Taking Down the Confederate Flag Is Not Woke

By John M. Sandy

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

There are some things history makes difficult to sentimentalize.

 

Frederick Douglass was a child when he learned what slavery meant. The lesson came through a closet door. Douglass remembered that his Aunt Hester was beautiful, strikingly so. She was, he wrote, “a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance.” She also had an admirer, a young man named Ned Roberts. Douglass remembered Ned as “quite a good-looking young man.”

 

Captain Anthony, the slaves’ master, did not like it.

 

He ordered Hester not to go out at night and warned her never to let him find her with Ned. “Had he been a man of pure morals himself,” Douglass wrote, “he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew him will not suspect him of any such virtue.” Anthony owned Hester. But there was one thing his ownership could not command: who she desired.

 

One night, he found her with Ned. Anthony took Hester into the kitchen. He stripped her from the neck to the waist. He bound her hands and fastened them above her head. Then he rolled up his sleeves.

 

“I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” he said. He began to whip her.

 

“The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped,” Douglass remembered, “and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest.” Soon “the warm, red blood” was dripping to the floor.

 

Douglass hid in a closet.

 

“I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight,” he wrote, “that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next.”

 

The law recognized Anthony’s claim to her body while recognizing no corresponding claim by Hester to herself. Anthony could dictate where she went, whom she saw, and what happened when she disobeyed. Ned could court her, perhaps. Hester could choose him, perhaps. But neither could make her free.

 

***

 

There is a temptation, when Americans argue about the Confederate flag, to begin with politics. We begin with “wokeness.” We begin with statues and statehouses, heritage and cancel culture. Before long, people are arguing about what someone displaying the flag today intends it to mean. One side sees racism. Another sees ancestry, rebellion, regional identity, or the courage of soldiers who fought beneath it.

 

I think we should begin in the closet.

 

What happened in that kitchen is inseparable from what the Confederacy later chose to defend. The Confederacy did not invent slavery. Neither, for that matter, did the American South. Slavery stained much of the early history of this country. It existed under the American flag. Northern merchants profited from it. Our Constitution accommodated it. Americans inherited a terrible contradiction between the self-evident truth announced in the Declaration of Independence and the human bondage practiced beneath it. And that history belongs to all of us.

 

In 1861, the contradiction finally tore the country apart. And the men who formed the Confederacy were not coy about the institution they meant to protect. Mississippi’s declaration of secession announced that its position was “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” South Carolina complained that Northern states had “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and wrongfully resisted the return of people who escaped bondage. The Confederate Constitution went further. It prohibited its government from passing any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” It protected the ability of slaveholders to travel with enslaved people and retain their claimed property rights in them. And in Confederate territories it commanded that slavery “shall be recognized and protected.”

 

Those are not the words of modern granola activists imposing their woke fashionable morality. They are the Confederacy’s words. Which is why I have trouble with the claim that removing the Confederate flag from places of public honor is somehow “woke.”

 

There was nothing woke about Frederick Douglass. There was nothing politically fashionable about a formerly enslaved man standing before 19^th-century America and forcing it to confront its principles and practices. Douglass did not need a modern theory of oppression to understand what slavery was. He had crouched in the closet. He had heard the screams. He had seen the blood.

 

This does not mean we should erase the Confederate flag from history. Quite the opposite. Preserve it. Put it in museums. Display it on battlefields where Confederate soldiers carried it. Teach children what it was and why men fought beneath it. Read the secession declarations. Read the Confederate Constitution. Read the letters of soldiers, including those whose motives were more complicated than the motives of the government for which they fought. History should not be cleaned up for our comfort.

 

But neither should history be confused with honor. I contend that a museum preserves and a history book teaches. But a government building and state flag honors. That is an important distinction. We do not erase history when we decide that a symbol no longer deserves a place of civic reverence. We make judgments about our history constantly. Every monument, portrait, flag, and name placed in a courthouse, capitol, or public square reflects a choice about what part of our inheritance we wish to hold up. The Confederate flag should be remembered and studied. But it need not be honored.

 

I understand that many people who display it today do not intend to celebrate slavery. Symbols can acquire meanings beyond their origins. For some, the Confederate flag may call to mind a grandfather, a battlefield, Southern identity, defiance of authority, or simply home. We do no service to one another by assuming the worst motive in every person who sees a symbol differently than we do.

 

But private intention cannot rewrite public history. The question is not simply what the flag means to us now. We should also ask what political order it represented then. And when we do, Frederick Douglass deserves a place in the conversation. Because the power Anthony exercised over Hester was the power of one human being to own another. And when the nation finally fractured over the future of that system, the Confederacy placed the protection of slave property into its fundamental law.

 

Perhaps that is what bothers me most about calling opposition to the Confederate flag “woke.” The word allows us to dismiss an old moral question as though it were a new political fad. It turns something Americans have wrestled with for generations into another skirmish in today’s culture war. Douglass takes us back to a time before our vocabulary became so convenient. Back through the arguments about monuments and flags. Back through Reconstruction and emancipation. Back before Gettysburg and Antietam and Fort Sumter. Back before there was a Confederacy at all.

 

Back to a kitchen, where blood drips onto the floor and a little boy hides in a closet, terrified that he will be next.

 

The Confederacy chose to preserve that world. We should preserve the flag that represents that history too. Preserve it behind glass and in books so that our children can see it and ask what happened here. But preservation is not veneration. And declining to honor that flag is not woke. It is remembering.

The Coming Post-Trump Reality

The Dispatch Editors

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

History has a way of surprising you.

 

When this publication launched in October 2019, we announced our intention to set a journalistic course distinct from that of our competitors, both in the so-called mainstream media and in the partisan and ideological press, regarding the biggest story of the day. Our animating spirit was to be neither perfervidly pro-Trump nor neurotically anti-Trump but cheerfully and soberly post-Trump, ready to focus on the many important facets of this American life not dominated by the eccentric principal resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, whose retirement then seemed incipient.

 

We were premature.

 

The country, of course, endured the shameful events of January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s risible attempts to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election, and, in 2024, his unlikely comeback from disgrace and exile—surely aided by both the excesses and incompetence of former President Joe Biden and his administration. But now, as we approach November’s midterm elections, we are cautiously hopeful that we are within spitting distance of the end of the Trump era.

 

If we are correct in that hope, the federal and state elections that take place eight weeks from today will signal the start of a transition to what could be a new era. Much can happen in two months of politics in this goldfish-memory era, and we have no illusions about the ugliness ahead. Partisan Republicans will spend their days insisting that the republic will end if the walking scandal that is Ken Paxton, a singular disgrace even among the rising class of profoundly dishonorable public servants, loses a GOP-held Senate seat in Texas and, with it, perhaps, the GOP majority in the upper chamber. Too many Democrats, meanwhile, will rally behind the radical anti-Americanism of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, shrugging off his persistent antisemitism and association with unapologetic terrorist sympathizers, just as they eagerly dismissed the Nazi tattoo and casual misogyny of Graham Platner in Maine until electoral, rather than moral, considerations ensured his defenestration.

 

At least from this temporal distance, it looks like much of the country seems prepared, finally, to reject the frivolity and depravity of Trumpism and its namesake. Democrats have opposed Trump from the beginning, of course. Many independents who once supported the president have turned on him. Most worrisome for the White House, and encouraging to us, are the Republicans who have had enough. To be sure, Trump still enjoys the backing of a substantial majority of his party and, as we’ve seen, his influence in GOP primaries remains. But his support among Republicans is slipping, in both breadth and intensity. Recent polling suggests that nearly half of the non-MAGA GOP, a substantial minority of the party, disapproves of his job performance. Even among Republicans who say they back the president, the number who strongly approve has been tanking. And yet Trump, obtuse and obstinate as ever, wants the midterms to be all about him.

 

Whatever the election brings, three things are true: Trump is broadly unpopular, he will soon be a lame duck, and, at some point, the Trump era will come to an end. So now is the time to contemplate in earnest what decisions Americans must face in that new era, and whose vision for confronting the existential problems these United States face will win out.

