[{"id":101965,"date":"2026-09-24T20:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T00:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?p=101965"},"modified":"2026-09-24T11:48:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T15:48:38","slug":"the-friendship-that-changed-international-religious-freedom-for-america-and-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/","title":{"rendered":"The Friendship That Changed International Religious Freedom for America and the World\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1981, two men entered Congress who would over time become the chief architects of modern U.S. religious freedom policy. But the story really begins a few years later. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1985, Congressmen Frank Wolf (VA-10) and Chris Smith (NJ-4) sealed a lifelong friendship that transformed the way America and the world engage religious freedom. On the basis of this remarkable legacy, they will be the joint recipients of this year\u2019s Defender of Religious Freedom<\/span> award<\/span><\/a> presented by the Religious Freedom Institute.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How It Began<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The friendship began in Bucharest, Romania, where Wolf and Smith met with victims of the brutal Communist despot Nicolae Ceau\u015fescu, who routinely silenced or eliminated people of faith. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

During their visit, terrified and desperate Romanians told the congressmen their stories of torture and rape, and dared to give them crumpled notes identifying family members who were also jailed for their faith. Profoundly moved and angered, Wolf publicly called the Ceau\u015fescu regime \u201cdarker and more evil\u201d than any on earth. Smith would later tell the story by reflecting on the book<\/span> Tortured for Christ<\/span><\/i><\/a>. Written by Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand, the memoir chronicled the unspeakable physical torture and psychological abuse of underground Christians under Ceau\u015fescu, including Pastor Wurmbrand and his wife Sabinat. \u201cI was moved to tears when I read it,\u201d Smith recalled, \u201cand challenged to act.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Two \u201cLions of Religious Freedom\u201d<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Smith and Wolf are devout Christians whose understanding of God\u2019s love obligates them to defend religious freedom for all. Neither hesitates to ground his public acts in religious convictions, traits often seen these days as politically unwise and even unconstitutional. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One opponent of Congressman Smith ran a campaign ad mocking him as politically timid and na\u00efve, ostensibly like the character played by Jimmy Stewart in <\/span>Mr. Smith Goes to Washington<\/span><\/i>. Anyone who has observed Chris Smith in action recognizes the absurdity of such a claim. His <\/span>principles are so deeply rooted that he insists on telling the truth as he understands it, even when doing so might lose votes for him or for his party or might threaten his safety. He is well known (and either admired or reviled) for his unyielding defense of the defenseless, from the innocent child in the womb to the sick, aged, and dying, as well as the violently persecuted. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the course of his thirty-four years in the House of Representatives (1981\u20132015), Wolf\u2019s devotion to the sacredness of the religious conscience led his colleagues, his constituents, and religious freedom supporters to label him \u201cthe conscience of the Congress.\u201d<\/span> Wolf became a towering figure in integrating religious liberty into modern U.S. foreign policy. Like his friend, he was and is eager to defend his moral and religious convictions and their implications for his policy views, undeterred by the political costs or threats that may result.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The bottom line is: Smith and Wolf are fierce, so much so that my colleague has quite fittingly<\/span> called<\/span><\/a> them \u201ctwo lions of religious freedom.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Congressman Smith: A Brief History<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In his home state of New Jersey, Smith is universally respected. He is serving his 23rd consecutive term and his 46th year in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the longest-serving congressman in New Jersey history, and is today tied for the honor of longest-serving current member of the House. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Among Smith\u2019s greatest legacies will be his relentless, forty-six-year quest to protect religious freedom at home and to fight for it abroad. His guiding principles in public life are expressed in the Declaration of Independence: <\/span>God creates every human being to be equal and gives each certain rights that must never be removed by anyone, especially governments. The first of those rights is the freedom to \u201cexercise\u201d religion. According to Smith and the Founders, that right belongs to everyone.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the United States, he has defended the Founders\u2019 understanding of free exercise against those who would degrade it. For example, he<\/span> played a key role<\/span><\/a> in ensuring that the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) would not provide a religious freedom defense for abortions.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In foreign policy, Smith has applied the Founders\u2019 vision on behalf of religious believers around the world by relentlessly drawing attention to their brutal treatment by political despots, theocratic regimes, and terrorists. In his own words: \u201cBillions of human beings, made in the image of God, live in countries where their God-given right to freely exercise their religion is restricted\u2014many to the point of incarceration, torture, and execution.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Three examples will help tell the Chris Smith story. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

During a trip to Nigeria, the home of the terrorist group Boko Haram, Smith met an evangelical Christian named Habila Adamu. Ordered to renounce his faith with an AK-47 pressed to his face, Adamu was asked: \u201cAre you ready to die as a Christian?\u201d Adamu said yes, he was ready to die as a Christian. In Smith\u2019s words: \u201cA bullet ripped through Habila\u2019s face. He crumpled to the ground, left for dead. By some miracle, he survived.\u201d Smith asked Adamu to come to Washington and tell his story at a congressional hearing. Adamu told the committee and the world: \u201cI am alive because God wants you to have this message\u2014knowing Christ is so much deeper than merely knowing Boko Haram\u2019s story of hate and intolerance.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Smith has also visited China on several memorable occasions and has brought many persecuted believers to the United States to testify. In 1994, Smith met with Chinese Catholic Bishop Su Zhimin. The bishop described being beaten, starved, and imprisoned for decades because of his faith. Again, in Smith\u2019s words: \u201cAnd yet, despite his immense suffering, Bishop Su prayed for China\u2019s leaders and those who persecuted him. He prayed not just for the persecuted church, but for the conversion of those who hate, torture, and kill \u2026 Love those who hate you, as Christ did from the cross.\u201d <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Not long after this meeting, Bishop Su was arrested and has been under house arrest since. If he is still alive under the supervision of brutal Chinese officials, he is ninety-four years old.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Other Chinese victims have made it to the United States and have told their stories in public hearings convened by Chairman Smith. I was honored to testify at one of those hearings, which was co-chaired by Senator Marco Rubio. Like the rest of the world, I heard the terrifying story of a twenty-nine-year-old Uyghur Muslim woman named Mihrigul Tursun, who had survived eleven months of torture in a Chinese concentration camp. It was difficult to hear her emotional description of what she had experienced: the death of one of her three babies in the camp; her incarceration in a cell with sixty women where rotating groups of fifteen would stand for two hours while others tried to sleep; forced drugs that caused extreme bleeding or death; torture in a \u201ctiger chair\u201d where she was strapped in and subjected to repeated electric shocks. Ms. Tursun and the other prisoners were forced to sing songs hailing President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party, and to repeat: \u201cLeniency for those who \u2018repent\u2019 and punishment for those who resist.\u201d <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Smith wanted America and Xi Jinping to hear this. In his own words: \u201cMs. Tursun\u2019s powerful testimony reminds us that we cannot be silent when the Chinese government is constructing a high-tech police state \u2026 whose goal is the forced assimilation of an entire ethnic minority population.\u201d He and Senator Rubio later introduced the <\/span>Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act<\/span><\/i>, which places sanctions on Chinese officials and businesses complicit in what both rightly called \u201ccrimes against humanity.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That was but one of dozens of religious freedom bills that Congressman Smith has introduced and sponsored. Others include the <\/span>Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act<\/span><\/i>,<\/i><\/b> which pushed a resisting Department of State to designate Nigeria as a \u201cCountry of Particular Concern\u201d under the 1998 <\/span>International Religious Freedom Act<\/span><\/i> (IRFA).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Congressman Wolf: A Brief History<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2011, Frank Wolf wrote a book entitled<\/span> Prisoner of Conscience: One Man\u2019s Crusade for Global Human and Religious Rights<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/i> In his introduction, Chuck Colson calls Wolf \u201ca modern-day William Wilberforce,\u201d referring to the member of the British Parliament who in the nineteenth century persuaded his government to end the slave trade in the British empire.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the book, Wolf argues that human slavery survives today among the worst of the religious persecutors, especially Sudan and China. After his retirement from Congress in 2015, Wolf added ISIS to the list. The terrorist group had by then established a sex-slave trade in Iraq. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Convinced that the United States was not taking seriously the sex slavery, beheadings, crucifixions, and other horrors ISIS was inflicting on Iraqi Yazidis and Christians, Frank Wolf worked with Chris Smith and the Knights of Columbus, with considerable support from the Religious Freedom Institute, to convince the Obama administration to declare ISIS\u2019s actions a \u201cgenocide.\u201d Smith held several hearings on the subject, including testimony by Wolf and Knights of Columbus head Carl Anderson, whose organization had produced a comprehensive study of the ISIS genocide.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wolf documented and publicized the mechanics of ISIS\u2019s modern slave trade. In 2017, he led a fact-finding mission directly into dangerous regions of Northern Iraq\u2014including Mosul and Mount Sinjar\u2014to interview survivors and compile evidence on the thousands of women remaining in ISIS captivity. His resulting report, <\/span>Northern Iraq 2017<\/span><\/i>, was used in congressional testimonies to secure millions in USAID funding to assist the victims of ISIS. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wolf was highly effective in pressuring U.S. political leaders to be tough. One technique was to quote victims who criticized American pandering. Wolf<\/span> told a reporter<\/span><\/a> that <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wei Jing-Shen, who spent years in prison and is referred to as the father of Chinese democracy and the Chinese Nelson Mandela, once told Chris Smith when American leaders pander to Chinese dictators, they beat dissidents more in the prison camps. By contrast, when American leaders are tough, predictable and transparent, \u201cthey beat us less.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frank Wolf understood religious freedom to demand bipartisan fidelity. He believed the principles of the American Founding established a covenant, not just with the American people, but with the victims of persecution. He also believed the Obama administration was failing to honor that covenant, especially with minority Christians.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2015, in his keynote speech at a<\/span> Georgetown University event<\/span><\/a> (sponsored by the Religious Freedom Project, precursor to the Religious Freedom Institute), Wolf drove the point home:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

President Reagan said the words in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution were a covenant we have made not just with those gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787 \u2026 but with the world\u2014with the student protester in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and with the displaced Iraqi nun in 2015. <\/span>But that covenant is now being shredded<\/span><\/i>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite [the ISIS war on Christians], the administration has gone to great lengths to avoid saying that Christians were targeted for their faith by ISIS. When ISIS kidnapped and beheaded 21 Egyptian men on a beach in Libya, the <\/span>New York Times \u2026<\/span><\/i> called them 21 \u201cCoptic Christians.\u201d The administration called them 21 \u201cEgyptians.\u201d After the killings at Garissa University, the administration would only refer to these Christian victims as \u201cKenyan citizens.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wolf could turn his wrath on Republicans as well. When President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders sought to expand trade ties with China, Wolf broke ranks and criticized their policies as unwisely subordinating the freedom of Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, and Chinese Christians to commercial interests.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Frank Wolf shared with his friend Chris Smith the virtue of telling the truth as he saw it, without fear. And like Smith, Wolf employed empirical evidence and reason in pressing his nation to honor human dignity. He was not afraid to employ Christian-based reasoning in ways that many considered \u201cunconservative.\u201d <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When the Ugandan government threatened to impose the death penalty on homosexuals, Wolf joined four other Republican members in writing to the Christian president of that country. Citing the \u201cfoundational Christian belief in the inherent dignity and worth of all men and women,\u201d the congressmen said that \u201cwe believe this legislation, if enacted, would be antithetical to that premise.\u201d Moreover, they continued, \u201cthe harshness of the proposals is \u2026 inconsistent with a Christian spirit of love and mercy.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As time went on, their arguments for religious freedom became national security arguments. In his Georgetown speech, Wolf put it this way: \u201c[R]<\/span>eligious freedom is <\/span>the <\/span><\/i>human rights issue of our time \u2026 not only because global persecution flies in the face of moral and natural law, but because religious freedom abroad is directly tied to our national security at home, as well as international stability.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

More religious freedom, both had come to believe, would reduce religious persecution, terrorism, violence, and war. At the same time, it would increase political stability and foster economic growth, especially in nations genuinely struggling to develop stable democracies.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Ongoing Significance of the International Religious Freedom Act<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Smith and Wolf\u2019s crowning achievement, born of their collaborative work and accumulated wisdom over the years, is a set of laws: the landmark 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), and its revision eighteen years later, the Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The 1998 IRFA was the product of Frank Wolf\u2019s moral and political vision. He sought a new and transformative religious freedom <\/span>policy<\/span><\/i> for the U.S. government, but he wanted to lock it into a law so popular that its substance would endure into the ages. It is difficult for those inured to (or contributors to) the bickering power struggles we currently call democracy to imagine such a nonpartisan transformation-by-statute today. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To be sure, debates over what became IRFA were often quite partisan. President Clinton\u2019s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the bill would create an illegitimate \u201chierarchy of rights\u201d in which other human rights would be marginalized. Under Clinton\u2019s democratic successors, it became clear that this foreshadowed the left\u2019s \u201crights\u201d claims of abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender fluidity. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, despite this and other disputes, IRFA passed unanimously in both houses of Congress. It established as the senior agent of transformation a new IRF Ambassador at Large in the State Department, who would \u201cadvance religious freedom\u201d in U.S. foreign policy, issue an annual report, and advise the Secretary of State and Congress. It was a win for American democracy.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the passage of time revealed flaws. Many were resolved in the 2016 Frank Wolf IRFA, authored and driven by Chris Smith. That law, passed unanimously, strengthened the original IRFA, and demonstrated yet again the fruits of their friendship. Recounting a few of its key provisions helps make the point. The ambassador needed more authority, and Smith provided it. Now the ambassador was to report directly to the Secretary of State. The national security dimension of IRFA was not strong, but Smith fixed that, too. Foreign service officers did not have mandatory training on the meaning and reach of religious freedom. Now they do.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The result was made clear when former Kansas senator Sam Brownback became the new IRF Ambassador. Suffice it to say that he brought U.S. policy closer to Frank Wolf\u2019s vision than it had ever been. Armed with the 2016 Wolf amendments, Ambassador Brownback was able to move toward achieving the Founders\u2019 vision as never before.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A friendship begun in 1985, forged in shared Christian faith and encounters with human misery driven by animus toward religion, would become the ground on which a historic legacy would be built. And, I\u2019m happy to add, Chris Smith and Frank Wolf are not done building it. As individuals, their accomplishments would prove immense by any metric. But the bonds of their friendship have enabled a legacy that far surpasses the sum of what they have done individually. In the years to come, may American leaders honor these architects of modern U.S. religious freedom policy by more fully pursuing their vision of religious freedom for everyone, everywhere. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Farr","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/person\/0bdcf8e71e2d0e88d1e49972e6490c3f"},"headline":"The Friendship That Changed International Religious Freedom for America and the World\u00a0","datePublished":"2026-09-25T00:00:38+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/"},"wordCount":2663,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_1966566763.jpg","articleSection":["Friendship","Relationships","Religion","Religious Freedom"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/","name":"The Friendship That Changed International Religious Freedom for America and the World\u00a0 - Public Discourse","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_1966566763.jpg","datePublished":"2026-09-25T00:00:38+00:00","description":"A friendship begun in 1985, forged in shared Christian faith and encounters with human misery driven by animus toward religion, would become the ground on which a historic legacy would be built.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_1966566763.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_1966566763.jpg","width":1400,"height":554,"caption":"religious freedom"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101965\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The Friendship That Changed International Religious Freedom for America and the World\u00a0"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","name":"Public Discourse","description":"The online journal of The Witherspoon Institute","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization","name":"Public Discourse","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","width":524,"height":179,"caption":"Public Discourse"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/PublicDiscourse\/","https:\/\/x.com\/PublicDiscourse"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/person\/0bdcf8e71e2d0e88d1e49972e6490c3f","name":"Thomas F. 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Quite the contrary: the authors believe that, in spite of an<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/thedispatch.com\/article\/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-integralism\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">apparent retreat<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of postliberalism, the movement continues to influence contemporary American political discourse. Indeed, people who have publicly endorsed it (<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/2026\/07\/jd-vance-milton-friedman-and-the-rahway-elegy\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and who continue to defend postliberal positions<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) are in positions of the highest power in the U.S. government. All the more reason, Patterson and Howes argue, to understand what makes postliberalism tick.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The authors helpfully summarize the whole postliberal platform (not just its integralist wing, the subject of Kevin Vallier\u2019s excellent book<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/global.oup.com\/academic\/product\/all-the-kingdoms-of-the-world-9780197611371?cc=us&lang=en&\"> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All the Kingdoms of the World<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">), which is diffused throughout hundreds of articles, social media posts, and several books. Postliberals reject liberalism\u2019s protection of individual liberty as a precursor to communism, atheism, and other ills; they instead \u201cadvocate for restoring a divinely ordained hierarchy, with the Church providing spiritual rule and the state political rule.\u201d (In theory the state submits to the Church if the two bodies disagree.) Demoting individual freedom means centrally organizing the economy (\u201cin collaboration with state-approved guilds or cartels\u201d) and concentrating all political power in a unitary executive that governs through bureaucracy (hence many postliberals\u2019<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.afpc.org\/publications\/articles\/instead-of-transcending-tyranny-the-new-right-wants-to-learn-from-it\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">sympathy for China\u2019s present government<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). Unlike conservatives, who (out of respect for everyone\u2019s freedom and dignity) try to effect political change through constitutional processes, postliberals employ<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2025\/09\/98868\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">cultural Marxist tactics<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, \u201cus[ing] political power to reward their friends and crush their enemies.\u201d They accept the administrative state and seek to populate it with their own numbers, \u201cput[ting] that bureaucracy to work providing a kind of right-wing welfare state.\u201d Whereas progressives use federal bureaucracy to advance sexual liberationism, many postliberals would use it to advance<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2025\/04\/97774\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">patriarchy<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Finally, postliberalism rejects America\u2019s responsibility for helping to uphold the law of nations; the United States should be neutral in all global conflicts, they say, even if that means allowing stronger countries to<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.compactmag.com\/article\/fueling-zelensky-s-war-hurts-america\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">annex weaker ones<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the book\u2019s greatest achievements is to show in detail the similarity between contemporary postliberal theory and dozens of regimes that have actually existed in relatively recent history (although not in the memory of young postliberals), all of which failed to usher in the Christian society they promised (hence the book\u2019s title). Contemporary postliberalism is not a discovery made by the American New Right in the last two decades; postliberalism has been a constant temptation of Western conservatives, especially religious ones, at least since the French Revolution. We\u2019ve been through all this before, and it has always ended badly.