More than half a century ago, the not-yet-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre offered a “doom-laden” depiction of modern education. Noting that our educational system reflects “the moral content of our society,” MacIntyre asserted that modernity is obsessed with “getting on.”

One gets on from one stage to the next on an endless conveyor belt. One goes to a primary school in order to pass the eleven plus in order to go to a grammar school in order to go to a university in order to get a degree in order to get a job in order to rise in one’s profession in order to get a pension. And those who have fallen out are not people who have found a true end; they are mostly people who have got off, or have been pushed off, the conveyor belt.

MacIntyre’s words reflect a growing disillusion with modern education. Critics have long argued that our meritocracy doesn’t live up to its noble aspirations. Now, the very ideal of meritocracy has come under fire. In The Cult of Smart, Freddie deBoer decries our self-deceiving obsession with intelligence as a stand-in for value—which is deceptive, he argues, because academic ability is unequally dispersed. Not everyone can succeed in college. Likewise, in The Tyranny of Merit, the political philosopher Michael Sandel describes our meritocracy as “credentialist,” harmful even to those who succeed, to say nothing of those who fall off MacIntyre’s proverbial conveyor belt.

These authors crystallize a widespread unease. On one hand, many people experience education as a frenzied series of benchmarks: to get good grades, to score well on tests, to finesse admissions essays, to get into top schools, to repeat the grade-test-finesse cycle for a good job or more degrees. On the other hand, the exact goal of this education is vague. The grades, test scores, the bottom rung of a career ladder—they often seem to be the point.

Our education system does, however, advance an implicit goal, one that goes hand-in-hand with the absence of a declared telos. That goal could be described as therapeutic—whatever affirms one’s inward self-understanding. College has, after all, come to be seen as a primary means by which to “find yourself” and to advance toward any possibility, any career, whatever you’ve always dreamed to be. In light of this aim, we believe that public education has lost its way.

The therapeutic aim stands in contrast with the proper goal of public education, which we might call the republican aim. If we aspire to self-rule—not dependence on autocrats for political order or landed gentry for economic survival—education inevitably plays a central role in our political life. It should be a public education that empowers the common person in the project of self-government.

The Promise and Peril of Public Education

In light of its republican aim, public education ought to serve at least two functions. The first is political, a training in the liberal arts or the art of being free. Today many define freedom as merely the absence of constraints—the freedom to do what you want. An older understanding, from which the liberal arts tradition emerged, equates freedom with the capacity for responsible self-rule. Far from being the emancipation from constraints on one’s desires, freedom in this older sense involves an emancipation from those desires. As such, freedom must be learned.

Herein lies the political impetus for the liberal arts. We become free through taught habits and dispositions that empower us to govern ourselves. They are inculcated through both a reverence for the past and the specific wisdom of that older tradition of liberty. Thus, the liberal arts resist the input-output model of education, schooling as a means to the next stage.

Second, public education should serve a practical function, as preparation for becoming a contributing member of one’s community. To be productive, one must be proficient in certain skills. It’s hard to excel at any role, at work or in the home, if you can’t read or write. Most occupations require particular talents that must be learned and practiced. Such training was traditionally contrasted with the liberal arts and referred to as a “servile” education—training which is not an end in itself. It is, after all, meant to follow the input-output model.

However “servile,” this education is neither inferior nor unnecessary. It complements the liberal arts, presupposing that everyone can contribute and that they should be empowered to do so. It is a part of a cohesive public education that cultivates not only able workers and parents but also self-governing citizens, capable of supporting themselves and their families.

The republican aim of public education has, however, been gradually overcome by the therapeutic. As MacIntyre explained, the moral content of our educational system reflects the moral content of society, which he describes as fundamentally utilitarian. We are incapable of agreeing on ends, so we instead appeal to placeholders such as “the greatest good” or “public welfare.” Many of our most dominant moral assumptions—the background premises to which we can appeal when making public arguments—reflect this ostensibly mandatory silence on ends. And these assumptions help explain how college has become a cultural obsession.

Our public arguments frequently fall back on an appeal to expertise, effectiveness, and professional technique—what Darel E. Paul calls “managerialism.” Paul writes:

Managerialism sees society as a collection of organizations. Those organizations are themselves made up of smaller organized groups down to the basic group units of society. Not only does each group require internal management to realize its goals; the entire society does as well. Any positive order reached spontaneously through the interactions of individuals and groups is either impossible or inefficient. Positive order must be intentionally produced through expert managerial technique. In fact, this is the way all organizational goods are realized.

This is no mere deference to expertise on narrow questions of scientific inquiry. Rather, managerialism entails the delegation of common responsibility to a managerial class, reducing normative judgement to an ostensibly neutral positive measurement.

Equal in its cultural sway is what Carl R. Trueman and others have called “expressive individualism.” Drawing from the work of Philip Rieff, Trueman shows how our culture valorizes the individual’s deeply felt sense of identity. This tendency is fundamentally therapeutic, calling for not only the acceptance but the affirmation of each person’s inward sense of self. Expressive individualism makes former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s evergreen maxim of modern freedom both plausible and compelling: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Both moral paradigms share an ostensible neutrality. Managerialism falls back on expertise and science. Expressive individualism valorizes personal choice and demands that institutions remain silent on the mystery and meaning of life. They promote the ideal type of the unconstrained individual, creating policies that remove constraints. Ultimately, managerialism and expressive individualism are but two sides of the same coin. The removal of constraints warrants an expansive managerial apparatus; the apparatus enables the removal of constraints. Those who embrace most fully the values of expressive individualism are likely to be the best managers, with only loose attachments.

These complementary paradigms provide the rationale for our fixation on college. According to managerialism, the tracked life, the “conveyor belt,” is a laudable goal. Higher education functions as a pipeline to the professional-managerial class, the means by which bureaucratic expertise is disseminated. Meanwhile, college is the perfect rite of passage for the expressive individual, as students are told to find themselves and go as far as their dreams will take them. A university education is buttressed by, and further disseminates, both moral assumptions. It should be no surprise that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—which harness a bureaucratic apparatus and emphasize individual identity—have become ubiquitous and extensive at universities across the nation.

College for All

The essential value of a college degree remains almost unquestionable in our political culture, bolstered by years of rhetoric that portrayed the degree as a symbol of upward mobility. In a 2014 speech, then-President Obama reiterated that “where you start should not determine where you end up.” In the next breath, he equated this with college: “And so I’m glad that everybody wants to go to college.” The previous year, at a middle school, the president echoed what Michael Sandel calls the “rhetoric of rising.” He emphasized equality of opportunity, of unlimited possibility for those who worked hard enough: “We’ve got to make sure that our young people—all you guys—have every tool that you need to go as far as your talents and your dreams and your ambitions and your hard work will take you.”

Later, Obama asked the audience, “How many students here expect to go to college?” To the adults, he commented, “I expect all of them to raise their hand.”

For years, this fixation on college preparation has led educators to emphasize testing and narrow academic achievement. In its most extreme forms, schools resemble Frederick Winslow Taylor’s early twentieth-century managerialism. Taylor took on the project of “classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae,” so as to achieve maximal efficiency. Schools often replicate this model, reducing teaching to an input-output sequence and assessing learning by a few measurable indicators.

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This is precisely the approach of many “no excuses” schools, which take our college-or-bust public rhetoric to its logical extreme. If one’s only shot at a good life comes through college, schools ought to do everything they can to ensure the best test scores—controlling students’ every movement for the sake of efficiency, so not a minute goes to waste. A training video from the Relay Graduate School of Education, for instance, shows a teacher guiding her students from their seats to a shared table, numbering each of their movements. When she says “one,” they scoot their seats back; at “two,” and they stand; at “three,” they step to the right. The trainer notes the teacher’s hyper-efficiency with approval; this teacher broke each step down to “the smallest chunk possible.”

But the narrow focus on achievement and efficiency hardly ends once students enter college. Instead, they enter a credentialing arms race that only entrenches class divides and further engenders status anxiety. Our degree-driven meritocracy, Michael Sandel argues, never displaced a system which disperses power and wealth unevenly. Instead, it merely justified unequal distribution by rewarding personal achievement, narrowly defined by academic performance. Meritocratic winners thus feel a sense of hubris, that their wealth and power have been duly earned, while the losers are further stigmatized as backward-looking, having ultimately not tried hard enough or moved to take the right opportunities.

Merit, narrowly defined, even tyrannizes those attending elite schools and employed in elite careers. As Alexis de Tocqueville described, the promise of mobility encourages the anxious desire to endlessly distinguish oneself—particularly among the winners, who have achieved the most and thus have the most to prove and to lose. Sandel observes this of his own students at Harvard, who clamor for academic and extracurricular distinction. These students would likely find themselves nodding along to MacIntyre’s description of the “endless conveyor belt.”

As the selective promise of mobility has been realized, it has created geographic sorting based on educational attainment. As William Bishop notes, “People with college degrees were relatively evenly spread across the nation’s cities in 1970. Thirty years later, college graduates had congregated in particular cities, a phenomenon that decimated the economies in some places and caused other regions to flourish.”

Students who are bright, good at school, and ambitious are often pushed toward elite higher education. While some might feel local attachment or pressure from family to stay nearby, these students at least face the background noise of credentialism, fortified by movies that portray the four-year degree as a ticket to success and public policy that prioritizes college. Such headwinds push these students to go to flagship state schools or even elite private colleges.

College thus serves as the pipeline into the professional-managerial class. Beyond their field of study, students are acculturated in the language and mannerisms of this class. They are carefully sorted and ranked by admissions officers and registrars as much as by corporate recruiters and HR performance evaluators. Even the college lifestyle prepares students to live as single people in tiny apartments in New York, Austin, or the Bay Area. For small town kids, this is the pipeline into the professional-managerial class. The process amounts to what Patrick J. Deneen calls educational “strip mining”—natural resources plundered, small towns and cities deprived, resources diverted to far-off cities.

Despite its manifold failures, college has long been treated as a policy solution to the problem of poverty and inequality. Until recently, charter schools received bipartisan support as a fix to our educational woes, and many of the largest charter networks embraced a college-centered mission. The Uplift Education network, one of the largest in the nation, intends for “70% of all our graduates to earn a college degree within 6 years of high school graduation.” IDEA Public Schools surpasses that goal: “From Pre-Kinder to 12th grade, IDEA Public Schools is focused on sending 100% of our kids to college.”

This is ironic—if not pernicious—because instead of helping the ordinary American, it presupposes that everyone should instead scramble for the best available opportunity, “as far as your talents and your dreams and your ambitions and your hard work will take you.” Rather than bolstering the common person, the college-or-bust model gives license to scorn those “left behind.” Rather than providing the impetus for better working- and middle-class jobs and more power for those without a college degree, it sets up a status pyramid scheme, where those who attend the best schools gain, while the late arrivers are told to buy in at high cost, motivated by an empty promise that their degree is of comparative value.

Opportunity Pluralism or Imago DEI

Of course, our modern education system has drawn its fair share of critics. Instead of the “rhetoric of rising,” a growing number of education leaders on the Left embrace an idiosyncratic notion of “equity,” defined in contrast with equality of opportunity. Instead of a “no excuses” approach—which emphasizes high standards and strict discipline—many reformers denigrate standards as fundamentally unfair. With these critiques entering the mainstream, one might expect college itself to be the subject of similar suspicion. The veneration of college has, however, remained largely unquestioned. In the lead up to the 2020 election, leaders on the Left quibbled over the details of a “college for all” agenda. Meanwhile, activists on the Right have recently rallied around the ideal of meritocracy, leaving credentialism unquestioned.

Through all of this, the republican aim—the goal of empowering common people—is simply eclipsed. Facing the onslaught of the meritocratic scramble, the liberal arts are relegated to the goals of that arms race. As a result, schools and universities treat traditional liberal arts as if they were, in some sense, servile in nature—one input in a college application, a box to check. Ironically, elevating the “servile” arts—through, for instance, offering more pathways to the trades—might aid in the revival of the liberal arts. It would at least reaffirm that some things are worth learning for their own sake. They don’t exist to help you “get on.”

Our public education system would benefit from pursuing what Joseph Fishkin has called “opportunity pluralism,” an alternative to our narrowly conceived equality of opportunity. Instead of striving for equal access to the single pathway of college, opportunity pluralism would ensure robust opportunities along a diverse set of pathways. College would be one of many good options—not the only good option, for those who can make it. This offers a promising alternative to the chaos of our current educational system. It also fits with that republican aim of education.

It is healthy to have a plurality of types. It is good for a political community to empower its people who work in unpretentious settings, solving practical problems, even perhaps with their hands. Yet our public education system doesn’t support this kind of pluralism. Rather, we push everyone to college, foisting the therapeutic aim on everyone. It’s a system designed to shape people in the likeness of the unconstrained individual, the manager—imago DEI. We should hope for more.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published at American Compass on December 6, 2021.

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The role of the Second Lady is inherently political. And for much of American history, so was pregnancy. Usha Vance’s pregnancy and birth is thus the latest chapter in a centuries-long debate about the role of women in public society.

Perched in a white dress and heels, Usha Vance seems care-worn but happy. Two of her other children lace their arms around her, not quite posed, with their feet dangling like the subjects of a Mary Cassatt painting. Her husband might be the vice president of the United States, but in this picture he is an afterthought.

(Image credit: Second Lady Usha Vance on X)

The photo, released by the Vances last month to announce the birth of their fourth child, represents the exceptional. The last time a child was born to a sitting first family was 63 years ago, and to a second family over 150 years ago. The American people aren’t used to birth in and around the White House.

The Vances are not only ending the drought, but putting their family life front and center in the process. In the months leading up to the birth of her fourth child, Usha made the performance of motherhood part of her brand as a public figure, real-life marketing for her husband’s signature pro-family policies. The Vances walk the walk in a way that’s much more countercultural than it first appears.

While forefronting the vocation of motherhood as the Second Lady might seem rote, it is atypical in the contemporary era. In the twenty-first century, all of the second spouses have been mothers—well, except Doug Emhoff—but this status serves as biographical information, not a description of how they spend their days. Following the inauguration ceremony, their children (usually grown) remain off-camera.

Instead, the archetypical second lady centers issues outside of the home: Lynne Cheney fought pop music obscenity, Karen Pence promoted art therapy to support veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Jill Biden cultivated the notion that her career came before her ceremonial role. “She’s a good teacher who happens to be the second lady,” a teaching colleague told Politico. “Not a second lady who happens to be a teacher.”

Usha Vance’s public appearances instead convey an aspirational, timeless but not really trad style of motherhood: showing off her chicken coop in a pair of overalls, reading Winnie the Pooh on her children’s literacy-focused podcast. Yet she is hardly a trad wife. Rather, as a Yale-educated attorney who practiced law through the early childhoods of her three older children, she is the realization of second-wave feminism’s loftiest promises. Women can have it all—at least, Usha can.

Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with many of her professional-managerial-class colleagues. The New York Times characterized Vance and other high-profile expectant mothers in or around the Trump administration as the Right’s new directive on womanhood itself:

If the bare-chested, muscled mixed martial arts fighters of the U.F.C. match that President Trump hosted on Flag Day were the poster guys for MAGA’s image of masculinity, then the pregnant women of Trump world are one half of their feminine counterparts. Along with the sheath-clad, lip-filled, pageant-haired Mar-a-Lago set, they offer an image of idealized womanhood that gives literal shape to the pronatalist movement.

“It almost feels like a memo went out,” said Jill Filipovic, the host of the “Week in Women” podcast. “They have quite intentionally opted to present themselves as, ‘I am really pregnant, and this is what women were chosen to do,’ and they are happy to say that both with their looks and their mouths.”

Vance swatted away this charge with a bit of sarcasm. “Now that we know the political significance of my $8.75 coral maternity dress from Old Navy, can’t wait to hear what the New York Times has to say about my elastic-waistband pants and compression socks!” she posted on X, complete with a digital receipt for the dress.

But the Times isn’t entirely wrong. To dismiss the political significance of a public pregnancy is to write off over a century of American history, and to suggest that Usha Vance’s public persona is accidental would require a level of naïveté crossing over into the willfully obtuse.

Simply existing as a pregnant woman in public was taboo well into the twentieth century. In 1904, dressmaker Lena Bryant (her first name was misspelled “Lane” on a bank loan) started selling clothes for pregnant and “stout” women through personally printed catalogs because newspapers refused to advertise maternity clothing. In 1952, CBS brought in a minister, a priest, and a rabbi to temper the obscenity of I Love Lucy’s landmark episode announcing Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy. In other words, pregnancy in the public eye is not a conservative tradition—much the opposite.

The recent coding of high-status, high-publicity pregnant women as conservative speaks to a cultural shift initiated not by the Right, but by the Left. The same progressive political commentariat that promotes abortion as health care and motherhood as a flight of fancy for the nannied class cannot observe pregnancy as a neutral, natural state of being.

The subtext of Usha Vance’s critics is the following: to choose pregnancy is to submit to the patriarchy. Andrea Dworkin wrote in her seminal 1983 book Right-Wing Women that choosing motherhood is simply a way to become “slightly less disposable”:

The only dignity and value women get is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is all that is offered to women as women. Having children is the best thing women can do to get respect and be assured a place.

Today’s fourth-wave feminists take Dworkin’s words a step further: pregnant women are worthy of derision. In a post-Dobbs climate, joyful pregnancy is an act of betrayal. The line between “wife” and “trad wife” is blurry.

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The Times piece does not just imply that MAGA men find the image of pregnancy politically advantageous, but that they are somehow putting the women up to it. When Usha Vance announced her fourth pregnancy, Time’s Chad de Guzman wrote:

[JD] Vance, in particular, is an outspoken pro-natalist. He has sounded the alarm on declining birthrates, branded Democrats as “childless cat ladies” and “anti-family and anti-child,” and called Americans’ lack of desire to have children as a “civilizational crisis.”

Of course, women outside of the political class do not really think this way. Even in America’s most liberal communities, baby showers are being thrown and foil-wrapped lasagnas delivered every day of the week. For as often as JD Vance was pilloried as “weird” during the 2024 presidential election, his family’s birth announcement is pretty normal.

In fact, outside of elite media and political circles, centering one’s public persona around pregnancy and motherhood can be hugely lucrative. Women are a household’s primary consumers, and motherhood-focused content resonates online. In an era where clicks and views translate to dollars, this can be big business for another kind of public figure.

Over the past five years, the number of social media mom-fluencers has jumped by 101%. Fortesa Latifi wrote in her book, Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online about a family who makes $8 million a year putting their home life in the public eye. Authentic-seeming family content, similar to that of Usha Vance, is both enormously popular and profitable because women enjoy watching it.

The Left-leaning commentariat ridicules pregnant women at its own peril. Democrats on the whole still command reliable support from women, but the current iteration of the party’s messaging saw it lose ground with them in the 2024 election. And when it comes to young men, who already lean to the right overall, those who supported President Trump ranked having children ahead of career or financial independence in their own personal definition of success.

Most regular people want to have children, and they don’t think about doing so as a political choice. When the family itself becomes a political battleground, the Left loses.

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A few weeks before Donald Trump’s first inauguration as president, the New Yorker published a cartoon depicting a mustached, mostly bald man, hand raised high, mouth open in a sort of improbable rhombus, tongue flapping wildly within, saying: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” The tableau surely elicited many a self-satisfied chuckle from readers disgusted by the populist energy and establishment distrust that they perceived in Trump’s supporters.

But what exactly is the joke here? Citizens in a democracy are not akin to airline passengers, buckled quietly into their seats and powerless to effect change, their destinations and very lives placed in the hands of professionals guarded by a reinforced door up front. Even brief reflection reveals the cartoonist’s analogy to be comparing like to unlike.

That none of us thinks we know better than a plane’s captain, yet we often think we know better than experts in matters of politics, suggests differences between those domains. And it highlights a vexing problem for modern political discourse and deliberation: We need and value expertise, yet we have no foolproof means for qualifying it. To the contrary, our public square tends to amplify precisely those least worthy of our trust. How should we decide who counts as an expert, what topics their expertise properly addresses, and which claims deserve deference?

We all rely upon experts. When something hurts, we consult a doctor, unless it’s a toothache, in which case we go to a dentist. We trust plumbers, electricians, and roofers to build and repair our homes, and we prefer that our lawyers and accountants be properly accredited. Some people attain expertise through training, others through experience or talent. I defer to someone who’s lived in a city to tell me what to do when I visit, and to a colleague who’s studied a particular topic at length even though we have the same mastery of our field overall. A friend with good fashion sense is an invaluable aid in times of sartorial crisis.

In all these cases, our reliance on expertise means suspending our own judgment and placing our trust in another—that is, giving deference. But we defer in different ways and for different reasons. The pilot we choose not to vote out of the cockpit has skill, what philosophers sometimes call “knowledge how.” We need the pilot to do something for us, but if all goes well we need not alter our own beliefs or behaviors on his say so. At the other extreme, a history teacher might do nothing but express claims, the philosopher’s “knowledge that,” which students are meant to adopt as their own beliefs. Within the medical profession, performing surgery is knowledge-how while diagnosing a headache and recommending two aspirin as the treatment is closer to knowledge-that.

But how are those without expertise to determine who has it? Generally, we leave that determination to each individual. A free society and the free market allow for widely differing judgments about who to trust about what, with credentialing mechanisms in place to facilitate signaling and legal consequences for outright fraud. Speculative bubbles notwithstanding, the market also helps to aggregate countless individual judgments in ways that yield socially valuable outcomes. Two New York City diners may have signs promising the “World’s Best Cup of Coffee,” but the one that actually has good coffee is more likely to be bustling on any given day and to thrive in the long run.

In the public square, we have historically placed our trust in a similar phenomenon, the wisdom of crowds. In the early nineteenth century, the Marquis de Condorcet codified the thesis that citizens who know less than experts can together generate a system that knows more. Condorcet’s Jury Theorem demonstrates a simple consequence of the law of large numbers: If voters are more likely to vote correctly than incorrectly and their votes are statistically independent of each other, then as the number of voters increases, the probability that voters get the right result approaches 100%. In large enough numbers, thinking for themselves, the vox populi will make the right decisions.

This rational populism has not been sitting well with the expert class, which finds democracy an inconvenient obstacle to technocratic rule. Thus the recent emphasis on “cognitive biases,” which treat the typical citizen as not only a non-expert himself, but also incapable of identifying the real experts or aggregating his opinions with other non-experts to achieve a reasoned result. There is confirmation bias, negativity bias, status quo bias, “tribalism,” and so on.

Particularly en vogue are the “implicit biases” of identity and diagnoses of “racial resentment” and the “authoritarian personality,” which were used to explain the results of the 2016 Election. Constructs like these provide the backdrop for expert dismissals of disfavored political views. Alongside the technically framed analyses of how people misprocess correct information comes an assumption that they are also cheaply programmable, easily gulled by puppeteer propagandists and “Fake News.”

Only the experts, then, can tell us who is truly an expert. Only someone untrustworthy would not trust them.

Obviously, we can do better than this morass of circular logic and Catch-22s. But before turning to the question of how a healthy democracy might engage expertise, it is worth enumerating the many problems of our status quo.

