The Claremont Institute Feed Items

In the first months of 2025, Donald Trump played a game of Russian roulette with the American economy and survived. Although the president had never hidden his enthusiasm for tariffs, the way he went about implementing them on taking office sowed confusion. Targeting not just geostrategic competitors like China but also allies like Canada and Britain, issuing demands that economists struggled to explain, reversing world-shaping policies from one hour to the next, and doing all of this on doubtful constitutional authority, sent markets into a tailspin.

And just when the president had been enjoying a honeymoon. In the last days of January, a majority of Americans had declared themselves—for the first time—Trumpians. They were particularly optimistic about his economic plans. But their enthusiasm diminished as the rumble of artillery from the trade war grew louder. By mid-April, fewer than 40% backed the president’s policy, and Trump was less popular than he had been at the same point in his first term.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded a policy enacted by the Obama Administration, and expanded by the Biden Administration, that barred immigration law enforcement from making arrests in “sensitive” areas, namely churches and schools. According to Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, this had become “fundamental” agency practice, which is something like so-called “super precedent”—that is, rules that progressives prefer.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” declared President Trump’s DHS. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense.” To most Americans this seems like common sense. If fugitives are exploiting lenient policies to avoid arrest and deportation, then those policies need adjusting.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Putting DOGE Down | The Roundtable Ep. 269

News broke a few weeks ago that President Trump would seek to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in his next budget proposal, along with several other federal cultural agencies. Hours later, it was also widely reported that some of our current grants were being withdrawn and canceled with immediate effect.

These announcements have caused fear, anger, and bewilderment inside our agency. I find myself (as the historian for the NEA) in the unique position of explaining to my fellow employees how matters have reached this dire pass.

When I arrived at this agency in 2004, in the first years of the George W. Bush Administration, the staff was mostly composed of Democratic Party supporters. But they were also cognizant of the near-death experience that the NEA suffered during the so-called “culture wars” (which stretched from 1989-1998), when the agency was widely lambasted for providing sub-grants that were used for exhibitions which included Andres Serrano’s blasphemous work “Piss Christ,” as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s sado-masochist and homosexual pornography.

The result of that foolish grantmaking was the restructuring of the NEA so that from then on 40% of our total budget was automatically awarded to state arts agencies, while an independent council was created to oversee the entire grants authorization process as a watchdog appointed by the executive branch.

The effects of screens on children are even worse than you can imagine: they can literally break down the human body. In her forthcoming book, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones, Clare Morell tells the story of an optometrist who discovered that an eight-year-old girl seeking relief from pain in her eyes no longer had Meibomian glands—which means her eyes cannot produce lubricating tears. Hours of daily digital screen time had trained the child to stare, which dried up her glands. At such a tender age she runs the risk of eventual blindness, as do thousands of other pediatric patients with her diagnosis. It is a fitting illustration of the tragic phenomenon that technology is having on human beings: pained children with blank stares who are unable to cry tears.

In a discussion with James Poulos, Morell explains that well-meaning parents should not simply set up safeguards to filter out the toxic effects of addictive technology. This is like advising a drug addict to use only less frequently, even though every dose is toxic, mind-altering, and possibly laced with a deadly synthetic.

Where do you go in Los Angeles on Memorial Day? Los Angeles is known as Lotusland—the city without a memory. And it’s true that memory rests lightly on L.A. But turn east from Sepulveda Boulevard just north of Wilshire, onto Constitution Avenue, and you immediately recede from the goings and comings of the eternal present and enter a sanctuary of remembrance. 

The main gate is opened each morning at 8:00. Visit on an ordinary weekday morning and there isn’t a soul stirring except you and one or two of the groundsmen. The traffic of the 405 freeway will continue to hum behind you, but a sacred local silence takes you in, to the company of over 85,000 veterans and their families, some from as far back as the Civil War, who rest in peace here at the Los Angeles National Cemetery.

Egads! The Democrats! I had almost forgotten about them. I’m sure they’d prefer we all did, at this point. Ineffectiveness and obscurity would be better than whatever the hell this train wreck is that we’re watching now. It feels indecent even to discuss, like commenting on someone’s unsightly facial deformity. But I suppose we must.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Covering Up the Cover-Ups | The Roundtable Ep. 268

Attending oral argument last week in the case touching on birthright citizenship pending before the Supreme Court, I observed a combination of confusion, omissions, and outright lies from some of the justices. As the lawyer for one of the amici, I witnessed the Court address the propriety of the nationwide, universal injunctions that have been issued by several district court judges blocking the execution of President Trump’s day-one executive order on birthright citizenship.

