The most consequential domestic policy development of the 2020s is neither COVID-19 nor Donald Trump’s reelection. It is Joe Biden’s decision to import ten million foreigners into the United States in violation of standing federal law. Many of the defining political fights of this decade stem from that choice: government shutdowns over border enforcement, states unilaterally redefining the meaning of citizenship, the growing willingness of the restrictionist wing of the Republican Party to defy its own business class, major fraud investigations in Minneapolis and New York, and the unraveling of consensus over whether federal law binds the states.

These are battles in a larger fight over who constitutes the American people, one that escalated with President Biden’s decision to actively facilitate the mass importation of illegal aliens into this country by land, air, and sea.

American politics is no longer primarily a contest over how we govern ourselves. It is a contest over who we are and who decides.

None of this is merely rhetorical. The federal government has shut down six times since 2018—and immigration has been central to nearly every one of them. The government shut down over border wall funding in 2018 and benefits for “Dreamers” in 2019. Two partial shutdowns concerning immigration enforcement occurred in 2026, the second shutdown being the longest in American history at 76 days.

When the U.S. cannot keep the federal government open, it’s usually due to disagreement not over fiscal policy, but over a foundational question—who belongs to the political community. And that’s the kind of disagreement that does not get resolved simply by winning the next election, as the backlash to immigration enforcement in Minneapolis made jarringly clear.

There are two Greek words to help us frame the moment. The ancients distinguished kratos—meaning power, authority, and the mechanics of rule—from demos—the people in whom that authority resides. Most Americans likely recognize these terms because together they form the root of the word “democracy.” For most of American history, our major political disagreements have been kratos arguments—debates over the accumulation of power in the federal government and how to exercise it for the common good.

Over the first quarter of this century, as our political differences hardened, the Left endeavored to convince, and succeeded in convincing, many of our fellow countrymen that the kratos as it exists is flawed and, more alarming, illegitimate.

Recognizing they do not have the breadth of public support to have their views made law, the Left decided to expand the political terrain. They argued that the Electoral College is racist and should be abolished, that proportional representation in the Senate is an antiquated relic, and that the Supreme Court remains useful only if packed. At the same time, they came up with a more insidious innovation: the Left realized they could change the answer to the question of who we are through the mass importation of illegal aliens.

The demos is the grounds on which we now contest our politics.

Defying the People

Recall what has happened since the 2024 election. The country spoke through the most legitimate instrument it has, and the answer was decisive: mass deportation and the restoration of federal immigration law. Yet the Left decided to defy that answer.

California expanded benefits to illegal aliens in the weeks after President Trump’s decisive victory. Illinois passed new sanctuary protections. New York City reaffirmed its municipal voting policy (before it was struck down) and expanded state-funded health coverage to those here illegally.

The left-wing government contractor apparatus, built to execute the Biden Administration’s mass importation policy, sought to obscure records and coach illegal aliens in how to evade the law, often with support from state and local funding streams. And when federal law enforcement began the hard and rough work of restoring law and order in the interior, the Left’s response was not simply protest. It was the single most extreme anti-federal resistance operation in living memory: coordinated, sustained physical resistance directed at federal law enforcement, designed to prevent them from carrying out the laws the American people explicitly called for in 2024.

Mere protesters do not stalk federal law enforcement officers through airports, feed their license plate data to sources in a local police department, threaten their families on Facebook, or smash windows at their hotels. American history offers few examples of localities resisting federal authority on that scale, and those episodes belong to some of our nation’s darkest chapters.

States and cities now reject the single definition of citizenship on which our union depends. The country voted decisively on the demos question. Yet a substantial part refuses to accept the result—not by contesting the count, but by denying the legitimacy of border enforcement and mass deportation altogether, along with the work of the legislative and executive branches to carry out the American people’s wishes on immigration.

The Left is contesting the very political order that produced a second Trump Administration committed to restoring sanity on immigration. This can be difficult to see because the current political moment allows the Left, along with establishment Republicans, to cloak its rejection of immigration enforcement in principle as concern over specific enforcement tactics. But the tactics are the pretext; the real objection is to enforcement itself.

This asymmetry cannot hold for long.

A Restoration, Not an Insurgency

Much of the commentary among advocates of immigration restriction and mass deportation invokes the restrictionist turn of America 100 years ago. That precedent, however, is inadequate to the moment. The 1924 Johnson-Reed legislation and the following decades-long political consensus worked because the country still had a kratos container capable of holding a demos dispute.

Both political parties generally accepted federal supremacy over immigration. Both generally accepted that citizenship was a single, uniform, federally defined status. The argument was about whom the country admitted. What was not contested was who would adjudicate it and who had a say.

Now attempts to enforce the law are met by sanctuary jurisdictions and street-level resistance. Deep blue states are unilaterally changing the demos itself through issuing IDs, extending benefits, and granting municipal voting rights to illegal aliens. They no longer accept the federal definition of who counts as a member of the political community. Since the container is gone, the resolution cannot look like 1924.