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>A Century of Horrors<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Consider America\u2019s own hemisphere. It may be hard to recall now, after the communist takeovers of Cuba and Venezuela, but in the twentieth century many Latin American countries, including Brazil and Argentina, were governed by right-wing postliberal regimes. But in those governments, the Church\u2014in their cases, the Catholic Church\u2014was subordinated to the state. That violation of postliberal theory owed less to the weakness of the postliberal movement in those countries than to political realities. Catholic postliberals, both laity and clergy, helped right-wing politicians come to power; but once in office those politicians could maintain power without the Church\u2019s help, and they didn\u2019t need to give postliberals what they had promised earlier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In twentieth-century Europe, politicians executed the postliberal agenda more consistently, and brutally, in the so-called \u201cclerical fascist\u201d regimes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Francisco Franco, the self-styled \u201cLeader by the Grace of God,\u201d oversaw a harsh right-wing government in Spain for forty years. The communists who governed Spain before Franco had killed seven thousand priests and religious and destroyed twenty thousand churches; but after the Spanish Civil War, Franco, leader of the victors, oversaw the execution of 180,000 people who had been sympathetic to the losing communists.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Franco justified much of his brutality (with the enthusiastic support of many Catholic bishops) as necessary to counteract the alleged Judeo-Masonic conspiracy; practically all other postliberal regimes of the time also believed in such cabals, as do<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cato.org\/commentary\/nationalism-driving-neo-rights-virulent-antisemitic-turn\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">increasingly many<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of today\u2019s postliberals. Why are postliberals attracted to such conspiracy theories?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Postliberalism developed as a reaction of European conservatives\u2014supporters of monarchy and aristocracy\u2014to (often violent and atheistic) widespread rebellions against established governments, from the French to the Russian revolutions. These rebellions took many political and ecclesiastical leaders completely off guard, moving them to search for answers. If they had taken the Bible\u2019s counsel, leaders might have examined their own consciences, to consider whether they were partly responsible for the widespread dissatisfaction with their governance. The <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ancien r\u00e9gime<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> was not as bad as the Jacobins thought, but it had big problems:<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nber.org\/digest\/202605\/taxation-and-origins-french-revolution?page=1&perPage=50\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">heavy taxation<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of the poor and middle class, with low taxation of the nobility; sometimes zero tolerance for<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/sophiainstitute.com\/product\/rethinking-the-enlightenment\/?srsltid=AfmBOoqNvWGZheCoeZMeA09FoyTp6dJPwrj9e_4Ow6NharCljRN2SEdL\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">religious nonconformists<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">; and the persistence of widespread poverty and even<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/serfdom\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">serfdom<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (which lasted in central and eastern Europe through the middle of the nineteenth century).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But many leaders refused, or were unable, to deal with such realities, or even to admit their existence. They concluded not that government had to change, but that the gullible, infantile masses had been duped by a minority group from outside the established cultural-religious order\u2014a small group, easily hidden, and not fully committed to the prevailing order\u2019s creeds. Jews and Masons fit that description well. Postliberals developed and promoted such conspiracy theories at length, and many people believed them. Once postliberals gained power across Europe, riding the wave of Hitler\u2019s rise in Germany, the terror began. In Vichy France, with the endorsement of numerous bishops, Marshal Philippe P\u00e9tain seized the papers of the Masonic Lodges (finding no grand conspiracy, however) and sent 70,000 Jews to be murdered in the Nazis\u2019 concentration camps. In Croatia, Ante Paveli\u0107 (a Nazi puppet dictator), directed his Usta\u0161e Catholic integralist party \u201cto spread the faith by the sword,\u201d causing the deaths of up to 290,000 Serbs, 40,000 Jews, and 40,000 Roma. Similar atrocities were committed in Austria and Slovakia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">These facts could help explain why, in the decades after World War II, the practice of Catholicism declined in<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/aleteia.org\/2023\/06\/17\/survey-examines-dwindling-catholic-population-of-france\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">France<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">,<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.christiantoday.com\/news\/catholic-church-sees-huge-decline-in-spain\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Spain<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and other countries where the Catholic hierarchy had \u201ccontributed significantly to the \u2026 public legitimacy\u201d of postliberal regimes. (Only now is European Christianity<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.oursundayvisitor.com\/despite-social-changes-france-is-still-deeply-rooted-in-christianity-sociologist-says\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">starting<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/aleteia.org\/2026\/06\/06\/what-is-the-situation-of-the-catholic-church-in-spain\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">recover<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.) The story of Christian Europe\u2019s alliance with postliberalism vindicates the warning of<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2025\/08\/98719\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Alexis de Tocqueville<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: in the long run, churches undermine their credibility when they ally with particular political parties, especially any as odious as the fascists.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='sharequotebox'><blockquote class='sharequotestxt'>Contemporary postliberalism is not a discovery made by the American New Right in the last two decades; postliberalism has been a constant temptation of Western conservatives, especially religious ones, at least since the French Revolution.<\/blockquote><div class='blockquote-share'><span class='s-options'><a class=\"cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_1 cmsmasters-icon-facebook-1 cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts"e=Contemporary postliberalism is not a discovery made by the American New Right in the last two decades; postliberalism has been a constant temptation of Western conservatives, especially religious ones, at least since the French Revolution.\" target=\"_blank\"><i class=\"fab fa-facebook-square\"><\/i><\/a><a target=\"_blank\" class=\"blockquote_tw cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_3 cmsmasters-icon-twitter cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts&text=Contemporary postliberalism is not a discovery made by the American New Right in the last two decades; postliberalism has been a constant temptation of Western conservatives, especially religious ones, at least since the French Revolution.&original_referer=\" ><i class=\"fab fa-twitter-square\"><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<p><b>Truth\u2019s Consequences<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why Liberalism Failed<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> also provides a thorough intellectual history of postliberalism, exploring the figures of the modern European conservative movement:<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Joseph-de-Maistre\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Joseph de Maistre<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, founder of political \u201ctraditionalism\u201d; his friend Louis de Bonald, founder of modern antisemitism; Augustin Barruel, the Catholic priest who came up with the first conspiracy theory to explain the French Revolution;<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2024\/09\/95970\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Charles Maurras<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">; and others.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The book also goes through the complicated history of papal statements on which integralist postliberals base their skepticism of religious freedom and their support for a close legal union of church and state. Patterson and Howes argue that integralism is not clearly the position of all bishops or popes before the Second Vatican Council (as many suggest), and that the prelates who promoted it often had political interests that compromised their intentions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In its third and final section (to my mind the best written), <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why Postliberalism Failed<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> refutes the simplistic view of doctrinal development on which much of integralism depends. The book cites (among other sources) Pope Benedict XVI\u2019s<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vatican.va\/content\/benedict-xvi\/en\/speeches\/2005\/december\/documents\/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia.html\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">2005 Christmas address to the Roman curia<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[T]he Church\u2019s decisions on contingent matters\u2014for example, certain practical forms of liberalism \u2026 \u2014should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Church now recognizes, Benedict continues, that one of those permanent principles is the right to \u201creligious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.\u201d But \u201c[o]n the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change,\u201d such as political constitutions. A society that is open to truth must also be a free society, because, as<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vatican.va\/archive\/hist_councils\/ii_vatican_council\/documents\/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html\"> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dignitatis Humanae<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> reminded us, \u201ctruth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, [entering] into the mind at once quietly and with power.\u201d Men should strive to orient political life toward truth, but politics will never be perfect, because no political solution is \u201cbig\u201d enough to fit the mystery that is each human person.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>A Call to Examination of Conscience<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why Postliberalism Failed<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is not without flaws.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tiresome refrain with which each section of the historical unit ends (\u201chis\/their postliberalism failed\u201d), the book\u2019s final conclusion (\u201cPostliberalism will <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">always<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> fail. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Deo Gratias.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201d) and other excessive rhetoric bespeak an overconfident triumphalism. The lovers of truth should indeed hope that falsehood will fail in the long run; but rather than gloating over the failures of past postliberals, we should ask why ordinary men and women, who were little different from the rest of us, were seduced by them. Each of us is capable of the sins that past postliberals committed unless we strive to love God with the commitment of saints. As the old adage says, \u201cThere but for the grace of God go I.\u201d We should also take the counsel that conservative leaders of the nineteenth century did not: to examine how much the spread of bad ideologies (in today\u2019s case, of postliberalism itself) may be the consequence not just of postliberal propaganda, but of the failures of all of us to live up to the demands of the Gospel. Young people might be less attracted to political strongmen and anger-driven conspiracy theories if the adults in their lives gave better witness both to love of truth and to love of freedom: standing up for justice calmly but firmly, eschewing<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2024\/10\/96243\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the contemporary world\u2019s self-indulgent lifestyle<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and instead sacrificing their own comfort to service of God and their fellow men.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The book might also have explained better why the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy is false. The authors do well to cite verbatim the texts of Bonald, Maurras, and others to show how absurd and unjust their ideas were. But in confused times like these, when many are willing to believe the absurd, more thorough arguments are needed. Several times the book suggests that right-wing leaders cited the conspiracy as an excuse to ignore \u201cthe very real problems of the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ancien r\u00e9gime<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201d that better explained people\u2019s discontent. What were those problems? What <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">were<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the true causes of the French Revolution and later revolts? I suggested a few answers earlier, but the authors say little. They do point to \u201cdifferences in culture between the Christian French and the Jewish diaspora,\u201d which may have explained misunderstandings between the two groups (especially after Jews were allowed to participate more in public life after the French Revolution); but more could have been said. Contemporary antisemites and others might dismiss the book for asserting the falsity of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy without proof. True, ideologues are sometimes so irrational that one can do little to persuade them (one should rather pray and fast for them,<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Mark%209%3A14-29&version=RSV\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">as Jesus counseled<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). But ideologues have many followers, especially among young people, who are not irrational but merely confused, impressionable, and looking for answers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But all told, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why Postliberalism Failed<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is a very timely and helpful resource\u2014a must-read for anyone trying to understand the evil twin of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2025\/09\/98868\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">critical Marxists\u2019<\/span><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2023\/11\/91715\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">identity politics<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that is seducing much of the American right. As Patterson and Howes warn, \u201cIt is good to oppose communism. It is not good to oppose communism out of support for clerical fascism.\u201d Postliberalism reduces the mystery of evil and sin to a conspiracy of heretics instead of Marxism\u2019s conspiracy of \u201cfalse consciousness,\u201d scapegoating Jews and Masons instead of the bourgeoisie; it opposes Marxism\u2019s insane rebellion against the reality of human nature with its own mad rebellion against the reality of human freedom.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em><strong>Image licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/rays-of-light-through-the-roof-of-abandoned-soviet-building\/286475822\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is good to oppose communism. It is not good to oppose communism out of support for clerical fascism.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":875,"featured_media":101957,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"","beyondwords_integration_method":"","beyondwords_project_id":"","beyondwords_content_id":"","beyondwords_preview_token":"","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"","beyondwords_language_code":"","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[713],"class_list":["post-101953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-public-discourse","pillars-education-and-culture","pillars-politics-and-law"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,875],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Postliberalism\u2019s Rebellion Against Reality\u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It is good to oppose communism. It is not good to oppose communism out of support for clerical fascism.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101953\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"John F. Doherty\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101953\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101953\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"John F. 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Emerging from the optimism of postwar America, modernization theory promised a universal path from tradition to modernity, poverty to prosperity, and autocracy to democracy. Seymour Martin Lipset\u2019s seminal article, \u201cSome Social Requisites of Democracy\u201d (1959),<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC7099882\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">crystallized<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the theory\u2019s core claim: the more well to do a nation, the greater the chances it will sustain democracy. Economic development was presumed to generate a middle class demanding political participation and the rule of law.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to validate this logic. The \u201cend of history,\u201d in Francis Fukuyama\u2019s famous phrase,<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.co.id\/books\/about\/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man.html?id=NdFpQwKfX2IC&redir_esc=y\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">implied<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that liberal democracy was the inevitable political destination of modern societies. For decades, this belief guided Western engagement with China. Washington and Brussels assumed that trade, investment, and globalization would liberalize Beijing. Wealth would breed freedom; markets would make democrats.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Forty-five years after Deng Xiaoping\u2019s reforms, this conviction lies in ruins. China has achieved modernization without liberalization, prosperity without pluralism. It has become the world\u2019s second largest economy and a technological superpower, yet the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s control is stronger than ever. Far from democratizing, China under Xi Jinping has constructed a new form of digital totalitarian governance, the fusion of Confucian paternalism, Leninist centralization, and AI surveillance.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This reality has sparked an intellectual reckoning. Why did modernization theory fail so completely? Was China an exception, or was the theory itself flawed? Scholars like<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/books\/9780674027541\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Minxin Pei<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> argue that China\u2019s political order represents a trapped transition, not a delayed democratization. Here I want to explain how modernization theory\u2019s Western bias, China\u2019s institutional \u201cgenes,\u201d and its civilizational identity have combined to render democratization structurally improbable.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Modernization Theory and Its Western Bias<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Modernization theory was born not only as a sociological model but as an ideological weapon of the Cold War.<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.co.id\/books?id=yZNwKHku4UoC&printsec=frontcover&hl=id#v=onepage&q&f=false\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Walt Rostow<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Stages of Economic Growth<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> was subtitled <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A Non-Communist Manifesto<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, underscoring its geopolitical purpose, to demonstrate that capitalism and democracy were the twin products of modernity.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The theory\u2019s internal logic rested on three assumptions: first, that industrialization transforms traditional hierarchies and creates rational, secular citizens; second, that a rising middle class naturally demands participation; and third, that democracy is the universal endpoint of social evolution. These assumptions reflected the Western historical experience, from the Reformation through industrialization to the rise of constitutionalism, but they ignored alternative trajectories.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.co.id\/books\/about\/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_C.html?hl=id&id=ez7CAgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Max Weber<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019s 1905 <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> linked capitalism to cultural individualism and rational legal authority. Yet China\u2019s path to modernization unfolded without Protestantism or the Enlightenment. Its Confucian ethos privileged harmony over autonomy, hierarchy over equality, and moral virtue over procedural legitimacy. Modernization theory mistook Europe\u2019s contingent history for a universal law.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Empirically, the theory also ignored authoritarian adaptability. Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi later<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.la.utexas.edu\/users\/chenry\/core\/Course%20Materials\/Przeworski97\/Adam%20Przeworski%20and%20Fernando%20Papaterra%20Limongi%20Neto%20-%20Modernization%20Theories%20and%20Facts%20-%20World%20Politics%20492.htm\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">demonstrated<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that while economic growth stabilizes existing democracies, it does not necessarily create new ones. The causal arrow runs one way: wealth sustains democracy, but it does not cause it. China\u2019s case shows why. Economic reforms after 1978 strengthened the Party\u2019s legitimacy rather than eroding it. Rising prosperity became a substitute for political rights, the so-called \u201cperformance legitimacy\u201d of authoritarian states.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre symbolized the death of liberal illusions in China. When the student-led democracy movement demanded reform, the CCP responded with tanks, not ballots. Yet rather than isolating Beijing, Western governments resumed engagement, assuming that economic openness would moderate political repression. The opposite occurred. After the 2008 global financial crisis, Chinese leaders concluded that Western liberal capitalism was morally and institutionally bankrupt. The collapse of Wall Street confirmed to Beijing that authoritarian capitalism could outperform democracy.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Modernization theory thus fell victim to its own teleology; it presumed a single road to progress. China\u2019s ascent has proven that multiple modernities exist, some democratic, others authoritarian. The \u201cuniversal\u201d model was, in truth, a parochial Western narrative.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Institutional Genes and the Resilience of Authoritarianism<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To understand China\u2019s persistent authoritarianism, one must look beyond short-term political choices to the structural DNA of its institutions. Chenggang Xu\u2019s 2025<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/chinabooksreview.com\/2026\/02\/26\/totalitarian-gene\/\"> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Institutional Genes<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> argues that China\u2019s governance system is shaped by enduring \u201cinstitutional genes\u201d inherited from imperial bureaucracies. These genes encode three core principles: centralization of authority, bureaucratic hierarchy, and ideological unity. The modern CCP is less a rupture with China\u2019s past than its most advanced expression.