One such problem is that the expert critique of common sense and the crowd’s wisdom is wrong. Many claims of psychological bias have collapsed in the social sciences’ replication crisis, while others have been minimized or undermined by their narrow scope and unreliability. Repeated tests of implicit attitudes yield highly variant results and seem to have little predictive utility; the attitudes may simply accompany behavior rather than cause it.

Where biases do exist, accuracy may dominate them in human perception, even when it comes to matters of identity. Psychologist Lee Jussim calls the well-replicated finding that we do quite well in this regard “stereotype accuracy.” As cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier shows in his book, Not Born Yesterday, demagogues tend merely to reflect popular consensus and rarely manage to shift it. Where widespread mistakes occur, they trace back not to snake-oil salesmen but to moments when common sense was misleading, or when people had little stake in whether their beliefs turned out to be true.

Ironically, the expert critique more effectively serves as a critique of experts. More so than the population, they appear susceptible to motivated reasoning and belief cascades. The replication crisis is a case in point, overturning dozens of seemingly established results, especially in social psychology, that claimed large effects on people’s behavior from deceptively small inputs. The findings that have succumbed range from bestselling fare like the “power pose” claimed to give women feelings of confidence and strength to storied research like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Incentives to find popular, important, statistically significant results seem frequently to overwhelm any imperative to find the correct answer.

One of the most telling failures is the infamous “hungry judges” study, in which the rate at which judges give favorable decisions (acquittals and relatively light sentences) starts high each day, deteriorates as the morning proceeds, and hits zero just before a lunch break, before returning to its earlier level once the judges have eaten. The study, a mainstay of cognitive science textbooks and their discussions of human deviation from rationality, has succumbed to a number of attacks. Most interesting is the common-sense observation of psychologist Daniel Lakens:

I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism. . . . If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal. If a psychological effect is this big, we don’t need to discover it and publish it in a scientific journal—you would already know it exists.

Lakens is not merely asserting here that the non-expert’s common sense is sufficient to contest the expert’s study. He is suggesting that common sense remains an essential part of the expert’s arsenal. The apparent expert who abandons it may end up worse off than the non-expert.

Experts are also susceptible to processes that arbitrarily reinforce an unexamined consensus, both ex ante and ex post. The linguist and left-wing political commentator Noam Chomsky has noted that the technocrats who express their expertise through public policy form a kind of “secular priesthood.” If admission to the priesthood requires demonstrated commitment to certain beliefs, then the deck is already stacked. The consensus view is a prerequisite for qualifying as an expert, not a considered consequence of one’s genuine expertise. Chomsky has always made this case about American foreign policy. But academia and journalism now conduct such sifting quite explicitly, with mandatory diversity statements that function as political pledges and high-profile firings of those who manage to slip through the cracks.

Once qualified, experts remain susceptible to the related phenomenon of belief cascades as new questions emerge, because they place their standing at risk if they depart from the views of fellow experts. (After all, what could threaten the enterprise more than the revelation that expertise does not dictate a particular conclusion?) When one expert, or a small number of experts, expresses a certain view—especially on a politically charged topic—that view quickly propagates through social networks both formal and informal, public and private, and becomes widely held on the assumption that experts can be trusted. What appears a broad-based consensus among people who have thought about the issue is really only the overamplified view of the few people who have thought about it at all.

Yet another problem for our experts is that the source, nature, and relevance of their expertise is often ill-defined. A degreed professional like former First Lady Jill Biden might want to be called “Doctor,” but even those who accede will struggle to articulate just what kind of knowledge she has that the rest of us lack. What is the knowledge-how or knowledge-that accompanying a doctorate degree in educational leadership? Or take the world’s most famous diversity consultant, Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D., whose degree is in “Multicultural Education” and whose “area of research” is “Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis.” On what field of propositions would we expect her to be an authoritative source and ask the typical non-expert to defer, setting aside his own judgment for hers?

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Even when expertise is genuine, disciplines and professions, along with their practitioners, seem determined to overextend its breadth for purposes of laundering their personal, non-expert opinions under their expert brand. In the summer of 2020, over 1,000 public health researchers signed a letter expressing their support for mass public protests in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as they insisted that in all other contexts the COVID-19 threat weighed against such gatherings. In The Atlantic, under the headline “Public Health Experts are Not Hypocrites,” Harvard Medical School professor Julia Marcus and Yale School of Public Health professor and MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner Gregg Gonsalves proposed that “systemic racism” was itself “a pervasive and long-standing public-health crisis.” By expanding the reach of the term “health,” the authors seemed to think they could also expand, as though by linguistic fiat, the breadth of their knowledge about the world, and demand new deference on matters of morality and politics. The signatories were public health experts, and systemic racism was a public health crisis, ergo the signatories were systemic racism experts.

Of course, such justification-by-stipulation is no justification at all. Marcus and Gonsalves never managed to explain what special insight a public health expert might have on the benefits of nationwide protests, or why anyone should defer to their conclusion that “the health implications of maintaining the status quo of white supremacy are too great to ignore, even with the potential for an increase in coronavirus transmission from the protest.”

Making matters worse, they warned that even asking, “how many new infections from the protests will public health experts tolerate?” is an impermissible “call to color blindness, to stop seeing the health effects of systemic racism as something worthy of attention during the pandemic.” Now they were self-declared moral experts in two ways: qualified to adjudicate a divisive political debate, and further qualified to scold those who might question that initial qualification. They didn’t just know better than us; they were better than us.

On one hand, it might seem unfair to highlight absurd and overstated rhetoric as characteristic of the public health community. On the other hand, this is the view that The Atlantic chose to present as the expert one, which illustrates perhaps the modern expert’s biggest problem: To become visible enough that non-experts can find him, he must proffer his views through Twitter, on talk show interviews, and in essays for magazines like The Atlantic. Such platforms select for certain experts, and certain views. Laypeople encountering an expert “in the wild” have no reason to think that he is representative of his discipline and every reason to think the opposite.

Rather than help to correct this distortion, markets can compound it by elevating experts whose expert recommendation is to buy more of their services. The “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) industry, for instance, sends confident, well-dressed people with lengthy but opaque credentials to train corporate workers and college students in the ever-evolving intricacies of progressive politesse. Their expertise is in interpreting—or “problematizing,” in the idiom of DEI—every event and attitude as one in need of further DEI services. A DEI consultant whose “equity audits” turn up few issues requiring months of intensive work would fade into irrelevance. The one who discovers an immediate need to double the staffing and resources of the department who hired him will have ambitious customers banging down his door.

A few months after the public-health-approved protests, another expert letter circulated. More than 50 former intelligence officials, including four former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, signed a statement questioning the provenance of emails found on a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, son of then-Democratic nominee and later President Joe Biden. The letter warned that the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and, in italics, that “if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.”

While the officials were careful to acknowledge that use of information in a foreign intelligence operation would not rule out the possibility of its authenticity, mainstream coverage eschewed this nuance. So did Biden, who declared to tens of millions of voters during a presidential debate that “there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what [Trump is] accusing me of is a Russian plant.” Most famously, Twitter suspended the New York Post for attempting to disseminate the story. In fact, no evidence has emerged of Russian involvement and the laptop and its emails proved authentic.

The letter had many of the hallmarks of untrustworthy expertise. The purveyors were “experts” in various national security fields. But they offered a judgment plainly motivated by an overriding political preference, on a question few had the actual expertise and none had the necessary information to answer. That the laptop could have been a Russian operation was something any two buddies could have come up with at a bar, not an expert opinion at all. Whether the laptop was a Russian operation, the experts had no idea.

The public will never be able to assess the validity of expertise on a case-by-case basis. Trying yields widely varied conclusions and thus eliminates any common starting point from which to conduct public debates—roughly the situation today. Assessing apparent expertise requires knowledge of a field’s inner workings, something almost no one has the time or inclination to learn. From the outside, it is difficult to infer what dogmas might contaminate a discipline’s standard training or what pressures might distort processes of hiring, promotion, and socialization. However, some general heuristics and defaults might provide a basis for at least some agreement.

First, a simple conflict-of-interest standard would make sense. Look at what people gain from giving their views, and from whom they gain it. Someone who stands to gain more personally from one view than from another should not be entitled to deference when offering the former. That does not mean the view is wrong, only that it must be defended on its merits rather than based on the identity of the speaker. A supporter of Joe Biden who declares that an embarrassing trove of Hunter Biden emails is fake may very well be correct and is entitled to make the case, but his listeners are similarly entitled to doubt his cogency or his sincerity. A supporter of Joe Biden who studies poisonous spiders for a living should be deferred to when he warns that the spider on your arm is poisonous.

Second, political stances should be inherently suspect. Experts can offer knowledge useful in evaluating the values-laden tradeoffs of politics and public policy, but that expertise does not make their judgment superior to that of any other citizen, and certainly not the democratic determination of a large group of citizens. This is not to say that no one can be a moral expert, only that technical expertise is not moral expertise. Plenty of people defer to religious leaders, community leaders, and even political leaders when it comes to questions of what to value and how to act. But in doing so, we should be aware that our moral experts will not be our neighbor’s. Identification of moral experts often depends on prior moral and political convictions, and disagreement on who the experts are will tend to mirror disagreement about the underlying issues.

Third, we should be far more skeptical of claims of knowledge-that expertise than of knowledge-how. In the latter case, people’s claims of expertise can be substantiated by their ability to deliver objective results. The surgeon with a track record of successful surgeries is easily distinguishable from the charlatan with none. Knowledge-that experts, by contrast, are laying claim to the truth. Sometimes they have it, and are guiding us as reliably as a pilot. Other times they are simply taking us for a ride.

Nothing is more useful, though, than one-on-one discussions, which allow a non-expert to get a sense of the true reasoning, beliefs, motivations, and character of an expert. In private, back-channel discussions, people are often eager to be honest, even when that honesty reflects poorly on themselves or their profession. When it’s possible to observe just where exactly the expert draws their certainty from, non-experts may find themselves convinced, or they may find themselves skeptical. A surprising number of issues come down to matters like a preference for more complex explanations over simpler ones, a vague sense that certain kinds of theories have fared poorly in the past, a conviction that a field should take a stance on important matters, and so on. Identifying these points of departure and working through one’s own thoughts on them is a more valuable epistemic activity for a democratic citizen than simply deferring to an increasingly distant and unreliable expert class.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published May 20, 2022 at American Compass.

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When Fox News asked President Trump last month if the United States was looking to update the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, he was unambiguous: “I’d rather be independent.”

Having declined to renew the agreement for a full 16-year term, the Trump administration triggered an annual review process. If the three countries can’t agree on how USMCA should change, it will automatically expire in 2036—or earlier, if the U.S. decides to leave. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer says the United States is now seeking separate interim arrangements with both countries to be concluded by the end of the year, while talks on “really important” issues continue into 2027.

What’s clear is that the agreement cannot continue in its current form. USMCA retains the essential features of its predecessor agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the world has changed too much since NAFTA was ratified in 1993. NAFTA sought to achieve maximum integration between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, and zeroed out tariffs on virtually all traded goods.

That was before anyone worried about American deindustrialization—or China. NAFTA’s premise was that American industry would get rich exporting to the rising Mexican middle class. Instead, American firms quickly realized they could turn low-wage, lightly regulated Mexico into an export platform to serve their existing American market, and rapidly offshored production.

The year before NAFTA took effect, the United States ran a $1.7 billion goods surplus with Mexico. By 2025, that had become a $197 billion deficit. Meanwhile, in the mid 2000’s Chinese producers started sending inputs to Mexico for assembly, which qualified them for tariff-free treatment, and reexporting the finished goods to the United States. China got the benefits of NAFTA without signing on to the agreement.

Trump has long promised to reverse these trends. In his first term, he renegotiated NAFTA and turned it into USMCA, adding rules that stripped tariff-free status from exported autos if they used too many non-North American parts or low-paid labor.

In his second term, Trump used his “America First” trade policy to levy across-the-board tariffs, incentivizing global firms to serve the American market by producing within it rather than exporting to it. The administration imposed especially high tariffs on China, recognizing that Beijing uses massive industrial subsidies to eliminate competition and leave the U.S. dependent on Chinese producers. Global flat tariffs were designed to shift fundamental trade flows back toward balance, while China-specific tariffs would reduce the U.S. economy’s dependence on its chief adversary.

Both of these goals are impossible to fully achieve with two neighbors who remain wide open to China and enjoy tariff-free access to our market.

This is a contradiction that USMCA can no longer bear. Under the agreement, goods originating in Mexico or Canada can be exported to the U.S. tariff-free. This functions as a glaring invitation for other countries to circumvent tariffs by shipping inputs to Mexico or Canada for assembly and export to the United States. Only autos face rules limiting this behavior. That might have worked when the U.S.’s effective tariff rate was around 3%, but now that the U.S. has erected a high tariff wall, everyone is looking for a back door. Trump’s tariff wall has two—one through each of our neighbors’ yards.

No country has been a more enthusiastic exploiter of this strategy than China, which is surging investment into Mexican manufacturing operations. Mexico does not reliably track Chinese investment, but one 2025 report found 200 discrete Chinese manufacturing and infrastructure investments in Mexico worth a combined $15 billion, observing that they “tend to cluster in the [Mexican] states with the tightest commercial and logistical linkages to the United States.”

That is supported by econometric evidence, which found that Mexican exports to the U.S. increased following U.S. tariff hikes on China, while Mexican suppliers increased the Chinese content of their exports. A June 2026 Federal Reserve study found that U.S. tariffs on China accounted for 53% of Mexico’s subsequent export gains in the American market, with Chinese production or processing in Mexico alone accounting for roughly 14% of the total increase. By simply relocating manufacturing operations to Mexico, Chinese corporations can still stuff U.S. supply chains full of their products.

It’s not just Mexico. After Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a “strategic partnership” with China in a misconceived attempt to signal independence from the United States, Canada agreed to import Chinese electric vehicles at low tariff rates. As the Financial Times reported:

With its manufacturing base hard hit by Trump’s tariffs, Canada’s industry minister Mélanie Joly also met BYD, Chery, Geely and Shanghai Launch Automotive Technology in China this month to discuss investments as part of her attempt to drum up hundreds of billions of dollars in non-US trade. Joly said all four of the Chinese carmakers were “willing to explore creating joint ventures” to build cars in Canada.

Mexico and Canada clearly don’t have much incentive to curtail this behavior on their own. In fact it’s quite the opposite. They realize full value from USMCA by monetizing their U.S. market access—a scarce and valuable asset—in the form of foreign investment.

The Trump administration is alive to this concern. Last year, Ambassador Greer told Congress:

With the USMCA, it’s important that Canada and Mexico not be used as an export platform for third countries. That’s not what we want. USMCA should be an agreement that promotes manufacturing in America and that we can rely on our partners to the north and south, if needed. It can’t be a situation where countries can just come in, China, Vietnam or somebody, build a factory in Mexico, assemble it with parts from there and send it across and get the benefit of an agreement where they’ve taken no obligations. So I want to make sure that it truly is an agreement that helps America first.

Now that the annual reviews are underway, the Trump administration must decide how to achieve that goal and prevent USMCA from undermining its America First trade policy. President Trump has suggested that the U.S. could simply walk away. We certainly have the leverage: trade with the United States constitutes about half of both Mexico and Canada’s entire GDP; combined trade with Mexico and Canada represents less than 6% of U.S. GDP. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff wall has even further increased the importance of USMCA for Mexico and Canada. Fully 83.6% of imports from Canada and Mexico now seek USMCA certification to avoid tariffs, up from around 50% in 2025. That turns the agreement into an exceptionally powerful tool to shape the North American market.

We should not reject this opportunity. Further, leaving USMCA would deal a serious and sudden blow to many American industrial firms that built trans-national supply chains in the wake of NAFTA. The better move is to use America’s leverage to get a deal that supports the administration’s mission to reverse deindustrialization, reduce dependence on China, and return America’s trade relationships to balance.

Mexico

The presence of a low-cost, low-regulation jurisdiction with tariff-free access to the U.S. market risks bleeding out the Trump administration’s reindustrialization strategy. Production (and the attendant jobs and investment) that might have been relocated to the U.S. to avoid tariffs instead goes to Mexico. As the FT reports:

Mexico has quietly become a cornerstone of the AI boom, providing 40 per cent of US imports this year of the computer servers that are widely used in the data centres powering artificial intelligence. Taiwanese manufacturers are rapidly expanding factories in Mexico to assemble servers, which are now the country’s top US export, overtaking autos that dominated its trade for decades….Servers and related hardware made up almost one-fifth of the $317bn of goods Mexico exported between January and May, more than double the same period a year earlier. Taiwan, in turn, is now Mexico’s third-largest trading partner, up from eighth place in 2022. Taiwanese companies have spent more than $1.6bn since 2020 on Mexican factories that offer geographic proximity and tariff-free access to US tech giants spending hundreds of billions on data centres.

The U.S. doesn’t have a free trade agreement with Taiwan—it has a bargained-for Agreement on Reciprocal Trade that applies 15% tariffs on Taiwanese exports. Absent USMCA, that might have induced Taiwan to expand AI server factories in America. But thanks to Mexico’s open door, Taiwan gets the same market access and lower costs by expanding south of the border instead. We might as well have a free trade agreement with Taiwan, and, for that matter, China and any other country that freely trades with Mexico.

This is the back door in action, and the administration must close it. If the United States is going to provide Mexico with privileged entry through the tariff wall, it can reasonably insist that Mexico help guard the wall.

There are two basic approaches that the administration can pursue to achieve this: a rules-of-origin approach and a customs union approach.

Rules of origin require that a minimum percentage of a product’s value actually be added in a USMCA country, using USMCA inputs, in order to get USMCA privileges. Strengthening these rules would build on the existing formula that the first Trump administration applied to autos.

Conceivably, this regime could extend to other important products such as AI server hardware. But it’s extremely difficult to verify whether a given product satisfies these requirements. Instead, enforcement depends on customs officials auditing paperwork in an attempt to trace every foreign input incorporated into every product exported from Mexico. There are intriguing proposals—and even successful trials—to run rules of origin enforcement through blockchain technology. But as it stands, such a large enforcement burden may stretch the tool beyond what it can comfortably bear.

There is another option that could prevent the benefits of USMCA from accruing to foreign producers: a customs union. Under this model, Mexico’s access to the U.S. market would be conditioned on Mexico mirroring U.S. trade policies with respect to China and other major exporters. If Chinese inputs and investment faced the same barriers in Mexico as they do in the U.S., there would be no opportunity to route them through Mexico in order to access the American market.

Mexico has already moved substantially in that direction. In late 2025, it approved tariff increases of up to 50% on vehicles, steel, and other goods from China and several other Asian economies. Bloomberg reported that the U.S. has asked Mexico to “mirror Washington’s tariff wall against Chinese steel and aluminum by imposing Section 232-style duties on imports from outside North America.”

Yet even more is needed. Mexico has no clue just how deeply China has tunneled into its economy. Two prominent Mexican academics recently called attention to “China’s expanding footprint in strategic infrastructure, digital networks, and security-sensitive technologies” in the country, while noting that “[a] difficult truth is that Mexico still lacks a consolidated and transparent picture of China’s footprint in its economy—where capital is embedded, through what ownership and financing structures, and with what implications for data governance, logistics corridors, energy systems, and industrial resilience.”

To take just one troubling example, Hutchison Ports, the China-based company that the Trump administration recently kicked out of the Panama Canal, is the single largest private operator in Mexico’s port system, handling up to 40% of the country’s containerized cargo.

The most realistic customs union option is requiring Mexico to enforce an investment screen that denies USMCA privileges to Chinese companies and limits Chinese investment in key sectors of the Mexican economy. Meanwhile, Mexico could match the United States’ China tariffs—or perhaps even global tariffs—on a subset of strategic industries, including autos, steel, AI and telecom equipment, semiconductors, and critical minerals in exchange for some amount of tariff relief.

However, the likeliest outcome is that customs union-style tariff matching is combined with enhanced rules of origin, at least for certain products. Although tariff matching can prevent other countries from accessing the U.S. market through Mexico, it probably isn’t capable of closing the massive U.S. trade deficit with Mexico, a key aim for the Trump administration. For that we’d need rules of origin, which could require that goods contain a minimum percentage of United States content to receive USMCA privileges. That would be a more direct path to closing the deficit, and the administration is likely to pursue it.

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Canada

Despite fundamental trade policy challenges, USMCA negotiations with Mexico have been proceeding successfully. The same cannot be said for Canada. Because it is a developed country with high labor and regulatory costs, Canada shouldn’t represent the same back door risk as Mexico. But for political reasons, our northern neighbor is doing its best to change that.

Prime Minister Carney, elected on a promise to confront Trump and reduce Canada’s economic dependence on the United States, retaliated against the president’s global auto tariffs by implementing a tariff regime applicable only to American vehicles—and then punished American manufacturers that transferred production out of Canada to the United States by reducing their tariff-free export quotas. According to the White House, American auto exports to Canada fell by 22% following Canada’s new policy.

In response, the White House made the unprecedented move of announcing new 50% tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian exports, with no exception for goods traded under USMCA rules. The administration used Section 338, a law that had never been previously invoked, and set a deadline of Aug. 19 before the tariffs would take effect. The Trump administration essentially signaled that it is ready to remove the “C” from USMCA.

The media has sided with Canada. After all, Carney was merely retaliating against existing U.S. tariffs. But this is a shallow analysis. Trump’s countrywide tariffs have always exempted USMCA-compliant goods, giving Canada a massive advantage relative to the rest of the world. Section 232 national security tariffs on autos, steel, aluminum, lumber, and copper affect Canada and don’t come with a USMCA exemption, but these tariffs are applied sector-wide on a global basis and don’t target Canada specifically.

There’s another factor that the media seems to have forgotten: Canada signed a strategic partnership with China. Under the strategic partnership—their term, not mine—Canada essentially reduced its tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for lower Chinese tariffs on canola seeds. The Prime Minister’s office explained that it was “working with urgency and determination to diversify our trade partnerships” and predicted that “within three years, this agreement will drive considerable new Chinese joint-venture investment in Canada.”

Following this agreement, Chinese producers could establish subsidized manufacturing and supply-chain platforms inside Canada, localize enough value to satisfy USMCA’s content rules, and then use Canada’s preferential access to compete in the American market. USMCA regulates product origins, but it has no provision preventing a nonmarket adversary like China from controlling the capital, technology, and commercial strategy behind a member country’s production.

This leaves the United States with a clear roadmap. We would never have signed our initial free trade agreement with Canada if it was in a “strategic partnership” with the Soviet Union. We now find ourselves in a similar situation. If Canada wants to integrate China more deeply into its economy, the United States should deny Canada the privilege of preferential access to the American market. Otherwise, market access for Canada means market access for China, which would defeat the goal of ending our economic dependence on our chief adversary.

Carney believes that Canada’s economic dependence on trade with the U.S. is a weakness that must be remedied. But he is likely to end up with the worst of all worlds: the destruction of Canada’s most valuable global asset—geographic proximity and tariff-free access to the American market—with nothing to show for it except a marginal increase in agricultural exports to China.

