflective patriotism. To borrow from the Duke Ellington classic, America’s got it bad and that ain’t good—but we’re not giving up, so we’ve got a story to tell—all achieved through a blend of diverse backgrounds and voices, of group and solo efforts; a harmony comprising complexity.

We need this soberly hopeful spirit to confront what the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor deemed, two decades ago,  America’s “quiet crisis”—the deplorable condition of its civic education and reflective patriotism. It’s still a crisis, even if some progress has been made in provoking awareness about needed improvement, and some remedies have been undertaken. Further, the crisis is not quiet anymore. The heated contests of the past three decades over the content of U.S. history and civics curricula in public schools have become only more heated and widespread. 

Undeniable evidence of civic ignorance among all ages of our citizenry, linked to widespread loss of confidence in all national institutions and professions—even the military—now combines with alarmingly low levels of patriotism toward America, especially among younger citizens. An angry, polarized politics itself fed by civic ignorance is shadowed by apathy among a vast proportion of citizens. Further, we now are so polarized about what civics is, and how to improve its status and quality in schools and higher education, that our national civic culture might fully disintegrate before the long game of a renewed American civics can produce civic repair.

Teaching America proposes that a more hopeful view can develop, among educators and all serious citizens and aspiring citizens, bringing more reasonable debate and less polarization to consideration of crucial questions facing us. These include how to sustain the American idea; what a reflective patriotism and American civics is; how civics can avoid propaganda and partisanship; what our schools and colleges should teach to forge responsible, informed, discursive citizens; how our civic culture can sustain America’s e pluribus unum; and why commitment to reflective civic learning and civic friendships, the activities of thoughtful patriots and civic friends, is a duty and delight for all ages. 

The national traction achieved by the Educating for American Democracy report, a national-consensus effort at civics renewal in a polarized moment, indicates that the  ingredients today of a national consensus are readily evident. In the five years since its release, pilot curricula modeled on the broad EAD guidelines have been adopted in 14 states, and 28 states have adopted a total of 40 educational policies aligned with the EAD approach. We’ve even seen left-right consensus on the value of Tocqueville’s peculiar philosophical phrase, a reflective patriotism. This should give inspiration to those who value the liberal principles of civil discourse and pluralism, that Americans still can agree to teach across and through our various philosophical and partisan differences rather than proffer either a left-progressive or a conservative civics. 

We should use the occasion of the 250th anniversary of our political founding to renew a rich civic education in our schools, colleges, and civic culture. Given the deep hole we are in, America250 commemorations and the civic-learning opportunities they afford should extend, ideally, from commemorating the Declaration in 1776 through to at least the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. That suggests a fifteen-year period of civic renewal, 2026 to 2041. Beyond our self-interest in repairing, perhaps saving, our damaged republic, this also would muster the appropriate honor and regard we should show to our founders and their achievements, and to the centuries of freedom, equality, argument, and reform they made possible thus far—and that we should pass to our posterity.

Civic Culture and the American Spirit

Our nation’s 250th anniversary is a great time to renew discourse about the pursuit of happiness named in the Declaration as one of our natural, God-given rights. Discussion of these large ideas about humanity offers higher meaning to students in schools and colleges—including for students focusing on scientific and preprofessional study. Rediscovery of the pursuit of happiness in a sense that fits with civic duties and the sacred honor of defending self-government also offers meaning to an American civil society and culture that faces a crisis of despair, anomie, and alienation, even amid our general conditions of great relative wealth and security.

The intersection of a reflective civics and serious discussion of the pursuit of happiness is evident in another of Tocqueville’s evergreen insights from Democracy in America. He suggests our democratic culture would tend to emphasize, most of the time and for most people, the practical and self-interested dimensions of human activities. Yet he was particularly concerned about the consequences of this democratic, egalitarian, and materialist spirit for education, and for participation in self-government. He counseled Americans to balance the intrinsically worthy and higher dimensions of education and civic participation on the one hand, and with utilitarian, self-regarding rationales for each, on the other. 

Restoring a primary place for a reflective, discursive civics in schools, colleges, and American culture is in our basic interest. It’s a matter of civic strength and health, and it will also renew the spirit of our educational institutions and our culture: a spirit of truth-seeking, lively discourse, reasonable debate, and attention to the full human consequences of our theories, approaches, inventions, and technologies. 

The activity of self-governing is intrinsically worthy for free human beings, and we should prioritize reorienting ourselves toward it. Whether in resisting tyranny in 1776, or in later crises, or in enjoying the more quotidian tasks and disagreements of self-government, we must perpetually recall that citizenship is a matter of sacred honor.

This will be hard. One reason jazz should be rediscovered as an American civic treasure is that its infectious joy and enjoyable sorrow compensate for the bitter truths of its founding and history. Great Black Americans who pioneered jazz, including Ellington and Louis Armstrong, were joined by white musicians who admired them; altogether they are exemplars of hope and amelioration in our history. They built a popular and artistic e pluribus unum, overcoming racial prejudice and its barriers, bringing good out of hypocrisy and evil.

In the spirit of the national-consensus jazz that my coauthors and I negotiated and forged in the EAD report, I hope that Teaching America encourages consideration of a reflective, enlightened patriotism and civic learning as lifelong priorities for all American citizens and aspiring citizens.

Private property is the foundational institution of market economies. More generally, private property is essential for establishing and protecting a liberal political and social order. Without formal (legal, political) and informal (attitudes, norms) support for private property, society will be neither free nor virtuous. While private property is not sufficient for human flourishing, it is necessary.

Liberalism pertains to institutions: not only private property, but also democracy, representation, constitutionalism, limited government, and the rule of law. A liberal political and social order contains formal procedures to permit a wide scope for private action, facilitate free association to pursue collective goals, peaceably resolve disputes, and limit the predatory tendencies of government. Its informal institutions, such as personal or professional ethical codes, must support its formal institutions—and ideally, resolve social dilemmas before formal procedures are needed.

But liberalism isn’t merely procedural. It also reflects substantive commitments to liberty and equality. The substantive component of liberalism is partly satisfied through the capacity to acquire, enjoy, and alienate private property, which enables individual choice about how best to pursue happiness. Without a robust conception of human dignity, a liberal political and social order will be fragile at best. In the realm of values, there is a longstanding tension between liberty and order: whether society’s institutions should make people free, or whether they should make people good. One of liberalism’s greatest strengths is that it makes this tension productive. Virtue and human flourishing are properly our highest ends, but by reflecting on human nature and carefully studying history and social science, we have learned that the comparative advantage of government—society’s coercive institutions for collective action—is protecting freedom, whereas the comparative advantage of civil society—its voluntary institutions for collective action—is promoting virtue.

Both in terms of institutions and values, private property is indispensable. Ownership rights create the conditions for social cooperation under the division of labor, defend personal freedom, cultivate moral projects, and strengthen civil society. Any political philosophy that denigrates private property cannot claim to be liberal nor to value human flourishing.

Private Property and Markets

Private property means the legally recognized control of a good by an individual or group. It entails the right to use, transfer, and (within the confines of the law) destroy the good. Equally important, it entails the right to exclude others from these benefits. Land, homes, factories, businesses, financial assets, and sometimes even ideas can be private property.

The most obvious benefit of private property is economic. Historically, private property was a precondition for the rise of capitalism and the spread of material abundance. 

For thousands of years, human living standards were basically stagnant: in inflation-adjusted terms, world GDP per capita fluctuated around $1,500 per year. In the nineteenth century, commercial innovations, including widespread protection for private property rights, gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. This resulted in history’s only sustained reduction in human poverty. In the United States, for example, GDP per capita in 1800 had risen to approximately $2,500 per year. It more than tripled over the next century, to $8,000 per year. Near-continuous economic growth yielded a figure of nearly $50,000 per year by 2000, and nearly $70,000 today. 

Other western nations that embraced capitalism enjoyed similar increases in material prosperity. Asian nations, such as Japan, South Korea, and (more recently) China, have also benefited from embracing private property rights. These successes strongly suggest there is something universal about the relationship between private property and economic wellbeing. It’s not culturally contingent.

Our historically unprecedented level of wealth only exists because private property enables an extensive division of labor. Exponential gains in per capita GDP would be impossible, and indeed, they have never occurred in a sustained way without productivity-enhancing specialization and trade. This decentralized process for creating and exchanging wealth requires coordination. As Ludwig von Mises recognized, private property rights are vital. Without private property, trade and markets could not exist. And without markets, there would be no market prices—critical indicators of resource value in varying lines of production. Profit and loss accounting could not be meaningful without prices, meaning businesses would have no reliable way to ascertain whether they were satisfying consumer wants. It is the system of market prices, adjusting in response to supply and demand changes, that gives commercial society its unique power to create wealth. Private property is the keystone: it holds the whole market edifice together.

The greatest benefits of the price system often emerge during times of turbulence. When war between the United States, Israel, and Iran choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026, the price of crude oil spiked. Refiners, shippers, and drillers across the world rerouted and searched for new supply, responding to the price shock without needing to know anything about geopolitical stakes or possible resolutions. The price carried the knowledge so that they did not have to. 

It may seem strange to use hardship to illustrate the importance of private property and prices. But in fact, it reveals why they matter. Oil became scarcer as a result of the war. That made everyone in the world poorer. Nothing can change that so long as the conflict continues. Instead, the price system allows economic actors oceans apart to find and pursue least-cost adaptations. Non-market and non-price rationing work poorly on this scale. At least with property and prices, we know where we need to change.

Private property buttresses the market process in several other ways. Building on Mises, F. A. Hayek realized that prices allowed households and firms to benefit from each other’s private and often tacit information. The price system, founded on private property, thus functions as a powerful communication and feedback system. Ronald Coase argued that market values for owned resources allowed conflicting parties to resolve their disputes by bargaining. Armen Alchian, William Allen, and Harold Demsetz pointed out that firms’ property rights to their residual income aligned the interests of producers with consumers, and that the firm itself, as an organizational form, was possible only because private property allowed for the necessary contractual structures. The immense productive capacity of contemporary capitalism, which we often take for granted, relies on practices rooted in private property.

Human flourishing obviously depends on more than material wealth. “Man does not live by bread alone.” Yet he does need bread to live. The material abundance created by markets keeps us fed, sheltered, clothed, literate, healthy, and entertained. It also provides the means for us to pursue meaningful artistic, intellectual, and moral projects. Private property is the reason we can have all of these things.

Private Property and Freedom

Private property is a bulwark of personal freedom. Ownership rights create a sphere of independent action for individuals and their voluntarily chosen groups. A liberal legal system protects private property from encroachment by those who wish to seize or otherwise profit from the productive efforts of others.

Just as important, a liberal legal system protects personal and group ownership rights from the state itself. Even in well-governed societies, those who occupy positions of public power will likely have a comparative advantage at commanding, cajoling, and coercing. Power both corrupts and attracts the corruptible. Private property is an essential component of an institutional framework that guards commercial and civil society from the predatory tendencies of government.

Natural rights theory is a major current of the liberal political tradition, especially its American variant. “Life, liberty, and property” was a standard rallying cry before and during the Revolution. The connection is not accidental. Philosophically, political liberals embraced an anthropology affirming that persons have property in themselves and in that to which they are due. Rights to physical resources were an outgrowth of more fundamental property rights—those that were “proper” to free and rational beings.

Even the variation that made its way into the Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” emphasizes the tight connection between property and freedom. To the founders, “happiness” meant human flourishing, not private and subjective satisfaction. And it was inconceivable that persons could flourish without the social recognition of their right to control and dispose of material goods. This virtue-centric approach to property was partly an outgrowth of classical and Christian traditions. But it also had something new: a high regard for commerce and the virtues of fair play in market exchange.

Private property and personal freedom thus reinforced each other. This symbiosis generated an expectation that persons and groups could use their property to associate on their own terms. Without an explicit violation of the law, or a clear and imminent danger to public safety, the government had no right to interfere in private associational decisions, whether commercial, like a business partnership, or civil, like a charitable or educational initiative. Free persons did not need the state’s permission to innovate.

Likewise, liberal protections against taxation, takings, and other arbitrary seizures of property were understood as matters of personal freedom. Without due process of law, as specified in the Constitution, private property remained vulnerable. To the founders, a government trespass without due process was as unjust as ordinary criminality. 

These principles endure in our own time. A California regulation, in force since 1975, required agricultural growers to admit union organizers onto their property for up to three hours a day, as many as 120 days a year. The growers had not opened their land to the public and did not wish to. Yet the state granted outsiders a right to enter. In 2021, the Supreme Court held in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid that this was a taking the Constitution forbids without compensation. What the regulation had appropriated was not the land itself, but the owner’s right to exclude, which the Court called “one of the most treasured rights” of property ownership. To take that right, however briefly, was to take property, and the government may not do so without due process of law.

By creating strong impediments to private and public expropriation, the jurists of the English common law and the founders of the American republic established many of the legal procedures and even the ethical norms we take for granted today, including the importance of self-directed action and the necessity of consent. Liberal freedoms rely on private property as much today as in the eighteenth century. But it would be a mistake to think property rights emphasize freedom at the expense of virtue. How we treat ownership is inexorably bound to how we treat each other. 

Private Property and Virtue

Private property is a means for developing moral habits. These habits, when they become a settled part of a person’s life, are known as virtues. The virtue ethics tradition is thousands of years old and incorporates both personal character formation and social wellbeing. The “cardinal” virtues of justice, prudence, courage, and temperance, along with the “theological” virtues of faith, hope, and charity, continue to form the backbone of our reflection on habits of excellence. A liberal order that protects property rights provides ample room for moral self-fashioning.

Our ethical projects usually require allocating resources. There are almost always individual and social dimensions associated with property use, and when property rights are a settled matter, the habits we build around them become ethically and socially important. For example, a household that persistently consumes less than it produces acts prudentially and temperately. It likely exhibits other virtues as well, depending on how those savings are used. Putting them into a business enterprise—developing a product or service that can improve people’s lives and offering it openly and fairly—reflects a sense of justice. Using the savings instead to care for the poor or otherwise less fortunate displays admirable charity.

Commerce and exchange require virtuous behavior. Dishonest or cruel dealings can prove profitable in the short run, but are rarely so in the long run. Virtues such as industriousness and honesty, which are themselves composites of the cardinal and theological virtues, receive their reward in market economies. They enable us to do well by doing good. And the more we practice them, the more we internalize them. One becomes a good businessman the same way one becomes a good pianist: practice. And private property is the material with which we practice.

This is even clearer in civil society. Extensive moral projects in the spheres of religion, education, and philanthropy all presume private property. It is therefore essential that churches and other congregations can own resources, including real property, so that their members can assemble and worship. As an historical example, when the Roman state ceased persecuting the Christian Church in the early fourth century, it also restored the Church’s confiscated property and guaranteed its ownership claims against future attempted expropriations. Property protection was itself a major contributor to the quest for freedom of assembly, conscience, and worship. 

The deeper legal architecture came later. The Papal Revolution of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries established the Church’s independence from secular rulers and, with it, the corporate property rights, jurisdictional autonomy, and systematized canon law that became an essential source for the entire western legal tradition—including its later commitments to individual rights, religious liberty, and limits on state power.

A similar argument holds for education and philanthropy. Universities must own property to provide a venue for faculty to teach and research. Respecting property rights thus promotes free intellectual inquiry. Likewise, philanthropic organizations provide the opportunity for individuals to pursue collective moral goals other than profit. The complex organizational tasks associated with feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and caring for the sick would be incredibly difficult—and impossible beyond a rudimentary level—without private property.

Since higher education is currently a controversial topic, it is worth exploring an instance of a college insisting on its right to shape its own educational vision and relying on private property to do so. In the 1970s, federal regulators began requiring colleges receiving any federal money, including student aid, to comply with rules that some institutions judged contrary to their missions. Hillsdale College, a private liberal arts school in Michigan, chose to forgo federal funds rather than submit. The choice was controversial then and remains so. Critics argue that the federal requirements are salutary and that Hillsdale’s refusal shields it from accountability. The merits of that dispute are not the point here. What matters is the possibility of institutional self-direction. Because Hillsdale owns its campus, controls its endowment, and has an extensive network of private donors, it can maintain an educational vision of which regulators disapprove.

Free of the governance and curricular pressures that move with federal priorities, Hillsdale has pursued a course of study centered on classic texts, the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtue, and the conviction that education at its best shapes character as well as intellect. This approach, although not unheard of, is uncommon within American higher education. An institution dependent on the favor of politicians and bureaucrats would find it hard to sustain. Hillsdale has sustained it because it owns the conditions of its work. Property does not guarantee that an institution will use its freedom well. It does guarantee that the institution is free to try.

Liberal societies do not have a monopoly on virtue, of course. We can develop moral habits in non-liberal societies, too. The point is that liberal societies, which necessarily feature robust property rights regimes, create widespread access to the resources that allow us to pursue our ethical projects while respecting the dignity of those with whom we cooperate and compete. Universities and their faculty can take controversial stances, and they can even contend vigorously with each other, thanks to the security that they enjoy in their property rights. At the individual level, liberalism’s conception of human persons as rational, free, and equal also implies the necessity of private property for individual self-cultivation consistent with universal dignity. The individual secure in their private property rights likewise enjoys the freedom to think and act within the law, without fear that those rights will be revoked as part of an extralegal punishment.

Conclusion

Private property is the foundation of markets, a bulwark of freedom, and a means of virtue. There is a unity to these themes. Markets require the moral habits that ownership fosters, namely prudence, honesty, industriousness, and restraint. Virtue requires the material means that ownership protects, since charity without resources is sentiment, and self-improvement without independence is daydreaming. Freedom requires both the sphere of independent action that property establishes and the character that responsible ownership produces. The age-old conflict between liberty and order—whether society’s institutions should make people free or make them good—resolves once we see that the institutions producing one also produce the other.

For too long, defenders of private property have tended to argue on grounds of efficiency and growth, ceding justice, dignity, community, and solidarity to their critics. This was both a substantive and strategic error. Private property reliably honors human dignity, because it treats persons as capable of self-direction. Private property also makes genuine community possible, because community presupposes voluntary association, and voluntary association presupposes that one has something of one’s own to contribute. And private property furthers social justice instead of stifling it, because exchange creates new wealth rather than seizing existing wealth.

Liberalism itself is a long accretion of law, habit, and inquiry—the reasoned and patient work of generations who understood that free societies do not maintain themselves. Private property is a non-negotiable component of this inheritance. While there is the danger that property’s critics will dismantle the liberal order, the greater risk is that liberalism’s beneficiaries will lose the will to defend it. Ownership is a badge of honor, and we should treat it as such. Private property is not the sum of human flourishing. But flourishing for the masses has never been achieved without it.

In January 2011, somewhere in the crush of bodies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a man held up a handwritten sign. It read: “Facebook: against every unjust” [sic]. He probably didn’t think of himself as making a statement about technology policy. He was making a statement about Hosni Mubarak—the dictator who, within weeks, would be forced from power, in part because tools like Facebook had given Egyptians a way to coordinate, organize, and find each other when state media was telling them they were alone.

Fourteen years later, almost to the day, the man who founded and still runs Facebook sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of an American president openly contemptuous of democratic norms. He was seated ahead of that president’s own cabinet nominees, alongside nearly every other major tech CEO. The same platform. A radically different relationship to power.

It would be easy to look at these two images and conclude that the techno-optimism of the early internet era was a fraud, and that the tools we thought would liberate us were always going to be captured by the powerful. Easy, and wrong.

But not entirely wrong. Something real did change between those two photos, and pretending otherwise gets us nowhere.

What changed wasn’t the technology, exactly. Facebook in 2011 was already a centralized platform owned by a single company. What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful.

By 2025, everyone had figured it out.

This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentrate power or that distribute it. It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes. And once you’ve built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing.

To understand why this change happened, and why it was arguably inevitable given the business models that emerged, you need to understand something about the economics of digital abundance.

The Incentives of the New Middlemen

Digital abundance reshaped what it means to be a cultural intermediary.

The early-internet conventional wisdom was that the network would kill the middleman. Yet the promised era of “disintermediation” never quite happened. What actually happened was that the middlemen changed character.

The pre-internet middlemen—record labels, book publishers, movie studios, magazine editors—were gatekeepers. Their entire job was rejecting 99% of what came through the door so that a curated few could reach an audience. The internet middlemen who replaced them did the opposite. Their approach depended on letting nearly everything through. They became enablers rather than gatekeepers, and an entire generation of cultural production—music, video, writing, podcasts—flowed through them in volumes the old gatekeepers couldn’t have imagined.

But the new middlemen still needed a business model. The successful early internet companies quickly ran into what appeared to be a fundamental economics problem: if anyone can create content, and all this content is available for free, how does anyone make money?

Economics has traditionally been the study of allocating scarce resources. Digital technology broke that frame. Suddenly information could be copied at near-zero marginal cost, and what do you charge for when what you’re providing is effectively free? Google and Facebook found the answer that defined the next two decades. The scarcity that wasn’t going away was human attention. Build a massive ad machine, sell that attention to advertisers, and the more data you collect, the more precisely you can target—which means the more you can charge. To build the data collection architecture meant taking increasing control over the flow of information itself.

So the same platforms that broke the old gatekeepers and let billions of people participate in cultural and political life also built the most concentrated attention-extraction machines in human history. The empowerment was real. So was the price tag: a business model that required centralization. The architecture that empowered users was the architecture that extracted from them. Building one required building the other.

From Enshittification to Despotification

That initial burst of user empowerment produced things like the Arab Spring. Distributed voices that the old gatekeepers had silenced were suddenly able to find each other, organize, and act. But abundance is loud. The same wave of user-generated content that let suppressed voices break through also produced a cacophony, plenty of it garbage, some of it deliberately weaponized.

By the mid-2000s, the dominant complaint about the internet was “information overload.” We had everything; we couldn’t find anything. The fix that won was algorithmic curation, delivered by centralized platforms. RSS readers and personal sites could in principle have solved the same problem, but they required users to do the curating themselves. The centralized platforms said: don’t worry about it, we’ll figure out what to show you.

Most people happily took that deal. And at the time, the deal was fine.

But that trade-off resulted in several downstream impacts that we’re just beginning to reckon with today. The first, as colorfully noted by writer Cory Doctorow, is the enshittification curve:

The companies that embraced centralized control over the user experience did so initially because they were, in fact, making things better for their users. Information overload was a real issue. Having a better system for managing it was a good thing. It’s why so many people flocked to these centralized social media platforms and became so enraptured by their algorithms.

The problem of centralized systems is that they create an irresistible temptation to control and exploit. Users who found value early on feel stuck: they can leave, but doing so means abandoning their community. That lack of easy exit creates lock-in, and lock-in enables enshittification.

And the same chokepoints that let companies extract value also let governments extract power. Those seeking control hunt up and down the network stack for leverage, and centralized providers concentrate it.

Call this despotification: the political analog of enshittification, where the same chokepoints get exploited to extract compliance from platforms—and ultimately to gain control over what people can say and hear.

The temptation of those in power to twist the knobs to their liking became irresistible. This took many forms: X downranking posts with links to external sites, Amazon choosing which products to show you as the promoted results, Instagram choosing which content deserves to be sent to you as a reminder notification, Substack choosing which newsletters to suggest to you. Each of these choices can be tweaked in ways that enable greater usage, engagement, and revenue, and not necessarily in the interests of the users.

They could often justify those tweaks. The incentives are just too great. For CEOs of companies, they were trying to justify their valuations, or they were responding to public pressure regarding what they allowed (or didn’t allow) on their platforms. Governments would float almost any argument that worked, even if they contradicted one another: some wanted control over these tools to prevent disinformation, others to “enable free speech,” while almost all political actors trotted out “protect the children” and “protect national security” at one point or another.

All this was always about gaining some sort of control over a centralized point of leverage, where one could influence what kinds of conversations were allowed, encouraged, or promoted.

Decentralization Brings Back Democratic Ideals

It doesn’t need to be that way.

Remember, the original promise of the web was that it would break down the gatekeepers and set up systems that enable more people to participate in the broader conversation space. It certainly changed the landscape, away from the earlier generation of media gatekeepers and toward more internet-powered enablers. But over the last decade and a half, many platforms have  gradually taken the role of the centralized provider, which is tempting for those seeking either economic or political control.

There’s no reason we can’t build a new generation of services that restores that democratic, decentralized promise—an open internet that empowers users rather than funneling control to gatekeepers.

We are already seeing small examples of that happening. In 2019 I wrote “Protocols, Not Platforms,” which laid out how a more decentralized architecture for online services could push power to the edges of the network, away from the chokepoints that make both corporate extraction and political capture so tempting.

