The class was called, rather plainly, “Moderns II,” and when I enrolled in it, I had no idea that it would change my life. I was a visiting student at University College London. While I had read some of the assigned authors (W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf), I had never read them in quite that way—as propositions about how to see (or not see) the world. The professor was a bit intimidating; he had a way of developing his thoughts as he spoke, his sentences moving in seemingly different directions until he landed—with a flourish—on an insight that, after the meandering that had come before, was both unexpected and somehow brilliantly inevitable. And he challenged us to think the same way. We had been reading The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s 1937 plea for a kind of socialism that would take the concerns of the working class seriously, and the professor must have noticed that something was bothering me.  

“Yes?” he said, suddenly appearing before me.  

“I don’t think Orwell enjoys being with poor people,” I stammered, thinking of the author’s many appalled references to the workers’ bad teeth, realizing, too, that what I had just said went against the grain of our class discussions so far, in which everyone had been warmly appreciative of Orwell’s efforts at empathy. 

“More!” the professor demanded, pointing at me. In hindsight, my critique of Orwell wasn’t particularly perceptive or even accurate, but that didn’t matter. For now, at least in my academic life, the floodgates were open: I had found a way to make the texts we were reading my own. I had discovered the pleasures of being opinionated. 

That class happened over 30 years ago, but I still think about it today. Much of the climate of American college education today seems geared to drive such opinionatedness not only out of our classrooms but the academy in general. The mind-bending assault of the Trumpists on colleges, the lethal mix of fake outrage and financial coercion that the president’s minions bring to campus, will set back American higher education by decades. It will also, as Brian Soucek in The Opinionated University acknowledges, make it unforgivably dull. What started as a laughable right-wing caricature of higher education—denouncing universities as Marxist training camps, with Stalinist professors brainwashing students into accepting the wicked gospel of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)—has now taken hold of the minds of many university administrators. Their alternative vision has “workforce-ready” students praising capitalism while joining hands with their “thought partners,” an army of compliant AI bots. The motto of higher education, if Trump and his helpers have their way, will no longer be “Sapere aude” (dare to know) but “Skill up.” Leaving aside the fact that being able to state one’s opinions clearly and coherently is an important life-skill, too, the laudable emphasis on getting students ready for life now masks a more sinister ideological impulse: to remake our universities in the outdated, nativist image of an older, mostly white America, purged of the dissidents and immigrants we don’t want.  

The Opinionated University is, as it ought to be, an unabashedly opinionated book. Soucek is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Davis who was trained as a philosopher. It shows: At its core, his book is a logically compelling dismantling of what has become the mantra of American educational leaders—institutional neutrality, a doctrine that essentially means that, when in doubt, a university should voice no opinion at all. As Soucek explains, that was the central recommendation of the so-called Kalven Report, issued in 1967 in response to student protests against the Vietnam War, by a University of Chicago committee chaired by the law scholar Harry Kalven Jr. In December 2023, when three flustered presidents of elite universities couldn’t tell a congressional committee whether they would penalize students on their campuses for alleged antisemitic hate speech (a “context-dependent decision,” they said), the popularity of the Kalven guidelines soared. If only those presidents had practiced institutional neutrality!  

The intent of the Kalven report was, of course, to preserve free speech against rash decisions made by university leaders. Yet, as Soucek now tells us, institutional neutrality creates more problems than it solves. He has fun labeling the adherents of institutional neutrality “Kalvenists,” a pun that hints at some deeper commonalities. The 16th-century Calvinists believed in predestination—that, in other words, God had, without letting you know, already decided whether to send you to Heaven or Hell, and that there was nothing you could do to change that. But Calvinists relaxed their grim doctrine by also allowing that there might be some signs even in your earthly life where you were headed—if your business succeeded, for example. Soucek shows that modern-day academic “Kalvenists” likewise get themselves entangled in exemptions. Even as they advise university leaders to stay out of politics, they also concede that there are situations where saying nothing is not wise—when, for example, a university’s core mission is under threat. And here’s the rub: Since there are, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 2,600 four-year colleges in the United States, many with their own slightly different missions, the list of exceptions is potentially endless.  

Soucek’s antidote to the moral porousness of Kalvenism follows from that insight—an embrace of pedagogical pluralism. His book envisions, in cleverly nuanced detail, an admittedly idealistic landscape of higher education in which each institution would, after internal discussion and without interference from above, speak up whenever its mission demands it. For a university with a large medical school, for example, it would make sense to weigh in on discussions about reproductive rights, while another school with strong international ties might champion protections for its international students. 

The archenemy of Soucek’s “opinionated university” is conformity. When I decided to become a professor, I didn’t realize how much paperwork would attach itself to my career, the way barnacles latch on to an aging boat: faculty reports, compliance certificates, lists of learning outcomes, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and effort allocations. (Making such documents digital has only increased their number.) In his first chapter, Soucek turns to one such document that gets conservatives’ blood boiling—the notorious diversity statement, an essay outlining a faculty member’s commitment to creating an inclusive environment, which used to be a staple of the academic application process before DEI became the acronym from hell. Soucek admits that such required assertions of pedagogical bona fides may become insincere—who wouldn’t want to teach a class that lifts all students, regardless of their background? But what if we decided to reimagine diversity statements as opportunities to express not abstract beliefs but as concrete plans for meaningful action? As Soucek points out, critics of such declarations don’t object to statements of a candidate’s teaching philosophy. Why not ask an applicant, then, how their work as a whole (including their research) would enrich, in its own unique and non-conformist way, the overall vision of the university they are hoping to join? 

Ironically, the most effective tools for enforcing educational conformity, also known as teaching evaluations, generally get a free pass. Treated as reliable data by university administrators, they are often skewed. As Soucek makes clear, evaluations tend to reward those who pander and grade-inflate. And they routinely yield lower ratings for women of color. Where “non-experts”—to wit, our students—sit in judgment on our teaching, charismatic slickness often wins out over disciplinary aptitude. (Soucek doesn’t mention the frequently abysmally low participation rate in an exercise many students view as a waste of time.) Anecdotally, this critique seems right to me. While I belong to a demographic that statistically fares well in evaluations, I am always surprised by how many of my students’ responses pertain to things other than class content: “Instructor looks rumpled,” one student commented on what I would describe as the result of having little time between classes. “Instructor is ok,” observed another student, before criticizing my high-energy classroom delivery: “But he should lay off the coffee.” 

If instructors, to improve their ratings, are tempted to ingratiate themselves with their students, some universities cozy up to the fine folks at U.S. News & World Report for better rankings as well. Soucek favors those colleges that don’t forget their mission and are not afraid to say “No! in thunder” (to use Herman Melville’s feisty phrase) when silence would harm their faculty and students. My colleagues at Indiana University were hoping for such support when an assistant professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, was castigated by Indiana’s own attorney general after performing an abortion on a very young rape victim. Instead, Indiana University’s president only volunteered that Bernard was a “well-respected doctor.” 

As university leaders like to remind us, academic freedom has its limits. My own university’s administration became obsessed with the phrase “expressive activity,” a term that strikes me as both unintentionally humorous and somewhat demeaning, as if stating one’s opinion were something akin to coloring pictures or going for a morning run. That Indiana University’s administrators didn’t view their faculty’s expressive activities as all that harmless became clear when they banished them from campus grounds between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (a restriction later blocked by the courts). But even Soucek believes that some frameworks should exist. Academic departments, for example, should issue public statements only about subjects in which they can claim some disciplinary expertise. And when a colleague’s research takes a turn that conflicts with a university’s stated mission, said university should leave the reprimands to that colleague’s academic peers.  

In a chapter on “institutional counterspeech,” occasions where a university feels compelled to criticize its own actions, Soucek grants that colleges often face hard choices. In a moving aside, he recalls how excluded he felt back in 2018 when UC Davis held a campuswide blood drive, complete with prizes, in which he, as a gay man, could not participate. (The FDA has since amended its guidelines.) Recognizing the importance of blood drives, Soucek appreciated a statement from his chancellor, who expressed his profound regret over the unnecessary and discriminatory federal restrictions. In a similar vein, a university leader might choose to condemn the views of an invited campus speaker as hurtful to some members of the campus community, while still allowing the event to proceed for the sake of academic freedom. In 2017, Lauren Robel, the provost of Indiana University Bloomington, declined to disinvite Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, a widely debunked 1994 book that attempted to correlate race and intelligence. “Our academic community,” Robel insisted, “depends, distinctively, on more than mere tolerance. It depends on engagement with ideas, perhaps especially with ideas we believe are wrong or flawed.” At the same time, as you debate ideas you dislike, you should always feel protected, as Soucek makes clear in his final chapter on “Regulating Campus Speech.” 

But that last example also makes me wonder how much of The Opinionated University rests on an assumption that we can no longer take for granted—that American universities, and specifically their leaders, always have the best interests of their students and faculty in mind. One of the most noxious effects of the ongoing MAGA makeover of American universities has been the extent to which politicians have deputized college administrators, inciting them, for example, to prosecute and punish those whose teaching falls short of the required “viewpoint diversity”—in translation: whose classes make conservative students uncomfortable. To which I would respond: No one, whether you are right or left or middle-of-the-road or nothing at all, whether you are faculty or a student, should ever feel overly comfortable in college. Or, as Soucek puts it: “The point of education, and of rational argument more generally, is to change what people think.” (Note that the mind that is being changed here could also be the professor’s … Has happened to me plenty of times!) Here’s hoping that generations hence will still be able to feel the rush of excitement I experienced decades ago when my professor stood before me, sensing I had an idea different from everyone else’s: “Yes?”  

The post The Kalven Trap appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In May 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner rose on the Senate floor to denounce the law that opened Kansas to slavery. In excoriating one of the bill’s architects, South Carolina’s Andrew Butler, Sumner all but accused the southern senator of raping the Black women he had enslaved, claiming that Butler had “chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.”

Sumner’s words highlighted a major, ugly scandal—and they provoked another. Three days after Sumner’s speech, Butler’s relative, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, approached Sumner in the Senate chamber with a heavy cane and beat him mercilessly about the head. Sumner was so horribly injured he could not return to the Senate full-time for three years. The House failed to muster a two-thirds vote to expel Brooks, who was treated like a hero in the South. To prove he retained the support of his constituents, Brooks resigned and then was quickly returned to office in a special election. Hundreds of southerners sent him canes as gifts, some inscribed with the words “Hit Him Again.”

Neither Brooks nor Butler appears in the University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus’s excellent new study, Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era. That’s because the book is concerned with the period from Watergate to the present. But Butler’s and Brooks’s successful defiance of scandal in an earlier era provides important additional context, reminding us that our current era of impunity and partisanship for even the vilest behavior is not unprecedented.

Rottinghaus’s book concludes that today’s entrenched political polarization helps politicians overcome scandal. This is hardly shocking; everyone knows that Donald Trump was elected president months after a felony fraud conviction, after being held liable for a sexual assault the presiding judge described as rape, and after attempting to interfere with a free and fair election. It’s almost a shibboleth to say “nothing matters” anymore. But Rottinghaus provides evidence and nuance for what has become conventional wisdom.