Let’s begin with the lies.

Early in the argument, Justice Sotomayor unequivocally stated that the Court had held 127 years ago that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, and repeated that holding in three other cases since. That is false.

The Supreme Court has never held that the children born on U.S. soil to temporary visitors or illegal aliens are citizens. The Wong Kim Ark case to which she was referring explicitly dealt only with a child born to parents who were lawfully and permanently domiciled in the United States—and the word “domicile” or one of its derivatives was repeated nearly 30 times throughout that opinion. Any language in the opinion beyond that is not part of the holding, but is rather non-binding dicta. The same is true with the passing references in the three other cases she cited—they are pure dicta. So her claim that the Court has already issued holdings that are contrary to the president’s executive order is simply untrue.

For 60 years, IBM was the heartbeat of our family. As a son, I (Andy) grew up in its orbit, my childhood punctuated by eight moves up and down the East Coast before eighth grade. Each new school, each cardboard box packed in haste, was a testament to IBM’s growing reach. We laughed that its initials stood for “I’ve Been Moved,” a lighthearted nod to a company we revered for how it respected the individual, its unmatched customer service, and its unrelenting pursuit of excellence.

As a father, I (Rich) dedicated 30 years to IBM, following my father-in-law’s path as a field executive. I led teams that launched groundbreaking technologies, and was proud to steward a legacy that didn’t just shape our family but redefined industries worldwide.

As shareholders, we grieve what IBM has become—a company where “I’ve Been Misled” now overshadows its once-proud ethos.

This is our urgent warning to Fortune 500 CEOs: embracing divisive political agendas like DEI courts material risk, derails your mission, and betrays the American values that drive success. DEI was never about diversity—it was about control, elevating race and sex over merit in a way that fractured many corporate cultures, IBM included.

College acceptance season is here—and with it the reminder that the college admissions process is broken.

Application essays, formerly written by highly paid tutors for those who could afford it, are now being composed by artificial intelligence. At the same time, the Ivory Tower’s embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which elevates race and sex above all other considerations, has made a mockery of merit.

In the midst of this systemic failure, the University of Austin (UATX) recently implemented a never-before-attempted policy that removes the subjectivity of AI-infused essays and DEI-infected applications: admissions based almost solely on standardized test scores.

If an applicant receives a 1460 or above on the SAT, a 33 or above on the ACT, or a 105 or above on the Classic Learning Test (CLT), that student is automatically accepted. (Full disclosure: I am the president of the CLT.) Any student with lower scores can still be admitted with the added consideration of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate scores, as well as one-sentence descriptions of up to three significant achievements such as outstanding athletic accomplishments or examples of personal fortitude.

UATX does not accept essays, insincerely elongated lists of extracurricular activities, proclamations of intersectional victimhood, or any other non-merit-based materials.

Two weeks ago, Federal District Court Judge Beryl Howell permanently enjoined the Trump Administration from implementing the president’s executive order targeting the Perkins Coie law firm. Trump’s order suspended security clearances for the firm’s lawyers and barred them from federal buildings, prohibited the government from engaging the firm, and directed that it be investigated for violating civil rights laws.

The order explained that these restrictions were appropriate because of Perkins Coie’s “dishonest and dangerous activity,” including hiring Fusion GPS to manufacture a false dossier to “steal an election.” As counsel to Hillary Clinton, the firm worked with Fusion GPS to produce the Steele dossier, which was used for the Russia hoax that destabilized the first Trump Administration.

In 2006, James C. Ho wrote an article titled “Defining ‘American’: Birthright Citizenship and the Original Understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Since his appointment to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018, his article has gained greater attention and authority than it otherwise might have done. Judge Ho was nominated by President Trump as an adherent of original intent jurisprudence, and the president’s confidence in Judge Ho’s fidelity to the Constitution seems to have been amply borne out by some of his early opinions. In one concurring opinion, he wrote that “it is hard to imagine a better example of how far we have strayed from the text and original understanding of the Constitution than this case.”

“Text and original understanding” are, indeed, the reliable touchstones of constitutional jurisprudence. But Judge Ho did not live up to those standards in his attempt to uncover the meaning of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, even as he has recently indicated he understands the high stakes involved. He did write that “under our Constitution, the people are not subjects, but citizens.” While Judge Ho provides no acknowledgment, this is a close paraphrase of a statement made by signer of the Declaration and the Constitution and Supreme Court Justice James Wilson quoted in chapter two. “Under the Constitution of the United States,” Wilson wrote in 1793, in the case of Chisolm v. Georgia, “there are citizens, but no subjects.”