There have since been various experiments and attempts to make that a reality. Specific decentralized protocols for social media have found audiences and developers: ActivityPub, Nostr, and Farcaster have all seen experimentation and useful apps developed. Then there’s the ATprotocol, which was developed in direct response to my paper, and Bluesky, where I’m on the board, and which has seen over 44 million users sign up. But much more importantly, the underlying protocol is now inspiring a larger, decentralized reinvention of the way the entire web works (in some ways, Bluesky itself is the least interesting development in the ecosystem, and what’s happening among the many developers is where the excitement lies).

Unlike the rise of Google or Facebook, these more decentralized offerings are designed to be locked open, so that we can build systems that present the empowering, enabling aspects of an open web, but without the chokepoints that make both enshittification and despotification all too tempting.

In such a system, the incentive structure is flipped. If the users themselves retain control over their data and which tools they can use to intermediate that data, then attempts to gain control over more centralized chokepoints become self-defeating. The ability of users to easily and seamlessly “exit” from one provider’s control, into some other provider (or even a self-hosted solution) means that the incentives to grab greater control are limited. Each step towards enshittification makes it more likely users will click a button and remove the problematic provider from their personal ecosystem without losing access to any content, data, or services.

Danny O’Brien, a Senior Fellow at the Filecoin Foundation, has argued that decentralization itself should never be the “terminal value” we pursue—it’s a means, not an end. The actual terminal value is “cognitive liberty”: the ability to think, reflect, and form ideas without those processes being surveilled, manipulated, or controlled by whoever owns the infrastructure.

The original World Wide Web absolutely decentralized some aspects of our cognitive liberty, enabling more people to speak, to associate, and to be heard. And that created tremendous opportunities, but also massive challenges, and the solutions to those challenges planted the seeds of the more enshittified, despotified world that we see today, with economic and political powers focused on controlling the chokepoints and manipulating them to their own interests.

Truly decentralized tools push power to the ends. Users control their data and choose which intermediaries operate on it—and that arrangement is a poison pill to both enshittification and despotification. Any move in those directions only pushes users across the deliberately low barrier to exit, taking their content, data, and community with them.

To Build the Decentralized Future

None of this happens automatically. The forces seeking control already have their arguments ready: centralized systems are safer, more accountable, and better at stopping bad actors. We’re already seeing this logic embedded in regulations being pushed under the banner of “protecting children” or “national security”—rules that would, in practice, further concentrate control in ways that make both enshittification and despotification more likely, not less.

Decentralization, like democracy itself, is something we have to fight for. Absent deliberate effort, the default trajectory runs toward centralization, because centralization is convenient, and convenience wins in the short term.

Which means the decentralized alternatives have to be genuinely better, not just philosophically purer. The centralized platforms won the last round because they removed friction. They didn’t ask users to manage config files or understand network topology—they said “click here and it works,” and most people took that deal. Any decentralized successor that requires users to become their own sysadmins will lose the same way the last generation of open protocols lost.

What’s different now is that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to having decentralized systems that are actually more convenient and more empowering, where the user experience is competitive with the centralized incumbents, and the democratic benefits come built in rather than bolted on. The goal is to build systems where those two things point in the same direction.

That’s what’s actually at stake in the work being done on decentralized protocols right now. A different architecture—one where the chokepoints that made enshittification and despotification inevitable simply don’t exist, and where democratic participation isn’t a side effect of good technology but the whole point of it.

The Next Internet

The pattern this piece describes is happening again right now, in real time, with the technology that will likely define the next decade.

The leading frontier AI companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, with xAI, Meta, and Mistral close behind—have every incentive to run the same playbook that the last generation of internet giants ran (and yes, some are the very same companies): Build something useful, attract users, create lock-in, exploit the chokepoints. The enshittification curve doesn’t care what the underlying technology is.

But the same forces that make decentralized social protocols viable apply here, too. The models themselves are increasingly interchangeable—users of agentic AI tools are discovering that the underlying model is a small piece of the puzzle, and the real value lives in their own data, context, and accumulated knowledge, all of which can live in files and databases they control. And open-weight models are getting good fast. Models you can run on hardware you own are inherently not subject to centralized control. Every step toward AI centralization makes the decentralized alternative more attractive. 

The choice in front of us is the same one that’s always been in front of us, just with higher stakes and less time: Do we let the next generation of tools get built around chokepoints, or do we insist on architecture that distributes power instead of concentrating it?

The internet’s first generation empowered billions of people who had no voice. The second traded that empowerment for convenience, but the convenience came with chokepoints that turned into weapons. The third generation—social and AI both—can have empowerment and convenience together. But that outcome isn’t automatic. It requires treating decentralization not as a technical preference but as the architecture democracy actually needs, and fighting for it with the same urgency we’d bring to any other democratic institution under threat.

The alternative is already visible. Two photos, fourteen years apart.

Liberalism—defined as the political philosophy that prioritizes individual freedom and human happiness—has always had an equivocal relationship with democracy. Democratic governments generally feature much greater liberty and happiness than other types of regimes. Liberals should resist the temptation to embrace authoritarianism.

But there are also multiple ways in which democracy can often threaten liberty and human welfare. These dangers include the tyranny of the majority and widespread voter ignorance. Democracy can also be a threat to its own perpetuation, by bringing to power authoritarian political movements. These are all longstanding problems. But recent events demonstrate their continuing—and in some cases growing—significance. Liberals need to acknowledge their gravity and more aggressively pursue various potential solutions. These include limiting and decentralizing government and possibly measures to make it more difficult for illiberal anti-democratic movements to take power.

Democratic Tyranny

It is tempting to dismiss the idea of democracy devolving into tyranny or injustice as a contradiction in terms. People often use “democratic” as a synonym for “good,” and “undemocratic” for “bad.” Whatever the linguistic merits of this usage, it is not analytically helpful. If anything good is by definition also compatible with unconstrained democracy, and anything democratic is by definition also good, then democracy ceases to be an analytically useful concept. Better to define democracy as a political system governed by majoritarian political processes. Such processes can make both good decisions and bad ones.

A slightly more sophisticated basis for dismissing the possibility that democracy can be bad is the idea—advanced by a few political theorists, such as Ian Shapiro—that there is no objective external basis for evaluating democratic decisions. If the voters and their representatives support a particular policy, who are we to say it’s wrong? 

Such moral relativism has a range of well-known flaws. Here I will merely note that, if we have no objective basis for evaluating the justice of democratically enacted policies, we also have no basis for concluding that democracy is superior to dictatorship, oligarchy, or theocracy. If there are metrics—such as liberty, equality, and human welfare—by which we can conclude that democracy is superior to these other systems, then those very same standards can be used to evaluate democracy’s own output, and to conclude that democratic government may need to be constrained or amended in various ways. 

Once we recognize that democratic governments are not inherently just or immune to critical evaluation, it becomes clear that they may be prone to systematic flaws. The most obvious is the “tyranny of the majority.” If democratic governments represent the will of a majority of the population, that majority might sometimes oppress minorities. There are many obvious historical examples from around the world, including the oppression of ethnic, racial, religious, and other groups. This danger is once again a serious menace in many democratic nations, thanks in part to the rise of ethno-nationalist movements—like Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and similar ones in various European countries—that seek to mobilize ethnic majorities in their respective countries by highlighting the supposed threat posed by minority groups and immigrants. Nationalists have a long history of persecuting and oppressing minority groups, and today’s nationalist movements are much like their predecessors in that regard.

The Problem of Political Ignorance

Voter ignorance is a second way in which democracy often menaces liberal values. As described in many studies, including my book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, overwhelming evidence shows that most voters know little about government and public policy. Majorities are often ignorant even of such basics as the names of the three branches of government, how the national government spends its money (voters in many nations massively underestimate how much is spent on entitlement programs, while greatly overestimating foreign aid), and which government officials are responsible for which issues.

Such behavior is actually perfectly rational for most of the public. If your only reason for following politics is to be a better voter, that turns out to not be much of an incentive at all, because there is so little chance that your vote will make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a U.S. presidential race, for example, though there are variations depending on the state). For most people, therefore, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities. 

Of course there are people who learn political information for reasons other than becoming better voters. Just as there are sports fans who love to follow their favorite teams even though they cannot influence the outcomes of games, there are also “political fans” who enjoy following political issues, and cheering for their favorite candidates, parties, or ideologies. 

There is nothing wrong with being a political fan. But if you are seeking out political information for the purpose of enhancing your fan experience, that objective is often inimical to the goal of seeking out the truth. Much like sports fans, political fans tend to evaluate new information in a highly biased way. They overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, and undervalue or ignore new data that cuts against them, even to the extent of misinterpreting simple data that they could easily assess correctly in other contexts. Moreover, those most interested in political issues are also particularly prone to discuss politics only with others who agree with their views and to follow politics only through like-minded media. This problem may well be even worse today, in the age of social media and a fragmented internet, than in some previous eras.

Thus, we have a serious two-level problem of political ignorance. Most voters are rationally ignorant, knowing little about politics and government. The minority, who are much more knowledgeable, are mostly political fans—highly biased in their selection of information sources and their evaluation of what they learn. In combination, these problems predictably lead to the election of political leaders and parties that pursue a wide range of badly flawed policies, including many that threaten liberty and other liberal values.

Voter ignorance is exacerbated by the enormous size, scope, and complexity of modern government. In most advanced democracies, government spending accounts for a third or more of GDP, and the state regulates almost every form of human activity. Even relatively knowledgeable voters cannot effectively monitor more than a small fraction of these policies and their effects.

The harm caused by political ignorance also exacerbates the problem of tyranny of the majority. Much oppression of minorities is itself the result of ignorance and bias. For example, ethnic discrimination and xenophobic hostility to immigration are often rooted in the ignorant belief that the economy is a zero-sum game, in which gains for one group can only come at the expense of others—ignoring the reality of growth, innovation, and mutually beneficial gains from exchange.

When I first started writing about political ignorance over twenty-five years ago, many scholars argued that voter knowledge levels are not a significant problem, because voters who know very little about government and public policy can still do a good job thanks to information shortcuts, the “miracle of aggregation,” and other workarounds. Such optimism is far less prevalent today, thanks to the rise of Donald Trump and other similar right-wing populist leaders exploiting political ignorance to their advantage. But Trump and his ilk are just particularly egregious examples of a problem that long predated them.

As I and other critics have long argued, information shortcuts have serious shortcomings. Among other things, they often require preexisting knowledge to use effectively. For example, the most common information shortcut is “retrospective voting,” rewarding or punishing incumbent politicians based on whether things went well or badly during their terms. As explained in chapter four of Democracy and Political Ignorance, voters often reward or punish officeholders for things they didn’t cause (most notably short-term economic trends, but also things like droughts and even sports team victories), while ignoring some things that politicians are in fact responsible for. 

The 2024 U.S. presidential election showed that shortcuts are even less effective than I previously thought. Key swing voters overlooked the dangerous—and obvious—menace to liberal democracy posed by Donald Trump’s efforts to use force and fraud to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. Instead, they focused on punishing Democrats for the less severe problem of inflationary price increases. In the process, they failed to recognize that Trump’s own policies—most notably tariffs, mass deportation, and exclusion of immigrant workers—would predictably increase prices rather than lower them, as in fact went on to happen. 

“Miracle of aggregation” theories hold that errors caused by voter ignorance matter little because ignorance-induced voter errors in one direction (e.g., in favor of Republicans) are offset by those in the other (e.g., in favor of Democrats), allowing more knowledgeable voters to determine the outcome. Alternatively, voters collectively might have greater knowledge than they do individually, and the electorate as a whole can make effective use of that aggregate wisdom. As discussed  more fully in Democracy and Political Ignorance, this happy outcome can only occur if voter errors are randomly distributed or other highly improbable circumstances arise. In the real world, even a slight nonrandom ignorance-induced bias can make errors virtually certain.

Bringing Illiberal Authoritarians to Power

In worst-case but all-too-plausible scenarios, democracy can be the cause of its own demise by bringing to power illiberal authoritarians. This famously happened in the case of Nazi Germany. More recently, authoritarians have come to power by democratic means and then proceeded to subvert democracy in countries like Russia, Venezuela, Turkey, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. In Hungary, the authoritarian Viktor Orbán was elected by democratic means, used government power to suppress opposition, and stayed in power for sixteen years, until he was finally thrown out by an opposition landslide so great that it turned his rigged electoral map against him. Even in the United States—one of the world’s longest and most deeply established democracies—voters elected Donald Trump despite his visible authoritarian tendencies, and then reelected him in 2024, even after he incited violence to try to stay in power after losing the previous election.

Trump probably won’t be able to completely subvert America’s liberal institutions, which are better-entrenched than those of Hungary, Russia, or Venezuela. But the very fact that he twice got the opportunity to try highlights a serious weakness of democracy.

Possible Solutions

The traditional solution to the danger of tyranny of the majority is to impose constitutional limits on government power, and to ban various types of invidious discrimination. These approaches have great merit, and have achieved much, including the abolition of Jim Crow racial segregation in the United States. But they cannot always cope with the full range of majoritarian tyranny. Most obviously, current constitutional rules, as interpreted by U.S. courts and those in many other countries, often don’t do nearly enough to curb majoritarian oppression of immigrants. The enormous size and scope of the modern state also makes it very difficult to curb these dangers, as it multiplies opportunities for oppression and discrimination.

There is no easy way to “fix” political ignorance. Experience shows that we cannot rely on public education to increase voter knowledge significantly, as knowledge levels have stagnated even as education attainment greatly increased over the last several decades. I assess a range of other possible options in my 2023 article on “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to the Problem of Political Ignorance,” and in Democracy and Political Ignorance. 

I believe the best approach is to make fewer decisions at the ballot box and more by “voting with your feet,” where incentives to seek out information and use it wisely are better. People can vote with their feet by choosing which governments to live under, based on their policies, and by making decisions in the private sector. As I discuss in various works, such as Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, we can empower people to make more decisions through foot voting by limiting and decentralizing government power, and by breaking down barriers to both domestic and international migration. These measures can increase the range of options available to foot voters and reduce moving costs. Decentralizing power to lower levels of government and—in many cases—to the private sector can empower foot voters to choose between a wide range of options without having to move long distances. We can also reduce the information burden on rationally ignorant voters by cutting back on the scope and complexity of government functions, thereby making it easier for voters to keep track of them. 

In “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions,” I suggest we should give more consideration to the possibility of simply paying voters to increase their levels of political knowledge, thereby altering the structure of incentives that leads to rational ignorance. For example, philanthropists or nonprofit groups could create a “Voter Achievement Test” that tests basic political knowledge, make it available to anyone who wants to take it, and give monetary awards to anyone who scores above a certain level, awarding perhaps $500 or $1,000 each. But any effective approach will take time, and there may be no one fix that is sufficient by itself. We likely need a combination of several strategies.

Constitutional constraints on government power can also help contain would-be authoritarians. But, given the opportunity, they can sometimes break through the constraints. A common strategy for doing so is the abuse of emergency powers, utilized by Vladimir Putin in Russia, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Benito Mussolini in Italy, and others; and most famously by the Nazis, with the 1933 Enabling Act. Legislators would do well to strictly limit emergency powers, and courts should not defer to the executive’s claims that the emergency situation required to trigger their use actually exists; they should demand proof. 

Liberals should also give more consideration to mechanisms by which illiberal authoritarians can be barred from power in the first place. Barring candidates and parties from running for office based on their illiberal ideologies alone is a dangerous tool, since it could be abused to suppress opposition parties more generally. On the other hand, there is less danger in barring officeholding by people with a demonstrated record of dangerous, illiberal, and anti-democratic actions. For example, several post-communist Eastern European nations enacted “lustration” laws barring from office some former officials of their communist dictatorships, particularly former agents of the secret police. These laws have helped prevent democratic backsliding, and they have not become a menace to democracy themselves. Had Russia enacted such a law, it might have avoided the horrific regime of ex-KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin. 

The United States, for its part, would have done well to enforce Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred future officeholding by public officials who engaged in “insurrection” against the United States, a provision originally aimed at Confederate insurrectionists after the Civil War. Elsewhere, I have argued that the Supreme Court was wrong to rule that Section 3 cannot be applied to Donald Trump because it supposedly could not be enforced without additional congressional legislation. A future Congress would do well to enact such enforcement legislation.

The above is just a preliminary overview of possible tools for mitigating the danger that democracy often poses to liberal values and—in some cases—to its own perpetuation. There is room for disagreement over exactly which solutions are best, and the optimal approach for some nations may well differ from that which is best for others. But the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that these are serious dangers indeed. Liberalism cannot do without democracy. But it also cannot survive a democracy with too few constraints on its power.

Image: Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Socrates” (1787), via Wikimedia Commons.

California has the most underfunded public pension system in the country. CalSTRS, the fund that pays the retirements of the state’s teachers, carries an unfunded liability of more than $100 billion—larger than California’s entire annual K–12 education budget. CalPERS, the parallel system for non-teaching public employees, brings the combined liability to roughly $136 billion. Between 2013 and 2021, the share of a California teacher’s salary that school districts had to send to CalSTRS more than doubled, from 8.3 percent to 19.1 percent, and roughly forty percent of recent increases in school budgets have been absorbed by pension costs rather than reaching classrooms. Three California cities—Vallejo, Stockton, and San Bernardino—have declared bankruptcy in the last two decades, with police and firefighter pension obligations as one of the largest drivers in each case. Cities that have not gone bankrupt have responded by cutting parks, libraries, road maintenance, arts programs, and, in some cases, the very police staffing levels their pension obligations were originally meant to support.

These are the visible fiscal effects of California’s public-sector unionization. By that term I mean the organized collective bargaining of government employees: teachers, police officers, firefighters, and the rest of the state and municipal workforce. This institutional arrangement is distinct from private-sector unionism in ways that turn out to matter a great deal.

The fiscal effects of public-sector unionism have produced a small library of policy reports and a steady stream of newspaper investigations. But they are not the deepest version of the problem, and they are not the version I want to focus on here. The deeper problem—and the one that should concern classical and modern liberals alike—is a problem of power.

***

The first essay in this series argued, following the pioneering University of Chicago economist Henry Simons, that concentrations of power are the principal threat liberals of all stripes should be working to prevent. The second argued that this concern reaches into wealth itself: when private fortunes grow large enough to capture the institutions that are supposed to constrain them, the classical liberal commitment to limited government may find itself pointed at the wrong targets. 

This essay extends the same diagnosis to another concentration of power, one that classical liberals have long named as such, but that modern liberals have tended to read as a victory for democratic accountability. I want to argue that modern liberals should read the situation more carefully, and that public-sector unions—particularly teachers’ unions and police unions—exhibit exactly the kind of power-problem Simons taught us to look for.

The case for public-sector unions, as usually made, runs through their private-sector cousins. Workers facing concentrated capital need organization. A single worker bargaining against a large firm is at a structural disadvantage that the law of contract cannot easily remedy. Collective bargaining restores something like parity. This is the countervailing-power argument: Concentrating capital can unlock economic efficiencies, making it socially useful, but the results can also bias market outcomes in a corporation’s favor, above all when the counterparty is a single individual. In times like those, it can help to have an organization on the individual’s side.  In private-sector contexts, that argument has real force. Samuel Bagg, in his recent book The Dispersion of Power, has recently developed this argument with particular clarity: Liberal democracy works only when concentrated power on one side of a social relation faces sufficient organized power on the other, and the labor union is among the few institutional vehicles we have for the latter.

But the structural setup of public-sector unionism is different in two specific and consequential ways, and the difference complicates the countervailing-power argument rather than extending it.

The first difference is on the union side. A private-sector union bargains with a counterparty, the corporation’s management, whose election it does not finance and whose tenure it cannot directly affect. A public-sector union bargains with a counterparty—a state legislator, a city councilmember, a school board member—whose campaign it has often funded. If today’s negotiation does not go well, it can fund the opposition tomorrow.  A public official’s continued tenure depends on the kind of organized political support that public-sector unions specialize in providing. This is not an arm’s-length transaction. The employer is an institution that the employee has had a hand in shaping, and the negotiator across the table is, in significant part, the union’s own political product. A counterparty in that position has weaker reasons than a normal employer to drive a hard bargain, and stronger reasons to please the people sitting opposite.

The second difference is on the government side. A private employer who agrees to a generous contract feels the consequences in firm revenue, share price, and maybe in personal compensation. The negotiator either has equity at stake or reports to people who do. A public-sector negotiator faces none of these incentives. The money committed to wages, benefits, and pensions is not the negotiator’s money; it is the taxpayer’s. The political costs of granting a generous contract are diffuse and deferred; the political costs of resisting are immediate and concentrated, since the union is in the room and the taxpayer is not. This is the public-choice problem that James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Mancur Olson described. It has particular force here, where a party with coordinated interests, the union,  faces a counterparty, the state, that is inherently conflicted and lacks meaningful incentives to strike a good bargain. The state’s incentive structure tilts systematically toward giving in.

These two structural facts—a politically advantaged union and fiscally insulated state negotiators—are not separate problems. They are the same problem, viewed from different sides of the table. Bagg’s countervailing-power argument, applied without modification, sees only the union side and reads it as labor exercising legitimate organized power against an employer. The framework misses what it is actually best equipped to see: the asymmetry of the underlying relation. In the public-sector case, the counterparty isn’t organized in the pursuit of the relevant interests. Instead, the union has helped to fund its election, while its financial discipline depends on a constituency, the taxpayers, that has no presence in the room. The union, having organized to face a concentrated employer that does not exist, now faces a counterparty that cannot resist it.

Daniel DiSalvo’s Government against Itself remains the most thorough scholarly treatment of these dynamics, and DiSalvo names the structural fact more compactly than I have: “in collective bargaining negotiations with the government, the people’s elected representatives partially cede control of the bureaucracy to unelected labor leaders. Many policy choices are then the outcome of negotiations between officeholders and unions, rather than the expression of the people’s will channeled through their representatives.” The negotiation, on this view, is not between government and a private counterparty. It is between two factions of government. One has reasons to enlarge itself, and the other has no real reason to resist.

***

The teachers union is the cleanest case, partly because the modern liberal stake in the question is easier to see. The basic story is familiar to anyone who has followed California education politics over the last two decades. The California Teachers Association and its local affiliates—United Teachers Los Angeles is the largest—are by some metrics the most powerful political organizations in the state. The CTA’s political action arm has consistently been among the largest contributors to state legislative campaigns. School board elections in major districts are typically lopsided. The union-endorsed candidate enters with a substantial advantage in funding and organized support that opposing candidates rarely match. The contracts that result govern not only wages but tenure protections, dismissal procedures, layoff order, evaluation criteria, classroom assignment rules, and a great deal of what looks at first like operational discretion but turns out to be significant public policy. Terry Moe’s Special Interest: Teachers Unions and American Schools provides the canonical scholarly account of these dynamics.

This is the half of the story classical liberals have always emphasized: an organized interest captures the public institutions that are supposed to constrain it, and the institutions then function in significant part for that interest’s benefit. The pension obligations sketched at the beginning of this essay are one downstream effect. The work-rule provisions that make it nearly impossible to remove an ineffective teacher are another. Decades of California school reform efforts—from charter expansion to performance pay to tenure reform to merit-based layoffs—have foundered in part because the teachers union has the political muscle to defeat them, and the politicians who would face them are the politicians the union helped to elect.

But there is another half to the story, one I would urge modern liberals to take more seriously than they have. The students most damaged by these arrangements are not the children of suburban affluence. The teachers who are nearly impossible to dismiss are concentrated, by the standard operation of seniority and transfer rules, in schools that serve poor and minority children. Layoff procedures that protect senior teachers regardless of effectiveness fall hardest on the schools where high-quality new teachers are most needed. Curricular and pedagogical decisions that emerge from union-shaped bargaining are decisions the families of the affected children have very limited ability to influence. The pattern is familiar. An organized political constituency captures the institutions intended to serve a more diffuse one, and the unorganized constituency pays the cost.