 

Consider: The federal government is headed for a fiscal crisis. Just last month the federal debt surpassed $40 trillion, and this year, interest payments on that debt will reach their highest shares of both GDP and federal tax revenue in the country’s history. Interest payments alone are a bigger expenditure than national defense. The debt has more than doubled since the end of the 2016 fiscal year, from $19 trillion. Out-of-control deficits and compounding entitlement liabilities drive that incomprehensible debt, and fixing this mess is not something the U.S. can simply “grow our way out of,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently claimed.  

 

Or consider how the U.S.’s position in the world is much diminished. This has come principally by Trump’s dishonorable attacks on NATO and other long-standing democratic allies, his aimless and dashed-off war in Iran, and by his destructive tariff war on low prices and flexible supply chains (attacks that have more than a little in common with the “economic patriotism” championed by Barack Obama and many contemporary progressives, whose ideas about national security and trade are nearly as wrongheaded as Trump’s).

 

Trump’s national security intellectuals—a term we use advisedly, given that some of his advisers are not intellectuals and some of his intellectuals seem shockingly unmotivated to bolster national security—insist that the administration is realistically adjusting to an era of great power, multipolar rivalries, and the need to maintain what some have called “spheres of influence.” This sophisticated theorizing has given us the “Donroe” Doctrine and “Lake America.” The truth is the theorizing is little more than gauzy window dressing on Trump’s impulses.

 

We would criticize the Democrats’ theories on national security too, but aside from reflexively opposing Trump and welcoming “anti-Zionists” into their tent, we have no idea what the Democratic understanding of foreign policy might be.

 

Regardless, for reasons partly attributable to Trump, but also for reasons long in the making, the world we face today is vastly more dangerous than the one America faced at the end of the Cold War. Ironically, that time of peace and prosperity, purchased with decades of perseverance and sacrifice, seems to arouse scorn from both left and right. It is apparently preferable to enjoy the luxury of denouncing an era of American “empire” in the rearview mirror than to ask how we might once again make the world safer for America, and more peaceful and prosperous in general, by providing global leadership.   

 

Addressing these crises—foreign and domestic—will require making difficult, unpopular decisions at a time when most politicians want easy sound bites instead. Some of those decisions, principally in foreign policy, will require more spending. Rearming our depleted armed forces and outfitting them to face the challenges presented by China, Russia, et al., is one such example. Other decisions, such as reforming the entitlements now bankrupting the country, demand real and painful fiscal discipline. Making these choices will require the kind of long-term, consensus-oriented program that Washington has shown no talent or appetite for in recent years, and any worthwhile program of reform will necessitate painful trade-offs that will leave precisely no one satisfied or unscathed.

 

But even less tractable than fiscal or foreign policy is the deeper cultural decay at the heart of our political dysfunction that has many Americans turning to a particularly ugly form of tribalistic politics as a kind of ersatz religion, a source of community and meaning. If we have a crisis of political leadership—and we do—we also have a terrifying crisis of American citizenship. Our decline is the product of countless choices at every level of society. Leaders of institutions surrender to the vibes and zeitgeist, dashing out of their lanes and roles to perform for their own aggrandizement or protect their own interests. Politicians, educators, public health officials, businessmen, clergy, philanthropists, and journalists certainly have particular responsibilities in all this, but so do we all. When the people do not demand better, they should not expect to get anything good.

 

These facts underscore the necessity of returning to a commitment to limiting the size and scope of the government’s influence in our daily lives. That principle is embedded in the gift the Founding Fathers left to us: a remarkably intelligent and adaptive constitutional architecture with which to organize our response to these challenges. That constitutional structure was designed to constrain power, to frustrate the ability of any one ideologue or iconoclast to wield the power and purse of the state like a foolish college student wields his father’s credit card and good name.

 

But there is no denying that the country no longer has a major political party devoted to limiting the size and scope of government. Broadly speaking, Republicans insist they care deeply about fiscal sanity and strong national defense. The message of the Democrats, meanwhile, is that budgetary discipline is unnecessary while national defense is a luxury we cannot afford. We are often chastised for our “both-sides-ism.” Well, we can at least say this much: The difference between these two messages is that the Republicans are right, but they are lying; the Democrats are at least honest, but they are wrong.

 

Democrats, of course, have long been the party of big government—from the New Deal through the Great Society—appealing to voters by promising government programs available to help at virtually every stage of our time on this earth. Remember, Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia?” Or Joe Biden’s shameless ploy to shift the burden of billions in student loans from those who took them out to American taxpayers? Now, while the Democratic Socialists of America and affiliated radicals enjoying a surging—but not unchallenged—ascendence in the Democratic Party, those same impulses live on in renewed pushes for Medicare for all, pledges to freeze rents, and promises of “free” universal childcare. Nothing new here.

 

For most of the past half-century, meanwhile, Republicans have promised voters they would be the party of limited government, through the Reagan presidency and the Gingrich and Tea Party congressional victories in 1994 and 2010, respectively. But in the decade since Trump was first elected, the country has seen an unmistakable trend toward expanding government.

 

Sure, there was DOGE, the ill-conceived and poorly executed Elon Musk effort to make the federal government more “efficient” at the beginning of Trump’s second term. But despite the administration’s absurd promises and Musk’s cringey showmanship, the actual savings of the effort were minimal. All the while, the president has declared that the entitlements driving our debt would largely be protected from cost-cutting reforms.

 

Instead, MAGA Republicans use government power to achieve their own preferred ends. While populist Republicans have warned of the creeping socialism among Democrats, they’ve cheered a president whose administration has taken stakes in 32 private companies, including a just-announced plan of dubious legality that would have taxpayers funding a Pentagon-led ownership of large swaths of the Venezuelan oil industry. Trump has also advocated public equity stakes in the technology companies driving American development of artificial intelligence—a proposal that in many respects mirrors one put forward by socialist Bernie Sanders.

 

Any talk among members of the Trump-era Republican Party of constraining government seems not to apply to the ones currently running the government.

 

All that is to say nothing of the rampant corruption within the Trump administration itself, which, on the matter of mere ordinary financial corruption alone, is without precedent in American history. Whether it’s the president cashing in on his cryptocurrency business to the tune of 11 figures, the way the aforementioned stakes in private companies benefit the president’s own family, or how the administration’s foreign policy seems to line the pockets of both Trump and his friends, this is an administration that manages to do three times a week something that would have resulted in an impeachment in more sober and self-respecting times.

 

So, in 20 years, will we look back on the Trump era as a parenthetical aberration or as the front-page headline announcing the arrival of something new, enduring, and ghastly—something alien to the best of our traditions and principles?

 

As our own Jonah Goldberg has observed, a two-party system cannot have a single sane political party: It will have two reasonably responsible and sober parties, or it will have two irresponsible and demagogic parties. At this moment, it may seem we are headed for the double-basketcase scenario rather than for a return to our senses.

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are sane and serious people in both parties. What the good people lack is either the incentives or the courage to take a stand. They tell themselves, not without reason, that it is better to work within the current dysfunction to make small improvements and prevent large disasters, biding their time like Christians in the catacombs of Rome for the opportunity to emerge and preach the secular gospel of political sanity.

 

Now is that time. The Trump era is ending, and that ending brings an appetite and a political opportunity.

 

We understand that even the best people find it difficult to work across the party line, to extend trust across that line, or even to see that authentic fellow Americans could even live on the other side of that line. But the contest now before us is not the extremists vs. the moderates so much as it is the grasping nihilists on either end of the political horseshoe against those exhausted and dispirited citizens in the horseshoe’s bend—those who still cling to decency, intelligence, prudence, good citizenship, neighborliness, and a rigorous commitment to dealing with the actual facts of the world, however inconvenient they may be.

 

As Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg made clear in this institution’s founding manifesto, The Dispatch has never attempted to force into existence a new great awakening of republican virtue. As journalists, our role in public life is simply to try to describe what is going on in the world and to host arguments about what to do about it. Nor do we pretend to a position of Olympian detachment and objectivity. We have seen some things, and we have reasoned judgments about what we have seen.

 

Nor is this a manifesto for some kind of No Labels-style centrism and bipartisanship. The times call for stronger stuff: If they mean only staying within the Venn overlap between MAGA and the DSA—and there is more overlap than you might think—then the cause will be lost even before the battle begins. What we need now are policies that call America back to fiscal discipline, advance faith in America’s ability to be a force for good around the globe, and that hold the rule of law and individual liberty as sacrosanct.