In the first place, impunity is not, in fact, all encompassing. Using a definition of scandal as “allegations of illegal, unethical, or immoral wrongdoing”—and excluding incompetence, unpopular actions, or policy failures—Rottinghaus identifies 156 presidential scandals between 1972 and 2021, as well as numerous congressional and gubernatorial scandals. To determine if scandals have more or less politically fatal impact today, Rottinghaus looked at resignation rates across time.

The results puncture some of the fatalism. In the Watergate era, resignation rates were 47 percent; in the 1980s—with Iran-Contra and the Keating Five scandal—resignation rates were about 50 percent. In the Bush years, resignation rates dropped to 43 percent, and in the first Trump term they were 45 percent. The low point was the Clinton era, when only about 40 percent of scandals produced resignations. From that vantage, today looks less like a collapse in accountability than a modest decline from already-low baselines.

One can fairly argue that Trump’s scandals are more serious—soliciting foreign election interference and trying to overturn elections have much more sweeping consequences for democracy than consensual but still improper sex with a subordinate. And Rottinghaus also notes that officials accused of impropriety now tend to stay in office longer even if they do eventually resign. Trump’s secretary of the interior in his first term, Ryan Zinke, survived in office for 16 months despite a series of corruption scandals involving the use of government resources for private travel. He even lasted for weeks after he lost the support of the Trump administration itself—though he was subsequently reelected to the House. Still, Zinke did step down, suggesting that some things do matter, at least for cabinet officers, even if only slowly. 

Curiously, the arena where scandal matters least isn’t the presidency—it’s the states. Gubernatorial scandals have dropped markedly since 2011, not because governors have grown more virtuous but because oversight has weakened. Single-party control at the state level has increased substantially over the past 15 to 20 years; today 38 states have unified one-party government. When one party controls both the governorship and the legislature, each has little incentive to scrutinize the other. Fewer investigations mean that fewer scandals become public, and fewer still result in resignations.

Increasing polarization also coincides with increasing partisan hostility. In 2016, for example, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans. By 2022, that number had jumped to 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats. 

This political landscape makes it possible for politicians to leverage partisanship to survive scandals or even to literally capitalize on them. Rottinghaus points to the day Trump was convicted of felony campaign finance violations related to hush-money payments to silence news of his affair with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Trump claimed that he was the target of a witch hunt, and his partisans agreed, showering him with tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions in a 24-hour period. “Claims of misinformation generate larger gains for politicians than simply ignoring the scandal or apologizing, making it a preferred strategy and more politically effective than a simple denial,” Rottinghaus observes drily.

That dynamic echoes the antebellum South’s reaction to Brooks. Then, as now, intense partisanship enabled supporters to celebrate transgression as heroism. Political scientists do not have surveys of partisanship from the 1850s, but you don’t need surveys to figure out that the era was characterized by increasing regional and partisan tensions. The country at the time was more divided than it has ever been; that’s why there was a civil war. In such a situation, Rottinghaus’s analysis suggests that you should see partisans willing to ignore and even cheer on scandals—which is exactly what happened with Butler and Brooks.

Like many political scientists and pundits, Rottinghaus tends to present increased polarization as a bad thing or as a threat to American democracy. He notes, for example, that cross-partisan friendships “can establish better boundaries for political wrongdoing by public officials and give people of all ideologies a rounder perspective.” He also conducted a survey showing that people with politically diverse friendships have less of a desire to see the other party engulfed in scandal.

What Rottinghaus emphasizes less is that polarization waxes and wanes—and that bipartisanship carries its own dangers. He repeatedly notes that partisanship has increased over time—which is true from the 1970s to the present. But the past 50 years is just the past 50 years; partisanship over a longer horizon has not trended in a single direction. For example, the extremely partisan post–Civil War Reconstruction era ended with the bipartisan Compromise of 1877. To resolve the disputed presidential contest from the prior year, white Republicans and white Democrats agreed to abandon Reconstruction-era efforts at fostering racial equality and joined together in suppressing Black rights and Black people—Democrats through open violence, Republicans more often through refusing to offer aid to those targeted. This bipartisan agreement on tacitly codifying white supremacy lasted for almost a century. Jim Crow was enabled in no small part by cross-party compromise and agreement. 

As the scholars Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor argue, polarization is only a “threat to democracy” if one ignores inequality; from a nonwhite perspective, racial repression has been far more destructive to democratic life than partisan division. 

Again, Sumner’s speech provides important context. Rottinghaus notes in passing that in the past politicians expressing racism and sexism would not have generated scandals. In fact, in the early Republic, rape of Black women was considered normal, unexceptionable, and unworthy of mention—or as the scholar Shannon Eaves puts it, “the antebellum South was deeply rooted in a rape culture.”

Sumner, by alluding to sexual assault on Black women as scandalous, was expressing and contributing to heightened partisanship. But in highlighting this grotesque tradition, Sumner was also highlighting the benefits of exposing scandals. In Sumner’s case, he drew attention to the systemic problem of slavery. His words, and the South’s violent reaction, did not result in accountability for Brooks. But it did help bring about the Civil War, giving enslaved people a chance to flee plantations and bring about their own emancipation.

Rottinghaus admits that scandals can be healthy: They raise public attention, spur reform, and expose systemic rot. He also argues that polarization has made scandals less damaging, though not irrelevant. But widening the historical frame reveals a deeper truth. The most consequential scandals are often those that clarify injustices long normalized by bipartisan consensus. Partisanship can enable impunity—but bipartisanship can conceal horrors.

Sumner’s example reminds us that scandals don’t always bring down politicians. But sometimes they force the country to see what it once refused to admit was scandalous at all.

The post The Scandal About Scandals appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Election night is magic for me. The TV ads and campaign hoopla have vanished. One side has won; the other hasn’t. The truth alone abides. 

But only the loser can confirm it. It takes the concession speech, delivered on live television, to make it real for the side that fell short. 

I will never forget sitting with my dad on my first election night. I felt his sympathy for New York Governor Averell Harriman as he conceded defeat to Nelson Rockefeller in 1958. All these years later, I recall his sympathy for that old-money (compared to Rockefeller) gentleman. 

That is why Donald Trump stands before us as a thief. It’s not all those old carny tricks—the Trump sneakers, the Trump University tuition, the failed Atlantic City casinos, or the bills never paid—it’s his denial to the American voter of an honest accounting of his 2020 presidential loss and the Capitol riot he torched on January 6, 2021. 

Today, my latest book, Lessons from Bobby: Ten Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters, is being published. Among its chapters is No. 9, Know When to Concede. 

One of Bobby Kennedy’s gifts was the moral ability to accept defeat, which he did in the 1968 Oregon Presidential primary, a week before his assassination.  

Here is that chapter and with it Bobby’s lesson:  

Donald Trump refused to concede the 2020 presidential election. He refused to halt the January 6 “Stop the Steal” attack on the US Capitol. He refused to attend the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, 2021.  

This may have been Trump’s worst crime against the American constitutional system. It definitely gets to the heart of it. The honest transfer of presidential authority is one of this country’s highest traditions. American citizens are proud to have elections that are carried out honestly, and proud to have this transfer of power seen by the world. I think of all the concession speeches in my life: Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore (after the long recount), John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. In his selfish interest, Donald Trump chose to undercut that tradition. 

Here’s a rule. Don’t run for office if you’re incapable of telling the truth about the results. Again, Bobby Kennedy offers the perfect model. 

Weeks before his death, Robert Kennedy could already see himself losing the Oregon presidential primary. The strongest reason had been his own delay in entering the race. Eugene McCarthy offered his anti–Vietnam War challenge in November 1967. Bobby Kennedy had waited until March. He could see himself about to be punished by Oregon’s antiwar Democrats.  

I recall watching Roger Mudd of CBS News interview Kennedy in an airport. When the newsman asked him if it bothered him that so many college students had stuck with McCarthy, the look on his face told us the answer. Boston Globe reporter Robert Healy said that really “gnawed” at Bobby. 

Another problem, close to home, was his lack of a gifted campaign manager, someone whose work would match what he himself had done for his brother Jack in 1960. It meant that his campaign was unable to change direction quickly as it needed to in Oregon. 

But on some issues, Bobby didn’t want to change course. “This just may not be my time,” he admitted. He was doing what he wanted to be doing. He was talking about the people in the cities and about their problems. Some of his advisors told him that the problems of the cities were remote to the voters of Oregon and might cost him votes in the primary if he did not change.  

Just a week before his death, he lost the Oregon presidential primary. It was the first time Bobby had lost an election, either as Jack Kennedy’s campaign manager or as a candidate himself. 

Columnist Jules Witcover described him “in his shirtsleeves, tie off but still wearing the PT-109 tie clasp that had been the symbol of Kennedy political invincibility. He had a heavily watered-down drink in his hand, and he was in a quiet, reflective mood—not bitter, not shocked, not even transparently disappointed, just resigned.” 

Bobby said that he could sense days before the Oregon primary that he was in trouble when he failed to get a responsive reaction from Portland factory workers. He could tell, he said, that they weren’t tuned in, that he wasn’t communicating with them. He asked aides where he had run well and where poorly, and he took the information much like the campaign manager he once was. One reporter asked him if he thought Oregon had hurt him, and it made him laugh. “It certainly wasn’t one of the more helpful developments of the day,” he said. 

But he refused to blame his campaigners. “If I’d won it, it would have been my victory, and I’ve lost it and it’s my defeat. I sometimes wonder if I’ve correctly sensed the mood of America. I think I have. But maybe I’m all wrong. Maybe the people don’t want things changed. I do better with people who have problems.” 

Pat Buchanan, then a campaign researcher for Richard Nixon, was impressed by the way Kennedy absorbed the shock of losing. “His graciousness in conceding defeat and congratulating Gene McCarthy was impressive. This is the first time I’d seen Bobby in person. He could not have shown himself better in victory than he did in defeat that night.” 

Bobby told Jack Newfield. “If that happens, I will just go back to the Senate, and say what I believe, and not try again in ’72. Somebody has to speak up for the Negroes, and Indians, and Mexicans, and poor whites. Maybe that’s what I do best. Maybe my personality just isn’t built for this. . . . The issues are more important than me now.”  

Looking forward to the California primary, Bobby raised the stakes. 

First, he agreed to meet Gene McCarthy in a nationally televised debate. “I’m not in much of a position now to say he’s not a serious candidate. Hell, if he’s not a serious candidate after tonight, then I’m not a candidate at all.” 

Second, he promised to end his campaign if he lost in California.  

The honest acceptance of his loss in Oregon showed that Kennedy wasn’t the “ruthless” figure he’d been called. 

Bobby Kennedy matters because he acknowledged defeat. That is the enduring reality here. If the loser in an election refuses to offer a public, televised concession speech, he is sharing his denial with his followers. That’s what Donald Trump, the loser of the 2020 presidential election, told his MAGA crowd as they headed to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.  