The clearest recent illustration is the COVID school closures. The opening months of the pandemic, before vaccines and before reliable data on in-school transmission, presented a period of genuine uncertainty in which workplace safety concerns were not unreasonable. What followed those months was different. Well into 2021 and 2022, after vaccines were widely available and most of the rest of American life had returned to something like normal, major urban teachers’ unions—the Chicago Teachers Union, United Teachers Los Angeles, the Boston Teachers Union, the United Federation of Teachers in New York—continued to resist a return to in-person instruction. The American Federation of Teachers, the national umbrella, was caught lobbying the CDC to make its reopening guidance more restrictive than CDC scientists had originally proposed. Schools in jurisdictions where unions had less political leverage reopened months—sometimes more than a year—earlier than schools where the unions held effective veto power over the decision. The costs of those delays fell, predictably and measurably, on the children least able to bear them. Wealthier families put their children into private schools that had reopened, into learning pods with hired tutors, or they simply kept a parent home to supervise the laptop. Poor and minority families had none of those exits. The NAEP results that began arriving in 2022 confirmed what had been visible in real time: substantial learning losses across the board, the deepest losses concentrated among low-income and minority students, and a sharp widening in the achievement gaps that American education had been trying to narrow for decades.

This is not a critique modern liberals should find difficult to recognize. It is the same critique they have made, correctly, of pharmaceutical companies’ influence over the FDA, of fossil-fuel companies’ influence over environmental regulation, of the financial sector’s influence over its supposed regulators. The structural pattern—organized interest captures the institution that is meant to constrain it, diffuse counterparty bears the cost—is the same. The difference is that in those cases modern liberals see the capture; in the public-sector union case they have tended to see solidarity. Both readings can be partly true. But even when solidarity is a real value, it is not a costless one—and the cost in this case has been tremendous.

***

If the teachers union is the case where the costs of capture are easiest to see, the police union is the case where the capture runs deepest—reaching beyond the bargaining table into law itself. Police unions have used their political power in two registers at once: at the bargaining table, where they negotiate contracts that constrain how officers may be investigated and disciplined; and in state legislatures, where they have lobbied for laws that codify those constraints into statute.

The collective bargaining agreements these unions negotiate are not merely about wages. They typically include provisions that delay misconduct interviews for forty-eight hours or more, that expunge disciplinary records after a few years, that exclude civilians from internal review processes, that prevent the public release of personnel files, and that limit the disciplinary authority of police chiefs over their own departments. The legal scholar Stephen Rushin documented the pattern empirically in a 2017 Duke Law Journal study that collected and analyzed 178 union contracts from major American police departments and found a substantial number to include precisely these provisions.

The legislative complement is the set of state statutes formally called Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights laws. First passed in Maryland in 1972 and now in force in fifteen states, these laws codify many of the same protections that appear in union contracts: cooling-off periods before officers under investigation may be questioned, the right of the officer to see complainants’ names and statements before answering them, restrictions confining investigators to sworn officers (which blocks independent civilian review), and time limits on internal investigations. Every state adoption has followed lobbying by police unions and associations. Where the contract cannot deliver the protection, the statute does.

What these provisions do in practice is documented most fully in the reporting of Radley Balko, a journalist and Liberalism.org Fellow who has spent decades researching the subject. His eighteen-month investigation of the Little Rock Police Department, published in The Intercept in 2021, traced the campaign by the local Fraternal Order of Police to oust the city’s first Black reformist police chief, Keith Humphrey. Mayor Frank Scott had appointed Humphrey in 2019 to implement accountability reforms. Within two years, Humphrey faced lawsuits from twelve of his own officers, including the two assistant chiefs who had applied for his job; a sustained pattern of human-resources complaints; and a coordinated effort by the FOP, the largely white old-guard officers, and sympathetic city officials to make his job impossible. The union did not need to win every collective bargaining dispute to defeat reform. It needed only to make the political and contractual cost of reform high enough that the city would back away. It largely succeeded.

These contracts, statutes, and campaigns are not byproducts of legitimate labor negotiation. They are the political accomplishments of an organized interest that has captured the institutions meant to constrain it.

Here again, modern liberals already have the conceptual framework they need. They have spent the last decade arguing—correctly—that policing in America imposes its heaviest costs on poor and minority communities, that accountability mechanisms are too weak, that the institutions of state violence have evaded democratic control. Each of those claims is consistent with, and arguably best explained by, the structural fact that police unions have organized to make accountability politically expensive for the officials who would impose it. The labor framing—workers exercising organized power—captures something real about how the unions feel from the inside. It misses what the framework is best equipped to see when applied to anyone else: that the organized power in question is being used to evade democratic control of state violence.

***

The point of these two case studies is not that public-sector unions are uniquely malign, or that the people who staff them are acting in bad faith. Most teachers and police officers do their jobs well, often under conditions classical liberal commentators have not always taken seriously. The point is structural. Public-sector unions exhibit, with unusual clarity, the kind of power-problem the first essay in this series identified as the core liberal concern: a concentrated organized interest that has captured the public institutions meant to constrain it, in a way that imposes costs on a diffuse counterparty without meaningful political resistance.

This is a Simons-type problem. It’s what Simons meant when he wrote that no one—among others, no leader, no faction, no class, no church, no corporation, no trade association, and no labor union—could be trusted with much power. The reason classical liberals should care about this is a familiar one: when private organizations grow strong enough to capture the institutions of public life, the rule of law and the conditions of fair political competition both erode. The reason modern liberals should care is different but no less serious: the costs of capture in these particular cases fall on exactly the constituencies modern liberals are most committed to defending—poor and minority students, the victims of police violence, and the diffuse public that depends on functioning schools and accountable policing.

The question I have been pressing across this series is whether classical and modern liberals can recognize one another as allies in resisting concentrated power. The public-sector union case is, I think, one of the cleanest test cases. Classical liberals have been visible critics of these unions for decades. Modern liberals have been the unions’ most reliable political defenders. Both stances have been partly correct. The classical critique misses something real about why public-sector workers organized in the first place, and about the legitimate function of organized labor in domains where the countervailing-power story applies. The modern defense misses the structural inversion that occurs when the “employer” is the state that the union has helped to elect, and it misses the costs the resulting arrangements impose on the modern liberal’s own constituencies. A liberalism worth the name should be able to see both.

***

The reforms this diagnosis suggests are not new. Both DiSalvo’s Government Against Itself and Moe’s Special Interest develop detailed reform agendas along familiar lines—narrowing the scope of collective bargaining out of policy domains (curriculum, accountability, pensions, healthcare) and back into traditional labor domains (wages, hours, working conditions), restricting the political activities of organizations that bargain with the state, and reforming the accounting and approval procedures around long-term liabilities so that pension and benefit commitments are visible at the time they are made, rather than decades later. Rushin’s work on police contracts develops the parallel agenda for law-enforcement labor relations. All of these reforms are responsive to the specific power problem that the structural inversion produces.

I want to close, however, by saying what the diagnosis is not. It is not a call for abolition. Public-sector workers face real workplace issues—safety, training, retaliation against whistleblowers—that organized representation can legitimately address. The teacher who fears retaliation for reporting administrative incompetence and the officer who fears retaliation for refusing to cover for a colleague’s misconduct both have an interest in collective protection, and the union is not the wrong vehicle for it. The point is that the institutional form public-sector unions have taken in California and elsewhere has, over decades, accumulated political and contractual power that goes well beyond protecting workers from arbitrary employer action. It has captured the public institutions meant to constrain it. That is the power problem. The reforms that follow are not anti-union; they are anti-capture.

Several weeks ago, an internet personality known as Clavicular overdosed on a live stream. Clavicular is known for advocating “looksmaxxing,” a trend, born out of incel culture, that teaches young men the only way to find a partner is to take radical steps to improve your physical appearance, including taking steroids, plastic surgery, and even attempting to change your facial structure. While it might be easy to write off Clavicular as just a bizarre internet personality, the reality is he generated a huge following among young men and is but one example from a broad network of radical male influencers. Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and numerous others have peddled hypermasculinity, misogyny, and fascist-tinged fitness culture to amass tens of millions of followers and considerable personal fortunes.

As a married 40-something, I find their appeal bizarre. Why, of all the possible ways to think about masculinity, have so many young men settled on such a basal, stereotyped, vision of what it means to be a man? What is particularly revealing about this vision is the absence of so many of the traditional markers of success: marriage, career, children, family, and community. It is an isolated, lonely version of masculinity, one where a young man can write off his failures and anxieties on just not being masculine enough. If only they looked and felt more masculine, they would finally gain women’s approval.     

This battle over the definition of masculinity and gender roles is set against a backdrop of increasing social and economic divergence between educational groups. The difference in career earnings between people with a college degree and those without has never been larger. The college educated are experiencing the traditional markers of advancement, getting and remaining married, buying a house, starting families, and developing careers. For people without college educations, these milestones are increasingly out of reach. In fact, in many ways we have seen the bottom fall out. “Deaths of despair,” those from drug overdoses, chronic alcoholism, and suicide have all risen in recent years, and the burden disproportionately falls on men without college degrees. Sociologically, we now see two tracks, one for people with college educations, and another for those without.

“Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart famously remarked, and thus it is unsurprising that sociological changes have political consequences, too. I’ve spent the last half-decade of my career thinking about how educational attainment shapes political attitudes and behaviors. What I have found is this: just like society at large, the political divide between people with college degrees and those without has never been larger. Over the past several decades, people with college degrees have moved steadily into the Democratic coalition, while people without degrees have become more likely to vote Republican. The divide between degree holders and those without has reshaped the entire political system. In contemporary politics, educational attainment rivals race as the key demographic cleavage that splits the electorate into competing groups. Among whites, education is the dominant cleavage. It’s also important among non-white groups: Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos were all increasingly polarized along educational lines in the 2024 presidential election. Minority voters without degrees shifted towards Trump to an unprecedented degree, men in particular.   

In contemporary politics, whites without a degree vote as a bloc for Republicans at a level we typically associate with minority groups. About two thirds of whites without degrees, a group that makes up nearly 40% of the entire U.S. population, voted for Trump in each of his three presidential bids. To put this in context, whites without degrees are just as Republican as groups like Latinos are Democratic. In fact, in 2024, non-college whites were considerably more Republican than Latinos were Democratic. No matter how you slice the data, Democratic support among the less educated has cratered. Obama won nearly 75% of the two-party vote among people without a high school diploma in 2008. Harris won just 35%. 

Yet educational polarization is a two-way street. While whites without a degree now vote with a level of uniformity we typically associate with minority groups, voters with graduate degrees do too. Graduate degree holders represent a relatively small percentage of the U.S. adult population (about 18%), but they exert an oversized influence on our politics. In some of my new research, I show that graduate degree holders of all races vote in an even more uniform fashion than whites without a degree. Kamala Harris carried nearly 70% of people with postgraduate degrees in 2024. One in four Democratic voters held a postgraduate degree in 2024—an all-time high. 

The educational sorting of the American electorate has had all sorts of consequences. As people that have followed this spring’s smattering of local elections, special elections, and referenda can attest, Democrats have dominated off-cycle elections, extending a trend that dates to at least the beginning of the pandemic. It was once political folk wisdom that there were more Democrats in the country than Republicans, but Republicans were more likely to show up on election day. In contemporary American politics, this old aphorism fails to hold. Graduate degree holders are the most likely to vote in every election, and the disparity in educational group turnout increases as the salience of the election decreases. In other words, when turnout is low, only the most engaged voters show up at the polls, and these hyper-engaged voters are disproportionately the highly educated. 

Educational polarization also explains some prominent macro political trends. Not that long ago, Iowa and Ohio, two states with middling, below-average levels of educational attainment, were presidential bellwethers, while highly educated states like Virginia and Colorado were solidly Republican. Over the past two decades, we have seen a reversal. In the 2024 presidential election, Ohio and Iowa were nearly as Republican as Texas, while Virginia and Colorado were reliably Democratic. Both states have gone for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 2008 and have all-Democratic governors and senators. Almost all the presidential election battleground states have populations whose level of educational attainment mirrors the national median. A state’s level of education does a remarkable job of explaining its partisan slant. 

The reasons why the electorate is now “divided by degrees” are numerous. A quick survey of public opinion data reveals that there is a direct link between education and cultural liberalism. People with higher levels of education hold more liberal views on things like gay rights, abortion, immigration, gender roles, and civil liberties than people with less education. Education is also associated with dispositions like social and institutional trust. As Trump’s authoritarian second term makes clear, these issues have all come to the forefront.

Yet just noting an association between two traits, like education and political attitudes, is much different from saying one causes the other. As far as whether there is a causal relationship between educational attainment and political attitudes, there is considerable debate as to whether it exists in the first place and, if so, what form such a relationship would take. The reason why establishing a causal link between education and attitudes is so hard is because people have agency over how much education they choose to seek out. There are almost certainly selection effects at work here, where people with more liberal attitudes to start with are the ones who tend to seek out the most education. Likewise, going to college is often associated with moving away from home. Young adulthood is a time when individuals’ attitudes are the most apt to change, and so a change in environment, peer group, and the like can produce attitudinal changes as well, even absent the college education.

That said, there is a body of evidence that shows education itself can lead to more liberal attitudes down the line, though the extent to which choice of college, field of study, and ultimate career path influence attitudes over the long term remains debated. Far from indoctrination, it appears there is a complicated process involving self-selection, socialization, and lifecycle events that lead the college educated to adopt more liberal views than those with less education. 

What is important to note is that none of these relationships between educational attainment and political and social values are new—we have known about them for a very long time. What is new is the rapid increase in educational attainment across all strata of society. For young men, who are falling behind their female classmates academically, the shifting educational and economic landscape has dramatically reshaped life prospects. 

Academic success leads to financial independence, and women are now less financially dependent on men. A consequence of this financial independence is that women are less willing to settle when it comes to marital partners. We have decades of economic research that shows women are unlikely to marry men with less education than them. Given that women are vastly outperforming men educationally, we now have a dynamic where the demand for marriageable men far outstrips the supply. Men are also far more likely to die young, become incarcerated, and suffer from drug and alcohol dependency. Those factors, combined with the education gap, skew the math even further. According to Social Security actuarial data, for every 100,000 men and 100,000 women born, by the time this cohort hits 30, there are 1,400 more living women than men. Both the educational disparity and the sheer numbers differential help to explain why so many people in Gen Z are single, especially men. In fact, a record number of women in Gen Z, nearly 30%, identify as LGBTQ. It’s hard not to read this rapid uptick in the number of young women who identify as bisexual as an indictment of male dating pool. 

In my view, young men used to enjoy a lot of privilege. Now that privilege is uneven. Millennials with college-educated parents are just as likely to own a home as their parents were a generation ago. Yet homeownership rates have collapsed for Millennials without college educated parents. Getting married and being a breadwinner is no longer a guarantee. Our economic and romantic fates are increasingly linked to our educational attainment, because college-educated couples are remarkably good at getting and remaining married. The collapse in marriage rates is a story about people without degrees, by and large.

A significant minority of young men who feel shut out of the marriage market have moved, not to reevaluate their expectations, but to embrace reactionary, misogynistic ideologies. As the examples at the beginning of this essay highlighted, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs who are more than willing to offload men’s failings onto women. Incel culture, the tradwife trend, and the “men’s rights” movement all stem from the same place: a sense of entitlement that no longer corresponds with educational and economic reality. Instead of self-reflection, far too many men have adopted a radical, misogynistic ideology that women understandably view as toxic. 

No generation’s gender politics are as polarized as Gen Z, and this split over gender roles maps onto the educational divide. While the overall conservatism of Gen Z men is overstated, the liberalism of Gen Z women is understated. Gen Z women will be the most educated cohort in history, and they also were socialized in an era of retrenchment of women’s rights (see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) and a significant subset of their male counterparts adopting deeply misogynist ideologies. Given the confluence of these factors, Gen Z women’s progressivism is unsurprising. 

Yet the educational and gender divides among our youngest adult generation are but a particularly pronounced example of what we see across the entire electorate. Our political battle lines fall increasingly along our growing educational cleavage, and this burgeoning divide has not only reshaped the electoral map and individual voting behavior, but gender relations as well. 

Educational attainment is the dividing line in contemporary politics. The 2024 election saw the most educationally polarized electorate in history, and this divide looks poised to grow even further. The current administration’s attacks on universities, scientific institutions, and government bureaucracies will only push educational groups further apart, while the collateral damage leaves us all worse off. While a future administration might reverse some of the damage to our institutions, the long term dynamics all suggest educational polarization will be a persistent part of our politics in the coming decades. 

Watch and Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | All Other Apps

Liberals have ceded discussion of the family to social conservatives for decades—and Lauren K. Hall thinks it’s a mistake liberalism can’t afford. In this episode, host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Hall, professor of political science and associate dean of academic affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology, about her Liberalism.org essay “Why Liberalism Needs the Family.” They discuss why classical liberals have under-theorized this pre-political institution; how siblings, trust, and the wider “village” cultivate the citizens that markets and self-government require; the false binary between total family autonomy and state intervention; and why over-scheduled, over-supervised childhoods may be quietly producing adults more comfortable with authoritarianism.

Further Reading:

• Why Liberalism Needs the Family—Lauren K. Hall

• Family and the Politics of Moderation: Private Life, Public Goods, and the Rebirth of Social Individualism—Lauren K. Hall, Baylor University Press

• The Radical Moderate's Guide to Life—Lauren K. Hall’s Substack

• Let Grow—Lenore Skenazy’s nonprofit, with the tiered intervention guide Hall recommends

Qualified immunity, which we discussed in part one, is typically an issue only with state and local police. But that’s only because the protections afforded to federal police make them nearly untouchable. Those federal protections are getting more attention as state and federal police increasingly work together on issues like drug enforcement, gangs, and immigration. It used to be that federal agents were few, making their immunities less important. But as federal law enforcement has grown, the importance of these exceptional protections has grown along with it.

The history of federal law enforcement tells the story. While the KKK Act (1871) provided a way to sue state and local officials for constitutional violations, it did not provide a way to sue federal officials. There are good reasons for the omission. First, there just weren’t very many federal law enforcement officers in the nineteenth century. The precursor to the FBI wouldn’t exist until the early twentieth century, and agencies like the DEA, ATF, and others would come much later. Second, the KKK Act was passed in response to rampant constitutional violations by state officials. To the extent that the federal government was involved at all, it was trying to protect freedmen from those officials. Creating a way for people to sue federal officials could hamper the goals of Reconstruction by giving the Klan and Confederate holdouts the ability to sue Black elected officials and others sympathetic to freed slaves. 

But starting in the Progressive Era, the number of federal law enforcement agencies and personnel began to grow. Today there are around 90 federal law enforcement agencies, depending on how you define “law enforcement.” As of 2023, those agencies employed about 137,000 full-time officers. 

Despite this massive increase in armed federal law enforcement officers, Congress has yet to create a way to sue federal law enforcement officers for abuse. So, in 1971, after a series of botched no-knock drug raids by federal narcotics officers, the Supreme Court created one. The incident that precipitated Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents took place in 1965, when six federal narcotics agents broke into the Brooklyn home of Webster Bivens and arrested him without a warrant. When the criminal charges against him were dropped, Bivens sued. 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that if there is no other remedy for a constitutional violation, the court would infer a right to sue for monetary damages in federal court. Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan articulated a principle that would seem to be obvious, but that the court has since all but ignored: There are no rights without remedies—if there’s no way to hold the government accountable for violating our rights, our rights may as well not exist.

And yet the Court soon began chipping away at Bivens. It first refused to apply Bivens to any claim not involving the Fourth Amendment. It then refused to apply the case outside the narrow context of warrantless home invasions. It then began to narrow even those parameters. Of the roughly 30 cases it has heard that have invoked Bivens, the Court has allowed the plaintiff’s lawsuit to go forward in just three, including Bivens itself. The most recent was in 1980. It’s gotten bad enough that civil rights attorneys sometimes would joke that the only way to win a Bivens claim was to have a client named “Bivens.”

In 2022, the court effectively put Bivens out of its misery. In Egbert v. Boule, Robert Boule, a hotel owner, alleged that a Customs and Border Patrol officer illegally entered his property without a warrant to apprehend a guest whom the officer believed (falsely) was in the country illegally. When Boule asked the officer to leave, the officer slammed Boule into a car and threw him to the ground. When Boule filed a complaint against the officer, the officer retaliated by filing a false report about Boule to the IRS and other regulatory agencies. Boule incurred thousands of dollars in legal bills. An internal Border Patrol investigation found that the agent had withheld information from investigators, “demonstrated lack of integrity,” and recommended his termination. Boule filed a lawsuit under Bivens, claiming that the officer had violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights. 

Boule lost at the Supreme Court. First, the court unanimously ruled that Boule could not bring a First Amendment claim under Bivens. The court had barred any claims outside of the Fourth Amendment a long time ago. But in a 6-3 vote, the court also threw out Boule’s Fourth Amendment claims. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas again expressed the conservative justices’ contempt for Bivens, and wrote that if the court were to decide the landmark case today, it would rule the other way. It is Congress’s job to create a remedy for constitutional violations, Thomas wrote, not the Court’s. In a concurring opinion, Justice Neal Gorsuch wrote that the majority opinion had basically killed Bivens. He wrote that the court should have overruled the 1971 ruling once and for all to prevent future plaintiffs from wasting their time.

The Court’s ruling in Egbert effectively made federal police officers absolutely immune from lawsuits, even for brazen and egregious abuse. That quickly became apparent in the case of Hamdi Mohamud, a Minnesota woman who was arrested and jailed for well over a year because of manufactured evidence. In 2010, a St. Paul, Minnesota, police officer named Heather Weyker began investigating an alleged sex trafficking ring involving Somali immigrants. Weyker notified federal law enforcement, who eventually deputized her as part of a federal anti-trafficking task force. Her work led to the arrest of more than 30 people. 

But the government’s case against the people Weyker targeted fell apart. In the end, none of them were convicted. A federal judge found that Weyker “likely exaggerated or fabricated important aspects” of the charges, and had been caught “lying to the grand jury,” and “lying during a detention hearing.” 

Weyker’s behavior toward Mohamud was particularly vicious. Mohamud was incarcerated for 17 months before the charges against her were dismissed. But she would never see justice. The courts first ruled that because Weyker had been deputized by the federal task force for the purposes of the sex trafficking investigation, she enjoyed the protections of federal law enforcement. So Mohamud couldn’t sue Weyker under the KKK Act. She’d have to sue under Bivens.

When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Egbert, Mohamud’s case hit a brick wall. The Federal Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit threw out her lawsuit in 2025, citing Egbert. And in March 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal. More than two dozen people hurt by Weyker’s misconduct attempted to sue for damages. And now, because of Egbert, none of those cases will ever get to a jury.

It’s hard to ignore the Supreme Court’s contradictory trajectories on qualified immunity and Bivens. In Bivens cases, the court has rejected its own 1971 ruling that created a way to sue federal law enforcement for constitutional violations. The conservative justices argued that creating that sort of cause of action is solely within the purview of Congress; the court had overstepped its authority in Bivens.

But with respect to the qualified immunity cases, Congress did pass a law creating a clear cause of action to sue state and local law enforcement in federal court for constitutional violations. The Court’s response, as we have seen, was to invent an exception to that law that doesn’t exist in the Constitution, and that explicitly contradicts Congress’s intent when it passed the law. In these cases, it seems unbothered about overstepping its authority.

There is no consistent legal principle in these two trajectories—other than excusing police from accountability for violating constitutional rights.

The only real remaining way to hold federal law enforcement accountable is through a complicated law called the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA. Congress passed the law in 1946 to allow people to sue the federal government itself for personal injuries or property damage caused by federal employees, as opposed to suing individuals. But the FTCA is notoriously difficult to navigate. It includes exceptions for actions that are considered “discretionary functions”—acts that may cause some harm but aren’t unconstitutional. At the same time, it includes exceptions for “intentional torts,” or actions so egregious that they couldn’t possibly be related to a government employee’s job. That leaves a fairly narrow set of actions that cause harm.

In 1974, Congress amended FTCA after a series of botched raids by federal narcotics officers. The amendment allows for claims under the FTCA against federal law enforcement officers accused of “assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, abuse of process, or malicious prosecution.” But like Bivens, the federal courts have gradually limited those exceptions ever since. 

The FTCA also doesn’t permit punitive damages, and it requires plaintiffs to exhaust all other possible claims in state and federal court before bringing a claim under the law. All of this makes it prohibitively expensive to sue under the FTCA, which means outside of nonprofit civil rights organizations, few attorneys are willing to take such cases. The odds are long, and the bar on punitive damages means that plaintiffs’ attorneys can’t count on the rare win and large award to bankroll the vast majority of times they lose.

The Supreme Court’s confusing, often contradictory jurisprudence on civil liability for police officers only gets more frustrating when considered with the restrictions the court has imposed on other methods of remedying constitutional violations by police. In a shadow docket ruling last year, for example, the court lifted a temporary restraining order that barred federal immigration officers from using race, language, and location to profile possible undocumented immigrants. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that any U.S. citizens or legal residents who suffered injury due to racially motivated profiling could always sue the offending officers (Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, 2025). The court has also cited lawsuits as a preferable way of enforcing constitutional rights over the Exclusionary Rule. It’s hard to take those opinions seriously when the court is simultaneously making it more and more difficult for such lawsuits to prevail.