None of this had to happen. Unlike Mexico, with which the U.S. has a large and growing trade deficit, U.S. trade with Canada is relatively balanced. Compared to Mexico, it looks much more like a bull case for free trade: two countries at similar levels of development with similar economic and legal systems pursuing comparative advantage. Canada and the U.S. have longstanding trade disputes in areas like lumber and dairy, but the fundamental issues posed by the Mexican labor-and-regulatory arbitrage strategy don’t apply to Canada.

Instead, the issue is purely political. It is understandable that Canada would react intemperately to Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric. But signing a strategic partnership with China is more than intemperate. Indeed, considering what Canada stands to lose, it’s considerably more reckless than Trump’s rhetoric. The president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association accurately summed up the risk: “Actively courting Chinese automakers is incompatible with renewing our far more important trade relationship with the U.S.”

Canadian negotiators are sweating out a deal with the Trump administration to remove the Section 338 tariffs before the Aug. 19 deadline. But Canada is seeking an even bigger concession: relief from all of the Section 232 national security tariffs, which are applied on a global basis to help reshore critical industries. So long as Canada maintains a strategic partnership with China, that should be a non-starter. Canada cannot demand exemptions from measures designed to protect strategic American industries while inviting subsidized Chinese producers into the same North American supply chains.

Canada is likely to come down from full relief and propose tariff rate quotas (that is, quantities of exports that can enter at reduced level before the full tariff kicks in) on certain Section 232 products, possibly in exchange for tariff-matching those products on China. But Swiss-cheesing national security tariffs with exemptions weakens the critical reshoring incentive they provide. That incentive is working: A recent KPMG survey of 275 Canadian manufacturers found that existing tariffs had driven 29% to move some or all of their production to the United States.

Canada should be given a simple proposition: if you want preferential access to the American market, including any exemption from sector-wide national security tariffs, you must mirror measures we have taken to block China from distorting that market. Anything less is a triangulation strategy that the U.S. should not and need not abet. If Canada wants to “diversify its trading relationships” away from the U.S. and toward China, perhaps we should do some diversification of our own.

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Note: Understanding America will go quiet the next couple of weeks and then back with exciting improvements at the end of the month.

The Paul Krugman faux apology tour continues. A few weeks ago, we highlighted Krugman’s acknowledgment on Wall Street Week that, “I am really reluctant to be where I am right now, but I do think that conditional tariffs on Chinese cars are probably going to be necessary. … I’ve been shocked not only by my own change of mind, but by some of my colleagues’ … It’s not 20 years ago anymore. We really do need to rethink.” Now he has a new article on “Geoeconomics” that opens:

Economists have spent the past two centuries trying to explain that global economics is a positive-sum game. That is, my nation’s success needn’t come at your nation’s expense. In fact, a country’s economy usually (though not always) benefits from economic growth in other countries because growth abroad leads to an expansion of a country’s export markets and makes better, cheaper imports available.

However, this sunny view is based on the assumption that we care about economic prosperity, not national power. True, disregarding questions of national power made sense for about 70 years after World War 2. During those years the Pax Americana created ground rules under which wars of conquest, economic blackmail and coercion, and other direct international power plays were mostly ruled out. National ambitions were focused on raising living standards. “To get rich is glorious,” declared Deng Xiaoping.

That was then.

Finally, a black and white confession of the make-or-break assumption underlying the rabid and absolutist brand of free-trade economics: “This sunny view is based on the assumption that we care about economic prosperity, not national power.” In other words, a great plan for a world that does not exist, and a nonsensical one in reality.

It’s impossible to overstate how fervently the economists now recognizing this tried not only to deny it for the past 30 years, but also to ridicule anyone who pointed out the problem. I will forever be fond of quoting this missive from National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru and American Enterprise Institute director of economic policy studies Michael Strain, assuring readers that I had no idea what I was talking about and simply did not “understand the model”:

He allows that the standard economic model of trade is correct in holding that all countries are better off if all practice free trade, but he says the model does not account for the fact that a country that refuses to practice free trade can reap benefits at other countries’ expense. Free trade thus presents a prisoner’s dilemma.

Cass himself is prisoner to a misconception, for he does not understand the model he is criticizing. That model does not ignore the possibility of a prisoner’s dilemma but rather denies that it exists. After all, the classical case for free trade was developed in a mercantilist world, and it argued that free trade almost always benefits the country adopting it, regardless of the trade policies of other nations.

In their defense, they were just echoing Krugman, who had written, “The economist’s case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case: a country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.” As recently as mid-2024, AEI’s Strain was tweeting this quote with a fist-punch emoji. Oops.

Speaking of the economist’s case, The Economist is finally abandoning its own case too. This week it railed against Chinese overcapacity, concluding:

The academic debate about Chinese overcapacity speaks to a broader and more fundamental struggle under way: a material contest over the worldwide shape of industrial production. On one side is China, supremely proficient in all manner of production. In that sense the commerce ministry is correct that China is competitive. But foreign companies are competing against not just supple, hard-driving Chinese firms but a whole-of-state approach to industry. Foreign companies, however big, stand little chance against a Leninist developmental state that has attained China’s size, wealth and modernity. As Rhodium Group, an American research firm, points out, the Chinese state once limited its intervention to a handful of sectors that it deemed to be strategic; now it pursues an “industrial policy of everything”.

On the other side is everyone else. Whether other countries are willing or able to defend what remains of their industrial turf is an open question. For at least a decade, America has been groping for a response. It has imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and worked to reshore production; despite President Donald Trump’s scorn for allies and admiration for China and Mr Xi, his administration wants to work with other countries, for instance, in securing critical supply chains. Europe is inching its way towards (embryonic) made-in-Europe plans. But both America and Europe have already run smack into Chinese dominance, above all, its rare-earth stranglehold. This is the part left unsaid in China’s rebuttal of all the overcapacity talk: try as they might, other countries struggle to fight back. Industrial might makes right.

Defending industrial turf… what a concept. It seems unlikely that anyone will ever apologize for having gotten it wrong. Krugman’s formulation that it’s not 20 years ago any more, we really do need to rethink and disregarding reality for 70 years made sense suggests we are unlikely to ever see anyone accept accountability for the damage done (20 years ago would have been an awfully good time to rethink!), but perhaps now we can at least put that era behind us for good.

Bonus Link: U.S. Factory Activity Expands Again in July (Wall Street Journal). “The ISM’s purchasing managers’ index was 55.6 in July compared with 53.3 in June. Analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal were expecting 54.” The ISM PMI is a closely watched measure of the manufacturing sector’s health, and was pointed to by anti-tariff commentators as the proof that tariffs were not working when it didn’t immediately shoot up after Liberation Day. They don’t talk about it any more. 🤷‍♂️

SAD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

The news out there is not good, friends. Sorry. Read these anyway:

Demoralized But Not Defeated: What 2,000 Young Men Told IFS About Their Lives (Institute for Family Studies). “About half of young men agree with the statement, ‘No matter how hard I work, people like me will never achieve the American Dream.’ Similarly, 72% agree that ‘Who you know is more important than ability or hard work in getting ahead.’ For a significant share of young men, the meritocratic story is a myth. Still, they are not giving up on themselves: a remarkable 84% say that having ambitious plans for the future describes them at least somewhat well.”

The Live Shopping App Where Some People Bid Until They’re Broke (Wall Street Journal). “Seven-year-old Whatnot is one of the fastest-growing shopping platforms in America. It allows people to bid, around the clock, on trading cards, squishy toys, designer fashion and instant ramen, auctioned live in high-energy shows within the app. It has tapped into the addictive qualities of social media, with opportunities fed to you in an algorithm-controlled scroll. Often, users don’t search for a particular item, but instead hope to hit on something by being on the app at the right time.”

Bookended Obsessive Parenting, from Crib to Career!

• Aw, It’s Baby’s First A.I. Surveillance System (New York Times). “Nanit and other start-ups want to track your children through the night — and soon, for much longer than that.”

• Helicopter Parents Are Co-Piloting Their Adult Children’s Careers (Wall Street Journal). “Mom and dad are calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their kid’s behalf, and even lurking just off-screen on Zoom calls.”

The A.I.-enabled baby monitors were too much for the American Compass team, so rather than just ranting about it on Slack we channeled our energies into this very constructive and enjoyable discussion at Commonplace: But Who Monitors the Baby Monitors?

GOOD READ FOR YOUR WEEKEND

And after all that, you deserve at least one good read, so check out this amazing post from Nobunaga on X, which begins:

I needed to move a sofa.

I mentioned this to an American. He said, “You know anybody with a truck?”

I did not know anybody with a truck.

He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.

“You gotta know somebody with a truck.”

I asked how one acquires such a person.

A SUBSTACK RECOMMENDATION ON LABOR

The new Center for State Labor Innovation has launched a publication, which you should be reading if you care about labor reform. Read the introduction from Sohrab Ahmari, Ron Bloom, Wilma Liebman, David Rolf, and Andy Stern: Labor Has to Innovate, Too.

DEFENDING INDUSTRIAL TURF (NOW WITH APPROVAL FROM THE ECONOMIST!)

No one better in the business on this front than Adam Chan, senior advisor to FCC chairman Brendan Carr and director of the commission’s Council on National Security. He joins ChinaTalk to talk about, well, China… and, in particular, the ban on imported robots:

The US has a nascent industry but is overwhelmingly reliant on foreign imports of devices. There’s a real risk of a supply chain dependence that, as these devices become critical to the industries of the future, we could end up in a situation where we are very dependent on foreign sources. Maybe these devices are critical to military applications, maybe to manufacturing and other industrial sectors, in which case it is very important for the US to have its own supply.

And then there’s Europe. *sigh* The German Auto Industry, a Pillar of the National Psyche, Is Trembling (New York Times). In his August update for Watching China in Europe, Rhodium Group’s Noah Barkin notes, “the CEO of VW has called on the EU to take tougher trade measures against China - a sign that the economics of EU-China relations have reached a tipping point. But the politics is about to get messy.” He illustrates:

Volkswagen, by the way, is now pursuing a strategy that consists of:

Doubling down on manufacturing at its EV hub in Hefei, China as part of what Blume describes as an “in China for China” approach.

Exporting the cars it produces in China, in Blume’s own words, to Southeast Asia, Australia, India, South America, Africa and Europe, in what looks more like an “in China for the world” strategy (minus the US market).

Pursuing mass layoffs in Germany, while luring Chinese carmakers into the German factories that Volkswagen is struggling to sustain.

Urging the EU to accelerate and broaden its trade defense measures against Chinese competitors that are seizing market share for plug-in hybrids at an astonishing rate.

If your head is spinning, you are not alone …

And Japan Says Combat Drones Key to Adapting to New Warfare as Regional Tensions Rise (Associated Press). “Experts say developing fully homemade drones while Japan’s commercial drone market is dominated by Chinese imports would be a challenge.” Thank you, experts!

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AND FINALLY, CHECKING IN ON THE AI

Jasmine Sun has an excellent essay on the true sources of opposition to data centers, No Data Centers in My Backyard: Money, Power, and Populism in the AI Buildout. You can also hear her on a recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show.

Following up on last week’s American Compass podcast episode with Princeton philosopher Greg Conti on the damage that artificial intelligence is doing to the academic psyche, worth also reading this short essay from mathematician Kirwin Hampshire, The Dark Night of Mathematics. This passage is striking:

Here is one story I have heard from mathematicians trying to cope with our emergency: Even if AI can prove theorems and theory-craft more efficiently than humans, and even if these proofs and theories are beautiful and interesting, and even if they are presented with elegance and clarity of thought, mathematicians will still have a place in the appraisal, presentation, understanding and appreciation of this new abundance of pleasing non-human proofs. We can still practice mathematics, learn mathematics, teach mathematics and do mathematics together. We can even still write proofs for fun, in our old-fashioned inefficient way. That is, even if LLMs can advance math in a manner objectively superior to our every effort, we can still basically do what we’ve always done.

Of course, under our system, no one is going to pay for this. Mathematicians are paid to prove theorems. Mathematicians are, indeed, also paid to teach, peer-review, go to conferences and learn mathematics, but all of that better result in some damn good theorems. This isn’t looking good.

It seems to capture well the misunderstanding among academics about what academia is for, as well as a misunderstanding among technologists about the value of abstract processing. Is it really the proving of theorems for which mathematicians are paid, as opposed to the appraisal, presentation, understanding, appreciation, and teaching of mathematics, to use Hampshire’s words, or the application of mathematics, to add the word that probably matters more? In a world where mathematicians proved theorems and did none of the other things, what would their work be worth? Conversely, in a world where theorems are a dime a dozen, their work would seemingly become much more valuable. So is the crisis here one of purpose and value, or just the deflation of an overinflated balloon of self-importance?

Speaking of overinflated balloons of self-importance, someone from a real business offered some useful thoughts on what LLMs are doing in the real world: I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I. (New York Times). “This brings me to A.I. washing. The insidious cousin of A.I. wishing, it is when a company — under pressure to immediately show results — claims to be doing more with A.I. than it actually is. … Perhaps the best-known version of A.I. washing is the most tragic one: the A.I. layoff. A company proclaims it needs fewer people because A.I. made its operations more efficient. Often the efficiency doesn’t exist yet. The cut is really about freeing up cash, sometimes to spend more on A.I.”

As for the many emerging social harms, Michael Strain lectures at National Review that Adults Are Responsible for How They Use AI. The argument takes a peculiar turn:

A person on the right who shares my view about the importance of human relationships should respond to this by arguing that Celeste should take responsibility for her decisions and change her behavior. A conservative should not respond to this by blaming the technology.

And yet, the impulse of many seems to be to conclude that, to the extent that chatbots threaten real-world human relationships, chatbots are harmful. A better instinct: To the extent that chatbots threaten real-world human relationships, humans need to be on guard and use chatbots responsibly in a way that promotes their own flourishing. And culture, communities, and other institutions need to help individuals make choices that advance genuine human flourishing (emphasis added).

So Strain doesn’t really mean that people can or should just “use chatbots responsibly” themselves. He recognizes that “culture, communities, and other institutions need to help.” This raises two interesting questions: First, do people need the same amount of help making choices about all technologies, or do some pose greater challenges than others, perhaps even by the sellers’ design, and thus might be legitimate causes for concern? Second, what are these other institutions that need to help–can the people of a republic take collective action through democratic processes to advance genuine human flourishing or is that disallowed?

As Abraham Lincoln wrote, “the legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”

Enjoy the weekend!

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• “Is Kansas Really Richer than Canada?” Jeff Reimer, Commonplace

• “Is Canada Really Poorer than Kansas?” Brian Dijkema, Commonplace

The process of converting the Republican Party from free market fundamentalism to a more balanced, “common good” approach focused on what a functioning economy owes to each citizen remains a work in progress.

With primary season almost over, it is notable that virtually no Republican House or Senate candidate has centered his or her campaign on support for the new conservative economics. That might strike some as odd given the high-profile nature of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. But it makes sense if one understands that support for Trump’s unorthodox economics is greater among general election swing voters than among the rock-ribbed conservatives who dominate primary electorates.

Primary election campaigns focus on the party base. Win that, and in most cases one will win the nomination. This is true for both parties, which is why one sees Democratic campaigns this cycle focused on fighting Trump and attacking Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Two other factors are also at play. One is the overwhelming GOP consensus on cultural issues, and the other is that Trump did not center his own 2024 campaign on his new economics. Does that undermine the case for his economic views? Not at all. Ronald Reagan’s example from 1980 shows that dramatic changes in party orthodoxy occur only when a presidential nominee pledges a new course, explains that new course during his campaign, and then successfully implements it during his tenure.

Those supporting such evangelization must ensure that the party’s 2028 nominee follows Reagan’s example in word and, if elected, in deed. Only that will fulfill the dream many hold of a multi-racial, working-class Republican Party.

Two credible pollsters, the Pew Research Center and GOP political strategy firm Echelon Insights, recently published large-scale analyses of partisan coalitions. Each found that the most solid Republican factions wanted smaller government and opposed an increased government role in providing health care or assistance to people in need. General arguments in favor of government action to help Americans, then, would run counter to the general sense of primary voters.

While the Pew survey found that large majorities of the party base factions support Trump’s tariffs, that is likely skewed by the high level of support GOP partisans have for Trump overall. The Echelon Insights survey found a large group of free traders remains among one of the two loyalist factions. Tariffs are thus not a good issue to run on in Republican primaries today because they tend to divide the electorate. Campaigning on an issue that has a substantial number of opponents is a risk in a multi-candidate primary, and accordingly few candidates are willing to take that risk.

That’s not to say that a winning nominee cannot back the new economics once they are in office. Senators Jim Banks, Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, and Eric Schmitt have made parts of the conservative reform agenda a centerpiece of their time in the upper house. But none of them made those deviations from previous party orthodoxy the central feature of their initial primary races. It’s quite possible that some of the newly elected Senators who kept a low profile on economic policy during their campaigns will turn out to be part of this caucus; we just don’t yet know which ones.

Candidates know that it’s much easier to run on issues that command super-majority support. Newly appointed South Carolina Senator Darline Graham recently cut a television ad outlining her views for the GOP primary electorate. They include the belief that every life is precious (an oblique nod to the pro-life community), that only United States citizens should vote in elections, and that “boys shouldn’t play in girls’ sports.” All of those views command supermajority support within the GOP, and none of her opponents disagree with her.

Most of this cycle’s Republican candidates contend that they support President Trump’s agenda. They talk about shutting down the border and opposing illegal immigration, another issue that aligns with Trump and on which there is little opposition within the party base (though it’s notable that this too was not orthodoxy prior to Trump’s 2016 campaign). Most candidates see little reason to say anything substantial about the economic policies that still divide official Washington.

These calculations lead to a collage of rather similar campaigns across the nation. I follow most primaries and watch as many ads as I can. They are remarkable in their similarity. Back Trump; stop illegal immigration; back traditional gun rights and cultural issues (which can include overt appeals to Christian faith in many Southern or rural areas). It’s a rare candidate who risks making an appeal that does not track these themes.

Things might have been different had Trump made economic renewal through an active federal government the primary centerpiece of his three campaigns. Those ideas were always present, even in his first speech of 2015. But they were drowned out by his emphasis on ending illegal immigration, fighting crime, and supporting the Republican cultural agenda. Swing voters heard that set of messages, and as a result started voting Republican—often for the first time in their lives. Moderate, well-to-do Republicans heard them too, and moved to the Democrats in part because they did not want those changes. But most Republicans focused on the items in Trump’s broad agenda they were already familiar with and overlooked the novel items.

The good news for reformists is that attitudes can change. We have already seen a significant change in Republican attitudes toward tariffs, moving from one-time opposition to more nuanced and in some cases supportive beliefs. Presidential rhetoric and action do impact public opinion, which makes the next big primaries—the 2028 GOP nomination battle—crucial if reformists are to continue their advance.

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Ronald Reagan’s example is instructive on that score. His 1980 presidential campaign challenged longtime economic orthodoxy by placing the private sector, not the government, at the center of economic life. He proposed a 30% income tax cut that was revolutionary in its time. His specific advocacy of those themes in his campaign meant his presidency would be judged by whether he enacted them in office and whether they worked. He largely did, and they largely succeeded, creating the modern GOP tax cut and “just say no to government” orthodoxy.

The tax cuts example is especially important. Democrats had long believed that voters wanted more government programs even if they paid more in taxes: their motto since the New Deal had been “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” Mid-twentieth-century Republicans cherished balanced budgets and generally supported tax cuts only if they were preceded by spending cuts. Tax cuts were the dessert, if you will, after the voters had eaten their vegetables.

Congressional Republicans approved Reagan’s landmark 1981 tax cuts mostly out of loyalty to the president rather than true belief. Once the deficit started to grow, GOP leaders such as Sens. Robert Dole (R-KS) and Pete Domenici (R-NM) often pushed Reagan to raise taxes. He gave in to them once, in 1982, on the promise that those tax hikes would be accompanied by three times the amount in spending cuts. When the cuts did not materialize, Reagan resolved not to give in to intra-party pressure again.

Reagan’s original platform included spending cuts, but he made clear that the tax cuts were not dependent upon reduced spending. In office, he failed to obtain Congressional support for cutting the budget nearly as much as he proposed. This forced him to choose between the balanced budget orthodoxy and cutting taxes. He chose the latter, and the American economy prospered even as budget deficits soared to then-record peacetime expansion highs for peacetime expansions.

The political impact was that Republicans learned voters cared more about income growth than government program expansion or fiscal prudence. After President George H.W. Bush violated his “no new taxes” pledge in 1991 to support a budget deficit reduction deal with Democrats—promoted by many of the same Congressional Republicans and advisors who had pressured Reagan—GOP voters and officeholders became even more convinced that Reagan’s approach was both good politics and good economics.

Any reform-minded Republican who believes in the new conservative economics needs to follow Reagan’s example. Step one: make a clear, comprehensive argument for why government-backed reindustrialization is in America’s interest. Step two: center the 2028 campaign on that idea and couple it with a few simple-to-understand policies. Step three: if elected, enact those policies and stand by them even under immense political pressure. Step four: if they work, bask in the glow and drive home their success during your re-election campaign.

That sequence will change minds and create a new Republican orthodoxy. After all, everybody loves a winner. Just as Reagan’s success between 1980 and 1984 begat the 1986 tax reform and every Republican tax cut since, the 2028 GOP nominee’s success can make a working-class-focused, common good economy the centerpiece of mid-twenty-first century Republican thinking.

Political change takes time. One election is rarely enough to alter a nation’s course, and it takes years for the lessons of even a successful alteration to sink into the broader consciousness. The fact that today’s Republican Congressional campaigns do not prominently feature Trump’s new economic thinking is not surprising under the circumstances. Reformers should not lose heart; the times, they are a-changin’.

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Perhaps the oddest thing about Sunday’s New York Times feature on the “Nanit” baby monitoring system was that all of its arguments in favor of the trend toward hypervigilant technology for babies kinda seemed more like arguments against. “I’ve gotten a little unnerved by how easy it’s become to outsource daily parenting decisions to technology,” writes Times reporter Sapna Maheshwari. “The downsides of this rush are manifest: sneakily high costs; the erosion of parents’ autonomy and self-confidence; giving sensitive data to corporations. But…” [Oh good, there’s a “but.”] “…there may be no stopping the growth of babytech as a category.”

The story’s simultaneous publication with the Wall Street Journal’s Helicopter Parents Are Co-Piloting Their Adult Children’s Careers (“mom and dad are calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their kid’s behalf, and even lurking just off-screen on Zoom calls”) provided a helpfully clarifying set of bookends for how a toxic approach to parenting in the professional class seems undoubtedly to be malforming a generation and, with its disproportionate influence on the wider culture, working directly against the commitment to “agency, competence, self-determination, and the use of technology to enrich lives rather than monetize their decay” that is fundamental to citizenship.

Nanit’s slogan, turn second-guessing into: I’ve got this, traffics nakedly in the double-lie that (a) parents are right to doubt their own abilities and live in fear, and (b) relying on obsessive monitoring and outsourced decision-making represents “getting it” and will make them feel better. The American Compass Slack is a pretty lively place most days, but it really springs into action at moments like this. We had enough to say that we wanted to share it with all of you, so here, a discussion with three members of the team currently raising young children.