I have long taken pride that we as Americans participate in a vibrant democracy—living in a country where those who lose elections give a public accounting of their loss. They don’t blame the count; they don’t blame the democratic system itself 

I recall sitting in our basement rec room with Dad watching the 1958 midterm election results. New York Governor Averell Harriman came on to offer his concession speech. He’d just lost the race to Nelson Rockefeller. My father felt an immediate emotional connection with the governor’s loss. As a middle-class guy, he could nonetheless identify personally with the moment the fabulously wealthy Harriman was facing. 

That was my introduction to watching national election results and to truly understanding our democracy. For years, through election after election, I have looked forward to the concession speech. It is a bittersweet time for those who fought hard in a campaign, especially for the candidate who just learned he or she had lost. 

But it is a clear sign that the campaign is over. All the TV ads and bumper stickers have done their business. Now we saw that the people have had their say. The winner has been decided. The loser has just told us so. It brings a crackling reality to the whole exercise. Our great democracy has won again. 

I especially took pride in our free and open democratic system when I served in the Peace Corps. As I hitchhiked my way up through East Africa, I saw young democracies where the losers would predictably claim that the election had been stolen. I have also personally witnessed a good number of elections in my career. I lost a primary myself running for Congress in 1974. I saw my first boss, Senator Frank Moss, lose his reelection bid in Utah two years later, and in 1980, I watched my boss, Jimmy Carter, go down. In both those cases, the losing candidates, my candidates, gave public concession speeches. 

Yet on January 6, we saw the same cheap charges—“Stop the Steal”—being thrown here in the United States. 

President Trump, defeated in the November 2020 election by seven million votes in the popular count, told a crowd of unruly supporters to head to the Capitol. Once there, they tore through the doors and left a trail of mayhem. It took the combined U.S. Capitol and Metropolitan Police to stop them before they could bring real harm or worse to members of Congress and to Trump’s own vice president. 

This piece is adapted from Lessons from Bobby: Ten Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters by Chris Matthews. Copyright © 2025 by Christopher J. Matthews.  Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The post What Senator Robert F. Kennedy Could Teach Donald Trump  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I first met Paul Starr in the summer of 1978 when I was working as a college intern in the speechwriting office of Jimmy Carter’s White House. I remember thinking how smart he was, and sure enough, a few years later in 1984, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Social Transformation of American Medicine. That book is so important that you cannot understand the history of medicine in the United States without it. He did something similar with The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, and he’s written a ton of other insightful stuff from his perch as a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. In between, he co-founded The American Prospect. Starr’s new book is American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now. It offers a significant and convincing new theory of how we have come to this sorry pass in American public life.

Note: This interview originally ran on the Substack Old Goats with Jonathan Alter with no paywall. Subscribe to Old Goats to support Jon’s work.

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JONATHAN ALTER: Thanks for doing this, Paul. First, how do you describe what you call “the American Contradiction”?

PAUL STARR: The title works two ways. First, it’s about the contradiction between the America of Obama and the America of Trump. The subtitle of my book is “Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now.” The first half covers what I call the American revolutions of the 20th century. Where we are now is the politics of revenge—the negation of many post-World War II changes in race, rights, and gender.

On a larger scale, though, the United States was born in the contradiction between freedom and racial slavery. Throughout history, this underlying conflict has shown up in many forms. The argument of my book is that the struggle against the legacies of slavery—against Jim Crow—became the point of departure for a series of movements, from civil rights, to feminism, to gay rights. The Black struggle set a paradigm for legal, cultural, and economic claims, and other groups picked up those models. The reaction against them has been formative for the country, and we’re now in the throes of the most radical reaction yet.

JONATHAN ALTER: Let’s dig into that. Clearly, we’ve never had a reaction of this type from the very top. That’s what’s different: Trump is president. In the past, right-wing demagogues didn’t have that much power. But some people say American history is like a sine curve—periodic ups and downs—and extrapolating from the present ignores that pattern. So, shouldn’t the cyclical nature of our history make us more hopeful? Think of the Palmer Raids and the KKK resurgence after WWI, but then FDR helped the country recover from that.

PAUL STARR: Parts of the past are encouraging, and you’re right, with Roosevelt, we recovered from the reaction in the 1920s you mentioned. But we were lucky. It didn’t have to turn out that way. I like Larry Bartels and Chris Achen’s book Democracy for Realists—it shows recovery depended a lot on who happened to be in power during the Depression. Luck played a role. There’s no guarantee the sine curve always brings us back; we don’t know that things must ultimately be progressive. What I do believe is that the threat to the Republic is now the most serious since the Civil War.

JONATHAN ALTER: So, your view is that when King or Obama said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” they were being idealistic?

PAUL STARR: It’s a happy illusion—useful as inspiration for presidents or movement leaders. But I don’t think analysts should assume any inevitability about it.

JONATHAN ALTER: I don’t assume inevitability, but I look at places like the Philippines, Brazil, or even Hungary today [Orban is very unpopular]—where eventually the worm turns, even where democratic traditions are weaker than they are here. In South America, 50 years ago all but Venezuela were dictatorships; today all but Venezuela are democracies in some form or other. Things aren’t fated to recover, but neither are authoritarian takeovers fated to last.

PAUL STARR: Absolutely. There are lots of countries oscillating between authoritarianism and episodes of democracy. Our history’s been mainly positive, with strong institutions. But one lesson from Trumpism is that those institutions aren’t as strong as we thought. Trump has trampled checks and balances, the courts haven’t always upheld rights as we assumed, and that’s different. The real danger is not just Trump’s attitude toward democratic norms, but also the Supreme Court, which lately has embraced radical changes enabling more presidential power. The threat is the combination of an unchecked president and a willing Court.

JONATHAN ALTER: Let’s go back—you use the metaphor that America isn’t a city on a hill, but a city on a fault line. What do you mean?

PAUL STARR: It’s in contrast to the “city on a hill” image, which Reagan popularized. There’s a big underlying rift—an unresolved contradiction—that periodically quakes our society. It’s as if America were built on a geological fault. We have tremors and the risk of an earthquake that could reduce [the Republic] to rubble. That’s the danger we’re facing, in ways most didn’t think possible.

JONATHAN ALTER: Like what? What did you not think would happen?

PAUL STARR: I didn’t expect the federal government would send troops into American cities on false pretenses of disorder—that’s happening now. We used to have presidential restraint—for example, with the unqualified pardon clause. Presidents used it within limits. Trump, though, uses it without restraint, and with loyalists placed into the DOJ, FBI, and now the government has the potential to work for personal vengeance. And Trump can always pardon more before leaving office.

JONATHAN ALTER: I’ve written about this as an extortion racket—and we’ve seen a totally corrupted DOJ. But we had that with Nixon, and the scale of things like COINTELPRO’s spying [FBI surveillance in the 1960s and 1970s] was worse. But Ed Levi [Gerald Ford’s attorney general] restored integrity to the DOJ under Ford within a year. So when people say the damage now can’t be fixed for generations, isn’t that historically shortsighted?

PAUL STARR: This isn’t Watergate or post-Watergate. During Watergate, Congress still worked as a check.

JONATHAN: But how strong was that really? Most Republicans stuck with Nixon until it wasn’t politically possible anymore. After the final tape, and with Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott counting heads, they finally told Nixon he had to resign. Was there really this brave Republican stand?

PAUL STARR: The major difference now is that Trump has a movement, the MAGA movement, disciplining the GOP and discouraging dissent. He retaliates. That structure—a leader controlling both a movement and a party—gives far more personal control than presidents usually have. Congress and the party lack the institutional independence we traditionally expect.

JONATHAN: But isn’t that also because, during Watergate, Democrats controlled Congress? There was institutional balance.

PAUL STARR: Yes, but today’s Supreme Court is another major difference. Nixon lost the tapes case, and even his appointees ruled against him. Today’s Court is far more partisan and much more aligned with Trump. It’s not comparable to what existed before.

JONATHAN: I’m not arguing that things aren’t worse now, just about our powers to recover. Do you think recovery is possible?

PAUL STARR: I think we can recover. But it will take both new popular movements and institutional reforms.

JONATHAN ALTER: You end your book with that hope. Is relying on that a long-range project, or do you see changes we could make in the near term?

PAUL STARR: We need both. I lay out some changes in an American Prospect called “The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform,” which I’ve joked could be called “the premature, over-ambitious, and yet inadequate guide to post-Trump reform.” But both popular movements and institutional changes are required—though I don’t have a detailed prescription.

JONATHAN ALTER: Let’s get to the history. You draw a line from the Lost Cause idea, as Southerners described the Civil War, through to MAGA. Some Republicans would object [and say] that’s a cheap shot. They’re not segregationists.

PAUL STARR: I’m not equating the exact pasts, but there is a vision of a lost America Republicans are referencing. For many, it means the 1950s—the “normal” world after WWII. That’s why that era starts my book. I cite a poll: two-thirds of Democrats say post-1950s changes made America better; two-thirds of Republicans say the opposite. The 1950s became the benchmark for normalcy, especially for people who grew up then and later felt jarred by subsequent change. For some, liberation and civil rights were positive. For others, it felt like the loss of moral clarity and consensus. We had this “area of American agreement,” as one NBC executive called it—a consensus politics, which never included everyone, but nonetheless felt solid. Now, people pine for that, and the loss contributes to polarization.

JONATHAN ALTER: Even historians like Louis Hartz in the 1950s developed what was called a “consensualist” school. That said, there was the George Wallace line and also economic nostalgia, like for the 1970s, before deindustrialization. How do you separate resentment about a changing America from the economic anxieties?

PAUL STARR: It’s a tragic coincidence: social movements overturned traditional hierarchies—white over Black, men over women, straight over queer—while economic shifts from technology and policy (free trade, deregulation) undermined manufacturing jobs and economic security in areas built on them. Both threatened the position of working men in different ways. It’s understandable that some felt Democrats weren’t looking after their interests on issues like trade and immigration, and resented the simultaneous social changes. That’s how the working-class political shift happened.

It’s understandable that some felt Democrats weren’t looking after their interests on issues like trade and immigration, and resented the simultaneous social changes. That’s how the working-class political shift happened.

JONATHAN ALTER: You don’t use “neoliberal” much in your book. I have a question about that term and its application to Carter, for example. Carter never deregulated Wall Street.

PAUL STARR: Look in my footnotes—I push back on Gary Gerstle’s Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism narrative. I don’t say neoliberalism caused everything. The term is used too broadly and often isn’t clear.

JONATHAN ALTER: I saw a great piece by David Greenberg about how “neoliberal” is used as a slur, rooted in misunderstandings. It unfairly slanders people like Charlie Peters [my mentor], Gary Hart—people committed to liberal ends but with different means.

PAUL STARR: There’s American “neoliberalism” à la Charlie Peters, and the European variant, which has a different background. I use it in a narrow way: the effort to bring back what used to be called “laissez-faire.”

JONATHAN ALTER: The broad use of “neoliberals” slimes all kinds of Democrats unfairly as if they supported the whole right-wing deregulatory agenda, which they and we at the Washington Monthly never did. The word should be retired.

PAUL STARR: I once ran The American Prospect from Princeton. In our second issue, Bob Kuttner criticized neoliberalism, which our co-founder Bob Reich read as an attack on him. Now he attacks neoliberalism.