Many in the political class presume that these policy disagreements will resolve as others have historically done—through legislation, the courts, and the slow grinding of consensus toward a workable center. That assumption is wrong.

You cannot half-recognize the ten million people the Biden Administration admitted in contravention of the law. You cannot merely half-restore the demos.

This is why the issue will not subside.

The administration that came in on the back of that reaction has been treated by its critics as a populist insurgency against governing norms. That description misreads the moment. The positions the Trump Administration is implementing were, until about a decade ago, the consensus of both parties: that the border is enforced, that deportation is a routine function of law rather than an atrocity, that citizenship is the only path to receive public benefits and the franchise, and that identification documents certify something real.

The Trump Administration is not the insurgency—it is the restoration.

The Left’s chosen terrain and the ferocity of its fight are the tell. Deportation, sanctuary jurisdictions, the status of those flown in under the Biden-era mass parole programs, the benefits for non-citizens, the IDs the government will honor: each of these, examined closely, is part of a much larger campaign to transform the demos in pursuit of permanent political dominion.

The Trump Administration stands in the breach. This is not a policy disagreement that can be resolved through compromise. It is an existential conflict over who counts as a member of the national citizenry. In an era when every political dispute is described as existential, few deserve that label more than one in which a portion of the country contests the very composition of the people themselves.

Every Issue Is Now a Proxy

There can be no return to the pre-Biden status quo. Housing, healthcare, schools, and crime are increasingly being seen through the lens of immigration, particularly the crushing fiscal weight of carrying millions of non-citizens in the markets and on the books. This is an essential question of political membership: to whom the benefits and responsibilities of that membership apply. Americans witness illegal aliens receive preferential or subsidized mortgage loan access and free emergency room visits, all while operating under a double standard that lets them flout the law at every turn.

Every domestic political debate has become a proxy for the crucial question of who is part of the American people.

Many establishment Republicans still argue that mass deportation is unworkable, that the American people will never bear the high costs of enforcement it requires, and that the country can eventually return to the old consensus. But they are mistaken.

The Left’s radicalization on immigration prevents the old consensus from re-emerging. There is no going back. They have no compunction about flouting immigration law, importing millions in a stunningly short window, and even fighting in the streets for their preferred outcome.

The Left is deliberately rejecting a uniform definition of citizenship. If they win, American citizenship will not erode but splinter irreversibly, a danger more immediate than any downstream effects on the census or future demographic trends. Every path to recovering the traditional understanding of American citizenship—to Make America Great Again—will require citizens themselves to shoulder real burdens and make real sacrifices.

It is our generation’s calling to confront this problem, whether we want to or not.

The post Battle Over the Demos appeared first on The American Mind.

Johann Kurtz’s essay on why younger generations feel left behind economically, even while official statistics from GDP to stock markets send signals that our economy is thriving, touched a nerve. 

Kurtz’s central argument is that young people only appear to be doing fine in official statistics because those measures fail to capture the collapse of “social capital”—the free inheritance of trusted neighbors, functional public schools, safe streets, and marriageable norms that previous generations received at no cost. Because that commons has been liquidated and privatized, young people must now repurchase its components individually at market prices. Expensive homes in good districts, private schooling, daycare, credentials, and more—all of it requires substantial financial resources, even as incomes have risen only modestly. Meanwhile, the cost of these essentials has increased many times over. 

The result is a measurement failure: cheap electronics and rising nominal incomes make the young look prosperous, but the actual building blocks of a middle-class life have moved beyond the reach of average Americans, which explains why younger generations are delaying or forgoing them entirely.

The process Kurtz outlines can also be applied to higher education. My basic thesis is that the college degree became a replacement purchase because the American labor market itself once functioned as a common good that has since eroded.

The Degree Replaces the Commons

The standard debate about higher education asks whether college is “worth it,” and the standard answer points to the wage premium. Since graduates out-earn non-graduates by a wide margin, the degree pays for itself. Therefore, the complaints of the indebted young amount to ingratitude. And yet the same young people carry $1.85 trillion in student debt, delay homeownership and marriage on account of it, and report in growing majorities that college wasn’t worth what they paid. Someone is measuring the wrong thing.

Seen in this light, the bachelor’s degree is a textbook replacement purchase. Previous generations received, free of charge, an enormous stock of social capital that sorted and certified young workers: high school diplomas that guaranteed real literacy because the issuing school would have been embarrassed to certify anything less; dense local networks of employers, coaches, pastors, and foremen who could vouch for a young man’s character because they actually knew him; internal career ladders by which a mail clerk became a manager; and employer aptitude tests that measured a job candidate’s fitness for a role. A working-class kid in 1965 was legible to the labor market at essentially no cost to anyone.

Every one of those mechanisms has been liquidated. The high school diploma inflated into meaninglessness. The vouching networks dissolved, along with the neighborhoods and congregations that sustained them. Internal ladders were dismantled as firms outsourced training. Direct aptitude testing was chilled by litigation after Griggs v. Duke Power (1971). 

