The Claremont Institute Feed Items

Today, the concept of “national security” is a staple of our political vocabulary, common in everyday language and entrenched in official institutions such as the National Security Council. But it was not always thus. Total Defense by Andrew Preston, a Canadian who is now a history professor at the University of Virginia after nearly 20 years on the faculty of Cambridge University, traces the rise of this concept and how it displaced earlier notions of national defense during the course of the 20th century. It is an important history, and one with underappreciated implications. 

The book’s subtitle—The New Deal and the Invention of National Security—distills its thesis: the concept of national security as we know it today (involving military and foreign policy matters not limited to territorial defense) coalesced during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Before the New Deal era, “national security” was used relatively rarely, and often to refer to something more like economic and political stability or, in the 19th century, national unity versus sectional interests. But in the 20th century, a new vocabulary was required to grapple with increasingly grave foreign threats that did not involve the imminent invasion of U.S. territory. Such a vocabulary was largely lacking in World War I, but the term “national security” emerged in the years leading up to World War II. 

We no longer live in a republican regime, properly speaking. We are instead governed by a class of administrators whose claim to rule is based on expertise rather than the consent of the governed. As Ronald J. Pestritto argues, President Trump’s administration has embarked “on the most extensive project since at least the 1930s to reclaim executive power from unelected bureaucrats and judges.” It’s hard to disagree with Pestritto’s observation that, in a more constitutionally sound world, we would not have to rely on the executive branch alone to do this heavy lifting. But as the saying goes, here we are. Whatever one might think of the current occupant of the White House, he is elected by the people—which is more than can be said of federal bureaucrats and judges. Ironically, those who complain most loudly about assaults on “our democracy” are least committed to restoring it.

Nick Fuentes is a problem. His influence is growing, fueled by his deft channeling of valid grievances. He has been further buoyed by neoconservatives and the progressive Left, both of which are desperate for “Nazi” bogeymen to validate their anti-MAGA hysterics. However, their ritual denunciations of Fuentes and his groyper legions are worse than useless. They merely encourage groyperism by providing a bigger kick of frisson due to breaking social taboos.

Chris Rufo argues that Fuentes’s critics misapprehend the groyper phenomenon by taking it in earnest instead of recognizing the “hyperreal” run amok. The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard used the term to denote the condition of postmodernity wherein our representations of reality become more phenomenologically real to us than reality itself, until they detach from reality entirely. “Emptied out, [signs] then circulate through digital media,” writes Rufo, “where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement.”

The United States Constitution establishes a republic, not a monarchy. If an American president ever had royalist or autocratic aspirations, it would pose an existential threat to the Constitution. Numerous Americans believe that’s what made President Richard Nixon so dangerous. When House Speaker Carl Albert denounced Nixon’s “one‐man rule” in 1973, he was channeling the opinion of many at the time—and since. But removing a monarch from office is no smooth, straightforward affair. If it’s true that Nixon acted like a king, then the closest the country has ever come to regicide was the drama of Watergate. The scandal began with the arrest on June 17, 1972 of five men working for the Republican Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP), who were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate Office Building. The scandal appeared to end with Nixon’s resignation speech two years later, on August 8, 1974. The successful removal of the president took presidential authority down in its wake, condemning any president who tries to recover it as another Nixon, another monarch-in-the-making. This has itself become a scandal, a stumbling block to understanding some of the most tumultuous years in American history, when the country and its politics changed forever.

Gen Z women, the most liberal demographic in the country, are becoming a powerful share of the electorate. Yet conservatives are misreading what actually drives our political decisions. While the legacy media fixates on a supposed surge of right-leaning youth, the reality is more complicated. Young women are not moving right because Republicans keep repeating the same mistakes Democrats made with young voters in the last election cycle. 

Last year, I wrote about former presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s failed attempt at being hip with the cool girls during her 2024 campaign. During a year when women were suffering sexual violence in conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, and when the prospect of marriage and family felt economically out of reach, Harris had countless opportunities to show young women she understood our concerns. Instead, she fixated on the fact that British musician Charli XCX made a pop culture reference about her, invited social media influencers to the Democratic National Convention, and appeared on a sex podcast while Americans were dying in a hurricane. Harris’s endeavor to win over the youth was more than wildly unsuccessful. It was vapid, unserious, and embarrassing. It communicated a belief that young women’s concerns begin and end with oversexed pop culture. 

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.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas | The Roundtable

This week, hosts Ryan and Spencer sit down as the year closes out to share their Christmas plans and recommendations: music, theater, food, drink, and more! Stay tuned in the new year!