For someone like Ann McLeod—who, as we saw, was gravely injured in a botched federal raid that had been looking for a low-level drug offender—the first hurdle to recovering damages is often finding an attorney willing to take their case. Civil rights lawsuits are expensive, time-consuming, and risky. Few attorneys have the desire or expertise to navigate the legal morass of immunities and restrictions, particularly in more rural and conservative areas. Any mistake could result in dismissal, along with a possible bar on bringing similar claims in the future. 

When Ann McLeod tried to sue the state and local police officers who raided her under state law, for example, the officers argued in court briefs that because the raid happened under the auspices of a federal task force, they were protected by federal immunity. But when she tried to sue under the FTCA by pointing out that the task force had violated numerous federal policies on the morning she was shot, the officers claimed that because they were apprehending someone for violating state drug laws, they were enforcing state law, and therefore couldn't be sued under a federal statute. Officers seemingly acquired, and shed, whatever status they needed to escape being held responsible in the argument at hand.

McLeod’s lawsuit should have been as open-and-shut as such a case should be. She had done nothing wrong. The task force officers had used overwhelming force to apprehend a low-level offender, failed to verify their suspect’s address, failed to check that their suspect wasn’t already in custody, carried out a volatile operation without ever training together, didn’t surveil the home before the raid, illegally forced their way into the home, and unjustifiably opened fire on an innocent woman. There was also considerable local media coverage of the incident, which generated outrage from the public and from politicians in the area, from across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, the fact that McLeod is a white woman with no prior criminal record probably helped generate more public sympathy.

Yet even McLeod’s case still bounced around the federal courts for years. It wasn't until April 2025—six years later—that the federal government settled with McLeod for $1.3 million. That’s enough for her to pay her medical bills, compensate her for her injuries, and pay for her treatment going forward. But such outcomes are rare, and generally they come about only for sympathetic plaintiffs who generate media coverage and public anger. 

***

The context for the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decisions seems particularly relevant and poignant now. The Egbert ruling effectively made federal police officers absolutely immune from lawsuits that stemmed from an abusive Border Patrol officer who retaliated against a U.S. citizen for defending an immigrant falsely accused of being in the country illegally. The sex trafficking case decided in light of Egbert also involved false accusations against immigrants—Somali immigrants in particular.

Today, Donald Trump has fully weaponized the Justice Department against his enemies, including enlisting police agencies like the FBI. His administration has set poorly trained federal immigration agents loose in cities around the country, often with dangerous rhetoric that the people they’re targeting “poison the blood of the country,” and that those who protest mass deportations are “domestic terrorists.” Trump officials have celebrated brutality from these agents, repeatedly told them they are “immune” from consequences for their actions, and directed them to “force confrontations” with immigrants and protesters. As of January 2026, the administration had more than doubled the size of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from 10,000 agents to 22,000, and diverted significant portions of other federal police agencies to immigration enforcement. The 900 percent budget increase for immigration enforcement passed by Congress in 2025 will add thousands more. Once a numerically small exception, federal agents’ immunities are becoming more and more important in how policing is done.

The good news is that it would be relatively easy to make police officers more accountable. Congress could pass a law tomorrow creating a cause of action to sue federal law enforcement officers for violations of constitutional rights. They could also pass a bill stripping state and local police of qualified immunity, which would allow for damages any time a police officer violates someone’s rights, without the onerous “well-established law” requirement.

Individual states could also create state causes of action against state and local law enforcement officers who violate the U.S. Constitution or their own state constitutions. Many already do. These laws are likely to be tested in court, but some constitutional scholars think they have a good chance of surviving.

In the past, it’s been difficult—but not impossible—for state prosecutors to hold federal law enforcement officers criminally accountable when they violate state laws. Such charges tend to be removed to federal court and opposed by the federal Department of Justice, and few district attorneys have had the will to take on the federal government. But that’s changing as the Trump administration continues to politicize the DOJ. We’re likely to see more such fights play out in the coming years as prosecutors in places like Minneapolis, St. Paul, and other cities try to bring criminal charges against federal officers for violence against immigrants and protesters. 

It will take some political will for state legislatures to pass laws holding federal police accountable. The beneficiaries of such laws—the marginalized people most likely to be abused by police—have little political clout. And those opposing more accountability—police unions and law-and-order groups—have considerably more power.

But a country where police are increasingly unaccountable for their actions just isn’t tenable, particularly under an administration that celebrates police violence and the weaponization of the law against its enemies. Law enforcement officers are entrusted with the most profound powers imaginable in a free society: The power to arrest, detain, use physical force, and kill. There’s a good argument that because of those powers, they should be held to a higher standard than everyone else. There’s also an argument that they should be held to the same standard. What isn’t acceptable is that they be held to a lower one. Yet that’s precisely what the courts have done.

In his speech to the U.S. Congress, King Charles III wonderfully reviewed the spirit of liberty that shaped Anglo-America, informed by Christianity: 

Magna Carta has appeared in at least 160 U.S. Supreme Court cases since 1789, the King noted, “not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” 

The King recalled the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as precursor to America’s own Revolution:

And the King specifically mentioned Christianity’s role:

Famously, Alexis de Tocqueville said Americans “combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” But the king’s affirmation of Anglo-American liberty and constitutionalism, in the context of Christianity, was timely. Much of today’s American Christianity has become despondent if not cynical about liberty and democracy. Religious practice has changed since Tocqueville’s time, and indeed, it’s changed a great deal within our lifetimes. New modes of religiosity have led to a new style of religious politics, and liberals of all faiths should give careful thought about how to respond to it.

Christianity, specifically Protestant revivalism and denominationalism, shaped early America. The diversity that those movements produced meant that Christianity would be widely popular, as it could fit the spiritual needs of many different communities. But it also meant that doctrinal unity was nowhere to be found. Civic toleration became the only answer. Voltaire famously said, “If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.” Early America had dozens of denominations and many more independent churches and sects, not to mention Roman Catholicism and Judaism. Its pan-Christian diversity—and then some—helped ensure that Christians of all stripes, none of whom were strong enough to dominate on their own, were invested in the republic, especially its guarantees of freedom of speech and religion. 

Denominationalism and religious institutions in America are now declining. Two or three generations ago, Americans would probably have been Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, or else they’d belong to another specific denomination. Today, one-third of Americans are religiously unaffiliated (though not necessarily unreligious). And the 60–65 percent of Americans who still self-identify as Christian are increasingly unmoored to traditional denominations. 

The only major component of American Christianity that’s growing is non-denominationalism. If it were itself a denomination, it would be America’s largest religious body besides Roman Catholicism. Today’s American Christian relies less on the institutional church and more on self-collation of religious resources: YouTube, podcasts, TikTok, Substack, Facebook, X/Twitter and other social media. Many if not most of these media don’t offer the community building and mediation of traditional faith communities in America. They rely on excitement, provocation, controversy, demonization, and buzz, often premised on outrage and impatience, stoking polarization and tribalism. 

None of these components are conducive to the social harmony, compromise, forbearance, and social temperance required for healthy democracy with liberty for all. David Hempton, describing the findings of Heidi Campbell about online religious communities, notes:

Amid this “tribalism” and “narrowness,” it’s no coincidence that American Christianity, or at least its loudest and most influential voices, is increasingly postliberal. It remains to be seen whether a “liberal” Christianity that affirms religious freedom and pluralism for all can meet this challenge.

We should hope that it does. Young men are increasingly identifying with Christianity. They’re going to church more often than they have at any time in the last 25 years—and, in a significant reversal, they’re attending more frequently than young women. They often describe religion as a counter to wokeness, and as an expression of their masculinity. Many of them resonate with post-liberalism, with its disdain for democracy, tolerance, and mutual respect, which are deemed weak and effeminate. They want high-octane religion, politics, and culture, pointing towards authoritarianism, and often laced with antisemitism, among other unsavory aspects. The various subgroups in postliberal Christianity are now competing for their attention, offering different mixes of emphasis on these sometimes divergent values.

Recently, a very intelligent young man who had hosted me to speak at his conservative group at an Ivy League campus several years ago (where I defended classical liberalism!) complained about my critique of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. He shared that he was a fan of Stephen Wolfe’s “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” for advocating a “government that promotes the good.” I responded that Wolfe specifically admits that this state in its promotion of the good may execute apostates and blasphemers. This young man is married, professionally successful, with an elite education, and from a mainline Protestant background, not fitting stereotypes about lost young incels living in their mother’s basement. 

Postliberal young Christian men are, like my correspondent, often highly educated and literate. This is especially true for Catholic integralism, which is one of the strong flavors of postliberal Christianity. It assumes that liberal democracy, including America at its founding, was a fruit of the Protestant Reformation—and thus it was poison from the start. It imagines a society where, as in Medieval Europe, the Catholic Church’s values are paramount in society, including in civil law. The state would punish blasphemy and heresy by the baptized members of any church—including Protestants. Non-Christians would be tolerated but not equal citizens. 

Recent integralist thinkers include Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School; Thomas Pink of King’s College London; Alan Fimister of Holy Apostles College and Seminary; Cistercian monk Edmund Waldstein; Gladden Pappin, previously of the University of Dallas and more recently with the government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary; and Chad Pecknold of Catholic University of America. Although not identifying directly with integralism, Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed, is a favorite of integralists. Sohrab Ahmari, as a postliberal Catholic, is at times aligned with them. Integralists also sometimes see an ally in Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism who spoke to a 2022 integralist conference.

Protestant analogues to Catholic integralism fly under many different banners. People of this persuasion have in the past called themselves Reconstructionists, though most often of late they identify as Christian nationalists. They too want a confessional state that enforces their religion and punishes all others. Unlike Catholic integralists, of course, they do not oppose the Protestant Reformation. They claim they are the only rightful political interpreters of it.

Magisterial Protestantism, which was practiced during and after the Reformation, had confessional states, typically with state churches, as today’s Christian nationalists emphasize. The magisterial model, as championed by Jean Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, remains binding for them. Often they cite the Westminster Confession of 1646, from the English Puritan Revolution, which demands that civil magistrates protect true religion. Like Catholic integralists, they think liberal democracy with religious freedom and free speech enables vice and error. The state should point to the common good.

The most prominent Christian nationalist, and perhaps the modern father of the movement, is Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho–based religious entrepreneur who is a favorite of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has hosted him at the Pentagon, and he belongs to Wilson’s denomination, which recently planted a church on Capitol Hill.

In media interviews, such as with Ross Douthat of The New York Times, Wilson is typically avuncular and avoids hot buttons. But Wilson does not disguise that he wants a Protestant confessional state, while granting it might be centuries away. He opposes voting rights for women, as do most other Christian nationalists. Wilson ignited controversy with Douthat by admitting he would not legally permit Catholic Marian processions, which are, after all, idolatrous in his eyes. His comment ignited Catholic pushback. It evinced that Catholic integralists and Christian nationalists are ultimately at odds with each other, even if both are postliberal, and even if both demonize some of the same enemies, including liberal democracy. 

Wilson’s publishing house has produced the most serious Christian nationalists’ manual, mentioned above, The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe, who writes that the state in some circumstances might execute unrepentant blasphemers and heretics. His policy prescriptions may claim the mantle of Christianity, but it shouldn’t have to be said that his notion of Christianity is remarkably extreme. 

A more recent, sophisticated argument for Christian nationalism is King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government by James Baird, a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America. The most important online publication for Christian nationalists is American Reformer, edited by Timon Cline, who formerly worked for the New Jersey Attorney General and for Doug Wilson’s New Saint Andrews College.

Several prominent adherents of these tendencies also espouse antisemitism. One incendiary leading Christian nationalist is Joel Webbon, a popular podcaster and pastor of Covenant Bible Church outside Austin, Texas. Webbon rejoices in provocation and controversy, which includes attacking Jews. Operating in a similar vein is another popular podcaster, Dale Partridge of King’s Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona. Aligned with Webbon and Partridge, Calvin Robinson is an English cleric and former British television host recently moved to America to enhance his public profile as a postliberal anti-woke online Christian influencer who also dabbles in anti-Jewish commentary. Their popular refrain is “Christ is King!” All Christians can affirm that sentiment, but for integralists and Christian nationalists, it means Christian political supremacy and often anti-Jewish views. Candace Owens, the Catholic online influencer, frequently deploys the phrase amid her explicitly anti-Jewish sentiments.

These personalities ten years ago would have been deemed extremist and inconsequential. But in our current postliberal era, they have oxygen and momentum, politically aligned with MAGA, and fellow travelers in a wider coalition of grievances against “elites.” They are proud nationalists who oppose wokeness and globalism.

Christian nationalists, unlike Catholic integralists, embrace the American republic, though they define it as Christian and Protestant. Minimizing the Constitution’s First Amendment promise of religious freedom, they stress that the Constitution initially allowed states to establish churches and restrict non-Christians. They abhor, or explain away, the revision to the Westminster Confession that American Presbyterians made in 1789, following the Revolution, to say that civil magistrates should protect religious freedom instead of enforcing a state religion. They deny the established judicial precedents holding that the Fourteenth Amendment made the Bill of Rights binding on state governments in these and other matters. Adjacent to Christian nationalists are Heritage Americans, who claim biological descent from America’s original Anglo Protestant settlers and insist they and their culture should have permanent ascendancy.

Of course, not all postliberal Christians are integralists, and not all have specific aspirations for a confessional state. But postliberal Christians are discomfited by freedom of speech, religious freedom, pluralism, and the political tumult of democracy. Largely they have embraced MAGA, although they’re sometimes disappointed that MAGA hasn’t gone far enough. Evangelical Christians are the staunchest voting demographic for MAGA, and there are even some evangelical watchdogs who profess to determine orthodoxy based on attitudes towards MAGA, regardless of theology. 

But it’s not that simple. Some evangelicals have also sympathized with the now defeated Orbán government in Hungary. Although Orbán is Protestant, his most prominent American religious supporters have tended to be postliberal Catholics, along with Rod Dreher, who is Eastern Orthodox. Orbán’s own propaganda makes frequent use of Catholic imagery, like the Crown of St. Stephen. 

What unites these disparate strands of postliberal Christianity isn’t a specific theology or a coherent set of policy prescriptions. It’s a style of doing politics. MAGA’s strongman rhetoric has shifted many evangelicals and others, if unconsciously, away from classical liberalism, with its commitment to limited government, rule of law, civil propriety, free markets, and societal pluralism. Skepticism of these values is what unites postliberal Christianity, meaning that the movement, considered as a whole, is political first, and religious only second. 

That’s unfortunate. The main American religious institutions upholding classical liberalism were once the mainline Protestant denominations, which are now mere shadows of their former selves. Twentieth century evangelicalism, led chiefly by Baptists, inherited a deep respect for American democracy, which they understood to be Christian and especially Protestant in origin. Baptists especially esteemed religious freedom.

Post-denominational America is mainly Baptist in its congregationalism and much of its theology. The distinguishing mark of Baptist social witness was its commitment to religious freedom. But Baptists never had a strong, wider political theology. And the Southern Baptist Convention is declining in membership and influence, among even its own members. So today postliberal Reformed voices, drawing upon a stronger intellectual tradition, dominate much of evangelical public conversation. 

Nondenominational churches are often more prone to strong pastors, who expect loyalty. And much of post-denominationalism is charismatic or Pentecostal—movements which especially esteem strong leaders. Many of MAGA’s strongest loyalists are charismatics, such as Paula White-Cain, who is commonly described as President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor. 

Ultimately, though, most postliberal Christians are not relying primarily on their pastors for societal guidance. They’re collating their own individualized online resources from many political and theological sources, which might include Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and others. These online influencers provide a dazzle, and a political dimension, that in-person pastors typically don’t.

A revealing and fascinating 2025 First Things article by Mary Harrington captured this zeitgeist by declaring that the age of democracy arose from the age of literacy following the Reformation. That age is now said to be closing, replaced by a postliterate, visual, online age, which allows humanity to return to its allegedly more natural state—monarchy. As an example of a “monarch” who can provide the digital “pageantry” required by the people, Harrington cited Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele. Also in First Things, American Reformer executive editor Josh Abbotoy suggested a “Protestant Franco” might be “inevitable.” 

Most American Christians likely aren’t ready for a Protestant Franco or a Nayib Bukele. But a whiff of strongman authoritarianism animates public online conversation about American Christians’ participation in politics. The irony is that American Christianity, especially Anglo Protestantism, was historically central to developing our classically liberal democracy and ethos. 

The current postliberal authoritarian trend has some precedents. During the Civil War and afterwards many Christians advocated a constitutional amendment making Christianity America’s established religion. The 1850s Know Nothing movement strove to ostracize Catholics from public life. The 1920s Ku Klux Klan revival purported to restore America to its Protestant roots. Prohibition, largely the project of Methodists and Baptists, more indirectly sought to encode low church Protestant morality in reaction against non-Protestant immigrants. These movements gained great influence and then collapsed. Pluralism and tolerance ultimately prevailed, even if across rocky roads. 

The Anglo-American political tradition of ordered liberty is 400 years old. Its trajectory is not easily reversed. Protestantism, with its stress on individual conscience, is ultimately inimical to authoritarianism. A “Protestant Franco” is a contradiction. American Catholicism for over 250 years has happily acclimated to American principles of freedom of religion and speech, with legal equality for all, which Catholic teaching of the last sixty years has ultimately vindicated. 

As King Charles III recalled, our liberties, with religious and speech freedom, and protections against overweening executives, descend from the American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution, both revolts against ambitious kings, and they date back to Magna Carta, which first restrained the powers of the English crown. 

American Christians, especially American Protestants, should be the most enthusiastic stewards of our liberal institutions and traditions that guard against the caprice and whimsy of strongmen and statists. Hopefully this enthusiasm will revive for the good of all.

Just before dawn on the morning of December 19, 2019, Ann McLeod awoke to the beam of a flashlight bouncing along her bedroom wall. Her fiancé had left early for work from their home just outside of Mobile, Alabama, and she had just fallen back asleep. 

A few nights earlier, the couple had spotted someone lurking in their backyard. Her first thought was that the same person had returned to rob them. McLeod, 19 at the time, grabbed her fiancé’s pistol from the dresser and walked toward the door to the carport in their kitchen. As she reached for the handle, the door flew open. She was quickly blinded by bright flashlights. Someone then yelled “Gun!” several times. Three police officers opened fire. 

The officers shot McLeod five times. They then left her bleeding for thirteen minutes while they shattered windows on the sides of the house before eventually dragging her outside and calling for emergency services. She barely survived.

The officers who shot McLeod were part of a Fugitive Apprehension Regional Task Force overseen by the U.S. Marshals Service. But despite the name, the task force wasn’t looking for a dangerous fugitive. They were looking for a man who would turn out to be the uncle of Ann’s fiancé. And that man wasn’t wanted for a serious federal felony. He was wanted for “attempted possession” of methamphetamine—he had purchased fake drugs from a police informant. It was the state’s lowest level drug crime. Worse, the man the officers were looking for hadn’t lived in the home for several years. The house was owned by the family matriarch, Ann’s future grandmother-in-law, who let her children and grandchildren stay there during hard times, or as they were just getting started in life. The uncle had moved out months before McLeod and her fiancé moved in.

It would get worse. Not only did the man no longer live at the house, he was actually already in police custody. And he had been for several months. The team of raiding officers hadn’t bothered to check.

The police agencies responsible for McLeod’s injuries never bothered to repair the damage to their home. Days after the shooting, the couple’s friends ordered pizzas and threw a “party” to pitch in and clean up the blood in the couple’s home. 

McLeod would spend the next five years trying to hold someone accountable for her injuries. She spent weeks in the hospital, and then years in recovery. She accumulated six figures in medical debt. 

No one would ever apologize to her for what happened. Nor did they offer to pay her medical bills. Instead, she had to sue. And the officers whose mistakes nearly killed her, along with the agencies that employed them, used the government’s vast resources to fight McLeod’s subsequent lawsuit at every turn, deploying the various immunities afforded to law enforcement and the government in a jurisdictional shell game to keep her from recovering any damages at all.

At the state and local level, police officers (and government employees in general) are protected from lawsuits by a policy called qualified immunity. The policy isn’t in the Constitution, nor was it ever enacted by Congress. It’s a legal fiction that the U.S. Supreme Court invented from whole cloth. 

In fact, qualified immunity’s very existence cuts against the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. After the Civil War, white supremacist terrorism ravaged newly freed Black residents of the former Confederate states. Much of that terrorism was carried out, encouraged, or passively allowed by state officials, most notably law enforcement. So in 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act. That law included a provision commonly called Section 1983, which created a path to sue in federal court when state or local government employees violate constitutional rights.

But nearly a century later, the U.S. Supreme Court took the first step in undermining that law. Perversely, it started with a case from a former Confederate state, and which involved the illegal arrests of Freedom Riders attempting to eat at a segregated lunch counter.

In the 1967 case Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court court agreed that the arrests of the Freedom Riders were unconstitutional. But it also carved out a loophole to the KKK Act. The Court ruled that a state or local official can’t be sued for “for acting under a statute that he reasonably believed to be valid but that was later held unconstitutional, on its face or as applied.” In this case, the court ruled that the officers who arrested the Freedom Riders reasonably believed that the state law they were enforcing was constitutional, even though it wasn’t. The court claimed that at the time the KKK Act was passed, public officials enjoyed various immunities from civil liability. That was true of judges and legislators, but not of law enforcement officers—the entire point of Section 1983 was to hold them accountable.

In the years since, the Court’s trajectory has generally been to fortify qualified immunity and generally close off the route to the courts that Congress created with the KKK Act. To even get a lawsuit against police officers in front of a jury, a victim of police brutality now must show that (a) the police violated their rights, and (b) there is settled law—typically previous court rulings—showing that the officers’ specific actions are unconstitutional. 

That second prong has allowed lower courts to effectively shield police from accountability. For example, despite case law clearly establishing that it is illegal for cops to sic police dogs on suspects after they have surrendered, one federal appeals court threw out a lawsuit from a minor injured by a police dog because, while the injured parties in the previous cases had been standing when they surrendered, the minor in that particular case had surrendered while sitting. Therefore, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled, the police couldn’t have known that siccing the police dog on a sitting child is illegal. The Supreme Court declined to review that ruling.

Qualified immunity isn’t merely a legal fiction. In practice, it makes the entire Bill of Rights conditional. We commonly hear that “ignorance of the law is no excuse”—you can’t defend yourself from criminal charges by claiming that you didn’t know that what you did was illegal. Qualified immunity not only provides an excuse for law enforcement officers when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, it’s an incentive for police agencies to keep their officers ignorant of how courts expect officers to treat members of the public.

And the Supreme Court has since added another new barrier to the courthouse door: In 2009, it ruled that federal courts can decide the second prong of the qualified immunity test without ruling on the first. That is, they can decide that there isn’t enough “settled law” for a police officer to have known the constitutional status of his actions, but skip the part where they actually rule whether the actions were unconstitutional in the first place.

The justification for the two-prong test was that it’s unfair to allow police officers to be sued without giving them proper notice (in the form of court opinions) that what they did violated the Constitution. But if the courts decide cases on whether officers had proper notice about the legality of their actions without ever determining if those actions were actually illegal, the courts never end up providing that notice. Going forward, other officers can engage in the same behavior knowing that they can’t be sued. 

Worse still, the Supreme Court has justified these decisions limiting the ability to sue police officers by relying on common assumptions about law enforcement that just aren’t true. More and more, rulings have been based on facts that aren’t accurate—pouring legal concrete around errors that should have been corrected at the appellate stage. Unfortunately, the Court has long been hampered by the fact that few of its justices have had any real-world experience in criminal law. 

For example, the court has consistently ruled that police officers are often forced to make “split-second,” life-or-death decisions. They shouldn’t have to worry in those traumatic moments about the possibility of getting sued. Seth Stouhgton, a former police officer and law professor at the University of South Carolina, has found that since the Supreme Court first used the “split-second decisions” description in 1989, it has been repeated by lower federal courts more than 2,300 times.

