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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.

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.

The Fog of Trade War | The Roundtable Ep. 262

Trump announces a sweeping tariff regime, then pauses it for 90 days—why? As a tactic to renegotiate trade deals? To reshore manufacturing? Some combination of both? With midterms just over the horizon, the stakes of this gamble to reorient global trade are high. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court lifts District Judge Jeb Boasberg’s temporary restraining order on deporting members of the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua—what’s next?? Internment camps for U.S. citizens?? This week, the hosts weigh in on the effectiveness of the recent tariffs, recount Justice Sotomayor’s ridiculous dissent, and touch on the limp, confused effort by the Left to protest. Plus: media and reading recommendations!

Recommended media:

The most powerful nation in history has spent the last three decades outsourcing its strength. Factories have been shuttered, energy dependence was reinstated, domestic bureaucracies have continued to grow, and bad trade deals were signed with rivals—all moves that have weakened America’s sovereignty. The Trump Administration is reversing this decline not only through rhetoric but also through action (which, admittedly, can be confusing at times).

The common thread weaved through President Trump’s current efforts is self-reliance. It’s evident in the concessions the Trump Administration is seeking from partners and adversaries alike. The administration’s “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs illustrate this tone. Unlike the soft diplomacy of the past, President Trump is seeking to rebalance trade and renew focus on American industry, while forcing better terms for America by using access to our markets as common leverage. While confounding critics who are accustomed to diplomatic platitudes and bureaucratic stagnation, this signals a return to American independence.

In the world that emerged after the Cold War, power moved with container ships and capital markets. Liberalism’s invisible hand was fortified by a visible navy, and its logic was one of frictionless flow: of goods, information, money, and governance standards. The sea was its main artery, and the U.S. Navy its steward.

Today, that world is cracking. Capital markets are fragmenting. Supply chains are shortening. Naval supremacy is increasingly contested not by peer fleets but by $10,000 drones and firmware updates. And, perhaps most significantly, ordinary people—the supposed beneficiaries of the globalized order—are turning against it.

What we are witnessing is not simply a redistribution of power, but a transformation in the very grammar of geopolitical influence. Economic integration no longer secures peace; in many cases, it foments resentment. Technological innovation no longer reinforces traditional hierarchies; it bypasses them. And military might no longer projects primarily from the sea—it radiates from code, chips, and algorithms.

This is a world no longer ruled by frictionless flows, but by points of friction—strategic chokeholds where denial is cheap and control is asymmetric.

The architecture of globalization was strategic, not merely economic. The United States underwrote an open trading system, because it extended American influence while suppressing the rise of challengers. Pax Americana was a naval enterprise. Aircraft carriers were not just tools of war; they were guarantees of commerce.

News of Britain’s disastrous 30-year experiment with mass migration appears to have left the rainy little island for the sunny uplands of America, where it was picked up by JD Vance. Speaking at a recent Washington, D.C. summit hosted by Andreessen Horowitz, the vice president argued that Britain’s economy is stagnating due to high levels of immigration, and accused Western nations of growing “lazy” by relying on imported “cheap labor” as a replacement for productivity.

President Trump has put into words what everyone in Washington was already thinking: there is a very real possibility of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities this summer. They would probably be led by Israel, with U.S. support and the quiet acquiescence of several Arab partners allowing the use of their airspace. It would be an enormous undertaking to blow up hardened underground sites in multiple locations at long distances, but the Israelis are almost certainly prepared and capable, having explored this option many times before. It’s probable that they briefed the Trump campaign in the months leading up to the election, setting out the most likely options and contingency scenarios. In the intervening months, it’s been a matter of the administration getting the right team in place at the National Security Council and waiting to see how Iran responds. 

JUAREZ, Mexico – On New Year’s Eve 2020, as President-elect Joe Biden was at home in Delaware celebrating his imminent move into the White House, a mob of some 300 Cubans stormed out of Juárez, Mexico, in a mad banzai charge over one of the international bridges toward El Paso, Texas. 

They swept past Mexican border guards, leapt pell-mell the wrong way over Mexican pay turnstiles, and sprinted for America in a crisscrossing stampede through traffic over the bridge lanes.

But alas, the outgoing Donald Trump was still in office, and his U.S. Customs and Border Protection Mobile Field Force, already riot-ready and waiting behind heavy concrete blocks tipped by concertina wire, stopped the migrant charge cold. Bunched up behind the barricades, the foiled mob loosed a telling chant: 

“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”

“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter. 

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.