As we close out 2025, the Trump Administration has racked up many big wins. But none are as significant as what President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have done to repair the recruitment crisis that took place during President Biden’s watch.

When I served in the House of Representatives, I chaired the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, so I saw firsthand how bad things got under Biden, especially at the Pentagon and in our military.

When Biden was president, he presided over the worst recruitment crisis since our military became an all-volunteer force over 50 years ago.

In 2022, the Army set a goal to recruit 60,000 new soldiers, but it only managed to recruit 45,000. That’s 15,000 soldiers short. And the same thing happened again the following year, when the Army was again 15,000 soldiers short of its 65,000 recruitment goal. When you add up the recruitment losses under President Biden between 2021 and 2025, the Army shrank by 40,000 soldiers due to a lack of recruits. That’s as many as four divisions of troops.

The Navy fared no better. In 2023, it was 7,500 sailors short of its recruitment goal of 37,000. In 2024, it was nearly 5,000 short of its goal of over 40,000 new sailors. So between 2021 and 2025, the Navy shrank by 16,000 sailors, which is about three aircraft carriers’ worth of United States sailors.

That’s how bad the recruitment crisis got during Joe Biden’s watch.

The assassins who conspired against Julius Caesar could have stabbed their victim in the street, but they chose to commit their crime in the Curia of Pompey while the Senate was in session. The location’s symbolism was part of the message they intended to send. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus with a microphone in his hand as he answered questions from the crowd. It was the style of debate that earned him the love of millions and the admiration of many powerful figures, including the president of the United States. It was also the activity that led his murderer to mark him as someone who “spreads too much hate” and therefore deserved to die.

Charlie Kirk was a once-in-a-century talent who will not be replaced. He had boundless energy, acute judgment, and a capacity to evolve that was unusual in a public figure. His organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and its political affiliate, Turning Point Action, managed a turnout operation for President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that helped achieve the biggest popular-vote victory in a generation. Kirk himself could have been on a presidential ticket someday, possibly even the first ticket for which he would have been eligible. Had he lived, he would have turned 35 a month before the 2028 election.

D.C. wasn’t supposed to be like this. Hard as it is to believe today, the capital was set apart as its own district not to make it an untouchable bureaucratic citadel, but to make it work for all Americans. Unattached to any one state and free from the control of any one constituency, our government was supposed to serve the whole country. Decades of misunderstanding, however, have muddled this design. Federalization gives us a fighting chance of restoring it.

“Ana minkum wa ileikum,” shouted 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, newly elected mayor of New York, to the heaving crowd in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater just before midnight on Election Night. I’m one of you!

What did he mean by that? Mamdani, after all, can come off as almost comically foreign. Look at the way he waves as he walks to the podium. He doesn’t swing his arm like a regular American. He doesn’t even wiggle his hand, as the late queen did. He frantically flaps his fingertips against his thumbs, the way kindergarteners do when they are pretending to listen to an imaginary friend. There’s something a bit “off” about Mamdani, like those German spies in old movies who, despite their perfect English, give themselves away by not knowing who won the last World Series. Or like Barack Obama, who proclaimed his affection for the Chicago White Sox and then proved unable to name a single player who’d ever taken the field for them. (Mamdani fends off baseball questions, such as whether he’s a Yankees or a Mets fan, by professing himself a fan of English soccer.)

Foreign policy and international relations are not disconnected from domestic politics—they are intimately intertwined. As I previously argued at The American Mind, the downsides of imperial foreign policy involve not only the possibility of being routed abroad, but also corroding social relations between citizens and their representatives at home. Perhaps the clearest recent example of this is the tragic shootings of two National Guardsmen in our nation’s capital by an Afghan national who was resettled in the U.S. after the war in Afghanistan.

Jeremy Carl is surely right that many of our Afghan allies are far from benevolent allies like the British or Canadians, as evidenced by reports from our own soldiers of serial pederasty amongst the Afghan National Police. But we should also analyze the extent to which the shootings can be described as “blowback.” It is reasonable to ask to what extent U.S. policymakers laid the groundwork for these sorts of attacks by our intimate involvement in nation-building in Afghanistan.

As part of its celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life has published my Provocation, “Government by the Unelected: How it Happened, and How it Might be Tamed.” This full-length essay seeks to assess how the Founders’ principles have fared after 250 years. I argue that government by the consent of the governed has gradually diminished—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—and has been substantially replaced by the government of a permanent, unelected, and allegedly expert class.