Every cheap signal was either destroyed or forbidden, with only one left standing. The degree became essentially mandatory in the professional economy, not because the jobs changed but because the free-sorting infrastructure was dismantled. Four years and $40,000 in debt now purchase legibility that a grandfather got with a diploma and a reference.

Immigration finished the job from the other side. It was not enough that the non-degree path was demolished; the wages of that path were then subjected to competition from a global labor pool. The post-1965 influx of immigrants was concentrated precisely in the low-skill segment of the market—the segment the old commons had served. George Borjas modeled the 1990–2010 immigrant inflow and found it increased total hours worked by high school dropouts by roughly a quarter, depressing their wages by around 6% in the short run. One could contest the magnitude of the effect, but not the direction: an increase in labor supply puts downward pressure on wages. 

The high-school-diploma job that once bought a tract house now clears at a wage set against a far larger pool of men who are also generally willing to work for far less because they arrived from economies where far less is a fortune. This closes the pincer: the diploma stopped certifying, and even where it still opened a door, the wage behind the door collapsed. The degree thus became a moat against labor competition in exactly the same way the overpriced neighborhood became a moat against social dysfunction. Instead of a way to get ahead, it became a defensive purchase to escape conditions that policy created and that no individual family can vote away.

This reframes the wage premium. A good can command a higher price because it becomes more valuable or because alternatives are destroyed. The college premium is overwhelmingly the second kind: not a bonus paid to the educated but a fine levied on the uncredentialed, whose access to stable employment collapsed. And, as with housing and childcare, the repurchase registers in official statistics as progress. GDP counts the tuition, the interest payments, and the salaries of the compliance staff—and calls all of it growth. The man forced to buy bottled water because the well was poisoned looks rich in the consumption data.

Now note the terms of the repurchase, which follow the pattern exactly: the replacement good costs radically more and is worse than what it replaced.

The cost side is familiar. In 1970-71, average tuition and fees at a public four-year university were $394, coverable by part-time work, with change. Today the in-state figure exceeds $10,000, nearly triple the real price, excluding room and board. The debt this generates functions, like housing inflation, as a direct tax on family formation: it raises the down-payment threshold, delays marriage, and delays or forecloses having children.

Making the Competition Global

Immigration operates on this market too, at the opposite end. Over a million international students (nearly one in ten) are now enrolled in American higher education, and the elite institutions actively court them: they typically pay full tuition and must document their finances before admission at need-aware schools, thereby cross-subsidizing everyone else. For all the talk of “diversity is strength,” this is a clear revenue model, not a charitable (or revolutionary) act of social justice. 

International students now make up roughly 10 to 15% of Ivy League undergraduate enrollment, even rising above 20% at some schools. The trouble is that elite enrollment is essentially fixed. Harvard’s class is not meaningfully larger than it was 50 years ago—so every seat sold to someone from the global applicant pool is a seat removed from the domestic one.

The American 17-year-old is thus made to compete in a worldwide tournament for a static number of seats, and a tournament is what his college years become: test prep from 14, a curated portfolio of synthetic passions, essay consultants, then—for the winners—four more years of GPA defense and internship scrambling because the sorting never stops. This is why the young report that college is no longer fun, and they are not wrong to see it that way. The old collegiate experience—the low-stakes four-year interlude of friendship, argument, leisurely reading, and wasted afternoons—was itself part of the commons. Fun is what a commons feels like. A tournament is what a market feels like. The students did not change; the ratio of applicants to chairs did.

Paying More for Less

The tripled price did not buy more instruction at America’s colleges and universities. Between 1976 and 2018, enrollment grew 78%, and full-time faculty grew 92%. Full-time administrators grew 164%, and “other professionals” more than 450%. Meanwhile, roughly 68% of faculty now hold contingent appointments, up from under half in the late 1980s: the person actually teaching freshmen is increasingly a pieceworker without an office. The marginal tuition dollar went to bureaucracy, not teaching or learning.

And the learning itself has thinned. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift found that 45% of undergraduates showed no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing after two years of college. Half the sophomores in their sample had not taken a single course requiring 20 pages of writing. Weekly study time fell from about 25 hours in 1961 to 12 or 13 by the 2000s. 

This makes perfect sense once we recognize what the product actually is: when a degree is purchased as a screening credential rather than an education, both buyer and seller have every incentive to minimize the education and maximize the throughput. Grade inflation is, after all, what the customer wants.

The final data point closes the loop: even as a pure screen, the purchase increasingly fails. The Burning Glass Institute and Strada Educational Foundation found in 2024 that 52% of bachelor’s-degree holders are underemployed a year after graduation—working jobs that never required the degree—and a decade out, 45% still are. Half the buyers pay retail for the replacement good and receive neither the education nor the sorting.

So the young are told the degree “pays,” and in the narrow accounting, it does—the way bottled water “pays” once the well is gone. They have spent four years and taken on five figures of debt to buy back, at retail and in degraded form, a certification their grandparents’ society produced for free as a byproduct of functioning schools and legible communities. The apparatus that sells it to them books the transaction as growth.