JONATHAN ALTER: It shows how careers and positions change. Back to your book. You reminded me that, for long periods, a partisan press didn’t undermine democracy—maybe the fragmentation and intense opinion journalism isn’t as big a problem as it seems. In a way, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” pamphlet was basically a Substack newsletter. In that sense, the postwar “Cronkite consensus” was unique but maybe the return of the partisan press itself might give us new institutions and movements.

PAUL STARR: In my research, I argue the 1830s penny press—much more partisan—was part of a robust democracy, letting parties communicate with their supporters and drive higher voter turnout. Earlier historians called it the “Dark Age” of journalism, but I saw it as a free market of ideas.

Fact-checking today is much higher than decades ago, but it’s not balanced: one side honors facts; the other, less so. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” are a symptom. Yochai Benkler’s Network Propaganda tracks stories—on the left, falsehoods rarely reach the major news media like The New York Times; on the right, they often do reach Fox. The media ecosystems work differently.

JONATHAN ALTER: You make a distinction in your book, especially about Latinos, between identifying as and identifying with. What do you mean?

PAUL STARR: Most people think of identity as a matter of identifying as Black, Latino, or white. But “identifying with” means immigrants may aspire to be like successful white Americans, believing in the land of opportunity. Many Hispanics identify as white on the Census—racial categories don’t predict assimilation or political behavior clearly. Hispanic political patterns fluctuate a lot—2024’s vote for Trump isn’t necessarily a trend. There’s been a category error—a POC “illusion”—merging groups that don’t share political trajectories. That worked during the Obama era, but isn’t stable.

JONATHAN ALTER: That suggests Latinos might be becoming more like the Irish, Italians and Jews. Fascinating. Let’s look ahead—what’s the best way forward for Democrats?

PAUL STARR: Progressives and centrists have to find common ground. Old policy arguments—affirmative action, free trade—are moot. New challenges like AI and economic turmoil may require limiting great wealth and monopoly power. Both sides should find common ground on immigration. Most Americans actually favor immigration when managed properly, but Biden’s team squandered early goodwill by failing to control the border and losing public confidence.

JONATHAN ALTER: What about the “popularist” view—crafting positions based on what polls say the base wants, or do you favor bold, even unpopular stances?

PAUL STARR: Popular positions are better, but Democrats need to break stereotypes. New candidates must demonstrate they’re not the “same old” Democrats. Whether it’s progressive or moderate, it has to be a big-tent hybrid. The party can’t succeed if factions turn on each other. Democrats will need someone who’s not strictly in either camp—someone who can balance concerns, even on sensitive issues like trans rights or border enforcement.

JONATHAN ALTER: On immigration, for example, some Latino groups were labeled “pull up the ladder” types if they wanted more enforcement, but the administration missed deeper currents about values and fairness.

PAUL STARR: That backlash even came from other immigrants, pointing out unequal treatment. Immigration has been a social triumph, but the [Biden] administration lost control of the narrative. Many Americans, after Trump, were ready for sensible reform, but Biden’s team missed the moment.

JONATHAN ALTER: Thanks, Paul.

Note: This interview originally ran on the Substack Old Goats with Jonathan Alter with no paywall. Subscribe to Old Goats to support Jon’s work.

The post What Is the “American Contradiction”? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Lanky and awkward, Nicholas Thompson joined his high school’s indoor track team in his sophomore year. At first, he was just an average runner, but he trained hard, eager to improve. That winter, to his surprise, the coach entered him in a two-mile race at the New England Prep School Championships. Thompson did not anticipate being a top finisher. Indeed, expectations for his performance were so low that no one had bothered to tell him that the dimensions of the course were different from those at his own high school’s track; mid-race, he was puzzled by his own split times, even as he noticed that he was lapping other, more accomplished runners.  

To his astonishment, Thompson set a school record. For the first time, he had not allowed his expectations to determine his performance. Years later, Thompson reflected, “If I had understood how fast I was running, I wouldn’t have been able to run that fast. Because I didn’t know the track, because I didn’t know how long the laps were, I didn’t get scared and shut down my body. I just kept going. To do it, I had to first forget that I couldn’t do it.” 

Today, Nick Thompson is a trailblazer in the worlds of technology journalism and magazine publishing. A former editor at the Washington Monthly, Thompson oversaw The New Yorker’s website before becoming editor in chief of Wired. Now, as the CEO of The Atlantic, he has engineered a remarkable turnaround, steering the magazine to profitability, growing its subscriber base to more than 1 million, and overseeing a hiring spree of Pulitzer Prize–winning writers.  

He is also an exceptional, record-holding long-distance runner, who has achieved his greatest success in his 40s, long after most athletes have hit their prime. At age 44, he completed the Chicago Marathon in 2:29, a speed that elevated him to elite status, ranking him among the world’s fastest runners in his age group. Having achieved his goals as a marathon runner, he set his sights on ultramarathons—races of more than 26 miles. At 46, he set an American age group record for the 50K, and then became the top-ranked runner in the world for his age group for the 50-mile run.  

Thompson’s athletic life—and the way it has fueled his professional success and shaped his personal life—is the focus of The Running Ground, an engrossing, unconventional memoir. The book traces a serpentine course, simultaneously a family history, an autobiography, an inspirational guide to middle age, and, most meaningfully, a meditation on running and its lessons for a life fully lived.  

Thompson frames the book, subtitled “A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports,” around his relationship with his father, W. Scott Thompson, an avid runner and occasional marathoner, who introduced Nick to the sport. One of Thompson’s earliest memories is from the age of seven, when he stood in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge clutching a bottle of orange juice and a fresh pair of sneakers to hand to his dad, who was competing in the New York City Marathon.

In a poignant moment of reflection, Thompson writes, “I run because of my father. Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.” 

Thompson paints a vivid and compassionate portrait of Scott Thompson, a complex, flamboyant, inexhaustible figure of tremendous talent and intellect, who emerged from a hardscrabble childhood in rural Oklahoma to become a Rhodes scholar, a White House fellow, and a celebrated academic. But at midlife, the elder Thompson’s life careened off track. He came out of the closet and walked out on his family, including seven-year-old Nick. Thompson writes with remarkable frankness about his father’s foibles during the subsequent decades—Scott was an alcoholic and a self-proclaimed sex addict with a proclivity for very young men. He grew unable to hold a job, and spent his later years living in Asia, where he had fled to avoid the IRS and an unpaid tax bill of over $300,000.  

In Nick’s 20s, the two lived together—more like roommates than father and son—and even collaborated on a book. Their home was a Washington salon, with raucous parties filled with diplomats, congressmen, and young journalists. The two shared professional interests in foreign policy and politics, a passion for music and, most meaningfully, running. Thompson writes, “My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.” 

A love of running connects The Running Ground’s two primary narratives—the father-son memoir, and the story of Thompson’s athletic life. Little in Thompson’s early life foreshadowed the great success he has achieved as a marathoner and ultramarathoner in his 40s. At Stanford, a preseason stress fracture derailed his college running career. After graduation, he returned to the sport, flirting with longer distances, including the occasional marathon. Throughout his 20s, Thompson writes, “running was my unrequited crush. I trained like a dilettante and searched for physiological shortcuts that don’t exist. I humiliated myself in races.” Likewise, Thompson comments wryly that his “professional life was the same goat rodeo as my running. I had fallen in love with journalism. But journalism hadn’t fallen in love with me.” 

At 29, he got serious, about both running and his career. On the brink of quitting journalism and starting law school, he applied for a job as an editor of the technology magazine Wired. A week before enrolling at school, he took a grueling, 20-mile predawn run up Cadillac Mountain in Maine, and returned with a renewed focus. “I had just done the hard thing of running up a mountain,” Thompson told his wife. “And it convinced me that I could do this much harder thing of betting on myself. If I didn’t get the job at Wired, I’d write a book.” He de-matriculated from law school, got the job at Wired, then wrote a book. Then he found a coach, established a training regimen, and focused on achieving a major goal, breaking the three-hour time at the New York City Marathon. But just one year later, two weeks after smashing that goal with a 2:43 time (finishing in 146th place out of 37,000 entrants), he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Upon recovery, he was determined to repeat that finish, and did so triumphantly two years later, shaving 13 seconds off his personal record. 

Approaching 40, profoundly grateful for his health, and as a busy professional and devoted husband and father, Thompson had little additional time for training and assumed that he had reached his potential as a runner. Even so, he maintained his fitness and speed with remarkable consistency throughout the next decade, completing eight marathons within a minute or two of his pre-cancer time. 

In 2018, at age 43, Thompson received an email from a team at Nike, inviting him to participate in an experimental program to pair “regular” runners with elite coaches, to maximize performance. The email had landed at an opportune moment—Thompson was grieving the death of his father and contemplating the meaning of middle age. 

Thompson’s father had warned him repeatedly that his life would fracture at around age 40. His paternal grandfather’s life had also splintered in middle age, when a scandal derailed his career as a minister. For Thompson, the pattern was a cautionary tale—if middle age was a point of inflection, how might he avoid the fate of his father and grandfather before him?  

Running, he thought, might be the key. Scott Thompson had run his fastest race at age 40, before his life spun out of control. In his 40s and 50s, he continued to run, but sporadically, for shorter distances, and at slower speeds. Still, it was a healthy habit in an increasingly unhealthy life, and offered structure and discipline. Nick recalls, “As my father descended into mania, the days when he ran were the days he kept everything else in control. If he had run more, could he have done more?” 

Thompson committed to the training program. The Nike coaches challenged common assumptions about the inevitability of runners’ declines in their 30s and 40s, pointing to certain biological advantages that come with age, like the strengthening of tendons and the trade-off of speed for endurance. They offered new technologies that sharpened Thompson’s understanding of his gait, and pushed him to collect data that informed his training. They stressed the need for more intense practices—time spent running fast—rather than additional mileage, and the importance of key metrics Thompson had long ignored, along with recommendations for a healthier diet and a nonnegotiable eight hours of sleep.  

Thompson also benefited from the psychological insights of the training program, particularly a theory coined by the sports physiologist Tim Noakes, the “Central Governor Model,” which posits that pain and fatigue can be psychological phenomena, with the unconscious mind seeking to protect the body. This phenomenon explains racers’ ability to sprint at the end of a long race, despite physical exhaustion. Thompson had learned a similar lesson in his high school race 30 years earlier: “We all can go faster. We just need to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brains is our brains. Training becomes a hide-and-seek with oneself.” 

Thompson came to realize that his relatively modest running goals had held him back. Reflecting on the decade following his cancer recovery, he recalled that all he had wanted to do was “to match the Nick I had been before the diagnosis.” The goal was to maintain his prior speed, not exceed it. He recalls, “I hadn’t been able to run a fast marathon in the past because I hadn’t wanted to. Or, more precisely, I hadn’t really cared about going that fast because all I really wanted was something else.”  

Within a year, Thompson had broken his own record in the New York City Marathon by five minutes and then exceeded his highest expectations for the next seven races. He has done so despite training “only” 65 to 70 miles a week, far less than the mileage of a professional marathoner.  