President Donald Trump’s administration has mostly defended its efforts to deport visa-holding foreign students on the grounds that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows deportation of those whose actions might have “adverse foreign policy consequences.”

But the administration could do a better job of articulating squarely what adverse consequences, exactly, it fears from the actions of high-profile detainees like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil, who engaged in and helped organize anti-Israel protests.

Section 237(a)(4)(C) of the INA renders deportable any alien “whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” (author’s emphasis) if the Secretary of State “personally determines that the alien’s beliefs, statements, and associations” would compromise U.S. foreign policy interests.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a two-page April 11 court memorandum for the Khalil case, asserted that Khalil’s “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities” fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States, and therefore undermined “U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world.”

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Congress Take the Wheel | The Roundtable Ep. 267

Sir Winston Churchill is known to have remarked that “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” That timeless mindset of deception has proven effective at enabling militaries to surprise adversaries on the battlefield throughout the history of human warfare. But when such tactics carry over into how the military communicates with citizens, ethical lines have clearly been crossed. This undermines the military officer’s oath of office and sows distrust among the public that the military is supposed to serve. Such a case is presently before us.

A recent report in the New York Times revealed that the pilot of the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter that knocked American Airlines flight 5342 from the sky in January made several errors. The pilot ignored a warning to change direction and collided with the plane, killing everyone on both aircraft. This information was not released by the U.S. Army nor the Department of Defense, even though the official policy of both is maximum disclosure, minimum delay. But in this and countless other cases, the military’s actions are hostile to official DoD policies.

In the rapidly digitizing landscape of modern America, our homes, businesses, and national infrastructure are increasingly reliant on interconnected devices—collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices promise convenience and efficiency, but they also pose an unprecedented cybersecurity challenge. From smart thermostats to baby monitors, each device can become a potential gateway for cyberattacks. The Biden Administration’s development of the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark (CTM) attempted to meet this challenge. While we take issue with many elements of that administration’s broader regulatory agenda, the CTM represents a rare case of smart, market-aligned governance.

The CTM is a voluntary labeling program for consumer IoT products that allows manufacturers to demonstrate they meet certain cybersecurity standards. But its true innovation lies not in the sticker slapped on a product box—but in the market incentives it unleashes. Unlike heavy-handed federal mandates, the CTM respects consumer choice, empowers corporate accountability, and opens the door to a new kind of risk-based procurement that strengthens our national cybersecurity from the ground up.

Kenin Spivak’s response to my piece, “Striking Iran Would Be a Mistake,” reflects a familiar but strategically short-sighted instinct within American foreign policy: the belief that forceful action against a dangerous regime, if justified morally or militarily, must also be wise geopolitically. But as I argued, and will expand upon here, the deeper question confronting the United States is not merely whether Iran goes nuclear, but whether the geopolitical structure of Eurasia becomes locked into a sinocentric configuration—one that fuses Iranian energy, Russian military-industrial depth, and Chinese strategic coordination into a single bloc capable of overturning the Western-led order.

The real catastrophe is not Iran’s enrichment centrifuges—it is China’s encirclement of the West.

The Trump Administration’s plan to reorganize the State Department is the most ambitious effort of its kind since the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998. Announced on April 22, it calls for reducing State Department offices from 734 to 602, a 17% cut. While the plan outlines a 15% cut across all existing bureaus, so-called “functional” bureaus, as opposed to the traditional geographic bureaus that oversee specific parts of the world, would in particular be slimmed down, especially those grouped under “J”—for example, the Under Secretary of Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

“J” (which confusingly used to be called “G”) has been around for a few decades. The world of J includes offices such as the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (a white elephant created under Hillary Clinton), the Office of Global Criminal Justice, and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), mocked internally as “Drool,” that would either be drastically cut back or eliminated altogether.

A considerable amount of the media’s drive-by criticism of the Trump reorganization plan takes at face value the name of an office or what it seems to be doing instead of asking if the work could be done elsewhere, or not at all. The names of these offices, however, have absolutely nothing to do with the work they actually do, much less the tangible value they provide in advancing an America First foreign policy.

Mr. President, I rise today to engage in this great debate that is raging across our country. Turn on the TV, read the newspapers, or open your phone and you will be overwhelmed by the back-and-forth over tariffs, trade deficits, prices, and markets. We hear the talking heads say that America simply can’t afford President Trump’s insistence on more favorable trade policies. We hear much less about whether America can afford to continue down the road we have traveled these past 30 years.