Task Force Dragging On | The Roundtable Ep. 261

James Hankins proposes a guest worker program that would address a half-century of shortcomings in American mass immigration policy. In its rare combination of hardheadedness and empathy, his argument calls to mind Victor Davis Hanson’s 2003 memoir/essay Mexifornia. Hankins is writing neither for economists nor for international lawyers, but for people who actually live in America and wish to do right by their neighbors, including the most recently arrived among them. This is going to be difficult.

We should be clear what Hankins means by “guest worker.” Aren’t illegal immigrants guest workers already? They are guests, after a fashion, and they do work. The expression “guest worker” means something different. Though the specifics can vary from country to country, the term means someone who is in the country where he works on sufferance. A guest worker has the right to work, but not necessarily the right to stay or become a citizen. Guest worker is an intermediate category between citizen and foreigner.

Hankins argues that elaborating such a special status for people would fix a few aspects of the present system that are especially unfair and perverse. By definition, illegal migrants do not belong here legally, but after long residence they may well belong here, and only here, culturally. What is more, their American-born children belong here unambiguously.

The triumphal arch holds a very important place in the annals of Western architecture and urbanism. In Roman times it played a lofty honorific role, even though most Roman arches commemorated civic achievements and personages rather than military victories. The freestanding monumental arch was a syncretic creation, structurally derived from Etruscan gateways and decoratively enriched with Hellenistic architectural and sculptural forms. Its distinctive presence, which accommodated an astonishing variety in massing and detail, enriched towns and cities across the Roman empire, from Spain to Syria.

The monumental arch should be regarded as a universal entity—eminently appropriate, one would think, to a universal nation like these United States. The late, great historian of imperial Roman architecture, William L. MacDonald, noted how the arch corresponds to the classical concept of human proportions as delineated in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in which a male figure is inscribed within an overlapping circle and square. The impost or “springing” of the opening within the arch corresponds, MacDonald noted, to the Vitruvian Man’s arms extended directly outward, while the curvilinear opening itself corresponds to his arms sweeping upward. The arch’s geometry thus addresses us as embodied beings. You can’t get more universal than that.

In his address to Congress this month, President Trump boasted—and justly so—of his administration’s astonishing success in stopping illegal border crossings over just six weeks. “Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded.” This is no Trumpian bombast: A 94% year-on-year reduction in illegal entries really is an unprecedented accomplishment. It is also a popular one: a majority of Americans approve of controlling the border.

An even larger majority—some 76%—approve of his policy of deporting undocumented aliens who have committed felonies. Even some on the Left like Jon Stewart have been wondering: if ICE knew exactly where to find all those murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and human traffickers, as clearly they did, why then did the Biden Administration never act to deport them? Good question.

The United States needs immigrants. Americans aged 65 or older will nearly double to about 50% of the population from today’s 27% due to declining fertility and rising longevity. The dire warnings we hear about the Social Security and Medicare systems will come true with a vengeance. Immigration, to be sure, is not the only remedy for our demographic problems—we can incentivize child-raising and extend the average working life—but it is an indispensable one. Working-age adult immigrants who pay into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds help keep these systems solvent.

The fall in America’s fertility rate stems from cultural and religious shifts that cannot be undone quickly. In a January 10, 2022 contribution to The American Mind, I reviewed the statistical evidence that the decline in our fertility can be explained by the attenuation of religion in the United States.

The most popular and encouraging part of the upheaval unleashed by the Trump presidency may be the administration’s fierce determination to break the grip that wokeness, the new racialism, and gender ideology have had on all levels of government, as well as on the commanding heights of civil society. As William Voegeli perceptively argues in the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Trump speaks for the 80% of Americans who are appalled by “anti-racism” being turned into a weapon of war by other means; who want free speech to be respected again; who are alarmed by limitless social engineering, the genital mutilation of the young, and literally open borders; who do not want women’s sports to be dominated by biological men; and who deeply resent the constant invective being directed against the noble American project itself.

President Trump has repeatedly spoken of a “common sense revolution,” a “revolution” that puts the lie to the para-Marxist claim, beloved by academics, journalists, and almost all politicians, that the concerns of citizens are almost exclusively “bread-and-butter” ones, and that “culture war” issues are at best a distraction and at worst an exercise in demagoguery, racism, and homophobia.

Jeremiah Gridley, leader of the Massachusetts bar when John Adams joined it, said that “a Lawyer ought never to be without a Book of Moral Philosophy on his Table.” In the founding era, moral philosophy was itself part of common law reasoning, as was political philosophy.