As Kurtz argues, this is not growth—it is the invoice for a destroyed commons. 

The post The College Replacement Economy appeared first on The American Mind.

With the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, mankind’s foremost moral authority—a Chicago-born priest and the absolute monarch of the longest-running institution in history—addressed a technology so advanced that even its creators struggle to comprehend it.

One of those creators appeared alongside the Holy Father: Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the leading AI model provider and a company publicly feuding with the government of the pope’s home country over battlefield use of its algorithms.

The remarks of both men were scrutinized the world over by public officials, executives, theologians, technologists, believers, and non-believers alike. The consequences of their attention remain to be seen. For now, as historian T.R. Fehrenbach said of the Korean War, the lesson of Magnifica Humanitas’s unprecedented release is that it happened.

The lessons of the document itself, however, are harder to summarize.

A Servant, Not a Master

Magnifica Humanitas runs close to 40,000 words. The gravity and complexity of its subject preclude any summary from doing it full justice, just as its novella length deters all but the most disciplined from finishing it. There is also an uncomfortable irony that most people who engaged with the seminal treatise probably ran it through their preferred LLM rather than reading it themselves.

This abdication of judgment is the greatest danger AI poses to citizens in a republic, and one to which we will shortly return. But first the imperfect summary.

At the highest level, Magnifica Humanitas draws on Catholic social teaching to safeguard human dignity in the age of AI. The Holy Father released it on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum—the landmark encyclical on the Industrial Revolution authored by his predecessor and namesake, Pope Leo XIII. As has been widely noted, the current Pope Leo seeks to hearken back to the former, while charting a path for the future.

He begins by contrasting two projects from the Old Testament: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem by the prophet Nehemiah after the Babylonian exile.

With Babel’s tower, fearful human beings “sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to ‘make a name’ for themselves” by creating “a single language, a single technology, a single direction.” The pope writes that their project was “conceived without reference to God,” and centered on “uniformity” and “homogenization over communion.” The result was disaster.

Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem provides the contrast:

Before taking action, [Nehemiah] fasted, prayed and interceded for the people. He then asked the king for permission to return to Jerusalem and, upon arriving, examined the destroyed areas in silence. He did not impose solutions from above. He convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition…. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.

After presenting the two roads humanity can travel with regard to AI, Pope Leo articulates certain tensions now coming to light: the tension between private, technological power and accountable political authority; between the ability of a few to wield AI for their own ends and a shared duty to the common good; and between an acceleration of technological achievement and the sober restraint so necessary for the exercise of “the better angels of our nature.”

The Holy Father mentions “citizenship” only once, in the context of the dignity of work and dangers to it. Similarly, he spends a single sentence on Just War Theory—to pronounce it outdated. The line caught many in the national security space by surprise; but it is a natural continuation of the Church’s teaching on the moral use of force since at least the 1960s. By no means an absolution from the duty of acting justly in combat, it is rather an acknowledgment that the theory has become a mechanical box-checking exercise.

Let us move to the salient issue of those private interests the pope identifies as being “endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.” In the age of AI, the Holy Father writes, “Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.”

He further warns:

[T]hose who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.

To that “more active political involvement,” how should citizens in a republic approach AI in the light of the encyclical? A good starting point would be emulating the Holy Father and going back to his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII.

Climbing Out of the Cave

Leo XIII considered his most important encyclical not Rerum Novarum but the little-remembered Aeterni Patris—“On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy.” He advocated a return to Aristotelian and Thomistic approaches in philosophy, to inquiry grounded in objective truth. For Leo XIII, social discord is downstream of bad philosophy. As he wrote in 1879, “False conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses.”

For us today, the main political implication of Aeterni Patris is that a republic cannot function well if its citizens cannot think well. Consequently, we have a duty to form our judgments on objective truth, which not only exists but is also something we can discover, understand, and live by.

This is why using an LLM to summarize Magnifica Humanitas is so problematic: it is the citizen outsourcing judgment about AI to AI itself.

It is a tale as old as time: once people lose their ability to think critically, they become easily manipulated by others. Then society’s tectonic plates begin to buckle. And no civil structures or constitutional processes can withstand the surge that follows.

Leo XIII, following Aristotle and Aquinas, argued that human beings are by nature political animals. We need well-ordered political communities if we are to achieve our highest flourishing this side of heaven. It is only within such communities that we can exercise virtues like courage, justice, prudence, and temperance.

If AI obliterates the state—or subverts or replaces it with that unprecedented private power—human beings lose this opportunity. If we need the polis to become virtuous, then whatever weakens it weakens our capacity for virtue itself.

Consequently, citizens wanting to preserve human flourishing and freedom should paradoxically strengthen the state against those private interests through a reapplication of the founding fathers’ prescription of checks and balances. Yet even as they support the state as a prudent bulwark against overly powerful private interests, they should ultimately plant themselves firmly in neither.