That is not a question that people in this city are asking. For many, it is not a question that appears to have occurred to them at all. The debates right now are about the future and how President Trump’s policies will shape it. That is good. These are important debates that we should have. But, today, I rise because I want to speak about the past.

I am speaking as an American but, in particular, as a proud Missourian, a boy from Bridgeton. My folks—they weren’t wealthy. My grandfather was an infantryman in World War II and returned from the war with an eighth-grade education and some money he won playing craps on the Queen Elizabeth on his way home. All of his children worked in his butcher shop growing up. Later, I remember seeing my dad work seven days a week on the midnight shift to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. He worked hard and lived honestly. And, just one generation later, look where we are.

The revolutionary online publication in which this note appears calls itself “The American Mind.” That memorable phrase was introduced into the American political tradition 200 years ago today, in a letter Thomas Jefferson sent to his Virginia neighbor, Henry Lee, on May 8, 1825.

Jefferson was at the time on the board of visitors of the University of Virginia, which he had founded just a few years earlier. Lee had written as one interested “in the renown of our ancestors, and the history of the Country” to call Jefferson’s attention to certain historical documents in Lee’s possession. “These papers,” Lee wrote, “might have formed the materials, out of which the fine propositions of the Declaration of Independence arose.”

Jefferson was already one of those ancestors in whose renown Lee was interested. He responded with a historic reflection that deserved to be remembered through the ages, explaining the purposes of the Declaration:

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Crowd Funding and Mob Rule | The Roundtable Ep. 266

To cap off the first 100 days of his administration, Trump sparred at length with Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press over his record so far—from immigration successes to choppy economic waters. Alarmed by Trump’s use of emergency powers in rolling out this agenda, David Linker at the New York Times draws some loose connections—to say the least—between Trump, Claremont, and Carl Schmitt. Meanwhile, Shiloh Hendricks has raised over $700 thousand from supporters after a video of her using the n-word prompted threats of retaliation. The guys discuss Trump’s first months, midterm prospects, and our climate of race politics. Plus: media recommendations!

Recommended reading:

President Trump’s barrage of tariffs has produced in response a barrage of criticisms. Some take the form of an appeal to expert authority: economists, we are told, agree that tariffs are bad policy, and thus the administration’s recent “Liberation Day” tariffs are prima facie irrational.

Such claims are, of course, exaggerations. At least some economists—even if unorthodox ones—have supported the use of tariffs in certain situations. Indeed, it is hard to see how economists can claim to reject tariffs in principle since they as a class do not reject all government interventions in the market. We rarely hear that economists agree in condemning the income tax or social assistance to the poor even though these policies are market interventions.

Nevertheless, suppose all economists actually agree that tariffs should be rejected in principle. What then? It does not follow that tariffs are necessarily bad public policy. Economists specialize in the conditions that make for an efficient and prosperous economy—but that is not the sole aim of government policy. A strong economy is not the same thing as a strong and secure political community. The latter is the aim of the statesman, who must take a more comprehensive view of things than the scholar who specializes in economics.

Megyn Kelly recently appealed to conservative men to stop preferring women who will not work. Young conservative men “are telling young, amazing conservative women that they are not attractive if they also work,” she said. We would be losing lots of talent, Kelly continued, if we tell young ladies they are only valuable if they give up work and “go into the home and only raise a family.”

The popular podcaster was thinking about recent polling showing a conservative vibe shift about “traditional gender roles.” Nearly 50% of Republican men and 37% of Republican women think “women should return to their traditional gender roles in society,” a 23% increase among men and a 14% increase among women since 2022. Support for “traditional gender roles” among Democrats unsurprisingly remains very low.

Conservatives should greet the rising popularity of tradmoms as a boon, not a crisis, so long as we avoid too narrow an understanding of tradmoms.

Last week, Ronald Dodson wrote in The American Mind that “acceptance of a limited Iranian nuclear capability could, paradoxically, enhance long-term regional stability and better serve the security interests of both the United States and Israel.” Dodson claims he premised this astonishing conclusion on decision theory courses he took while in college. He also supports his conclusion with inaccurate assessments of geopolitics generally—and the Middle East specifically.

Because Dodson favors Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb, he views a military strike as “unnecessary.” He believes military action would fail and would “destabilize” the region. Given his objective, he never discusses non-military alternatives or explains how to induce Iran to “limit” its nuclear capability.

In the context of Dodson’s core thesis and his other writings, the question of whether to attack Iran is a red herring: his goal is not to avoid kinetic action, but to facilitate Iran’s development of a nuclear capability that “restrains” Israel.