 

There are no ironclad laws of politics or history, but if there were one, it would be this: When responsible actors refuse to deal with legitimate issues responsibly, irresponsible actors will fill the vacuum and deal with them irresponsibly. Look to the last 10 years for proof of this. Why has the president felt so free to do the rampant self-dealing since returning to the White House last year? “Because I found out nobody cared,” he told New York Times reporters early this year.

 

So as reporters and commentators and publishers, as fathers and mothers, as voters and public officials, as members of religious congregations, as operators of businesses—as citizens participating in the glorious variety of American life—we have, to an extraordinary and often unappreciated degree, the power to make of our public life whatever we choose to make of it.

 

Whether we adorn our choices in blue or red, we can have more crises and convulsions, more rage and more monetization of rage, more ad-hocracy and mobbery and profligacy. Or we can have something better. We are not ready to entertain airy thoughts about national renewal or a renaissance of republican virtue, as happy as these things are to contemplate. We are talking about the grubby, difficult details of governance required of leaders in a republic: getting the deficit down to a manageable level, shoring up the rule of law against the forces of anarchy and predation, and talking to the American people like grown-ups rather than pandering to them like they’re angry, aggrieved teenagers.

 

That would be, at least, a start.

 

There is much that is good and admirable and inspiring and worth celebrating in America today. We have vast reserves of decency and ingenuity in this country that could be tapped if we could just clear the rust from the gears. We should be grateful for these resources and what they have accomplished, from the consistent improvements in material living conditions worldwide to wondrous technological and medical innovations led—for good reason—by American businesses, American workers, American scientists, American universities, American cities, and the capacious, audacious American spirit. We do not know what comes next, but we know that the power to decide what comes next is in the hands of the only people on this Earth who have ever raised their flag on the moon. In that, at least, we find reason for hope—sober hope—at the end of a long, vicious, squandered decade.

The Great Appeaser

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

If I release a rabid monkey on a leash into a museum, and it smashes vases, bites tourists, and flings poo at the Mona Lisa, I can’t claim I’m not responsible when I choose not to tug on the monkey’s chain—especially when I tell the monkey lovers: “A vote for the monkey is a vote for me and my party.”

 

Let me explain.

 

The other day, CNN’s Manu Raju asked House Speaker Mike Johnson whether voters should hold Johnson partly responsible for the Iran war dragging on.

 

“On Iran, you said repeatedly that this war was going to be over soon. You said that this would be a temporary blip on gas prices,” Raju said. Six months later “[p]eople are getting hurt still at the pump. Should the American people not also judge you on your projections here that were clearly off base?”

 

Johnson replied: “Manu, that is one of the stupidest questions you’ve ever asked.”

 

“Why is that stupid?” Raju asked.

 

“I have nothing to do with the prosecution of the war across the globe,” Johnson insisted.

 

After some crosstalk, Raju replied, “You are—you are selling this to the American public, are you not?”

 

“So, should the House speaker be held responsible for the duration of a military conflict around the globe?” Johnson responded. “You answer that question.”

 

Raju didn’t, but I’ll take a stab.

 

There are a couple of ways to come at this. Let’s start with the constitutional stuff.

 

The official—congressionally authorized—Constitution Annotated has a section called “Overview of Congressional War Powers.”

 

The mere fact that the Constitution grants war powers is kind of inconvenient for Johnson, but we’ll get back to that. Among the powers granted to Congress are the powers to declare war, raise and support armies, provide a navy, make rules governing the armed forces, regulate captures, and—most consequentially in the modern era—appropriate or withhold the money necessary to continue wars. I’m open to some nuance at the margins, but broadly speaking, these powers are solely granted to Congress.

 

Now, it’s certainly true that Congress has been delegating a lot of its authorities to the executive branch for a very long time. But Johnson is very, very fond of touting himself as not just an expert on the Constitution, but a faithful servant of it. “My background is in interpretation of the Constitution, and I am a textualist,” he told The New Yorker in 2020. “We all should have an interest in these very specific clauses of the Constitution being followed.”

 

As part of his explanation for why Joe Biden was “the worst president in American history,” he complained that as speaker, he was denied access to the president to consult on national security.

 

“I became speaker in October 2023, and there were all sorts of big national security concerns going on,” he told Bari Weiss in 2025. “I started requesting a meeting with the president because, you know, I’m kind of old school. I’m a constitutional law guy. The speaker of the House should be able to talk to the president, especially in times of great national interest and calamity.”

 

The “Rule of Law” section on Johnson’s official website says, “Each branch of government must adhere to the Constitution … Congress must faithfully perform its constitutional responsibility of oversight.”

 

So much for his own stated views of his responsibilities. And I think we’ve covered the text of the Constitution well enough. Let’s move on to history and tradition, as the “old constitutional law nerds” might say.

 

Henry Clay was one of the greatest statesmen of the 19^th century: He served as a senator, representative, secretary of state, and speaker of the House. He helped create both the Whig and Republican parties. He was so respected that he was elected straight to the speakership, despite being a freshman. He was only 34. As speaker, he—at least as much as President James Madison—drove the public effort to declare war on the British. He seeded the relevant committees with fellow war hawks, and under his leadership Congress declared war for the first time.

 

Fast forward to 1847, the now elder statesman Clay was opposed and horrified by President James Polk’s war with Mexico. He explained that while the War of 1812 had been “a War of National defence, required for the vindication of the National rights and honor, and demanded by the indignant voice of the people. … How totally variant is the present War! This is no War of Defence, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression.” Sound familiar?

 

Now, Polk did get a declaration of war (of sorts) from Congress, but what offended Clay and many others was that Polk had, in their view, started a war and then got Congress to ratify a fait accompli.

 

Clay argued that it didn’t really matter how we got into the war; Congress still had a lot of say about how the war should be conducted, what the war aims should be, and how it would be paid for. Alas, that doesn’t sound very familiar.

 

“Either Congress, or the President, must have the right of determining upon the objects for which a War shall be prosecuted,” Clay said. “There is no other alternative. If the president possess it and may prosecute it for objects against the will of Congress, where is the difference between our Free Government and that of any other nation which may be governed by an absolute Czar, Emperor, or King?” (Emphasis added.)

 

He continued:

 

…in expounding the constitution, we ought to keep constantly in view the nature and structure of our free Government, and especially the great object of the Convention in taking the war-making power out of the hands of a single man and placing it in the safer custody of the representatives of the whole nation. The desirable reconciliation between the two powers is effected by attributing to Congress the right to declare what shall be the objects of war, and to the President the duty of endeavoring to obtain those objects by the direction of the national force and by diplomacy.

 

…

 

I conclude, therefore, Mr. President and fellow-citizens, with entire confidence, that Congress has the right, either at the beginning or during the prosecution of any War, to decide the objects and purposes for which it was proclaimed, or for which it ought to be continued. And, I think it is the duty of Congress by some deliberate and authentic act, to declare for what objects the present War shall no longer be prosecuted.

 

History and tradition don’t begin and end with Clay, of course.

 

In 1983, Speaker Tip O’Neill personally negotiated with President Ronald Reagan on the size and duration of a Marine deployment to Lebanon. O’Neill had told Reagan, “No way, no way, will I give you a blank check.” In 1991, Speaker Tom Foley insisted that President George H.W. Bush had to come to Congress and ask permission for the first Gulf War, and Bush agreed. In 2002, Speaker Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt sponsored the authorization of the use of force in Iraq again.

 

The Spanish-American war is a fun exception to the point I’ve been making, but not in a way that helps Johnson. The Constitution, after all, doesn’t grant the war powers of Congress to the speaker, it grants them to Congress. Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed—dubbed “Czar Reed” for his tight control of the House—was opposed to war with Spain. The problem? The actual Congress wasn’t. He—and the president—were ultimately forced to follow Congress’ lead.

 

Let’s just say that Johnson’s incredulity is not credible coming out of the mouth of a “textualist” Constitution-thumper.