Thompson muses about the reasons for his success—perhaps his body responds to training better than others’, and he has been remarkably free of injuries—but it is hard to escape the conclusion that he simply works harder and smarter than most. To lean on a cliché, Thompson reminds us that we can do hard things. He runs even in the most miserable weather, and regardless of the location—he has run through Times Square at midnight, through cities to the airport, and to black-tie events with a tuxedo tucked in his backpack. He runs despite aches and pains, nausea and fatigue. “The deeper truth,” he reminds readers, is that “you have to learn to run when you hurt, and you have to learn to hurt when you run.”  

Thompson’s own pre-race rituals and preparation offer a window into his own intensity and the arcana of the sport, in which an improvement of just a few seconds can be meaningful. For instance, before each race, Thompson pays careful attention to his feet, clipping his toenails, shaving the hairs on his toes, and applying Vaseline. As an ultramarathoner, he has taught himself to urinate while running. 

The reader is left craving more such details, both about the sport—for instance, that it is tradition for a record-breaker to drink champagne from his sweaty running shoe—and also the ways it has impacted Thompson’s professional life. The reader who comes to this memoir with a familiarity with Thompson’s storied career and reputation for a relentless work ethic and talent for untangling knotty problems will be disappointed by the virtual absence of workplace anecdotes. While he describes his major career pivots (and the long, contemplative runs he often takes while weighing his options), Thompson writes in a too-broad fashion about the ways in which running has improved his professional life. For example, he muses, “I had learned that our minds create limits for us when we’re afraid of failure, not because it’s actually time to slow or stop.” The memoir is filled with similar axioms about the instructive lessons from running, like teaching concentration, the value of discipline, and the need for setting goals, but is disappointingly light on specifics about the impacts on his own professional life.  

Thompson’s prose is lean and spare, like the strides of a runner. At times, he veers into inspirational cliché, but at its best, the writing is almost Zen-like, when he captures the quality of running in nature, perfectly in sync with the rhythm of each step. He describes being so in touch with his body’s rhythms that he can run a mile and, without glancing at his watch, predict the time within a second or two. While most of Thompson’s training is on mundane urban courses, including his daily eight-mile round trip commute, his description of runs among the mountains of New England exude sheer joy: “To run through the Andover bird sanctuary in October is to cross into a Winslow Homer painting. The palette changes subtly each day as the maple trees flip from green to scarlet while the oak trees stubbornly hold on to their russet leaves.” 

Thompson intersperses his own narrative with five excellent chapters profiling other exceptional long-distance runners. The profiles interrupt the biographical flow of the memoir, but they are among the most compelling stories in the book and serve as a reminder that not all runners are motivated by a competitive drive.  

The most interesting of those profiled is Suprabha Beckjord, a world-record-holding ultramarathoner. For 13 years, Beckjord completed the 3,100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, organized by the Indian guru Sri Chinmoy. This astonishing race course—a distance greater than from San Francisco to New York—consists simply of circumnavigating around a public high school occupying a single square block in Queens, New York. Successful runners complete approximately 60 miles per day—day after day, for nearly two months—throughout the hot New York City summer. For Beckjord, the race is one of spiritual transcendence and self-awareness, and the mundane course offers an opportunity to notice the tiniest variations in one’s surroundings—an insect on a tree, a subtle change in the weather, a chip in the sidewalk. 

The Running Ground crackles with big ideas, about intergenerational inheritance, the power of love and forgiveness, the inevitability of aging, the mind-body connection, and the value of hard work. The memoir’s intertwined stories—Thompson’s relationship with his father alongside Thompson’s own journey as a marathon runner hitting his stride midlife—are compelling narratives. There is so much of interest in this lean, slim memoir. The downside is that Thompson races toward the finish line, without offering sufficient time to fully explore each of these individual themes. He writes, “One can run as a way to seek spiritual awakening, and one can run to fulfill ambition. It’s often hard to do both.” Perhaps a memoir, too, is best written as a journey of spiritual awakening, a meandering journey of self-knowledge, rather than a sprint to conclusion.  

The post Hitting His Stride  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As one of President Joe Biden’s top economic advisers, I frequently made my way out to the White House North Lawn to give interviews to the media about the state of the U.S. economy. Especially as the pandemic-induced recession faded in the rearview mirror, I was out there hundreds of times touting how the unemployment rate was at 50-year lows on the back of remarkably strong job growth. Inflation was falling and inflation-adjusted pay was rising.

And yet in every single interview, I got the same question: So why aren’t people feeling it? Why so much good data amid so many bad vibes?

In fact, the question was not hard to answer. It comes down to one word, a word that defines the dominant economic challenge with which American families have been struggling for years: affordability. Whether it’s housing, child care, health care, groceries, utilities, insurance, or other costs, significant numbers of Americans have found that these and other critical goods and services are either out of reach or so pricey that, after they’ve paid for them, they don’t have enough money left to even think about getting ahead.

This duality between the data and how people experience the economy is the subject of The Mismeasurement of America, by Gene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency during the Clinton administration. Focusing on unemployment, wages, inflation, and the growing economic distance between Americans at the top and the bottom of the income scale, Ludwig argues that the problem is that the numbers I was touting were, if not quite wrong, then “profoundly misleading.” He then develops his own set of numbers, which he argues better explain why people have long felt a lot worse about the economy than you’d glean from the government’s top-line statistics. While Ludwig is right that top-line numbers, all of which are broad averages, fail to present a full picture of how the different income classes are faring, that’s not a “mismeasurement” problem. It instead reflects the impossibility of encompassing in just a few numbers something as complex and disparate as the U.S. economy. A better title for his book might have been “The Incomplete Measurement of America.”

Ludwig’s critique of inflation statistics is particularly germane to the affordability crisis. The Consumer Price Index is an overall metric that averages out the changes in prices faced by 90 percent of the population. (The CPI does not include prices in extremely rural areas, farm households, and religious communities, among other exceptions.) Ludwig reasonably worries, however, that the average obscures important differences in inflation between income groups.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the CPI, has itself been looking into this and they find that from 2005 to 2024, prices rose 66 percent for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale but just 57 percent for those at the top. This disparity is a double disadvantage: Such households face both lower incomes and higher prices. Ludwig’s adjusted CPI, which he calls the “True Living Cost,” or TLC, captures this dynamic by significantly up-weighting in the index the goods and services that dominate the consumption basket of less-well-off households, including housing, health care, food, and child care.

While this is the right way to drill down on the affordability challenges facing low- and middle-income families today, Ludwig misses one of the more important positive price developments of our time. For technology goods, like computers and smartphones, the TLC registers large price increases while the CPI registers the opposite. The CPI has it right, reflecting a rare cost decline that’s actively making us better off. The BLS statisticians adjust for the fact that computers and cell phones are remarkably more powerful than they used to be. Decades ago, it would have cost millions of dollars for a computer to do what a $700 laptop can do today. Adjusted for quality, the cost of such technology has fallen sharply over the years, and this decline has improved consumer welfare. Yet the TLC appears to ignore these quality improvements and somehow has technology costs soaring over time.

For another example of how Ludwig offers an overreaching solution to a real measurement challenge, consider unemployment. Ludwig argues that instead of the 4.3 percent unemployment rate for August reported by the BLS, what he calls the TRU—the “True Rate of Unemployment”—is 24.7 percent. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of unemployment in America will realize that Ludwig has either made a mistake or is aggressively redefining unemployment. The last time unemployment was that high was during the Great Depression.

Ludwig’s “unemployment” rate, however, includes a lot of people who are, in fact, working, both part-timers and low earners. His terminology is thus off, as is his critique of the current measurement system, which is clearly, transparently, and consistently measuring what it says it’s measuring. If you looked for a job and you didn’t find one, you’re unemployed. That simple and intuitive definition has revealed important information about labor market conditions for many decades.

But as Ludwig’s adjustments reveal, there were a lot more underemployed and underpaid people in the American labor force in August than 4.3 percent. That doesn’t make the official unemployment rate wrong or misleading. Though Donald Trump, who recently fired the commissioner of the BLS, might claim otherwise, our statistical agencies continue to rigorously churn out valid, reliable numbers. (Trump doesn’t like that they show the tariffs raising prices and cracks forming in the job market, but that’s actually a testament to their accuracy.) But Ludwig’s metric helps to bridge the gap between what the official jobless numbers say and the struggle that many working Americans go through every day.

Extracting from these weedy details, and recognizing that the current system is not mismeasuring America, Ludwig’s book provides an important bridge between good data and bad vibes. As he shows, in an economy where inequality has been on the rise for decades, where millions are underemployed, where poor people’s inflation rises faster than that of the rich, averages increasingly fail to tell the full economic story.

Of course, many authors, most notably Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, have made this point before. But by looking at the problem through the lens of jobs, hours worked, wages paid, the costs of housing (and utilities, such as electricity), child care, health care, and so on, Ludwig’s measurements help to shine a light on a policy agenda to address the affordability crisis. His underemployment rate would come down, for example, if we helped involuntary part-timers move to full-time schedules. (Ludwig would correctly note that such a change would not show up in a lower unemployment rate.) An affordability agenda, which Neale Mahoney and I describe in a new brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, would help make it easier for economically stretched families to afford housing (by making it easier and cheaper to build), child care (through targeted subsidies), and health care (reversing coverage cuts, Medicare buy-in) in ways that would directly feed into Ludwig’s alternate cost-of-living measure.

What we should take from this book, then, is not that America is mismeasured. It’s that the gap between what the top-line numbers report and how folks feel about their economic situation is, in part, a function of the increase in economic inequality, of how far they’ve fallen relative to the average. Should we want to better understand how America is really doing, we must dig deeper into the numbers.

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As the world soured on Big Tech platforms in the “techlash” of the late 2010s, the conversation centered on how technology was harming its users. An avalanche of best-selling books, magazine think pieces, and documentaries sounded alarms about the annihilation of privacy and attention spans, crises of loneliness and teen depression, and echo chambers and political polarization. This era of commentary connected broad societal problems back to the intimate relationship between tech platforms and the individual.

The Age of Extraction, by the Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, takes a different route to the conclusion that Big Tech is destabilizing society: one focused on the economic relationship between platforms and other businesses. Wu, a founding father of the “neo-Brandeisian” anti-monopoly movement that influenced antitrust policy under the Biden administration, contends that platforms such as Google and Amazon have become essential commercial infrastructure and use this power to extract ever-more value from smaller businesses in the form of exploitative fees and pricing. He calls artificially intelligent platform extraction “the emergent form of economic power in our time,” and suggests that it is a driver of inequality and ultimately the rise of authoritarianism.

This argument won’t be revelatory to those steeped in anti-monopoly debates. Nor does the book serve as an especially persuasive introduction to the topic for those encountering it for the first time. Still, Wu’s writing is lively and lucid and he provides some fresh insights, especially on where the power of platforms is headed in the age of AI, and the dangers this poses to the republic.