The fuller work traces the history of this development, pointing both to the rise of the Progressives in the latter part of the 19th century and to the role of the federal courts in enabling the Progressive remaking of American government during the 20th century. These phenomena will not be unfamiliar to readers of my scholarly work or that of others in the Claremont Institute’s orbit.

Ladies and gentlemen: it is a great pleasure to be with you tonight in the People’s Republic of New York. Two days ago the voters in their wisdom elected as mayor by a comfortable margin Zohran Mamdani—a socialist, an immigrant, a critic of Israel and of Zionism, son of a movie director and a Columbia professor of postcolonialism, the holder of a degree in “Africana Studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience extends to co-founding the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and being a backbench New York State assemblyman for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer. Except for being a member of Democratic Socialists of America rather than the Democratic Party, Mr. Mamdani is in every respect a worthy successor of Barack Hussein Obama as a modern-day progressive statesman.

One of the most striking features of the Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy is not merely what it argues, but how it argues. This is not accidental. Michael Anton, one of its chief architects, is not a technocrat or a committee scribe. He is a political theorist in the classical mold, deeply aware that ideas endure not merely because they may be correct in the abstract, but because they are memorable, vivid, and intelligible to the moral imagination.

Political philosophy is rarely remembered for syllogisms alone. Plato’s Republic is canonized because it shows justice. We remember the image of the just man likened to a well-bred dog, fierce toward his enemies yet gentle toward those he knows. Plato compressed an entire moral psychology into a single, unforgettable metaphor. We remember the cave not because it proves an epistemological claim step by step, but because it dramatizes the human condition in a way no abstract argument ever could.

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.

Now It Can Be Told | The Roundtable Ep. 298

Australia has suffered its deadliest mass shooting in decades, allegedly perpetrated by father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, on the first night of Hannukah. Meanwhile in Germany, (yet another) planned attack at a Christmas market was foiled. This week, Spencer and Mike discuss problems that have finally gotten too overwhelming for even the BBC and the New York Times to ignore, from mass migration to the DEI crusade against young white men. Plus: Christmas recommendations!

Conservative jurisprudence has been casting about for over 40 years, trying to find an anchoring ground or even a stable definition of “originalism.” But with the advent of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), overruling Roe v. Wade (1973), the tagline for conservative jurisprudence might now be, “Conservative Jurisprudence: Seeking Justice by Changing the Subject.” And the mission statement: “We carefully, and steadily, steer around those questions of moral substance that stand at the heart of our gravest cases.”

In the Dobbs case, Kavanaugh took his bearings by noting that the country was deeply divided on this contentious matter. One notable sign, he said, was that “many pro-life advocates forcefully argue that a fetus is a human life”—”forcefully argue,” as though there is no long-settled, empirical truth on this matter, found in all of the textbooks of embryology, as though there never could be a truth of the matter. In other words, in this mode of conservative jurisprudence, the judges must affect not to know the plainest objective truth that bears on the practical judgment here.

The Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) provides a rare official statement on the main threats facing the United States, as well as lays out strategies to address them. Typically released once per presidential term, this administration’s NSS focuses on how the U.S. can reestablish its military and economic might in a world that’s clearly moved well beyond the post-Cold War era. As stated in its introduction, the document aims to be a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.”  

Part of advocating a foreign policy of “principled realism” is pointing out how Europe, an important U.S. partner going back centuries, has been actively rejecting its historic ways of life.

The Trump NSS details several serious challenges the continent faces, including economic stagnation. However, that issue is overshadowed by the impact of mass immigration, which is transforming Europe by “creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” The NSS forecasts that if current trends persist, Europe may become unrecognizable within two decades, as it is at risk of “civilizational erasure.”

Northwestern University recently struck a deal with the United States Department of Education (ED). The university will pay a $75 million fine and guarantee there will be no more Jew-hating on the quad and no race discrimination in the admissions office or on faculty hiring committees. Then, federal money will start to flow again. But can Northwestern be trusted to honor its end of the bargain?

It is honestly amazing to be noticed, even if negatively, by someone of the eminence of Steven Pinker. I respect Pinker because (among other reasons) Steve Sailer, whom I also respect, respects him and has explained in terms I can understand why Pinker’s work is worthy of respect.

Pinker and I have one major disagreement (and I assume many others), which is brought out in his tweet: I have a foreboding sense of apprehension about the future; Pinker by contrast wrote two whole books arguing that now is the greatest time to be alive. What I recall of them is that Pinker’s case centers around, first, a decline in violence. Which I don’t doubt is true in many respects, though as Sailer points out, it can be made easier or harder to argue the world is less violent than it used to be depending on when you start the clock. Second, Pinker enthuses about various advances of science and technology, much of which I would have to concede, especially since I am a beneficiary and consumer of so much of it.