Oren Cass: Let’s start with the Nanit story and your reactions to reading it. Do you use Nanit or Owlet or something similar? Do you know people who do? How much did the story feel true about the direction of parenting in professional America, as opposed to an exercise in finding something that would seem dramatic and get clicks?

Theresa Braid, Communications Director: I actually thought this piece captured a real parenting trend (unlike a lot of what passes muster in the NYT Style section). These devices, along with apps like Huckleberry, promise that with lots of data collection they will be able to offer an optimized parenting approach—sleep schedules, when and how to introduce solids, and so on. In my own parenting “peer group,” mostly D.C.-area professionals with one or two children, that optimization impulse is very strong.

We have two young kids (3 years old and 10 months old) and started with a closed-circuit dumb video monitor but often opt for just “keeping an ear out.” The original impulse to avoid higher tech was just budget related, because we didn’t want to pay $15 per month for my phone to tell me to put a kid to bed when he’s sleepy. But as I’ve grown more confident in my own parenting, I see how freeing it is to rely on your own instincts first. I feel badly for first-time parents who might be losing a chance to genuinely connect with their kids because they’re focused on doing things the way the app says to.

Abigail Ball, Executive Director: I do have a Nanit, but only use it as a baby monitor (albeit one that I can access with my phone, fancy!). I knew it came with some sort of band for tracking the baby’s breathing, but we never took it out of the package. We were also given an Owlet that I set up once and then promptly forgot about before ever putting it on my baby’s foot. (Editor’s note: if you are the one who gave Abby the Owlet, she wants you to know she really likes it.) All of which is to say I am precisely in the demographic for this stuff and have almost entirely opted out, without even fully realizing I was doing so.

That said, I know tons of moms who are obsessed with tracking. The Huckleberry app is super popular and lots of moms end up tracking every single nap, feed, and dirty diaper for months, for no clear reason. For first-time parents (read: moms), it’s a major source of anxiety at an already high-stress time. Only adding to this is that now every single nice baby-tech item has an AI component—if the reams of data isn’t enough to stare at in the middle of the night, you can now ask your white noise machine’s AI “sleep coach” for advice.

Haisten Willis, Commonplace Editor: I’ll have to defer to the moms on some of this (dads may be less likely to talk with each other about baby devices), but I’m not sure I know anyone other than Abby who has one of these things. My wife and I don’t use a baby monitor at all, instead simply waiting for the ancient call of a screaming one-year-old to let us know she has stopped sleeping. Regardless, the story feels true directionally, and not in a good direction, as just another outlet for everyone’s drive to find new ways to use data and phones and apps in everyday life. As an editor myself, it did also catch my eye that the Times quotes three different executives from the companies in question extolling their products before getting to the more skeptical pediatrician.

Oren: Haisten, no baby monitor, that’s impressive! Or extreme? Is that just because you never got around to it, or are you opposed on principle? And for everyone, to what extent do you see these choices as matters of cost and convenience versus holding broader and longer-term implications for both parents and kids?

Haisten: Yes indeed, no baby monitor. I’d like to think it’s extremely impressive rather than impressively extreme, but really we just found it extraneous. I think the number of children in the family makes a big difference. We have three now and are expecting our fourth. We used a low-tech baby monitor with our first child ten years ago, and maybe a little with our second. By the third we thought, “we can hear the baby crying, we don’t need this thing.” The Times writer said she bought a second Nanit for her second child, but how far would she take this? Would she continue to maintain this level of tracking for four separate children? That would be quite a bit of data to digest in any given night.

Theresa: Yes! I feel like the more kids you have, the less time you have to fiddle with tech. Also, the confidence level is just higher.

Abigail: See, I’m about a decade behind Haisten, and for new parents in our demographic it’s now just the default. The Instagram algorithm, the Babylist suggested purchases, and so on all show you the same products: Nanit baby monitor, Owlet sleep sock, Hatch sound machine, Huckleberry app. It’s a glide path. You have to choose intentionally to seek out a different option like a low-tech baby monitor and be able to answer the question implicit in the marketing: why don’t you want the best for your baby?

It creates a sense of hypervigilance, or even paranoia. The Times talked about how the first baby monitor was developed after the Lindberg baby kidnapping, which isn’t exactly the sort of thing the typical parent should be worrying about, then or now. But we are all living as if serious risks lurk around every corner. It’s impossible to disconnect and relax if you’re constantly checking that your baby is still breathing—and if you have the ability to check, why wouldn’t you? Don’t you want to be sure your baby is still breathing?

Partly, this is just a question of risk tolerance, and I think a big challenge is the fact that when we’re talking about little babies, even toddlers, it’s really hard to countenance any risk to their health or wellbeing. So, when given the chance to mitigate risk, parents tend to jump at it, without considering the downside. And those downsides are very, very real. These things mediate our relationships with our children in meaningful ways—if you’re talking to your kid through the baby monitor from the other side of the house, well, the medium is the message, I suppose.

Theresa: To Abby’s point, when my first kid was born, I was on Instagram and the feed relentlessly fed me information about products with the thinly veiled threat that the well-being of your child relied on the purchase of whatever garbage was on offer. I got sick of the algorithm and quit Instagram cold turkey before the birth of my second, which has been a hugely welcome reprieve from the horde of mom-fluencers.

To be clear: just because I don’t use a monitor all the time doesn’t mean I don’t sneak into the nursery a few times a night to check on my younger kid’s breathing. I think that’s just a mom habit as old as time. I would actually be interested in exploring what digitizing that experience—why creep into the bedroom if you can just check your phone?—actually steals from parents. Those early nights, feeling my hand rise and fall on my infants’ chests to check their breathing, are some of the most tender moments of my life.

I’d also put a different harm on the table, which is that maintaining a parenting panopticon is bound to burn folks out, which means parents are likely to have fewer children overall. And I suppose the causation runs both ways. As people start having kids older, as they tend to have fewer kids, it seems to follow that they are more likely to be in this demographic and parent more intensively and obsessively.

Abigail: The older-parents piece of this is really interesting to me. Delayed families mean smaller families, and also that the parents are more likely already professionally successful and therefore prepared to view their family as another thing to be optimized, and the fact that if you’ve waited so long for kids, you feel an even more heightened protectiveness when they arrive. The challenges of IVF for many older parents compound the challenges further and pre-program a—quite necessary in that case—focus on tracking, optimizing, and reliance on technology.

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Oren: What Abby and Theresa are both describing, that this style of parenting is what people now fall into, or perhaps get a shove into, speaks to the basic reality of communal life that there is always going to be some standard parenting culture. And in the abstract that’s good, as opposed to expecting each family to fend for itself and make it up as they go. The problem seems to arise when that culture is entirely divorced from tradition and commercialized as technological safetyism. How did we get here? Any advice for getting out?

Theresa: I think what parents are trying to purchase with these devices is a way to offload some of the overwhelming responsibility. I don’t mean that unkindly. When you bring home a newborn from the hospital you don’t, like Mrs. Mallard in Make Way for Ducklings, “know all about bringing up children.” Or at least you don’t think you do. Modern life is built on learned expertise and practiced skills, not instincts.

Parents want to know that there is some better authority out there, some expert who can tell them if they’re doing this very difficult job correctly. I think there’s a reason that professional-class parents especially gravitate toward this model, beyond just that they can better afford it. We are determined to get the A, even when the only test is basically keeping your kid alive. And the flipside is that the potential costs are so much larger than anything you’ve ever had to consider—genuinely catastrophic, life-or-death. The mistakes you could make seem so arbitrary (leaving a teddy bear in the crib?!). It’s terrifying. Why wouldn’t you purchase anything that could make a tragic outcome feel less likely?

Haisten: That’s a much better explanation than the often-cited “generation gap” (the Times story has the obligatory grandmother who thinks moms these days are “crazy”). This technology simply was not available in previous eras. What evidence do we have that parents and especially moms haven’t always wanted as much information about their children as they possibly could get? Basic baby monitors emerged soon after radio technology became common, just as AI-assisted monitors are emerging now.

But what may be different, where cost does come in, is that we now have a large set of parents with the resources to just start with everything and then (maybe? hypothetically?) see what they don’t need. But once it’s your routine, you take for granted that you need it. My advice would be to forgo the gadgets, at least at first, and see how things go with your little one. Theresa already spoke to this exact moment, because it is so powerful: Nothing beats looking down at your sleeping child to check on her, seeing her tiny chest rise and fall, and knowing that she is okay. Squinting at your screen with one eye on the TV so you don’t have to get off the couch is not the same.

Theresa: My age (I was 27 when my first kid was born) definitely impacts my parenting style, but more because of my stage of life than because of my generation. A lot of the more advanced tech just wasn’t in our budget. I remember when my oldest was born, it seemed like everyone we knew had purchased a Snoo. We couldn’t afford a $1,200 bassinet! We couldn’t even afford to rent one! I don’t think my kids are worse off for not having it.

If anything, I think having our $100 bassinet (my coworkers on Capitol Hill bought it for us as a baby gift, thanks again guys) made us more in-tune with my son’s needs and cues when it came to sleep. As an older infant, he slept better than a lot of his Snoo-coddled peers. I don’t know if not having the Snoo is to thank for that, but we just reused that gifted bassinet with our second kid and it worked like a charm. It’s in the basement, on deck for (hopefully, someday) kid number three.

Abigail: Oh my God, the Snoo. How have we not mentioned the Snoo? I’ve heard it called Saint Snoo. Extremely helpful for some, but this is one of those things where my perspective is very similar to what Haisten was saying about using technology to solve problems: meet your kid, if they suck at sleeping, try the Snoo, but you do not need to prewire everything!

Haisten: “Meet your kid first.” That is the perfect advice.

Abigail: And people do need different things—I’d like to defend the basic baby monitor if your home layout requires it! In a D.C. rowhouse, I can’t always hear my husband call me from upstairs, much less a newborn.

Haisten: Fair point! The layout of your home certainly makes a difference here. Anyway, I reject the label “anti-Baby Monitor.” I’m more “pro-No Baby Monitor.”

Oren: There seems to be some sort of odd collective action problem where parents generally aspire to a different parenting experience (and experience for their kids) than they are choosing to in fact pursue. But it’s hard to make the case that it’s an actual collective action problem. Nothing stops anyone from just going a different route, and it doesn’t even seem like an area where social pressure is doing a lot of work (presumably there isn’t a lot of negative judgment for not having a Nanit, letting your kid walk to the library, whatever…). How do you explain that dissonance and what if anything can be done about it?

Haisten: I actually think there is some social pressure at play here. You want to provide the best for your children even if it is something that can seem silly from a 30,000-foot view like a high-tech baby monitor. And perhaps there’s a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses aspect as well: Can you afford to buy these devices along with a nice bassinet and crib? Your friend down the street did! Letting your kid walk to the library is another one: We’ve let our older kids play by themselves outside a few times and have actually had adults stop and ask them where their parents are. There is some fear of being judged in either case.

Theresa: People are going to follow the trends of their peer group, period. Social media really expands that perceived peer group, and it also slants the consensus towards whatever corporations want to put in front of you. Tech makes constant surveillance possible-ish, and that comes with revenue and an ad budget. You’re getting at the question of what parents really want, both for themselves and for their kids. With the goal of a larger family in mind, I think it’s easier to sand off the edges of these high-cost, high-surveillance technologies as the standard of good parenting. Haisten, I think your kids’ independence reflects that in a great way.

Haisten: Thanks Theresa. I’ve felt less peer pressure on the monitor front with my younger kids, so maybe that will happen on the independence front with them as well when they get older.

Abigail: When it comes to the tech, it’s not quite a collective action problem, because there is zero social sanction against not using any of this stuff. But the “nice” version of whatever baby item is now the “smart” version. You will set it up, and you will get notifications about your baby’s sleep score.

And it’s a very distinct market because it’s largely selling to first-time moms, who, before having the baby, will likely assume that more data is better, because they can’t imagine what it’s like to be newly postpartum with a newborn, and then, once they are home with the baby, are extremely sleep-deprived and hormonally primed for anything aimed at keeping their baby safe and healthy. Many new moms today lack support from other women who have older children who could keep this all in check. A huge part of being able to MGTOW (moms going their own way) is seeing a model of it being done differently. Intergenerational communities go a really long way in providing this.

These companies are definitely predatory and probably verging on criminal, and I think they’re the source of a meaningful amount of postpartum anxiety.

Oren: Maybe charge them with consumer fraud? There’s always the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. But what if, for all its faults, it, you know, works? Maybe it just makes parenting better?

Abigail: This is where, to Haisten’s earlier point, it’s very important to read past the marketing pitches to the part where the person with actual responsibility caring for children weighs in. The most important part of the story was when the pediatrician says “Parents are losing a little bit of the muscle of their own confidence and decision-making. What would you do if you didn’t have this app that said your baby needs a nap? You’d look at your baby. And see that they look tired.”

I find this the most compelling critique of this type of technology. Much like our use of GPS to get everywhere, “nap prediction technology” is an outsourcing of our innate human capabilities. But instead of offloading our ability to navigate Route 50, we’re offloading our ability to understand our own children. I can’t imagine a more depressing indictment of the state of modern technology.

Haisten: This is what jumped out to me in the story as well. The writer herself admits, “I’ve gotten a little unnerved by how easy it’s become to outsource daily parenting decisions to technology.” There is some self-doubt here, that the technology has to be consulted before taking action, and also some misplaced faith that if you’re doing things right you won’t have problems. Being a parent and especially a new parent is very difficult and I think a lot of people second-guess themselves when it’s 2 a.m. and the baby has been screaming for half an hour. An AI-assisted monitor adding to that anxiety while filming the event, collecting data on it, and costing the parents money each month is, well… appalling.

Equipping parents to handle the challenges of parenting is one thing, encouraging them to outsource their own decisions is quite another, and probably leads to the opposite result.

Theresa: Right. The issue is how far they’ve taken it, and clearly are planning to. The head of Nanit told the Times that, at least hypothetically, “the app could flag a delay and offer parents tips for improvement, like reading more bedtime stories.” What are we doing here? You can’t abdicate the core responsibilities of parenthood to something literally inhuman. Trust yourselves, parents! How are you going to help a kid talk through her first crush if you’re relying on an algorithm to listen for her first words? Parenting doesn’t get easier, we just get better at it over time. If you’re not putting in your reps when little ones are still little, I don’t think you’ll miraculously pick up these skills when they’re 13.

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Excepting the socialists leading Spain, Ireland, and the Democratic Party in the United States, many progressives are now willing to concede that illegal immigration will be their undoing unless they craft a policy to reform it. If they fail, conditions could be right for a national populist wave to strike Europe just as it has the United States.

As living memory of World War II fades, the institutions crafted in the aftermath of that continental carnage find themselves in a perilous situation. The European Union’s stability is still based on the premise that centrist parties of both the Left and Right will advance the favored policies of the last few hundred subscribers to The Economist.

Under that premise, nations states like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain were tasked with weeding out any would-be populist elements from each respected country and from smaller nations within the coalition.

But since Brexit, the premise has gotten shakier and shakier. Every time the centrists of Europe believe they have beaten back the populist uprising, it comes back, only stronger. The question now is whether national populists can finally break through the block.

We’re seeing progress in each of these countries, though it is far from linear. Following Brexit, Boris Johnson and his British Tories flooded the UK with an unprecedented wave of migrants from the Third World, which led to Labour winning a landslide victory in 2024. Yet despite that kick in teeth, populists have rallied around Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a party that has won a series of by-elections and more than 2,000 local government seats across the country.

Across the Channel in France, Marine Le Pen lost her 2022 bid for the Palais de l’Élysée and was subsequently convicted of embezzling European Union funds. Yet her heir, Jordan Bardella, has made their party, the National Rally, the largest single voice in the French legislature, and Le Pen is polling first in the upcoming 2027 French presidential election.

Germany’s AfD was kicked out of a coalition of EU nationalist parties for being too extreme, while centrist politicians in Germany have openly considered banning the party. Yet after years of weathering what seemed like an impossible storm, membership in the AfD nearly doubled from 2024 to 2025, and now the party owns a commanding lead ahead of regional and national elections.

Then there’s Italy, where Giorgia Meloni became the first nationalist to be elected to Prime Minister of a Western European country—only for the EU to kick into overdrive making sure she fell in line. Yet Meloni has proven an especially tactful politician, providing not only stability within Italy for the first time in a generation but also driving continental policy on illegal immigration. In fact, Meloni’s biggest domestic political threat is not socialists but an even more nationalist party, National Future, which is led by retired Italian army general Roberto Vannacci.

Not even President Trump’s re-emergence as the ugly American promising to bully Europe for its excessive freeloading has been enough to scare the populace into supporting the centrist slop offered up by EU politicians of the last few decades.

Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called elections just weeks after Trump demanded to annex Greenland (a Danish territory), only for her Social Democrats to lose their majority and the national populist Danish People’s Party to reemerge as a political force after a half-decade in the political wilderness.

Even when European centrists have won, such as the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Obran and his Fidesz Party, it was only to cede power to a man who attacked Orban for being too liberal on immigration.

But the greatest defeat for Europe’s neoliberal centrists greatest didn’t come at the ballot box. Rather, it came from the traditional Right’s unwillingness to resist nationalism coming from within its own coalition.

The End of the EU Establishment?

The European Union Parliament consists of eight coalitions, with the center-right European People’s Party, centrist Renew Europe, and center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats holding a majority of the seats. These three parties have controlled the EU Parliament for the last two decades while blocking any effort made by the far Left or nationalist Right to make changes that better reflect their constituencies.

While it maintains control of the legislative body, the centrist bloc’s numbers have dwindled as the three nationalist Right coalitions grew from controlling 15% of the seats in 2014 to 27% today. Polls suggest that the nationalist parties could surge past 31% ahead of the next election in 2029—growth which is not going unnoticed by the establishment European People’s Party.

Last year, for the first time in the history of the EU Parliament, the European People’s Party delivered an olive branch to the previously excluded nationalist coalitions, asking for their help pushing against green new deal policies that were hurting Europe’s economy. Though fairly benign in terms of policy, the move reflected a major turning point where the supposedly center-right European People’s Party was no longer willing to refuse working with the nationalist Right. For over a decade, the EPP saw its coalition shrink as voters turned to more nationalist parties over those who betrayed their base in order to hold together an ever-strained center.

Earlier this year, the EPP once again turned to the nationalists to pass legislation against the will of the center-left’s Socialist and Democrats. This event was even more norm-shattering because it wasn’t over an issue like economics that some moderates can come to terms with. Rather, this was about the most important victory for nationalist parties—immigration.

Nations across Europe have been seeking faster deportation for criminals and rejected asylum seekers, but were often thwarted by the European Commission on Human Rights and other EU regulations. EU law states that you cannot send a migrant back to an unsafe nation, so conservative leaders like Meloni and former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sought to instead send migrants to “safe third countries outside the EU borders,” similar to Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy.

But the Socialists would never go for it, nor would minor coalitions from the far Left, and there weren’t enough centrist EPP and Reform Europe members to pass the legislation. The only way through was toughening the policy by winning over nationalists in the other coalitions.

With the backing of the nationalist Right, the revised policy stipulates that rejected asylum seekers who cannot be returned to their countries of origin can be transferred to “return hubs” outside of the laws and regulations of the EU. Passage of this policy was a major win for Meloni and her allies.

In essence, the center can no longer keep the nationalist Right out of the governing conversation. The ultimate test will come in upcoming national elections in Germany and Austria, where nationalist parties are expected to garner the most votes but still likely need coalition partners to form a government.

The EU’s center-Right parties are realizing that the only way they can pass conservative policies is to join forces with the dreaded nationalists, turning their backs on the generations-old compact to stop the hard Right at every turn.

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The Domestic Front

Unfortunately, political parties within individual European countries haven’t yet learned that lesson.

Western Europe has become a region void of political stability. France has cycled through seven prime ministers in the last six years, the United Kingdom is about to start its fifth, and the only way for Angela Merkel’s former party, the centrist Christian Democratic Union, to keep the nationalists at bay in Germany after the next election will be to enter a coalition with various Left and far-Left parties. All of these countries sit in a state of political chaos precisely because they refuse to work with the nationalists. Italy is the sole exception—its nationalist prime minister is closing in on four consecutive years in office.

The center-Left is even conceding a bit of ground when it comes to immigration. Labour’s Keir Starmer greatly slashed legal immigration from the Boris wave while he was leading the UK; Denmark continues to pursue punitive measures against illegal immigrants, and even Hungary’s new anti-Orban prime minister is looking to slash legal immigration from South Asian countries.

Throughout Western Europe, all of the institutionalists who believe in the promise of post-war Europe are dying on the hill of mass immigration, losing ground with each passing year. We could be on the verge of a nationalist wave on the other side of the Atlantic.

Nationalists and populists from Europe won’t always agree with their U.S. counterparts. When it comes to artificial intelligence, for example, the Trump administration champions the technology while European leaders like Meloni compare the promises of tech leaders to those of 1990s politicians who said there would be no downsides to free trade with China.

Still, due to the shared issue of immigration, along with the threat of China and its advancing influence in the Southern Hemisphere, a nationalist/populist coalition that crosses the Western world could be a powerful force. Having nationalists govern both the U.S. and top European countries could create a shared permission structure for each nation to control its borders, deport illegal aliens, pursue smart energy policies, and protect its unique national identity.

In the decade since Trump first took office, American progressives have championed Europe as a shining beacon of democracy that would never succumb to his border and immigration restrictions. But if every country in the West begins working from the same playbook, institutional Leftists will have nowhere to turn to aside from Canada—and that’s pretty sad.

Could we, in 2028, live in a world where Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni lead two of the largest nations in Western Europe, Reform UK and AfD are ascending ahead of their respective upcoming elections, and JD Vance is the Republican Party’s presidential nominee?

It’s no longer out of the question.

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And they conducted politics accordingly. Neither side behaved well in every instance. But when one strayed toward irresponsibility, the other appealed to the people’s better angels rather than taking the opportunity to behave even worse, and voters rewarded discipline. After President Ronald Reagan’s initial tax cuts left the deficit far larger than his advisers had predicted, he accepted a series of tax increases to narrow the gap. In 1983, the Republican White House and Democratic House agreed on a major Social Security reform that extended the program’s life through both tax increases and benefit cuts. In 1990, another Republican White House and another Democratic Congress committed to spending caps that held until the budget reached balance. It is in this way, and only in this way, that a democratic republic can flourish.

Sadly, fiscal policy is one of the areas in which Republican Party dogma has departed most obviously, and most calamitously, in recent decades from the conservative tradition and the core obligations of citizenship. And no one bears more responsibility for the failure than Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist. Everyone is familiar with the ATR “pledge,” under which most Republicans have promised, in effect, never to raise taxes under any circumstances. This imprudent absolutism led to absurd results such as all eight GOP candidates in the 2012 presidential primary signaling at a Fox News debate that they would reject a budget deal with $10 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases.

The result has been steadily rising spending and expanding government, ballooning deficits, and a debt crisis now out of control, as interest payments exceed the defense budget and drive deficits yet higher. More fundamentally, Norquist’s legacy will be to have bastardized conservatism, cheapened citizenship, and polluted the public square with a childish politics that elevates name-calling over problem-solving and promotes win-at-all-costs strategies that produce only losers.