The Age of Extraction is divided into two parts. The first delivers a rendition of the familiar Big Tech hero-to-villain story, framed around the platforms’ evolution from “enablement” of economic activity to the “extraction” of value. The second, shorter section looks at the global trend toward political instability and democratic backsliding.

In the optimistic late 1990s and 2000s, Wu reminds us, there was never supposed to be a “big” tech. Pundits predicted that the internet, by lowering barriers to business entry and favoring nimbleness, would usher in a decentralized, egalitarian economy. The business writer Seth Godin declared that Small Is the New Big; the blogger Glenn Reynolds envisioned An Army of Davids replacing old corporate Goliaths. The tech thought leader Jeff Jarvis, in his 2009 book, What Would Google Do?, declared that “the Lilliputians have triumphed. The economies of scale must now compete with the economies of small.”

According to Wu, such predictions were based in part on the perception that new tech platforms like Google and Amazon were “public-spirited town squares that existed to help others, almost like corporate charities.” The platforms played into this perception—especially Google, with its famous “Don’t Be Evil” slogan. A letter the company’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote to investors in 2004 explained that Google would do “good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains.” But in the early days, they also lived up to it. Amazon created Amazon Marketplace, which empowered countless Americans to start small businesses using its built-in customer base and logistics capabilities. In return, the company asked only for a reasonable fee: about 19 percent of a seller’s revenue as of 2014.

But as Amazon cemented itself as the dominant e-commerce platform—in large part by subsidizing shoppers and hoovering up potential rivals—it began to put the squeeze on sellers. It ratcheted up monthly fees and introduced a major implicit fee by placing rows of sponsored results at the top of search results pages. (By 2024, sellers were paying Amazon more than $56 billion per year to make their products visible.) By 2023, fees averaged more than 50 percent of sellers’ revenue. And yet, with Amazon commanding such a large market, sellers couldn’t walk away. Wu shares anecdotes of entrepreneurs who built thriving e-commerce businesses largely through Amazon, only to be put out of business as the fees mounted up.

If Wu wanted to persuade readers that we are truly living in an age of extraction, some additional case studies might have been helpful. Journalists such as the Washington Monthly’s Phillip Longman have compared Big Tech platforms to the railroad monopolies of the Gilded Age for the better part of a decade. There are plenty of other examples to choose from. Google’s dominance in “ad tech,” the stack of platforms connecting advertisers and web publishers, allows it to extract 30 percent of publisher ad revenue through various fees. Apple’s commission on iOS in-app purchases reached 30 percent before a recent court ruling forced the company to allow app developers to route purchases through their own websites. Uber’s “take rate” on ride fares is dynamic and opaque, but it increased dramatically in recent years and has been shown to range from 40 to 70 percent.

Puzzlingly, The Age of Extraction leaves these examples on the table, not even giving them a brief mention. Readers might be left wondering if platform extraction is a problem that extends beyond Amazon as Wu moves ahead to explore tangentially related topics. One chapter observes that the internet failed to translate into “the rise of a new creative class holding significant wealth,” and that even the influencers who have found financial success are “a laboring class” with stressful lives—although it does not tie this reality to any specific extractive practices by platforms. (Wu doesn’t mention, for example, content creators’ paltry share of YouTube and X ad revenue.) Another chapter describes how private equity roll-ups of specialist medical practices raise patient costs while degrading quality of care, and how the mega-landlord Invitation Homes has exploited renters by consolidating local housing markets and then systematically raising rents and piling on absurd “junk fees.” Wu argues that these phenomena represent “platform power beyond tech,” because private equity-backed medical groups bill themselves to doctors they hope to buy as convenient administrative intermediaries, and Invitation Homes uses technology to buy and manage thousands of homes.

The freshest material in The Age of Extraction comes in Wu’s analysis of how Big Tech is diversifying and augmenting its platform ecosystems to maintain their power. Wu describes Google, Apple, and Amazon’s splashy ventures into entertainment and sports broadcasting as an effort to become “fully spun cocoons of life and living.” And, of course, the platforms are now “investing heavily in owning or controlling the relevant talent, data, and technologies” of the AI race. OpenAI and Anthropic are backed by Microsoft and Amazon, respectively; Google, Meta, and Elon Musk’s X are developing popular models in-house and control key distribution channels. Thus while AI technology may disrupt certain Big Tech products, Wu points out that AI market structures appear “headed in the direction of reinforcing [Big Tech’s] advantage.”

Just a few decades ago, Francis Fukuyama was predicting The End of History, “the old dictators, cranky old men, were on their way out,” and “a kinder, gentler future was meant to be on its way in,” Wu writes. “What went wrong?” His answer is a bit slippery, particularly with respect to how much weight it assigns to the tech platforms that are the main subject of his book. At first he blames “the destabilizing effects of laissez-faire capitalism,” and concedes that “the tech platforms are not nearly the entirety of this story.” At another point, he blames “the emergence of platform capitalism and broader trends in the economy.” The theory he actually fleshes out centers on corporate consolidation generally, although the tech platforms certainly fit in.

Wu sketches the progression from consolidation to authoritarianism as a “sequence in five steps, each based on known and well-studied tendencies.” Monopolization is followed by extraction, which, “by its nature … creates a narrow class of winners” and a “broader class” of losers: “consumers who pay more, workers who are paid less, and local, regional, smaller, and medium-sized businesses that are acquired or driven out of business.” This inequality leads to the emergence of mass resentment, then democratic failure—“compounded if the state is understood or credibly portrayed as supporting and perpetuating the ongoing extraction”—and ultimately the rise of the strongman. In a play on the title of the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek’s iconic book, Wu calls this progression “the real road to serfdom.”

He presents this as a sort of natural law, and doesn’t make much of an effort to support it empirically. That’s not much of an issue with respect to the latter part of the causal chain, as the link between inequality and resentment and political instability is fairly self-evident. But readers might need some evidence to be satisfied that monopolization is a significant driver of inequality to begin with. Wu could have mentioned the work of the economists Marshall Steinbaum, José Azar, and Ioana Marinescu, who have connected employer concentration in labor markets to lower wages. From the consumer perspective, he could have surveyed anti-monopoly research into how consolidation is making household cost centers like health care and groceries more expensive. Or he could have deployed a historical example, such as that of the Gilded Age, to illustrate his point. But as with his argument about platform extraction, Wu declines to elaborate.

Nevertheless, The Age of Extraction concludes—after a few short chapters taking down the ideas that markets are self-correcting and that crypto technology will solve inequality—by presenting policy solutions to the expansion and abuse of monopoly power as a broad “architecture of equality.” The solutions begin with antitrust. Wu mentions that antitrust enforcement “staged a comeback” under the Biden administration and lists major cases, although he doesn’t explain how specifically they could mitigate extraction. Other solutions could include utility-style regulation and price caps, which Wu points out have proved successful beyond the utility sector. For instance, “swipe fees” are capped in the European credit and debit payment processing markets. New “common carrier” rules, such as those historically used to govern railroads and telecommunications networks, could prevent dominant tech platforms from discriminating in favor of their own products or services. And quarantines and “line of business” restrictions could prevent platforms from leveraging their preexisting monopolies to dominate new markets, such as artificial intelligence.

At around 200 pages, The Age of Extraction is a fun and breezy read, and it will hold the attention of casual readers even if they do not end up convinced of its grandest claims. But for neo-Brandeisian true believers, the book is likely to frustrate. At a pivotal moment for the movement, with its Biden-era champions out of power and the Trump administration reversing much of their agenda, Wu is content to retread familiar intellectual territory rather than illuminating what comes next. And amid a contentious factional battle to shape the future of the Democratic Party, the thinness of the book’s argumentation makes it unlikely to win hearts and minds. For an advocate of Wu’s talents, The Age of Extraction represents a missed opportunity on multiple fronts.

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A paradox haunts books by contemporary Supreme Court justices. Publishers give the justices huge sums—$2 million, in the case of Justice Amy Coney Barrett—to write monographs insisting that Supreme Court judging is apolitical. Publishers provide these guarantees because Supreme Court judging in the United States is hyperpolitical: Partisans can be trusted to buy and praise the books written by justices on their side of the political fence. 

This paradox has a predictable literary consequence: The books are almost always bad. Recent books by Justice Neil Gorsuch and former Justice Stephen Breyer were widely and rightly panned by reviewers, though purchased in large numbers by partisan readers. Neither book explained why publishers, bookstores, producers, and influencers roll out red carpets for people whose primary job is supposedly to follow, to the letter, instructions given in past centuries.

Justice Barrett’s new book, Listening to the Law, meets the low bar set by her colleagues. She promises an accessible (not scholarly) insider’s guide to Supreme Court practice. The justices, Barrett tells us, like one another, attend parties together, and manage to disagree without rancor. Judging, she insists, is a matter of humility, of listening carefully to the law made by others. Apart from an informative discussion of textualism, the method with which Barrett is most associated, the book offers no account of why serious scholars—including, one suspects, Professor Barrett—think actual judicial practice is far more complicated than simply discovering (or “listening to”) the law made by others. The effect is less analysis than campaign biography, a self-presentation in the style of politicians explaining why they can be trusted with power.

The resemblance to political memoir is not accidental. Barrett, like her colleagues, aims to humanize herself. She assures readers that her pre-Court “life was good, but like anyone’s, it was not perfect”; that “these last years of being in the public eye have toughened me up”; that “all human relationships depend on kindness and humility.” Such bromides could have been lifted from a stump speech. Justices, like candidates, must persuade their audiences that they are relatable, trustworthy, and possessed of the moral fiber to do their jobs. The difference is that candidates eventually face voters. Justices, armed with life tenure, face only history.

Indeed, one of Barrett’s most insistent themes is precisely that life tenure guarantees independence. “The Constitution’s guarantees of life tenure and salary protection for federal judges,” she writes, “are designed to fortify a judge’s resolve to stand firm against the tide of public opinion.” The only evidence she provides for this claim is Alexander Hamilton’s assertion, made more than 200 years ago in Federalist no. 78, that “nothing will contribute so much as [life tenure] to that independent spirit in the judges which must be essential to the faithful performance of so arduous a duty.” Throughout, Listening to the Law celebrates the “genius” of the Framers. What was good enough for 18th-century minds ought to be good enough for 21st-century citizens.

An accessible guide to constitutional practice might note that very few constitutional democracies grant judges life tenure, and those that do (Canada and the United Kingdom) still require retirement no later than 75. Those judiciaries seem at least as independent as federal courts in the United States. A Brennan Center for Justice study by Lisa Hilbink of the University of Minnesota found that other democracies achieve judicial independence through shorter terms, mandatory retirement, or both, with no decline in performance. Indeed, the supreme court of Israel, which imposes mandatory retirement no later than 70, has far more aggressively challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies than the U.S. Supreme Court has challenged Donald Trump’s policies. Similarly, the lack of life tenure has not inhibited the supreme courts of India and Germany from declaring constitutional amendments unconstitutional. 