It’s also mostly a myth. In the overwhelming majority of incidents in which police officers use force, they do so aggressively, not defensively. That is, police officers initiate the confrontation. The vast majority of use-of-force incidents are also the product of multiple conscious decisions officers make in the minutes leading up to the confrontation. They’re not adrenaline-fueled, split-second reactions. This isn’t to say that officers are never forced to act suddenly with little time to process, but such incidents are exceedingly rare even among use of force incidents, much less in officers’ day-to-day routines. As Stoughton writes, “the realities of police violence are such that the circumstances in which officers must make a truly split-second decision are highly unusual, which militates against the Supreme Court's generalization.” And yet the split-second myth is so pervasive that scholars like former NYPD James Fyfe have been warning against its application since the 1970s.

The court has also argued that given the perils of policing, it’s unfair to hold officers liable for damages for difficult decisions that could leave them indebted for life. That fear was one of the animating issues in Pierson, the first qualified immunity case. But police officers themselves are almost never held personally liable for damages in abuse cases. The scholar Joanna Schwarz found that 99.98 percent of the awards and settlements in police abuse cases are paid by governments, not individual officers—“even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated, or prosecuted for their conduct.” Generally speaking, governments only refuse to indemnify police from lawsuits when their actions are so abusive that they fall outside the scope of a law enforcement officer’s duties. Perversely, this also means that in the most egregious abuse cases, the victims are less likely to be made whole.

Finally, in both qualified immunity and other cases involving civil liability for governments and government officials, the justices have often worried that making it easier to sue police officers would open the floodgates to such lawsuits, which would overwhelm the courts with frivolous claims. But not only is this not a persuasive argument, it shouldn’t be a factor at all. The Bill of Rights makes clear that the protections it enumerates are inalienable. There is no caveat that civil rights are contingent on the federal courts’ capacity to accommodate making people whole when their rights are violated. If the courts get overwhelmed, Congress should create more courts. If Congress fails to do so, the Supreme Court should make clear that Congress is failing one of its key constitutional obligations.

Qualified immunity at the state and local level has been the poorly informed creation of the federal court system. Creating it frustrated both the intent of the Constitution and of the KKK Act. Qualified immunity’s growing strength over the years has set up perverse incentives that tend to make law enforcement less accountable and transparent. Part II of this essay will look at how the federalization of law enforcement has made officers even less accountable and transparent, including in the case of Ann McLeod.

A liberal, Robert Frost famously joked, is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

In the midst of assaults against liberalism at every level, in a venue dedicated to its revitalization after a long crisis, I think the usual thing to do with this joke would be simply to reject it. Liberalism, one expects to hear in response, is a “fighting creed,” and we would do well to remember it.

I think that’s all true, and yet I think there’s something important to Frost’s line. The creed for which liberals fight is one about which the joke will always ring at least a little bit true; a revitalized liberalism will and should remain one that has a little bit of ambivalence about taking its own side. 

To see why, let’s consider a couple of ideas that are standardly contrasted with the idea of liberalism as a “fighting creed”: liberal neutrality and liberal norms.

Liberal Neutrality: Against Favoritism

Neutrality is among the least loved ideas that have often been connected to liberalism. Neutrality among religions, arguably the core example from which much else has followed, is uninspiring compared with substantive religious belief. It is widely thought to be bloodless and abstract, derided as a vision of what Harvard communitarian Michael Sandel famously caricatured as the "unencumbered self”—unencumbered by beliefs, commitments, loves, passions, projects.

Critics of liberalism despise it. They think it’s simultaneously false, because liberalism promises neutrality among various ways of life, while it also and insidiously makes alternative ways of life unsustainable; and unworthy, because real, vital, manly political actors agonistically commit to a substantive goal with their whole heart. But liberals themselves are often uneasy with neutrality: in good times, they call to surpass it for something more ambitious and inspiring; in bad times, they worry that it discourages necessary political action; and in both, they wonder whether it neglects questions of ethos and character that are necessary for the maintenance of freedom.

These complaints often misunderstand the type of neutrality at stake. Liberal neutrality is not personal apathy or indifference; its opposite is not commitment. Rather, liberal neutrality is impartiality—the impartiality of rules, of procedures, of freedoms. Its opposites are favoritism, nepotism, privilege, and personalism. Its standard cases, no less important for being familiar, are state neutrality as among religions, and judicial neutrality as among persons. 

The latter doesn’t mean, and has never meant, neutrality between criminal and innocent action. And it doesn’t rest on the fantastic claim, never achieved in any society, that the effects of the law will fall equally on everyone. Rather, it means the demand that the same procedures and principles will apply regardless of who appears as a plaintiff or victim and who as a defendant. The ideal represented by justice being blindfolded is older than liberalism, though it traditionally meant impartiality as among members of a privileged class: the same rules applied regardless of which propertied citizen, or which man, or which nobleman, appeared in each of the seats. 

The eventual advent of liberal governance didn’t invent the rule of impartial law, but it presupposed it, rested on it, and generalized it. In the important account given by Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast in Violence and Social Orders, the emergence of what they call the “open access order” was the generalization and democratization of what had previously been organizational tools reserved to ruling-class elites. Organizing a business as a corporation no longer depended on royal favor, whether from personal connection, family status, political alignment, or plain bribery. As mercantilism gave way to liberal market capitalism, it became a simple, universally available bureaucratic procedure. As the elite political competition of  eighteenth-century Westminster gave way to an inclusive liberal democracy, ordinary citizens likewise gained access to the franchise and to the ability to join political parties. The right to form and belong to a church followed the same path, as grudging toleration among Protestant sects became liberal religious liberty. 

It’s noteworthy how much the current crisis involves backsliding on exactly these dimensions: from neutrality, impartiality, and impersonal governance to favoritism, partiality, and personalism. The global trend has been ably documented in Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein’s book The Assault on the State, but it has accelerated since their book was published two years ago. The attack on liberal commercial markets has taken the form not only of protectionist nationalist tariffs and an increasing state ownership stake in large firms, but an astonishing degree of personal favor, enrichment, and spite on the part of political leaders. Dangerous purges of the military officer corps, law enforcement, and the previously independent expert civil service have quickly spread from Türkiye and Israel to the United States, turning executive authority and security into tools of personal power and spite. 

The always-difficult problem is that the partisan elected leadership of the executive has authority over law enforcement, something I analyzed in various ways here, here, and here. The problem has now become a genuine crisis. It’s brought the abuse of both prosecutions and pardons for personal and political gain. The challenge to liberalism today is not just a matter of liberal political actors being defeated by conservative or socialist rivals within a stable, underlying, and ultimately liberal system, within which the winners would also work. It is now a matter of liberal orders and systems crumbling into the mercantilist and personalist “natural state.” As North, Wallis, and Weingast show, that state is the historical rule, to which liberalism has been a rare and brief exception.

The complaint that neutrality is false because nothing is ever really neutral is utterly beside the point here. Yes, the open access order, the rule of impersonal law, the professional civil service, and the open market are substantive political goods, difficult to attain or to maintain, requiring substantive commitment. Yes, they have substantive effects on the social order. But, yes, they are neutral in the relevant institutional sense: in their various ways, they all further impartiality among persons. I discussed this idea in greater depth on The Institute for Liberal Studies’ Curious Task podcast with Alex Aragona. 

Playing Hardball: Norms and Sanctions

Probably the most famous book about the backsliding in the last decade, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, foregrounded the idea of democratic norms and their erosion. They identified the central norms as mutual tolerance, different parties’ acceptance of each other as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, a willingness not to push to the limits of institutionally permissible power. In terms more familiar to public law and constitutional theory, forbearance is a willingness to refrain from what Mark Tushnet calls “constitutional hardball.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt say that these norms are a necessary but previously under-noticed complement to such formal institutions as the separation of powers. They argue that these norms have been gradually eroded in the United States, mainly from the right, since the 1980s. And they say that this is a feature of cases of democratic and constitutional backsliding around the world. Their treatment of democratic norm erosion has been widely influential, and it now organizes scholars’ treatment of such topics as whether and when members of the public believe that certain kinds of speech can legitimately be met with official censorship or unofficial violence.

Whether or not it’s directly inspired by Levitsky and Ziblatt’s work, we hear a similar kind of discussion about norms in public intellectual debates on the center-left and left about how to respond to the two Trump presidencies. It is a commonplace on the left that the Biden administration in general, and Merrick Garland’s leadership of the Department of Justice in particular, was characterized by too much deference to norms, too much forbearance, especially in the pace of prosecutions for the January 6, 2021 attacks, but also, for example, in the refusal to try to expand and pack the Supreme Court, or to abolish the filibuster. This line of argument shapes criticism of Democratic congressional leadership on an ongoing basis, charging them with trying to govern according to outdated norms of bipartisan mutual toleration. 

More broadly, some people seem to believe that if bad things happen in politics, it must be because their own side didn’t fight hard enough. That easily becomes a belief that their own representatives decided not to fight hard enough, deliberately handicapping themselves with rules and restraints. The language of “norms” has become, for some critics, a shorthand for such half-hearted politics. This mindset looks at the contemporary crisis, and asks of liberals a version of the question Anton Chigurh asks in No Country For Old Men: If the norm you follow brought you to this, of what use was the norm?

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s history of the erosion of forbearance and toleration is valuable. The broader discourse that treats forbearance as the model of liberal norms—political, or liberal, or constitutional, or democratic, norms—is, however, actively misleading. It muddles together norms with niceness.

Norms are neither laws, though laws may variously enforce, specify, or ground norms, nor virtues, though norms may habituate persons into virtues. It helps organize one’s thinking about norms to remember that they are both normative and normal, and that each of those matters. A norm is a shared expectation, in both senses of “to expect”: not only the predictive “I expect rain today” but also the prescriptive “I expect better of you.” A norm describes an approved-of behavior that can also be widely relied on, and the internalization of the pattern of behavior. Moreover, the normative and the normal reinforce each other. The widespread pattern encourages internalization through the flawed but standard psychology of sociable beings: what is done around here is a primary source for thinking about what ought to be done. And the belief that the norm ought to be followed leads to penalizing its violation, which serves to reinforce the pattern.

Sanctioning need not be a matter of formal punishment. Think of Tushnet’s metaphor of “hardball.” When a pitcher pitches too aggressively to the inside of the strike zone, retaliation in kind by the opposing pitcher is a standard response. The second pitcher isn’t contributing to the erosion of baseball’s norms; they’re enforcing the norms. Tit-for-tat self-help has limits as a way to enforce norms, and in many settings we try to replace it with third-party judgment of one kind or another. But often such judgment is not available, and if we want a norm to remain normal, to remain an expectation on which we can rely in common, it will have to be supported by horizontal enforcement. Without some sense of legitimate sanctioning of violation—even if it is only social criticism—I think that the habit, custom, or pattern isn’t actually a norm.

Liberal Norms and Their Institutions

As with neutrality, so with norms: their relevance to liberal politics is institutional. 

Institutions, Robert Goodin argues, are themselves sets of norms. They are, as Goodin put it, the relevant “organized patterns of socially constructed norms and roles, and socially prescribed behaviors expected of occupants of those roles, which are created and re-created over time.” This is true even for institutions that rest on legitimate coercive physical force; “legitimacy” is a normative word and an observed social fact. 

To return to the analogy for a moment: the norm against inside pitches is a genuine norm within the game, but the sport itself is an institution, built out of nothing but norms. The rules of conduct constituting the game—nine innings, three outs, three strikes, infield fly rule, and so on—are all stable expectations. Their violations are either sanctioned by the umpire, or they render the game invalid. If a violent mob storms home plate after the final play and demands that the result be overturned, the normative structure of the game is compromised, and the people are doing something other than playing baseball.

A constitutional government, a market-governed economy, democratic elections, the rule of law, a professional and impartial civil service, a separation of church and state, the freedom of speech and the press: these are all institutions built out of norms. The evolution of liberal orders consisted of these and similar norms gradually becoming both normal and normative. Religious groups could safely refrain from the struggle for political power, increasingly secure in the knowledge that they weren’t at risk from some rival religious group seizing it and persecuting them. Defeated political parties could peacefully leave power, knowing that their rivals would do likewise when the time comes. Producers could concentrate on economic production rather than mercantilist rent-seeking or channeling wealth into the pockets of rulers. And so on. 

During the long process of the consolidation of liberal orders, these norms all demonstrated virtuous patterns of self-reinforcement. The more stably they could be counted on, the more robust the belief in their appropriateness; the more widely shared the belief in their appropriateness, the stabler the expectation. 

It’s worth noting that these are all norms for circumstances of pluralism and disagreement. Religious liberty was a response to the fact of serious religious conflict. Liberal democracy, understood as a system in which parties cede power after they lose votes, only makes sense given the factionalization of political life into two or more parties. To focus on the latter case, liberal democracy is not a system in which liberal political parties necessarily win every election. This is Frost’s paradox: to be a partisan liberal is to support the establishment or maintenance of a system in which your own side can regularly lose. 

Norm Erosion and Norm Collapse 

A norm that is an independently normatively valuable aspiration might still erode as an observed normal expectation. (Conversely, it might gradually take hold; the spiral can be vicious or virtuous.) Standard examples from the literature of norms that have this quality include norms against littering, against leaving dog waste on the ground uncollected, and against smoking in particular times or places. Even in a place with litter everywhere, we can still make sense of what a person is doing who declines to litter, or who makes it a point to clean up a little bit every time they go for a walk. They’re doing their part, even if no one else is. If they’re just one person, they’re probably exercising a virtue rather than following a norm, but they might be trying to set a norm: They aim to show by good example and to get others to think about what they’ve been doing. In more intermediate cases, there’s enough compliance to describe the norm as present but not having fully taken hold, or as having eroded from some previous time but not yet collapsed. Today there is still a norm against talking on cell phones during a movie, though it’s significantly eroded.

By contrast, a norm that is normative primarily because it is normal, a coordination convention, won’t look like this. There’s no such thing as an eroded norm about which side of the street to drive on. If even 10% of drivers stop observing the local convention, then no one can safely rely on it. We immediately collapse into a much worse equilibrium, each driver having to navigate around every other driver in both directions, all the time. Where the normative force depends on keeping to the normal pattern, we should be on the lookout for collapse rather than erosion.

Some norms aren’t as purely conventional as this, but they’re close enough that they similarly collapse rather than eroding. Waiting in an orderly queue is, in my view, like this. Unlike which side of the road we drive on, there’s a moral difference between the rule “everyone wait your turn” and “whoever has the sharpest elbows goes first.” But once 10% of the people have committed to the latter, the people who remain aren’t like the person individually picking up litter. They’re simply suckers, abiding by an imagined rule that is not the operative norm, and they’ll never get to the front. Everyone understands this and reacts accordingly; they adjust to the fact that this particular crowd isn’t lining up in an orderly way—and the results can be violent, even fatal.

I suggest that liberal institutional norms are very often of the sort that risk collapse rather than mere erosion. 

If one party in a two-party system refuses to abide by the norm of peacefully accepting election losses, the democratic norm of selecting leaders peacefully through elections is at risk of collapse. If one party violates the norms of respecting a free and independent press, using the full power of the state, from the bully pulpit, to antitrust law, to harassment lawsuits, to bring the press to heel, that norm is also at risk of collapse. The press won’t reset to an independent posture when the other party takes back power; it will rationally respond to the threat of the initial party’s return.

The same logic holds across the range of personalist, favoritist, mercantilist, and other politicized attacks on the norms of neutrality. If one party purges the professional civil service, or the officer corps of the military, if it replaces the impartial rule of economic law with tariffs, subsidies, and antitrust permissions that depend on bribery and personal access, trust in those norms as an expected practice is shattered. They are not the sort of expectations that function in a four-years-on, four-years-off system. 

This puts liberal political actors, movements, and parties in a difficult position. The open-access order’s emergence and stability relied on a political consensus about the positive-sum character of the peace and prosperity that liberal rules made possible. One party could take the lead, but it couldn’t unilaterally create the whole order. Under circumstances of norm crumbling and collapse, a party that plays by no-longer-operative rules just creates a permission structure for surrender to the other side. Even when the norm-abiding party is in power, the press, the civil service, big business, the military and police, and so on will have every reason to curry favor with its rival, on the expectation that the rival party will return to power and restart retribution and favoritism soon enough. 

Does this mean that abandoning norms is the right strategy? No, that dodges the real difficulty. Liberal politics is, in large part, the politics of trying to instantiate liberal norms. Freedom of religion and speech, the rule of law, the impersonal open market, free and fair elections: those are neutral institutions across persons, but that kind of neutrality is the liberal’s fighting creed. Reversing the other side’s friends and enemies lists, changing around who gets treated with favoritist privilege and who with spiteful retribution—these aren’t liberal politics at all. These are the destruction of the order that liberal politics tries to create.

The difficulty is real. Without the possibility of sanctions for noncompliance, a norm becomes just an aspiration. But the institutions that can sanction violations within a constitutional order—courts, most obviously—are themselves creatures of constitutional norms. Without third-party enforcement, sanctions reduce to tit-for-tat self-help by the parties involved. But for norms of the sort we’re considering here, that amounts to a different kind of surrender for liberals: a surrender of the overall order at which they aim.

Norms, Not Niceness

Some political norms are a lot like the norm against inside pitches: there’s a ready tit-for-tat enforcement mechanism that leads straight to mutual forbearance. Others are more like the norm against an armed mob storming home plate; without third-party enforcement, the norm may vanish. If critics of liberal norms from the left sometimes forget the difference and treat all normative restraint as equally suspect, some avowed supporters of liberal norms blur the distinction for the opposite reason. They treat norms of forbearance and nice behavior within rule-governed structures as if they’re just the same as the rules that constitute the structures themselves.  We are currently in the middle of a major round of tit-for-tat gerrymandering in the United States, at least some of whose participants would prefer a symmetrical scaling down of the tactic. Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen refer to this as anti-hardball, retaliatory action aimed at ending the escalation.

This is, I think, one of the sources of a general distaste for norms-talk in the contemporary crisis. The intra-elite comity of the sort that characterized bipartisan governance in the United States in the mid-twentieth century was a norm, too. Before we get nostalgic about it, we should recall that it was a norm that rested on the ugly fact of Jim Crow. White conservative southern Democrats could get along with white moderate Republicans nicely enough; the white Democratic solid south meant that Democratic dominance in Congress wasn’t ever really at risk, and the exclusion of Black voters meant that many divisive questions were kept off the agenda. (This has been widely studied; most recently, see Stephen Skorownek’s The Adaptability Paradox.) There’s something especially perverse about nostalgic elites whose commitment to such niceness constrains them from forthright criticism of the violations of fundamental, system-level norms. Here at last we find the actors who genuinely won’t take their own side in the political quarrel.

This is probably not unique to the United States. Elite esprit de corps is very real, even in the most democratic and inclusive open orders. Niceness across the aisle is psychologically easy. Confronting the task of trying to build or rebuild system-level norms when opponents refuse to cooperate is not. This is the challenge for liberal renewal: a willingness to take our own side robustly, while remembering that our own side is in large part the advocacy of norms that are neutral between the sides in such quarrels.

I read some really great political theory this week.

And unlike Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics, this book had a dragon.

Joe Hill’s most recent novel, King Sorrow, takes its main characters and its readers on a scary and suspenseful exploration of the dubious wisdom of the claim that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That old political saw gets hauled out from the back corner of the basement whenever it seems expedient to make a morally dubious alliance with a stronger power. Hill’s novel, a deliciously gory and smart bit of horror in its own right, exposes the ethical void at the center of such alliances.

[Editor’s Note: There are spoilers ahead.]

When Arthur Oakes’s mother, a pastor and social justice activist, is convicted for an accidental death that occurred while she was protesting on federal property, she and her son run afoul of the Nighswander clan. Jayne Nighswander, whose mother is an inmate in the same prison, is a violent thief and drug dealer who also prostitutes her youngest sister, Tana. On prison visiting day, when Arthur lends Tana his sweatshirt, Jayne immediately perceives his kindness as weakness and decides to push him around. 

When she later discovers that he attends the elite Rackham College and works in its rare book room, she targets him for more than bullying. Unless Arthur steals $60,000 worth of material from the rare book room and hands it to Jayne for resale, her mother will make his mother a target for violence while she is in prison. It’s a tidy little trap, and seeing no way out of it, Arthur complies. His compliance only opens the door for further problems, though, as Jayne can now blackmail him for his previous thefts.

Desperate and guilt ridden, Arthur turns to his friends for help. Allie is the beautiful one—cheery and kind and closeted to appease her very religious parents. Donna and Donavan are twins—one’s driven by anger, and the other by addiction. There’s Colin, the privileged scion of a dissolving family, living with his grandfather who is dying of AIDS. And there’s Gwen, the “townie” friend of these college students: brilliant, in love with Arthur, and the bridge between the ivory tower of Rackham College and the world the Nighswanders inhabit. 

When Arthur’s wealthier friends offer their allowances and trust funds to get him off the hook, only Gwen can understand why that won’t work.

Gwen is right. Jayne Nighswander has no intention of letting Arthur pay his way out from under her control. The power she has over him is more enticing than the money she can make.

Like college students since the university was first invented, Arthur and his friends respond to his predicament in the only sensible way. They get absolutely obliterated on scotch and weed and—accidentally or not—summon a demon/dragon named King Sorrow from a hellish world called the Long Dark.

As with many decisions made by chemically altered college students, this seems like a great idea at the time. King Sorrow agrees that on Easter he will obliterate the person the group names and that until then he will protect them by giving them magic tattoos they can use to call him over to this world if they are in danger. 

He’s terrifying and powerful and incredibly violent. But after all, the enemy of their enemy is their friend. And they have a clear contract. One name. One murder. And protection until then.

But dragon demons are trickier than that, and Arthur and his friends are, it must be said, remarkably dim. It turns out that like a massive, scaly, fire-breathing cat, King Sorrow likes to play with his food before he eats it. The scenes where he tortures Jayne by invading her nightmares and fracturing reality are unforgettable. When Arthur and the others hear about and see the effects of her torment, they begin to regret their connection with King Sorrow and to realize the gravity of what they’ve contracted him to do. They begin to look for ways to worm out of their bargain. 

Can they call the dragon off? Not without sacrificing one of themselves, and that’s surely a bad trade. After all, they’re good, and Jayne Nighswander is bad.

What about telling Jayne and her boyfriend to run? Maybe they can get far enough away to be out of the dragon’s range? Could that work? Could it backfire?

Already that contract is looking a lot less desirable than it did the night they agreed to it. Maybe, though, all this guilt they’re feeling isn’t necessary. As Donna points out to Arthur, “you aren’t going to be the reason she dies…King Sorrow is.” 

Arthur’s response, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” is a reference to an outburst by Henry II that persuaded several of his knights to murder Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Arthur is studying to become a medievalist, so the reference is appropriate for him. It is also apposite because the question of how much responsibility Henry II bears for the murder has been a matter of much debate over the centuries. Donna is suggesting that ordering a murder isn’t really the same thing as being a murderer. Arthur is expressing his doubts. 

This reference to Henry II and Becket suggests that Hill is aware that his book about a dragon is an extended metaphor about political choices. King Sorrow is a powerful ally, but a dangerous one. Machiavelli warns against such allies in chapter 21 of The Prince, pointing out that, “a prince ought to take care never to make an alliance with one more powerful than himself for the purposes of attacking others, unless necessity compels him, as is said above; because if he conquers you are at his discretion, and princes ought to avoid as much as possible being at the discretion of any one.” 

Similarly, Phaedrus’s Fable V warns that “An alliance with the powerful is never to be relied upon…” presenting the story of a cow, goat, and sheep who make an alliance with a lion, only to find that he takes all the shares of the food they catch. “Because my name is Lion, I take the first; the second you will yield to me because I am courageous; then, because I am the strongest, the third will fall to my lot; if anyone touches the fourth, woe betide him.”

The enemy of your enemy is likely to turn against you.

But King Sorrow isn’t just dangerous because of the violence he commits and the way that violence might be turned against anyone at any time. He’s dangerous because of the way that an alliance with him and with his strategies of murder and mayhem changes the people who ally with him.

When Jayne and her boyfriend are slaughtered by King Sorrow in an impressively gory scene in an abandoned drive-in, it briefly seems as if, aside from their crushing guilt, the six friends will be all right. The threat to Arthur is ended and they can get back to living their lives. But King Sorrow reappears a few months later to explain that their bargain is a bargain for life, and that he will require them to select a new victim every Easter for the rest of their lives. 

As the years pass and the friends continue to select victims for King Sorrow, Colin persuades them into developing a system for the selection of targets. 

It all sounds so reasonable, so plausible. It’s just a continuation of the original reason for calling on King Sorrow—the punishment of the wicked and the protection of the good. But when Gwen protests, Colin’s defense of his plan begins to ring hollow, for her and for the reader. 

The enemy of your enemy is likely to turn you into something terrible.