Norquist makes no pretense of taking policy seriously. He evinces little familiarity with the substance of the federal budget and offers no pathway toward fiscal balance. In our debate this week on Henry Olsen’s Conservative Crossroads, I asked him whether he could point to anyone who had produced a politically plausible budget that could balance without tax increases. His first answer was that “federalism is the path.” He suggested we should “fight fraud.”

I tried to explain that the states could not rein in Medicare, Social Security, defense spending, or our interest payments on the debt, and asked again, “What can we hold onto that says, yes, this is a level of spending cuts that the American people would ever consider, even on the right-of-center, that becomes fiscally sustainable?” His answer, again, was to “let the states figure things out.”

Was he proposing to send Medicare and Social Security to the states? Or national defense? No, he was “talking about most of the welfare programs and certainly Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, to jobs programs.” Amusingly, AFDC is the program that was reformed into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families during the Clinton administration. Three decades after it happened, this is still one of the few spending cuts on Norquist’s list.

The amusement soured into pity when Olsen, moderating the debate, asked what each of us would do about Social Security. Norquist mentioned cutting benefits for high earners, but even he knew that got nowhere near a solution. And so he reached for more money, not smaller government—first “Trump Accounts” (an entirely new spending program), then selling off federal land. Even he does not take his own platform seriously.

Norquist’s team fired off not one but two press releases seeking to clean up their boss’s mess the next day. It’s the second one that interests me: “Oren Cass Calls for Trillions in New Tax Increases.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are headed for more than $24 trillion in cumulative deficits over the next ten years, so we do indeed need to raise trillions of dollars in additional revenue. We could make unprecedented spending cuts that Republicans have never contemplated, and Norquist would never propose, and we would still need trillions of dollars in new revenue. Seeing as the debate’s topic was “Should Conservatives Raise Taxes?” and my position was “yes,” I guess I took for granted that I should come prepared with a list of increases that I believe conservatives should put on the table. I proposed closing the deficit over time with roughly $1 in tax increases for every $2 of spending cuts, getting revenue to about 19% of GDP and spending to about 20%. The taxes I had in mind included codification of tariffs, higher rates for the top income brackets, a higher corporate tax rate, a financial transaction tax, and a higher payroll tax cap.

That position is open to entirely reasonable critique from anyone advocating an alternative budget with spending cuts sufficient to make tax increases unnecessary. But Norquist cannot do that, because he has no alternative, and anyone who has studied the problem knows that the shape of any such proposal would be neither plausible nor popular. He can’t even admit there is a crisis.

Olsen asked him directly, “Do you see the federal deficit, which is now running at about 6% of GDP, our debt is 100% roughly of GDP (the amount that’s held by the public), do you see that as a crisis or do you see that as just normal government operating…?” After a meandering non-answer, Olsen tried again, and Norquist eventually arrived at this: “So you’re asking me about an impossible not true counterfactual fairytale. Do I believe in that? No. And if you walk into a room believing that, you’ll get tooken.”

Norquist can be forgiven the debate faceplant. What’s unforgivable is his abdication of citizenship. His preference for lower taxes is reasonable—admirable, even. But tax cuts below plausible spending levels are not tax cuts; they are tax deferrals. Someone will have to pay the tab, and he is advocating that we pass it to our children, with interest.

“To be a citizen,” we write in Reclaiming American Citizenship, “is to inherit something built by others, owe something to those around you, and leave something better for those who come after.” Rather than tackle the entitlement crisis, he suggests that we take our national inheritance of public lands and sell it off (“with the sale of land, you could solve a lot of the problems,” he assured us) to sustain an unsustainable binge a bit longer, leaving less to future generations. This is what we mean by people who “have mortgaged structures they did not build, sold off assets they did not own, and devalued the basic currency of citizenship.” And it is why “we find our nation headed toward fiscal collapse, as we continually consume more than we can produce, accumulate debt we cannot repay, and make promises we cannot and will not keep.”

The only defense offered for this folly is a cry to “look at the other side.” Democrats will never accept spending cuts, the argument goes, so Republicans should never accept tax increases. The evidence actually cuts the other way: for instance, with the 1983 and 1990 deals mentioned above, as well as the 2011 Budget Control Act that Norquist cites himself. Never mind. Democrats purportedly reneged on a 1982 deal, and that justifies everything.

Thus, the plan must be to attract voters by cutting taxes, win elections, and then use the resulting power to shrink government. Norquist was strikingly blunt about this during our debate, framing his opening statement around the idea that Republicans “made themselves become the party that would not raise taxes. Branding is very important. You see that with Coca-Cola, that’s why you can pick up a Coke and take it home. … Republicans who raise taxes or even suggest that, Republicans who raise taxes are ratheads in a Coke bottle.”

A political party as a soda brand, voters as consumers of sugary beverages, and fiscal conservatives as “ratheads.” This is, nearly verbatim, the corrosion we describe in Reclaiming American Citizenship: the people “devolving from citizens into mere consumers—passive subjects of an empire that promised safety and comfort while draining away liberty, dignity, and prosperity.” Norquist proudly takes credit.

The analogy would be bad enough even if it inadvertently captured something true. But Norquist pairs this rhetoric with a narrative account that only confirms his own failure. He describes two periods, one in which Republicans were open to tax increases and one in which they were not. “The Republican Party was willing to go along with this and support tax increases from 1932 until 1994,” he says. In those days:

We’re not opposed to tax increases on principle. We didn’t say no. During that period, how did it work out for the Republican Party? They control Congress twice. They won Congress twice in 62 years. It was as if the Washington Generals and the Harlem Globetrotters played every single day and the Globetrotters always won.

By contrast:

In 1994, the Republican Party, 95% signed the commitment, written commitment to the American people. We’re not raising taxes. What happened? We had a situation where the Republicans won 18 years of government, House and Senate 18 years. Democrats, six years, mixed, six years. So we’ve seen that as the party that won’t raise taxes, we have a chance to govern.

Because he proudly touts how faithfully Republicans followed his strategy for decades, it is entirely fair to ask, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” Well, from 1932 to 1994, the deficit as a share of GDP fell from more than 4% to less than 3%, and the budget was on its way to balance within a few years. The Great Depression and World War II did drive publicly held debt above 100% of GDP in 1946, but by 1994 it was back below 50%, a remarkable feat of fiscal discipline.

But in the first, fleeting moment of unified Republican control at the start of President George W. Bush’s first term, the GOP passed a massive tax cut. When it had control again in 2003, it passed another. Spending, which had fallen as a share of GDP in every year of the Clinton administration, rose sharply. The surplus collapsed back into deficit. By 2019, the last full year before COVID, tax receipts were at their lowest level for an economy at full employment, and spending at its highest, since the 1980s. The deficit was nearly 5% of GDP. This year it is 6% of GDP and the federal debt is climbing back above 100% of GDP, on track to surpass its post-World War II record.

This is exactly what theory would predict. Promising to cut taxes no matter what happens to spending is an invitation to profligacy. William Niskanen, economic adviser to President Reagan and longtime chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, explained the point well:

The demand for federal spending by current voters declines with the amount of this spending that is financed by current taxes. Future voters will bear the burden of any resulting deficit but are not effectively represented by those making the current fiscal choices. One implication of this relation is that a tax increase may be the most effective policy to reduce the relative level of federal spending.

Nor does the evidence support the case that anti-tax zealotry works as a political ploy. American Compass’s own research shows that Americans of all political stripes strongly prefer efforts to restore fiscal sanity through a combination of higher taxes and lower spending. The Norquist style leads directly to perception of the public square as “an arena merely for fighting, with no prospect of resolving differences or achieving change,” we argue in Reclaiming American Citizenship. We must “choose instead a responsive politics that demonstrates faith in the wisdom and morality of ordinary citizens and holds elites accountable for representing and serving them well.”

No doubt, Norquist will go down with his ship, speechifying instead of debating, attacking instead of proposing, and leaning on references from 30 or 40 years ago, when his position fossilized. But for any conservative who aspires to help get America out of its hole, the time has come to put up or shut up: How are we going to pay our bills? There’s no shame in having tried a strategy that proved ineffective, but a great deal in sticking with it once you know you are harming your own nation.

As we conclude our citizenship statement, “What passes for radicalism these days at both ends of the political spectrum has become quite dull, performed for attention, impressive to no one, incapable of solving problems. We stand for something that is far more radical because it dares to be responsible and responsive: the hard work necessary to reclaim American citizenship, reform ourselves, and restore our American republic.”

Well that was a bit long, so we’ll run through the roundup quickly.

GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY FOR TECH

The Good: Big Companies Are Starting to Hire Again, Defying Predictions of AI Wipeout (Wall Street Journal). This follows last week’s news that initial jobless claims had fallen to their lowest level in more than 50 years. We remain vigilant for signs of labor-market catastrophe, but thus far the evidence remains scant.

The Bad: Young Adults Are Letting AI Do Their Talking for Them—Even in Person (New York Times). “She’ll even, at times, fire it up to formulate a response to the person standing next to her.” Please consider refusing to continue a conversation with anyone who does this.

The Ugly: Meta Is Fighting a Mountain of Social-Media Lawsuits—at Just the Wrong Time (Wall Street Journal). The libertarian case for not regulating massive companies as they release products that impose potentially massive costs on society is that we already have tort liability, which would place the cost back on the companies, so we can trust them to behave rationally. Of course, that only works if the liability indeed gets imposed. Now Meta is lobbying for immunity, which would reward its malfeasance and send exactly the wrong message to future “permissionless innovators.”

But what if the liability is too high, and even bankrupts the company? Well, what if a company’s products are so toxic that people wish it didn’t exist? Welcome to the wonderful world of law and economics. If you’d prefer not to have that catastrophic and unpredictable liability hanging over an industry’s head, may we introduce you to the wonderful world of actually governing in a democratic republic?

Speaking of which, if AI models are going to start committing felonies, someone needs to go to jail. And if you’re cavalierly unsure of how many felonies you’re committing…

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs (The Atlantic). Too many brutal anecdotes to pick one, just read the whole thing. And as you do, ponder which of the awful progressive ideas promoted today by The Atlantic will be the subject of this kind of takedown ten years hence?

• Bonus link: Oren’s oldie-but-goodie in the New York Times on the folly of progressivism’s faith that it stands always on “the right side of history.”

Inside the Phone-Throwing Drama at the Troubled, Broke Democratic Party (New York Times). Self-recommending headline.

Can Vance square his Catholicism with Trump’s Republican Party? (Sohrab Ahmari, Financial Times). “...it is a Republican vice-president who has written a book sharply critical of the old religious right, and sometimes even of the culture-warrior new right. Along the way, Vance praises labour unions, calls for a living wage and favourably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish priest who sympathetically engaged with Marxism.”

And for your weekend listen, check out American Compass policy director Chris Griswold on the University of Chicago’s Capitalisn’t Podcast with Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean.

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THE GLOBAL REBALANCING

FCC chairman Brendan Carr and his team deserve enormous credit for continuing to lead the China-decoupling charge in the Trump administration. This week’s ban on advanced Chinese robots was especially notable: Trump Administration Bans New Chinese Humanoid Robots, to Protect US AI Buildout (Reuters). For more, see excellent breakdowns from Friends o’ th’ Stack Peter Harrell and Chris McGuire.

But, uh oh, somebody call the wahmbulance… China threatens retaliation against U.S. humanoid robot ban, says it ‘severely damages’ relations (CNBC).

In Foreign Affairs, Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan makes The Case for a Strategic Investment Fund.

Mercedes-Benz Cuts Sales Guidance Amid Worsening Chinese Market (Wall Street Journal). Some real “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” energy here. Who could have guessed that betting your future on the Chinese market and handing over an ownership stake to Chinese entities wouldn’t work out better?

Speaking of which, Tesla Weighs Sale of China Business to Pave Way for Potential SpaceX Merger (Wall Street Journal). It’s good that people recognize a major U.S. defense contractor should not have a major Chinese arm. Perhaps we should have recognized a decade ago that it was a bad idea for a major U.S. electric vehicle maker to have a major Chinese arm…

More encouragingly, Lilly, Resilience to Invest $750 Million in US Drug Manufacturing Expansion (Reuters): “Global drugmakers have been ramping up U.S. manufacturing since last year and stockpiling inventory as President Donald Trump’s administration moves to impose 100% tariffs on branded drugs ⁠unless companies cut prices or make medicines domestically.”

And for your contemplation, Adam Tooze mulls the discontinuities between China Shocks 1.0 and 2.0, while Michael Pettis underscores the similarities.

CROPS CONTINUE TO NOT ROT IN FIELDS

The New York Times of course stands ready with credulous reporting that Employers Fear Labor Shortage as Many Immigrants Lose Protected Status. But around every corner, more evidence fro how the world really works.

In Asterisk, Dylan Matthews tells the extraordinary story of cotton picking’s rapid automation. “Considering that the going hand-picking rate was barely 60 cents in the late 1930s, it is natural to wonder if the Rusts would have succeeded even if they had been able to produce a mass-produced model then. Their machine was fine, but it could not compete with cheap Southern labor. Once Southern labor was no longer cheap, though, mechanization became very attractive indeed. And because it was no longer cheap due to a mass exodus from the farming sector and migration northward, there were far fewer people left for their invention to displace.”

More on the topic, from the Economic History Association:

The most controversial issue raised by the introduction of the mechanical cotton harvester has been its role in the Great Migration. Popular opinion has accepted the view that machines eliminated jobs and forced poor families to leave their homes and farms in a forlorn search for urban jobs. On the other hand agricultural experts argued that mechanization was not the cause, but the result of economic change in the Cotton South. Wartime and postwar labor shortages were the major factors in stimulating the use of machines in cotton fields. Most of the out-migration from the South stemmed from a desire to obtain high paying jobs in northern industries, not from an “enclosure” movement motivated by landowners who mechanized as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the South’s cotton farmers were often reluctant to make the transition from hand labor, which was familiar and workable, to machines, which were expensive and untried.

Holley (2000) used an empirical analysis to compare the impact of mechanization and manufacturing wages on the labor available for picking cotton. The result showed that mechanization accounted for less than 40 percent of the decrease in handpicking, while the other 60 percent was attributed to the decrease in the supply of labor caused by higher wages in manufacturing industries. Hand labor was pulled out of the Cotton South by higher industrial wages rather than displaced by job-destroying machines.

AND FINALLY, SUBMITTED WITHOUT COMMENT

All from the Wall Street Journal…

See the $600 Million World of Executive Perks. “From private ranch vacations to concierge medicine, these are the ultraluxury perks top executives scored last year.” (“Apollo Global Management, the private-equity giant, spent $790,000 for its billionaire CEO, Marc Rowan, to have a car and driver, citing ‘increased efficiency, convenience and confidentiality.’”)

His Wedding Guests Were Arriving—Just as His $45 Billion Fund Was Falling Apart. “Leopold Aschenbrenner was hailed as the ‘Nostradamus of AI.’ But his Situational Awareness hedge fund took on too much leverage, leading to a crash he never saw coming.” (“There would also be a pre-wedding colloquium to discuss ideas in panels and breakout sessions…”)

He Didn’t Plan to Buy in Los Angeles. The Perfect Home Changed His Mind. “Darren Walker, president of Anonymous Content, filled the Paul Revere Williams–designed house with sleek furnishings and a collection of works by Black artists.” (“From 2013 until the end of 2025, Walker was president of the Ford Foundation, based in New York. During that time he oversaw some $8 billion in grants to individuals and organizations, while shifting the foundation’s focus to art and social-justice initiatives.”)

Enjoy the weekend!

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• “The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here,” by Gregory Conti, Compact

• “Big Tech’s War on Human Achievement,” by Gregory Conti, Compact

Can the Western world afford to disentangle itself from China’s economy? A better question might be to ask whether it can afford not to.

Focusing only on the first question makes the answer seem obvious. Earlier this month, consulting firm EY published a study arguing that the “cost of replicating China-linked supply chains” for the United States and Europe could reach nearly $24 trillion by 2050. The group’s press release reads, “even partial decoupling risks locking in structurally higher prices, leaving consumers and taxpayers to absorb the trade‑offs,” giving the distinct impression that such decoupling does not make financial sense.

But any serious discussion of the costs of decoupling should put those costs in perspective, compare them to the costs of staying put, and consider that decoupling over a quarter century would be substantially more cost-effective than a sudden collapse of economic ties if, for example, China invades Taiwan.

Decoupling from China will certainly have costs. Companies who purchase inputs heavily subsidized by the Chinese state will have to pay more for alternatives. The West will need to make strategic investments in technologies where China leads, such as robotics and electric vehicles, if it wants to compete in those industries.

The EY study tallies the costs of Western investment in manufacturing, infrastructure, and research and development at $23.6 trillion—a large headline number. But let’s add some context. Using simple assumptions of 2% U.S. GDP growth through 2050 and 1.5% GDP growth for Europe and the United Kingdom, total economic output from the West will reach more than $1.7 quadrillion in nominal dollars. In that case, $23.6 trillion turns out to be less than 1.5% of total GDP.

For further comparison, the U.S. will spend about 3% of its GDP on defense this year, while the European Union, where defense expenditures are rising, will spend more than 2%. If China remains America’s preeminent strategic competitor over the next several decades—a view that most U.S. foreign policy and elected officials share—spending about half of what we spend on defense in order to decouple from the Chinese Communist Party is not an unreasonable proposition.

Even that comparison is likely too generous. Most of what EY counts as the cost of decoupling is actually investment to produce goods needed to do so, such as mines, processing facilities, and electrical grid equipment. These investments would not only create resilience against China but would employ millions of our own people in construction and production.

Weighed against those potential costs, meanwhile, are the costs of not decoupling and instead maintaining today’s strategic dependencies.

The U.S. and Europe got a taste of that cost last year when, in response to President Trump’s April 2025 trade war, China began restricting a range of rare earth mineral exports to the U.S. and its allies. Within weeks, U.S. automakers and other industries were warning of potential plant slowdowns and closures, ramping up pressure on the Trump administration to cut a deal to reduce trade tensions.

This summer, the International Energy Agency published a study arguing that if China fully implemented its rare earth restrictions, the cost to the West would be $6.5 trillion per year “of downstream production outside China … across the automotive, high-tech, defence and energy sectors.” Unlike EY’s $24 trillion estimate of an aggregate decoupling cost through 2050, this estimate is of annual costs until alternative supplies are created. Thus, a single year of the disruption IEA describes would consume more than a quarter of the entire purported 25-year decoupling bill.

A separate estimate, from Bloomberg Economics, looked at the potential cost of dependency on Taiwan for semiconductors. The model estimated that if a war between China and Taiwan cut off global supplies of semiconductors from both countries, it could cost $10.6 trillion in economic damages in the first year alone.

China has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use this leverage to its advantage, and not only against the United States. Just last week, China cut off 14 European countries from obtaining access to a variety of Chinese inputs, including critical minerals, in response to Europe sanctioning 14 Chinese and Hong Kong firms over their support for Russia in its war against Ukraine.

The mere threat of cutting off supplies gives China substantial leverage at the bargaining table, potentially forcing the U.S., Europe, and other allies to make trade and national security concessions in order to avoid losing access to key inputs. It is hard to put a specific dollar figure on this loss of national autonomy, but the costs are nonetheless real and substantial.

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Decoupling will not be easy, but it can be done with sound policies carried out across several years.

First, sound policies. Governments need to use a combination of industrial policy tools such as grants, loans, and purchase commitments, plus tariffs, tax policy, and innovation policy to encourage both a market for non-Chinese products and the development of capacity to make them. Sound policies also spread the cost of building economic resilience across stakeholders—the companies making new investments, their customers, end consumers, and the government—so that no single group absorbs them in full.

The second critical component is time. Opponents of decoupling tend to focus on how hard it would be to do so overnight. It is undeniably true that short-term decoupling would be hard and expensive. Despite the Trump Administration launching an aggressive, multifaceted campaign over the past year to create non-Chinese supplies of rare earths, the U.S. and allied economies will likely remain dependent on Chinese rare earths for at least the next several years.

But over time, those new investments will pay off, and decoupling will become more affordable. The right question is not whether we could decouple by the next quarter, but whether the investments we make this year and next leave us less exposed by the 2030s.

There may, of course, be a handful of economic sectors where U.S. entanglement with China is anodyne. Children’s toys and footwear perhaps come to mind. (Though wouldn’t it be better to source toys and footwear from U.S. allies?)

We should all hope that at some future point a new government in China brings about profound changes to the state-backed economic policies that have done so much to hollow out manufacturing in the U.S. and, today, Europe as well. We should also hope that the same government drops Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism and allows China’s billion-plus citizens the political freedoms they deserve. But until that time, the U.S. and China will remain geopolitical competitors. Whether to decouple is a choice within our means—one to be considered seriously—rather than being dismissed out of hand due to overblown and ill-contextualized cost estimates.

The reality is that the U.S. can afford to decouple if we put our mind to it and execute a strategy over time. Getting there—the investments we make today—will cost trillions spread over a quarter century. Staying put risks trillions in a single year. Washington should have a full and frank debate over the merits of decoupling, and should not be susceptible to over-blown cost estimates and other fear tactics intended to suppress, not inform, debate.

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In 1994, Barbara Jordan emerged into the thick of the immigration debate with a voice, a delivery, and a message of economic justice as powerful as an Old Testament prophet and as job-centered as the legendary trade unionist A. Philip Randolph.

After 40 years of modest immigration and tight labor markets uplifted American workers of all races, Congress had voted to restart mass immigration in the mid-1960s—while promising it wouldn’t. But Jordan, the black trailblazer from Texas, presented a policy blueprint that could have corrected most of the anti-worker immigration mistakes of the 1965, 1986, and 1990 immigration laws.

The most powerful parts of Jordan’s mid-1990s proposal included setting an annual cap of 550,000 permanent legal immigrants (the twenty-first century average is around 1 million a year) and creating a verification tool to stop employers from hiring illegal foreign labor. This second step would have virtually ended illegal immigration.

Jordan, the first southern African American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was concerned about rising numbers of unemployed and underemployed black citizens in the overstuffed hiring lines of their country. But she was far from the first person to make the case.

As early as 1895, Booker T. Washington beseeched white industrialists to “cast down your bucket where you are” to hire black Freedmen rather than importing foreign workers. A century later, Jordan appeared before a joint congressional panel and said, “immigration policy must protect U.S. workers against unfair competition from foreign workers, with an appropriately higher level of protection to the most vulnerable in our society.”

Unlike Booker T. Washington, Jordan was not a political outsider speaking for her race, but instead someone who spoke from inside of the halls of power for all struggling Americans.

President Bill Clinton appointed Jordan as chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform shortly after he took office. Jordan had delivered the keynote address at Clinton’s 1992 Democratic nominating convention, calling for an economy where “a young black woman or man from the Fifth Ward in Houston or South Central Los Angeles” could attend public schools and gain employment that would “enable her or him to prosper.” That was more likely to happen in a time of reduced immigration.

Clinton believed in Jordan’s abilities. He awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, declaring her the “most outspoken moral voice of the American political system” who had “captured the nation’s attention and awakened its conscience in defense of the Constitution, the American dream, and the community we share as American citizens.”