Instead, they should root themselves in the family.

The Pillar of Civilization

Nehemiah’s Israelites rebuilt the walls of their city with stones, but it was the coming together of families that reconstituted their society. Families today are the building blocks of republican society, with political justice as the mortar holding them together.

To safeguard the family, citizens should first take a defensive measure: ensuring AI does not erode their ability to think for themselves. The second, offensive measure is to ensure AI strengthens families—especially working families—relative to the state and private interests.

We can do this by applying AI to the kinds of projects that redound to the greater health and civic strength of families. In government, we must eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, which artificially inflate the cost of everything from housing to food to home goods. In industry, we must equip workers with AI so they can work far more productively, allowing them to harness their “tribal knowledge.”

The third response should be to support the state in presenting a positive vision of AI. The National Design Studio recently put forward a local-first, open-source AI privacy model that scrubs personally identifiable information from electronic communications, preventing accidental sharing.

By rejecting a purely regulatory stance and by advancing a positive vision that bends AI to the needs of families, republican citizens can exercise greater influence over both the state and powerful private interests to better protect their liberty.

As Pope Leo writes, our political goal should be “slowing things down when everything is accelerating.” Here again the family is vital—for its moderating influence across society and for the capabilities it imparts to decision-makers at the highest levels of the state.

The prior century offers a paradigmatic example, when a relationship between brothers helped humanity walk back from the brink of nuclear Armageddon in October 1962. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy arrested a seemingly inevitable catastrophe in part through his brother, Bobby, who served as a supremely trusted confidant and backchannel to the Kremlin. It is a chilling question to ponder whether it would have been better if algorithms had been running the counsels of Washington instead of men—fathers, who like so many others, as Kennedy later said, “all cherish our children’s future.”

Strange Bedfellows?

My strongest critique of Magnifica Humanitas is not about the document itself, but rather about how it was introduced to the world—through a press conference, the first ever for any encyclical. At the event, Pope Leo XIV told Anthropic’s Chris Olah, “In the name of the Church, I accept your invitation to walk together, to listen and to speak and together to find the way for humanity.”

Find the way to where?

The walking metaphor implies a destination, and in deciding on one destination, travelers explicitly reject all others. The Latin origin of the word “decide,” after all, is the verb decidere— “to cut off.”

I will confess, as a believing Catholic, I am skeptical about the Church taking directions on humanity’s destination from anyone or any organization that does not share in its mission to lead souls to a right relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. The Church’s mission directly contradicts the atheistic, effective altruism worldview of Anthropic’s co-founders. No middle ground is possible if both sides hold to their fundamental beliefs.

The Church’s association would be less of a concern if the matter at hand were strictly material. But as Olah rightly pointed out, the whole debate surrounding AI now is supra-material: “AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered. We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it and we understand the physics that act on it.” In contrast, AI systems are “a little like bringing a fictional character to life.”

For many, AI challenges what it means to have an intellect, and therefore free will, which is intrinsic to being human. What the world needs from the Catholic Church is not a companion on the journey, but a shepherd who sets the course, who reminds us that we always have free will, and who teaches that, for all our agency and all AI’s power, the final story is ultimately written by our loving Father.

Some may read this critique as a gripe over tone. But as any parent knows, tone matters—especially when a child encounters something new and potentially dangerous. The authority of the speaker matters, too. The whole world did not stop to listen to the thoughts of a septuagenarian Chicagoan on AI; it stopped to hear a man with spiritual authority handed down via an unbroken succession from Jesus Christ himself. That authority, speaking confidently and never doubting its right—its duty—to speak because it comes from the Son of God, is essential now.

In the pope’s defense, there is a subtle but significant distinction between speaking in public with someone and speaking in public to someone. It is possible the Holy Father was doing both when he released his encyclical with an Anthropic co-founder at his side, saying, “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”

The pope has his authority; the rest of us also have our own over the tools we use and permit to shape us. For all their capability and mystery, AI systems remain the tools of human beings. Christ did not become man, suffer death, and rise from the dead for AI systems. He did these things for human beings—for us—in all our wretchedness and all our magnificence.

The post Nehemiah’s Republic appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

Trump Reopens the Trade War | The Roundtable Ep. 327

President Trump this week has announced a set of 50 percent tariffs on various Canadian goods, with a 30-day window to negotiate before they are imposed. In retaliation against Canada’s quotas on American cars and alcohol, Trump proposes to levy tariffs on wine, hockey sticks, and cement. But does it serve America and the Right ahead of midterms? Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearings, following the dismissal of Pam Bondi, give a snapshot of the Right’s shifting composition ahead of midterms. Plus: Lindsey Graham, RIP.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 327 appeared first on The American Mind.

Celebration of the semiquincentennial will not be complete without remembering the only president of the United States born on the Fourth of July: Calvin Coolidge, our 30th president, who was born on July 4, 1872.