In his American Mind essay, Dodson observes that when a state sacrifices stability for “abstract moral clarity or the illusion of control, it erodes its own foundations…. In Iran’s case, only strategic patience—not a theology of war—can cultivate such space.”

The first sign of just how revolutionary President Trump’s second term would be actually came two years before his re-election. On June 6, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, delivering pro-life conservatives a victory decades in the making—but which, in the end, was only made possible by Donald Trump.

Before Trump’s first term, Republican presidents had displayed a remarkable knack for preserving a pro-Roe majority on the Court: George H.W. Bush more than offset the conservative jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas by appointing Anthony Kennedy and David Souter. And while both of George W. Bush’s appointees voted to reverse Roe, the younger Bush had tried hard to place a family crony, rather than a judicial conservative like Samuel Alito, on the bench.

Would Alberto Gonzales or Harriet Miers, Bush’s preferred choices, have overturned Roe? Would Chief Justice John Roberts have borne the burden of being the man who ended Roe if his had been the deciding vote, rather than just one of a 6-3 supermajority made possible by Trump’s three anti-Roe justices? Mitt Romney was a staunch supporter of Roe—and a financial contributor to Planned Parenthood—until he started running for the Republican presidential nomination. Would a Republican like Romney, or John McCain, or another Bush have dared do what Trump did?

When conservatives discuss the books that drew them to the Right, they typically mention God and Man at Yale, Witness, The Closing of the American Mind, or The Road to Serfdom (a favorite of President Reagan’s), among a few others. I read those books, too, as I drifted from being a Clinton Democrat to holding a low-level post in George W. Bush’s Administration. But another book had just as much influence on me, and was especially relevant to my place of work: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz.

Horowitz’s name was unknown to me until it popped up in the faculty lounge after he had declared war on my academic field and colleagues. This was around 2001. I didn’t know about his place in the New Left, time among the Black Panthers in Oakland, work for Ramparts, best-selling profiles of young Rockefellers, Fords, and Kennedys (co-written with Peter Collier, who would go on to lead Encounter Books), or controversial turn to the Right, which he announced during the Second Thoughts Conference he hosted in 1987, the 20th anniversary of the New Left’s march in Washington, D.C.

In 2016, there was arguably no issue that was more important to Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign than the fate of the U.S. Supreme Court. Due to the February 2016 death of conservative judicial icon Antonin Scalia and the remarkably successful strategy of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to sideline then-pending nominee Merrick Garland and hold Scalia’s seat vacant through November, voters were able to cast their ballots uniquely confident that the winner of the presidential election would be able to decisively shape the Court’s future trajectory. The Scalia vacancy, along with Trump’s publicly floated list of possible high court picks, helped galvanize religious and social conservative support for the heterodox Republican nominee at a time when Roe v. Wade was still on the books.

It’s not often that an opinion writer has the good fortune to elicit serious commentary from respondents of the caliber of Christopher Caldwell, David P. Goldman, Helen Andrews, John DiIulio, and Jeremy Carl. I’ve read with admiration the work of all five commentators for many years and have books by four of them on my shelves. I’m grateful to them for taking the time to respond and share their knowledge and practical wisdom.

Christopher Caldwell, I take it, is generally favorable to the idea of granting legal status to the millions of illegals in the country who do not have criminal records. But he worries, and rightly so, that the compromise I propose would be unable to clear the hurdles presented by the U.S.’s existing civil rights regime—hurdles that activist judges would likely multiply. In practice, legal residence combined with amnesty for past misdemeanors would turn into “a euphemism for a program of settlement,” or “an immigration program that dare not speak its name.”

I’ve decided that it no longer makes sense to call myself “pro-life.”

This isn’t because I changed my mind about abortion. Becoming a father only intensified my belief that parents’ obligation to protect and provide for their children begins morally, and should begin legally, at conception.

But that’s no longer what the label “pro-life” means.

Spend long enough defending your “pro-life” beliefs, and you’ll eventually hear that you’re not really pro-life unless you support bike lanes, corn subsidies, and a return to the gold standard.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. Here’s a partial list of things you can’t support if you want to hold onto your “pro-life” card (according to people I’ve encountered on the internet):

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Trimming the Ivy | The Roundtable Ep. 265

What is this thing called “merit”? And what role did it play during the recent but hopefully bygone age of elite college dominance, runaway financialization, and the rise of competitive blame-shifting? This is the puzzle proffered by Nicholas Lemann in his 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy: Why should competition for slots at a tiny number of selective colleges play a substantial role in how young people come to fill lucrative private sector jobs?