Chile rarely captures sustained American attention. It is distant, orderly, and often portrayed as a reliable outpost of stability in South America. But this image is vanishing—and the shift matters far more to the United States than many realize.

Chile is a crucial democratic partner in a region where China and Russia are expanding their influence. Its economy is tightly linked to U.S. markets, its copper and lithium reserves are central to American technological and defense supply chains, and its politics influences the balance of the entire Southern Cone.

The country features a two-round system for its presidential elections, the second round of which will be held on December 14. Two candidates are running: one from the Right and the other from the far left-wing. A Communist victory in Chile—or a prolonged period of instability—would affect U.S. geopolitical, economic, and security interests.

But the deeper reason Chile matters to Americans is that its current crisis illustrates a broader lesson: economic success without a strong cultural foundation cannot sustain a free society. The United States faces its own internal cultural fractures. What is happening in Chile is not only a regional concern—it is a cautionary tale.

To understand how Chile arrived at this fragile moment, one must look at its origins and the long-standing tensions that have shaped its national identity.

If you only read social media, you’d think the conservative legal movement is in dire straits. Politicians lash out at judges and at the Federalist Society. Some on the Right grumble that originalism has yielded little more than panel discussions and law‑review symposia. In this very forum, friends suggest that our moment demands a new “constitutional morality,” a more ambitious jurisprudence that will somehow arrest civilizational decline.

Count me unconvinced. The short answer to “What comes after originalism?” is more originalism, plus better policy. The movement’s future lies in consolidating the gains of the last decade, deepening our commitment to the Constitution’s text and original public meaning, and building political and cultural institutions that can address the “crises of belonging, fertility, and meaning.” Courts have an important—but limited—role in that project. Asking judges to save the country is not just unrealistic; it’s a category error.

Every few years, someone tells us the United States is not really the child of the long tradition of republicanism, English common law, colonial self-government, the natural rights principles enshrined in our Declaration, and the debates involving the framing of a new government that transpired in Philadelphia after the war. No, we’re subtly led to assume that our political father is someone else entirely: this time, it’s the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy.

Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary on the American Revolution leans into that claim, suggesting in the first episode’s preamble that the very idea of our Union was inspired by the Iroquois. By subtly juxtaposing the Iroquois and the Founding Fathers, viewers are invited to believe that if they thought Franklin, Washington, and company fathered America, then they’ve been building the wrong monuments.

Burns tells a vivid story. But it’s also a deeply misleading one—and the very treaty on which his opening narrative depends says almost the opposite of what he needs it to say.

The scene in question is the 1744 Lancaster treaty council. Representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia met with Iroquois leaders to settle land disputes and keep them allied against the French. During the talks, an Iroquois speaker did just as Burns relates—namely, he advised the colonial governors to live at peace with one another and act together as the Iroquois nations did. But the colonial reply—effectively omitted by Burns—matters just as much.

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.

Somalia et Alia | The Roundtable Ep. 297

In the first part of my extended reflection on the character of conservatism, I warned that the American Right is confronted by a “pseudo-Rightist culture of repudiation” that in important respects mirrors the intellectual and political Left. The crude white nationalism and vociferous anti-Semitism of the so-called “groypers,” who delight in the nasty, transgressive utterings of the internet chameleon Nick Fuentes, present the most recent example of that phenomenon.

On another front, a spirit of ingratitude dominates in certain precincts of the Right. There is a marked tendency to dismiss even the most admirable conservative wisdom of the past as outdated, irrelevant, or worse. A young critic of mine at The American Conservative, who writes very much in that dismissive spirit, accuses me of making “rote” appeals to the likes of Burke and Churchill, as if deep immersion in the thought and action of these two great conservatives can only be formulaic and irrelevant.

But a conservatism that forgets the most capacious meaning of the social contract, the enduring bond that connects the living to the dead and the yet to be born, and the multiple reasons for gratitude to our noble if imperfect forebears—Burkean themes par excellence—has lost essential bearings, and will rather quickly lose its soul.

For half a decade, the Right has debated “free market fundamentalism.” This phenomenon is also known as “zombie Reaganism,” “libertarian neoconservatism,” and “neoliberalism.” Whatever you call it, it never happened. That is to say, the reduction in government expenditure and size that Reaganites promised and liberals feared turned out to be a mirage. What happened instead is that, starting in the 1980s, both parties set the country on a course toward Total Boomer Luxury Communism (TBLC).