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Historical institutionalism reinforces this argument. Path dependence theory (Mahoney, 2000)<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/226486834_Path_Dependence_in_Historical_Sociology\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">suggests<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that once a political system establishes core institutions, subsequent developments are constrained by those initial choices. In China, the Qin dynasty\u2019s unification created a bureaucratic model that valued order and uniformity. The civil service examination system embedded meritocratic hierarchy within a centralized empire. The CCP\u2019s Leninist organization, its disciplined hierarchy and ideological monopoly, align seamlessly with this ancient template.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.journalofdemocracy.org\/articles\/chinas-changing-of-the-guard-authoritarian-resilience\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Andrew Nathan<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019s theory of authoritarian resilience further explains how the CCP has adapted to modernization. Through mechanisms of co-optation, institutionalization, and performance based legitimacy, the Party has managed to renew itself even as society transforms. Xi Jinping\u2019s era illustrates this evolution: term limits were abolished, but bureaucracy became more efficient, censorship intensified, but governance capacity expanded.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">China\u2019s political economy also reveals adaptive authoritarianism. As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.coleurope.eu\/why-nations-fail-origins-power-prosperity-and-poverty\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">argue<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, inclusive political institutions foster innovation, while extractive ones breed stagnation. Yet China has defied this dichotomy. Its political institutions are authoritarian but strategically inclusive; they incorporate elites, entrepreneurs, and technocrats under Party supervision. The private sector thrives, but only within politically sanctioned boundaries. This system, what<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/341288633_China%27s_Gilded_Age_The_Paradox_of_Economic_Boom_and_Vast_Corruption\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yuen Yuen Ang<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> calls \u201cdirected improvisation,\u201d sustains dynamism without liberalization.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The key to China\u2019s resilience lies in the fusion of coercion and legitimacy. State surveillance, propaganda, and nationalism create what<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/elizabethperry.scholars.harvard.edu\/publications\/higher-education-and-authoritarian-resilience-case-china-past-and\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Elizabeth Perry<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> terms \u201cpatriotic authoritarianism,\u201d a regime sustained not only by fear but also by consent. The middle class, often romanticized by modernization theorists as a democratizing force, has become a pillar of stability. Dependent on state patronage and wary of chaos, it trades political freedom for material security.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In short, modernization has not undermined authoritarianism, it has modernized it. China\u2019s \u201cauthoritarian capitalism\u201d is not transitional but adaptive. The Party\u2019s institutional genes allow it to evolve without democratizing, proving that authoritarianism can be resilient, legitimate, and prosperous.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Civilizational DNA and the Logic of Control<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Beyond institutions lies the cultural substrate of Chinese politics, the idea of a civilizational state.<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/308376573_The_China_wave_Rise_of_a_civilizational_state\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Zhang Weiwei<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> describes China not as a nation-state but as a civilization-state with a continuous history and moral mission. In this framework, the CCP presents itself as the custodian of five millennia of civilization, not merely a political party. Its legitimacy derives from cultural continuity, not electoral consent.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Confucian political philosophy has always emphasized moral governance (de zheng) over procedural democracy.<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/282311796_The_China_model_Political_meritocracy_and_the_limits_of_democracy\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Daniel Bell<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> calls this \u201cpolitical meritocracy,\u201d rule by the virtuous and competent rather than by majority vote. The Party has appropriated this tradition, portraying its meritocratic bureaucracy as superior to the populist volatility of Western democracy. Xi Jinping\u2019s \u201cChina Dream\u201d rhetoric reinterprets Confucian harmony in nationalist terms, merging ancient moralism with socialist ideology.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Technology has become the new instrument of moral order. The \u201csocial credit system,\u201d ubiquitous surveillance, and algorithmic censorship extend the ancient logic of hierarchical control into digital space. The Party justifies these mechanisms as tools of social harmony, not repression. As Wang Huning, one of Xi\u2019s chief ideologues,<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0962629825001404\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">argues<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, moral governance requires information discipline, truth managed by authority. The result is a techno-authoritarian synthesis that aligns perfectly with China\u2019s civilizational DNA.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This framework also explains why liberal democracy lacks cultural traction in China. Pluralism is viewed as fragmentation, dissent as moral disorder. The Confucian ideal of harmony renders adversarial politics illegitimate. Citizens measure legitimacy through performance, not procedure. As long as the state delivers stability and growth, the moral contract holds.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fareed Zakaria\u2019s concept of \u201cilliberal democracy\u201d is<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.com\/world\/rise-illiberal-democracy\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">inverted<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in China\u2019s case, what emerges is liberal autocracy, a market economy under centralized political control. This model, once dismissed as transitional, has become a global alternative. From Central Asia to Africa, China\u2019s civilizational narrative and developmental success have inspired admiration, if not emulation.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Modernization theory could not foresee this because it equated modernity with liberalism. Yet China demonstrates that technological sophistication and authoritarian control are not contradictory, they are mutually reinforcing. The \u201ccivilizational state\u201d thus represents not a deviation from modernity but a distinct form of it, a non-Western modernity that privileges harmony over freedom, order over dissent.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='sharequotebox'><blockquote class='sharequotestxt'>Modernization theory is dead, and China killed it.<\/blockquote><div class='blockquote-share'><span class='s-options'><a class=\"cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_1 cmsmasters-icon-facebook-1 cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts"e=Modernization theory is dead, and China killed it.\" target=\"_blank\"><i class=\"fab fa-facebook-square\"><\/i><\/a><a target=\"_blank\" class=\"blockquote_tw cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_3 cmsmasters-icon-twitter cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts&text=Modernization theory is dead, and China killed it.&original_referer=\" ><i class=\"fab fa-twitter-square\"><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<p><b>The Geopolitical Consequences of a Failed Paradigm<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The failure of modernization theory is not merely academic, it has reshaped global geopolitics. For decades, Western engagement strategies assumed that trade and globalization would liberalize China. From Nixon\u2019s 1972 visit to Clinton\u2019s support for WTO entry in 2001, engagement was justified by faith in convergence. Instead, engagement produced divergence, an authoritarian superpower embedded in global capitalism.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As Alastair Iain Johnston<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/direct.mit.edu\/isec\/article-abstract\/44\/2\/9\/12242\/China-in-a-World-of-Orders-Rethinking-Compliance?redirectedFrom=fulltext\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">observes<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the West misread China\u2019s compliance as convergence, when in fact it was instrumental adaptation. The CCP learned to operate within international institutions while quietly rewriting the norms from within. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) extends this approach globally, exporting not ideology but infrastructure, and, with it, surveillance technology and data governance norms.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The \u201cBeijing Consensus,\u201d coined by Joshua Ramo (2004), encapsulates this shift, a model based on experimentation, state-led capitalism, and political stability, rejecting Western prescriptions. The global South, weary of IMF austerity and Western conditions, increasingly views China as a pragmatic alternative. In Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, authoritarian efficiency often appears more appealing than democratic dysfunction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This ideological pluralism signals the end of the liberal international order\u2019s moral monopoly. Kishore Mahbubani<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hachettebookgroup.com\/titles\/kishore-mahbubani\/has-china-won\/9781541768123\/?lens=publicaffairs&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23899436321&gclid=CjwKCAjwtKrUBhAhEiwAr77ZoiDkhA8HVnlqFNH2EWcPeN3xpJEPlDOrn8MpMUHYQob6w7vJU74mnhoCztYQAvD_BwE\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">argues<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that the West must abandon the illusion of universality, \u201cThe West believes it is teaching the world, but the world is no longer learning.\u201d China\u2019s rise is not just material, it is epistemic. It offers a different vision of progress, one that divorces modernization from liberalization.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For the United States and its allies, this presents a strategic dilemma. Confrontation risks accelerating decoupling, engagement risks legitimizing authoritarian norms. As Hal Brands<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/yalebooks.yale.edu\/book\/9780300268058\/the-twilight-struggle\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">warns<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the liberal world faces \u201ca twilight struggle\u201d against a system that believes freedom is weakness and order is strength. The death of modernization theory forces the West to rethink its most cherished assumption that history has a direction, and that direction leads to democracy.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>The End of a Teleology<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Modernization theory is dead, and China killed it. Economic growth has not bred democracy, it has fortified authoritarianism. The CCP\u2019s resilience is not an accident of politics but the expression of deep institutional and civilizational continuities. Its \u201cinstitutional genes\u201d ensure that modernization strengthens, rather than undermines, centralized control.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To expect China to democratize is to expect its civilization to reinvent itself. Modernization theory mistook the particularities of Western experience for universal truth. The death of that theory compels humility. History is plural, not linear. There are many modernities, and not all are liberal.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">China\u2019s rise forces scholars and policymakers to confront an uncomfortable reality: that modernity no longer belongs to the West. The future may not resemble the past, and democracy may not be destiny. If modernization once promised freedom, China has shown it can also perfect control. Understanding this is the first step toward navigating the twenty-first century with clear eyes.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Image licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/the-great-wall-of-china\/94315847\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>China\u2019s rise forces scholars and policymakers to confront an uncomfortable reality: that modernity no longer belongs to the West.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2716,"featured_media":101946,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"4085fb09-9041-450b-a422-5433ba2c8e62","beyondwords_preview_token":"4d97bcda-8d70-454a-b582-6fcffa4bdfe7","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[2443,15,24],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2684],"class_list":["post-101941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-democracy","category-foreign-affairs","category-politics","pillars-politics-and-law"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,2716],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Why China Will Never Democratize\u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"China\u2019s rise forces scholars and policymakers to confront an uncomfortable reality: that modernity no longer belongs to the West.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ronny P. 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Sasmita\",\"description\":\"Ronny Sasmita is a Senior International Affairs Analyst at the Indonesia Strategic and Economic Action Institution. He holds a PhD in International Political Economy from the University of Tokyo.\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/author\\\/ronny-sasmita\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Why China Will Never Democratize\u00a0 - Public Discourse","description":"China\u2019s rise forces scholars and policymakers to confront an uncomfortable reality: that modernity no longer belongs to the West.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Ronny P. Sasmita","Est. reading time":"9 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/"},"author":{"name":"Ronny P. Sasmita","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/person\/22b45bfa5729eb9f0643d5e872e8f426"},"headline":"Why China Will Never Democratize\u00a0","datePublished":"2026-09-23T00:00:02+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/"},"wordCount":1898,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_94315847.jpg","articleSection":["Democracy","Foreign Affairs","Politics"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/","name":"Why China Will Never Democratize\u00a0 - Public Discourse","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_94315847.jpg","datePublished":"2026-09-23T00:00:02+00:00","description":"China\u2019s rise forces scholars and policymakers to confront an uncomfortable reality: that modernity no longer belongs to the West.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_94315847.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_94315847.jpg","width":1400,"height":933,"caption":"China"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101941\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Why China Will Never Democratize\u00a0"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","name":"Public Discourse","description":"The online journal of The Witherspoon Institute","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization","name":"Public Discourse","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","width":524,"height":179,"caption":"Public Discourse"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/PublicDiscourse\/","https:\/\/x.com\/PublicDiscourse"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/person\/22b45bfa5729eb9f0643d5e872e8f426","name":"Ronny P. 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The Roberts Court has gone far toward correcting these abuses; this is some of the beneficial fruit of \u201coriginalism\u201d and \u201chistory and tradition\u201d jurisprudence. In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dobbs,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Justice Alito put paid the spurious historical claims of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Roe <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">v. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Wade<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (which the Court had already largely abandoned in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Casey<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). The \u201cwall of separation\u201d metaphor that launched modern religious liberty doctrine (<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Everson<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) has given way to a more accurately historically informed \u201caccommodationist\u201d perspective. Now Professor Carson Holloway gives us a rich account of the Anglo-American law of libel, exposing the flimsy basis of Justice Brennan\u2019s opinion in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">New York Times <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">v.<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. With<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.encounterbooks.com\/books\/no-liberty-libel\/\"> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No Liberty to Libel<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, he has probably saved some future Supreme Court clerks a lot of legwork.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> case (1964) arose out of the civil rights movement. Civil rights organizations took out an ad in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The New York Times<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> protesting the repressive acts of officials in Birmingham, Alabama. Several of the allegations were inaccurate, at least in detail, and those officials (Sullivan was a municipal \u201ccommissioner of public affairs\u201d) sued for libel. Alabama, like most states at this time, held publishers liable for false and defamatory statements (though, as Holloway points out, Sullivan was not named in the ad, so really wasn\u2019t \u201cdefamed\u201d\u2014but the Supreme Court was looking for a way into, not out of, reviewing the state case), and a jury awarded the plaintiff $500,000. Such awards would effectively inhibit media coverage of the civil rights campaign.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Overruling the Alabama court, the Supreme Court established a new, national standard of libel. Public officials (later \u201cpublic figures\u201d) could not win a libel suit unless they showed \u201cactual malice\u201d\u2014that the publisher had knowingly published defamatory falsehood, or had done so with reckless disregard to the truth. This was an exceedingly difficult standard for plaintiffs to meet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Holloway provides a masterly and smoothly written survey of the case law and treatises on libel from the Founding to the present. The English common law of libel at the time of the American Founding was quite plaintiff-friendly. As Blackstone explained in his 1760s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Commentaries<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, it amounted to nothing more than \u201cno prior restraint\u201d\u2014no censorship; no need to obtain permission to publish beforehand. You could publish whatever you wanted, but would be held liable for the harm that you did to anyone\u2019s reputation by it. Malicious intent was assumed; the defendant had to rebut the presumption. Truth was no defense\u2014the maxim was \u201cthe greater the truth, the greater the libel.\u201d If you wrote that the King was a fat idiot, no BMI chart and IQ test would save you. You were guilty of (seditious) libel for undermining popular confidence in the government. Holloway points out that the American judge and commentator James Kent took issue with this standard, claiming that it was \u201can oppressive innovation of the Star Chamber.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So much for Blackstone. Americans had already expressed a more libertarian attitude in the eighteenth century. The famous <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Zenger<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> case (New York, 1735) seemed to establish a truth-defense standard, but, as Paul Finkelman noted, the case was \u201cnot so much a \u2018legal precedent\u2019 as an act of jury nullification.\u201d The best evidence for a more permissive American attitude in the Founding era is, ironically, the notorious Sedition Act of 1798. This statute made it criminal to publish false and defamatory statements about the federal government\u2019s officers. The act modified the common law by making truth a defense (though it had to be proved by the defendant), let the jury rather than the judge decide the legal question of whether the publication was defamatory (previously all the jury decided was the fact of whether the defendant had published it), and limited the penalties.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Jeffersonian Republicans condemned the Sedition Act, which expired in 1801, coincident with the Republicans\u2019 electoral sweep. New sedition acts were enacted in 1918 and 1940. None was held unconstitutional. (Holloway notes that John Marshall defended the 1798 act\u2019s constitutionality, but opposed it as bad policy. I would quibble here; dispute remains about whether Marshall wrote in defense of the act.) The <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Court remarked that the Sedition Act had been \u201ccondemned by the court of history.\u201d But the Jeffersonian Republicans objected primarily on constitutional, especially federalism, grounds. And the First Amendment was not among their principal objections. First was that punishing this crime was not among the enumerated powers of Congress, contrary to the Federalist argument that federal courts could punish seditious libel as a common law crime, absent any enumerated power. The Republicans argued that seditious libel could be punished by the states (state laws like Virginia\u2019s were harsher than the federal act), but not by the federal government. Republicans objected, with some justice, that the Federalists used the act for partisan purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After this Founding-era fight, libel law did not evolve much. The Sedition Act controversy involved <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">seditious<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> libel\u2014libels against the government\u2014and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">criminal<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> libel. It did not affect the private (tort) libel laws of the states at all. Criminal libel had all but disappeared by the twentieth century, Holloway points out. The mid-century American Law Institute\u2019s Model Penal Code did not include a criminal libel section. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> conflated these\u2014it turned a state private or civil libel case into a public, First Amendment case, and asserted that the First Amendment imposed a new, national libel standard. Holloway discusses six federal private libel cases (involving the territories and District of Columbia) before <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that raised no First Amendment concerns. As late as 1942 Justice Frank Murphy (a passionate liberal often seen as a Warren Court precursor), wrote that \u201cThere are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention of which has never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and the obscene, the profane, the libelous.\u201d Some state courts had gone further. Kansas, in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Coleman <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">v.<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> MacLennan <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in 1908, provided the principal historical precedent for Brennan, though Holloway explains that this case had not done what Brennan claimed it had.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Clearly, the Court was legislating, not adjudicating, in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, imposing its preferred standard of libel over those of all the states, as it would impose a national abortion code for all the states in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Roe<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. A significant but overlooked feature of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is how the liberal justices revived one of the liberals\u2019 \u201cLochner-era\u201d <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">b\u00eates-noires<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a federal common law. The Constitution gives the federal courts the power to decide controversies between citizens of different states (\u201cdiversity jurisdiction\u201d). In 1842 the Court decided that the federal courts did not have to use the common law of the states (as the Judiciary Act of 1789 seemed to require), but could consult general principles of law in diversity cases. Progressives complained that the federal courts chose rules that favored big business defendants, and in 1938 they convinced the Court to repudiate the federal common law. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> established a federal common law of libel, to trump Alabama\u2019s libel law. The justices did not admit that they were doing this, any more than they admitted that <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Roe <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">revived the \u201cLochner era\u201d doctrine of \u201csubstantive due process.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Holloway is a political scientist; I\u2019m a historian. I am grateful and satisfied that he has done the work that historians should be doing, replacing law-office history with real history. Alas, historians have too often prostituted themselves to lawyers\u2019 needs for history in high-profile constitutional law cases. Alfred H. Kelly, the historian who worked with the NAACP on the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Brown <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">case, was one of the few who admitted as much. (<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Apropos,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Kelly wrote an important article on the history of libel law in the 1968 <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">American Historical Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.) In a confessional article (after the Court said that the history was too indiscernible to decide the case\u2014\u201cwe cannot turn back the clock,\u201d it said) entitled \u201cClio and the Court: An Illicit Love Affair,\u201d he said that his brief \u201cmanipulated history in the best tradition of American advocacy, carefully marshalling every scrap of evidence in favor of the desired interpretation and carefully doctoring all the evidence to the contrary, either by suppressing it when that seemed plausible, or by distorting it when suppression was not possible.\u201d He traduced the standards of the historical profession, but he did it for a good cause.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One should appreciate Holloway\u2019s historical work whether one favors or rejects the \u201cactual malice\u201d standard of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. As he concludes, overturning <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u201cwould not be gutting the First Amendment but restoring its true meaning.\u201d Holloway is firm but circumspect about the substantive issue. He does critique the public-private figure standard and notes that <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> gave the media a privileged status that is incompatible with the principles of republican government. It\u2019s hard to deny that <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The New York Times<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> was on the right side in this case. (I grew up with the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Times<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and still subscribe\u2014but only for the crossword.) Clearly, Holloway carries the death warrant for <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. What would be the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">practical<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> result of its overturning? I guess that most states, having lived with the actual malice standard for sixty years, would adopt it, just as most states, their populations inured to abortion-on-demand for fifty years, have adopted the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Roe<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> standard. This would be a pity, for, as Holloway points out, American self-government has not benefited from two generations of the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sullivan<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> standard.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<em><strong>Image licensed<a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/supreme-court-of-the-united-states-blue-sky-diagonal\/464918601\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>American self-government has not benefited from two generations of the <i>Sullivan<\/i> standard.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":762,"featured_media":101930,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"4d2d314e-067f-4e48-a48a-98ec1a5e61ad","beyondwords_preview_token":"66702881-79d4-49e2-bf59-4bb6fd3439f5","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[8,1033],"tags":[],"coauthors":[454],"class_list":["post-101926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-supreme-court","pillars-politics-and-law"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,762],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Libel and Law-Office History\u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"American self-government has not benefited from two generations of the Sullivan standard.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101926\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Paul Moreno\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101926\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101926\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Paul Moreno\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/e9d87a52b0cac727de4dcf04fc2667ab\"},\"headline\":\"Libel and Law-Office History\u00a0\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-22T00:00:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101926\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1593,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101926\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_464918601.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Book Reviews\",\"Supreme Court\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101926\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101926\\\/\",\"name\":\"Libel and Law-Office History\u00a0 - 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He was a James Madison Memorial Fellow in 2005-06.","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/author\/paul-moreno\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101926"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101928,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101926\/revisions\/101928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101926"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=101926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":101918,"date":"2026-09-20T20:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T00:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?p=101918"},"modified":"2026-09-18T13:21:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T17:21:49","slug":"whatever-happens-at-all-happens-as-it-should","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101918\/","title":{"rendered":"Whatever Happens at all, Happens as It Should\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Just outside the French Quarter of New Orleans, on the corner of Basin and St. Louis Streets, there is an ancient necropolis called St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. When the Catholic cemetery was built, the city was still a Spanish frontier province, and as such retains some of its historic memory as an outpost of French culture. The inscriptions that mark the various above-ground monuments are commonly in French, some austere and formal, others unexpectedly tender and poignant. There is one small marker that gives no name or dates. It appears to be the tomb of a child from some time in the previous century. It is very plain, and upon the weathered stone is carved a single word: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pourquoi?<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u201cWhy?\u201d A simple epitaph that carries with it a significant and inescapable existential question.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is impossible to encounter this little inscription without feeling the emotional weight of its author, one that has exceeded the immediate grief that produced it. Despite the brevity of its narrative, the question being posed is not \u201cWhy did this child die?\u201d but \u201cWhy does any of this happen at all?\u201d Perhaps more deeply still: \u201cWhy is our world built in such a way that this is allowed to happen?\u201d The innocents suffer, the greatest of earthly beauty decays, and every human effort inevitably dissolves into nothing. \u201cMust all things in the last be swallowed up in death?\u201d<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/1658\/1658-h\/1658-h.htm\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">asked<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Plato\u2019s Socrates, who was acutely aware of this phenomenon in his own time.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our contemporary thought has supplied many technical explanations for suffering, but these explanations are not the same thing as answers. What is more, explaining how things happen is a poor substitute for explaining why things happen. Our scientific knowledge may explain disease vectors, pathogens, and all those elements that sharpen our mortality. However, it is foolish to assume that psychological anguish can be reduced to neurological function, that the state of our interiority can be oversimplified into a series of synaptic firings. Our humanity continues to ask more of us than these kinds of flat, material explanations can answer. It challenges us with metaphysical questions, the paramount of which is: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why does it have to be this way?<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It might be said that the whole of Western philosophy and religion is intended to address this issue. The question of human suffering is certainly older than all of our contemporary institutions. We find it latent in the earliest documents of civilization; the Sumerian narrative of the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Epic of Gilgamesh<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> explores themes of transience and causality as its protagonist navigates an ecologically hostile universe. Just the same, this is echoed by the author of the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Book of Job<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and by the various tragedians of ancient Athens. Long before anyone attempted to construct a systematic notion of theodicy, societies had already discovered the terrible reality of the disproportion between virtue and fortune. Among the commentators on this from the ancient world was the second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was famously a proponent of the philosophy of Stoicism.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Despite the extraordinary privilege of his station in life, his reign was punctuated by various calamities that punctuated political life in late antiquity. The Antonine Plague swept repeatedly through the provinces of the empire, killing millions, all while military crises along the Danube frontier to the north demanded years of his personal attention. Seven of his fourteen children died before reaching adulthood. His co-emperor Lucius Verus died suddenly, as did Marcus\u2019s wife Faustina. There is a persistent awareness of death that appears to penetrate his writings and his thoughts. His major surviving philosophical work, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Meditations<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, was not composed by a man speculating about the nature of human suffering from the security of a university lecture hall. It was originally a private exercise, written by a man attempting to remain morally coherent in a world that appeared determined to demonstrate its indifference to mortal agency.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Marcus makes several famous assertions in his work. Among the collection of his wisdom is the assertion that: \u201cWhatever happens at all, happens as it should.\u201d To some readers, the sentence borders on the bizarre. The proposition that pain and suffering <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">should<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> happen is perhaps too much to fully digest in one sitting. Why should the death of a child, or the ravages of a plague, or the betrayal of a friend need to happen at all? Viscerally, they appear wrong to our moral sensibilities and our perspective of a just universe. They offend our intuitive convictions that reality ought to possess some correspondence between the exercise of virtue and happiness. Standing before that little grave in New Orleans, it would require an almost superhuman and indecent callousness to say that whatever happened there \u201chappened as it should.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, it is not Aurelius\u2019s point to claim that suffering is good in itself, still less that cruelty should be greeted with a studied indifference. The psychological claims of Stoicism are considerably more subtle than simply ignoring the problem of pain. Saying that something happens \u201cas it should\u201d is to say that no event exists independently of the world from which it arises. For Aurelius, the universe is not a collection of random unassociated accidents, and by extension the course of history is not arbitrary. It possesses a single intelligible order, governed by <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">logos<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, in which everything that happens emerges from a greater and more immense web of causes that extends far beyond the comprehension of any individual. We encounter only fragments of the world, and engage with the course of time only through the limited lens of our fragile intellect.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While this sounds fairly straightforward, it is a perspective that we often ignore. It is a distinction that is important because we judge the meaning of external events according to their relationship to ourselves. That is to say, we call something distinctively fortunate because it fulfills our own personal desires, and unfortunate because it frustrates the ends we have in mind. While these are clearly subjective, the invisible hand of the natural world recognizes no such distinction. The rainstorm that in its violent fury ruins the harvest of one farmer may save the pending harvest of another. The forest fire that brings the full force of destructive conflagration to the woods releases seeds that would not otherwise germinate. And such is the course of the world and ultimately the governing principle of human destiny. For the Stoic, this is the heart of any earthly wisdom: as the Greek ethicist Epictetus<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.perseus.tufts.edu\/hopper\/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0236:text=disc:book=1:chapter=12&utm_source=chatgpt.com\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">wrote<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, that moral instruction means \u201clearning to desire that things should happen as they do\u201d.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Admittedly, there is something deeply unsettling about this proposition, as it deprives us as individuals of the sacred egoism from which we normally perceive and evaluate the world. We naturally imagine that the moral fabric of reality ought to justify itself before our own experiential tribunal. If in the course of our own life, something causes us pain, we regard the pain itself as evidence that something has gone wrong with the order of the world. Aurelius points to the childishness of this presumption and wholly reverses it. He posits that perhaps it is not the moral governance of the universe that has failed to conform itself to us, but we who have failed to understand our small place within an elegant design much more expansive than our own ego. Curiously, we find this same conclusion being drawn in the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Book of Job<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, when the Lord appears to Job and questions who he is to make moral judgments on the phenomenological order of the universe. Job offers his own intellectual humility in response: \u201cI have uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not \u2026 I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes\u201d (Job 42:2-6).<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Aurelius and his Stoic compatriots are regularly suspicious of the question <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">why<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and the latent meaning that is implied when we pose this type of question. When we ask why something terrible has happened, we are not looking for a materialist explanation for the cause. The physical cause is usually known to us. What we are really demanding is justification for why it happened at all. We are coping with reality, and looking for a substantive explanation of why it has violated the arrangement we believed existed between ourselves and the moral order of the cosmos. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For Aurelius, human beings suffer because we have implicitly converted our understanding of temporary possessions of things into permanent expectations. All of us abstractly know that, in time, our bodies will fail, our friends, family, and heroes will inevitably die, that our social reputations will one day disappear, and eventually even our names too will be forgotten. However, we operate in the world otherwise, perversely, as if an exception has somehow been negotiated on our behalf. For many, death arrives simultaneously as tragedy and insult to our perceived exceptionalism. We are wounded by the loss, but also taken aback that the power of time and nature has been enforced upon us, and imposed a condition we always knew belonged to being alive. The acceptance of fate, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amor Fati<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, is part of recognizing our endowed limitations in mortal clay. \u201cThe Fates guide the willing, but drag the unwilling,\u201d as the Roman orator Seneca<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.stoicsource.com\/seneca\/letters\/107\/?utm_source=chatgpt.com\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">noted<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> some twenty centuries ago. His observation remains uncontradicted in the course of those centuries, because the state of our hubris has not changed in that time. We still resist the course of time, believing that it should be different, for no other reason than that we feel it as such.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The difficulty here is that there is an enormous distance between accepting the proposition of mortality, of the transience of the world, philosophically, and encountering it personally. It is easy enough to take the nebulous position, acknowledging that every child is mortal and is subject to the frailty that is part and parcel of our humanity. However, it is another matter entirely to bury one’s own child. The exercise of philosophy becomes impotent precisely at the point where abstract pain acquires a name and a face. The little inscription in St. Louis Cemetery exposes the limitation of every neat philosophical system. Its singular question (<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pourquoi?) <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">is not intended to be an intellectual inquiry, delving into the fine print of the question of theodicy. It is a protest against the temporal state of affairs.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='sharequotebox'><blockquote class='sharequotestxt'>Morally, we are responsible for what we do with the world that has been given to us, not for the one we wished we inhabited.<\/blockquote><div class='blockquote-share'><span class='s-options'><a class=\"cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_1 cmsmasters-icon-facebook-1 cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts"e=Morally, we are responsible for what we do with the world that has been given to us, not for the one we wished we inhabited.\" target=\"_blank\"><i class=\"fab fa-facebook-square\"><\/i><\/a><a target=\"_blank\" class=\"blockquote_tw cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_3 cmsmasters-icon-twitter cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts&text=Morally, we are responsible for what we do with the world that has been given to us, not for the one we wished we inhabited.&original_referer=\" ><i class=\"fab fa-twitter-square\"><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Again, we are met with the practical directives of Aurelius\u2019s wisdom. He does not answer the protest, as no one truly can. There are no words that could give even a satisfactory explanation for such pain. Instead, he assumes the pragmatic position and attempts to teach us how to live when there is no answer readily present. For much of humanity, peace begins when the demand that reality be otherwise is finally relinquished, when we step away from the insistence that our vision of the way things <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">should <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">be is definitive. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This should not be interpreted to mean a passive state of acceptance of evil in our world. A reasonable observation of ethical principles requires that strong actions be taken precisely whenever action remains possible. This is a prohibition against those things that are beyond our ability to control or even navigate. The happy and perhaps even moral person recognizes our limitations, and does not insist that our happiness depends on controlling what lies beyond our power. Morally, we are responsible for what we do with the world that has been given to us, not for the one we wished we inhabited.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Aurelius asks us to abandon the ghosts of moral pretense. What has happened in the world has entered fully into the structure of reality and cannot be extracted from it. To wish that the events of the past were otherwise is ultimately to wish for the impossible, a different universe, perhaps even a universe beyond causality. Here Stoicism approaches something beyond a simple philosophical proposition; it is the borderland where wisdom transmutes itself into faith. To say that \u201cwhatever happens at all, happens as it should\u201d ultimately requires confidence that the whole possesses an intelligibility invisible from the vantage point of the fragment. The part cannot comprehend the whole; the individual atom is blind to the vastness of the universe. There is humility in such a proposition, because it concedes that the hidden power that animates the universe is under no obligation to make itself comprehensible to us.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There is something severe in this kind of wisdom, but also merciful. We cannot command that the past return what it has rightfully taken. We cannot bargain with time, or exempt ourselves, or those we love from the common fate of all mankind. We can only determine what shall be made of the days that remain to us. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Stat sua cuique dies<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (\u201ceach has his appointed day\u201d) as Jupiter spoke in Virgil\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Aeneid<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, reflecting on the mortality of mankind. That appointed day comes for each of us; what remains within our power is not to escape the limits of our nature, but to determine how we shall live within them.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em><strong>Image<a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/blank-gravestone-with-other-graves-and-trees-in-background-old-stone\/220135797\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> licensed via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is something severe in this kind of wisdom, but also merciful. We cannot command that the past return what it has rightfully taken. We cannot bargain with time, or exempt ourselves, or those we love from the common fate of all mankind. We can only determine what shall be made of the days that remain to us. Stat sua cuique dies (\u201ceach has his appointed day\u201d) as Jupiter spoke in Virgil\u2019s Aeneid, reflecting on the mortality of mankind. That appointed day comes for each of us; what remains within our power is not to escape the limits of our nature, but to determine how we shall live within them.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2683,"featured_media":101923,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"2e01b2b3-2488-437e-8781-93a53f5346fc","beyondwords_preview_token":"99654524-7e2c-486a-9490-b9ceda1c2be1","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[11,2492],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2646],"class_list":["post-101918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-death","pillars-the-human-person"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,2683],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Whatever Happens at all, Happens as It Should\u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There is something severe in this kind of wisdom, but also merciful. We cannot command that the past return what it has rightfully taken. We cannot bargain with time, or exempt ourselves, or those we love from the common fate of all mankind. We can only determine what shall be made of the days that remain to us. Stat sua cuique dies (\u201ceach has his appointed day\u201d) as Jupiter spoke in Virgil\u2019s Aeneid, reflecting on the mortality of mankind. That appointed day comes for each of us; what remains within our power is not to escape the limits of our nature, but to determine how we shall live within them.