Equally central to Barrett’s civics is the notion that judicial review exists to protect minorities from majority tyranny. Aware of our fallibility, the wise Framers of the Constitution created an institution that would ultimately declare segregated schools unconstitutional, protect free speech from local censors, and prevent police officers from physically abusing persons suspected of crime. The trouble, which Barrett conveniently neglects, is that the most difficult and consequential cases pit one minority against another. Consider Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021), which concerned whether the city could exclude a Catholic foster care agency that refused to work with same-sex couples. Both parties plausibly claimed to be protecting vulnerable minorities. Philadelphia argued that it was protecting LGBTQ families from discrimination; the Catholic agency argued that it was being discriminated against for its religious beliefs. 

History also undermines the slogan. Before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), it is difficult to identify a Supreme Court decision striking down a federal law most Americans would now say protected deserving minorities. More often it went the other way: Dred Scott (1856) denied Congress the power to ban slavery in the territories; the Civil Rights Cases (1883) voided Reconstruction-era protections; Pollock (1895) struck down the federal income tax; Carter Coal (1936) invalidated New Deal reforms. Slaveholders, too, claimed the mantle of an oppressed minority. As today, one person’s “worthy minority” was another’s entrenched interest, and few historians would tally the Court’s record as consistently protective of the vulnerable.

The deeper problem is not just that the Court often failed in practice, but that it has never had a clear method for identifying which minorities deserve protection. That choice is inherently political, so Barrett just ignores it. Listening to the Law never even hints at the difficulty of identifying the minorities that merit judicial protection, or whether the history of judicial review evinces any tendency for courts to make the right choices in this regard. Once one looks at the actual record of judicial review, what emerges is less a steady defense of the downtrodden minorities than a scattershot series of interventions, many of them on behalf of entrenched elites. 

As Mark Tushnet has noted, judicial review amounts to “noise around zero,” producing essentially random deviations—sometimes good, often bad—from what the political system would otherwise generate. When a pattern can be discerned, it is a tendency to side with the executive over Congress and with legal elites when they differ from the less educated or less wealthy. Professor Barrett is almost certainly aware of this scholarship, but Justice Barrett leaves readers with the comforting civics textbook version, assuring them that courts stand reliably with the powerless when in fact the historical record points to something closer to the opposite.

Listening to the Law likewise assures readers that justices decide cases on law, not politics. A few anecdotes about particular justices, Barrett’s willingness to sustain death sentences despite her moral opposition to capital punishment, and statistics demonstrating that approximately half the decisions the justices make are unanimous constitute the entire evidence for this assertion. No scholar paints with so broad a brush. A high percentage of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decisions concern matters such as the proper interpretation of the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a matter on which most people who are not retired have weak if any policy preferences. 

As politically conscious citizens observe, when the justices decide major cases on which the political parties divide, the justices appointed by Republican presidents almost always take positions favored by the Republican Party and the justices appointed by Democratic presidents almost always take positions favored by the Democratic Party. Consider abortion, campaign finance, and the recent Supreme Court practice of using the emergency, or shadow, docket to block lower federal court rulings temporarily enjoining Trump administration executive orders. A citizen who bet at even odds that the justices would vote consistently with the president that appointed them would gain a fortune. When exceptions exist, the tendency is for the justice to side with more moderate members of the party against more extreme members. That some Roberts Court justices may side with the Wall Street Journal editorial page over Donald Trump when the justices rule on tariffs hardly demonstrates a court above politics.

The free exercise clause offers perhaps the starkest example of politics shaping judicial decision making. During the second half of the 20th century, conservative originalists were committed to the proposition that the free exercise clause as originally understood provided religious believers with no exemptions from generally applicable laws. This point was emphasized in the Reagan administration’s Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation in 1988, a core statement of conservation constitutional principles at the time. Justice Antonin Scalia made it explicit in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), holding that worshippers had no right to use peyote in religious ceremonies when Oregon law banned the drug entirely. 

By the early 21st century, however, evangelical Protestants—core members of the Republican coalition—became the typical free exercise claimants. A miracle promptly occurred. Republican-appointed justices discovered that the 1791 clause had always guaranteed exemptions, or that laws burdening evangelicals were exceptions to the no-exemptions principles. Who knew? Religious organizations may now engage in what would otherwise be considered employment discrimination by designating employees or teachers as ministers, as decided in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020). 

The near-perfect correlation between partisan affiliation and votes goes unacknowledged in Listening to the Law. The message is simple: Trust us.

This, finally, is the problem with the genre itself. By presenting judging as a realm of pure law, insulated from politics, the justices offer a picture so implausible that it makes the opposite claim—that judging is nothing but politics—more credible. In their effort to inspire confidence, they deepen cynicism. If the only choices are civics class pieties or unvarnished partisanship, many readers will conclude, not unreasonably, that the latter is closer to the truth. Publishers, of course, will not mind. Judicial celebrity sells, and the market for reassurance is deep. Barrett closes with optimism that the constitutional project will endure, with no hint of constitutional crisis or recognition that many Americans believe one already exists. That is for serious studies of law and politics. Barrett’s purpose, like that of her colleagues’ books, is to persuade readers that all will be well so long as the justices remain in charge.

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Taxes make civilization possible. When the ancient Greeks introduced democracy roughly 2,500 years ago, they implemented a progressive taxation prototype so that those who benefited most bore the heaviest burden of maintaining the civilized society that enabled and protected their wealth. Athenians also honored the rich for paying their taxes. The U.S. Constitution itself was born of a tax crisis—a story hardly anyone knows. In 1787 we scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which had reduced the United States to begging for alms from 13 parsimonious states, and created a new republic that could tax its citizens. As I have long told my law students, a government is its taxes.

Every American schoolchild is taught, in the official version of the reasons we declared independence from the mad tyrant in London, that taxes can oppress and even destroy. But they can also enrich the politically connected and their enterprises. In a democracy, the design of tax systems is central, and America today suffers a monstrosity that burdens most workers more than billionaires.

Enter Ray D. Madoff’s Second Estate, a book about the role of federal taxes in worsening inequality. Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, argues that income and wealth have become dangerously disconnected, that the rich can live tax-free by borrowing against assets, and that charitable vehicles like private foundations and so-called donor-advised funds worsen inequality rather than serve the public. Her title evokes the French nobility whom the crown exempted from taxes, a favor that helped sustain their lavish lifestyles while impoverishing everyone else. 

To understand Madoff’s book, imagine that you are an economist from another solar system, sent to stealthily observe earthly conditions. Your report would note that in wealthy countries taxes are more than a third of economic activity, poor ones half that much, and that contentment is highest in high-tax countries. 

Since high taxes align with prosperity, you might expect taxes to be something people love and embrace. Instead, you find that tax is a vile three-letter word, especially in the largest wealthy nation in the world. A society that cannot function without taxation has taught itself to see taxes as illegitimate.

It is this paradox that gives Second Estate its energy. Madoff contends that taxes in the United States do not simply raise revenue—they allocate privilege, as well. Workers face immediate withholding, wage reporting, and payroll levies, while owners of capital enjoy loopholes and leniency. A telling detail: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used the child tax credit that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1997. Bezos got this benefit because the way Congress wrote the tax law, he is a pauper. 

How do gazillionaires pose as paupers? Congress lets them borrow against their assets, spending freely while showing no earnings. For years, Elon Musk paid himself a one-dollar salary while borrowing against Tesla stock to finance a lifestyle of palaces and private jets. On their tax forms, these men look poor.

Anyone can borrow, of course, but unless your wealth grows faster than your debts and interest, you will be crushed. For billionaires, whose fortunes compound faster than they can spend, borrowing is a tax-free fountain of cash. This “buy, borrow, die” strategy—buy appreciating assets, borrow against them during life, and die with the gains untaxed thanks to the step-up in basis—has become the template for dynastic wealth in America.

Allowing the super-rich to borrow and spend their untaxed wealth without bearing any of the burden of supporting the government that protects their lives and fortunes is just the start of a cornucopia of tax favors for the richest of the rich.

Consider income taxes. Workers pay higher tax rates than owners of capital. Earn a million dollars in wages, and your marginal tax rate is 37 percent. Realize a million in capital gains, and you pay 23.8 percent. That means a well-paid worker forks over more than half as much to Uncle Sam than the investor who cashes in. On top of that, workers pay payroll taxes. Social Security applies only up to a wage cap, but Medicare applies to every dollar earned, with a surtax on high earners. The few hundred Americans whose salaries exceed $50 million pay Medicare tax on every dollar. No investor pays anything comparable on their gains.

On this point, which was central to my 2003 tax book Perfectly Legal, Madoff is persuasive. America really does operate two tax systems: one for wage earners, whose income is independently verified and taxed at the source; and another for private business and real estate owners, who decide how and when to report, or whether to report at all. This asymmetry explains why workers cannot cheat and investors often can.

But the strength of Second Estate is also where its weaknesses appear. Nowhere does Madoff write that inequality would be reduced if the Social Security tax applied to all wages. Removing the cap would generate a torrent of revenue, shoring up its coming shortfalls and enabling increased benefits, particularly for the poorest among the elderly and disabled, thereby reducing inequality. Madoff calls payroll taxes “hidden,” even though they appear on every pay stub. She repeatedly cites the capital gains tax as 20 percent, omitting the 3.8 percent surtax imposed to fund the Affordable Care Act. She writes that income, capital gains, gift, and estate tax rates stack to produce levies as high as 74 percent, a mathematical fiction. These mistakes are not trivial. From a tax law professor, readers expect precision.

Equally troubling is what Madoff leaves out. In addition to Social Security tax reform, the word audit never appears in her book. Yet enforcement is the fulcrum of taxation. Congress requires employers to report wages and withhold taxes, but trusts business owners to self-report income, deductions, and estate transfers. 

Unsurprisingly, cheating is rampant. Donald Trump, for example, claimed fictitious companies and phony tax losses for at least seven years. Unless audited, such returns stand. And audits have collapsed. IRS auditors of large corporations cost taxpayers about $200,000 annually in salary and benefits, yet uncover nearly $20 million each in unpaid taxes. Any rational business would expand that workforce. Congressional Republicans instead decimated it. The IRS reported that in 2022 it completed just five audits of individual international tax returns, down from almost 8,300 in 2014.  The IRS completed only 38 audits of America’s 26,500 ultra-high-income individuals in 2018. In some years, low-income Americans have been more likely to be audited than those making more than $100,000. The collapse of enforcement is not a footnote: It is one of the chief reasons inequality has widened. By ignoring it, Madoff misses the engine that makes her strongest anecdotes possible.

Where she does train her fire, at length, is on philanthropy. Madoff devotes much of her book to what she characterizes as abuses by private foundations and by an equivalent used by many merely prosperous Americans (including my wife and me) called donor-advised funds.

She is right that some donor-advised accounts sit idle, and that wealthy families sometimes use foundations to maintain influence under the cover of charity. But her treatment makes them seem like the beating heart of inequality when in fact they are a small piece of the picture. The combined $1.7 trillion in endowments and donor-advised funds may sound vast, but it represents about 1 percent of national wealth. By comparison, capital gains preferences, gutted audits, and payroll tax caps shield sums that dwarf the charitable sector.