The Jordan Commission took the best parts of the two prior immigration eras, combining the principle of admission numbers friendly to U.S. workers that existed between 1924 and 1965 with the admissions criteria put in place afterward that did not exclude applicants by race or ethnicity.

Jordan’s commission recommended fewer admissions while prioritizing spouses, minor children, skills, and needs that were, above all, the American community’s needs. The proposed system would give anyone in the world who met the criteria a chance, regardless of race, color, or creed—but the numbers would also be limited in order to serve the national interest.

Barbara Jordan believed in welcoming immigrants. A civil rights icon herself, Jordan rejected discrimination and bigotry, calling the United States “the most successful multi-ethnic nation in history” even while acknowledging that “[w]e have our troubles.”

“The Commission recommendations are intended to continue the many benefits of legal immigration, while limiting the costs,” she said in 1995. “We are a nation of immigrants, dedicated to the rule of law. That is our history—and it is our challenge to ourselves.”

Yet Jordan made no apology for setting immigration limits, and she advocated for enforcement that would give those limits teeth. Combining the best aspects of the 1924 and 1965 immigration laws was in line with the principles of prominent black leaders dating back to the late nineteenth century.

Prioritizing Vulnerable Workers

Born in 1936, Jordan was a product of the great black migration which was unleashed by the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. Her mother (a maid) and father (a preacher and warehouse clerk) were among those who remained in the South but benefitted nonetheless from increasingly tight labor markets and improved working conditions forced by the departure of such a large number of workers to the North and West.

Jordan grew up in Houston during segregation and Jim Crow, but also witnessed a steady leveling of incomes and the rise of the black middle class during the moderated-immigration era. Along with economic gains, black Americans achieved new political power. The year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Jordan was elected to the Texas State Senate, and she later became the first African American since Reconstruction to represent Texas in Congress.

But even as people like her were breaking racial ceilings in the post-civil rights era, immigration admissions began accelerating, and most black Americans were finding their economic prospects stagnating or declining.

The expanding middle class and shrinking racial wealth gaps of Jordan’s childhood were halted and reversed throughout her adulthood following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. So, when called to confront the politically intractable issue of immigration in the 1990s, she accepted despite the fact that she was facing advanced multiple sclerosis.

“The Commission is particularly concerned about the impact of immigration on the most disadvantaged within our already resident society,” she said, “[meaning] inner city youth, racial and ethnic minorities, and recent immigrants who have not yet adjusted to life in the U.S.”

Jordan kept those Americans in mind as her priority when people advocated leniency for illegal immigration as if it were a victimless crime. “Unlawful immigration is not acceptable,” she said. “There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough,” she testified before Congress.

Jordan was emphatic that “deportation is crucial” in any country’s immigration system. For a system “to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process,” she told a congressional committee. But she also demanded humane treatment in all dealings with the foreign born, legal or not.

The commission’s greatest enforcement passion was in insisting that employers behave legally. “As long as U.S. businesses benefit from the hiring of unauthorized workers, control of unlawful immigration will be impossible,” Jordan said. And that stirred the passions of powerful industries in the opposite direction.

As 1996 began, Jordan’s opponents coalesced into a massive and well-funded lobbying campaign against legislation containing her commission’s recommendations, which previously had enjoyed broad support.

President Clinton had praised the work of Jordan and her commission by name in his 1995 State of the Union address. When the commission’s blueprint was unveiled later that year, he endorsed it as being “pro-family, pro-work, pro-naturalization.” Jordan was planning on the power of that endorsement to see her effort through.

Polling found that most of the American public wanted immigration reduced to at least the 550,000 cap Jordan recommended. In a 1995 Gallup poll, for example, 65% of Americans said they wanted immigration numbers cut. The Associated Press reported on another survey, this one from Roper, which found that nearly 80% of Americans wanted immigration rates scaled back “drastically.” One-fifth wanted all immigration halted. Yet it was not to be.

Sadly, on Jan. 17, 1996, Barbara Jordan passed away unexpectedly at the age of 59. She had been in poor health, but her untimely death of pneumonia was a shock. Rarely is one person so influential, so pivotal, that the fate of tens of millions of people rests on whether she lives or dies. Jordan was such a person. That was such a day.

Perhaps the legislation she backed should have breezed through Congress as a testament to her illustrious career of public service, just as the legislative branch had done in passing the 1965 immigration act in honor of the assassinated President Kennedy. But it didn’t happen this time.

“The effort to reform legal immigration policy was routed by its well-organized and influential opponents,” investigative journalist Jerry Kammer wrote in his book, Losing Control: How a Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked the Backlash That Elected Trump. Kammer detailed how “fierce opposition” gutted the legislation and kept Congress from enacting key recommendations.

Jordan was at her most forceful in condemning immigration policies that thoughtlessly brought in foreign workers without regard to whether their skills were needed or whether their presence would harm the resident labor force.

“Many American workers do not have adequate job prospects,” she said. “We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder.”

But the 1996 Congress—like all other congresses since 1965—continued to allow mass migration of less-skilled foreign workers to directly compete with America’s most vulnerable citizens. That edition of Congress eventually passed a bill preserving all mass immigration categories. It included some enforcement measures that targeted illegal immigrants, but protected the businesses that enticed them with jobs.

The Foreign-Worker Tradition of the Titans

The 1996 Roper poll found that 72% of African Americans wanted annual immigration cut to 300,000 or below (near its level before the 1965 act). In the end, though, the black working class was not a priority for Congress.

The key blow came on the afternoon of March 21, 1996, when the House voted on an amendment that stripped all the Jordan commission’s immigration reductions. The final tally was 238 in favor to 183 opposed. The heart of the Jordan blueprint would have survived if just 28 members had voted the other way.

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According to a Wired piece by author John Heilemann, Jordan’s blueprint for a time had been expected to pass because of backing by “conservative restrictionists,” the Democratic White House, and the bipartisan commission chaired by what he called “the famously liberal” Barbara Jordan.

“It was a powerful, if unlikely, alliance,” he wrote. “And with no politician daring to risk being called ‘weak’ on immigration in an election year, it seemed an unstoppable one as well.”

But once the tech industry titans were alerted to the threat to their supply of foreign workers, a cascade of actions peeled off the support of enough Republicans to create an anti-reform majority, as Wired explained.

Hundreds of executives flooded the halls of Congress, a raft of studies were commissioned to refute claims that immigration was depressing wages, and a cadre of bright, young free-market libertarians who over the next two decades would come to occupy top Republican congressional staff and member positions combined to block Jordan’s recommendations.

In this sense, the 1990s were a sad historical echo of the 1890s. In 1896, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge passionately appealed for limits to the Ellis Island immigration surge, saying that nothing “does so much to bring about a reduction of wages and to injure the American wage earner as the unlimited introduction of cheap foreign labor through unrestricted immigration.”

That effort failed, and African American workers suffered for nearly three more decades before the federal government finally removed the immigration barrier to a tighter job market. By greatly reducing the foreign labor flow in 1924, Congress and President Calvin Coolidge cleared the way for four decades of rapid black economic improvement in America’s hiring lines. As we’ve seen, that improvement stalled and regressed after Congress re-installed the barriers with its 1965 mass immigration act.

If she had lived a few months longer, could Barbara Jordan have held her ground against such an onslaught? It’s impossible to say. Polling continued to find an American public eager to see migration levels reduced, as it still does today. But for decades most members of Congress—and most presidents—have found it more convenient to ignore the public, mandate or not.

Jordan’s Vision Today

Following the rejection of Jordan’s recommendations, the federal government has provided an additional 30-plus million foreign citizens with lifetime access to the labor and housing markets of American communities. Millions more foreign citizens have been allowed to join the illegal workforce.

The percentage of working-age (18-64) U.S.-born men outside the labor force has been climbing steadily since Congress restarted mass immigration in 1965. African American men have been most affected, especially those without a college education. Federal data found the percentage of that group who were not in the labor force more than doubled, from 12% in 1960 to 25% in 1990.

By 2024, the percentage of black men who were left out, dropped out, or pushed out of the labor market had nearly tripled from its 1960 rate, reaching 35%

Not surprisingly, 25% of all black children lived in poverty in 2024, a rate three times higher than for white children. This is related in part to the sharp decline in family formation which has been exacerbated by the sharp decline in men with meaningful work.

Immigration policies certainly were not the sole cause of this disheartening reversal from the stunning black march into the middle class between 1924 and 1965. But higher immigration rates have been one of the key factors. According to economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, who wrote the book Unequal Gains, a magisterial history of inequality in America. “Immigration has thus been part of the story of rising U.S. inequality since the 1970s, much as rising immigration was also part of the inequality story between the 1860s and World War I.”

Absent grassroots citizen outrage, the George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations would have increased annual legal entries of foreign labor still further. But both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders have also spent the ensuing three decades blocking legislation aimed at reducing foreign labor.

After House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) won committee passage of a mandatory E-Verify bill in 2011, with endorsements even from most major business lobbies, the Speaker of his own party refused to bring it to a House floor vote. In 2017 and 2018, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) introduced bills containing most of the Jordan Commission’s recommendations to reduce legal and illegal immigration. The leaders of their party in both chambers ensured those bills were defeated.

Many Democrats in Congress supported Jordan’s solutions for the first decade after she died. But in recent years, elected members of her party have almost universally turned away from her immigration policies that would protect American workers.

The current Congress again has an opportunity to approve most provisions of the Jordan blueprint with the Americans First Immigration Act (H.R. 8586), sponsored by Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.).

Backing Jordan’s vision, the legislation would end chain migration, eliminate the visa lottery, and significantly reduce legal immigration levels. It differs from the Jordan Commission in creating a single, merit-based, points-driven system to replace all existing employment-based green card categories. However, the sponsors’ intent, backed by substantial new restrictions to prevent the use of those visas to undercut American workers, is the same as Jordan’s—to protect American workers.

This Congress also has a choice of bills that would enact individual Jordan Commission recommendations to end chain migration (H.R. 2705 and S. 1328), stop the visa lottery (H.R. 1241 and S. 4983), and mandate E-Verify (H.R. 251 and S. 1151).

All those bills would mitigate a practice decried by black leaders ranging from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. DuBois to A. Philip Randolph to Coretta Scott King to Barbara Jordan: Employers using foreign labor to avoid recruiting and advancing formerly enslaved people, and then their descendants, on the nation’s job ladders. The effect has been to steal black wealth before it could be earned.

Our surplus-labor economy of the last six decades has severely exacerbated racial disparities that ethically challenge and destabilize our national community. Had Congress passed Jordan’s blueprint 30 years ago, we’d be living in a very different country today. That doesn’t mean it’s too late to act now.

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Adapted from the newly released Second Edition of “Back of the Hiring Line: A 200-year history of employer bias, immigration surges, and depression of Black wealth.” Roy Beck is a former newspaper journalist, founder of the NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation, and author of five books on public policy and ethics.

Earlier this month, the New York Times published a remarkable article describing how the United States has been running Venezuela as a de facto colony, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio playing the role of Roman proconsul. Per the Times:

Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources, and its government. … The direct control over Venezuela’s public revenues, in particular, distinguishes Washington’s influence there from most other countries beholden to its military and financial might.

The U.S. Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it to Venezuela through the country’s banking system, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom.

Nor is this control limited to purse strings. The U.S. reviews appointments to key government positions and writes the rules for Venezuela’s economy; we tell their high officials when they can appear in public, with whom they can meet, and even what they can post online.

The last time the United States exercised such direct, comprehensive power over the destiny of a foreign people was during the early days of the Iraq War. But even the occupation of Iraq, as sweeping and viceregal as it was, had a timeframe baked in (L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority gave way to a transitional Iraqi government after just over a year). One must go back to the turn of the twentieth century to find a true parallel.

In Venezuela today, as in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, there is no real indication of how long America will be running the show. The Trump administration has spoken vaguely of a three-phase plan to restore the country to its citizens’ control, without offering any details on timing and procedure. More than six months after former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s removal, no date for a new election has been set. President Trump himself has said it may be “years” before we hand back the reins to Caracas.

Despite the unprecedented nature of this arrangement, it has so far failed to raise much of a stir among voters. One reason is no doubt the relentless flood of events. Since Operation Absolute Resolve went down in the wee hours of January 3, the United States has gone to war with Iran, negotiated a ceasefire, and gone to war with Iran again. We’ve seen a partial government shutdown, the first crewed deep-space mission since the 1970s, a World Cup, and countless mini-scandals (each of which might have, in more ordinary times, commanded a weeks-long news cycle of its own). Little wonder Venezuela is no longer top of mind.

Another explanation is that the material costs have been minimal, especially when compared to our ongoing Middle Eastern adventure. Controlling Venezuela, a country of 29 million souls, does not require an army of occupation, nor are we on the hook to fund a massive reconstruction effort (although the recent earthquake has led us to ship out more aid). In fact, by taking over management of Venezuela’s large oil reserves—and, apparently, spiriting away some of its gold—we may well stay in the black.

But America has not gotten off scot-free. Rather, the costs we are incurring have less to do with our pocketbooks and more with our understanding of what it means to be citizens of a free republic.

The Law of the Jungle

Consider the justification for our domination of Venezuela.

The seizure of Maduro, it may be recalled, was framed as a police action rather than an act of war. “This was a law enforcement operation,” United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz told the UN Security Council shortly after the raid, “in furtherance of lawful indictments that have existed for decades. The United States arrested a narcotrafficker who is now going to stand trial in the United States in accordance with the rule of law for the crimes he’s committed against our people for 15 years.”

That initial rationale has all but disappeared. In May, the Justice Department quietly dropped a long-running investigation into acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez for her suspected involvement in the drug trade. Later, it was reported that Diosdado Cabello—the ruthless head of Venezuela’s internal security, who was indicted with Maduro for narcotrafficking and has an enormous bounty on his head—has become a close U.S. partner and is helping us manage his country. And other than the odd offing of a cartel leader or boat sinking, the war on drugs is hard to discern as a driving force in America’s Venezuela policy (this is in one sense unsurprising, considering how exaggerated the narcotics threat from Venezuela was—though that’s a separate issue).

Other justifications have surfaced: development and democratization; keeping China, Russia, and even Iran out of the Western Hemisphere; recouping alleged losses taken by big U.S. oil companies. But they change with the day and the speaker, and often come across as slapdash, post hoc rationalizations.

What this increasingly resembles is main force, the law of the jungle. It is the strong doing what they will, and the weak enduring what they must.

Of course, there’s nothing new in the domineering application of American power, a temptation to which we often succumb. But there is something different about completely disregarding even the pretense of a consistent moral or legal rationale. As noted earlier, the assumption of outright control—not to mention the open exploitation of our vassal’s natural resources—goes far beyond our usual conduct.

One can argue about the strategic benefits of all this. But it is clear that there are ramifications for our republican institutions.

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Republican Citizenship

In a healthy republic, we ask citizens to impose limits on their appetites and their interests, and we embrace those limits as in some sense defining us. The American system, rightly understood, does not have a universal ambit; our polity is made for, by, and of a particular people.

To play the game of empire is to cast aside those limits. It is to look far beyond our own political community, to prioritize aims other than the welfare of ourselves and our compatriots, and to enter a sphere of action in which the ordinary rules of ethics do not apply. It is, in other words, for the nation as a collective to act in a way that would be abhorrent for any of its individual members.

Indeed, it is worth asking a bit more pointedly how American imperium is being wielded in Venezuela today. The highest priority appears to be helping oil and mining companies get their cut of that country’s natural bounty. “The oil companies are going to go in,” Trump said the day after Absolute Resolve, “they’re going to spend money. We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We’re going to get reimbursed for all of that.”

He has been as good as his word. A flurry of energy and mineral agreements are clearing the way for U.S. companies to swoop in and rev up operations in earnest. This past week, the Financial Times reported that the Trump administration has collected over $13 billion from sales of Venezuelan oil so far, while providing next to no information on what it’s doing with the money.

The whole affair has a certain grubbiness, involving as it does the use of public power for private gain. Doling out another country’s mineral resources to the likes of Chevron and Exxon seems a far cry from the public-mindedness and rejection of narrow self-interest that authentic citizenship requires.

Membership in a republic—or at least, in our republic—also demands a single, common standard that applies equally to all. It seems to be the case, as U.S. diplomat and historian George Kennan once observed, that America “is really capable of knowing only the quantity which we call ‘citizen,’ that it debauches its own innermost nature when it tries to deal with the quantity called ‘subject.’”

Stray Truth Social posts aside, no one is seriously suggesting that we should put Venezuela on the road to statehood. So long as we continue to exercise functional sovereignty over their country, there are 29 million Venezuelans who could, with some justice, be called subjects.

The consequence is that American political power is being exercised on a basis other than the consent of the governed. In some sense, we are opening the door to multiple categories of civic personhood. This strikes at one of the core tenets of our political order: that we are an association of self-governing equals, forming a polity, to quote William Jennings Bryan, “in which every citizen is a sovereign, but no one cares to wear a crown.” (This is also why the presence in our country of large numbers of illegal immigrants is as much a political problem as an economic or social one.)

Then there’s the effect of this imperium on the officials who exercise it. Handing down orders to subjects is very different from governing free citizens, and a government which grows used to the ease of managing the former eventually comes to resent dealing with the difficulties of the latter. Already we catch glimpses of this; consider the administration’s reluctance to provide Congress or the public with information on the opaque funding mechanisms used to handle Venezuelan oil revenues—which themselves seem to subvert Congress’ constitutionally guaranteed power of the purse.

For all of these reasons, the rule of territories we do not intend to incorporate into the body politic on terms of equality has always been understood, at least by our most perceptive statesmen, as a danger to the nation’s republican character. “If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1791, “it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”

Authentic citizenship demands a patriotism and a love of a particular community that is fundamentally incompatible with empire. It is high time we recognize this and end our imperial experiment in Venezuela.

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The bill, called the Connected Vehicle Security Act (CVSA), would bar connected vehicles, software, and hardware tied to China and other adversaries from the U.S. market. Cruz and Cantwell supported two amendments that would have significantly weakened its effect:

The first amendment, from Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), attempted to let Chinese batteries into U.S. supply chains. As written, CVSA bans electronic systems that monitor, manage, secure, or externally communicate EV battery operation. The Duckworth amendment would have limited that to systems handling only wireless battery communication. Cruz argued the broader language could raise consumer costs by needlessly barring foreign batteries. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Chris McGuire, in a white paper circulated to Senate offices before the markup, made the opposite case: an adversary able to reach a battery’s control software could start a fire fast enough to destroy the vehicle and endanger anyone nearby. The CVSA’s broader prohibition was designed to mitigate this exact risk; narrowing it would have left the vulnerability unaddressed. The Duckworth amendment failed, 9–19, and the original language survived.

The second amendment, offered by Cruz, would have allowed companies to operate in the U.S. with greater Chinese ownership. As written, CVSA establishes a bright-line 15% threshold for control by a “foreign entity of concern” (e.g., China). Cruz’s amendment would have eliminated that threshold altogether. As I noted ahead of the markup, one of the companies that stood to benefit from the Cruz amendment was Mercedes, whose Chinese-linked ownership sits just under 20% combined: state-owned BAIC holds 9.98%, and Li Shufu, founder and chairman of the Chinese automaker Geely, holds another 9.69%, together landing at 19.67%, and subjecting Mercedes to the legislation’s prohibition.

Under the legislation as written, the company instead faces a choice: pare those stakes back below the threshold, or stop selling cars in the United States. Eliminating that test in the Cruz amendment would have spared Mercedes from divesting at all, and left room for its Chinese shareholders to buy an even greater stake. Cruz withdrew the amendment without even forcing a vote—an unusual retreat for a sitting chairman, and a telling one, suggesting he knew it would fail, overwhelmingly and at the hands of his own party’s down-dais members, on a provision he had chosen to champion.

The committee then passed the bill as written, unanimously, with Cruz’s and Cantwell’s own votes among the ayes. The two most powerful members of the committee had just been rolled by one of its most junior members. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a freshman Republican from Ohio and the legislation’s lead sponsor, held the line against both the chairman and the ranking member—and won, against a concerted lobbying campaign by industry actors to water the bill down.

That is rare. Committee chairmen control the agenda and the schedule and expect to have the votes before a markup begins; one who offers an amendment and then pulls it from consideration has visibly lost control of his own committee.

The fight is a small window onto a larger shift. We wrote in May about three bills—on housing, labor, and rail safety—advancing through a Republican-controlled Congress over corporate objections, and argued they were best read not as three fights but as one fact: the machinery that once disciplined Republicans away from anti-corporate positions, and toward a more laissez-faire approach to regulating markets, no longer delivers the votes. Wednesday is a fourth data point. A chairman carried an amendment that would address a corporation’s concerns—the kind of ask that once would have slipped quietly into the legislation before anyone knew there was a fight. Instead it played out in the open, and the American interest prevailed over a foreign automaker’s desire to maintain Chinese ownership. — Daniel

KEEPING CALM AND TARIFFING ON

Today marks the expiration of the 150-day window during which the Trump administration could impose temporary global tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, its stopgap after the Supreme Court invalidated its initial IEEPA tariffs. (We discussed this move at the time in Understanding America, and Peter Harrell wrote an excellent piece for Commonplace about it.) The administration used that intervening period to prepare action under Section 301 of the same law, which has now taken effect. Per the Wall Street Journal:

The new levies target 60 economies, or more than 80 countries, that [USTR] Greer’s office says represent about 99% of U.S. trade. Countries that have laws on the books to combat forced labor were given a 10% tariff, while those without such statutes were given a 12.5% tariff.

Also in the Journal, Greg Ip highlights how the administration is now combining the use of Section 301 (a traditional tool, but one that requires significant process) and Section 338 of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff (rarely used, and granting significant flexibility) to continue its Liberation Day strategy.

Ip also highlights that the tariffs are likely to generate around $250 billion per year in revenue, which the Atlantic Council’s Josh Lipsky notes is likely to make repeal rather difficult for any future administration or Congress facing huge deficits.

Meanwhile, north of the border, Carney Has Tried the Carrot and the Stick With Trump—but Neither Is Working (Wall Street Journal). Maybe that’s because, as Daniel has explained, Canada Doesn’t Have the Cards.

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

In the Wall Street Journal, Stagnant Germany Considers the Unthinkable: Sunday Shopping. “While most of Europe has embraced seven-day retail, Germany has largely stuck to its century-old ban—until now.”

From Mike Lind, at UnHerd, Serfdom, Republican-style. “To address the genuine short-term labor shortages, the bill proposes to raise wages in American agriculture to lure US citizens, while providing federal subsidies to farms in labor-intensive sectors to allow them to purchase labor-saving agricultural technology. Just kidding!”

• Bonus link: If you haven’t read it already, Daniel’s essay on the Mudsill Theory of a two-tiered labor system is a must.

From the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, War Housing. People complaining that labor and materials shortages make an expansion of the housing supply too difficult should take a look at what the country accomplished during World War II.

• Bonus link: Speaking of interesting case studies, Baron Public Affairs highlights the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to defuse revolutionary pressure from a restive creative class during the Great Depression through “federal subsidies to keep the overeducated and underemployed busy and dispersed.”