 

So let’s offer a political answer to Johnson’s question. Recently, the speaker was plugging next week’s “midterm convention”: “The president’s going to look right in the camera and say, ‘I am on the ballot,’ okay, because even though his name isn’t, right, his administration, his legacy, the American First agenda is, we’ve got to get people to turn out.”

 

So, which is it? Is the president’s conduct of the war—and everything else—the standard by which voters should hold Congress accountable or not? If the speaker and the House shouldn’t be “held responsible” for the war and its economic consequences, why say that this congressional election is a referendum on Trump?

 

If Johnson and the Republicans have turned themselves into a rubber stamp for whatever Trump does, then they are politically responsible for what Trump does. They can’t have it both ways. They can’t refuse to use even the slightest bit of their constitutional authority—which is another way of describing a clear refusal to live up to their constitutional obligations—and then say they have no accountability for what the president lawlessly or unconstitutionally does.

 

Johnson the “constitutionalist” is simply a fraud, and Johnson the politician is simply a coward. He wants Republicans to be a mere extension of Trump’s Caesarian authority when it comes to MAGA voters, and he wants to be exonerated wholly from the consequences of that choice in the eyes of every other voter.

 

Clay was known as “the Great Compromiser” because he expertly used his power and knowledge of the Constitution to defuse sectional crises. Johnson should go down in history as the Great Appeaser, because no speaker in history has so self-gelded the job and institution.

 

I really wanted to work in some wordplay about how we’ve gone from the statesmanlike “feats of Clay,” to Johnson’s “feet of clay.” The problem is that “feet of clay” comes from the Bible and is supposed to mean “a hidden, serious weakness or character flaw in someone who is greatly admired, respected, or powerful.” And that’s the hitch. Not only is Johnson not greatly admired or respected, his weaknesses and character flaws are not a concealed bug. They are the defining feature of his speakership.

Welcome to the ‘Imperial Populist Oligarchy’

Paul D. Miller

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

 

The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this summer offered an occasion to reflect with gratitude on the American achievement: an experiment in ordered liberty that has not just persisted but improved, a nation that became an inspiration for equality and liberty the world over, a republic that has tried to balance the people’s voice with the wisdom of history.

 

But the anniversary is also an occasion for us to reflect on our current moment and its challenges. We live in a fraught time, and it is no longer clear that the things we have admired—our persistence, our inspiration, or our republic—will endure.

 

In fact, the American republic has declined in ways that may be hard for Americans to see, as the decline involves institutional changes, not hot-button issues of race or religion. The American regime has become less republican, more democratic; less federalist, more nationalized; less citizen-owned, more executive-led; less aristocratic, more oligarchic.

 

In short, the American regime today is not a republic so much as an imperial populist oligarchy.

 

A republic, if you can keep it.

 

It has become a cliché to insist that the American founders built a republic, not a democracy. The cliché is true: James Madison, the drafter of the Constitution, clearly identified the new government as a republic throughout The Federalist, repeatedly distinguished it from a democracy, and spoke of “the pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans” in Federalist 10.^⁠ Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” which presumes the Constitution’s self-understanding as a republican document.

 

The Constitution did not establish an Athenian direct democracy in which every citizen could gather in person to legislate, judge, and oversee public affairs, which would have been both impractical and a recipe for mob rule. Rather, the Constitution established a representative regime among coequal citizens in which the people elected delegates who formed only one part of an elaborate architecture of offices designed to operate under the rule of law and protect their natural rights.

 

It was this combination—popular sovereignty and coequal citizenship exercised through representation; the division of government into distinct branches, each with checks and balances on the others; all governed and limited by a constitution, the rule of law, and natural rights—that made the new government a republic, not a pure democracy. Alexander Hamilton argued that these modern institutions would guard the American republic against the tumult and upheaval of the ancient experiments in liberty. He wrote in Federalist 9 that they are “powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained.”

 

Populism.

 

We do not live in that republic anymore. Consider the ways the United States has grown less republican and more purely democratic, even populist, since the early 20^th century.

 

The 17^th Amendment (ratified in 1913) made senators directly elected by the people rather than by state legislators, turning the Senate into a second House. The Senate’s apportionment of two senators per state, regardless of population, went from being a safeguard of states’ rights to an easy target for anyone—like the Democratic Socialists of America—who wants to complain that the Senate is antidemocratic.

 

At the same time, the political parties instituted party primaries rather than party caucuses (i.e., smoke-filled back rooms) to select nominees for office—for statewide office by the early 20^th century and for the presidency in the 1970s. That empowered individual politicians at the parties’ expense, fragmenting party cohesion and undermining their mediating influence.

 

And since the early 20^th century, most states have adopted citizen initiatives and referenda, bringing American democracy much closer to direct, Athenian-style participatory democracy but without the face-to-face relationships of a city-state. While initiatives and referendums improve state governments’ responsiveness to voters, they also make laws without the benefit of legislative compromise and, often, without legal expertise.

 

As the American regime has grown more democratic, it has also become, as the founders would have warned, more volatile, more prone to extremism, more dominated by the passion of the masses and the politicians who would manipulate them. Much of our polarization and division today likely stems from the ways our regime has become more democratic and less republican.

 

The imperial executive.

 

Over the same time frame, the U.S. government has seen a decisive shift in power, both formally and informally, from the legislature to the executive.

 

Informally, the presidency has assumed the cultural authority to set the agenda, from Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit” to Barack Obama’s “pen and phone.” The work of the American government orbits around the president’s wishes, either for or against, in a way that would have been foreign and scandalous to the presidents of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

 

Formally, presidents have accreted extraordinary powers. They rule the executive branch by decree, and with a vast array of departments and agencies at their disposal, and they exercise considerable market power within the American economy. In short, the executive branch has become the single largest, richest, and most powerful institution ever created in the history of mankind, creating a concentration of power in its chief executive officer that should alarm any republican.

 

Add to that the president’s emergency and national security powers, under which Congress has granted the president wide latitude and discretionary authority (there are 51 declared national “emergencies” in 2026, the oldest dating to 1979). Congress reined in some of the “imperial presidency” after Richard Nixon’s flagrant abuses of power and criminality, but Donald Trump has pushed the boundaries back out again. He has relied on “acting” appointees without Senate confirmation, centralized control over independent agencies, unilaterally reorganized and shrunk executive agencies without congressional authorization, and broken norms against leveraging the presidency for private business deals. In 2024 the Supreme Court formally staked out a doctrine of presidential immunity protecting presidents from prosecution for official acts.

 

And the president’s war powers, always the area in which he has had the greatest latitude, are slipping away from Congress’ lone attempt to rein them in. The 1973 War Powers Resolution tried to set reasonable timetables by which presidents must receive congressional authorization for military operations. Every president rejected the constitutionality of the WPR but obeyed it anyway—until Obama’s war in Libya and Trump’s war in Iran. We now have a commander in chief who can wage war unilaterally, indefinitely, with little oversight or accountability.

 

Oligarchy.

 

Thomas Jefferson hoped the new government would be led by a “natural aristocracy,” men of recognized “virtue and talents.” The founders hoped their republican machinery would screen out demagogues and select natural aristocrats for leadership. That was their hope for the House, the Senate, and the Electoral College.

 

Madison wrote in Federalist 10 that electing representatives to the House would “refine and enlarge the public views” by entrusting the government to those “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country,” men of superior “patriotism and love of justice.”

 

Similarly, during the Constitutional Convention, he anticipated the Senate would be composed of “enlightened citizens, whose limited number, and firmness might seasonably interpose [against] impetuous councils.” The Senate would be the body “sufficiently respectable for its wisdom & virtue” to be a bulwark against the dangers of populism and democracy.

 

And Hamilton hoped the Electoral College, as a small, dedicated body, would be more likely “to possess the information and discernment requisite” for choosing a president, as he explained in The Federalist. This body would be directly accountable to the people but, unlike them, would be able to act “under circumstances favorable to deliberation.” Such a process would avoid the “tumult and disorder” of a national plebiscite. The Electoral College would protect the process from the “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” and instead elevate men “preeminent for ability and virtue,” he wrote in Federalist 68.