The American meritocracy was created in the mid-20th century by academic administrators such as war gas chemist and sometime Harvard President James Conant not to staff Wall Street but to find the best and the brightest to fill vital government and scientific positions.

We can think about how merit selection can and should work for these few and demanding positions by riffing on the 1943 Warner Brothers propaganda short The Rear Gunner. The small and folksy Burgess Meredith was the star, while the tall, slim, and handsome Ronald Reagan was in a supporting role.

During my time at Southern Methodist University, I had the privilege of studying under Herbert Simon, the polymath whose work on decision theory shaped Cold War strategic thinking. Simon critiqued idealized rational actor models and emphasized prudence over ideology. That education remains urgently relevant today as voices in Washington and Jerusalem renew calls to strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

From a realist perspective—one grounded in Cold War logic and decision-theoretic caution—a military strike would be not just unnecessary but destabilizing. A restrained acceptance of a limited Iranian nuclear capability could, paradoxically, enhance long-term regional stability and better serve the security interests of both the United States and Israel.

Realism begins with the sober recognition that the international system is anarchic, and states act to ensure their survival. Power matters, but so does restraint. As John Mearsheimer argues, states pursue advantage not from moral aspiration but from cold cost-benefit analysis. Unlike liberal internationalists or neoconservatives who cloak intervention in moralism, realists ask: Will this war enhance stability? Can this adversary be deterred?

Harvard University historian James Hankins celebrates the 94% reduction in illegal border crossings that the Trump Administration achieved in just its first six weeks as an “unprecedented accomplishment.” He cites polling evidence indicating that, while a wide majority of Americans supports deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of felonies, a wide majority is against deporting most undocumented but otherwise law-abiding illegal aliens. Mass deportations, he argues, are neither “good for the country” nor “politically smart.” He warns GOP leaders that stories about “immigrants suffering in detention camps, tearful family separations…and so forth…could turn into a major wedge issue for Democrats in the 2026 election cycle.” This argument for measured, not mass, deportations needs to be amended and refined—but it should not be rejected.

Matt McCaw never wanted to leave Oregon. The problem, he explains, is that Oregon left him. “The state went off the rails during the COVID pandemic,” the 46-year-old textbook salesman tells me. “The authorities immediately closed down our schools and churches. Instead of an education, my six kids were given exactly four hours of online classwork a week. People hassled you if you dared to set foot outside your front door without wearing a mask. And of course you couldn’t even escape by going out for a movie or a meal, because everything was boarded up, and the restaurants were takeout-only.”

It’s one thing for a civil authority to take such drastic measures within the strict confines of a genuine public emergency. But as Britain’s Harold Macmillan once sagely reminded us, speaking of the strange reluctance of the state to relinquish supplementary power once given a taste of it: “You can always throw a dog a bone, but you can’t always take it back again.”

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Of Comms and Conclaves | The Roundtable Ep. 264

Why are young college-educated women trending left-wing?

Many like Charlie Kirk blame universities for indoctrinating young women. But the problem is deeper. Parents and young women have swallowed a feminist vision of the heroic feminine that elevates the university while leaving tradition and family behind.

“What defines” the New Woman, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote in her 2003 book Why There Are No Good Men Left, “is not her relationship to marriage, but the remarkable path she follows from cradle to career.” She is single for longer than she used to be. She may not want children. She is independent, confident, increasingly irreligious, and must stand on her own. Advanced education and professional achievement are keys to the new view of womanhood.

Marriage, motherhood, and religion used to be the most important markers for women. Parents beamed when daughters married. Fathers hoped daughters would earn an M.R.S. degree. Wedding pictures were mounted above fireplaces. No more.

Why is Harvard’s motto in Latin? On the current coat of arms, printed on three open books, is the inscription VE-RI-TAS: “Truth.” Through Harvard’s history, there have been several other mottos, including in Christi Gloriam and pro Christo et Ecclesia (sometimes appearing alongside the original Veritas). The current one-word version, stripped of references to Christianity, was adopted in the early 20th century.

Would it be so surprising, given its current trajectory, if Harvard finally decided to remove the word entirely, like an annoying wisdom tooth? While the Trump Administration’s recent ultimatum to Harvard has drawn critiques not just from the Left but even the New Right, there is still broad consensus that something must be done to halt the decay of America’s prestige institutions.

However cringe it may seem to some, the administration’s demand that Harvard implement “viewpoint diversity” in admissions and faculty appointments at least recognizes, in official print, that our nation’s reputedly elite institutions have largely put themselves in service of a left-leaning political patronage industry. It is hard for many people to see how this conduces to Veritas.