If his fondness for spreadsheets isn’t enough of a clue, I will spoil the twist for you now. Colin may be as evil a being as King Sorrow. His spreadsheet, it turns out, begins as a list of the irredeemable and morphs, in time, into a list of those who are politically inconvenient or who stand in the way of Colin’s growing tech empire. As he puts it, “If there has to be evil in the world then I’d at least like to be in charge of it.” 

When the others decide to try to find a way to banish King Sorrow back to the Long Dark and end his increasingly destructive rampages, Colin refuses to give up his access to King Sorrow’s power. Instead, he murders Arthur and names Gwen to King Sorrow as the next victim.

It is not quite clear, and I’m not sure Hill means it to be clear, whether Colin is evil from the beginning, or whether his association with King Sorrow makes him become so. While the other friends seem to stumble haplessly into evil and to remain sickened by it even as it threatens to overtake them, Colin ends the book by welcoming evil with open arms, even seeking another ally—stronger than King Sorrow—to give him more protection and more fire power. 

It takes the united efforts of the surviving members of the group, some impressive emergency medicine, and a few magical medieval relics to prevent Colin’s rise to further power and to finally break the hold King Sorrow has over the group. Most of them do not survive. None of them escape unscathed.

Matt Zwolinski recently reminded visitors to this site that “The shared enemy is concentrated, unchecked power, wherever it lives.” King Sorrow reminds us that this is always true, even when we think the power is at our command. 

You’ve probably heard of Adam Smith’s much-celebrated takedown of central planning in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

Except—this is not a takedown of central economic planning. Smith is talking about those who would change political society without regard for the “established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more of those great orders and societies, into which the state is divided.”

Smith isn’t arguing against ideal plans for government or the abstract concept of “system.” He’s in favor of those things. What Smith is doing in this, a favorite passage among fans of small government, isn’t a condemnation of utopias. Smith is arguing that those who have ideas about how to make the world better should implement those ideas through what we’d now recognize as liberal politics. 

The Danger of System

Smith has a lot more to say about the love of “system,” especially in especially Part IV, chapter 1. Earlier in the book, Smith talks about the human tendency to confuse the “beauty of a system”—the perfection of its design, the way it’s all worked out and rational and understandable to us! Chef’s kiss!—with our assessment of its effects. 

Smith doesn’t use these words, but he’s talking about a conflation of form with function. It’s something we do all the time. We tend to fixate on the means for achieving something, whether it’s by doing it the way it’s been done before, or doing it in the way we imagine would be perfect. Sometimes, this fixation means we lose track of whether or not our chosen form actually accomplishes the goal. As Smith puts it, “we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end.” 

This confusion is the source of Smith’s parable of “the poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.” The poor man’s son spends his whole life struggling for wealth and power, and at the end of his life looks back and realizes that he wasted time and effort on “mere trinkets of frivolous utility,” akin to the fancy toys accumulated by someone who likes gadgets. 

What happens to the poor man’s son is this: Smith says that if you ask someone ambitious for wealth and power why they want it, they might say that they want for their life to feel easy and safe. Wealth and greatness are observably grand, beautiful, and noble. Feelings of ease and tranquility, though, are accessible with much less observable (and more achievable) levels of material wealth, levels that don’t encourage ambitious behavior. 

Yet Smith says that it’s a good thing that people are driven by the search for more perfect means to achieve our ends. Ambition for power and riches can lead someone to fritter their life away by neglecting more achievable or praiseworthy goals, and finding even better ways to do things really does make people happier. Those who can afford to look for cleverer or more aesthetically pleasing ways of meeting their needs rather than simply being satisfied by their needs being met. Meeting this demand encourages economic activity and innovation, both increasing overall wealth and rewarding those who provide more perfect trinkets or services. As rich people spend money on these things, they distribute the money that used to maintain landed estates and courts to ordinary laborers. In this way, the “poor man’s son” passage leads pretty directly into Smith’s first (and best) use of the “invisible hand” metaphor: in which rich people, in their pursuit of better and better means, “divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements.”

This is how Smith rolls, and it’s why we still learn from him. The effects of this impulse are good, provided it’s let loose in a commercial society. And it really is bad that the poor man’s son squanders his life chasing wealth and power. 

The poor man’s son is like the man of system—he got carried away by an idea and so threw propriety out the window doing something that, when constrained the right way, benefits society. We tend to find systems attractive, so it’s important to plan whatever systems we mentally inhabit so that they work well. As Smith wrote, “The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare.” After all, whether they’re acting in the market or in politics, people are people. 

Smith describes possible reasons for getting into politics. The first is ambition, like the ambition that drives the poor man’s son. This sort of striving can bring out the worst in us. In the halls of power, success can be the result not of “the esteem of intelligent and well-informed equals,” but “the fanciful and foolish favor of ignorant, presumptuous, and proud superiors; flattery and falsehood too often prevail over merit and abilities.” Most of us share Smith’s worry about politics motivated by personal enrichment. Smith also says that admiring the powerful can corrupt our moral sentiments. It’s best not to give that power to the worst among us. 

The problem for society is how to encourage better people to end up on top.

Systems Thinking

Continuing with reasons that people get into politics, Smith gestures at those who are in public life because they’re primarily motivated by concern for the wellbeing of others. As with elsewhere in his writing, he does not think benevolence can provide enough motivation to take care of everyone in a large-scale society, where we are socially distant from most people. As in the distribution of material goods, we need a more universally felt motivation as a backstop. 

To motivate someone without ambition or sufficient benevolence to act in the public interest, Smith encourages playing up the appeal of systems thinking about how governments function and how they might be improved. He encourages the study of politics: “Nothing tends so much to promote the public spirit.” The urge to improve systems of government, based on a common human desire to find better ways of doing things, can motivate someone who would otherwise have no interest in serving the public. 

When thinking of the spirit of system, most market liberals think of the man of system passage and condemn both him and his real-world exemplars. We consider ourselves fundamentally different from a man of system because we believe in distributing and weakening the power of the state—the source of coercive power we’re most worried about, and that a man of system relies on. 

And yet. Free trade is a system of economic policy. A system Smith thinks it’s absurd to expect we’ll see realized. The simple system of natural liberty isn’t easily achieved, no matter how enchanted we are by its elegance. Liberals are positively enamored with systems, and the more different our ideal system of government is from the one we have, the more at risk we are of the idea running away with us until we lose sight of the people affected. 

It seems like advocates of small government aren’t immune, after all. This is why the late Steve Horwitz cautioned: Don’t smash the state. A man of system, who looks down at the chess game, declares the whole board corrupt, and flips it so that the pieces shatter across the ground is not better than someone who forces those pieces into their right place. 

Smith and Horwitz aren’t recommending an indifferent, anti-systematic quietism.
They would ask us to find the right constraints on how we implement the systems we want. Propriety in government as spelled out by Smith looks like today's liberal politics. Liberals’ respect for dissenters as individuals, with a right to principles of motion all their own, precludes forcing through a system that few people will support. 

What makes illiberals dangerous isn’t the mere fact that they have a vision. It’s their lack of respect for the rights and dignity of those who disagree with them. Usually, this tendency looks like limiting the decisions available, perhaps by making it illegal to build or open a business the way someone imagines. In extreme cases, it’s the willingness to let the pieces shatter—dissidents left to starve, or sent to gulags and reeducation camps. There’s no need to compromise on behalf of the people written out of politics, no need to constrain the spirit of system.

In contrast, when we want change, liberals need to convince others that our system is better than the status quo. We can’t take public opinion for granted. Our job is to change it. We will rarely completely succeed. And so, instead of liberal utopias, we “establish the best [system] the people can bear,” as Smith put it. That doesn’t mean, and it shouldn’t mean, that we can’t have ambitious ideas about how politics and government ought to work.

There’s also a temptation to believe in a sort of anti-system available to us in the form of conservatism. A principled commitment to stability and incrementalism as good in themselves might seem like a guard against the inflexibility of the man of system. 

F.A. Hayek described in conservatism a propensity to rely on what has already been proven workable and directing change based on preserving or pursuing those proven institutions. Conservatism is in this way also overly concerned with form when it considers how to fulfill different functions. 

Conservatism’s preoccupation with means over ends can also lose track of individuals when it binds the hands of reformers in the face of the sort of injustice that needs to be ripped out, root and branch, or the sort of problem that can’t be solved through tinkering. An obvious example of putting incrementalism before individuals comes from those whose concern about the radical political change pushed for by the US Civil Rights movement in the United States led them to defend southerners’ ability to maintain segregation and discrimination. The entire idea of “states’ rights” prioritizes collectives over individuals. 

The further the world drifts from a liberal consensus, the more dramatic a liberal program will become compared to the status quo. The ability of liberals to fall back on the conservative anti-system alternative will be weakened. That’s fine, though. Liberals need not hold any kind of commitment to incrementalism as good in itself. Liberal incrementalism is a byproduct of commitment to individual dignity and respect and the corresponding unwillingness to sweep aside dissenters. 

This makes it easier for liberals to pursue more sweeping reforms. After all, such reforms represent some of our greatest victories—think of the abolition of slavery or the enfranchisement of women. In countries where institutions have failed to act as liberal guardrails, or where they’re in danger of failing, liberals can feel free to move beyond preservation or restoration.

That Pesky Principle of Motion

Smith doesn’t talk about it, but it strikes me that there’s another sort of man of system. A sort who, upon encountering a chessboard with pieces that have principles of motion all their own, gets up from the table and goes home.

We’re not accustomed to thinking of someone who won’t engage with politics on principle as a man of system because the effects of that choice are very different—dictators are unquestionably worse than abstainers. The chess metaphor still illuminates a similarity. Someone who will never choose the lesser of two evils is reacting based on an imagined better world with imagined humans that move the way the chess pieces ought to.

This man of system is also enamored with a vision of the world—so enamored that he cannot bear to improve things only partway. Contrast this again with Smith’s man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence: “When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong.” 

But it’s complicated. That imagined, ideal system ought to matter, too. We should care about our ideals enough for them to motivate us, and so departing from them needn’t be an easy call. Propriety has to do with weighing when compromising can ameliorate a wrong better than standing one’s ground. That means there’s no cut-and-dry single answer, only a demand that we attend to, and strive to be realistic about, politics. We're stuck with the need for discernment.

Understanding that something is meaningfully given up when we compromise away from a deeply held belief also encourages us to think about how and whether we might draw attention to the world’s shortcomings while still participating, when that participation is called for. 

In a famous example from 2002,[1] French left-wing voters handed Jacques Chirac a landslide victory to stop the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen in a runoff presidential election. Lest anyone think they were happy about it, those voters symbolically washed their hands after the ballots were cast—evocative messages that a vote for Chirac was necessary, but distasteful. This message was also clearer for observers than abstaining (which might be done on principle, because of busyness, or out of apathy) would have been.

And, while those who warn against the man of system might not like framing it this way, a positive spin on Smith’s spirit of system is not a new idea for classical liberals:

That’s Hayek, too, of course, here mirroring Smith’s conviction that a fleshed out idea of how things ought to work can provide motivation for individuals to do the work of improving government and society. 

Hayek departs from Smith when he insists that an inspiring vision of a free society has to be held by people who will not bend: “They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians.” Trying to change public opinion, as Hayek advocates—he argues those who only pursue practical politics “have done nothing to guide” public opinion—puts one firmly within the political work of persuasion. Hayek’s framing rejects this, though, holding those with inspiring liberal visions apart from those willing to engage in politics. 

Smith shows a different way, one that doesn’t require people to choose between conviction and political action. A motivating ideal subject to liberal politics doesn’t have to be only a destination, one that has to be reached in its entirety to be worthwhile. A spirit of system can, instead, give us direction and a way to assess the costs of different options. We need not become a man of system simply because we’ve adopted an ideal, nor should we insist that every compromise is good for liberalism.

Finally, ideals don’t have to look like a barely recognizable utopia. Liberals are often too modest about what our convictions imply. Ameliorating the wrong when we cannot establish the right sounds more like Judith Shklar’s prescription for political “damage control” in The Liberalism of Fear, an idea that is often contrasted with more aspirational politics.

Shklar also says that “It used to be that the mark of liberalism was that it was cosmopolitan and that an insult to the life and liberty of a member of any race or group in any part of the world was of genuine concern.” We’d do well to remember that eliminating the politics of fear for everyone, no matter how modest it sounds, is something we’ve never achieved. We've not even brushed our fingertips against it. 

Freedom and equality are aspirational values, not something defined by what was already achieved. And so liberals have to be willing to imagine better. Liberalism doesn’t require anyone to give up their visions of an ideal world as motivation. It only constrains how those visions are pursued.

Notes

[1] The 2002 French election example comes up in this conversation between Toby Buckle and Jacob T. Levy on The Political Philosophy Podcast during a discussion of voting abstention.

“Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by an LLM are speech.” With that curious line, one of the first judges to confront the question suggested, in the teeth of law and logic, that AI outputs might not be protected by the First Amendment.

Consider what that would mean. If the outputs of large language models were not treated as protected expression, the government would have sweeping power to dictate what they can and cannot say—even what they must say.

Already, sixty percent of Americans, and nearly three-quarters of those under thirty, use AI to find information. Those numbers will only grow. AI is fast becoming a medium through which hundreds of millions of people form opinions and make sense of the world. A government with control over AI outputs could twist that pursuit of truth—rewriting the past, shading the present, and warping the future.

Lately, public debate over AI outputs has been dominated by headlines about teens killing themselves after talking to chatbots. The “words strung together” line comes from one such case. A boy engaged with a chatbot styled after a queen from Game of Thrones. In his last exchange, he wrote, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” and it responded, “Please do my sweet king.” He then took his own life, and his mother sued the platform. The district court denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. The case later settled.

AI firms should take these cases seriously and work to prevent their recurrence. But one can acknowledge a tragedy without abandoning core principles. Time and again, the Supreme Court has been confronted with lawsuits involving disturbing speech—Maoist propaganda, flag burning, animal crush videos, signs declaring “God hates fags”—and held the line for the First Amendment. The impulse to make a hard case come out right is no excuse for doing something wacky, like questioning whether words strung together are speech. We protect speech precisely because it is powerful.

The anxiety about AI is the latest in a long line of panics over new communications technologies. Change prompts fear, and fear spurs calls for censorship. If past is prologue, this panic will in time look overblown, if not downright silly. As they consider whether the First Amendment protects AI outputs, courts should take care not to embarrass the future. The safest way to do this is to recognize the obvious: that AI outputs are expressive, and that, like other forms of expression, they are protected by the Constitution.

Some sneer that this is “free speech for AI.” That misses the point. AI firms indeed have a First Amendment interest in the design of their models. But you don’t have to buy that. If you dislike Big Tech, or AI firms, or corporate speech generally—fair enough. Set all that aside. Attacks on AI speech are attacks on you. They rest on the notion that you cannot be trusted to encounter ideas the state deems dangerous. This is a free country, where a citizen can see ideas, weigh them, and make up his own mind. The push to curtail your right to interact with AI assumes that you cannot or should not do this.

A robust First Amendment tradition assumes the opposite. Martin v. Struthers (1943) holds that a town may not “substitute the judgment of the community for the judgment of the individual householder” about which leafletters may come to the door. Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965) strikes down a law that required people to confirm with the post office their desire to receive foreign political propaganda (you have a right to “read what the Federal Government says contains the seeds of treason”). Stanley v. Georgia (1969) affirms your right to possess certain forms of obscenity (“a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch”). Packingham v. North Carolina (2017) concludes that even convicted criminals may generally access the “vast democratic forums of the Internet.”

One way to think of it is that if AI is not protected by the First Amendment, all bets are off. The state may require an LLM to say this and not that. Refuse to discuss ICE, or Gaza, or the horrors of slavery. Treat DEI as a toxic ideology. Go silent when your questions become inconvenient for the people in power. No one should want AI controlled by a hostile state—and the state will, at some point, be hostile to you. When you picture the government shaping AI outputs, picture a government run not by your friends, but by your enemies.

Our “forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” That line, written by Justice Robert Jackson in Thomas v. Collins (1945), captures the point. We fought a revolution. We threw off the grip of kings, priests, and other received ideas. In America, the state may not treat people as too fragile, too gullible, or too impressionable to encounter disfavored ideas. We are citizens, not subjects.

The AI firms’ rights do merit a word. Your right to receive AI outputs unmolested by the government is bolstered by their right to control their models. Again, you need not agree—but the argument is stronger than critics allow. AI firms select training data, set alignment goals, and build filters and guardrails. They decide what responses a model will or won’t provide. The Supreme Court has protected editorial control over newspapers, parades, and social media. The principle extends neatly to AI.

It is true that the state has the power to regulate product safety. But calling LLMs “products” changes nothing. A book is a product. A film is a product. Books and films—like chatbots—emit speech you have a First Amendment right to receive. Each can carry dangerous messages and cause emotional distress. That does not make them defective. (When a book binding explodes, call me.) If the government can reclassify expression as a commercial artifact subject to safety regulation, the jig is up. This is not a situation where a product incidentally displays information, like my coffee maker’s clock. A chatbot exists to talk to you. The state may regulate its data practices, its cybersecurity, its energy use. But regulating what it says is regulating speech.

True also that the state may regulate conduct. It could, for instance, forbid using an LLM to engage in racially discriminatory hiring (though that’s already illegal). But what it cannot do is dictate what goes into, or comes out of, a model. As the Supreme Court recently confirmed, “speech does not become conduct just because the State may call it that.” What LLMs produce is speech in the most literal sense. Words strung together. Text is expressive, regardless of source.

People grasp the expressive nature of AI in a hurry when it starts saying things they don’t like. Last year, the Trump administration issued an executive order on “preventing woke AI in the federal government.” The order rails against DEI as a “pervasive and destructive” ideology. Because the order is aimed at government-deployed models, it might be constitutional. But imagine the same order directed at LLMs generally, and you see the problem. Say the president orders LLMs to agree that the 2020 election was stolen, or that climate change is a hoax, or that western culture is a pathology. It’s easy to grasp the expressive power of an LLM when you contemplate one built specifically to offend you.

Notice too how escalatory the it’s-not-speech-it’s-conduct game is. The left sees conduct, not speech, when the question is whether someone must build a website for a gay wedding. The right sees conduct, not speech, when the question is whether a social media platform must leave certain posts up. The Supreme Court has rejected this move in both directions. The proper reaction to that consistency is a sigh of relief, not a continued push for the courts to find conduct when you want the state to control something, and speech when you don’t. Clever arguments about how new technology is different invite laws that force the web designer to build the gay wedding site (or a website denouncing gay weddings). Creative theories about why digital platforms are quasi-public property open the way to social media being drowned in hate speech (or gagged by censors). Same goes for LLMs. We need nothing less than de-escalation in the culture-war arms race. If you don’t like the other side twisting First Amendment rules, that’s great. But you’ve also got to stop doing it yourself.

I’ve spent most of my career being pretty skeptical of egalitarian arguments, and in many ways, I remain skeptical. Common though it may be among my philosopher colleagues, the idea that justice requires any robust form of material equality always struck me as both philosophically groundless and economically naïve.

My anti-egalitarian leanings have strong philosophical support. Robert Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example, for instance, makes a convincing case that equal outcomes are in deep tension with respect for individual liberty. The leveling down objection (in either its philosophical, literary, or musical form) demonstrates that making a society more equal doesn’t necessarily make it better in any respect. And, perhaps most importantly, Harry Frankfurt showed that what really drives many of our objections to unequal distributions is actually a commitment to sufficiency—the belief that people should have enough, not necessarily the same.

 But all of that is perfectly compatible with the claim that less inequality, on the margin, might turn out to be very important after all. That case starts with Adam Smith—not the cartoon Smith of introductory economics, but the Smith who spent hundreds of pages in The Wealth of Nations documenting how the wealthy rig the rules. Smith saw with perfect clarity that employers don’t just compete in markets. They also collude. “Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.” And when the legislature steps in to adjudicate? “Its counsellors are always the masters.”

The philosopher Eric Schliesser, in his book on Adam Smith, argues that Smith’s “theoretical partiality toward the working poor” was not sentimentality. It was a deliberate correction for a bias Smith regarded as structural and permanent. “Intentionally favoring the working poor may, in fact, produce more equal treatment of all,” Schliesser writes, because “in most circumstances the rich can take better advantage of any system of rules.”

Throughout the Wealth of Nations, Smith “calls attention to what contemporary economists call ‘rent-seeking behavior’ by well-connected elites.” On Smith’s telling, the entire mercantilist system was a monument to it. The rich didn’t just happen to benefit from the rules. They wrote them.

Later thinkers have formalized the mechanism Smith described. Michael Munger and Mario Villarreal-Diaz argue that the transition from capitalism to crony capitalism has the structure of a prisoner’s dilemma. In any successful market economy, there comes a point where, for a given firm, “it becomes more profitable, in an accounting sense at least, to use the power of the state to extract resources from others or to protect those existing products from competition.” When that point arrives, rational firms redirect resources from innovation to lobbying. Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, in The Captured Economy, document what this looks like across finance, intellectual property, occupational licensing, and land use: “the proliferation of regressive regulations that redistribute wealth and income up the economic scale while stifling entrepreneurship and innovation.” And a more recent study of corporate mergers finds that consolidation is followed by significant and persistent increases in political influence activities, providing empirical verification of Henry Simons’s basic intuition: economic concentration doesn’t stay in its lane. It spills into politics.

***

Now, if you’re a classical liberal reading this, you probably have a ready response. I know, because I’ve made it many times myself. The response goes like this: the problem isn’t markets, it’s the state. If government didn’t have the power to hand out favors, there would be no favors to seek. The solution to cronyism is to shrink the state.

There is something to this. The classical liberal tradition has always understood that a state with discretionary authority over economic life creates opportunities for rent-seeking, and that one way to reduce rent-seeking is to reduce the authority available to be captured. But while this is the natural first move in the classical liberal response to concentrated wealth, it doesn’t solve the problem. “Just shrink the state” can mean many things; it could mean to spend less, to hire fewer people, to enforce the laws less strictly, or to deliberately scale back capacity in other ways. Unfortunately, some of those ways can be counterproductive or even dangerous. To see why, I want to turn to what is arguably one of the most important papers in political economy of the last two decades: Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s “Persistence of Power, Elites, and Institutions.”

Acemoglu and Robinson distinguish between two kinds of political power. De jure political power is the formal, on-paper power allocated by laws and constitutions—the power to vote, to hold office, to write legislation. De facto political power is the informal, real-world power to shape outcomes outside the formal channels—through lobbying, campaign finance, control of media, the revolving door between industry and regulatory agencies, and in some cases outright intimidation or violence. De jure and de facto power interact, but they are not the same, and they are not distributed in the same way. A society can change who has de jure power without changing who has de facto power. And, crucially, those who lose de jure power through institutional reform have strong incentives to invest in de facto power to offset the change. The smaller and wealthier the elite, the more they stand to gain from controlling politics, and the easier it is for them to solve the collective action problem involved in doing so.

Acemoglu and Robinson model the interaction formally and derive a striking result. Under certain conditions—conditions that turn out to be fairly common empirically—the effect of a change in formal political institutions is completely offset by changes in investment in de facto power. This is what they call “captured democracy”: a pattern in which democratic institutions survive on paper but “choose economic institutions favoring an elite.” Even more strikingly, their model shows that in some configurations, pro-elite economic outcomes are actually more likely under democracy than under autocracy, precisely because the elite invests so heavily in de facto power to offset the formal democratic advantage of ordinary citizens.

The historical example that motivates their paper is the American South after the Civil War. Slavery was abolished. Former slaves were enfranchised. On paper, the de jure distribution of political power had been radically transformed. But the southern economic elite, confronted with this formal change, invested massively in de facto power: monopsonistic labor arrangements, policies designed to impede labor mobility, political disenfranchisement through literacy tests and poll taxes, and the systematic use of intimidation and violence to enforce a political order that formal law no longer authorized. The result was that the pre–Civil War economic order—plantation agriculture, labor repression, concentrated wealth—persisted for nearly another century. The formal institutions had changed. The distribution of de facto power had not. And it was de facto power that determined outcomes.

The implication for the “just shrink the state” strategy is sobering. You can strip government of its power to hand out favors, but the concentrated wealth that benefited from those favors remains intact, and the people who hold it have every incentive and resource to rebuild the state in self-serving forms. The state doesn’t stay shrunk. It grows back in the shape the most powerful interests prefer. The “just shrink the state” approach treats political institutions as a dial you can set; Acemoglu and Robinson show that the setting of the dial is endogenous—continuously pushed by the distribution of economic power itself.