TBLC is driving every aspect of American decline—from skyrocketing national debt and the erosion of our defense industrial base to the despair of young people. It’s not the only reason for the decline, to be sure, but it’s a major part of the problem. Yet TBLC has been entirely obscured from view.

The essence of TBLC is that it redistributes wealth from younger families and workers to seniors, who are on average much richer. America has achieved the Marxist paradise of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after dinner. Only it looks more like golf in the morning, horseback riding in the afternoon, drinks at the social club in the evening, and a restful night’s sleep in a million-dollar home—all thanks to the largesse of the U.S. government.

The Trump Administration recently released an extremely promising National Security Strategy (NSS)—but the same cannot be said about the proposed FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The House and Senate’s compromise NDAA, which was published on Sunday night, appears to be in tension with the goals of the NSS. While the National Security Strategy prioritizes a hemispheric defense of the American homeland, the NDAA locks decision makers into maintaining unnecessary overseas troop levels. Despite the stated aims of the NSS, Congress seems to be looking to safeguard the national security priorities and infrastructure of previous eras.

Restricting the drawdown of troops stationed overseas, increasingly murky foreign entrenchment through legally binding efforts to sell arms, and dubious clauses requiring congressional approval at every turn all serve to bind the commander in chief’s hands. All of this reeks of a shadowy order desperately trying to maintain the status quo at the expense of the will of the people who elected Donald Trump in 2024.

This cannot stand.

Suicide is a growing public health crisis in the United States.

In 2023, approximately 49,300 Americans died by suicide, with an age-adjusted rate of 14.1-14.7 per 100,000 people. The rate for men was 22.8 per 100,000, which is roughly four times higher than that of women, at 5.9 per 100,000. Suicide rates among young men have been rising steadily since 2010, with men ages 15-34 being the fastest-growing segment. In 2023, the suicide rate for men ages 15-24 was 21 per 100,000, compared with 5 per 100,000 for women of the same age.

Today’s suicide prevention efforts must focus more on men, yet public awareness and policy attention remain limited. Unsurprisingly, mainstream media coverage often fails to report these age- and gender-specific trends accurately, making it harder to direct resources and interventions where they are most urgently needed.

With his lead symposium essay, Jesse Merriam revisits the constructive criticism he offered of “A Better Originalism,” the manifesto I, Hadley Arkes, Josh Hammer, and Matthew Peterson co-authored in these pages at the advent of the Biden presidency. As Merriam wrote in 2021, “The failure of legal conservatism is principally a product of how it is structured, not the product of an inadequate legal theory.” By structured, he meant not only the institutions that dominate the conservative legal movement, but also the aims at which those institutions pull oars together to achieve.

Legal conservatism needs substantive goals to which the movement can orient its activities, a point on which Merriam is correct. Indeed, a hyperfocus on the methodologies of the prevailing form of originalism, the original public meaning variety, masks the ultimate ends of a legal conservatism worth pursuing in the first place.

Jesse Merriam persuasively argues that legal conservatives are no longer committed to maintaining the essential features of the American legal and political order. They are instead obsessed with matters of constitutional interpretation, emphasizing the related doctrines of originalism and textualism. So they consider it something of a victory when progressive justices such as Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson embrace those doctrines, even though it’s perfectly clear they will use them for progressive ends. Indeed, even Justice Neil Gorsuch, an avowed textualist, did so in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) when he insisted, absurdly and ahistorically, that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects individuals from employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. His pretextual textualism is as lawless as anything that has animated judicial supremacists since at least the 1950s.

Furthermore, making originalism and its variants the core of legal “conservatism” is a fool’s errand. It does not give conservatives a positive legal language in which to express, or a legal agenda with which to fight, the substantive evils that non-originalist decisions represent. And this assumes that originalism even provides the tools to overturn such decisions, which is hardly clear.

Given the generation-defining AI race that’s currently moving at breakneck speed, one would think Congress might have a productive thought about it by now. But this assumption would unfortunately be a mistake. Instead, federal legislators have chosen to mostly ignore a crucial issue that has deep ramifications for our nation. By the time they step up and see the bigger picture, it might just be too late.

Recently on Truth Social, President Donald Trump slammed the “patchwork” of state regulations Congress has allowed to flourish. AI policy is being drafted not in Washington but in states like California. It’s being crafted not by sensible, informed actors but by out-of-touch lawmakers who few people know, who won’t be held accountable, and whose motivation lies in appeasing their constituents rather than strengthening U.S. national security.