It is charming that Coolidge was born on the date of the American Declaration of Independence that we have been celebrating for 250 years now. It is almost providential when we reflect that he joins John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln as a president who emphatically took all his political bearings from the principles of the Declaration; and he joins Adams and Lincoln as a president who became one of the great expositors of those principles.

Like the 6th and 16th presidents, Coolidge saw all of America’s blessings of liberty flowing essentially from the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. And like his two predecessors, he understood that when we cease to understand and live by these principles, we will cease to enjoy those blessings as a people.

“Silent Cal,” as Coolidge came to be known, fondly and otherwise, was actually quite eloquent. He was a student of Demosthenes and Cicero from his early days. In the evenings of his mature years, he enjoyed translating selections from Cicero’s orations. He regarded his Latin as serviceable for translation but not strong enough for composing. He also enjoyed translating Dante. A foreign diplomat quipped that Silent Cal could be “silent in five languages.” His English prose was known during his day, even among his critics, for its clarity and economy. He loved the poetry of Homer, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Coolidge was president when the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence came about 100 years ago on July 4, 1926. The speech he gave to commemorate the occasion is the one most remembered for its exposition of the principles of the American Revolution. He delivered the speech at Independence Hall on July 5. He called it “The Inspiration of the Declaration.”

About the significance of the Fourth of July for Americans and the world, he said on that occasion, “It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history.” The principles themselves were immortal and universal. What was new was proclaiming them as the grounds of the political life of a particular people. As Coolidge stated:

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world.

The passage most frequently quoted from Coolidge’s speech, for good reason, is this:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.

This passage is so deserving of being requoted and remembered because already in Coolidge’s time—and continuing in our own time—the doctrine had come to prevail among the most authoritative intellectuals that there were no final truths that could be guides to political and moral life. There was just “progress” or “history,” which ultimately came to mean there is just “change.” As a result, eminent progressive historians like Carl Becker could sneer that “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.”

Progressive historians caricatured Coolidge as being a tool of big business and believing that the accumulation of wealth was the ultimate purpose of America and the ultimate end of life. To the contrary, as Coolidge insisted:

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy.

To introduce yourself to Calvin Coolidge, you can’t do better than to start with his own Autobiography, written with his characteristic clarity and economy soon after he was president. Then, to immunize yourself against the distortions of the progressive historians, you should read the great Tom Silver’s book, Coolidge and the Historians, republished by Hillsdale College Press. As Amity Shlaes (author of the highly acclaimed Coolidge) says of it:

This is the volume that turned America’s eyes to a forgotten president. Through accurate and precise scholarship, Silver showed just how wrong the old evaluation of Coolidge was. In the process, Silver also demonstrated the power of a substantive rebuttal—to change minds, and to change history. Coolidge and the Historians is must reading for anyone interested in Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge was a humble man—a worthy American hero who well understood and eloquently articulated the importance of heroes in a few fine speeches:

Great men are the ambassadors of Providence sent to reveal to their fellow men their unknown selves…. When the reverence of this nation for its great men dies, the glory of the nation will die with it…. It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow. A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come.

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I live in Loudoun County, Virginia, about a mile from the largest concentration of data centers on earth, which has given the online discourse around them a vaguely odd character. At worst, they are large concrete squares that are indistinguishable from any other industrial park, except that they produce less noise or pollution. My utility bill is ordinary, if slightly below the national average, and my roads are as nice as any in the country. But to hear online activists talk, my community should be on the verge of running out of water.

Loudoun County hosts roughly 200 operating data centers; Northern Virginia’s cluster draws some 4,140 megawatts, more than double Beijing’s, the world’s second-largest market. Since the data centers began being built in the late 1990s, Loudoun County has been able to spend lavishly on infrastructure and public schools, all while cutting its real property tax rate. In fact, the county calculates that every dollar of services it provides the industry returns some $26 in taxes.

When I noticed the glaring difference between this reality and the online discourse, I realized that this is a recurring pattern I have seen my entire life. When I was growing up in the early 2000s, there was a set of beliefs in American society that were viewed as non-political and weren’t debated by either side. They acted as an ideological background radiation of sorts. I like to call this the “Boomer Truth Regime,” after both the Boomer generation and the boom time after World War II.

You can take the American 20th century as one huge emotional and moral arc. Starting in 1900 and continuing for the ensuing 45 years, our country had its optimism for the future hammered out of it. It was in this era that Jim Crow intensified, the Depression battered the country, and we fought two world wars.

But beginning in the 1940s, American society, and to a lesser extent the whole world, began a process of upward movement—and as a result acquired a feeling of almost inevitable, rapid, transformative salvation. Start with almost any evil, real or perceived, of that century—sexism, colonialism, segregation—and trace it forward, and you will find a satisfying narrative conclusion by 1999.

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel called the resulting mood “indefinite optimism”: the belief that things simply get better without anyone having to decide how. And so we bundled all the changes of that era together and sanctified the whole package. For decades, it has been taken for granted that basically all societal and cultural shifts in the second half of the 20th century were good—and that they existed as a single, inseparable package.