Prominent voices on the Left and within movement conservatism have argued that President Trump’s approach to foreign trade is strange, unorthodox—and even un-American. This is not surprising. After all, doctrinaire commitment to free trade—and doctrinaire distaste for protecting American industry—has been the dominant view among elites of both major political parties for at least a generation. Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that Trump’s actions on trade appear as a wholly irrational disruption of a system that, according to our political elites, does not need to be discarded.

This view of the matter, however, is based on an incomplete understanding of the American political tradition. Trump’s approach to trade policy has deep roots in American history, as we can see if we cast our gaze further back than we are accustomed to doing. Indeed, it does not go too far to say that the American Founders would find Trump’s approach to international commerce perfectly intelligible and respectable.

The most obvious way to link President Trump to the Founders is to invoke the justly celebrated name of Alexander Hamilton. The Report on Manufactures, Hamilton’s most famous state paper during his tenure as George Washington’s Treasury Secretary, laid out policy objectives that are essentially the same as those being defended by Trump and the members of his cabinet who are responsible for trade policy.

If Elon Musk didn’t have other priorities at the moment, he might want to consider adding Reddit to his free speech portfolio. Such a feat would take away one of the largest and most powerful social media platforms the Left uses to spread propaganda and organize at the local, state, and national levels. This would give conservatives a new, massive platform to drive politics and change culture, especially among younger Americans.

Conservatives missed the opportunity to dominate on Tumblr, which counts Gen Z and Millennials as a substantial portion of its active users—to the tune of 135 million per month. Given TikTok’s relationship with its Beijing-based ownership, conservatives have largely avoided the app in good conscience. But the opportunity with Reddit is different.

By the sound of it, the University of Michigan’s seeming about-face on DEI has the potential to be a drastic change for the better—but right now it’s only a distant potential. The university has been obsessed with DEI for a long time, and any serious shift in its approach will require a profound cultural and ideological change.

What we now call wokeness and DEI erupted on the public scene sometime around 2014, perhaps linked to the race riots emanating from Ferguson, Missouri. But for those of us connected to America’s institutions of higher learning, this progressivist view of social life has been around for quite a bit longer, percolating in academia among radical thinkers at least since the 1970s.

I was introduced to the now-familiar conceptual architecture of DEI in the middle of my time as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was at U-M when woke was taking root.

In the fall of 2006, I participated in the university’s Program on Intergroup Relations. I learned about social identities, privilege, intersectionality, marginalized groups, systemic oppression, etc. It was all so faddish and intellectually shallow. Even as an undergraduate, I didn’t find these all-encompassing doctrines compelling. But it was evident many of my peers did.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular poet in American history. As Dana Gioia writes,

His work commanded a readership that is almost unimaginable today even for best-selling novels. In terms of their reach and influence, Longfellow’s poems resembled studio-era Hollywood films: they were popular works of art enjoyed by huge, diverse audiences that crossed all social classes and age groups.

Longfellow published “Paul Revere’s Ride” in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1861 (when the magazine was still highly respectable). Few Americans remained who had a living memory of the American Revolution. With his poem, he succeeded in preserving part of that heroic memory in verse for many generations to come, the way Homer did for ancient Greeks or Shakespeare for Englishmen in more recent times. 

It wasn’t just for future generations that Longfellow wrote. His own generation faced the coming of the country’s great crisis, the Civil War. All his readers would have heard in this poem the appeal to the courage and spirit of the Revolution, on which America must always call when a crisis comes. Millions of Americans still know lines of the poem by heart. It does us good to know them.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Future-Maxxing | The Roundtable Ep. 263

Every nation has a story. Recently, the Washington Post described the Smithsonian Institution, with its 21 museums and 14 educational and research centers, as “the official keeper of the American Story.” What kind of story have they been telling about our country?

On March 27, President Trump issued an executive order arguing that there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” and promote a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” This “revisionist movement” casts American “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” A White House fact sheet calls for “revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.” Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, is tasked with leading the administration’s efforts. 

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is perhaps the most welcome wake-up call for the federal government—and its obscene spending habits—in decades. It is refreshing to see many overpaid, underworked, often-vacationing federal employees fretting about whether their cushy jobs will disappear, and to see at least one branch of the federal government working to rein in our massive deficit spending. All of this is long overdue.