This sets the Founders apart not only from the modern academy, with its separate departments for government, philosophy, and law, but even from their British contemporaries of the late 18th century such as the jurist William Blackstone. As James Wilson noted of Blackstone, “He should be read and studied. He deserves to be much admired; but he ought not to be implicitly followed.”

Contra Blackstone, the Founders maintained that if one does not think about common law precedents in particular, and legal reasoning in general, in light of the moral/legal reasoning behind them, one will misread them. The reasoning that justified them was inseparable from the law itself, and informed the scope and limitations of any precedent that followed.

A sense of fear is rippling through higher education—the fear that the Trump Administration will hold it accountable for violating federal law. As President Trump withholds millions in grants to Ivy League institutions, The New York Times’s Thomas Edsall innocently asks, “The American university system commands worldwide respect. What would prompt a call for its abolition?”

Like so many institutions, the American university system used to enjoy bipartisan trust and support. It once commanded broad-based respect, a respect that has been in freefall as the Left systematically dropped objective standards of excellence and the canon of Western civilization, replacing them with ever-evolving departments of grievance studies and activism. The majority of Republicans view American universities as a net negative. Independents are trending the same way, with just one-third saying they have “quite a lot” of trust in our universities.

On the basis of once high levels of trust, the universities secured enormous taxpayer benefits not given to any other sector. Now, they are shocked to find themselves in the process of losing their special carve-outs, which make up a substantial portion of their budgets. Losing these perks is a serious threat to their entire business model. In other words, as the kids say, FAFO.

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.

Mixed Signals | The Roundtable Ep. 260

Atlantic reporter Jeff Goldberg was mistakenly added to a national security group chat, leading to a DC media feeding frenzy—is there anything of substance to be gleaned from this goof? Meanwhile, Jay Bhattacharya—an early opponent of the 2020 lockdowns—was confirmed by the Senate to direct the National Institutes of Health, hopefully marking a turn back to sound health policy. This week, the guys talk through messaging and operations security, Biden-era censorship, plummeting egg prices, and more! Plus: a round of reading recommendations.

Recommended articles:

How Covid Remade Our America, Five Years Later

My friend, mentor, and former professor Jed Rubenfeld published an article last week in The Free Press titled “Why MAGA is Furious with Amy Coney Barrett.” In addition to discussing the particulars of the Right’s recent spat with Justice Barrett due to her vote in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, Rubenfeld explores “a civil war now being waged within legal conservatism, a war that will determine its future.” He contends that, like his progressive students a decade ago, many young conservatives are beginning to “turn against the constitution.”

With the utmost respect, Professor Rubenfeld is wrong. The rejection of our constitutional order remains a fringe view among right-wing law students and young lawyers. The most potent challenge to actually-practiced legal conservatism comes not from “right wing anti-constitutionalism”—it comes from originalism itself. But ours is not the same critique of originalism as Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule, who has been something of a bogeyman for legal liberals and FedSoc types. Yet for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the FedSoc establishment, it’s not clear Vermeule has much sway among young lawyers on the Right.

Those who control the Democratic Party despise America, our Constitution, and our history. Their goal is a repressive society based on Marxist and intersectional ideologies. Their claim to be champions of democracy is hypocrisy of the highest order. Through subterfuge and force they have moved the United States to the precipice of the abyss. Their radical views, vitriol, and violence are intolerable. Only by the strongest medicine, intravenously administered, can we turn the tide.

Donald Trump’s goal is to restore individual liberties, a constitutional republic, and American exceptionalism. He is fallible, and his flaws have been exacerbated by a decade of political, legal, and financial attacks. Yet, blemishes and some dark impulses aside, there is a broad chasm between the hellscape sought by Democratic activists and leaders and the America Trump seeks.

Like any young right-winger, I follow Vice President JD Vance closely on X. He’s one of the most interesting and inspiring figures in the Trump Administration. Recently, he discussed an interaction he had with a Ukrainian American that got my attention. The gentleman accused Vance of abandoning “his” country, to which Vance retorted that his country is America. He then said a line that has stuck with me, something I had never heard a politician express before: “I always found it offensive that a new immigrant to our country would be willing to use the power and influence of their new nation to settle the ethnic rivalries of the old.”

What Vice President Vance succinctly outlined is a problem that naturally seems to come with empire building: becoming international waters. The United States has become a place where other nations fight to win money, power, and influence for themselves while the American people are left in the dust. Client states at the outer edges of our empire have become the constituency of our politicians and bureaucrats. Taxpayers of the empire suffer as they’re forced to fund the outer colonies, getting hardly anything tangible in return for their labors.