Among the sanctified conclusions was not only indefinite optimism for the future but also a deep fear of the dangers of new technology. In short, the Boomer Truth Regime permanently fused the word “machine” with the word “gun,” as they were in the world wars. This was largely a traumatic response to the misuses and abuses of the cornucopia of technology by tyrants during that era.

In the early 20th century, the world had at its fingertips an inventory of wonders such as nitrogen fixation, airplanes, automobiles, submarines, rockets—and every one of them was first used at scale for murder. So when our society looks at a new power, what we see is the face of the murderer. We see Hiroshima, or the tank, or the B-2. It is this same reflex that has killed the creation of new nuclear or hydroelectric power, because we have been taught to be more afraid of the side effects than excited about the potential.

The Boomer Truth Regime decided that anything capable of doing huge things is, on its face, terrifying and must be vigorously opposed.

You can see the degree to which this belief is highly influential in America and other Western countries in the polling data around AI. In Ipsos’s 2026 global survey, 83% of Chinese respondents and 79% of Indian respondents say AI products make them excited; in the United States, the figure is only 33%, compared with 29% in Britain. Or take, for example, that when asked whether AI’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks, 85% of Chinese respondents and 80% of Indians say yes, compared to only 38% of Americans. Pew also finds that about half of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, and only one in ten is the reverse.

It is possible that the data centers in Loudoun County will begin to drive up costs. Virginia’s own legislative auditors project that data-center growth could add $14 to $37 a month to a typical residential bill by 2040—but the size of the effect is nowhere near the emotional reaction you see in American society right now. The same report found that data centers currently pay their full cost of service and have no history of cost-shifting to households.

For decades, doubting any piece of the Boomer Truth Regime package was the equivalent of a kid complaining about his bedtime. Dissidents could say whatever they wanted, in whatever register they wanted, precisely because there was no chance the thing they were calling for would ever be implemented. Every critique of the Boomer Truth Regime was essentially powerless. But that era will soon end as the generation raised in the 21st century inevitably takes over. It isn’t that younger generations stopped believing in pieces of the package, but that the idea of viewing it as a sanctified whole is dissolving.

And when the sanctity eventually falls away, everything will be reexamined at once—not just the parts you dislike. The whole package, from nuclear power to civil rights law, will be on the table in our lifetime. It is up to us to defend the parts we value and reject the parts we don’t.

One part I reject is the idea that we can no longer, and should no longer, do incredible things. AI is one such thing. It of course has dangers, but it also has almost incalculable potential—and I know which side I’m betting on.

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When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani referred to the African National Congress’s (ANC) Freedom Charter as a key inspiration during his inaugural address, it prompted a pointed question: Will New York City undergo “South Africanization” under his watch?

If Afghanistan is famously referred to as the graveyard of empires, South Africa surely qualifies as the laboratory of empires. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the phenomenon of toppling statues, which originated in South Africa with the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement. At the University of Cape Town in March 2015, Chumani Maxwele threw human feces at the bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes, the 19th-century prime minister of the Cape Colony, sparking a movement that eventually succeeded in having the statue removed. From there, this phenomenon spread to campuses across the West, becoming one of the defining political spectacles of the following decade.

Whether it’s cash-in-transit heists in Italy, the escalating theft of copper cable in the United States, Mamdani urging New Yorkers to limit their air-conditioning use to support a strained power grid, or increasingly brazen race-based policies in Britain, Westerners can’t help but notice that their countries are becoming more like South Africa.

To understand the consequences of this trend, we need to ask: What does South Africanization look like as a political phenomenon and as a policy framework in practice?

De-development in South Africa

What one might call South Africanization is characterized by chronic decay of infrastructure and public spaces due to a lack of maintenance and the deterioration of state capacity to provide basic services. Parks, monuments, cemeteries, and sidewalks are the canaries in the coal mine. They start being stripped of all metal objects, then become polluted, neglected, and unsafe. Even war memorials are not spared, being the most visceral example of a nation’s heritage literally being scrapped for drug money.

Recently, the South African X account Jozi vs Jozi went viral for effectively exposing the country’s urban decay under ANC rule by comparing Google Street View images of Johannesburg from the mid-2000s with those from 2026. Shocking, even apocalyptic, scenes of urban degradation stunned onlookers worldwide. South Africa appears to have introduced a new category to geopolitics: a de-developing nation. To quote a popular South African joke: “What did South Africans use before candles? Electricity.”

South Africanization also entails a fusion of the ruling party and government, blurring the dividing lines between them. The vehicle for the ANC’s iron grip on state power for the past 30 years has been the policy of “cadre deployment.” This is when party loyalists are inserted into every level and facet of the government and public service apparatus.

Beyond rewarding loyal party members, family, and friends with sinecures, cadre deployment primarily serves to bring the government leviathan under the ruling party’s total control. This process of state capture has been one of the top priorities, if not the top priority, of the ANC since gaining power in 1994. This helps explain why some interpret criticism of the ANC as criticism of the country, and why threats to the ANC’s power are regularly framed as threats to South Africa—even as “treason.”