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101918\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"D. P. Curtin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"10 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101918\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101918\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"D. P. 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We cannot command that the past return what it has rightfully taken. We cannot bargain with time, or exempt ourselves, or those we love from the common fate of all mankind. We can only determine what shall be made of the days that remain to us. Stat sua cuique dies (\u201ceach has his appointed day\u201d) as Jupiter spoke in Virgil\u2019s Aeneid, reflecting on the mortality of mankind. That appointed day comes for each of us; what remains within our power is not to escape the limits of our nature, but to determine how we shall live within them.\u00a0\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101918\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101918\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101918\\\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_220135797.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_220135797.jpg\",\"width\":1400,\"height\":848,\"caption\":\"grave\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101918\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Whatever Happens at all, Happens as It Should\u00a0\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\",\"name\":\"Public Discourse\",\"description\":\"The online journal of The Witherspoon Institute\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\",\"name\":\"Public Discourse\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2018\\\/07\\\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2018\\\/07\\\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png\",\"width\":524,\"height\":179,\"caption\":\"Public Discourse\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/www.facebook.com\\\/PublicDiscourse\\\/\",\"https:\\\/\\\/x.com\\\/PublicDiscourse\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/455aa14a52a62bff6cacbd58bde0709b\",\"name\":\"D. 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He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Scriptorium Project.","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/author\/dermot-curtin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2683"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101918"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101920,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101918\/revisions\/101920"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101918"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=101918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":101906,"date":"2026-09-17T20:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T00:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?p=101906"},"modified":"2026-09-17T20:44:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T00:44:24","slug":"the-bookshelf-a-post-literate-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101906\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bookshelf: A Post-Literate Age?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Earlier this month, I read an <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/2026\/09\/xteink-e-reader-best-technology-years\/688539\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">article at <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Atlantic<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> about an inexpensive Chinese-made e-book device that is hardly any larger than a credit card. This device is so no-frills (no graphics, no touchscreen, no color, no backlight) that buyers are raving about the ability it gives them to dwell on the text of the book it displays without being distracted by their phone\u2019s attention-hogging features. The gizmo even clings magnetically to the back of one\u2019s phone, so all one needs to do is to turn the phone over and begin reading plain text.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Color me a bit skeptical. I am in favor of any stratagem people adopt to read more books, but the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Atlantic<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> writer reported that the little gizmo had enabled him to spend a whopping ten hours reading a large work of nonfiction \u201cover the past several weeks.\u201d Somehow I don\u2019t think that is much to boast about.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And how much will anyone retain from reading books on this little scrolling postage stamp? I have written here before, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2025\/08\/98653\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">last year<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2022\/09\/84546\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">three years before that<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, relating my concerns about the differences between e-books and physical books. (Looks like it\u2019s becoming my annual back-to-school theme.) I haven\u2019t entirely given up e-books, but I recognize that, for me anyway, paper is preferable. Indeed, when I was reading in midsummer for last month\u2019s column on Court-packing, I began Laura Kalman\u2019s book on the subject as a PDF on my tablet. But about a third of the way through, I realized that this was an important work of history with granular detail, and I ordered a hard copy. When it arrived, I reproduced all my markings of the PDF in the physical book, and went on reading the hard copy exclusively\u2014and both more quickly and more deeply.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maryanne Wolf would understand, I think. Wolf is the author of this year\u2019s <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.princeton.edu\/news\/2026\/09\/03\/pre-read-author-maryanne-wolf-urges-incoming-class-read-deeply-courage-and-effort?utm_source=PWB&utm_campaign=b1431724c3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_01-12-2026_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a8ef7fd788-b1431724c3-599485872\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Princeton Pre-Read<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a book selected by President Christopher Eisgruber to be sent to every incoming freshman student and then to form the basis of discussion when they arrive on campus. Wolf is a cognitive neuroscientist who has studied the way our brains learn to read and to understand and retain what we read, and her 2018 book, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/mwntma7e\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, is very good on this subject.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Wolf is not altogether opposed to reading books on screens, but she is properly cautious about it. (Full disclosure: I learned of Wolf\u2019s book only two days before writing this column, and so I got hold of it the quickest way possible and read it … on a screen!) She reports, for instance, a study that showed young readers of a short story had better retention of its plot if they read it on paper than if they read it on a Kindle. There is something about a book\u2019s \u201cconcrete, spatial dimension\u201d that helps us. Constant screen reading\u2014as we all typically do now for our non-book reading for news, entertainment, and communicating with family and friends\u2014even has a baleful impact on our reading of physical books, affecting the ways our eyes move over a page and our brains take up information. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But there\u2019s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper. The personal computers of the 1980s gave us word processing, making the typewriter obsolete; the early internet of the 1990s gave us email (I remember thinking that this was reviving the lost art of letter writing that had been killed by the telephone); and by the turn of the century the bounty promised by the web looked truly impressive: digitized books and primary sources for research, online journals, a proliferation of news and commentary. (Yes, also the logorrhea of early blog culture, now reappearing on Substack.) Then came the smartphone, the jazziest (though not the first) being the iPhone, debuting in 2007. Now in the hands of billons worldwide, these devices have fundamentally changed our daily lives, for good and for ill. They are designed to seize and keep our attention, to amuse us endlessly with ever-changing stimuli, and to lure us into an in-the-cloud world that contains much of the human race\u2019s knowledge yet also makes us dumber. As Wolf writes:<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No self-respecting internal review board at any university would allow a researcher to do what our culture has already done with no adjudication or previous evidence: introduce a complete, quasi-addictive set of attention-compelling devices without knowing the possible side effects and ramifications for the subjects (our kids).<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What we are all experiencing\u2014and Wolf confesses her personal struggle to return to deep reading of books\u2014are \u201cdecreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge.\u201d<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Convinced that consistent, attentive reading is essential for the development of both our reason and our compassion, Wolf is worried about the effects of our contemporary screens on our capacity for self-government. This is even more explicitly the concern of British writer James Marriott, a journalist at <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Times<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Marriott\u2019s <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/829140\/the-new-dark-ages-by-james-marriott\/\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> has been out for a few weeks in the UK, and is soon to be published here in the U.S. (This one, dear reader, I acquired on paper from the publisher.)<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Marriott is a worried man, and he works hard not to be <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">too<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> alarmist\u2014to use his indoor voice, as it were. But <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The New Dark Ages<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: \u201cAs reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.\u201d We fill our eyes (and now increasingly our ears<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">,<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> too) not with the pages of books or even with the extended narratives and arguments to be found in newspapers and magazines, but instead with TikTok and YouTube videos, podcasts, X memes, Instagram posts, and Reddit rants. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='sharequotebox'><blockquote class='sharequotestxt'>There\u2019s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper.<\/blockquote><div class='blockquote-share'><span class='s-options'><a class=\"cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_1 cmsmasters-icon-facebook-1 cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts"e=There\u2019s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper.\" target=\"_blank\"><i class=\"fab fa-facebook-square\"><\/i><\/a><a target=\"_blank\" class=\"blockquote_tw cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_3 cmsmasters-icon-twitter cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts&text=There\u2019s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper.&original_referer=\" ><i class=\"fab fa-twitter-square\"><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nothing seizes our attention for long. New texts arrive, as do emails, Signal chat posts, the endless doomscroll of social media sites, not to mention a constant mix of algorithmically tailored ads. We dance and skip from app to app, alternately dulled with boredom and stoked with anger or shock or lust, somehow unable to look up from our screens and pay proper attention to the nearest live human beings. And those two-dimensional people on our screens? They are easy to divide into \u201cthem\u201d and \u201cus\u201d; even when we address \u201cthem\u201d on social media as \u201cyou,\u201d we increasingly treat them inhumanely\u2014because we can, and because they are not present in the room with us.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Marriott, citing Wolf, notes that reading does not come naturally to human beings the way speech does. It must be learned, and our brains \u201crewire\u201d for the task. And for most of human history, illiteracy was more common than literacy, largely because the technology for reproducing the book was the pen. Gutenberg changed that, and by the eighteenth century, European nations like Britain had become voracious reading cultures. Marriott convincingly argues that the rise of literacy, reaching near-universal levels by the end of the nineteenth century, propelled the emergence of liberal democracies. The pan-European \u201cRepublic of Letters\u201d among elites was followed by the mass democracy of newspaper readers. Parallel to these political developments was the evolution of the novel. Authors like Dumas and Dickens reached millions with novels in serial form whose readers flocked to newsstands for the latest installment. Hugo, Eliot, and Twain formed the sympathies of readers for the travails of others. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The literate age was not immune to vice and animosity, as Marriott frequently pauses to remark. As everyone knows, one of the most intellectually and aesthetically refined societies of the turn of the twentieth century existed in Germany, and the land of Goethe gave us Goebbels. Yet on the whole, Marriott argues, literacy was a force for good. \u201cThe great age of print culture,\u201d however, \u201cwas short-lived,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe historical window in which reading was widespread and existed as society\u2019s main form of entertainment was a brief one.\u201d<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But Marriott is not here speaking of the smartphone; not yet. It was television that first drew our eyes up from the activity of reading to the passivity of watching. As TV stations proliferated (and the remote was invented), channel-surfing was the self-distracting habit, long before doomscrolling. Forty years ago in <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/4v22tfnh\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, Neil Postman was alive to the fact that (as Marriott puts it), \u201cif the written word imposes order on the world, the moving image tends towards disorder.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And now, in the smartphone age? \u201cYou don\u2019t have to spend much time on TikTok before <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Love Island<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> begins to look like Kenneth Clark\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Civilisation<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u201d We have entered what Marriott calls, in one chapter title, \u201cThe Disenlightenment.\u201d Everything must be simplified. Film and TV scripts must put laborious expositions into dialogue, because we are too dumb to follow a plot. Conspiracy theories abound. Podcast celebrities blather about how they have been attacked by demons, and rapt audiences nod gravely. Cabinet secretaries spread disinformation about vaccines. The president of the most powerful nation on earth has apparently not read a single book straight through since the fifth grade, but he knows how to jab his adversaries on social media. \u201cBritain and America are now led by what is probably the least literate political class in the history of their respective democracies.\u201d The rise of leaders and parties promising strength, vengeance on \u201cthem,\u201d and miracle cures for our self-inflicted social and economic ills is the unsurprising result.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As I said, Marriott is a worried man. So am I, when I read passages like this: \u201cMass literacy is a recent phenomenon. So is mass democracy. We simply don\u2019t know whether one can survive without the other.\u201d But, he urges those readers who have made it to the end of his book, \u201creading and a cultural reverence for reading will be around for a long while yet. And that means those of us who value books and reading still have a chance to make our case.\u201d I am by disposition sunny, and rarely morose. I detect similar inclinations in James Marriott. But there is no question that we have some darkness to contend with.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Interestingly, neither Wolf nor Marriott has much of anything to say about artificial intelligence, which at the moment bids fair to take us from dumb to dumber. Wolf published her book in 2018, which may let her off the hook. But Marriott, who keenly appreciates what screens have already done to reading comprehension and to writing, should have taken stock of where AI is already pointing us\u2014to acceleration of our downward trends. But <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The New Dark Ages<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is so good, I look forward to his thoughts on the subject.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em><strong>Image licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/close-up-of-unrecognisable-little-child-lying-in-bed-at-night-holding-mobile-phone-in-front-of-his-face-gadget-addiction-and-excessive-late-night-screen-time-smartphone-overuse\/1665343721\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The <i>New Dark Ages<\/i>, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: \u201cAs reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":378,"featured_media":101912,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"0d5cc06a-dfaf-4029-b26d-32c1b879e575","beyondwords_preview_token":"dcefa74c-73d6-401a-a76a-db2528f644ed","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[11,593,1081],"tags":[],"coauthors":[37],"class_list":["post-101906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-technology","category-the-bookshelf","pillars-education-and-culture"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,378],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Bookshelf: A Post-Literate Age?\u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. 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Franck\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101906\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101906\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Matthew J. 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He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: \u201cAs reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.\u201d\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101906\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101906\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101906\\\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_1665343721.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_1665343721.jpg\",\"width\":1400,\"height\":933,\"caption\":\"smartphone\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101906\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Bookshelf: A Post-Literate Age?\u00a0\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\",\"name\":\"Public Discourse\",\"description\":\"The online journal of The Witherspoon Institute\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\",\"name\":\"Public Discourse\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2018\\\/07\\\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2018\\\/07\\\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png\",\"width\":524,\"height\":179,\"caption\":\"Public Discourse\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/www.facebook.com\\\/PublicDiscourse\\\/\",\"https:\\\/\\\/x.com\\\/PublicDiscourse\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/16f09b2a9d95df91b1922681503a6c07\",\"name\":\"Matthew J. Franck\",\"description\":\"Matthew J. Franck is Senior Contributing Editor of Public Discourse. He is also a visiting Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University, Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, where he chaired the department and taught courses in political philosophy, constitutional law, and American politics. Franck has written, edited, or contributed to books published by the University Press of Kansas, Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press, and has published articles and reviews in\u00a0American Political Thought, the\u00a0Review of Politics, the\u00a0Journal of Church and State, the\u00a0Catholic Social Science Review,\u00a0National Affairs,\u00a0The New Atlantis,\u00a0First Things, the\u00a0Weekly Standard, Touchstone, the\u00a0Claremont Review of Books,\u00a0National Review, and\u00a0Public Discourse. On Twitter he is @MatthewJFranck.\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/author\\\/mfranck\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Bookshelf: A Post-Literate Age?\u00a0 - Public Discourse","description":"The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: \u201cAs reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.\u201d","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101906\/","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Matthew J. 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Employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations stood about <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/digitaleconomy.stanford.edu\/news\/canariesaug26\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">19 percent below where it would have been<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> if it had kept pace with similarly aged workers in less exposed occupations. The researchers found no evidence of widespread economy-wide displacement and stressed that the pattern is descriptive rather than causal. Yet the divergence appears to operate primarily through reduced hiring. The deeper danger is that young workers may lose some of the work through which professional judgment used to be formed.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A different body of evidence points in the opposite direction. In a field study of 5,179 customer-support agents, access to a generative AI assistant <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w31161\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">increased productivity by 14 percent on average and by 34 percent among novice and lower-skilled workers<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. The researchers found suggestive evidence that the system transmitted some of the practices of stronger workers to newer ones and helped novices move up the experience curve faster. AI can accelerate apprenticeship once a novice is inside an institution even as automation shrinks some entry-level tasks that once served as apprenticeship. A recent Trends in Cognitive Sciences review captures the tension: <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/42425850\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">offloading cognition to AI can impede skill acquisition and contribute to skill decay<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, but the risks depend on how the technology is used.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This paradox requires a more discriminating response than either nostalgia or enthusiasm. Some skills should disappear. A demanding practice does not become valuable merely because previous generations had to master it. Yet some inefficient-looking practices are formative: they cultivate mental models, habits of attention, error detection, and practical judgment. The right standard is therefore to preserve the function of a practice when that function forms the person, even when the technique itself can safely disappear. I call the capacity to make that distinction meta-competence: the prudence to know what to delegate, what one must still understand, when to distrust a fluent answer, and when to descend beneath a technological abstraction. Human flourishing in an AI-rich society will depend less on keeping every old skill alive than on knowing which losses make room for higher competence and which losses quietly destroy the path to it.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Dead Difficulty and Formative Difficulty<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The history of programming offers a useful model. Early programmers worked close to the machine, manually translating problems into long sequences of low-level instructions. When IBM released Fortran commercially in 1957, the abstraction was dramatic. IBM\u2019s history records that a problem requiring as many as a thousand manually keyed program instructions could be <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ibm.com\/history\/fortran\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">reduced to forty-seven instructions in Fortran<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Scientists and engineers could state problems in a form closer to mathematical notation while a compiler handled much of the translation.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Few people would argue that programmers should have kept writing machine code simply because doing so was difficult. Fortran removed what we can call dead difficulty: effort that no longer cultivated a capacity necessary for the work humans were being asked to do. The abstraction freed attention for more valuable forms of reasoning and widened access to programming. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Humans routinely reshape their environments to reduce mental work, a phenomenon psychologists describe as <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/27542527\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">cognitive offloading<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Writing, calculators, search engines, and software abstractions all move some cognitive burden outside the individual. Offloading can expand capability when it releases attention for more consequential judgment.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yet abstraction does not eliminate the need for understanding. A high-level programmer who knows nothing about what happens beneath the abstraction may struggle to diagnose a failure, reason about performance, or recognize when the tool\u2019s behavior departs from the intended result. Research on skill retention shows why this matters: a quantitative review found <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1207\/s15327043hup1101_3\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">substantial skill loss after periods of nonuse<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, with the amount depending on the type of skill and the interval without practice. Human-factors research on automation has likewise treated <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/10929828\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">situation awareness, complacency, and skill degradation<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> as central considerations in deciding what to automate and to what degree.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That gives us the other category: formative difficulty. Formative difficulty produces something durable beyond the immediate output. It builds a mental model, a sense for exceptions, a capacity to explain why an answer is right, or the judgment to recognize when ordinary rules no longer apply. Education and professional formation have always mixed dead and formative difficulty. Students calculate by hand what software later calculates instantly. Junior employees produce drafts that supervisors rewrite. Trainees solve problems slowly that experts later handle with tools and shortcuts. Some of this effort should vanish as technology improves. Some looks inefficient precisely because learning is inefficient. The moral error lies in treating the exercise itself as sacred rather than asking what human capacity the exercise serves.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>AI Can Teach and Deprive<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The distinction becomes especially important because novice learning does not follow a simple rule that harder is always better. Research on the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0747563208002161\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">worked-example effect<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> shows that novices can learn more efficiently from carefully structured examples than from unguided problem solving. A later experiment likewise found that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0361476X1000055X\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">example study outperformed problem solving alone<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for novices learning electrical-circuit troubleshooting. Other work shows that students who generate <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1207\/s15516709cog1302_1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">self-explanations while studying examples<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> develop more example-independent understanding. At the same time, research on <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/eric.ed.gov\/?id=EJ800999\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">productive failure<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> shows that struggling with complex problems before receiving full instruction can improve later transfer, and experiments on <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.1152408\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">retrieval practice<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> show that repeatedly retrieving knowledge can strengthen long-term retention more than additional study alone. The point is that the right kind of cognitive work matters for durable competence.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Generative AI can participate in that formation when it is designed and used as a scaffold rather than a substitute for thought. The customer-support study is one example. Education provides another. In a randomized trial involving more than 700 tutors and 1,000 students, Stanford researchers found that a real-time AI system that modeled expert tutoring practices made students <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/scale.stanford.edu\/publications\/tutor-copilot-human-ai-approach-scaling-real-time-expertise\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">four percentage points more likely to master mathematics topics<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, with larger gains for students whose tutors had previously been rated lower. The system made expert patterns available at the point of need while keeping a human tutor engaged.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">AI can also conceal the absence of formation. A 2026 systematic review of generative AI in healthcare found recurring concerns about <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/42445869\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">automation bias, deskilling, and effects on diagnostic reasoning<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. A novice analyst may likewise receive a polished AI draft and mistake fluency for sound reasoning, producing competent-looking work without the mental model needed to recognize a subtle error. A 2025 study of 319 knowledge workers found that higher confidence in generative AI was associated with <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-critical-thinking-self-reported-reductions-in-cognitive-effort-and-confidence-effects-from-a-survey-of-knowledge-workers\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">less self-reported critical-thinking effort<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, while the nature of critical thinking shifted toward verification, integration, and stewardship. That shift can be healthy if verification and stewardship become real disciplines. It becomes dangerous when the worker has never developed enough independent competence to perform them well.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Consider the first draft of an analytical memo. Writing the draft may force a novice to organize evidence, notice gaps, distinguish a claim from its support, and confront uncertainty. If AI writes it, the organization may receive a better document sooner and the novice a useful example of stronger work. Whether this counts as progress depends on what happens next. Does the analyst have to explain the reasoning in his own words, identify the strongest reason the draft could be wrong, trace important claims to evidence, and defend the recommendation against objections? Or does he simply forward polished prose that has never become knowledge? The same visible output can represent either accelerated formation or borrowed performance.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Schools face the same choice. Requiring students to reproduce every old technique would confuse tradition with formation. Letting them bypass every demanding cognitive step would confuse performance with learning. A sensible AI policy therefore asks which experiences cultivate judgment and then redesigns those experiences around the new tool. A novice programmer might study an AI-generated solution, explain each step, predict what will happen when an assumption changes, and then solve a related problem without assistance. Research on scaffolded generative-AI coding support suggests that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/bjet.13589\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">structured guidance can improve coding performance while supporting metacognitive self-regulation<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. The aim is to move difficulty to the place where it forms the capacities that still matter.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='sharequotebox'><blockquote class='sharequotestxt'>Human formation has never meant doing everything the hard way. It means becoming the kind of person who can recognize what the hard way was teaching.<\/blockquote><div class='blockquote-share'><span class='s-options'><a class=\"cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_1 cmsmasters-icon-facebook-1 cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts"e=Human formation has never meant doing everything the hard way. It means becoming the kind of person who can recognize what the hard way was teaching.\" target=\"_blank\"><i class=\"fab fa-facebook-square\"><\/i><\/a><a target=\"_blank\" class=\"blockquote_tw cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_3 cmsmasters-icon-twitter cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts&text=Human formation has never meant doing everything the hard way. It means becoming the kind of person who can recognize what the hard way was teaching.&original_referer=\" ><i class=\"fab fa-twitter-square\"><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<p><b>Prudence About Delegation<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Meta-competence is therefore best understood as a form of prudence rather than a technical trick. The competent user of AI needs more than prompt-writing skill. He must know what understanding the task requires, what errors matter, what needs verification, and whether he could recover if the system failed. Older research on automation bias is relevant here. A systematic review found that people can <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/21685142\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">over-rely on automated decision support and fail to detect new errors it introduces<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. A later review found <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC7651899\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">automation bias even in single tasks when verification was complex<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. The risk is especially serious when the human role is reduced to passive approval, a version of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/29051723\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">out-of-the-loop performance problem<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> long studied in highly automated systems.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Institutions can cultivate prudence deliberately. Before automating a routine task, a school or workplace should ask four questions. What does a novice learn by doing this task? Is that lesson still necessary for competent adult performance? If the task disappears, where will that lesson be learned instead? How will we test whether the person actually possesses the underlying competence rather than merely producing the right output with assistance? These questions make automation a decision about human formation as well as efficiency.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sometimes the answers will justify letting a skill die. Few adults need to perform every calculation by long division, and few programmers need to spend their careers translating formulas into machine instructions. Preserving those techniques universally would consume time better invested in more valuable capabilities. In other cases, the learning function must be rebuilt elsewhere. A junior professional who no longer writes every first draft might be required to diagnose an AI draft before revising it, reconstruct its argument from evidence without looking at the generated prose, handle the exceptions the system cannot resolve, or explain why an apparently plausible answer fails. These are not arbitrary hurdles. They are replacement exercises for capacities the old workflow once formed incidentally.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Assessment must change as well. If a machine can reliably produce an ordinary answer, then human testing should increasingly emphasize abilities that make delegation safe: explanation, verification, transfer to a new case, recovery from error, and judgment under ambiguity. Meta-cognitive monitoring is trainable; a meta-analysis found that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/edu0000674\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">learning-strategy instruction can improve the accuracy with which learners monitor their own understanding<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Meta-competence begins with an accurate sense of what one knows, what one does not know, and when assistance has exceeded one\u2019s ability to evaluate it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The broader challenge in <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/disasteravoidanceexperts.com\/aibook\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">AI adoption at work<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is therefore institutional rather than merely individual. Organizations shape what people practice, what they are rewarded for noticing, and what kinds of mistakes they are expected to catch. A workplace that automates junior tasks without redesigning apprenticeship may enjoy short-term productivity while quietly consuming the human capital on which later expertise depends. A school that bans useful tools may preserve obsolete exercises while failing to teach students how to exercise judgment in the environment they will actually inhabit. Prudence requires a third path: remove dead difficulty, preserve formative difficulty, and create new forms of practice when the old ones disappear.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Technological progress has always involved forgetting. We no longer expect educated people to retain every technique that once mediated competent work, and we should not treat the disappearance of a skill as a human defeat simply because the skill was hard to acquire. The real loss occurs when a society discards the exercise and fails to notice that the exercise was carrying a formative function. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Human formation has never meant doing everything the hard way. It means becoming the kind of person who can recognize what the hard way was teaching. We should let many skills die. The virtue lies in doing so with enough prudence to know what must be reborn at a higher level.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em><strong>Image licensed<a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/concept-robots-and-artificial-intelligence-are-taking-away-jobs-robots-and-humans-are-sitting-waiting-for-a-job-interview-technology-competition-automation-mixed-media-copy-space\/750779912\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI will make many cognitive techniques obsolete, and preserving them for their own sake would mistake difficulty for formation. Schools and workplaces should instead preserve or rebuild the learning functions that cultivate judgment, prudence, and human agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2715,"featured_media":101890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"54e087be-f597-4d9b-b35c-cae85cccd3f2","beyondwords_preview_token":"e22948e7-3ff4-4a05-8a18-72b9f0cbf211","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[13,1089,2476],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2683],"class_list":["post-101884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-institutions","category-the-university","pillars-education-and-culture"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,2715],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Virtue of Letting Skills Die\u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"AI will make many cognitive techniques obsolete, and preserving them for their own sake would mistake difficulty for formation. Schools and workplaces should instead preserve or rebuild the learning functions that cultivate judgment, prudence, and human agency.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101884\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Gleb Tsipursky\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Gleb Tsipursky\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/72892bc9e22b4209ef20ea3c9f0705f0\"},\"headline\":\"The Virtue of Letting Skills Die\u00a0\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-17T00:00:07+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":2008,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_750779912.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Education\",\"Institutions\",\"The University\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/\",\"name\":\"The Virtue of Letting Skills Die\u00a0 - Public Discourse\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101884\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_750779912.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-17T00:00:07+00:00\",\"description\":\"AI will make many cognitive techniques obsolete, and preserving them for their own sake would mistake difficulty for formation. 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His newest book is The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026) https:\/\/disasteravoidanceexperts.com\/aibook","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/author\/gleb-tsipursky\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2715"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101884"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101892,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101884\/revisions\/101892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101884"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=101884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":101879,"date":"2026-09-15T20:00:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T00:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?p=101879"},"modified":"2026-09-11T12:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T16:49:11","slug":"theorys-rise-and-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/","title":{"rendered":"Theory\u2019s Rise and Fall \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Over recent years, a number of books have offered a delightful path into exploring the development of European thought in the twentieth century. The subject, when taken purely in terms of ideas, can prove abstruse and inaccessible. When analyzed as the response of real human beings to real situations, drawing on a tradition of European thought, a clarity emerges, often seasoned with amusing anecdotes of the rivalries, petty and grand, that shaped the interactions of those who helped to form the modern mind.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sarah Bakewell set the standard with <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the Existentialist Caf\u00e9<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, her study of the intertwined lives and thought of Sarte, de Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and Aron. <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/317335\/the-frenchmen-by-emily-eakin\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now, Emily Eakin has written an excellent volume that also addresses French thought.<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Frenchmen, or, My Life in Theory, <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Eakin starts with Sartre and carries the story through to Derrida, focusing on the development and impact of Theory. Her work is learned, thoughtful, and most entertaining, replete with helpful exposition of the various theorists as thinkers and illuminating tittle-tattle about them as people. (Who would have imagined that, when staying at hotels, Lacan would insist that his silk underwear should be sent out and laundered by hand? Or that he ended his career only in the third person, a habit I had previously thought was restricted to superannuated heavyweight boxers?) Her narrative has two more fascinating facets: first, she weaves in her own story\u2014from being mesmerized by Theory as an undergraduate to her current attitude toward it, one that might be characterized as appreciative but critical. Second, she focuses particularly on the reception of Theory in the United States.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The story begins with the displacement of Sartre and the existentialism he represented by a rising set of new thinkers. These thinkers replaced his emphases on the individual and on freedom with attention to those things that lay behind the construction of the individual. Among them, the most prominent were to be Althusser, Bataille, Barthes, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, then Derrida and Foucault. With them, the Cartesian ego was plunged into new levels of complexity. Structuralism made the self a systemic construct, determined by a web of relations within which individual self-consciousness existed and by which it was determined. Eventually, this gave way to post-structuralism, with any notion of meaning being destabilized and endlessly deferred. Individual significance\u2014a central preoccupation of the earlier generation of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty\u2014came to appear an illusion as the spirit of negation tore down everything that presumed to present itself as solid.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There were considerable differences among them. Althusser was an eccentric reader of Marx; Foucault was the great opponent of anything vaguely Hegelian. But what they all shared in common was the central place they gave to language. For each of them, language was not a means of reaching for the truth, but rather, a cage that itself constitutes reality, or a slippery, deceptive thing that had the appearance of stability but was slippery, manipulative, opaque, and elusive. After the trauma of the Occupation, when existentialism offered a useful means of discovering personal significance, post-existentialist thought reflected a Europe where the very possibility of individual significance was increasingly problematic. Structuralism and then post-structuralism provided philosophical rationales for the malaise.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is striking is how Theory became the means for scholars of modest renown in France to become what Eakin dubs \u201cacademostars\u201d in the United States. It is not that intellectuals could not be celebrities in France\u2014the YouTube footage of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Fe91KVvGG2I\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sartre\u2019s funeral<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> demonstrates far otherwise\u2014but America granted the likes of Derrida, de Man, and Foucault special status. This, in turn, raises the interesting question famously posed by Edward Said of what happens to a theory when it travels to a different context. The French theorists covered by Eakin all experienced the Occupation. It is quite understandable that the travails of Europe in the twentieth century provided fertile soil for the questioning of received values, the nature of power, and even the possibilities of meaning and truth. Transposing those onto a pre-9\/11 America, marked by materialist consumerism and a confident belief that it was the shape of the future, even the Hegelian end of history, is interesting. And in America their adoring disciples in the academy generally lacked their deep background in the history of Western philosophy, often masking this lack with a standard academic trick: hiding their ignorance under a surfeit of impenetrable jargon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One way of understanding the ready reception of Theory in the U.S. was that it offered an exciting way of revitalizing the humanities, which had become exhausted and irrelevant. Eakin notes that the scholar John Guillory made a strong case for such a view. But I would suggest another, perhaps more plausible, possibility: for all its origins as a nihilistic function of Europe\u2019s catastrophes, Theory in the U.S. allowed for a playful thumbing of the nose at authority that appeals to the anti-authoritarian and democratizing impulses that have always been part of American culture. And ironically, as Eakin notes, it created a situation where subsequent generations did not feel the need to read the great texts of literature as the Masters of Theory had read\u2014and deconstructed\u2014them on their behalf. It did not revitalize the humanities, but rather disemboweled and fragmented them.\u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One question the book does not really address, but that needs to be raised, is the relationship between the personal lives of intellectuals and the ideas they peddle. And when those intellectuals have, like the subjects of this book, reshaped vast swaths of the university curriculum, the question becomes pressing. These are not people whose personal lives are easily separable from their work. They were not rocket scientists or engineers who happened to have exotic sex lives. Many of them were preoccupied with what would traditionally be called the darker aspects of existence: suffering, pain, violence, death, as with Bataille and Foucault. And many of them indulged in these things in their real lives. With the exception of Deleuze, all of Eakin\u2019s chosen theorists were either womanizers or promiscuous homosexuals. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This does not invalidate their thinking any more than Caravaggio\u2019s murderous violence discredits his paintings, but, to apply some of their own thought to themselves, one wonders how much of their thinking was really designed to liberate them for indulging their sexual impulses. Lacan is a good example: his self-absorption and self-indulgence made me wonder if his deliberately rebarbative and sexualized patois was designed to allow him to (putting it bluntly) get laid as often as possible. And their practical interests scarcely ended with conventional promiscuity. Eakin notes that Foucault campaigned for the abolition of child sex laws but does not mention an (in)famous January 1977 <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.1sur5.org\/definition\/petition_1977\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">open letter in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Le Monde<\/span><\/i><\/a> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">defending the actions of three men facing a criminal trial for having had sexual relations with minors. It was signed by Barthes, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Sartre, though not (despite claims to the contrary) Foucault\u2014an impressive who\u2019s who of French Theory. It says a lot that the serially adulterous Derrida and the bigamous philanderer Paul de Man were two of the more conventionally libidinous.\u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Of all the figures Eakin discusses, this question of thought and life has typically been asked of Paul de Man, who turned out after his death to have been an anti-Semitic Belgian collaborator with the Nazis as well as an accomplished financial fraudster, a bigamist, and an absent father\u2014in short, a sociopathic fake in every area of his life. But de Man has faded from view. Today, the question should be pressed most sharply on Michel Foucault, the theorist of most continuing relevance, and still (by some reports) the most cited thinker in humanities publications.\u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many of us first encountered his work through the important scholars who drew upon it. For me, it was Quentin Skinner, the intellectual historian, and Charles Taylor, the philosophical analyst of culture. But as Eakin indicates, Foucault\u2019s fingerprints are everywhere, from literature to medicine to postcolonial theory. His consistent opposition to power in his own lifetime tended, by virtue of the politics of the sixties and seventies, to ally him generally though not exclusively with the left. Post-COVID, he has proven useful to the right, his concept of biopower standing in judgment of the left\u2019s use of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. And now, with the advent of AI and other technological developments, the question that preoccupied Foucault\u2014the abolition of man\u2014is once again a pressing existential concern well beyond the classroom. Foucault looks set to remain relevant.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But strange to tell, Foucault provides a rather extreme example of the kind of person that his acolytes among post-colonial theorists despise and debunk. According to his erstwhile friend, Guy Sorman, Foucault engaged in pedophilia. Like Gide and Wilde before him, he was a privileged, educated white European male from an affluent background who allegedly traveled to Africa to pay to rape young African boys in graveyards. And yet he continues to be one of the most widely cited theorists in academic literary circles. This goes well beyond the \u201cbenefit of clergy\u201d that George Orwell pinpointed as the reason why an artist such as Salvador Dali was exempted from the moral codes applied to ordinary people. In our age, not all of the culture makers enjoy such exemptions. Lesser academics have lost their careers for sexually harassing students: certainly wicked behavior but not typically criminal and not the equivalent of child rape. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='sharequotebox'><blockquote class='sharequotestxt'>Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human that fully reflect the human experience.<\/blockquote><div class='blockquote-share'><span class='s-options'><a class=\"cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_1 cmsmasters-icon-facebook-1 cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts"e=Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human that fully reflect the human experience.\" target=\"_blank\"><i class=\"fab fa-facebook-square\"><\/i><\/a><a target=\"_blank\" class=\"blockquote_tw cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_3 cmsmasters-icon-twitter cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts&text=Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human that fully reflect the human experience.&original_referer=\" ><i class=\"fab fa-twitter-square\"><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Did he do it? The details seem almost too lurid to be true, and some have sought to deny the claims. But what his defenders have failed to acknowledge is that the alleged behavior is consistent with the amorality of his thought and with what we do know of Foucault\u2019s fascination with sexual transgression and power. And the academic establishment has destroyed people for less while choosing to grant Foucault a pass, even though the alleged behavior seems consistent with his thinking about sexual behavior. He is what the French call a <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">monstre sacr\u00e9<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a public figure of such renown that he is untouchable. For all of his many insights and contributions to cultural analysis, it shames academia that such a man still enjoys high status among intellectuals, and it demands that we face the question of how his personal predilections are connected to his intellectual contributions. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The arc of Eakins\u2019s own relationship to Theory parallels the fortunes of Theory in wider academia. Mesmerized by it as a young student, she has come to see its limitations, just as academia has done, even as aspects of it\u2014e.g., its hermeneutic of suspicion\u2014remain helpful tools. Take Foucault as an example. As Said, by no means a hostile critic, observed, his theories cannot account for historical change or allow for any notion of improvement or progress. And yet who in real life, given the choice, would not choose incarceration for a few decades over being executed by dismemberment for a failed assassination attempt, as was the case with Robert-Fran\u00e7ois Damien?<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is worth noting one aspect of the story that would be missed if Eakin were not as interested in the real lives of her subjects as she is in their thought. Toward the end, she tells of how the later Foucault came to value friendships. It is ironic, given that the premises of his thought would surely have precluded him from giving a theoretical account of friendship that did not reduce it to questions of power and manipulation. Nietzsche, his antecedent in the analysis of power, is never less persuasive and more absurd than when he tries to explain gratitude as a form of revenge. \u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perhaps here we see why Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human\u2014e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude\u2014that fully reflect the human experience. Like so many forms of adolescent iconoclasm, Theory worked well for a while in the classroom, especially among young people with little experience of life. But it ultimately proved unworkable in practice.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/nida-lithuania-11-august-2019-sculpture-of-famous-french-philosopher-jean-paul-sartre-on-the-parnidis-sand-dune\/523389718?prev_url=detail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em><strong>\u00a0Image licensed via Adobe Stock.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human\u2014e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude\u2014that fully reflect the human experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":793,"featured_media":101882,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"f3c13cf8-9aa4-4643-a04a-77b977b3d3d8","beyondwords_preview_token":"e62674c5-dc0a-4131-9185-8cf5bd93dd0e","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"coauthors":[485],"class_list":["post-101879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","pillars-education-and-culture"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,793],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Theory\u2019s Rise and Fall \u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. 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It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human\u2014e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude\u2014that fully reflect the human experience.\u00a0\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101879\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101879\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101879\\\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_523389718_Editorial_Use_Only.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_523389718_Editorial_Use_Only.jpg\",\"width\":1400,\"height\":933,\"caption\":\"Sartre\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101879\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Theory\u2019s Rise and Fall \u00a0\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\",\"name\":\"Public Discourse\",\"description\":\"The online journal of The Witherspoon Institute\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\",\"name\":\"Public Discourse\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2018\\\/07\\\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2018\\\/07\\\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png\",\"width\":524,\"height\":179,\"caption\":\"Public Discourse\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/logo\\\/image\\\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/www.facebook.com\\\/PublicDiscourse\\\/\",\"https:\\\/\\\/x.com\\\/PublicDiscourse\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/c1734b1d91c07b5e0a5b719e97b8e801\",\"name\":\"Carl R. Trueman\",\"description\":\"Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC. For academic year 2025-26 he is the Busch Family Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of numerous books, including The Desecration of Man,\u00a0forthcoming from Sentinel on April 7th.\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/author\\\/carl-trueman\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Theory\u2019s Rise and Fall \u00a0 - Public Discourse","description":"Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human\u2014e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude\u2014that fully reflect the human experience.\u00a0","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Carl R. Trueman","Est. reading time":"10 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/"},"author":{"name":"Carl R. Trueman","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/person\/c1734b1d91c07b5e0a5b719e97b8e801"},"headline":"Theory\u2019s Rise and Fall \u00a0","datePublished":"2026-09-16T00:00:21+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/"},"wordCount":2090,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_523389718_Editorial_Use_Only.jpg","articleSection":["Book Reviews"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/","name":"Theory\u2019s Rise and Fall \u00a0 - Public Discourse","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_523389718_Editorial_Use_Only.jpg","datePublished":"2026-09-16T00:00:21+00:00","description":"Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human\u2014e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude\u2014that fully reflect the human experience.\u00a0","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_523389718_Editorial_Use_Only.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_523389718_Editorial_Use_Only.jpg","width":1400,"height":933,"caption":"Sartre"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101879\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Theory\u2019s Rise and Fall \u00a0"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","name":"Public Discourse","description":"The online journal of The Witherspoon Institute","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization","name":"Public Discourse","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","width":524,"height":179,"caption":"Public Discourse"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/PublicDiscourse\/","https:\/\/x.com\/PublicDiscourse"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/person\/c1734b1d91c07b5e0a5b719e97b8e801","name":"Carl R. 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He is the author of numerous books, including The Desecration of Man,\u00a0forthcoming from Sentinel on April 7th.","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/author\/carl-trueman\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/793"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101879"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101883,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101879\/revisions\/101883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101879"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=101879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":101874,"date":"2026-09-14T20:00:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T00:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?p=101874"},"modified":"2026-09-11T12:39:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T16:39:23","slug":"america-saved-the-jews-can-the-jews-save-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101874\/","title":{"rendered":"America Saved the Jews. Can the Jews Save America?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">America saved the Jews many times over. On April 29, 1945, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/encyclopedia.ushmm.org\/content\/en\/article\/dachau\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">American infantry liberated Dachau<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and found a death train outside the gate, over two thousand of those aboard already dead; Lt. Col. Felix Sparks <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/remember.org\/witness\/sparks\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">wrote that the scene numbed his senses<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. His men freed the roughly thirty thousand survivors. Three years later, with <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/encyclopedia.ushmm.org\/content\/en\/article\/displaced-persons\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">hundreds of thousands of European Jews still in displaced-persons camps<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, Harry Truman <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.trumanlibrary.gov\/education\/presidential-inquiries\/recognition-israel\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">recognized the new State of Israel eleven minutes after it declared its existence<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yet America\u2019s protection of the Jews goes back to the nation\u2019s founding. The rationale for protecting these \u201cHebrews\u201d came from ancient Jewish wisdom, and that same wisdom may now let the Jews honor the covenant in return by helping America keep what it borrowed.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 1790, George Washington <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/founders.archives.gov\/documents\/Washington\/05-06-02-0135\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Everyone quotes the letter\u2019s famous promise of a government that gives \u201cto bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.\u201d But Washington didn\u2019t write that phrase: Moses Seixas, the congregation\u2019s warden, had sent him those words the day before, and Washington returned them as a courtesy.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The line Washington added himself is the one worth remembering. He promised that every man would sit \u201cunder his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid\u201d\u2014a line from the Jewish prophet Micah that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mountvernon.org\/library\/digitalhistory\/digital-encyclopedia\/article\/vine-and-fig-tree\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Washington used nearly fifty times across his correspondence<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. A Hebrew image was what he reached for by reflex when he wanted to say what the republic was for.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That reflex ran deeper than one letter. <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/lsupress.org\/9780807115060\/the-origins-of-american-constitutionalism\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Scripture was the most-cited body of text in the founding era’s political writing<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and its two biggest contributions to the republic are structural, not decorative. Genesis supplied the premise that a human being made in the image of God carries a dignity no government conferred and none can revoke\u2014the idea beneath \u201ccreated equal\u201d and \u201cendowed by their Creator.\u201d Deuteronomy supplied the form: a covenant sworn not only by the present generation but by <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sefaria.org\/Deuteronomy.29.14-15?lang=bi\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“those who are not with us here this day”<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, consent to government across time rather than government by conquest. Even the word \u201cfederal\u201d records the debt, from the Latin <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">foedus<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, covenant, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Fountainhead-Federalism-Bullinger-Covenantal-Tradition\/dp\/0664221815\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a term the Puritans took from Jewish sources into secular politics<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. For <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/books\/paperback\/9780691029122\/the-myth-of-american-individualism\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the Reformed traditions that carried it<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2014Congregationalist, Presbyterian\u2014that covenant vocabulary was not one source of political legitimacy among several, but the master one.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">America\u2019s founders grafted this ideal\u2014a government bound by law, answerable to people not yet born\u2014onto a republic that would have to survive its own disagreements. That graft may be incomplete: a covenant meant to bind the unborn needs a discipline of argument that keeps the losing side inside it, not law alone. As America faces what <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.encounterbooks.com\/books\/american-secession\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">F. H. Buckley argues is already two nations in all but the force of law<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the Jews might have something to offer.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>A Jewish Discipline for Disagreement<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Jewish tradition has a discipline for staying in argument with people you will still have to live with tomorrow\u2014\u05de\u05d7\u05dc\u05d5\u05e7\u05ea \u05dc\u05e9\u05dd \u05e9\u05de\u05d9\u05dd, disagreement for the sake of Heaven\u2014and America, to survive another 250 years, would do well to recover it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Mishnah, an old code of Jewish law, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sefaria.org\/Pirkei_Avot.5.17\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">supplies the phrase and a test along with it<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. A dispute that is for the sake of Heaven endures, it says, and one that is not, does not. Its example of the first is the rabbis Hillel and Shammai, whose schools argued for generations without either side trying to silence the other. Its example of the second is Korach, who led a rebellion against Moses\u2019s leadership in the wilderness and lost. Notice what the Mishnah declines to do. It names both sides of the Hillel-Shammai dispute, but only Korach\u2019s side of his dispute with Moses, because it describes how an argument was conducted; it does not rule on who deserved to win.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jewish tradition sorts disagreements into two kinds: arguments about truth, and disputes about power. An argument about truth can run for generations, each side sharpening its case against the other, because truth does not run out from being used\u2014the argument has worth no matter who wins. It can even end in a binding ruling and remain what it was: the loser forfeits the decision and keeps his standing.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But a dispute over who gets to decide what is true has one possible ending: someone wins, and the loser forfeits his standing along with the ruling. The energy spent fighting over who decides produces nothing.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Talmud, the centuries of rabbinic debate built up around the Mishnah, remembers this pair of schools above the rest for how they disagreed. It reports that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sefaria.org\/Eruvin.13b.10\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">after three years of dispute, a voice from heaven declared that both schools spoke words of the living God\u2014and that the law follows Hillel<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Both schools were right; the law could follow only one. Why Hillel? Because, the Talmud answers, his school was patient under provocation; it taught Shammai\u2019s rulings alongside its own; more than that, it stated Shammai\u2019s position first, by name, before its own. The law followed the school that was more gracious to the school it defeated. To state your opponent\u2019s case first, and state it well, is a harder discipline than our courts or our politics now ask of anyone.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And Jewish law does not erase the losing argument. The Talmud records the losing opinion anyway, on purpose, in case a later court finds merit in it\u2014an argument kept for a reader who does not yet exist. It is the covenant of Deuteronomy in miniature, held open for those who are not with us here this day.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">American courts keep the same habit, whatever its lineage: the dissent is published beside the majority, binds no one, and waits. The dissenting judge returns to the bench, not eradicated for being wrong, because the truth is a process. The rules of the institution require this; public argument has no such rule. It had only a habit, and habits are what get lost.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>When Jews Forget Their Own Method<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No one has lost the habit more visibly than American Jews themselves.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Three years after October 7, American Jewish opinion has split, not into two clean camps but into a widening gap: a majority still connected to Israel, and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/short-reads\/2024\/04\/02\/how-us-jews-are-experiencing-the-israel-hamas-war\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a growing minority, up ten points since 2020, saying the United States is too supportive of it<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. On top of that sits a separate fight over who defines the terms: when <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/diversity\/religion\/2025\/01\/28\/ihra-antisemitism-definition-adopted-harvard-prompts-backlash\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Harvard adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the backlash came from students arguing that the definition itself chills speech<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Both are fights over who draws the line and who is excluded once it is drawn, not arguments over a shared question.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The exclusion is no longer only rhetorical. In 2024, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/quick-takes\/2026\/08\/07\/u-minnesota-pays-holocaust-scholar-after-job-offer-pulled\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the University of Minnesota offered a Holocaust scholar the directorship of its genocide-studies center, then rescinded the offer five days later after donors objected to his describing Gaza as genocide and warned that fundraising would “grind to a halt”; the university later paid $250,000 to settle<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. That is money paid to exclude rather than persuade\u2014a dispute over who decides, not over what is true.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A fight over who decides leaves no later court to appeal to. Once the other side is gone, there is no argument left to keep.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">None of this is unique to the Jews. The same instinct\u2014disqualify the opponent rather than answer him\u2014now runs through American public argument at large.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>An American Answer<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some will object that disciplined argument is useless against people who treat every claim as a bid for power. But America has met this test before, without any Jewish vocabulary at all. In 1858, Stephen Douglas proposed to settle slavery in the territories by popular vote, professing not to care which way the vote went. Lincoln refused to trade the question of right for the question of who votes: <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nps.gov\/liho\/learn\/historyculture\/debate7.htm\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“No man,” he said, “can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down.”