Yet it remains to be seen whether DOGE will help jump-start a serious and sustained effort to restore fiscal sanity, or whether its high-profile efforts will wrongly convince Americans that enough has been done, and that we can stop worrying that the federal government is bankrupting the country. If the former happens, it will be an extraordinary and much-needed development; if the latter, it will provide further evidence that, as Lincoln warned us nearly two centuries ago, if our republic is to be destroyed, it will be destroyed from within.

There are already signs that DOGE might not be able to deliver as much as originally promised. 

Professor James Hankins has written a sincere but largely misguided piece advocating for what amounts to a national guest worker program with a delayed pathway to citizenship. He proposes, with appropriate modesty, that “The advantages of this [immigration] proposal may not seem obvious at first sight to Republicans.” Let me, with all due humility, suggest that the alleged advantages are not obvious because they are not there. While Hankins’s program has a slightly different taste, it is basically the same old amnesty wine in a new bottle.

His core problem is viewing immigration policy as one issue among many in which any proposed solution should ultimately be subject to a popularity contest. In reality, immigration is an existential issue, and the way we approach it defines what kind of community we will be.

In the wreckage of World War II, there was no question who had won. Europe lay physically and morally bankrupt—its cities shattered, its institutions hollowed out, and its spiritual confidence extinguished in the fires of fascism and the humiliations of collaboration. America, in contrast, emerged not only militarily triumphant, but also civilizationally intact. It stood at the apex of industrial productivity, financial power, and—most crucially—a sense of providential mission. The nation had saved the world again from barbarism, and now it would rebuild it.

The instrument of this rebuilding was not martial coercion but what was euphemistically called the European Recovery Program. The Marshall Plan, as it came to be known, was a masterstroke of economic strategy. But it was more than that—it was a civilizational covenant. Through grants and loans, technology transfers, and institutional design, the United States reseeded the very soil of European life with the means of moral and material reconstruction. The goal was not merely to avert famine or restore infrastructure, but to reorient Europe toward the West—toward a shared vision of liberty, dignity, and law grounded in the remnants of a Christian moral order.

Western Europe rose from the ashes, and for a time, it seemed to regain its footing. From the founding of NATO to the forging of the European Economic Community, the transatlantic alliance was not merely a political convenience, but an expression of civilizational unity.

This book aims to provide nothing less than a full-throated defense of moral and political sanity against the latest eruptions of ideological mendacity in our time. Its thesis is simple enough, but it needs the full resources of applied political philosophy to explain with adequate clarity and depth. The thesis? That the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just 35 years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.

Public opinion has turned against DEI. It is tempting for DEI advocates to wish this reality away and call the DEI rollback part of the “white backlash.” Or claim that people just don’t want to learn real history. Or keep DEI in place under another name. Some administrators in academia are simply rebranding DEI as “community engagement” or “belonging centers.” But we all know what you are doing—it’s the same thing with a slightly different label.

DEI advocates are no doubt convinced of their position. They do not want to change. Their jobs depend on DEI policies. They think the DEI cause is righteous and central to the mission of higher education.

A majority of Americans find DEI policies objectionable, however. My home state of Idaho recently banned DEI policies, joining many states in passing sweeping bans. The recent dismantling of DEI at the University of Michigan may be a watershed moment for DEI in higher education. Michigan had been a leader in DEI advocacy, when measuring its funding of DEI initiatives and the number of DEI administrators on its payroll.

Something is happening here. What it is, is rather clear.

Let’s face facts: DEI advocates are increasingly in the minority. They are fighting rear-guard actions against a majority of people in the country, and in many states. They are fighting against democracy to preserve their DEI domain.

Professor James Hankins has proposed a grand bargain on immigration. He has the right idea: with an issue as thorny as immigration, on which the views of the American electorate are split, one might even say schizophrenic, the solution must be some kind of compromise. In order to strike a lasting bargain, each side must be satisfied with what it receives in return for giving up some of its demands.

Alas, in the Hankins bargain, what the Right gets, it doesn’t want, and what the Left gets, it doesn’t need.

The Left’s preferred policy solution for illegal immigration is amnesty. Their plan has always been to get as many people as possible over the border and then, when the congressional winds are favorable, grant them citizenship. They think they will be able to get enough conservative crossovers to pass an amnesty. There have always been Republican defectors who are either naïve would-be humanitarians and think amnesty is the compassionate solution or cynical friends of big business who want to maximize immigration as a source of cheap labor.

Plus, it would take some very compelling sweeteners to get the Left to agree to accept the half-loaf of guest worker permits, since they fully expect to get the full loaf of amnesty soon enough. None of the concessions Hankins offers are anywhere close to sweet enough.