Legal conservatives find themselves in an unusual position: originalism has reached unprecedented acceptance within the judiciary and the bar. A majority of Supreme Court justices—including at least one appointed by a Democratic president—identify as originalists, or at least strive toward originalism. Guided by the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments, the High Court has overruled Roe v. Wade, ended the use of race in higher education, and recognized the individual right to own firearms.

But some find these successes disorienting. Originalism’s victories have triggered an important debate among conservatives. Some wonder if originalism is up to the task of fashioning an approach to constitutional interpretation rooted in a conservative morality that can supply a positive agenda for law and policy. For these conservative critics, the moral neutrality of originalism, which arose in opposition to the explicit policymaking of the Warren Court, appears to be its central defect.

Professor Jesse Merriam’s essay in The American Mind is an example of this view. He writes,

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.

Double Tap Dance | The Roundtable Ep. 296

On July 19, 1776, after New York’s delegates had received instructions from the new Provincial Congress in their colony to support independence, Congress resolved that the Declaration “be fairly engrossed on parchment, with the title and stile of ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America,’ and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress.”

The formal handwritten document, the one now displayed in the Rotunda of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., was probably prepared by Timothy Matlack, clerk to the Second Continental Congress, who was known for his fine penmanship. He was also a colonel in the Philadelphia Fifth Battalion and later became a delegate to Congress.

The Journals of the Continental Congress records on August 2, 1776, that “The Declaration of Independence, being engrossed, and compared at the table, was signed [by the members].” Most signed the Declaration on that date, though several delegates signed later. Delaware delegate Thomas McKean was a colonel of the Philadelphia Fourth Battalion, in New Jersey reinforcing Washington’s troops, and was the last person to sign the Declaration, perhaps as late as 1781.

Many conservatives, myself included, have recognized the wisdom of a populist turn in our politics. A roused populace was necessary to address the growing illiberalism and sheer unaccountability of woke elites who, for at least a generation, have committed themselves to redefining the theory and practice of liberal democracy. But populism also has marked limits, especially when applied to the realm where principle and prudence, in the high and noble Aristotelian or Burkean sense, must inform action.

Populist anger must be calibrated and channelled so that it does not become self-destructive. The welcome resistance to the progressivist “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton so suggestively called it, must not give way to a rival spirit of repudiation on the Right that dismisses our intellectual and political forebears as fools and frauds. “What has conservatism ever conserved?” is both historically illiterate and politically ungrateful.

I have a longtime friend—I’ll omit his name because he is somewhat politically prominent—who has been very involved in the extraction of Afghans from Afghanistan who allegedly helped us and resettling them in the United States. My friend already has a demanding job, but he has often worked through the night, forgoing sleep to help with this task.

I have a number of strong political disagreements with him, but I would never question his patriotism. He voluntarily served as a soldier in Afghanistan after overcoming great obstacles to be accepted into the military. But I would strongly question his political judgment, and the judgment of anyone who thinks we should be settling Afghan refugees in America.

Unfortunately, a number of our former soldiers, no matter how sincere their beliefs, seem to sympathize more with people in a foreign country whom they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be allies rather than with the interests of the only country to which they owe their allegiance.

As a pessimistic Boomer (and Big Law veteran) who channels Robert Bork, I regard the state of our politics in the MAGA era the same way Charles Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities nearly two centuries ago: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I try to temper my gloominess about the current zeitgeist by aiming for a perspective somewhere between Pollyanna and Jeremiah.

Thanks to President Trump, the 6-to-3 originalist majority on the Supreme Court is the only thing standing between us and the abyss—a hellish combination of Deep State corruption, socialist economics, cultish wokeism, and cultural degeneracy. Yes, President Trump has over three years left in his second term, and is heroically trying to drain the swamp. But Congress is gridlocked, the midterms loom, and recent election results suggest the MAGA agenda is not as popular as Trump’s 2024 drubbing of Kamala Harris might indicate. She was, after all, the weakest Democratic candidate for president since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Unlike Trump in 2024, the Bush/Quayle ticket won an Electoral College landslide, and a majority of the popular vote. The nation is much more divided now.

Despite all of this, unlike my friend Jesse Merriam, I am encouraged by the state of the conservative legal movement—at least relative to the Left’s capture of so many other American institutions.