<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Two years later at Cooper Union, he inverted the oldest creed of power, might makes right, into <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.abrahamlincolnonline.org\/lincoln\/speeches\/cooper.htm\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“let us have faith that right makes might.”<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Lincoln never persuaded Douglas. He argued as though the question had an answer, in front of people who had not yet decided, and within two years they came his way. Recovering the practice takes no national consensus about truth, only enough people willing to argue as though truth were the point while others are still listening.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We American Jews could be some of those people. We alone cannot save this country. But what we kept through the centuries of exile we can practice again and teach as citizens: the method of arguing for truth instead of for power, of winning by being right rather than by being loud enough, funded enough, or connected enough to keep everyone else from speaking.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sefaria.org\/Pirkei_Avot.1.14\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hillel framed the teaching as three questions<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? The practice has to be recovered at home first, inside the community that carried it for two thousand years and lately let it fall quiet. When I am for myself alone, what am I? Then it has to be handed outward, because a discipline kept inside one community was never the point of keeping it. If not now, when? The country that borrowed the covenant is losing its ability to maintain it.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For centuries without a country of their own, Jews kept that discipline alive. We are home now, sheltered under this nation\u2019s fig tree, Americans as fully as anyone and Jews still, and the discipline is the debt we can repay: the habit of fighting over the truth without trying to destroy each other. It is what keeps a fig tree standing, so that everyone beneath it might sit, at last, with none to make them afraid.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em><strong>Image licensed<a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/closeup-of-hebrew-word-abraham-in-torah-page-selective-focus-banner\/422516834\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Americans are fighting over who decides what\u2019s true. Jews once argued for truth itself. Can Jews teach America how to argue yet remain united?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2694,"featured_media":101877,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"80012b4f-a8b5-478b-8be2-4aaee609359c","beyondwords_preview_token":"4ec8d889-6822-43a4-b436-850116a63931","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[1193],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2657],"class_list":["post-101874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-judaism","pillars-education-and-culture"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,2694],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>America Saved the Jews. 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Oranburg\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101874\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101874\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Seth C. Oranburg\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/dbc23ca9a8fe769809f1f2d4ea980e2b\"},\"headline\":\"America Saved the Jews. 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Billions of creatures crammed into horrid conditions and summarily slaughtered, just because it\u2019s convenient for us. In his book <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/books\/9780312319731\/dominion\/\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dominion<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the evangelical Christian Matthew Scully wrote that his pro-life views helped inform his compassion for farm animals and revulsion toward their treatment. He didn\u2019t need to convince me; I\u2019d abjured meat years before. But I couldn\u2019t help wondering: should this compassion also flow in the opposite direction? If I was revolted by the brutality of factory farming, could I really be <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">just<\/span><\/i> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">fine <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">with abortion?<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It continued with Pope Francis and Pope Leo. Moral giants. Standing up for peace, for the dispossessed, for protecting the least of us. American Democrats fell in love with them, and they were right to. But both popes <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/capp-usa.org\/2023\/05\/pope-francis-on-abortion\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">have<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> been <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncronline.org\/vatican\/pope-leo-warns-war-back-vogue-hardens-stance-abortion\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">clear<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that opposing abortion is part of their social ethos. It\u2019s one of the ways they champion the least of us. Democrats always seem to gloss over that part.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It continued with the pro-life advocates. Not all of them. Not the televangelists who use abortion as a culture-war line to keep donations flowing. Not the online trolls who use abortion rhetoric as an <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/show\/researchers-report-stunning-surge-of-misogyny-in-schools\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">outlet<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for their gross misogyny. But the other pro-life advocates. Leah Libresco Sargeant, whose pro-life advocacy is shot through with a message of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/undpress.nd.edu\/9780268210335\/the-dignity-of-dependence\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">dignity<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.otherfeminisms.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">feminism<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Matthew Loftus, the pro-life doctor who moved his family to <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/matthewandmaggie.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">rural Kenya<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> because that\u2019s where he could do the greatest lifesaving work. Kathryn Jean Lopez, the writer who lives her pro-life ethic by championing <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.oursundayvisitor.com\/mercy-a-point-of-reference-for-charitable-works\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">compassion for all<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and malice toward none. And some of the others: Patrick T. Brown, the pro-life family scholar who sends <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/ptbwrites.substack.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">weekly fusillades<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of policy ideas to help struggling families. Patrick Deneen, the post-liberal pro-lifer whose political ideas are so bracingly heterodox that even Barack Obama has <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/06\/16\/politics\/barack-obama-reading-list-mitch-landrieu\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">praised<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> them. The <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.solidarity-party.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">American Solidarity Party<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a fledgling U.S. political party that has a pro-life policy position together with other policy positions that would have most Democrats nodding along in approval.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It continued with <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dobbs<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Hours after <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dobbs<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> issued in June 2022, my kids\u2019 preschool director led the parents in a sorrowful moment of silence for the decision, prefaced by a short speech about how awful the decision was. But I didn\u2019t need a preschool director to lecture me on constitutional law. I\u2019d written law review articles on constitutional law. And <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dobbs <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">got it right. No clause of the Constitution guarantees a right to abortion.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It continued with a recognition of just how stifling the Democratic monoculture has become on abortion. The days of the culturally conservative pro-life Democrat are all but gone. Former Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards was one of the last. Now, to be a Democrat in good standing, it seems you must favor unrestricted abortion up to viability, if not <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/19thnews.org\/2026\/08\/massachusetts-abortion-law-no-limit-pregnancy\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">beyond<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It continued with a glance around the world and a recognition that abortion restrictions do not create misogynistic hellholes. According to the World Economic Forum, the United States currently ranks <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.weforum.org\/publications\/global-gender-gap-report-2025\/in-full\/benchmarking-gender-gaps-2025\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">forty-second<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for gender equality, and most of the countries above us have stricter abortion restrictions than the average blue American state. Some of them (like Germany) have quite significant restrictions. Others (like Chile) virtually ban the procedure.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It continued with a recognition of how brutal abortion can be, particularly as the fetus continues to develop. A second-trimester fetus can <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ehd.org\/dev_article_unit10.php\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">suck her thumb<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. She can <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.whattoexpect.com\/pregnancy\/fetal-development\/fetal-touch\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">feel her surroundings<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. And aborting her is a bloody business. It typically involves suctioning her out of the uterus with such force that she\u2019s literally <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cato.org\/commentary\/certain-us-abortions-tear-fetus-apart-isis-style\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">torn apart<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It continued in despair as wildfire smoke from ever-hotter summers flooded our skies, fouling our air so badly that my children couldn\u2019t safely play outside. Social conservatives should be natural allies in the fight against climate change, given that they value tradition and dislike wrenching change. But it\u2019s much easier for Democrats to build alliances with social conservatives if Democrats <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2021\/12\/79334\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">concede some ground<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> on the issues that social conservatives hold most dear. And yes, that certainly includes abortion.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s how it started, that\u2019s how it continued. I don\u2019t know where it will end. Not for myself, not for my party, not for my country. But I do know that we\u2019re not in a good place right now.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>A Journey for the Pro-Life Movement? <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The pro-life movement should also consider some journeying, as it\u2019s not in a very good place, either. The years since <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dobbs <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">have seen an <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kff.org\/womens-health-policy\/abortion-trends-before-and-after-dobbs\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">increase<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in abortion rates.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We\u2019ve also seen a raft of referenda liberalizing abortion laws, even in <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Missouri_Amendment_3,_Right_to_Reproductive_Freedom_Initiative_(2024)\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">conservative<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Montana_CI-128,_Right_to_Abortion_Initiative_(2024)\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">states<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Finally, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves pro-choice versus pro-life has widened to an <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/1576\/abortion.aspx\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">eleven-point pro-choice lead<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, up from a statistical tie in 2020. Given these data points, most observers would conclude that whatever the pro-life movement is doing is not working.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What would work better? The conventional wisdom is for pro-lifers to moderate their position on abortion. But I\u2019d offer different advice: pro-lifers shouldn\u2019t necessarily moderate on abortion. Instead, they should moderate on <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">everything else<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What I mean is this: voters do not consider abortion in a vacuum. The abortion debates in this country are also wrapped up in a red versus blue battle over other values, issues, and ways of life. So long as the pro-life movement is part of the GOP coalition, the attractiveness of the pro-life message is affected by the attractiveness of the GOP. And it\u2019s hard to grow the pro-life tent if the pro-life movement is bound up with a hard-right GOP that is repellent to centrist and center-left voters.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To illustrate this point, consider two powerful political figures who are both associated with the pro-life movement. The first is careful to moderate and triangulate his pro-life views to appeal to more centrist voters. To that end, he <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2024\/10\/01\/trump-abortion-veto-national-ban-00182091\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">opposes<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> national abortion bans, even after fifteen weeks. He\u2019s <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2019\/may\/19\/trump-backs-abortion-in-cases-of-or-incest-contradicting-alabama-law\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">advocated<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> exceptions in cases like rape and incest. He <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2024\/08\/29\/trump-measure-overturn-florida-six-week-abortion-ban-00176809\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">criticized<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Florida\u2019s six-week abortion ban for not giving pregnant women enough time to make their decision. By contrast, the second figure is much more dogmatic. He <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/thegoodnewsroom.org\/pope-delivers-fierce-defense-of-the-unborn-in-address-to-diplomatic-corps\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">opposes<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> abortion from conception onward. If he favors any exceptions, he hasn\u2019t been public about it. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class='sharequotebox'><blockquote class='sharequotestxt'>The pro-life movement would be in a stronger place if it served as a moderating influence within the GOP.<\/blockquote><div class='blockquote-share'><span class='s-options'><a class=\"cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_1 cmsmasters-icon-facebook-1 cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts"e=The pro-life movement would be in a stronger place if it served as a moderating influence within the GOP.\" target=\"_blank\"><i class=\"fab fa-facebook-square\"><\/i><\/a><a target=\"_blank\" class=\"blockquote_tw cmsmasters_social_icon cmsmasters_social_icon_3 cmsmasters-icon-twitter cmsmasters_social_icon_color\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?after=2026-08-06T00%3A00%3A00&page=1&rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts&text=The pro-life movement would be in a stronger place if it served as a moderating influence within the GOP.&original_referer=\" ><i class=\"fab fa-twitter-square\"><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can probably guess where this is going. The first figure is Donald Trump; the second figure is Pope Leo. Now ask yourself: which figure is more likely to persuade centrist or center-left voters on abortion? Trump, who is feared and disdained by the left half of the country? Or Leo, who is <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/abcnews.com\/Politics\/americans-favorable-view-pope-leo-negative-reaction-trumps\/story?id=132672462\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">widely admired<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">? To ask the question is to answer it. Trump is more moderate on abortion, but Leo is better positioned to persuade the moderates because his overall image and ethos is more attractive to them. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thus, on issues <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">beyond<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> abortion, the pro-life movement has a vested interest in cultivating a humane and center-right GOP over a hard-right GOP. They do not have the luxury of being neutral on \u201cnon-abortion issues,\u201d because the palatability of their message is affected by the palatability of the overall GOP brand. When the GOP ravages foreign aid, pro-lifers should <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/02\/10\/opinion\/pro-life-foreign-aid-pepfar.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">speak up<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. When the GOP blocks clean energy, pro-lifers should speak up. Whenever the GOP veers in a hard-right direction, pro-lifers should speak up, because it\u2019s not in their interests to be part of a hard-right political coalition.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is this advice to the pro-life movement also self-interested? Absolutely. As a Democrat and an American, I much prefer a humane and center-right GOP over a hard-right GOP. But self-interested advice can still be correct advice. The pro-life movement would be in a stronger place if it served as a moderating influence within the GOP.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The counterargument would be that, given the vast abortion gulf between the parties, pro-lifers should be loyal and uncritical supporters of whatever the GOP policy agenda happens to be, on the theory that GOP political control is the overriding consideration. To that counterargument, I would ask: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">how\u2019s that working out for you? <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The last several years have seen GOP control in a majority of states, and GOP federal control since early 2025. But national abortion rates keep rising and the share of pro-life Americans keeps dropping. Even a <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">deus ex machina<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> scenario where the FDA yanks approval of mifepristone would not turn the ship. Misoprostol-only chemical abortions would still be available, as would abortion medication shipped anonymously from overseas, as would cheap interstate travel to pro-choice states. The only way to substantially reduce abortion in this country is through persuasion. And again: the pro-life movement would be better-positioned to persuade moderates if it\u2019s seen as a moderating influence on the GOP. Less Trump, more Leo. That\u2019s how you build a bigger pro-life tent.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em><strong>\u00a0Image licensed <a href=\"https:\/\/stock.adobe.com\/images\/animal-shadows-on-the-flag-democrats-vs-republicans-are-in-ideological-duel-on-the-american-flag-in-american-politics-us-parties-are-represented-by-either-the-democrat-donkey-or-republican-elephant\/525731389\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">via Adobe Stock.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So long as the pro-life movement is part of the GOP coalition, the attractiveness of the pro-life message is affected by the attractiveness of the GOP. And it\u2019s hard to grow the pro-life tent if the pro-life movement is bound up with a hard-right GOP that is repellent to centrist and center-left voters.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1285,"featured_media":101872,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","beyondwords_generate_audio":"1","beyondwords_integration_method":"rest-api","beyondwords_project_id":"54010","beyondwords_content_id":"ee48db3b-fe27-4b30-9c96-c4638fefc6f2","beyondwords_preview_token":"45af38c3-eabc-4f43-9622-8e49af46d144","beyondwords_player_content":"","beyondwords_player_style":"standard","beyondwords_language_code":"en_US","beyondwords_language_id":"","beyondwords_title_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_body_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_summary_voice_id":"8540","beyondwords_error_message":"","beyondwords_disabled":"","beyondwords_delete_content":"","beyondwords_podcast_id":"","beyondwords_hash":"","publish_post_to_speechkit":"","speechkit_hash":"","speechkit_generate_audio":"","speechkit_project_id":"","speechkit_podcast_id":"","speechkit_error_message":"","speechkit_disabled":"","speechkit_access_key":"","speechkit_error":"","speechkit_info":"","speechkit_response":"","speechkit_retries":"","speechkit_status":"","speechkit_updated_at":"","_speechkit_link":"","_speechkit_text":""},"categories":[4,2489],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1198],"class_list":["post-101867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abortion","category-political-parties","pillars-politics-and-law","pillars-sexuality-and-family","pillars-the-human-person"],"acf":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[1291,1285],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>A Democrat\u2019s Ideological Journey on Abortion\u00a0 - Public Discourse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So long as the pro-life movement is part of the GOP coalition, the attractiveness of the pro-life message is affected by the attractiveness of the GOP. And it\u2019s hard to grow the pro-life tent if the pro-life movement is bound up with a hard-right GOP that is repellent to centrist and center-left voters.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101867\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Joshua Sohn\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Joshua Sohn\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/b63599d6ecfbaaccc569ffe2c6b00a7c\"},\"headline\":\"A Democrat\u2019s Ideological Journey on Abortion\u00a0\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-14T00:00:28+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1490,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_525731389.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Abortion\",\"Political parties\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/\",\"name\":\"A Democrat\u2019s Ideological Journey on Abortion\u00a0 - Public Discourse\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/101867\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/AdobeStock_525731389.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-14T00:00:28+00:00\",\"description\":\"So long as the pro-life movement is part of the GOP coalition, the attractiveness of the pro-life message is affected by the attractiveness of the GOP. 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And it\u2019s hard to grow the pro-life tent if the pro-life movement is bound up with a hard-right GOP that is repellent to centrist and center-left voters.\u00a0","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101867\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101867\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101867\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_525731389.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/AdobeStock_525731389.jpg","width":1400,"height":933,"caption":"political parties"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2026\/09\/101867\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"A Democrat\u2019s Ideological Journey on Abortion\u00a0"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","name":"Public Discourse","description":"The online journal of The Witherspoon Institute","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#organization","name":"Public Discourse","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/WIS-PD-AltLogo-FULL-Website.png","width":524,"height":179,"caption":"Public Discourse"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/PublicDiscourse\/","https:\/\/x.com\/PublicDiscourse"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/#\/schema\/person\/b63599d6ecfbaaccc569ffe2c6b00a7c","name":"Joshua Sohn","description":"Joshua L. Sohn is an attorney and writer in Washington, DC. 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