***

None of this, I want to be clear, refutes the classical liberal tradition. It does refute the crudest version of the “just shrink the state” response—but that’s only the entry point to a much richer body of classical liberal thinking about institutional design. The tradition has been grappling with variations of the de jure / de facto problem for a long time, and it has developed some genuinely valuable resources for thinking about it. Let me mention two.

The first comes from the public choice economist James Buchanan, especially in his late work with Roger Congleton, Politics by Principle, Not Interest. Buchanan’s starting point was a worry very close to the one Acemoglu and Robinson formalize: ordinary democratic politics tends to produce legislation that benefits concentrated interest groups at the expense of diffuse majorities, precisely because the concentrated interests have more to gain from political investment. His response was to propose what he called the generality principle: a constitutional-level constraint requiring that political decisions apply non-discriminatorily to everyone. If legislation must treat all citizens the same—no targeted subsidies, no industry-specific tax breaks, no carve-outs for favored groups—then the payoff to lobbying collapses. There are no group-specific rents to capture, and therefore no reason to invest in the de facto political power that Acemoglu and Robinson worry about. F. A. Hayek had long championed the virtues of general, abstract rules on the grounds that they preserve individual freedom and accommodate dispersed knowledge; Buchanan’s contribution was to show why such rules are also, specifically, capture-resistant. The generality principle won’t solve every problem, and enforcing genuine generality is itself politically difficult. But it identifies a structural feature of institutional design that makes the de facto power problem less severe—and it does so in a way that is entirely consonant with classical liberal commitments to the rule of law.

The second resource comes from the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, whose lifelong work on commons governance offers something even more radical. The debate about concentrated economic power has typically been framed as a binary: either the state constrains it through centralized regulation, or the market solves it through competitive pressure. Ostrom spent her career showing that this binary is false. Communities can and do self-organize complex governance arrangements—for fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, groundwater basins—that neither rely on centralized state authority nor reduce to pure private ownership. The institutional form she documented and analyzed is called polycentric governance: decisionmaking distributed across multiple overlapping centers of authority, each with its own rules, each accountable to a different constituency, each capable of interacting with and constraining the others.

Polycentric governance has several attractive features. It is often more adaptive than centralized systems, it makes better use of local knowledge, and it is more responsive to the actual preferences of the people it governs. But the feature most relevant to our present concern is one Ostrom called redundancy. In a polycentric system, governance isn’t concentrated in a single institution that determines outcomes for everyone. It’s distributed across what Ostrom referred to as “parallel autonomous systems”—multiple bodies of rulemaking, interpretation, and enforcement operating alongside one another rather than answering to a single central authority. And that distribution has a crucial property: if any single node in the system is captured or fails, the others continue to function. “The probability of failure throughout a large region,” Ostrom wrote, “is greatly reduced by the establishment of parallel systems.”

This is exactly the structural response that Acemoglu and Robinson’s analysis calls for. The de jure / de facto problem is fundamentally a problem of single-point capture: concentrated wealth seeks out the lever of formal authority and bends it to its purposes. A polycentric system denies concentrated wealth that lever, because there is no single lever to find. Capturing one institution leaves several others standing. And unlike Buchanan’s top-down constitutional approach, which depends on getting the rules right at a founding moment and then holding them in place against pressure, Ostrom’s polycentric systems are continuously remade from below by the people who live within them. When one arrangement fails, participants modify it. When capture starts to happen in one forum, others provide alternatives. Governance becomes adaptive rather than fixed, which makes it that much harder to seize permanently.

There’s a further implication of the polycentric logic worth dwelling on, because it cuts against the grain of much progressive thinking about inequality. In a genuinely polycentric system, wealth inequality itself can sometimes be a source of strength. Multiple centers of private wealth, each with its own interests and each competing with the others, can serve as checks on one another and on the state. Douglass North and Barry Weingast tell exactly this story about England after the Glorious Revolution: Parliament could credibly constrain the Crown after 1688 precisely because the merchant and landed classes had accumulated enough private wealth and organizational capacity to make constitutional constraints stick. Montesquieu made a version of the same argument about the nobility as a check on monarchical power; Tocqueville made another about voluntary associations as bulwarks against democratic despotism. The classical liberal tradition has long understood that a pluralistic civil society with many competing centers of wealth is among the most durable defenses against centralized tyranny.

But the protective function depends on a condition that is easy to miss: wealth must remain distributed across genuinely competing factions rather than coordinated into a dominant one. Once the centers of wealth coordinate—through trade associations, shared political investment, revolving-door networks, or simply convergent class interests—the pluralistic check becomes a unified faction, and the unified faction captures the state. That is precisely the transition Acemoglu and Robinson’s model captures: the elite’s ability to solve the collective action problem of political investment is what drives the captured-democracy result. The problem isn’t wealth inequality as such. It’s wealth coordinated into a politically dominant faction.

Neither Buchanan nor Ostrom fully solves the problem Acemoglu and Robinson identify. Buchanan’s generality principle depends on whether genuine generality can be enforced in a polity where the wealthy have strong incentives to carve out exceptions. Ostrom’s polycentric arrangements are vulnerable to capture at the meta-level: the formal recognition and protection of local self-governance is itself something concentrated power can undermine. But both represent serious classical liberal engagement with the underlying problem, and both point toward responses that go well beyond simply shrinking the state.

***

What, then, should we do about the immediate problem of wealth concentrations already large enough to exercise significant de facto political power? Here the honest answer is that no single policy lever is adequate, and Acemoglu and Robinson’s framework helps explain why. Wealth concentrations large enough to purchase political influence cannot be undone by a single institutional intervention, because any single intervention will itself be subject to the de facto power it is trying to constrain. The appropriate response is therefore plural rather than singular, and ongoing rather than decisive.

One natural direction is tax reform aimed at dynastic wealth. I’ve argued at length that an annual wealth tax of the sort championed by Gabriel Zucman is poorly matched to its stated goals, largely because of valuation and incentive problems that worsen as the tax grows. But more modest reforms within the income tax base are promising: treating death as a realization event and repealing step-up in basis would bring decades of accrued capital gains into the tax base at a natural accounting point, and a minimum tax on accrued gains for the ultra-wealthy would target extraordinary returns as they arise. My colleague Miranda Perry Fleischer has shown that closing the step-up loophole is “a plausible second-best solution” for those concerned about concentration. And Fleischer has also made the case for a Rignano tax—one that taxes old money more heavily than new by taxing inherited wealth at progressively higher rates as it rolls through the generations. Even Robert Nozick, in The Examined Life, proposed something close: restructuring inheritance so that “taxes will subtract from the possessions people can bequeath the value of what they themselves have received through bequests,” such that “an inheritance could not cascade down the generations.”

But tax reform isn’t a complete answer, as a glance at the current American political landscape makes clear. The oligarchic clique around the present administration is largely self-made rather than inherited, and would not have been constrained by any plausible inheritance tax regime. Taxation can work on the next generation; it can’t solve the problem of this one. That’s a reason to think about tax reform alongside other institutional responses rather than as a replacement for them. The kind of market-structure reform Lindsey and Teles advocate—narrower intellectual property rights, lower barriers to occupational entry, less regulatory interference with housing supply, reduced subsidies for financial risk-taking—attacks the economic rents that fund political influence at their source. The generality principle Buchanan pointed toward suggests a discipline for evaluating institutional proposals: do they treat citizens generally, or do they invite the carving out of special interests? And Ostrom’s polycentric approach suggests that the long-run defense against capture lies less in any particular centralized reform than in the cultivation of multiple, overlapping institutions capable of absorbing shocks and routing around failures. No one of these approaches is sufficient on its own. Together, they begin to match the problem’s scale.

***

Classical liberals should take wealth inequality seriously. Not because the sufficiency argument is wrong—I still think it’s largely right as a matter of philosophy. And not because classical liberals need to sign on to the progressive policy agenda—the classical liberal toolkit is often the most effective route to the ends progressives most want to reach. They should take it seriously because their own deepest commitment demands it. If you believe, with Simons, that “no one may be trusted with much power,” you cannot avert your eyes from the most potent engine of power concentration operating in modern democracies. Wealth converts to political influence. Political influence converts to favorable rules. Favorable rules convert to more wealth.

What I have tried to show in this essay is that the classical liberal tradition has more resources for thinking about this cycle than its critics often suppose—and that the work of taking it seriously is only beginning. The framework Acemoglu and Robinson offer should reshape how classical liberals think about the relationship between wealth and power. Buchanan and Ostrom offer directions for institutional response that go well beyond shrinking the state. None of this settles the question of what is to be done. But that, perhaps, is the point. The question of what wealth does to power is not one any of us can afford to wave away—and it is certainly not one that any single policy lever can be trusted to settle. 

In policy debates, some see state action as the obvious solution; others say the same about civil society and/or markets. But listen closely, and you’ll often find that everyone’s gone negative: They have lots of bad things to say about the other side, and not much in favor of their own. That’s the “pretty pig” problem: We can all see the downsides—many of them quite real—with one system, and so we conclude, a bit too quickly, that the other one must be better.

As I’ve noted before, that approach leads to disagreement without engagement, as the advocates on both sides ignore the problems of their own preferred system: The state I can imagine is clearly a good solution to the real world commercial system I’m immersed in, but that state doesn’t exist, and its powers are not stable or reliable.

A sensible view of the problem is Jason Kuznicki’s 2017 book, Technology and the End of Authority. The book centers civil society, displacing what Kuznicki argues has been a misplaced focus on the state. A review of the concept of “political authority” gives very little justification for treating the state as the permanent “moral center” of society. At best, government is a historically contingent tool for solving certain problems: security, coordinating solutions to collective action problems, adjudication of disputes, and maintenance of public order.

This is not a contract theory, or a natural rights theory, though it might be reconciled with those views. The government is a technological answer to the question of how to solve the problems of living together. We’ve come to think of the state, with its conventional bundle of coercive practices, as if it were merely a natural development. But there is no reason to accept that claim empirically, and there is no good cause to give it any moral force. The reason that “government” and “state” have the meanings we associate with those words is that their functions, and those coercive practices, were chosen by human agents making compromises based on limited information. They had to do their best to create institutions that elicited information and gave workable incentives to people in the future, while working within the technological constraints of their own eras. There is no particular reason to defer to the “authority” of the government, unless government as a tool continues to serve our needs.

Technology is a key moving part in the justification for state action; it’s also a limit on the use of state power. The role of the state as a contingent tool must always be evaluated against the capacities of decentralized private action, and the parameters that govern this comparison are fluid and constantly evolving. 

It’s therefore unsurprising that those who sought to control and direct the state’s coercive powers created a powerful mythology of the state’s inevitability and necessity. But the state is a bundle of coercive powers handed down from the past, and the contents of the bundle are not inevitable. It’s possible the whole thing may not even be necessary. The western philosophical tradition exaggerated the moral centrality of the state, as a means of reducing the costs of compliance and enforcement; fair enough. But modern technology increasingly forces a re-evaluation, and the once-useful mythos of necessity is now an obstacle that must be dealt with.

Which brings up the main point of this essay: the usual problem of private rights involves a distinction, and an enforcement, between what is yours, and what is mine. The problem modern society now faces is a different distinction: what is mine, and what is ours? That is, what kinds of rules, activities, and direction of resources will be done by decentralized groups, and what functions will be carried out by the state?

Who Will Build the Roads?

You might have heard the question in market-liberal circles: In a stateless utopia, who will build the roads? That question is a great example for my purposes, because roads are important and tangible. And yet the question is so often discussed on a high plane of abstraction—and that makes it harder to see how physical and social technologies interact in the real world. 

One important motivation for the founding and spread of public choice economics is to correct for the excesses of the market failure justification for state action. The logic of that justification is that there is literally no way for decentralized private action to provide public goods, or to correct for externalities. Public choice economics challenges that hasty conclusion. And when it considers a question like “Who will build the roads?,” it’s informed by empirical evidence.

“Public goods,” in particular, are defined as those useful goods and services that markets cannot provide, because the item is non-rival—it doesn’t get used up when others use it—and non-excludable—it’s difficult or expensive to charge the average cost price, and the marginal cost of a new consumer is zero. 

The term “public goods” doesn’t refer to the public good—that is, all benefits to the general population—it’s about which things meet the technical conditions of being non-rival in production and non-excludable in consumption. The public good is often served by using private commerce, by saying “this is mine,” not “this is ours.” Think of grocery stores, retailers of electronics, restaurants, movie theaters, coffee shops, and many other spaces. All of the thousands of private sources of public good need to be insulated from state direction and control, because no single actor could know enough to act correctly, and they would have no incentive to act correctly if they did. Private action, both in commerce and in voluntary private associations, serves the public good.

But there are still public goods that the state should provide. Are roads among them?

Having a road network is certainly good for the public. But to be a public good in the economic sense, roads would have to be immune from congestion, or the effects of increased use, and they’d have to be very expensive to provide on a fee-contingent basis.

The congestion problem for roads has recently been much commented on; the implementation of “congestion pricing” in New York City and other areas has resulted in substantial improvements in drive times. On the other hand, for many rural roads there is little or no congestion, unless there is an accident, and the “non-rival” condition is usually met.

For many years, the real difficulty was that charging for use of the road was expensive. It took human toll booth operators, and the long lines at toll booths were a deadweight loss—a simple inefficiency, with no upside anywhere. But digital tools and electronic sensors have completely changed the cost calculus, to the point where roads are obviously excludable.

I have a North Carolina “Quick Pass” transponder attached to the inside of my windshield, behind the mirror. It lets me drive on (almost) any toll road in twenty northeast and southern states, and tolls are collected instantly and seamlessly from my pre-arranged account. It’s easier to pay tolls than to pay for a movie ticket or groceries.

That seems like a pedestrian (sorry) point, but it is exactly the sort of thing that Kuznicki was talking about. Technological changes are moving the boundaries of what the state must, or ought, to do. Voluntary associations, what public choice founder James Buchanan called “clubs,” are now able to accomplish collective goals that once required state action.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Private, collective, voluntary action has long supplied public goods in northern Europe. Far from being socialist, Scandinavian countries have for centuries used voluntary, decentralized, private organizations to provide “public” goods, especially roads. A defined group of users pays dues, sets rules, and often accepts state subsidies in exchange for granting broader access.

Roughly two-thirds of Swedish roads (by length, not traffic) are managed by private road associations. There are about 60,000 associations responsible for more than 130,000 kilometers of roads. Of course, that means that the average association manages about 2 kilometers of road, and the median is less than that: some are simply roads that branch off a main road and serve 50-80 property owners. (That number can vary widely and is larger in more urban areas).

About 24,000 of those associations receive public subsidies, but the subsidy comes with conditions: if they take the money, they must keep the road open to general vehicle traffic. Some of these associations even handle ferry services in the Stockholm archipelago. That’s not socialism, but neither is it standard capitalism; it is decentralized, voluntary, user-based provision inside a legal framework overseen by the state.

In Finland also, most of the roads, as measured by length,  were built on the same model. Finland has about 370,000 kilometers of private roads linking roughly 30,000 businesses, 40,000 farms, 250,000 homes, and 190,000 holiday homes to the public network. These roads are financed and managed by owners through road maintenance associations.

In Norway, roads are financed primarily through direct user charges via AutoPASS; tolling now spans hundreds of toll stations across dozens of transport projects. That’s not a membership club in the Swedish-Finnish sense, but it follows the same basic logic of excludable, user-financed infrastructure, rather than fully socialized provision. Norway is perhaps the clearest example why roads are no longer “public goods”: technology has changed the conditions under which collective activities can be financed and provided.

Wanted: a Theory of the State

Infrastructure finance shows how  the conditions that justify full state provision are actually quite strict, and changes in technology—in many activities, not just roads—mean that the question of what the state must do, and for that matter what it should do, is always pressing. We can’t have a useful answer to those questions, however, unless we have some comprehensive vision of what a state is for in the liberal society.

As noted at the outset, the usual answer is that the state should serve the public good. The popular conception of the public good would make this charge too vague, and overly broad. The standard economics answer is that the state should produce public goods, that is, things that have collective benefits, but which cannot be provided properly by private action. But that’s not really a theory of the state, by itself.

Law is organized force; the state exists to enforce the law and adjudicate disputes over its application. That means that the state cannot legitimately extend its direction and control beyond the proper scope of the use of force. The justification for the use of force must be, and can only be, the incapacity of voluntary private action to supply the lack or need.

In short, the state as an instrument, not a moral end in itself. But that means that the proper role of the state is historically and technologically contingent, and it should constantly be reexamined and questioned. Problems that once required state action may now be solvable in other ways. Of course, the reverse is also true: problems that once did not require state action may deteriorate or devolve into concerns that private action cannot correct. Naïve claims that the state should always get bigger (or, for that matter, smaller) are misleading. Liberals need a theory of the state to understand how the state should be reformed and directed.

Claims that “the state should do that” must be evaluated fairly, not simply dismissed on ideological grounds. But if someone wants to argue that a function is truly essential to the state, the burden is on them to show that the problem really is best or only solvable by state coercion. Applying that standard, if we can do it seriously and consistently, will give us a greater intellectual credibility and a much smaller state. 

Ambition, in the classical sense, reveals itself in the character of the people around President Donald Trump. His second term is an opportune moment to look to the fall of the Roman Republic, when ambition and its corrosive effect on human character launched a civil war and doomed self-government. It’s worth doing so not merely as a matter of historical curiosity, but to draw lessons about the effect that such ambition and such characters are having on our own republican form of government. And, one hopes, to take action to preserve the American republic before it, too, is undone by ambition, lawlessness, and the lust for power.

An ambitious person, in the classical understanding, fixates on seeking the approval of others in the quest for power. Because that sensibility holds that the approbation of others is more important than self-respect, someone possessed by ambition in the classical sense sees few, if any, restraints on what he or she may do to win it. 

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and FBI Director Kash Patel are ambitious men. They’re ambitious in the classical meaning of the term. Their recent (March 24, 2026) competition to praise their boss gives us a sense of the classical meaning of ambition:

Stephen Miller: What president Trump has done on border security and public safety is a national miracle that will be studied not only for generations but for centuries to come. Thank you, president Trump.

Donald J. Trump: Thank you, Steve. So, Kash, see if you can top that. I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s a tough one, Kash. That is tough.

Kash Patel: I’m reminded that Americans exist to protect this country day in and day out and they’ve done it like we’ve done it here. But what we didn’t have was you. So while we’re out there fighting for the dreams of our children, just know, Mr. President, how many millions of dreams like mine are going to be lived thanks to your brilliant leadership. Mr. President, thanks for delivering America the safest country on God’s green earth. Thank you very much.

Readers of any political persuasion might recoil at such a blatant request for flattery, and at watching it be honored on camera. 

Ambition, Power, and Crime 

The word ambition in English has both positive and negative connotations, depending on whether one relies on the modern meaning or on the classical sense of the term, which has persisted alongside the modern one, and which still plays a role in how we think about human motivations and character. Ambition is derived from the Latin ambitio, itself derived from ambire, to go around. It referred to the practice in the Roman Republic of canvassing for votes, of walking around the Forum and asking people to support one’s candidacy for elected office—often, according to eyewitness testimonies, accompanied by the payment of bribes. (The related term ambitus emerged as an element of a criminal charge of illegal solicitation of support with inducements, such as money, meals, or gifts.) Ambition meant chasing after the approval of others, flattering or bribing them, or receiving flattery and bribes oneself. It undermined the norms of honesty, public service, dignity, lawfulness, and frank and direct speech. The word thus entered the English language freighted with negative baggage, with the connotation of seeking glory or recognition for oneself to the detriment of the public thing, the res publica. Even if not accompanied by illicit bribes, ambitio was demeaning and destructive both of character and of public good.

An ambitious person, in the classical understanding, is fixated on seeking the approval of others in the quest for power, and, because the approbation of others is more important than self-respect, someone possessed by ambition sees few, if any, restraints on what he or she may do to procure it. An ambitious person is scheming and ruthless. In William Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of Macbeth, Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition” for power leads to ever greater crimes and to ever greater corruption of Macbeth’s soul. As he acknowledges in his soliloquy,

The American founders shared that negative understanding of ambition. John Adams warned in 1772 that “Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human Heart. The Love of Power, is insatiable and uncontroulable.” In Federalist no. 6 [1787], Alexander Hamilton warned that “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.” George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address of 1796, warned of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who, he feared, “will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” That is a warning that we would do well to heed today, as such ambitious and unprincipled men have swarmed over the executive branch of government. 

Ambition, Character, Strife, & Self-Government

Ambition thus understood is closely connected to bad character, to civil strife, and to tyranny. Ambition leads men to seek political gain through flattery of electors or those with concentrated power, power that necessarily comes at the expense of others. In effect, they must sacrifice their own souls and integrity to gain the favor of others, as Miller and Patel demonstrated when they fawned over Donald Trump.

If it were merely humiliating for them personally, it would not be a matter of public concern. Unfortunately, ambition brings down popular governments, whether we call them democracies or republics. Thucydides, in his book The History of the Peloponnesian War, diagnosed the root causes of civil strife (stasis) as “the desire for power, based on personal greed and ambition, and the consequent fanaticism of those competing for control.” “Personal greed and ambition” translate the Greek pleonektein philotimesthai, to have more of the love of honor, which the Romans later termed ambitio.

The horror of ambition became a staple of Roman political thought, and warnings against it played a role in the defenses of the republic by Cicero and Cato the Younger. Ambition, thus understood, was the enemy of popular government and of liberty. Cicero wrote extensively of the role of the desires—dangerous to self-government—for fame, glory, and power. In his final treatise, On Duties, he noted that “men are led most of all to being overwhelmed by forgetfulness of justice when they slip into desiring positions of command or honor or glory.” Ambition undid the republic that he and Cato sought to defend. 

Not long after the end of the republic, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus opened his Handbook, or Enchiridion, by stating that “Some things are within our power, while others are not.” We cannot control what happens in the world, but we can control what we do. In his teachings, he described on a personal, rather than a political, level the hollowness of the love of the honor of others, in Greek philotimia. A craving for the approval of others is a diversion from self-mastery, which is the only secure foundation of human flourishing. That’s a state known in Greek as eudaimonia, or maintaining one’s spirit in a good condition. Eudaimonia is an achievement that depends on our choices, whereas honors, recognition, and fame depend on the choices of others. “Eudaimonia” is rarely used outside of classics seminars, and it’s frequently translated into English as happiness. This may be misleading, as we’ll discuss below. 

Ambition in the Modern World

Like “happiness,” “ambition” is a word with a range of meanings. There is a sense—a modern sense—to the word ambition, one focused on meritorious achievements through production and exchange, through diligence and self-mastery, through the pursuit of knowledge and the creation of value. It’s not the recognition as such that matters here, but the meriting of that recognition. A pivotal figure in the emergence of the modern sense of ambition, as in so many other concepts of modernity, is Adam Smith. Smith focused on the importance of the awareness of meriting recognition, rather than on being recognized or lauded without any accompanying merit. We should seek, not merely to be approved, but to be worthy of approval: 

Thus, the “desire to become ourselves the objects of the like agreeable sentiments, and to be as amiable and as admirable as those whom we love and as admirable as those whom we love and admire the most” requires us to “become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct.” 

Smith was well aware of the classical case against ambition. He also described in detail a different kind of ambition, one associated not with the search for power over others through control of the state, but with meritorious action. It’s a sense of ambition suitable to a commercial republic, which rests on the achievement of merit through the creation of value among freely cooperating persons, and on the cultivation of the liberal virtues suitable to civil societies. A person ambitious in this new and modern sense 

Smith’s treatment of ambition is complex and nuanced, as we can find in his discussion of “The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.” Such a man labors his whole life to serve the needs of others, creating and accumulating wealth, but he never finds the tranquility and repose he thought his efforts would bring. Even that person, who is visited by heaven with the ambition to become wealthy, and who works his whole life, does so by creating value and satisfaction for others, rather than by confiscating it or by using violence to dominate and humiliate enemies.

Smith distinguished the search for praise from the search for praiseworthiness. He and other thinkers of the Enlightenment pioneered a modern understanding of the relationship between ambition and character. Smith was well acquainted with the classical Stoic tradition, in which Cato the Younger and Cicero were steeped. The cultivation of character through self-mastery was connected to personal freedom, but also to the freedom of the republic. Smith observed that self-command is not merely a virtue, but the foundation of all the virtues: “Self-command is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre.”