Unsurprisingly, corruption has become an embedded feature of the system. As investigative journalist James Myburgh has noted, “The point about corruption in South Africa is not that it is and was condoned, but that it has become compulsory. You can’t legally do business with the state or state-owned enterprises without essentially cutting in some or other ANC faction.” This state of advanced kleptocracy, where corruption becomes so normalized that businesses budget for it under “facilitation fees,” logically flows from the policy of cadre deployment. The ANC is fundamentally incapable and unwilling to effectively fight corruption, because by attacking corruption, they would attack themselves, and their allies would be caught in the crossfire.

Then there is the ever-increasing centralization of state power. The ANC has an insatiable drive to expand the government’s power, influence, control, and reach. This is the obligation imposed on them by their Cold War-era National Democratic Revolution (NDR) dogma. The ANC government has relinquished power only by a court order or, more commonly, as a result of the deterioration or even collapse of government capacity.

The increasing centralization of state control manifests itself in the vast and ever-expanding social grant patronage system, which has rendered more than 50% of citizens dependent on some form of government assistance. The emergence of this welfare-industrial complex is by design. The ANC has no incentive to combat poverty or the unemployment rate, which currently exceeds 43%, because a decrease in either would result in less state dependence among the populace. This dependence, in turn, helps to strengthen the party’s grip on power through the electoral leverage it provides, allowing the NDR to march on unimpeded.

Finally, there is the relentless and fanatical commitment to a top-down race-based social engineering agenda. The ANC refers to this discriminatory program as “transformation,” which demands that every facet of society, from corporate boardrooms to primary school sports teams, be altered to reflect the demographic makeup of the national population, under threat of government sanction. The ANC prioritizes this racialist agenda—the right to discriminate “positively”—above even the pressing need to provide basic services such as an uninterrupted electricity and water supply.

This racialist agenda serves as a moral veneer to facilitate and also obscure the other features of South Africanization. Under the guise of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), those with the right skin color, family ties, political connections, and loyalties obtain government jobs, tenders, and positions on corporate boards. BEE and transformation are the moral cudgels used to justify cadre deployment, which is the vehicle facilitating the NDR. All of this leaves a trail of de-development in its wake.

The Zimbabwe Endgame

If the ANC’s policies are inspiring Western politicians, which regimes and policies inspire the leadership of South Africa? You don’t need to dig deep to find the answer. Speaking in Zimbabwe in 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa heaped praise on the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front’s (ZANU-PF) policies, labeling the late dictator Robert Mugabe’s violent land confiscations as “ambitious” and “essential.” He emphasized that the South African government seeks to copy ZANU-PF’s policies so that the country can be more like Zimbabwe.

The Mugabe regime’s land policies of the early 2000s involved chaotic and often violent invasions and seizures. Private property rights were severely violated, as thousands of white farmers and their families were driven off their land and attacked. Some were even tortured and murdered. Mugabe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme resulted in mass human rights violations and the collapse of the Zimbabwean agricultural sector and economy. This caused millions of Zimbabweans to flee ZANU-PF’s “utopia,” some swimming across crocodile-infested rivers to reach South Africa.

Under Mugabe, the breadbasket of Africa was turned into the continent’s basket case. South Africanization is a stepping stone toward the final phase of de-development: Zimbabwefication.

From Disorder to Order

Fortunately, the ANC’s modus operandi contains the seeds of its own defeat. Over the past few decades, the South African government’s capacity and reach have been collapsing under the weight of chronic mismanagement, the rejection of merit-based appointments, skyrocketing expenditure, endemic corruption, abysmal service delivery, and a shrinking tax base.

From the dust of this collapse, decentralization of power, state-proof solutions, private-sector initiatives, community-based organizations, and a selfdoen (do-it-yourself) ethos are emerging as counterweights. Where government fails, civil society organizations, the private sector, and communities are picking up the slack. In doing so, they are creating growing oases of order amid a desert of disorder, to borrow Professor Koos Malan’s metaphor.

Notably, both the virtuous and the nefarious sense opportunity as a power vacuum opens due to deteriorating state capacity. It is therefore not surprising that both organized crime and organized communities are thriving in the “new” South Africa. Additionally, the South African private security sector has become one of the largest, most innovative, and competitive globally, with personnel significantly outnumbering the police and military combined. Private sector and community-based organizations are seeking to fill the gap faster than criminals can. Fortunately, that seems to be happening.

The bad news is that many Western nations seem doomed to continue down the pothole-pocked road of South Africanization. The good news is that effective responses are already being pioneered and stress tested at ground zero in South Africa. My advice to Westerners is to start researching, reaching out, and taking notes from organizations like AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement, which are at the forefront of developing state-proof solutions to these trends.

South Africa is once again a new frontier, and on the frontier, not only surviving but thriving favors the bold.

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