And AEI’s Robet Pondiscio writes an open letter to Alpha School, famous for promoting its model (>$40K-per-year private school with minimum teacher salaries of >$100K) with claims like, “all educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because GenAI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you.”

WORLD’S WORST LEDES

The introductory anecdote for a big-think news story can be highly instructive. If this is an important trend, not just a random anecdote, the best and most compelling example ought to be credible and replicable. When it backfires, you get, well…

In the New York Times, Senior Living Facility in Distress as Immigrant Caregivers Are Forced Out:

Channing House, a senior living community just a mile from Stanford University, is home to pioneering scientists, tech executives and inventors. But during a recent meeting, its residents confronted a problem they felt powerless to fix: the sudden loss of their caregivers to immigration policies.

Residents of Channing House often pay seven-figures for entry to the community. A representative couple, highlighted later in the article, are “Lou Thompson, a high-speed rail expert who helped develop Amtrak’s Northeast corridor and was there with his wife, Alice Galenson, an economist who worked at the World Bank.” When it comes to caring for people like them, are these jobs Americans won’t do, or simply services that wealthy retirees don’t want to pay for?

And in the Washington Post, The Biggest Winners of the American Economy Fear They’re Sinking Fast:

Throughout a nearly two-decade career, Susan Smith considered herself a winner in the American economic lottery. She moved easily between tech jobs, earning a salary of more than $500,000 in her most recent position, as a mid-tier executive at Meta. A single mom, Smith could afford two nannies and support her disabled son without financial worry.

But as Silicon Valley has pushed headlong into artificial intelligence and heavy job cuts, that security has evaporated. Smith once readily put in 70-hour workweeks, believing the tech giant’s apps benefited humanity and th…

Adhering to the principle that we shouldn’t say anything at all if we don’t have anything nice to say, we’ll just leave that one right there.

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SPEAKING OF TECH, THOUGH

There are so many terrible people out there. Yes, this violates our just-stated principle but, like, come on:

At a work conference in Albuquerque, N.M., in May, Chang wore a small pin with a red light indicating it was recording. Someone who worked at the conference eventually approached Chang and told her the device was making people uncomfortable. She found the request to stop recording triggering.

“It’s my thing,” she says. “I’m not attributing who said what. It’s for my general knowledge.”

Chang has also taken to recording most of her first dates, usually with Granola. She puts her phone out on the table or her chair and then once the date is through, she has the feed automatically sent to Anthropic’s Claude to report back on how she did.

The whole Wall Street Journal story is worth a careful read because, as venture capitalist Eric Bahn puts it, “I just see this as normal protocol. Our society is moving to a state of East Germany.” And yes, Bahn has invested in Chang’s start-up.

The Journal takes a remarkably fatalistic view:

With the rise of camera-equipped smartglasses, AI-recording bracelets and other covert devices, a societal shift is under way. And it isn’t clear how much say we will have in the matter—or how much our conversations will change if we all know they’re all being entered into the permanent record.

But actually, we have as much say as we want, via our republican form of government. We can just ban the devices. We can require two-party consent. And cultural norms are defined by actual people. If everyone sits cowed to the side, the Emmie Changs of the world will indeed ruin our public spaces. When you have the option, try saying, “excuse me, could you please turn that off” and “no, actually, it’s not OK if you record this conversation.”

AND FINALLY, A SALUTE

‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Turned Down Million-Dollar Offer to Perform in Saudi Arabia: ‘I Don’t Need to Take Any Money if It Makes Me Feel Icky’ (Variety).

Enjoy the weekend!

Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series comparing the U.S. and Canadian economies. For an American perspective on Canada, read Jeff Reimer’s “Is Kansas Really Richer Than Canada?”

“No way! I don’t believe you.”

This is what I often hear when I tell my Canadian friends that Ontario ranks 48th of the 60 U.S. states and Canadian provinces in GDP per capita. Ontario sits just above states like West Virginia which are known for their poverty, and well below even the so-called rust belt states like Ohio and the flyovers like Kansas. New York and California are so far ahead of us that we can barely see them.

For many Canadians, this stings. Ontario, where I live, is the beating heart of the Canadian economy; its machine; its engine. Whereas Kansas is… where’s Kansas again?

It turns out that Kansas is in the top half of the rankings, at 29th, a full 19 spots ahead of Ontario. If Ontarians think they live in an economic engine, we need to come to terms with the fact that it’s sputtering. Here, as demonstrated by Canadian economist Trevor Tombe in The Hub, is the evidence:

But how real is this? What about (and this is something I hear immediately after sharing the data) taxes, what about health care, what about transfers? Isn’t America much more unequal? Yes, Kansas might produce about $25,000 more per person, and yes, the median Kansan household makes slightly more than its Ontario counterpart before taxes and transfers, and yes, the Gini coefficient in Kansas is slightly higher (.455 vs. .447 on market income, though my hunch is that it’s significantly higher than Canada’s after taxes and transfers).

But how does that feel on the ground? Does it make any difference to an everyday household? To find out, I took a trip straight into the belly of the beast: Kansas itself, the Wichita area to be specific.

My partner in this endeavor, Jeff Reimer, is as close to an American version of this Canadian apple that you will find. We each have four children of similar ages, we hold white-collar jobs at a think tank, our wives are professionals, and we both send our kids to independent Christian schools. We’re both in reasonable middle-aged health.

I visited the Reimers in their home in Newton, just outside of Wichita, and cooked with them, ate with them, prayed with them, and lived alongside them for a few days.

Leaving Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, I knew I was bound for America because there were no instructions in French, the accents were American, and the snacks had more sugar. Otherwise, the passengers on board—business men and women in suits, salespeople heading back from their traplines, engineers, families—were impossible to distinguish as being from one country or the other.

Upon landing in Denver, the first stop on my trip, the differences became more obvious. For starters, the military’s place in the American consciousness is far, far higher than it is in Canada. U.S. military veterans are honored on billboards in American airports and are even given priority when boarding. You can hold whatever opinion you want about the justice of American wars (I have many thoughts), but Americans honor and respect their military in ways that, at least to me, appear pretty healthy.

While that might be expected, the airport also showcased another difference—the outsized influence of the U.S. charitable sector. You might see one or two charities advertised in Canada, but in Denver I counted a multitude of foundations sharing their work and encouraging Americans to give away their money. There were two for veterans, one for adoptions, and another for a foundation that “chooses values we hope most individuals would find encouraging and relevant,” whatever those are. This too can be found in the economic data: America’s culture of generosity far outpaces that of Canada.

Americans also have an extremely pluralist system of higher education. School advertisements abounded in both Denver and Wichita: this community college promises that, this state university is best at this, you can live your best life at this university, which is just down the street from the other one which, did you know, also has a great basketball team? Americans love their schools like they love their moms, a connection which is lost on most Canadians.

Americans also love to travel. Hamilton, Ontario, the city where I live, includes about 500,000 residents, with another 1.35 million living within a 45-minute drive. The city of Wichita is about 20% smaller than Hamilton, with only about 650,000 in the wider metropolitan area. Yet Wichita’s arrivals and departures list contained 40 flights from six different airlines. Hamilton had 17 from three airlines. American prosperity indeed.

Jeff picked me up and took me on a tour of the outskirts of Wichita before we headed for some Kansas barbeque. Wichita, a typical prairie town, sprawls like a man who’s eaten too many ribs and drank too many beers (American beer sells for a buck or two less per pint than it does in Canada).

A rolling cornfield near Wichita (photo credit: Jeff Reimer)

Finally—and this one was a significant shock for me—in America, medical providers seek you out rather than the other way around. U.S. hospitals have ads indicating that they want you to come, whereas in Canada our hospitals are so full you get the sense they would prefer you’d just stay home. That may sound harsh to Canadian ears, but it’s a fact. American medicine competes for your business; Canadian health care worries they don’t have the capacity to treat you.

Jeff was quick to remind me that this state of affairs has both strengths and weaknesses. The Reimers have experienced significant health challenges within their family and were treated ably and quickly by the best doctors in the world. But, were they not rich in social capital, the experience could have bankrupted them.

Over lunch at a small Mexican restaurant run by new American citizens (the American dream lives, and it’s delicious!) we discussed the benefits of a pluralist system (competition driving service) but also how the profit motive can alter the nature of care for human beings in less-than-positive ways.

In other areas, Wichita and Hamilton were surprisingly similar. Comparing notes, Jeff and I were surprised to see that education and hospitals, rather than manufacturing, were the largest employers in both cities (Wichita is known for making chemicals and airplanes, while Hamilton is home to a famed steel industry). Despite that fact, both cities also boast significant food processing sectors. Kansas, an American breadbasket, ships millions of tons of wheat to population centers around the world, while Hamilton is a hub for mustard, sugar, and grain.

For a bit of cultural exchange, Jeff then took me to an American grocery store (the subject of much fascination for European World Cup visitors this summer). We both have big families with growing, ravenous, teenage children, and groceries make up a large portion of our families’ budgets.

I was expecting American food to be significantly cheaper, and in some areas—mainly in milk and things made from milk—it was. That was not a surprise. Canada’s dairy cartel is one of the main irritants in the otherwise (and don’t let Trump tell you differently) successful trading relationship between our two countries. But overall, a basket of basic goods costs only about 50 cents more in Canada than in the U.S. If you removed milk, cheese, yogurt, olive oil, and ibuprofen, Canadian groceries were actually about four dollars cheaper. But either way, the difference is not huge.

Numbers provided by Brian Dijkema

Medicine is another story.

I took a run in the middle of a hot, dusty, windy, and absolutely beautiful Kansas day, with meadowlarks, the official state bird, singing to me on each step. The next day I had a few aches, and I learned that pain relief costs about half as much in Kansas as it does in Canada.

Medicine is one of the biggest differentiators between the United States and Canada, though it also cuts both ways. As previously mentioned, the competitive American medical sector means that Americans receive better, more advanced health care than Canadians, in a more market-oriented environment.

It’s all more readily available, and you have greater access to newer and often better drugs. We have good care in Ontario, but there’s a reason that wealthy Canadians often go to the states for care. When it comes to drug and treatment development, America is far in advance of not just us but the rest of the world as well.

The downside of U.S. health care is that you might go bankrupt after receiving it. There is a real tradeoff for segments of the American population who make too much money to receive state support yet not enough to afford their own insurance. That can make Canada’s slow, dysfunctional, yet fully socialized medical system look good by comparison.

Bottom line: For employed white-collar professionals like our families, America’s medical system is likely superior, while for the un- or underemployed, Canada’s is probably a better fit.

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The other major economic differentiator comes in housing. While Jeff’s home is slightly larger than mine, we both have similar-style houses in the suburbs, only mine is significantly more expensive. Yes, I live close to Canada’s biggest city, while Wichita lies far from the big U.S. cultural centers, but the price comparisons aren’t even close.

Even when comparing Hamilton to Pittsburgh, the U.S. city it most closely resembles, prices are much lower south of the border. For families like ours, that makes a huge difference, and that goes double for young families just getting their start. It’s a pure, cold economic advantage for the American family and one that, when combined with higher wages, explains why many young Canadian professionals are hopping south.

Our two intrepid reporters visit Eighth Day Books in Wichita (Reimer at right, photo credit: Brian Dijkema)

Underlying the cost differences in medicine and housing is what I think is one of the biggest differences between the two countries: in the U.S. there is an expectation of dynamism. This too can carry significant downsides. Touring Wichita and suburban Newton, the downside of dynamism was visible everywhere. Many houses constructed in the 1990s looked derelict, revealing how cheap construction doesn’t last. There were streets full of boarded-up buildings; drug addicts pushing shopping carts to the local rehab center; crumbling concrete grain elevators that, at blood-red sunset, wouldn’t look out of place in a dystopian novel.

The same thing seemed true when it came to the dynamism of American Christianity, which was on full display. The number of churches was not that different from Hamilton, but their makeup was. There were many small congregationalist churches fitting in alongside the mainlines, but also plenty that appeared to be dwindling, small, even derelict.

In general, much of the Wichita area had a workaday feel. One gets the sense that this could be a good place to raise your kids or start a business, but it might also be a place where you could just fade, like the cheap vinyl siding of a 1990’s house.

But the dynamism runs both ways. I visited a bookshop that, despite being located in the middle of the continent, seemed to have built a real, legitimate, grassroots culture of arts and letters. There were churches engaged in full theological debate—even through their architecture—with each other and with the wider culture that would not have been out of place in fourth-century Nicaea.

Outside Eighth Day Books (photo credit: Brian Dijkema)

All of which brings you back to the contrasts of America. Pope Benedict XVI, upon visiting the White House in 2008, said he came to the U.S. as “a friend, a preacher of the Gospel, and one with great respect for this vast pluralistic society.” As a friend myself, I too find it hard to have anything but respect for America’s vastness and its pluralism. It is huge and it contains multitudes both good and ill. I love it differently from my home and native land, but I love it nonetheless.

But overall, what struck me most was not the differences but the similarities.

John Keegan, the great war historian, once said that “a Canadian is an American who rejects the revolution.” This is true. Both are new world countries. We Canadians rejected the revolution, but the commercial, legal, and social culture of both countries are remarkably close. Each of us, when visiting Europe or Asia, are more likely to be mistaken for each other’s countrymen than anyone else.

Our histories are different, and there are many differences between our politics and our cultures writ large. These would likely be felt more acutely over time as habits and expectations seeped into one’s daily life, one’s family, and one’s community. Kansas is richer on paper, but the experience of life there—economically speaking—was not markedly different from my life in Canada. As I ate a dinner of pork chops, broccoli, and sweet potatoes identical to the one that my wife and I would cook for our family in Hamilton, and as we played cards after the meal, and as the kids drifted off to bed, the experience suggested that all happy countries, like all happy families, are alike.

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In December of 2024, recent Canadian export to the United States Jordan Peterson claimed that “the richest province in Canada is poorer than the poorest state in the United States.” The statement garnered much attention, not least because he made it something of a talking point, repeating it the following January in an interview with Pierre Poilievre, then thought to be a lock as Canada’s next prime minister. Since then, the claim (and others like it) has become a standard trope in discourse surrounding the two nations.

What Peterson said is not quite accurate, but it’s more exaggeration than mistruth. While most Canadian provinces are richer per capita than the poorest U.S. state (Mississippi), that isn’t saying much: In a combined ranking of all 60 states and provinces, eight of Canada’s ten provinces sit solidly in the bottom third, and provinces constitute five of the six poorest of either jurisdiction. So while fact-checkers were eager to pounce on Peterson’s claim, arguing that it doesn’t hold up exactly, that it holds up as well as it does comes as a shock—especially when the state in question happens to be located in the Deep South or in “flyover country.”

But why should it be shocking? What leads us to assume Canada’s relative prosperity when compared to parts of the U.S.?

I went and visited Canada myself to find out. But first, here is my pet theory.

In the imagination of the progressive Canadian technocrat from a cultural and economic center like Toronto (which is located in Ontario, ranked 48th of the 60), cultural ascendency must eventuate in economic ascendency. And that is exactly what Canadian technocrats had for a good ten years. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the virtual incarnation of the Liberal Party’s progressive, globalist economic politics, was in power from 2015 to 2025. Though he was elected before Donald Trump, Trudeau had barely been in office a year when Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election and all the assumptions of the American progressive establishment came crumbling down.

Trudeau then positioned himself (and Canada writ large) as the North American successor to Obama-era optimism and as the refined, urbane alternative to crass MAGA populism: rational, science-based, clearly on the right side of history. Many Americans bought into this narrative. Threatening a move to Canada is something of an American tradition, but in 2016 it was put on loudspeaker, with many coming to view the great white north as a fantasyland of liberal prosperity. Canadian elites, rather than pointing out that the grass is always greener on the other side of the 49th parallel, began to believe the hype themselves.

Trudeau held an invincible confidence in his own future vindication. Under his administration, spending increased and regulatory ambition abounded. But the future is a fickle god, and you cannot, it turns out, regulate your way into the eschaton. During Trudeau’s tenure, Canadian provinces slid closer and closer to the bottom of such combined provincial-state GDP rankings, and Canadians were shocked! Shocked I tell you! The racist, science-denying, Trump-voting, backwater red states were supposed to be on the losing side of history. Trudeau’s cultural ascendency resulted not in economic ascendency but in spools of red tape wound tighter and thicker around Canadians’ lives.

My theory is vastly oversimplified, and probably gives the United States too much credit for the outcomes of Canadian policy (we Americans always think too much of ourselves). Be that as it may, how does all of this play out on the ground? We have the numbers and the stats and the theories. What does it feel like to live in one place versus the other?

Enter two men, intrepid travelers, a Canadian and an American, friends and co-workers, each with an affection for the other’s country and a healthy-though-not-uncritical love of his own. My counterpart, Brian Dijkema, and I are both employed by the Canadian think tank Cardus. Much about our lives is similar, save our location: He lives in Ontario; I reside in Kansas.

The terms of our assignment: to visit and observe a day in the other’s life. We are both in early middle age, married with four children, both knowledge economy workers, neither wealthy nor poor, trying to do right by our families, our jobs, our churches, and our communities. I hail from Newton, Kansas, a small town near Wichita. The following stems from my visit to Dijkema’s home of Hamilton, Ontario, population 569,353.

7:30 a.m.: Brian and I meet up at Pür and Simple, a bougie breakfast joint located in the parking lot of a large strip-mall complex called the Meadowlands. (They name developments, a friend once quipped to me, after the things they pave over.) Brian manfully downs a five-egg omelet, while I take care of an egg-and-sausage bowl. Each of our dishes costs around $20 Canadian which, accounting for the exchange rate, is comparable to a similar American dining experience.

After breakfast, Brian drives me around Hamilton and points out the varying levels of wealth. Many of the homes were built in the 1980s and are modest but comfortable. Several, however, are being torn down to make way for much larger ones, some tasteful and beautiful and livable, others your kind of standard McMansions, yet others boxy, ostentatious monstrosities. Housing prices are on the rise, and sturdy, modest, middle-class homes are being squeezed out of the market along with the people who might have owned them.

Photo credit: Jeff Reimer

Brian lives on “the Mountain,” a misnomer Hamiltonians are happy to use and eager to explain. Hamilton Mountain is not a mountain but an elevated area atop the Niagara Escarpment, a cliff-like slope that cuts straight through the city on its 650-mile journey across the Great Lakes basin. Most everything on the mountain is suburban in character, an alternating patchwork of residential neighborhoods and shopping districts. Sprawl is limited only by regulatory decree—namely, a greenbelt protecting local agriculture and wildlife. And it really is a belt: As Torontonians flee skyrocketing housing prices and make their way to Hamilton, elevating home values here, an outer rim of housing has cropped up beyond the greenbelt where prices are lower.

Driving back down the mountain, Brian and I emerge from the forested road that angles down the escarpment into what feels like a completely different city. This is the old steel-industry town akin to Pittsburgh. Lower Hamilton is wedged between the westernmost tip of Lake Ontario (known as Hamilton Harbour) and the escarpment, so sprawl is limited by geography. The only way to build is up. Lower Hamilton is older and grittier, denser and more urban. Wealth and poverty are closer neighbors down here. Upper Hamilton was developed after the end of history, when postwar consumer capitalism had achieved its cultural hegemony; below, the longer history of the twentieth century is told in narrow brick buildings, old apartment high-rises converted into public housing, church façades converted into posh apartment buildings, and whole blocks cleared out for even posher residential high-rises.

One might be tempted to see in lower Hamilton, particularly the many grand but empty mainline churches, the story of religion’s decline and the rise of secular, post-Christian society, and in some ways they’d be right. But for those with sharper eyes, churches are everywhere. Catholic and Orthodox houses of worship maintain a strong institutional presence. On Barton Street, which Brian calls “the most interesting street in Canada” for its layered sociological richness and demographic diversity, Holy Trinity Polish Catholic Church sits nearly next door to St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church, down the street from Holy Spirit Ukrainian Catholic Church. Several blocks south we pass the ugliest, most garish Catholic church in lower Hamilton—which, Brian says, is full of pious, rosary-praying Vietnamese church ladies. Many of the churches that look derelict have in fact been converted into other churches: Presbyterian buildings into Jamaican Pentecostal ones, Methodist edifices into Nigerian charismatic communities, to say nothing of the dozens of other international churches in abandoned storefronts and run-down office buildings, a makeshift sign the only indication of the worshiping community within. Most of these places wouldn’t even show up on Google Maps, yet their presence is an indicator of the large immigrant population that calls Hamilton home.

Closer to the lake—and to the factories that depend on its shipping channels—residential areas are dominated by small, old union homes from Hamilton’s steel days. Brian points out the occasional house still inhabited by a retiree, clean and fastidiously well kept. But mostly they are dilapidated and in ill repair, a fading shadow of modest, working-class prosperity. Not the kind of place you’d want to find yourself late at night.

Urban renewal, of the kind that has rejuvenated city centers over the past 20 or 30 years with breweries, bistros, and bohemian retail shops, dots lower Hamilton, though not as much as I expected. Some of the lakefront has been developed into a park with greenspaces and restaurants and sidewalks. It seemed vacant and forlorn, but then again this was early March in Canada. A snowstorm blew through the day I left.

Photo credit: Jeff Reimer

All this is familiar enough to my American eyes: secular modernity’s hollowing out of traditional institutions, haltingly optimistic attempts at urban renewal, indicators of increased immigration. All of it seems slightly accelerated compared to the U.S., in keeping with Canada’s stronger political and social ties to Europe. There is standard political corruption too, even mob activity, which Brian points out here and there. But two forces of entropy stymie civic renewal and growth in Hamilton in a way that seems unique to Canada and is in keeping with my pet theory. One is the residual high-minded moral earnestness that tips more often than not into virtue signaling, and the other is a love for enforcing such gestures through bureaucratic means.

In lower Hamilton, Brian drives me by a promising, humane, and innovative public project: a group of 40 tiny homes designed as transitional housing for the homeless, a way out of the tent cities and into a stable place to keep warm and find work. A great idea! But Brian knows the whole story: When it came time to find a contractor for the project, instead of initiating a fair and open bidding process, the city tendered the project to a “local Indigenous-owned business” that took advantage of the well-intentioned gesture and went through another company to purchase substandard housing units from China. When the units came in, they needed significant upgrades. In order to bring them up to code, the city hired local vendors who capitalized on the city’s desperation to “‘make a meal’ of the project.” The budget more than tripled, a cost borne by the city’s taxpayers.

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The problem with all this, Brian tells me over spicy margaritas, is not political corruption, at least in the strict sense, but a sort of “soft corruption” in which the chance for city officials to pat themselves on the back for their own virtue means losing sight of the common good.

A related problem is apparent in spots where housing development clearly began at some point but was abandoned. Roads terminate abruptly. Grass and weeds grow unmown on lots cleared of trees. Trash is strewn about. There’s an abandoned roll-off dumpster sitting along the side of the road. This is the result of a Kafkaesque tangle of NIMBYism facilitated by municipal and provincial laws, taxes and development charges, and mortgage rates too high to justify further investment. Brian says it’s emblematic of an overweening, almost zealot-like earnestness that prompts the Canadian government to lay its hands on all entrepreneurial endeavors. And when businesses see their competitors’ ships caught on the rocks of a thousand regulations, they find a more hospitable port in which to weigh anchor—namely, the United States. That’s one reason housing prices are much lower in America, especially in more rural areas like mine.