What is most frustrating is how little credit she gives to the practical safeguards that exist. Private foundations are required by law to pay out 5 percent of assets annually. In practice they exceed that. In 2022, the total figure was $103 billion—6.4 percent of assets. Donor-advised funds also pay out generously, though individual accounts can stagnate. To deal with this, many community foundations already enforce a rule that after three years of inactivity, the donor loses advisory privileges and the sponsoring foundation makes the grants. It is a sensible fix Congress could easily adopt. Madoff prefers to tar the entire vehicle with insinuations of a “wink-and-nod” culture.

That insinuation is not only unfair, it is demonstrably false. My wife, who ran a community foundation for three decades, oversaw thousands of grants each year. To test Madoff’s charge, I tried to recommend a grant from our family’s donor-advised fund to an organization that was authorized by Congress but not a 501(c)(3) charity. The software instantly blocked it. No wink, no nod. Her blanket suspicion of impropriety is less an argument than a smear, and it distracts from the real issues: how to make permanent charitable capital more accountable without destroying its usefulness.

Surprisingly, Madoff never questions why giving away appreciated stock subject to a 23.8 percent tax can produce a 37 percent tax savings instead of being limited to the value of the tax avoided.

Madoff also misses the history of reform proposals that could have helped her case. More than half a century ago, the charity reformers Pablo Eisenberg and Norton Kiritz urged Congress to require private foundations to evolve so that boards would eventually be controlled by outsiders rather than heirs. The Filer Commission, a national study of philanthropy in the 1970s, endorsed the idea on the grounds that “citizen empowerment” groups needed a chance to compete with the older, larger institutions that then enjoyed a near monopoly. By ignoring this history, Madoff forfeits the chance to show how her critique fits into a longer tradition of efforts to democratize philanthropy. 

Still, the book has value. She reminds readers that taxation is not an afterthought but the core act of democratic life.

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Since Donald Trump regained the White House, news consumers have been inundated with stories about “pronatalism”—the ideology and movement gaining ground on the right that views falling birth rates as an existential crisis and encourages families to have more children. Trump has called himself the “fertilization president”; his ex-henchman Elon Musk has 14 children (give or take); and Vice President J. D. Vance has called for more children to be born and derided childless women. Because some of the movement’s loudest and most-covered champions are staunch conservatives with clear, if only sometimes overtly stated, ambitions to restore traditional gender roles, or even advance eugenics, many progressives’ initial reaction has been to consider the movement creepy and distasteful. Others have expressed concern that it will lead to the walking back of women’s rights. Yet a current of curiosity has crept into left-of-center media as people wrestle with what dramatic depopulation would really mean for standards of living across the globe. Vox published a story on pronatalism in May with the subtitle “Don’t let polarization distract you from one of the most important issues the world faces.” A month later, The New York Times ran a feature on the subject, “The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the Birthrate.” 

A new entry into this conversation is Dean Spears and Michael Geruso’s After the Spike. Spears and Geruso, both economists at the University of Texas at Austin, make the case that we should all be concerned about population decline as an existential threat. They contrast “two futures”: one in which global population peaks at 10 billion about 60 years from now and then stabilizes; and another in which it begins to fall, shrinking to 2 billion—the same as in 1927—within the next three centuries. Unless something changes, the authors contend, the second scenario is more likely. In such a world, they warn, standards of living will stagnate; fewer people means fewer innovations to improve our quality of life, from music to coffee to vaccines. More gravely, they claim, less innovation and fewer resources would cripple humanity’s ability to tackle major challenges, whether developing climate solutions or deflecting an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.

Spears and Geruso’s second scenario can sound alarmist. The first two chapters of their book lay out widely acknowledged facts. The birth rate is already below replacement rate in more countries than not. Further, as countries get richer, their birth rates go down; population decline will not be contained to currently wealthy, whiter countries. Nonetheless, not everyone sees this leading to catastrophe. The UN, for example, agrees that there is an 80 percent chance that the world population will peak in this century, but predicts that the peak will be followed by a “gradual decline,” not a crash.

Still, quibbling about the speed of population decline risks missing Spears and Geruso’s central point: Concern about shrinking numbers need not imply conservative views on gender roles, reproductive freedom, or indifference to climate change. (Geruso, after all, served on Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.) They know that persuading progressives is an uphill climb, which is why, after establishing the demographic facts, they immediately turn to dismantling the case against population growth. This early section, “The Case Against People,” tackles fears that more humans would worsen climate change, undermine women’s equality, or simply condemn children to suffering. The following section, “The Case for People,” flips the script: More people, the authors argue, means more creativity and innovation, and thus a greater capacity to solve problems large and small. They also advance an ethical claim: Future people “have a stake that counts,” and we should believe that they want to exist and that their lives will “have value.” The book ends by dismissing the usual policy levers—cash incentives and coercion—as either ineffective or immoral, and calls for new thinking on how to avert a demographic collapse. 

Spears and Geruso’s choice to rebut their critics before making their own case is unusual but effective. Their climate chapter, in particular, forces readers to confront a basic reality: The timelines for climate change and population decline don’t match. Barring something drastic, the global population will keep rising for the next 50-some years—well past the deadline for cutting emissions to avoid the worst climate scenarios. Depopulation half a century from now will not save us.

A chapter titled “Population Starts in Other People’s Bodies”—true enough, though a little glib coming from two men—argues that fertility need not decline further for gender equality to advance. A fertility rate around two, they contend, is compatible with women’s equity. They note that among countries with rates between one and two, the gender pay gap shows no correlation with birth rates. And in the U.S., from 1975 to 2010, when fertility stagnated, the pay gap narrowed significantly. Their conclusion is that stabilization and feminism can coexist—if men simply help more at home. “The clearest reason why stabilization need not be bad for women,” they write, “is that men could and should do more parenting and housework, across the many years it takes to raise a child.” But optimism alone won’t get men to change their behavior. What’s missing is policy to push them toward it.

Leaning on optimism is the through line of the book. “Progress happens wherever people are solving problems,” Spears and Geruso write, and they take this faith to its limit. The existence of more people, in their view, means more ideas, more discoveries, more resources. Depopulation, then, would be disastrous, choking off the innovations needed to tackle “fixed-cost” threats like climate change (or a killer asteroid). Their belief that sheer numbers will generate solutions to humanity’s gravest challenges is far more convincing than their suggestion that numbers alone  will mean that future men will cook dinner for their family. Men have begun to do more unpaid care work over the past few decades, but significant disparities remain stubbornly sticky. Women with children under six, for example, spend a third more time on child care each day than their male counterparts. While innovation has made it easier to recycle and drive an electric car, it has not made it easier to leave work in the middle of the day and pick up your sick kid from school. We need policy solutions that help turn optimism into reality.

Spears and Geruso have little to suggest. They can tell us with certainty that governments’ efforts at addressing population decline (or population growth) have never significantly moved the needle. Plans for government control aren’t just immoral, they’re also failures. The authors write, “Attempting to force fertility has influenced birth rates, especially over the short term, but has never actually had enough power and leverage to shove the world on or off the path of depopulation.” Likewise, the solution often promoted by progressives dabbling in natalism—public spending to make parenting easier—hasn’t seemed able to reverse the general trend. Denmark and Sweden, for example, both spend double what the U.S. does relative to GDP on family benefits and still have lower birth rates. Notably, the Trump administration’s proposals so far include small gestures at money and larger moves to limit reproductive choice, including reserving scholarships for people who are married or have children, “baby bonus” grants to new mothers, and restrictions on abortion paired with government education programs focused on fertility. Spears and Geruso would say none of these are likely to work. 

While the authors are clear that they are short on solutions, they do advance an interesting theory about the decline in global population: opportunity cost. People often claim they aren’t having as many children as they want to because they can’t afford them. This is a tempting explanation, especially in the U.S., where the cost of child care is too expensive for many families. Spears and Geruso, however, show that the decline in birth rates holds across states even as the cost of children—child care, housing, and so on—varies significantly. Why, then, are people telling us that kids are too expensive? The authors argue that they are saying that they have to give up too much to have children—not just money, but opportunities. As our choices about how to spend our time and make money and meaning in our lives have expanded, the opportunity cost of having a child has gone up. “A better world with better options makes parenting worse by comparison,” Spears and Geruso write.

If we are going to answer the authors’ call to find policy solutions, looking for ways to make parenting a better option seems like a good place to start. Money can help, but it’s insufficient; time is necessary, too. How do we make it easier for parents to leave work when their kid is sick without fearing the loss of either their next paycheck or essential opportunities? How do we support parents so they don’t have to choose between delaying having children and having a career? How do we get men to do more work at home? 

That final question is not just about feminist principles. Recent research from the Nobel Prize–winning economist Claudia Goldin suggests that more equitable distributions of caregiving within families might be essential to increasing fertility rates. Goldin found that the countries with the lowest fertility rates are ones that experienced the most rapid GNP growth. Opportunities opened up for women, but men’s attitudes had not shifted, and they remained unwilling to increase their share of housework and care duties. The ensuing conflicts—extreme versions of the stubborn gender disparities in the U.S.—led to a sharp decline in birth rates. The division of work at home appears to be significant to people’s fertility choices. 

These insights point toward a progressive agenda the book itself only gestures at: lowering the opportunity cost of children by giving parents more time. This means policies that let people leave and reenter the workforce more easily, that redesign careers so advancement doesn’t hinge on never stepping away, and that actively push for more equal divisions of care. Research needs to be done on what this kind of agenda could look like in the U.S. 

There are international models, among them Tokyo’s four-day workweek for municipal employees, and Iceland’s near-universal 36-hour week and its parental leave policy that assigns equal time (six months) to each parent. It is too early to know if Japan’s plan, rolled out this spring, will raise birth rates, as it is intended to do. Early studies from Iceland show not just happier families but also men spending significantly more time on child care and housework. And Iceland’s birth rate, while still below two, has remained higher than the rate in other Nordic countries.

Just as we should be using international comparisons of workweek and leave policies to learn about reducing opportunity costs by redistributing time, we can also compare the experience of different career paths to lead us to policy solutions. More than a century of gendered job segregation has also meant that careers traditionally dominated by women have developed career paths where the opportunity cost of children is lower. Take, for example, teaching and nursing, the two most common occupations for women today. Both typically require post-secondary degrees, but the training and the job itself are significantly different from advanced-degree career paths historically dominated by men. These jobs include more flexibility about when to enter training, how schedules align with caregiving, and how to step in and out of the workforce. There is surprisingly little research comparing fertility rates across specific professions in the U.S. (although there is quite a bit on how fertility correlates to education levels), but one preliminary analysis suggests that rates may be higher in certain woman-dominated professions. More rigorous research on this subject could help us understand if adaptations that originally grew out of gendered inequality now offer models for reducing opportunity costs of having children across professions.

Spears and Geruso compare themselves to the “climate pioneers of the 1950s.” While they believe we are near the peak of the population spike, they know we are at the beginning of building the body of research to support stabilization. Whether or not you accept their unique blend of alarmism and optimism, it’s clear that the opportunity cost of children is currently too high. Research to support stabilization is a worthy cause, because we should all want a world where children are seen as an opportunity, not a cost.

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