 

I hope it is not too controversial for me to assert that the U.S. Congress today is not a bastion of the “natural aristocracy” of merit. Most members are millionaires, and all are beholden to the fundraisers and donors who keep their perpetual campaigns afloat. The problem of money in politics is not new, but we have shifted the center of gravity from the elected officials themselves—where at least we have some transparency and diffusion—to donors and super PACs increasingly dominated by a very small elite of exceptionally wealthy individuals. Instead of an aristocracy of virtue, we have Elon Musk.

 

Regime change.

 

Every change in American politics has increased concentrations of power—in the mob, the presidency, the oligarchy, the federal bureaucracy—at the expense of mediating republican institutions (Congress, the states, and political parties). The American regime today is not a mixed constitution with elements of benevolent monarchy, aristocracy, and republicanism; it is becoming a mixed constitution of imperial populist oligarchy.

 

I mean that in a very precise sense. The founders were self-consciously following the political archetypes laid out in antiquity. As they knew, Aristotle had developed a typology of regimes: rule by the one, few, or many; and regimes that govern for the common good or private good. That yields six regime types. Regimes that govern for the common good include monarchies, aristocracies, and republics (the one, the few, and the many, respectively); and those that govern for private gain include tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.

 

The political thinkers of the ancient world, like Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, counseled a mixed constitution as the best regime. The American founders deliberately created a mixed regime that included elements of the one (the presidency), the few (the Senate), and the many (the House). They hoped to capitalize on the benefits of monarchy, aristocracy, and republicanism while using each regime type to offset the dangers of the others.

 

Much of the story of the past century is the deterioration of each part into its degenerate counterpart. The executive is not monarchal but increasingly imperial. Our leading citizens are not true aristocrats (leaders in virtue) but oligarchs, a mere cabal of wealthy tech bros. And whatever republic we had threatens to turn into mob rule. The result is an extraordinarily strong executive office that rotates among oligarchs who compete for demagogic sway over the mob that elects them. This is not the republicanism that Cicero or Jefferson envisioned.

 

The upshot is that we continue to ape the forms of American democracy, to go through the motions, while everyone knows they have been hollowed out and are approaching meaninglessness. Trump is not the cause of everything, but unlike most past American statesmen, he saw our degeneration not as a threat but as an opportunity. His success has set a precedent others will follow in ways that bode ill for the future. Americans continue to have extraordinary personal freedom, but dangerously little sense of citizenship.

Defending the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

By Brian J. Paul

Sunday, August 23, 2026

 

In the last few months, we’ve watched as a U.S. senator has reintroduced a bill with ten cosponsors to restructure the Supreme Court, the House Minority Leader has called a Court majority “illegitimate,” and the president has attacked the very justices he appointed for ruling against him. Meanwhile, two justices appeared before the House to ask for millions in extra security funding; one of them told of how she has had to explain to her children what a bulletproof vest is and why she is forced to wear one. In view of these events, it’s worth taking a moment to remember why the Court still deserves our confidence — and our defense.

 

The Founders did not create the federal judiciary as an afterthought — they made it an independent branch precisely because they anticipated moments like this one, when politically unpopular rulings would tempt the other branches to retaliate. Alexander Hamilton, one of the principal advocates of the Constitution, understood that the judiciary “is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its co-ordinate branches.” Lifetime tenure and salary protection under Article III of the Constitution exist for this very reason: to allow judges to decide cases on the law, not on which political faction controls Congress or the White House. An independent judiciary was never designed to be popular in real time; it was designed to be a check that operates regardless of public sentiment. The current moment — a Court ruling against a sitting president’s signature tariff and birthright citizenship policies, with some of his own appointees joining the majority in those cases — is Article III working exactly as designed, not evidence that something is broken. The same can be said for what might be considered conservative-coded rulings: for example, the decision prohibiting racial gerrymandering from this past term and, even more controversially, the 2022 decision overruling Roe v. Wade.

 

More than two centuries ago, in the canonical decision of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court established that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is” — a principle that has served as one of the pillars of American constitutional government ever since. Without judicial review, the courts have no meaningful way to check the other branches. Many of the Court’s most highly charged rulings are thus the direct descendants of Marbury. In the tariffs decision, the majority grounded its holding in the relevant statutory text and Article I’s assignment of the taxing power to Congress. In the recent ruling striking down limits on the president’s authority to remove officers of the Federal Trade Commission, the majority grounded its holding in Article II’s Vesting and Take Care clauses. Both are textbook exercises of the same power of judicial review that Hamilton first claimed in Federalist No. 78 and that Chief Justice John Marshall made law in Marbury; they tell a coordinate branch it exceeded a textual limit fixed by the Constitution. That a ruling happens to cut against either party is irrelevant to its legitimacy; the first part of Marbury itself involved a ruling against the incoming administration.

 

The Court’s legitimacy comes from how it decides, not what it decides. Reasoned opinions; adherence to text, structure, and history; transparent voting records; and public dissent are the procedural guarantees that make a ruling worthy of precedential force. If legitimacy depended on outcomes pleasing a particular faction, no independent judiciary could exist at all. The whole point of having an independent court is for it to sometimes rule against whoever happens to hold power in the moment without fear or favor. After all, for every winner in a Supreme Court case, there must be a loser.

 

President Trump’s response to the tariff ruling — calling the decision “deeply disappointing,” saying he was “ashamed” of the justices who ruled against him, and calling them “a disgrace to our nation” (even “disloyal to our Constitution”) while praising by name the justices who ruled his way — is a case study in treating judicial legitimacy as outcome-contingent. That kind of rhetoric, aimed at justices for ruling against the president who appointed three of them, sends a corrosive message: that judicial fidelity should run to the appointing president rather than to the law. This is the opposite of what the judicial oath requires: to “administer justice without respect to persons.”

 

On the legislative side, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) reintroduced a bill proposing 18-year terms and a new justice seated every two years, framed explicitly around restoring “trust” in a court he and his cosponsors describe as facing a “legitimacy crisis.” Whatever one thinks of term limits as policy, restructuring the Court’s composition in response to disfavored rulings normalizes the idea that judicial independence is negotiable whenever it becomes inconvenient.

 

Once the judiciary’s authority is treated as contingent on winning, no ruling — for anyone, on any side — can ever be regarded as truly legitimate. Congress does hold constitutional authority to set the size of the Court; it has changed the number of justices several times before, ultimately settling at nine in 1869. But the last time there was a concerted effort to alter the Court’s composition, now nearly 90 years ago, the Senate overwhelmingly rejected it. In a scathing report, the Senate Judiciary Committee recognized FDR’s court-packing proposal for what it was: a gambit designed “to make this Government one of men rather than one of law. . . .” So “utterly dangerous” was the bill, the committee openly wished “its parallel [would] never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” Alas.

 

Criticizing a specific ruling — arguing it was wrongly decided, or that the dissent had the better of the argument — is healthy, normal, and part of what we do every day as engaged citizens. Robust critique of judicial reasoning strengthens the system, which itself is adversarial by design. Delegitimizing the institution that issues the ruling — attacking justices personally, threatening to pack or restructure the Court because a preferred position lost, or declaring the Court’s authority illegitimate as a matter of principle — undermines the institutional trust necessary for any ruling to be enforceable. The current environment all but erases this line. A president calling justices a “disgrace” for ruling against him, and senators reviving a structural-reform bill explicitly timed to public approval polling, both move from “we disagree with this outcome” to “this institution’s authority itself is suspect.” As Hamilton wrote, the Court has “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” If even the authority to render a valid judgment is in question, the Court has nothing, and Americans will be the worse for it. Rights without a judiciary free to declare when they have been violated aren’t worth the parchment they’re printed on.

 

The Supreme Court does not need our political leaders to agree with every decision it hands down — it needs them to defend the process that makes those decisions binding at all. When a losing side is a president or a caucus of senators today, it will be a different president and a different Congress tomorrow. If we allow “I disagree with this ruling” to collapse into “this Court is illegitimate,” we are rhetorically dismantling the very forum in which those interests can be vindicated when those in power fail them.