Brian is far from a libertarian. He sees a positive role for the government in realizing the common good. But he also recognizes the economic realities of supply, demand, and market competition that any modern industrial society will bump up against. The government’s good intentions in Hamilton, and across Canada more generally, create a willful blindness to these realities making it prohibitive to do business there. Many entrepreneurs are disincentivized to stay in the country. Yes, much of it has to do with uncertainty over tariffs and the sheer fact that the U.S. is simply much larger than Canada. These liabilities, however, are not helped by Canada’s high taxes and regulations. That Canada’s citizens find it difficult to do business in their own country does not bode well for the country’s economic future.

How all of this plays out on an individual level is harder to discern. In my day with Brian driving around Hamilton, buying coffee, roaming the grocery store, clocking gas prices, even stopping at the first, gloriously kitschy Tim Horton’s, we found—somewhat to our surprise—little that was dramatically different from one place to the other. With the exception of gas (Kansas has some of the cheapest gas prices in either nation) and some groceries such as dairy products, most goods are similar in price, if slightly more expensive in Canada.

So, is Kansas richer than Ontario? In GDP per capita, sure. But that macro reality rarely reveals itself in demonstrable differences in our daily lives. By the measure of opportunity and risk, however, the difference shows up more clearly, and Kansas seems to have the advantage. I would rather start a business or buy a home almost anywhere in Kansas than in Ontario, and I am fairly confident I would have an easier time succeeding at either, especially if starting from scratch.

Maybe that’s like people in the Midwest being terrified of hurricanes but not tornadoes, and people on the Gulf Coast being terrified of tornadoes but not hurricanes. I am, for instance, more exposed to soaring medical costs than Brian is; we prefer the devil we know. But it is in areas such as business and real estate where macro-economic pressures bear down most perceptibly on micro-economic realities, and all too often it is these sectors that slowly reshape the landscape of everyday realities we take for granted.

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I believe there is an animating spirit to every country, a set of principles and behaviors wrapped up in its origin and history that, shy of some national cataclysm, are near impossible to suppress. America’s national spirit of individualism and industriousness and innovation is still alive and… maybe not well, but kicking. Canada’s animating spirit, owing to its New World frontier origins, its more frank negotiation with its indigenous heritage, and its bifurcation between Old World Anglophone and Francophone cultures, is not as well defined. Canada’s spirit is of course caught up with that of the U.S., but is also fiercely and self-consciously independent of it. While Canadians do not think about America nearly as much as we Americans assume they do, there are few things they know better about themselves than that they are not Americans. That sense of proud separateness has created, I believe, a deep internal conflict that pulls Canadians away from a positive identity rooted in their own history and toward either U.S.-style industriousness or European Union-style proceduralism.

For all the dysfunction at the heart of U.S. politics, America’s industriousness and relative intolerance for government overreach keep us more entrepreneurially nimble. My Canadian friends agree, often to their chagrin. But when that tension devolves into bitterness or smug anti-Americanism, something distinct about our shared North American culture is lost.

When I walk the streets of Canada, whether in Hamilton or Ottawa or Vancouver, it feels almost American, yet everything’s subtly different. The speed-limit signs are in kilometers. The storefronts have different names. There’s poutine on the menu. It’s so similar and yet foreign, somehow mine but not mine, like putting on a shirt I left at a friend’s house after his mom washed it. That’s Canada. It’s recognizable, yet with its own unique quality, its own scent, the familiar smell of an old friend.

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There was a brief, shining moment right after the 2024 election when it seemed like the Democratic Party might move closer to the views and values of the working-class voters it was so obviously losing. But that trend quickly dissipated as #Resistance fever gripped the party, the usual suspects mounted stiff resistance to any revision of policy positions, and momentum shifted to the energized progressive Left.

That trend continues today, as exemplified by the remarkable success of the Democratic Socialists of America. First there was DSA member Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the 2025 New York City mayoral race, which was followed this year by a surge of DSA triumphs. Mamdani and the DSA backed three Democratic primary candidates in New York City House districts—Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez—all of whom won. Notably, these wins came not against moderates but against firmly progressive Democrats, including Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat, who Chevalier ousted.

Other high-profile DSA victories include Chris Rabb securing the Democratic nomination for a Philadelphia House seat and Milat Kiros winning the Democratic nomination for a Denver House seat (ousting a 30-year incumbent in the process). Rabb will run unopposed in November, and Kiros is almost certain to win as well. In addition, DSA members Donavan McKinney of Michigan (Detroit/Wayne County) and Cori Bush of Missouri (St. Louis) are favored to garner Democratic nominations for heavily Democratic House seats and are also likely to swell the DSA Congressional delegation.

And it’s not just the House! DSA member Francesca Hong is mounting a strong campaign for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and DSA-backed Abdul El-Sayed is favored to grab the Michigan Democratic nomination for Senate. If nominated, both stand an excellent chance of winning the general election. DSA member Janeese Lewis George recently secured the Democratic nomination for Washington, D.C. mayor, and DSA member Nithya Raman has advanced to a runoff against incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Does all of this mean the DSA is about to “take over” the Democratic Party? I don’t think so. But it does mean a big hit on the party’s potential to de-Brahminize and become more attractive to working-class voters.

The DSA has had significant success and recently hit 120,000 members, making it the largest socialist membership organization in American history. But it’s a big country! As Kyle Saunders points out, to match the per capita membership of the Eugene Debs-era Socialist Party, the DSA would need more like 400,000 members.

Furthermore, DSA wins have been confined to very blue, urban areas of the country where securing the Democratic nomination is equivalent to winning the general election (we’ll see what happens in the statewide Michigan and Wisconsin contests). Today’s Democratic Party, despite these trends, includes many, many politicians and voters who do not hail from intensely blue areas and who are far less likely to succumb to the DSA’s blandishments.

Rather than taking over, the best way to think about the DSA is that it represents the vanguard of the radical professionals. In that sense it is the continuation of a longstanding Democratic Party trend. Democrats have become increasingly hegemonized by the professional class, and professionals themselves have become more radical, especially in the Donald Trump era.

Thus, when polls suggest that 66% of Democrats are favorable toward socialism but only 42% support capitalism, it does not mean that two-thirds of Democrats are about to join the DSA or, indeed, that they have any idea what they mean by favoring “socialism.” It means instead that professionals are being further radicalized by their fervent opposition to Trump and Trumpism, and are willing to pick a “brand” that expresses maximum opposition. This radicalization provides fertile ground for the DSA, even if the overwhelming majority think socialism only means vague principles like “be kind” or “the government should do stuff.”

The DSA’s appeal is particularly strong among younger professionals, many of whom struggle to afford life in the high-cost metropolitan areas in which they reside. Their upward mobility is frustrated and, in their view, unjustly so. This bleeds into extreme dislike of Trump and contempt for a Democratic establishment they believe has failed to stand up to the president and the billionaire capitalists who enable him.

The more political among these radicalized young professionals are naturally drawn to the DSA. They see it as their organization, one that crystallizes their grievances and functions as the leading edge—the vanguard, if you will—of their priorities, both economic and cultural.

Of course, the DSA’s conceit is also that it’s a working-class organization. Its rhetoric and program uses the phrase “working class” over and over again, as if repeating that phrase magically makes its members working class. But it doesn’t, and they aren’t.

As anyone even vaguely familiar with the real-life DSA knows, blue collar workers are as scarce as hen’s teeth among actual members. DSA members are overwhelmingly college-educated and hold professional jobs, unless they’re over-educated “skidders” who’ve wound up in low-level retail gigs or are slumming it to organize the proletariat. The organization’s culture is such that a typical non-college-educated worker who wandered into a DSA meeting would run screaming in the other direction, bewildered by the language and frightened by the radical policy positions.

One might think that, given the DSA’s emerging status as an electoral force, it would be tempted to soften some stances to appeal to more voters. But no. Instead it’s becoming more radical. On July 14, the group released its updated national platform, which calls for abolishing the Senate and replacing the President and Supreme Court with “an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress”(!).

According to the DSA, funding for police departments should be diverted to public services along the way to full abolition of both the police and prison system. All illegal immigrants should be amnestied, Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be abolished, and open borders established. Not to mention: reparations for slavery, a Green New Deal, universal rent control, defunding the Pentagon, a 32-hour work week, no restrictions on “gender-affirming care,” and public ownership of the largest corporations. It is difficult to find a radical, impractical, unpopular proposal that is not in this platform.

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Of course, DSAers running for elected office frequently soft-pedal their support for these radical ideas, preferring instead to talk about “affordability” and how they’ll stand up to Trump and the billionaire class. Once elected, they may even, as in Mamdani’s case, try to portray themselves as simple problem-solvers providing effective public services—sewer socialists who practice “pothole politics.”

But DSA politicians can’t escape the branding and dictates of DSA’s radical commitments. So instead of hiring more cops, as initially promised, the Mamdani administration is ramping up support for “gender-affirming care,” immigration law services, a new Office of Community Safety, and countless other programs dear to the hearts of radical professionals. That doesn’t have much to do with sewer socialism.

As for making the city more affordable, that is just very hard to do given the morass of bureaucracy, non-government organizations, and municipal unions that must be reckoned with—and that include many of Mamdani’s strongest supporters, who will stoutly resist anything that encroaches on their interests. Far easier are gestures like rent freezes for regulated rental units—already done—which, ironically, are likely antithetical to the larger goal of increased housing supply and affordability.

Expecting the DSA to genuinely appeal to working-class voters is a fool’s errand. Its members are what they are—creatures of a vanguard organization of radical professionals pursuing their own priorities. As such, the DSA should be thought of as an even-more Brahmin Left faction within the broader Brahmin Left of the Democratic Party.

In fact, the DSA will be a force for the continued and intensified Brahminization of the party. Any effort to embrace positions more congenial to the working class will be ferociously resisted by the increasingly well-organized and powerful DSA. This is the real problem with the group: not that it will “take over” but rather that it will prevent the Democrats from undergoing the brand reinvention needed to reconnect with actual working-class voters.

Consider three recommendations from New York Times columnist Tom Edsall in a recent piece helpfully titled, “If the Democrats Actually Want to Win, This Is What They Have to Do.”

First, Edsall recommends Democrats firmly enforce immigration laws, including tough border enforcement and deportation of unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes.

Second, he suggests the Democratic Party support the aggressive prosecution of those accused of violent crime and those who engage in crowdsourced “teen takeovers” of stores, as well as for all forms of child abuse. The party, he writes, should back the restoration of bail requirements in the case of felonies, lifetime sentences for offenders convicted of multiple violent crimes, tough enforcement of child support laws, and the death penalty if supported by the voters in a state and endorsed by a jury.

Third, Edsall says the party should say that there are two sexes: men and women. A man can claim an identity as a woman, and the same is true in reverse. Their claim should be respected and they should be protected from any form of discrimination for their choice.

The claim does not, however, alter their biological sex.

Consequently, it is legitimate in areas such as sports where a transgender person would have a competitive advantage over non-trans people to bar their participation. Similarly, claiming a sexual identity does not give a trans woman the right to be incarcerated in a woman’s prison. Finally, “gender-affirming” surgery and hormone treatments should be banned for those under age 18 due to the potential for irreversible harm.

These recommendations would go some way toward shoring up the weaknesses that tanked the Democrats in 2024. Yet the DSA and its supporters can be counted on to lie down on the railroad tracks to prevent any of them from even being considered.

This is the nub of the problem. The unchecked Brahminization of the Democrats, which has only been accelerated by the #Resistance and by intense negative polarization against Trump, has encouraged the radicalization of the professional class. That in turn has fed the growth of the DSA, the vanguard of the radical professionals, who now stand in the way of serious Democratic course correction such as that recommended by Edsall.

The road back to the working class is likely long and difficult for Democrats. The DSA’s growth just makes it even more difficult. Or perhaps it will knock Democrats off the road entirely. I would not underestimate the peril now facing the party.

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I thought I might take it upon myself, on behalf of the nation’s taxpayers, to respond to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s suggestion that the federal government take 5% stakes in the leading AI companies. Thanks, Sam, but no thanks.

As with most such marketing gambits from corporate America, the thin gloss of generosity does little to obscure the self-interested posturing, in this case, to foreclose competition by attaching the public interest to the fate of particular firms. As with most such musings from Mr. Altman, the idea itself betrays a remarkable misunderstanding of the proper relationship between the private and public sectors under democratic capitalism.

The thing is, we don’t need OpenAI’s magnanimous offer of 5% of its equity. We already hold a claim on more than 20% of its profits, in perpetuity, through the corporate income tax. Would that equity become more valuable if OpenAI were to become more successful? Surely. But “successful” here would mean generating much larger profits, of which we would again receive our 20%. And if that 20% stake is insufficient, the people of the United States, through their representatives in Congress, can increase it.

Of course, corporate taxes are an imperfect way for the public to share in the private sector’s gains. But how would a direct equity stake improve matters? Equity delivers no realized value, usable for the public’s benefit, until OpenAI pays a dividend or the government sells shares. Tax payments are more reliable, and less subject to management chicanery, than dividend payments. The proceeds from a sale would be a one-time windfall, not a genuine sharing in the upside of AI.

Perhaps, as the stock appreciates, we could cash in some of the paper gains. But we can cash in those gains anyway, through the capital gains taxes collected from the other shareholders when they sell—again, an imperfect system, to be sure, but, again, a better one than trying to time the market. Enormously wealthy shareholders in companies like OpenAI have ways to shield their gains from taxation. Enormously profitable companies—like, well, definitely not OpenAI, but maybe Google or Microsoft—have ways to shield their profits. But those are not arguments for the government holding direct equity stakes. They are arguments for closing loopholes in corporate and capital gains taxes. Perhaps our Silicon Valley leaders could throw their support behind that effort?

Such a change would not benefit them much. Giving the government a stake in the performance of their stock, by contrast, comes with the tremendous benefit of the government taking an interest in the performance of their stock.

When the public shares in private-sector profits and equity appreciation through taxation, we can all be agnostic about who wins and loses. Maybe OpenAI goes on to dominate the global economy, maybe Anthropic does, maybe some startup yet to launch has the right formula. Maybe it is the frontier AI labs that capture the lion’s share of the profits from the new technology, maybe it is the power generators, maybe it is the firms that find the practical applications, maybe it is the workers who see their productivity rise. So long as we define the tax base well—corporate profits, capital gains, and labor income—we can direct a share of the tangible output from economic progress in every scenario toward public purposes.

Some have pitched the ownership stakes as a form of sovereign wealth fund. But for nations like Norway, Singapore, and the Gulf petrostates that generate enormous wealth from narrowly concentrated economic activity, the premise of such funds is to reinvest their profits as broadly as possible, usually outside their borders. The model is a second-best effort to achieve the broad exposure to economic growth that the United States already has.

Conversely, insofar as our share of AI’s value comes through our holdings of stock in OpenAI and other leading AI labs, our success depends on theirs. Any policy proposal that might not benefit them would be framed as inconsistent with the public interest. Witness how corporate interests already argue against anything that might curb their power and profitability, on the grounds that any harm to the stock market will imperil the retirement savings of millions of Americans. In on the joke, CNBC headlined its coverage of Altman’s pitch: “OpenAI proposes 5% stake to Trump administration to ease Washington pressure.”

What about Intel and other companies in strategic industries such as critical minerals, where the federal government has taken stakes? Unlike the OpenAI gambit, those investments represent an industrial policy aimed at channeling capital toward underfunded sectors and ensuring that the United States has successful companies in them. Likewise, the strongest proposals for a U.S. sovereign wealth fund envision it as a mechanism for supporting needed capital investments, not a way to broaden the public’s exposure to economic growth. There are many important debates to be had about whether and when industrial policy makes sense, and about the utility of equity stakes in particular. But such moves, intended to direct capital where the market would not otherwise send it, and allow the taxpayers taking the risk to share disproportionately in any resulting returns, bear no relationship to exceedingly well-funded tech companies buying favor with the highly valued equity they are already throwing around.

For ordinary Americans to share meaningfully in the gains from AI, the technology will have to deliver meaningful gains for ordinary Americans—not through convoluted schemes of redistribution, but through the development and diffusion of useful tools and technologies that improve their lives and jobs. That is where policymakers, and PR-hungry AI pitchmen, should focus their attention.

If a substantial share of newly created economic value is going to come from AI, and we want a disproportionate share of that value to support public goods, we should establish an AI-centric tax base and raise revenue from it, just as we do from profits, investment gains, and wages. And we should be clear that the goal is to direct some of AI’s value toward public services that benefit the nation, not to fund some new handout to compensate for a reality in which the technology is causing more harm than good.

This is the intuition behind a “token tax,” which would capture some share of the value from every computation performed. That may not be quite the right construct—for instance, the chips themselves or the energy usage might be better tax bases. Economists can help to refine the best mechanism, a much better use of their time than boldly collecting signatures for a comically vague statement that “We Must Act Now.” And technologists, instead of play-acting roles from The Wolf of Wall Street and calling up Washington with an amazing offer on a stock, but we have to move quickly, should focus on making their technology useful. — Oren

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

In Compact, Gregory Conti makes the humanist case against the machine in “The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here,” arguing that generative AI is not another industrial revolution but a moral and cultural cataclysm already underway, one that corrodes the work ethic, common culture, and human distinctiveness that conservatives claim to prize.

In “Young Adults are Poor Despite Every Metric Which Suggests Otherwise,” Johann Kurtz writes: “My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated. Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments.”

In “Mom, Dad, I Want to Be a Welder,” the New York Times reports that “Gen Z is increasingly turning to trade schools in hopes of future-proofing their careers against AI. But getting their parents and peers on board can be a challenge.”

And one Bad Read: For a window into the poverty of the Deirdre McCloskey school of “economics,” read the Cato Institute scholar’s conversation with Yascha Mounk on why China is “more free economically” than the United States, which she uses as part of an argument for why the United States should drop its trade barriers on Chinese autos and allow for their importation (little mention, however, of the state subsidies the Chinese government provides to its auto sector, and the beggar-thy-neighbor policies it’s used to build and protect it).

IMMIGRATION AND GROWTH

Last week, Daniel covered a new paper from Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and coauthors, which found that across more than a hundred countries and hundreds of U.S. communities since 1950, lower birth rates predicted higher output per worker and higher wages, with no fall in aggregate output. The causal mechanism is induced innovation: when young workers grow scarce, employers must invest in technology and process improvements, and that scramble to do without cheap labor is what drives the gains. Daniel argued that the finding ought to inform our immigration policy: nothing holds so-called “labor shortages” at bay and wages down as effectively as importing foreign workers into the U.S. labor market.

This week, the Wall Street Journal covered the same paper, alongside recent work from University of Minnesota demographer Steven Ruggles, to make a contrarian case under the headline “Why AI Might Actually Help Solve the Next Labor Crisis.” Ruggles projects net entry into the labor force to turn negative in the 2030s, an unprecedented shortage he expects to lift young workers’ wages, give organized labor a rare opening, and produce the first cohort in half a century to out-earn its parents. A labor shortage, Ruggles argues, is “a huge incentive to adopt labor-saving devices, like AI.” Labor scarcity, in other words, is the forcing function that makes the machine worth building. Ruggles offers one caveat that doubles as the point: a rebound in immigration would blunt the shortage, and the wage gains with it, making every proposal to import labor a proposal to foreclose those gains before they arrive.

BONUS LINK: Read John Carney’s take on Acemoglu, Autor, and Ruggles: How Immigration Robbed Gen X and Millennials of Their Future

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages—long a redoubt for the case that immigration answers almost any economic ailment—show a crack. In an op-ed arguing against wealth taxes as a fix for the nation’s fiscal woes, the author concedes what immigration boosters rarely will: that importing workers is no cure for our demographic problems. “Immigration simply defers the problem. Immigrants also age and retire, and their birthrates converge with the national average within a generation or two.”

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ON CAPITOL HILL

Russia Sanctions Bill Hits 60 Co-Sponsors (Axios). A Russia sanctions bill championed by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) might soon hit the Senate floor. The legislation would impose new sanctions on Russian defense, energy, and financial targets, as well as on the shadow fleet Moscow uses to evade current restrictions. It would also authorize President Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the five countries that buy the most Russian oil and gas, China and India among them, for as long as they keep buying, and on the countries and entities that help Russia evade the energy sanctions. This would mark the first time Congress has authorized tariffs as an explicit geopolitical weapon (that is, unless you believe the Supreme Court erred in its Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump ruling…), and give the administration a new tariff authority on strong statutory footing for the duration of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It would also amount to yet another instance of the merging of the economic and national-security spheres, which Oren described at the onset of the administration’s second-term trade agenda, citing former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Stephen Miran’s prediction that tariffs would be wielded in ways deeply intertwined with national-security concerns.

Connected Vehicle Security Act scheduled for markup. Next week, the Senate Commerce Committee will mark up the Connected Vehicle Security Act, bipartisan, bicameral legislation from Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), which American Compass endorsed upon its introduction. The legislation would codify a Biden-era rule prohibiting Chinese-linked connected-vehicle software in the U.S. market and expand the prohibition to hardware. Unsurprisingly, certain industry actors are lobbying behind the scenes to soften some of the bill’s prohibitions. The Commerce Committee should resist them and report the strongest version it can, especially in light of expectations that the version reported out of committee will be folded into this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Speaking of the NDAA: the current version of the must-pass legislation circulating in the Senate, as currently drafted, includes the MATCH Act, the AI Overwatch Act, and the Chip Security Act, a trio of measures that would curtail China’s access to AI semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. As American Compass wrote in Stop Selling the Rope, these measures and others like them are vital for U.S. economic competitiveness and national security.

REINDUSTRIALIZATION AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

And finally, some reindustrialization (and deindustrialization) headlines to end your week.

In the Wall Street Journal, “The White House Made Fixing Intel Its Pet Project. It’s Working.” The administration took a 10% stake in Intel and has since twisted the arms of Apple, Nvidia, and SpaceX into signing on as customers. The plan is starting to pay off.

In the New York Times, “TSMC Adds $100 Billion to Its U.S. Spending Plan.” The pledge brings the Taiwanese giant’s total Arizona commitment to $265 billion, which the Times concedes is “partly in response to increasing political pressure on foreign semiconductor companies to locate factories in the United States.”

And also in the Journal, “The U.S. Is Trampling Allies in the Global Hunt for Rare Earths.” The United States has outspent the European Union on critical minerals by roughly eight-to-one over five years, buying up non-Chinese supply faster than Europe can convene a meeting about it. The complaint frames American decisiveness as the culprit (refreshing!). But the deeper lesson runs the other way: while Europe deliberates its way to dependence on Beijing, the United States is building the alternative. As one European executive quoted in the piece put it, “while we’re talking, the next value chain is bought by the Americans.”

Recent headlines confirm as much: EU Accuses China of Seeking to Reshape Global Order in Stark New Strategy Paper (SCMP), and Europe Has to Take on China to Save Free Trade. Novel insights and strategies for—checks calendar—July 2026. The EU better act soon: Volkswagen Warns It May Need to Cut 50,000 More Jobs (WSJ).

Enjoy the weekend!

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