The “ambition” of modernity seeks to be worthy of recognition through the creation of value, whether or not that recognition arrives in life. It rests ultimately on the cultivation of character. It takes work and dedication and probity and prudence and generosity and frankness, among other virtues. Those, as Smith notes, are generated under conditions of liberty far more easily than under conditions of tyranny, submission, or tutelage, which reward fawning ingratiation, rather than creativity, work, or self-discipline.

The classical sense of ambition entailed the degradation of character, whereas the modern, which is associated with honest business enterprise, with the arts and sciences, and with athletic and musical achievement, is rooted in the cultivation of the kind of character that the Greeks associated with eudaimonia: self-control, honesty, dignity. It is an ambition concerned primarily with honour, and not with honours.

Ancient ambition generates a character that lies and dissembles, that deceives others, that seeks their approval without actually benefiting them. It creates no shared value; it achieves no human excellence; it destroys or at best merely reallocates value rather than creating it. Modern ambition engages a range of authentic virtues in the search for praiseworthiness. It is civil, creative, peaceful, cooperative. Classical ambition persists, as witnessed by the groveling and slavish sycophancy of those appointed to power or seeking power under the present administration, but it is not the only outlet for the urge to improve one’s station in life. As state power expands, however, and as it is concentrated more and more in the hands of one person, authentic achievements that are praiseworthy are displaced by the toadying self-abasement of those who seek the approval of the despot and the largesse, perquisites, and sinecures that he can bestow upon them. 

Eudaimonia, or Enduring Flourishing

Ambition in the modern sense, but not in the ancient, is entwined with happiness, or flourishing—that is, with the ancient idea of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia plays a key role in both the virtue ethics of Aristotle and in modern liberal thinking. In Aristotle’s description, eudaimonia is an activity, an energeia, a term meaning “being in work” or “being in a deed.” We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Like “ambition,” the modern English word “happiness” has a dual meaning. That duality leads to a great deal of confusion when discussing happiness. It can mean a fleeting condition, such as being joyful or pleased, as when we ask “Does that make you happy?” But it’s also often used to translate eudaimonia, which is decidedly not reducible to a fleeting condition of joyfulness, or to any mere feeling. In the sense that “happiness” does mean eudaimonia, however, it played a role in the founding of the United States of America as a free and independent republic of free and independent citizens.

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, wrote that eudaimonia is an “activity in conformity with virtue.” It’s not something that others give to us, and it’s not something that we just stumble into, for “it is better to be happy as a result of one’s own exertions than by the gift of fortune.” For happiness to be an activity, it must have its origin in us; we must be responsible for it, both in the causal sense, in the way that the wind is responsible for the toppling of a tree, and in the moral sense, in the sense that I am responsible for behaving honestly or dishonestly. The active exercise of our choice in accordance with virtue is integral to the moral growth of the individual, to the development of one’s character. The mere approval of others is not an essential ingredient in happiness, for, as Aristotle noted,

So eudaimonia is an activity, not a condition of being, such as being joyful or pleased or satisfied. That’s important in understanding the role of happiness in the American republic, which is redolent of eudaimonia. Two hundred fifty years ago, the American founders affirmed that “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In addition to the universality of the claim for equal rights—a claim that is still in process of being made good—the term pursuit stands out. The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not believe that everyone has an unalienable right to happiness, but rather an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit implies effort, work, striving, activity, energeia. “Happiness” in the Declaration is the realization of the modern ambition to create value and to receive merited approbation. That happiness isn’t possible without pursuit, that is, without activity. Activity is also how we build our characters, how we exercise the virtues and acquire the habits that make us better people, more capable of self-mastery and, accordingly, more likely to be good citizens of a free republic. 

Obsequious Flattery and the Corruption of Character 

In his Discourses, the Stoic Epictetus is depicted as advising a young man who was focused on his handsome appearance and his amazing hair, as young people are often wont to do. Epictetus told him to focus instead on his character: “For you yourself are neither flesh nor hair, but choice, and if you render that beautiful, then you yourself will be beautiful.” The beautiful soul, which is cultivated through choice, through doing, through experience, through learning, is more beautiful than the accident of physical appearance. It is also what free citizens in free republics cultivate. That is not to say that physical attributes, including cultivation of health and strength and even appearance, are unimportant, but they are not the foundations of good lives and, moreover, of good societies.

Why do we cringe when a powerful man demands praise from ambitious sycophants? Because we know that obsequious flattery cannot make the strongman beautiful or admirable. We cringe because we know that the demand and the unctuous fawning it requires are at odds with America’s highest ideals. Such individuals are alien to a free republic, which rests, not on unctuous fawning and servile prostration, but on the love of freedom and on the praiseworthy self-mastery and independence of men and women of character. 

In Aeschylus’s play The Persians, the oldest surviving play in western dramatic literature, and staged eight years after the catastrophic Persian defeat at the Battle of Salamis, the mother of Persian king Xerxes asks about the Greeks who have defeated the conquering slave armies of her son, “Who commands them? Who is shepherd of their host?” to which the chorus of Persian elders responds, “They are slaves to none, nor are they subject.” That was once said of Americans. Let us hope that it will be said again.

When liberals think about institutions, we usually think of markets and governments, the big structures where our policy debates play out. But these conversations skip over a prior question: where do we find the people who make markets and governments work? What kind of institution produces adults capable of self-governance, voluntary exchange, peaceful disagreement, and the long-term thinking that sustains free societies?

The answer is the family, and yet liberals have had very little to say about it.

This is not a small oversight. The family challenges some of liberalism’s favorite categories. It is neither purely individual nor purely collective. It is not chosen the way we choose market transactions, and it is not imposed the way states impose law. It is pre-political, rooted in natural affections and biological realities that do not map neatly onto the frameworks liberals prefer. The result is that liberals have tended either to ignore the family, treat it as just another voluntary association, or view it with suspicion. More libertarian strands may reduce family bonds to a species of contract; more progressive strands may see the family as a source of inequality demanding public correction. In both cases, the family becomes a problem to be solved rather than an institution to be understood.

This essay is an attempt to correct that blind spot and to highlight some of the liberal thinkers who have seen more clearly. My claim here is not merely that liberals should tolerate the family, or that family policy is one issue among many. Rather, strong family life is absolutely critical to the success of the liberal project, across all four of its major pillars: economic, political, cultural, and epistemic. Understanding why requires looking at the family not through the lens of ideology, but through the lens of what families actually do.

Economic Liberalism: The Family as Spontaneous Order

Liberals who take markets seriously should take families seriously for the same reasons. The Hayekian insight about the dispersal of knowledge in society—that no central planner can access or process the particular, local information that individuals possess—applies with special force to families. Parents hold precisely the kind of intimate, particular knowledge about their children that bureaucratic systems cannot replicate: what motivates a specific child, what frightens her, where she is developmentally ready to be pushed, and where she needs patience. This is not sentimental; it is epistemic. Families are knowledge-processing institutions of extraordinary sophistication. Like all human institutions, they’re far from perfect. But they’re much better than centralized alternatives.

Hayek himself recognized that the spontaneous orders he championed in the market depend on smaller-scale social orders operating by different rules. The family is the most important of these, and not just because it operates by different rules. The family is where humans learn about rules and rule-making in the first place. As the economist Steve Horwitz argued, families function as a kind of “institutional playground” where children first encounter the give-and-take of social life, with its negotiation, rule-following, and fairness. Those lessons begin long before they ever enter a market or a voting booth. The skills that make free markets work—delayed gratification, reciprocity, and trust—are not natural endowments. They are cultivated, and the family is where that cultivation overwhelmingly happens.

Families also manage distributional problems that markets and states handle poorly. They provide safety nets for the very young, the very old, and the disabled, with a motivational intensity that no public program can match. Centralizing these functions confronts the same knowledge and incentive problems that economic liberals have always identified in more conventional centralized planning.

Political Liberalism: Subsidiarity and the Buffer between Individual and State

Limited government requires more than constitutional design. It needs intermediate institutions. And the family is the most fundamental of these.

Montesquieu understood this better than anyone. In The Persian Letters, his protagonist Usbek leaves behind a seraglio full of wives as he travels to Paris. In his absence, jealousies and intrigues rage out of control. Usbek responds with escalating coercion, surveillance, and punishment, and the novel ends in suicide and bloodshed. The tragedy is not simply a statement about polygamy. It is about what happens when domestic and political life are organized around coercion and power rather than consent and mutual affection. The seraglio is a household governed the way despotic states are governed: through fear, secrecy, and the absolute power of a single ruler. And like a despotic state, it cannot hold.

The causal connection runs both ways. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that by training men to be despotic in the home, societies raise men who only know how to rule through fear. Authoritarian families produce authoritarian citizens. But the reverse is also true: More egalitarian family structures create the habits of self-governance essential to moderate political life. The family is not just shaped by the regime it lives under. It shapes the regime in turn.

The principle of subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest level of institutional organization competent to address the matter at hand. That principle finds its most natural expression in the family. Edmund Burke understood this from the other direction: our affections begin at home and extend outward, and political orders that respect this natural structure tend to be more stable than those that try to override it. Parents making decisions about their children’s education, health, and moral formation are exercising a form of self-governance prior to any political institution. When the state assumes these functions, it does not merely substitute one set of decisionmakers for another; it eliminates a layer of governance that buffers against centralized power.

None of this means that family autonomy is absolute. The family can be a site of genuine harm, and liberalism cannot wish that tension away. But the answer is not to choose, once and for all, between family freedom and state intervention. It is to recognize that this balance will always require ongoing contestation. That kind of iterative, community-level negotiation is itself a liberal practice.

Cultural Liberalism: Pluralism Starts at Home

Liberals committed to cultural pluralism and tolerance should recognize the family as one of the primary engines of the diversity they value. Families transmit culture—language, religion, moral sensibility, aesthetic taste, ways of being in the world—with a specificity and depth that no public institution can replicate. A pluralistic society is, at bottom, a society of diverse families passing on diverse traditions.

This cuts against the instincts of some cultural liberals, who may see the family as a site of conformity or parochialism. Those concerns are real. As Judith Butler has argued, building on Montesquieu’s argument, family structures can undergird deep inequality and sustain coercive systems. But the solution most consistent with liberal principles is not to homogenize family life through state intervention. It is to support a pluralistic ecosystem of family forms. The variation in family structures across cultures and throughout history is not a bug; it is the social equivalent of biodiversity, producing the same kind of resilience. Attempts to impose a single model of family life—whether from the traditionalist right or the progressive left—threaten the very diversity that makes liberal societies adaptive. And the existence of various kinds of family forms allows for the tradeoffs of each to be compared. Competition exists between kinds of family forms, just as it does in other areas of human life. 

Cultural liberalism also needs the family for a more basic reason: tolerance is a learned disposition, and families are where it is first learned. Children who grow up negotiating differences within their own households—between siblings with different temperaments, between the desires of the individual and the needs of the group—develop the habits of compromise that a pluralistic society requires.

But even toleration has its limits, and the family is no exception. Every liberal society will have to make hard calls about which kinds of family life are tolerable and which are not. This is not a challenge to liberal principles, but the expression of them: the need for constant and iterative dialogue and contestation about values, goals, human goods, and the purpose of human institutions.

Epistemic Liberalism: The Family as a Teacher of Humility

Perhaps the least appreciated (but maybe most important) liberal argument for the family is epistemic. Liberals who care about the open exchange of ideas, intellectual humility, and the decentralization of knowledge should recognize the family as a critical institution for all three.

Knowledge in society is dispersed across time and place, and much of it is particular rather than general: how to farm a specific piece of land, navigate a specific community, or run a specific business built over generations. Families preserve and transmit this knowledge through intergenerational contact. It cannot be captured in policy manuals or standardized curricula, and when families are disrupted, this knowledge is lost.

More broadly, the family embodies, and demands, the epistemic humility that the best liberal thinkers have always championed. Family life is humbling. It forces us into contact with people we did not choose, whose needs compete with our own, and whose development we cannot fully control. It teaches that the world is more complex than any single theory can capture, which is the foundation of the epistemic modesty that makes liberal societies possible.

This humility, in turn, challenges the more extreme individualism of some strands of liberalism. None of us are fully self-made. We all enter adulthood with baggage, not just emotional and psychological, but linguistic, cultural, and developmental. The very shape of our brains and the networks of our neural pathways were formed well before we had any rational capacity to choose. We enter liberal society not as agentic individuals, but as humans whose personalities, impulses, goals, and values were shaped by other people’s choices, sometimes generations before we were born. In an era of ideological certainty and epistemic bubbles, the family is one of the few remaining institutions that forces us to reckon with perspectives we didn’t select.

Setting the Table

If the family is so critical to liberal thought, why have liberals neglected it? Partly it’s because social conservatives have so aggressively claimed the family for their own; it seems that some liberals may assume any serious engagement concedes ground to traditionalism. This is a mistake. Defending the importance of family life is not the same as defending any particular family form, nor does it require grounding family autonomy in religious tradition. The case I am making rests on empirical grounds: on what developmental science, evolutionary psychology, and institutional analysis tell us about how children develop and how societies sustain themselves.

The family is a pre-political institution that does not fit neatly into any ideological bucket. It challenges libertarian individualism just as it challenges progressive egalitarianism. It is messy, concrete, idiosyncratic, and resistant to theoretical tidiness. But that messiness is precisely what makes it so valuable. The family table is where the balance between individual and community is first struck, where freedom and obligation are first navigated, and where the next generation of free citizens is formed.

Liberals have ceded the family to other political traditions for too long. But the family does not belong to the traditionalist right any more than it belongs to the progressive left. It belongs to anyone willing to look honestly at how human beings actually develop. Every free society depends on people who can govern themselves, cooperate with strangers, tolerate disagreement, and think beyond the present moment. Those capacities are not innate. They are built, slowly and imperfectly, in the daily life of families, by people navigating exactly the kind of messy, unchosen, untheorizable relationships that liberalism has never been comfortable with. If we are serious about epistemic humility, about the limits of what any single institution can know or accomplish, we should start by taking seriously the one institution that teaches it first. The liberal project does not begin at the voting booth or the marketplace. It begins at home.

When walking to an American Political Science Association (APSA) panel in 2022, I remarked to a colleague that the subject of discussion was “liberalism in crisis.” Their response was “when isn’t it?” Although it was said in a joking voice as we traversed the conference center halls, the sentiment identified something true. This was not the first time such a panel appeared at this conference, nor would it be the last.   

The precarious state of liberalism today is at once unprecedented and yet deeply familiar to historians of political thought. The European age of revolutions, from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, presented a time when values like human freedom and equality were getting a public hearing, and were in need of defense. The twentieth century saw the rise of totalitarianism and the worst excesses of cruelty. Democratic backsliding today suggests that individuals would rather support authoritarian governments than defend political rights for those with whom they disagree. It makes a person want to hide away at home and watch sitcoms.

One might do worse.

Liberalism, of course, is more than just a set of principles, or formal, institutional, or legal rules. It is a habit of character, and it requires cultivating an orientation toward those values which form the basis of liberal institutions. From this perspective, liberalism can be understood as a practice. It is not enough that we merely believe in the principles of freedom, fairness, and equality—we have to enact them in our personal lives. Rather than being merely an abstract theory, liberalism as an ideology informs who we are as members of a political community—indeed, the survival of liberal institutions requires that at least some of us adopt and adhere to this outlook. 

One way to cultivate these values is through an engagement with works of popular culture. Even sitcoms—or so I hope to convince you. I take popular culture to be a set of cultural artifacts that are known and understood by a significant group of a culture’s individuals. What even shows like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched can offer that John Rawls or NPR on their own cannot is a creative and affective way to engage with political questions and concerns, on terms that are immediately understood by the general public, but without the risks and emotional hardship that so often accompany serious discussions of current events. They also ground our reflections in the ordinary lives of individuals. As Judith Shklar reminds readers in considering Orwell’s 1984, the novel’s themes “are surely matters that have always been important to political theory, and by recapturing them imaginatively, we may avert theory’s worst fault: that is, to talk in a vacuum and about nothing at all, to heap words upon words that have no bearing on anything or anyone who has ever lived and spoken in the actual world.” 

By taking their audiences out of themselves, these works can more effectively ground them in the real world. Even if all that we want from them is an escape, they still reflect on the tangible concerns, thoughts, and feelings, which, by virtue of merely being a human, one can relate to and understand. This expands our capacity to relate to others. For any art to be popular, it has to appeal to aspects of life that are already shared. It can then produce and reproduce a shared discursive sphere of references that enable us to engage with political problems from a safe ground, one where we can walk away and disconnect at any time.

A Brief and Selective History of Pop-Culture Liberalism

The relationship between liberal values and popular culture isn’t new; it’s an essential feature of the history of the liberal tradition. This link has been especially pronounced in satirical writings, which offer a way to playfully but seriously criticize politics. Baron de Montesquieu, the acclaimed Enlightenment author best known for his philosophical treatise The Spirit of the Laws, in fact began his career as a popular novelist. In his Persian Letters, Usbek and Rica find themselves immersed in Paris’s distinctive cultural and political milieu. Their status as outsiders lets them critically view and assess the customs and traditions of the country, and they are not impressed. Reflecting on Parisian coffee shops, Usbek muses: “But what shocks me about these wits is that they give no service to their country, but fritter away their talents on childish things.” When viewed through their eyes, these “wits,” or the self-professed intellectual elite, are wasting their time with vapid conversations rather than actually contributing to society. Through his vivid descriptions, Montesquieu transports readers into the beautiful, lush, and ultimately shallow state that he takes Parisian intellectual culture to be. 

At first, French authorities banned The Persian Letters, proving its success in not only poking fun at the French, but more seriously in exposing the flaws of the French state under Louis XIV. Montesquieu had touched on a sensitive topic. The fictional nature of the work allowed Montesquieu an avenue in which to explore his ideological commitments in a different conceptual space; the value of such a space is that it can connect with readers on an emotional level. The ways in which laws, customs, and mores are intrinsic to the public sphere, and serve as the foundation of a political community (a foundation deeper than and essential to its formal rules), are found in the biting portrayals of the Parisian salons just as much as in the formal diagnosis of the French situation in The Spirit of the Laws. Although the form of writing and the nature of appeal differ, the principles are the same. One scholar observes this continuity directly, and notes of Montesquieu that “the principles, the forms, and the assumptions remained the same in his mind from the beginning to the end of his life.” 

The tradition of satirical novels continued into the twentieth century, perhaps best exemplified by texts like George Orwell’s admittedly bleak 1984. Here, government surveillance appears in its most extreme form. Every neighbor is a potential agent of the Party, watching and observing one another’s actions. “Thoughtcrime”  is a serious offense, and individuals are forced to convince themselves of a false version of the truth or risk state punishment. Readers of The Persian Letters and 1984 encounter imaginative environments where a healthy skepticism government is not only well-founded but appropriate. Although these forms are fictional, their function is not. There is an ideology, as well as a moral, to the story. 

But it is not only within novels that liberal principles have been put forward and explored. The literary critic Paul Cantor, writing about the popularity of television shows in the twentieth century, discusses how The Simpsons serves to simultaneously mock fundamental American institutions whilst recognizing their importance; The X-Files’s depiction of the government as secretive and worthy of suspicion raises awareness of what the state fails to disclose; and Star Trek portrays the end of history, the universality of liberal values, and a profound appreciation for humanism. Children’s films also capture these ideals, with Monsters, Inc. providing another instance where there is a glorification of the liberal consensus, with the film’s happy ending being achieved when “individual ingenuity advanced energy production, increased profits, and adhered to an ethical code of conduct.”

Alexandre Lefebvre has continued in Cantor’s tradition of writing about liberal values within popular culture, with his recent book Liberalism as a Way of Life. In it, he notes how Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope is “the most vibrant, relevant, relatable, and just generally awesome—representative of the spirit of early liberalism.” The principles at the heart of Parks and Recreation are “the need to keep public land, resources, and institutions free,” a political value harkening to the seventeenth century and liberal author John Locke. Or consider The Good Place, where Lefebvre finds a meditation on how liberals, and indeed all people, ought to focus on the way we treat one another, rather than the comprehensive, conflicting, and incommensurable beliefs that we hold. By setting things aside, we create the opportunity to bond with individuals we otherwise might never have spoken to. Consider, for instance, the close relationship that forms between Jacksonville Jaguars fan and petty criminal Jason, and the wealthy, excessive, party-planning Tahani. Of particular importance here is that Lefebvre uses these examples to advance his idea of what it means to be a liberal; their function lies in their capacity to tap into these values and explore them in a novel way. 

How Popular Culture Functions

Popular culture draws on a background imaginative capacity, one that the members of a community can find intuitive and use as a vehicle for making sense of liberal values and principles. Popular culture can simultaneously create and reinforce our identity as individuals, reflecting on our values and principles, and can orient us outward, toward other members of a political community. Watching films or television shows can provide a resource for personal inspiration, delivering a value that matters to us in an entirely different context that we would not or could not typically experience directly. In this way, even sitcoms are akin to a thousand small philosophical thought experiments. They encourage viewers to discuss scenarios in ways that we might like philosophers to do, but they’re without the analytic jargon that typically accompanies such discussions. They bring ordinary people to talk to one another about imagined but accessible scenarios—most of which rather crucially focus on other ordinary people.

The historian Benedict Anderson has argued that artifacts like the novel are an essential mechanism for nation-building. These works provide a way to conceive of oneself as part of the “imagined community” of strangers—the co-nationals whom we cannot possibly meet, but with whom we share a common identity. The Simpsons was the quintessential American television show precisely because there is a character for every individual to sympathize with and relate to—even if they are cast in an absurd and hyperbolic form. City dwellers and small-town folk alike are familiar with staples like the local bar and convenience store, and the inept city hall that fails to finish municipal projects. Popular culture thus deepens our collective and individual self-understanding, provides a medium for connecting with others, and extends our capacity to recognize similarities with a broader group of individuals.  

But it is not enough to show that there exist liberal forms of popular culture, or that pop culture and liberalism are compatible. Any ideology will have popular works and genres that are especially its own—conservatives, for example, are particularly fond of spy novels. Nor is it enough to discuss the value that popular culture has in general for a political community. What is the distinct value of popular culture for liberal viewers? One illustrative example, foreshadowed in the introduction, is the way that these works facilitate an appreciation for diversity, essential to the liberal belief in pluralism. Sitcoms provide a helpful illustration of this point, in the way they engage our sense of humor, remind us to laugh at ourselves, and provide new perspectives for us to think about. 

Consider for instance popular sitcoms from the 60s, like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched, both of which pushed against traditional conceptions of the family. The Brady family came together at a time when both divorce and remarriage were socially and legally stigmatized in the United States. It was the nuclear family, of one wife and one husband married eternally, that was deemed the ideal form, toward which all of humanity was aspiring. The idea of kids from different parental backgrounds, coming together and forming a new family, might have been a strange thought to the American viewer. This is what the Brady bunch is, though—a blended family that redefines and questions what society thought at the time. The stereotypical struggles of the siblings, and the other difficulties that both parents and children have, these are the common and identifiable elements that relate the show to a broader audience who is able to see the constitutive elements of family life in the Bradys’ dynamics. The new styles of family formation then arising pushed against older norms, and as they did, popular art, like sitcoms, encouraged social acceptance across differences.     

Bewitched particularly challenged and took to task the traditional role of the housewife. Samantha, raised by witches, never learned the required etiquette for the home life that she and Darrin set out to pursue in their marriage. She cannot cook or clean, and she is terrible at charming Darrin’s boss. She has none of the traits that a proper wife at the time ought to have. In fact, she actively resists those traits, with her strong sense of independence and a willingness to speak frankly and openly. Yet the show does not tell a narrative of how she learned her proper place in the world; rather, it tells how the world changes around her. Darrin is frustrated and irritated at times, but the episodes end consistently on a note of two people coming together and accepting one another. He does not force her to change, nor does she want to. Rather, their home is a different kind of home from the others they know. This again pushes against an established idealized version of society, to offer a different narrative about what it is possible for individuals to be. 

Judith Shklar reminds us that it is not enough to note the fact of pluralism; we must celebrate it. Watching sitcoms is one way of doing so. They can broaden our horizons and challenge the way that we think about the world. Exposure to new ideas fosters a sense of epistemic humility, reminding us of how little we know about the lives of others. The familiarity of sitcoms additionally provides a resource for bonding and relating to others. Although we may not know much, there are things we all share in common. If the people matter, so does what they are watching. We should therefore not relinquish our pop culture references for discourse about endless news cycles or constant and intractable philosophical debates about the meaning of freedom. Being a liberal in practice requires living a life in the real world with others, and this, in turn, involves taking time to watch sitcoms.