 

Although attacks on the Court are nothing new, the nature of the attacks has become more radical. When several justices feel compelled to ask the solicitor general whether the president considers himself bound by Court rulings — as they did during an oral argument last year — something is terribly amiss. Fortunately, the solicitor general said yes, but today’s yes can easily become tomorrow’s no if all you really care about is whether the bottom line is, by your lights, “correct.” Hamilton was right in 1788 and he is right now: “All possible care” must be taken to enable the Court to defend itself against the attacks of the other branches. To Hamilton, that meant adopting a constitution that provides for an independent judiciary. To elected officeholders, it should mean even more: preserving, protecting, and defending the independent judiciary, in both word and deed. A bulletproof vest is a miserable substitute for responsible discourse.

The Democracy They Warned Us About

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The Democratic Socialists of America, an insurgency within the Democratic Party, is having a moment, and it is showing us something worth noticing: This is the democracy John Adams warned us about.

 

Given the record of socialism in power, critics of the DSA and what it stands for are justified in suspecting that these radicals are not actually all that serious about the democratic part of democratic socialism, that the word “Democratic” in the faction’s name is no more meaningful than in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But the thing to be feared here is the opposite: They are extremely serious about the democratic part and will strip Americans of their rights, liberty, and property in the name of—and with the aid of—democracy.

 

Democracy is the oxygen of the American political atmosphere, and as in the physical atmosphere, you only want a little bit of that oxygen—too much oxygen in the mix and the political metaphors start to write themselves: People develop tunnel vision, the central nervous system breaks down, tiny sparks turn into explosions and conflagrations, and the thing we cannot do without becomes the thing that kills us. Sola dosis facit venenum, advises the old physician Paracelsus: It is the dose that makes the poison.

 

What distinguishes the American constitutional order is not its democratic components—which it has in common with any number of daft utopian schemes and failed revolutionary projects—but its antidemocratic components: the Bill of Rights, which places Americans’ civil rights and civil liberties beyond the reach of mere majorities, the division of national powers among the branches and subdivision within the legislative branch, the further division of political power between the national government and the states, etc. On top of these is the broader American order that counterbalances political power per se with private power, including civic institutions explicitly protected by the Constitution (the press, religious bodies, private associations) as well as that greatest of all guarantors of liberty: property.

 

The DSA, in the name of democracy, proposes to remove all buffers between the individual and centralized national political power wielded on a purely majoritarian basis. The DSA would, according to its own platform, abolish the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, and replace the latter two with House committees controlled by the majority party. The DSA would eliminate Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to criticize elected officials (by, among other things, nullifying the Citizens United decision) or to petition them for redress of grievances (by abolishing lobbying), and put elections under the control of the majority party in Congress by mandating state to control of the financing of political campaigns. It would override property rights by imposing state ownership on U.S. businesses.

 

This is a formula for mob rule, of course, and the DSA would expand the size of the mob by extending voting rights to noncitizens and incarcerated felons. It is strange—and ahistorical—for the DSA to assume that it and its allies will always have the biggest mob, as though Donald Trump had not received millions more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024. Nationalists, socialists, and national socialists are always confident that they have the People on their side, and all of them are right—at times.

 

It is not only the radical left that wishes to eliminate our constitutional safeguards and competing centers of power. The so-called new right (the fourth or fifth “new right” in our political history) sneers at “procedural liberalism” and insists that the “common good” provides the caudillos of their dreams with a moral mandate to restrict economic liberties and ordinary daily liberties (see, e.g., Sohrab Ahmari’s entirely insipid odes to the so-called blue laws), to wield the force of the state to put American businesses (especially technology companies) under political discipline, etc. The most contemptible of them reject such foundational American commitments as religious liberty and advocate, as in the case of Curtis Yarvin, a return to monarchy. They speak more often in terms of old-fashioned European étatisme and that slippery “common good,” but the closer they approach to electoral politics the quicker they are to invoke “the People” on whose behalf they, like their leftist variants, purport to be acting. The division of power and structural limitations on political ambition are no less inconvenient to the utopians of the right than to the utopians of the left.

 

“Absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats,” as John Adams observed. Adams was at times terrifyingly prescient:

 

Obsta principiis, nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.

 

(The war against foppery is, alas, evidently lost.)

 

Adams was famously acerbic on the subject of democracy—which, being an intelligent and educated man, he understood to be something distinct from what the United States has long enjoyed, i.e., a republican form of government with its motions controlled by certain limited democratic processes:

 

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.

 

What the DSA has in mind is the democracy that Adams warned us about: one in which power, once blessed by a temporary majority, is arbitrary, undivided, and irresistible. The DSA promises that it will use this only to do good for the People, which is, of course, the same promise various peoples heard from the Jacobins before their Reign of Terror, from Lenin and Stalin before their terror, from Mao before his terror, from Hitler before his terror—and from Donald Trump, who murders and oppresses and steals and terrorizes while promising that his only ambition is to “Make America Great Again.” I do not mind if the ladies and gentlemen of the DSA wish to call that “democracy,” which is what John Adams called it.

 

But, if you ask me, terror is terror.

America at 250: Reflections of a Patriot by Choice

By Jianli Yang

Saturday, July 04, 2026

 

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Founding, I have found myself reflecting on my own journey in America and what this extraordinary nation has meant to me. I owe my freedom and even my life to this country. I have told before the story of returning to China from my graduate studies in the U.S. to participate in the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement, surviving the massacre, later earning my doctorate in political economy from Harvard University, returning once again to China to promote peaceful democratic reform, being imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party, and finally being rescued through the determined efforts of the United States. My gratitude to America is permanent and profound.

 

But this is not that story. Instead, I want to share experiences that I have never written about before, moments that shaped my understanding of America long before I was forced to depend upon it.

 

In 1986, I left what many considered an exceptionally promising future in both academia and politics in China. I came to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. For the first time in my life, I breathed the fresh air of freedom.

 

Only those who have lived under dictatorship can fully appreciate what freedom feels like. It is not merely a constitutional principle or a political slogan. It is an atmosphere. It is the quiet confidence of ordinary people who do not live in fear. It is the ability to speak without constantly calculating the consequences. It is the simple dignity of walking through life without wondering whether someone is watching every move you make. Despite the tremendous academic pressure and the formidable language barrier I faced at UC Berkeley, I experienced a sense of inner peace unlike anything I had known before.

 

To a young man who had grown up in a country still emerging from decades of political terror, poverty, and isolation, the San Francisco Bay Area seemed almost unreal. The Pacific breeze carried not only the scent of the ocean but also the spirit of liberty. People laughed openly. They debated passionately. They dressed however they pleased. They criticized their government without fear. Individuality was not merely tolerated; it was celebrated.

 

Berkeley itself was an intellectual revelation. The university demanded excellence. The competition was intense. Yet what impressed me even more was the institution’s moral seriousness. Mathematics, philosophy, economics, history, and political science were not treated as isolated disciplines but as different paths toward understanding truth. Ideas mattered. Evidence mattered. Debate mattered.

 

In China, intellectual inquiry was constrained by ideology. At Berkeley, questioning authority was considered one of the highest academic virtues. That experience permanently changed how I viewed both scholarship and citizenship.

 

Naturally, I was also astonished by America’s prosperity.

 

Only days earlier I had left behind a country where scarcity remained a defining feature of daily life. Standing in San Francisco, I was amazed to learn that most of the magnificent skyscrapers before me were privately owned. Banks, automobile manufacturers, and countless other great enterprises were built and operated not by the state but by private citizens.

 

This was a society that rewarded initiative, innovation, and hard work. It was a country where individuals were encouraged to create, build, and succeed. I began asking myself: Is this what people mean by the American dream?

 

Ironically, this did not seem entirely foreign to Chinese civilization itself. Classical Chinese philosophy never condemned prosperity. The Zhou Yi (Book of Changes), one of the foundational texts of Confucian thought, recognizes the pursuit of wealth as part of human nature and encourages productive labor, creativity, and prosperity pursued with virtue. Why then, I wondered, had the communist regime deprived generations of Chinese citizens of private property, economic opportunity, and personal dignity? Why had a civilization with such rich philosophical traditions become trapped in a political system that denied so much of human potential?

 

America’s prosperity and intellectual freedom dazzled me. But something else moved me even more.