In his address to Congress this month, President Trump boasted—and justly so—of his administration’s astonishing success in stopping illegal border crossings over just six weeks. “Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded.” This is no Trumpian bombast: A 94% year-on-year reduction in illegal entries really is an unprecedented accomplishment. It is also a popular one: a majority of Americans approve of controlling the border.

An even larger majority—some 76%—approve of his policy of deporting undocumented aliens who have committed felonies. Even some on the Left like Jon Stewart have been wondering: if ICE knew exactly where to find all those murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and human traffickers, as clearly they did, why then did the Biden Administration never act to deport them? Good question.

An unexpected line to trace through Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement underscores how post-1960s America—high on a new civil rights regime enforced by the federal bureaucracy—evolved into a culture of easy capital and low-accountability work. Caldwell’s warnings about limitless government spending, cheap credit, and extraordinary leniency on personal and corporate debt hint at a deeper transformation that I will make explicit: easy money ultimately begat easy jobs, embedding a sense of entitlement not just in civic life, but also in corporate America. Lax job performance and perpetual punting on profitability became commonplace, normalizing positions unattached to genuine operational needs.

The book’s climax spotlights Ronald Reagan’s decision to cut taxes and increase spending to buoy the Baby Boomers. Rather than halting the runaway habits of endless federal agencies, trimming spending, and repealing harmful laws from the prior generation, the Reagan Administration doubled down. The massive expansion of the administrative state—ostensibly to enforce civil rights—spilled into economic policy: free-flowing money, perpetual government growth, workless jobs, and inflated assets in both the public and private spheres. The federal government, alongside subsidized industries, sprawling corporate giants, and a host of NGOs, served as the unwitting backstop for this risky status quo.

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.

Tren Wreck | The Roundtable Ep. 259

You’re fired. Trump, by executive order, has moved to terminate federal contracts with law firm Perkins Coie for its role in promoting the 2016 Russiagate conspiracy and otherwise influencing elections—sparking fervorous debate in and across the aisle. Meanwhile, the administration invoked the emergency powers of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport members of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, provoking an activist judge to obstruct the law’s use. Who rules: Congress or courts? The hosts sit down to discuss these ongoing legal battles in government, real battles abroad, and the absurd responses from the Left across the board. Plus, more media recommendations!

Recommended reading:

As the Trump Administration pushes DEI out of schools and colleges, it should incentivize patriotic civic education as a salutary alternative. While curricular mandates from Washington violate federalism—besides the views of the growing chorus of Americans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—many federal tools remain available.

DEI, which nominally denotes “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” has come to stand for the full set of anti-American teachings and principles outlined in the January 2021 report of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. These include promoting a false history of slavery that inaccurately denigrates the American Founders, praising progressivism and muting the horrors of Communism, and inculcating racist identity politics.

In contrast, the 1776 Report highlights ways Americans can develop enlightened patriotism. The family, inspiring and accurate education, noble stories, solid scholarship, and reverence for the rule of law under our common Constitution of the United States all have their roles.

Much has been written about Trump Derangement Syndrome, that mental and emotional affliction that distorts its victims’ ability to make measured judgments about the doings of our past and present president. No doubt much more will be written about it, because this malady shows no signs of abating.

One of the worst side effects of TDS is the widespread circulation of bogus constitutional claims. As Trump, the astute politician that he is, has staked out popular positions on many issues of interest to the public, his critics, at a loss for other arguments, routinely say he is trashing the Constitution.

This is a serious problem. Preserving our constitutional system, and the many blessings that flow from it, depends on preserving a correct understanding of the Constitution’s various provisions among the public. But the public’s understanding of the Constitution is undermined by the TDS brigade’s continual reiteration of fanciful claims of constitutional violations.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London is undoubtedly one of its worst decisions in the past 20 years. The Court gave state and local governments the option to transfer private property from its rightful owner to another private owner, justifying this as a “public use” since it will supposedly promote “economic development.” Kelo is a classic example of activist judges rationalizing a predetermined result—in this case, overturning the Constitution’s protection of private property rights.

The Court’s decision stripped Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the historic Fort Trumbull neighborhood of their property in order to build an “urban village”—a fact Justice John Paul Stevens breezily dismisses in his opinion, which is a thoroughly unimpressive piece of legal legerdemain. Stevens failed to note that the neighborhood would be bulldozed even though he acknowledged that not only had Kelo lived in her house since 1997, and had made substantial improvements to her property, but that “Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life.” The continued existence of what was apparently a very stable residential area, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of “progress.” Stevens held that the residents and their homes must be sacrificed in the interest of a supposed greater good.