In his opening essay, Jesse Merriam calls for a more positive, more substantive, and more ambitious legal conservatism. An almost exclusive focus on originalism, he suggests, has made the conservative legal movement too narrow, technocratic, and reactive. Merriam argues it has become overly concerned with means, such as the correct rules of constitutional interpretation, instead of ends, like securing the common good. It is too preoccupied with correcting old wrongs, like reversing erroneous precedents, instead of achieving positive results, such as fostering the conditions of a virtuous and orderly society. The scions of legal conservatism, Merriam contends, should learn from the great legal-political movements of the past like the New Deal and the civil rights movement and seek, through legal and political activism, to build the kind of legal order necessary to restore the nation’s traditional political identity.

Despite thousands of lawsuits against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma now being settled, the opioid crisis continues to devastate families and communities. This is why there are massive national efforts to expand addiction treatment, develop non-opioid pain alternatives, promote natural remedies, and confront the Mexican drug cartels flooding America with fentanyl. In recent years, opioid-related deaths have finally begun to decline, suggesting those initiatives are starting to make a real impact. But that progress may already be slowing.

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.

Friends and Frenemies | The Roundtable Ep. 295

A recent White House meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani gave the president a chance to flip the script while publicly debasing the rhetorical currency of the “anti-fascist” Left. In this special holiday episode, the guys are joined by Matthew Peterson to discuss the president’s latest strategy, and answer listener questions. On the docket are emerging factions within the conservative movement, federal leniency on Antifa post-domestic-terrorist designation, and more. Plus: The crew gives thanks and share holiday plans, antics, eats—and cultural recommendations!

For too long, many Republicans have confined their criticisms of mass migration to illegal immigration. But the truth is that our entire legal immigration system is broken—and the consequences for Americans have been nothing short of disastrous.

The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program is a clear example of the urgent need for reform.

Recent reports have outlined the Trump Administration’s plans to overhaul or end OPT. As I noted in a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow earlier this month, this is welcome news. It would represent a long-overdue correction to one of the most abused programs in the U.S. immigration system.

The OPT program is a work benefit tied to the F-1 visa, the standard nonimmigrant student visa that allows foreign nationals to attend U.S. colleges and universities. The program allows student visa holders to work in the U.S. for up to 12 months after finishing their degree; STEM graduates are allowed an additional 24-month extension.

American popular culture since at least the 1950s has fetishized rebellion. But what’s left to rebel against in the 21st century?

None of the traditional sources of authority or repression hold much sway today: not the church, not parents, not hierarchies of taste or class. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll are now just passé Boomer recreations. Yet American society is not without a rigid morality that imposes itself on everyone, and on some—young men in particular—much more than others.

The modern dogma that regulates everything from sex to speech is liberalism. What happens when the all-American love of rebellion meets this dogma? You get a generation in revolt against liberalism’s strictures. And like earlier generations that revolted against Christianity and bourgeois respectability, the radical youth of this generation embrace whatever is shockingly offensive to the old prudes.

Hierarchical marriage—the “trad wife”—is as much a rejection of today’s norms as sex outside marriage was of the old norms. Affirming traditional religion is now the kind of rebellion that rejecting the same used to be. Feminism is repressive, so the “manosphere” becomes liberation. Antiracism is humorless, so “The Will Stancil Show,” in all its ugliness, is an underground hit.

A friend who works with high school students recently said to me, “I overheard a group of boys talking about ‘international Jewry.’” He was in disbelief to hear these seemingly mild-mannered kids express views that, not 20 years ago, would have been considered taboo.

What is going on with Gen Z?

I’ve written elsewhere that Gen Z is experiencing a kind of church resurgence. That remains true. But at the same time, Gen Z is one of the most polarized generations in American history.

In 2024, Gen Z—led in part by young activists like Charlie Kirk and Scott Pressler—shifted toward Donald Trump. He won 46% of Gen Z voters—56% of young men and 40% of young women. This led many to expect that a younger, more populist generation would shift the country rightward. But now, in 2025, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won 78% of the youth vote in New York City—67% of young men and 84% of young women. Far from being locked into any one existing political party, young people are more divided than ever.

One cause of this is what I call “Nomadic Progressivism.” Kids born between, say, 1997 and 2012 have been thoroughly inundated with progressivism and identity politics from birth. They came of age amid several key developments that shaped their moral and social formation:

The charge that newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an “Islamist” has mostly been derided either as Islamophobic or mocked as Boomer bait. In response, many cite Mamdani’s commitments to various leftist social causes that are antithetical to radical Islam, such as his promise to use $65 million in taxpayer funds for “sex change” operations. And indeed, he seems to use his Muslim faith as more of a chit in the great progressive oppression game—“Muslim and brown: two points!”—than being genuinely dedicated to its tenets, let alone the fundamentalist version of it.