 

On weekends I often drove my old used car into small towns throughout Northern California simply to see more of American society. Their beauty impressed me. Their cleanliness impressed me. Their harmony with nature impressed me. Yet what touched me most was something remarkably ordinary: Every town had a beautiful public library. Every library had wheelchair access. Soon I noticed that buses, public buildings, sidewalks, and countless other public facilities were also designed to accommodate people with disabilities.

 

One day I found myself in tears. Throughout China, I had seen poor people and disabled people humiliated, ignored, and mistreated, often with no legal recourse whatsoever. I remembered the helplessness I felt witnessing their suffering. Here, by contrast, a wealthy society had chosen to measure itself not only by economic achievement but also by how it treated those who could contribute least to material prosperity.

 

That reminded me of a story from a Chinese classic The Book of Chuang Tzu. An inspector asked a livestock trader how he judged whether a pig was truly healthy. The trader replied that he examined the parts of the animal least likely to accumulate fat. If those weakest parts were healthy, then the whole animal must be healthy. Chuang Tzu used this story to teach that the true measure of a society is found not at its strongest points, but at its weakest.

 

I came to believe that the same principle applies to politics. A just society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. America, imperfect as every nation is, understood this truth better than many societies I had known.

 

In every human heart, two aspirations should coexist: the desire to pursue individual happiness and achievement, and the responsibility to care for the vulnerable and protect the common good. The healthiest society is one that safeguards liberty, protects private property, rewards excellence, creates opportunities for success without artificial ceilings, and simultaneously ensures that those who are disadvantaged are not abandoned. Freedom and compassion are not enemies. They are partners.

 

This conviction has deep philosophical roots in both the East and West. Nearly simultaneously, Confucius and the great philosophers of ancient Greece arrived at remarkably similar conclusions. Confucius taught the Doctrine of the Mean — a politics of balance, moderation, and moral restraint. The Greeks engraved upon the Temple of Apollo the timeless injunctions: “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess.”

 

Long before I entered politics, I came to believe that the first principle of good government, or the golden rule of politics, is simple: Do not go to extremes. Political extremism almost always begins by claiming moral certainty. It often ends by denying the humanity of those who disagree. History repeatedly confirms this lesson.

 

The Chinese Communist Party has governed through successive extremes. First came radical communism, which abolished private property and devastated society through campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Later came state-directed crony capitalism, in which political privilege — rather than free competition — determined economic opportunity. In both systems, ordinary citizens ultimately served the interests of those who held power. Dissent was criminalized. Independent institutions were crushed. Human rights became subordinate to political control.

 

America offered something fundamentally different. Here, competing political parties represented different interests and different philosophies, yet they remained bound by constitutional rules, elections, federalism, and the rule of law. Citizens disagreed vigorously, but disagreement itself was not a crime. Americans of different races, religions, backgrounds, and beliefs could largely live together in mutual tolerance while participating in the same democratic experiment.

 

I began to believe that the ideals I had encountered in both Chinese philosophy and Western political thought had found their most successful practical expression in the American constitutional order. My own dream merged with the American dream.

 

The society I envisioned decades ago remains the society I hope for today: one that firmly protects fundamental human rights, places no artificial ceiling on individual achievement, guarantees a basic floor of human dignity for the vulnerable, rewards work and innovation, and preserves liberty under the rule of law.

 

Looking back, I recognize that my first impressions of America were necessarily idealistic and incomplete. Over the years, my education, friendships, scholarship, and experiences taught me that America’s history is richer, more complicated, and more self-critical than I initially understood. Yet complexity has only strengthened, not weakened, my admiration for this country.

 

Generation after generation, Americans have expanded the promise of liberty while preserving constitutional continuity. The country’s remarkable network of families, churches, civic associations, local governments, independent courts, and voluntary organizations forms the social fabric upon which freedom ultimately depends.

 

After World War II, America became not merely the world’s strongest nation but the principal defender of the free world, the leading advocate for human rights, and the brightest beacon for countless people struggling against tyranny — including me.

 

I love America not because it is perfect. I love America because it possesses the moral capacity to correct itself without abandoning its founding principles.

 

Of course, America today faces profound challenges.

 

Political extremism increasingly feeds upon itself, with excesses on one side often serving to justify excesses on the other. Identity politics has deepened social divisions. Confidence in the rule of law has weakened. Constitutional boundaries among the branches of government have become subjects of growing controversy. America’s retreat from confident leadership within the free world has created uncertainty about the future of the international order that generations of Americans built at enormous sacrifice.

 

Even more consequential may be the revolutionary impact of information technology, especially artificial intelligence. AI is reshaping democracy, economic competition, national security, human relationships, and even our understanding of what it means to be human. The extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in a handful of technology companies, combined with their increasingly complex relationship with government, challenges many of our traditional assumptions about capitalism, liberty, equality, markets, and constitutional governance.

 

These are questions that neither conservatives nor progressives can afford to ignore.

 

Yet the principles that first inspired me nearly 40 years ago remain unchanged. A free society should protect human rights. It should reward excellence without limit. It should guarantee basic dignity to those who struggle. It should preserve ordered liberty under the Constitution. Above all, it should reject political extremism and seek the wisdom of moderation.

 

As someone who has experienced both totalitarianism and democracy, I remain convinced that America’s greatest strength has never been ideological purity. It has been constitutional balance, civic virtue, and an unwavering belief that free people, governed by laws rather than passions, are capable of self-government.

 

Those convictions continue to guide my own thinking. They also shape my hope that America can overcome its present challenges and enter the second half of its third century stronger, freer, and more confident than ever. In future essays, I hope to explore these questions in greater depth and details.

 

May God continue to bless the United States of America.

What the Declaration Declared

By Thomas Sheppard

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

Two hundred and fifty years ago, John Adams could barely contain his excitement. “I am apt to believe that [this day] will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival,” he wrote to his wife, Abigail. “It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” He believed he was living on one of the greatest days in history, and he refused to let anyone dim his ardor. “You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not… The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.”

 

That Adams was slightly off on his date has long been a source of humor, but he was right in the main. While the Continental Congress did vote to declare America’s independence on July 2, it still needed time to finalize the wording of the official statement, and thus it was not until July 4 that the Declaration of Independence rolled off the printer’s presses. At the time, Adams was far from alone in seeing the actual vote as the crucial point and the declaratory document as something of an afterthought. The moment of declaring independence was history-making; no other colony had severed relations with its metropole and become a new nation before. But at the time, it competed for attention with multiple other dramatic events. The Continental Army was scrambling (ultimately without success) to hold onto New York, while many members of the Continental Congress wished they were back in their respective home states for what was seen as the more important work of drafting new constitutions for 13 now-autonomous states. With independence declared, political momentum focused on the much more immediate concerns of state building and war-fighting. It is probable that, if all the Declaration of Independence had done was announce separation from Great Britain, it would amount to little more than a historical footnote today.

 

Instead, this document has become the political heart of the American nation. The Declaration of Independence still matters a quarter of a millennium after its signing because it did more than state what “these united states” were not—appendages of the British Empire; it declared what the new nation is, arguably the first creedal nation in world history. A political entity born of Enlightenment ideals and then-radical beliefs about humanity, the Declaration of Independence matters not only because it announced a change in the relationship between the American colonies and London, but because it forever altered how the world perceives the connection between human beings and their governing institutions. It was a document that created an American nation, but it was also a document written for the world, and the world could never be the same once its words were promulgated.

 

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In May 1776, Adams believed the colonies had already effectively broken with Great Britain. No one could deny an open war existed on American soil—blood had been spilled at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill more than a year earlier, and George Washington’s army had just driven a British force out of Boston. Meanwhile, all of the British royal governors had been ousted from their capitals to new lodgings in Royal Navy ships offshore, and British rule on the ground was nonexistent. In light of these momentous events, Adams pressed through a resolution calling on all the colonies to “adopt such Government as shall in the Opinion of the Representatives of the People best conduce to the happiness and Safety of their Constituents in particular and America in General.”

 

If all the Continental Congress had wanted to achieve was declaring a separation from Britain, Adams’ resolution came incredibly close. The preamble to Adams’ resolution bluntly excoriated the British government for attempting “the destruction of the good people of these colonies,” and “hostile invasions and cruel depredations,” and called for new, American governments whose responsibility would include quashing any lingering vestiges of royal authority. This was the language of severed ties and independent action. For Adams, as far as the matter of independence was concerned, the Declaration itself was a bit superfluous.