However, his campaign’s success is owed at least partially to what may be New York City’s first politically organized Muslim voting bloc. It represents what is likely the beginning of a new chapter in the city’s long history of ethnic retail politics.

Even in his transition period, Mamdani’s deep connection to this voting bloc is clear. For example, Hassaan Chaudhary, the political director for Mamdani’s transition and inaugural committee, was not only outed by the New York Post for anti-Semitism, which is par for the course in left-wing politics, but also for the more traditional Muslim skepticism of gay rights, which is decidedly not.

Three incidents from Mamdani’s campaign stood out as notable, showing his connections to this growing group.

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.

I Will Be Your Tootsie-Nuzzi | The Roundtable Ep. 294

Dr. D, as I called him, was a scholar and a gentleman. He earned his PhD from Yale after writing a dissertation on Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Wittgenstein, published as Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy by The University of Chicago Press in 1981. Later he wrote David Hume and the Problem of Reason, from Yale University Press, and a book published by ISI called The Roots of Freedom, based on lectures he gave for Radio Free America. After starting his career at the University of Chicago, Dr. D moved to the University of Houston and then to Loyola University Chicago in 1993, just as I was enrolling there in graduate school.

Jesse Merriam has inaugurated this symposium on the future of the conservative legal movement with a provocative essay arguing that the movement needs to reassess itself in light of our current political and cultural moment. He argues that it should shed its technocratic “focus on how precedents are interpreted and distinguished” in favor of a broader project “that conceives of law as a way to sustain the American way of life.” Legal conservatism, Merriam continues, should “develop a constitutional morality that reflects the larger project…of constitutional and…civilizational restoration.” He does not want to abandon originalism but says that the conservative legal movement needs to mount a positive project to meet today’s considerable challenges.

I agree.

In order to clarify Merriam’s argument, it is important to point out that the movement has always needed, if it has not quite always had, at least three separate but overlapping projects.

Today’s conservative legal movement is the proverbial dog that caught the car. After years of effort (and more than a little fortuity), a solidly conservative majority now sits on the Supreme Court. The movement has racked up a string of wins on longstanding priorities, ranging from affirmative action to abortion to administrative agency deference, with perhaps the most seismic changes still to come. The Court’s blessing of the long-theorized “major questions doctrine,” which grants courts broad power to deem a particular action outside the purview of administrative agencies and properly committed to Congress, is a blade perfectly forged for dismantling that perennial movement bogeyman, the administrative state.

So where do things go from here?

President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory—until they weren’t. Speaking recently on 60 Minutes, the president said he would let NVIDIA “deal with China,” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. NVIDIA’s stock jumped immediately—but China did not get what it wanted.

Days later, in a Financial Times interview, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: cut us off, Beijing wins.

The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. NVIDIA has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China. 

To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.

For decades, U.S. education has been dominated by the American Left. Their stranglehold was highly visible during the Biden Administration, with countless stories about wildly inappropriate books in school libraries, Critical Race Theory being taught in classrooms, and national associations calling for parents to be designated as domestic terrorists.

How did our public school systems—including those in red states, from Iowa to Alaska—become infected with radical leftist ideology? The answer is education consulting groups.

Most Americans don’t realize that every aspect of governance, from parks and wildlife departments to the curriculum in kids’ schools, has been outsourced to a coalition of nameless, faceless NGO consulting groups that are funded by millions of taxpayer dollars funneled through the government. One of the worst offenders is the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

The great civilizations of antiquity have never needed a majority to survive. They have always required just a quorum of men who knew what they believed and acted on the courage of their convictions. A few hundred trierarchs at Salamis, a few thousand hoplites at Thermopylae, a Roman handful who backed Scipio when everyone else wanted to sue for peace—a hearty few have helped preserve their respective ways of life in times of turmoil.

The American Founders understood this. Fifty-six merchants, farmers, and lawyers in Philadelphia signed their own death warrant, and 12,000 half-frozen men at Valley Forge kept that signature from being erased. Formation of character is about learning how to stand when everyone else sits down. We don’t study great men to cosplay greatness—we study them to see how a group of determined souls can change the world.

Today’s America, however, no longer forms leaders. It manufactures influencers and administrators. Its schools churn out credentialed mediocrities fluent in therapy and management but strangers to duty, tragedy, or honor. The republic’s elite, once shaped by Scripture and Cicero, is now shaped by LinkedIn. The result is a leadership class without leadership, a caste of clever children managing the ruins of their inheritance.