 

Some members of the Continental Congress, still harboring dreams of rapprochement with the mother country, felt Adams had swindled them, slipping his preamble condemning Britain and essentially announcing independence into a straightforward bill to sustain governance in chaotic times. But the mood of the Congress, and much of public opinion, had moved beyond the reconciliationists. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had swept through American culture like wildfire at the beginning of the year, and with every drop of American blood spilled, the reality became more inescapable that the 13 American colonies had become a distinct entity.

 

On June 7, Virginia made it official. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia put forward a resolution “that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” A few delegates dithered or requested time to receive official instructions from their respective legislatures, and the vote on Lee’s resolution was pushed to the following month. But Congress as a whole felt confident enough in the outcome to go ahead and name committees for managing foreign alliances and establishing plans for “the form of a confederation” of the soon-to-be independent states. As for the committee that has earned iconic status in American history, it seemed far less consequential at the time. Congress designated a Committee of Five to write up a statement to go with the forthcoming declaration of independence.

 

 The group tasked with drafting a statement of independence formed on June 11. Adams was obviously included, as were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. The bulk of the writing fell to Jefferson, a man who had clearly distinguished himself as a gifted writer through his “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” and having the bulk of the writing come from a Virginian would be helpful for all-important sectional unity. At the time, the Declaration was seen by virtually everyone as decidedly secondary to the vote itself and the formation of a confederated government, and no one seemed to attach much urgency to the words their colleague from Virginia was crafting. Jefferson worked quickly, completing most of the draft in only a few weeks.

 

Jefferson identified his first task as presenting “the causes which impel them to the separation.” He acknowledged that taking such a momentous step for “light and transient causes” would be a serious mistake. The grievances driving Americans to cut ties with the empire they had been loyal members of for well over a century were far from light and transient, though. They amounted to “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” In a series of fiery blasts against King George III, Jefferson drew on highly emotive language more suitable to describing the collapse of a marriage than a political severing; in his original draft, Jefferson said of Americans, “we must endeavor to forget our former love.”

 

The Declaration’s charges against the king were intended as a call to arms, not a dispassionate discussion of the political scene. As such, we must own that a few of those charges were more than a little dubious. In his biography of King George III, Andrew Roberts chips away at some of Jefferson’s overwrought language and vague accusations, sharply dissecting the ogre-like image of the British monarch that had come down through history. But even if he was a reasonably enlightened monarch, he had reduced his American subjects to a second-class status and deprived them of the basic rights and liberties that all Englishmen expected—indeed were entitled to under the British constitution. He had made the population of the 13 American colonies his enemies in practice, and now they would be his enemies on the battlefield.

 

However, the Declaration was not written with the king as its intended audience, nor was it written for the British people, though Jefferson addressed them explicitly in some passages. The document was not even written with an American audience primarily in mind—had he intended it only for his countrymen, Jefferson could easily have stopped with a discussion of the reasons the king was no longer fit to govern. There was ample precedent on that point, and he did draw on Britain’s own 1689 Declaration of Rights that had ousted King James II. Moreover, several states had already issued formal statements on the need to sever ties with the British government.

 

None of these were sufficient for Jefferson’s purposes, though. “State and local resolutions on Independence said nothing about the flaws of the British constitution, or the future of mankind, or the birthday of a new world,” as Pauline Maier notes in her study of the American Declaration’s origins. Jefferson was writing for the world, because he intended to rally global public opinion to the American cause, a cause of liberty that he considered universal. Thus, he drew not only on English precedents, but on Enlightenment principles, particularly the ideas of natural rights and government by consent. He especially pulled from John Locke, though Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” was ennobled to life, liberty, and “the pursuit of happiness.” The result was a statement of political philosophy more than a mere collection of grievances.

 

After completing the draft, Jefferson shared it with Adams, Franklin, and the rest of the committee, who suggested revisions. It was at this stage that “sacred and undeniable” truths became “self-evident” truths in the preamble, but overall the other four drafters were happy with Jefferson’s work. The same could not be said for the Congress as a whole, which set to work editing Jefferson’s draft once it was received from the committee. Delegates debated certain passages, removing or altering sections they found controversial. Jefferson’s line criticizing the fact that “Scotch and other foreign auxiliaries” were heading to American shores offended a few delegates proud of their Scottish heritage. The comment had to go.

 

More controversial in the eyes of later generations was the deletion of a clause criticizing the slave trade. The clause was cut in part because it made the absurd claim that King George had dispatched slave ships to seize Africans and then impose them as a labor force on an unwilling American population, a wildly implausible fiction that helped salve the consciences of Americans fighting for liberty while holding their fellow men in bondage—Jefferson himself prominent among these. His denunciations of slavery were unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of Southern delegates, who would never have signed a document that included such stark condemnations of slavery.

 

Jefferson reacted to all these changes in roughly the same manner as every writer throughout history whose work has been subjected to an editor. Years later, he still stewed over the repeated “depredations” and “mutilations” to his essay. Sensing his misery at the time, Franklin tried to console him with an amusing anecdote about a hat-maker who tried to get a sign for his shop designed by committee. Whether the tale did Jefferson any good in the moment, he appreciated the attempt. Adams likewise expressed a preference for Jefferson’s earlier version, but historians have generally endorsed Congress’ work. The final version of the Declaration was leaner, more focused, and more reflective of a broad consensus of opinion that could get 13 disparate colonies on board with a united war effort against the world’s preeminent military power.

 

On July 2, 1776, Congress voted itself free of the British Empire. Two days later, it officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. In the immediate aftermath, the primary effect was to crystallize the goals of the fight, to abandon forever any notions of salvaging the relationship with Great Britain. If that was all it had done, the document would be largely forgotten today, of as minor significance as its crafters initially suspected. The Declaration’s transcendent ideas have come down through history in words that even the critical Roberts concedes stand as “superb prose which will justly live for as long as democracy and self-government still matter in the world.”

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” With these opening lines, the Declaration became an American Scripture, a statement of national creed that made the nation far more than a mere breakaway of the British Empire, but a beacon of Enlightenment ideals for all the world.

 

The Declaration of Independence has no legal standing in the United States. It cannot be cited in court nor used as binding criteria for legislation. As a statement of political philosophy, though, it is the cornerstone of the nation. To be an American is not to hold a certain ethnic identity or to trace a certain lineage; it is to venerate the transcendent truth that human beings—regardless of race, class, capability, or social standing—all stand equal before their Creator. Their capacity to live, to live free, and to live well comes from a power above all human governments and can never be denied by institutions made up of mere mortals. To be an American is to believe that government exists for the people—all of them—and not the other way around. Governments are established to protect inalienable rights, not to give and take rights based on the whims of the ruler or even some conception of what those in power paternalistically decide is best for those under their boot. To be an American, in short, is to believe, affirm, and cherish a set of truths that plant the responsibility for a virtuous society squarely on the shoulders of its citizens and plant responsibility for keeping those rights safe and sacred on the shoulders of the people’s government.

 

It was Abraham Lincoln who best encapsulated this truth. Speaking at Independence Hall as the country was on the brink of a horrific civil war, Lincoln reminded the nation what its founding document stood for. “It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

 

Two hundred years ago, John Adams struggled for breath. He wheezed out his last words, “Thomas Jefferson survives,” just before passing into eternity. Once again, he was wrong on the details but right on substance. Jefferson had died hours earlier, memorably asking, “Is it the 4th yet?” before lapsing into his final coma. But he does survive. Two centuries after his death, he lives on in immortal words that split history. Through civil war, domestic discord, economic roiling, and seasons of terrifying global turmoil, the idea that birthed this nation and the experiment in liberty it inaugurated endures. Today, perhaps more than at any time since the Civil War, America’s standing as an exceptional inspiration for liberty and human rights, a shining “city on a hill,” is suffering under dire strain. May we all—native and newcomer, Democrat and Republican, contented and zealous—take up the ideals that Jefferson penned and dedicate ourselves anew to seeing that they remain a beacon of what is best in humanity for another 250 years.