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A graduate of a local Catholic school, Pittman was an academically high-achieving student and a talented baseball player. He was, by all accounts, a normal American teenager. But his social media presence tells the story of someone who had recently navigated obscure parts of the internet; in the weeks before his crime, Pittman posted about adopting a “Christian diet” for “testosterone optimization” and published a cartoon video of a woman “baptizing” a stereotypically-dressed Jewish figure, complete with a large nose and money bags, by pushing him into a pool. 

Pittman’s hate-fueled arson attack was a despicable crime for which he will receive the justice that he is due. Still, important questions remain. How did a teenager who had until recently lived an apparently normal life end up trying to burn down a synagogue? Amid increasing worry about the spread of anti-Jewish attitudes in some dark corners of the online right, what can right-wing figures of stature and authority do to prevent such trends from spiraling out of control? How can the right stop more Spencer Pittmans from being created?

We don’t yet know the full story of Pittman’s radicalization. But it seems likely that his descent into an anti-Jewish worldview was in large part fueled by online content. While it would be wrong at this point to blame any one influencer for his radicalization, as a broad matter, there are a number of online anti-Jewish provocateurs who have drawn significant followings among young people, and young men in particular.

In their efforts to address the explosion of anti-Jewish content on the online right, the movement’s authority figures should do two things: First, they ought not overstate or mischaracterize what is happening. They should exercise prudence and pursue calculated interventions rather than engaging in sweeping generalizations and imprecise accusations. Second, they must offer Gen Zers—and particularly young men—who might be tempted toward dark ideas an affirmative, positive alternative vision that gives them responsibility, agency, and hope for the future. 

Getting beyond vibes and viral clips, what precisely is happening with young right-wingers and anti-Jewish attitudes? The demographer Eric Kaufmann argues that while data show that support for anti-Jewish conspiracies—for example, that the Holocaust did not happen or was grossly exaggerated—is noticeably increasing among young people, such trends likely “reflect a broader Zoomer tendency” that he characterizes as “a nihilistic content-neutral conspiracism which encompasses, but is not focused on, Jewish and racist tropes.” The most common correlate of adherence to anti-Jewish attitudes and conspiracies, Kaufmann found, was “general conspiracism”—for example, those who thought the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy or the moon landings were faked were far more likely to deny the Holocaust. 

Kaufmann’s report, together with a December 2025 Manhattan Institute survey, are worth reading in full; they demonstrate that while anti-Jewish attitudes have risen among young right-wingers, such wrongheaded views are part of a broader Gen Z tendency toward “nihilism, provocation and conspiracy”—and they still represent a significant minority among the Gen Z right. Kaufmann notes that while the average Republican voter under thirty-five views Jews slightly worse than in 2020, opinions are still “within the historic range going back to 1964.” And while skepticism of Israel is unsurprisingly high among youthful followers of influencers for whom opposition to Israel and Judaism constitutes their raison d’être, far fewer of the followers admit to harboring anti-Jewish attitudes themselves. 

There are other statistics likely to challenge caricatures of a mass of young, white, right-wing men on track to revive 1930s Germany in the United States. Among Trump voters under fifty, minorities are twice as likely as whites to describe themselves as racist. And, while 26 percent of Trump voters under fifty self-identify as anti-Semites (compared to only 3 percent of Trump voters over fifty), more of the former group say that whites receive more favorable treatment from society than Jews do. Additionally, half of Trump voters under fifty who identify as racist endorse affirmative action and DEI. 

This is not data that supports the rise of an ideologically coherent anti-Jewish movement on the youthful hard-right; it rather suggests the growth of a conspiracy-minded, deeply distrustful cynicism—one that is far more likely to laugh at degrading jokes over beers and discuss the feminizing effects of touching receipt paper than plot how to remove Jews from public life. It is not helpful when leaders on the right make statements that overstate or misrepresent the problem in ways that the data do not support; claiming that the Republican Party is experiencing an “existential crisis” of anti-Semitism, while I’m sure well-intentioned, is easily ridiculed by online-right influencers, hardens hearts among young people tired of being preached to, and ultimately does not effectively serve the cause of combatting anti-Jewish attitudes.  

Instead, right-wing authority figures should make the case that descending into internet conspiracies is, as Christopher Rufo recently put it, “enervating and self-destructive.” Spending significant time on YouTube, X, Rumble, or Twitch absorbing negative content about Jews pulls right-wing guys away from the real-life responsibilities on which they should be focused: study, work, caring for friends, raising a family, serving their country, growing in virtue. Authority figures should make clear that the movement needs young men who are spiritually, mentally, and physically healthy and whose rational capabilities are intact—and that rotting your brain by living in online anti-Jewish echo chambers is directly deleterious to that end. 

The message should be that Gen Z comprises the next generation of the American right, and everything good that is being done now will eventually depend on the next generation to be sustained. Someone who has destroyed their ability to function productively through internet conspiracies cannot lead a company, be a professor, writer, or serious thought leader, run for office, or staff a presidential administration. 

The left has many built-in advantages in their unceasing quest for cultural and political dominance. They control the elite institutions and wield immense influence on the public culture. So the right simply cannot afford to have legions of young men exiting the fight because anti-Jewish conspiracies have demolished their internal sense of direction, engendered within them a feeling of nihilistic powerlessness, tarnished their reputations, and warped their brains. 

Rather than making accusations or delivering moralizing lectures, authority figures must make clear that the movement to defend the country from malign forces will be defeated if the next generation isn’t ready to take up the mantle. Anti-Jewish conspiracies are soul-corrupting distractions that ruin the trajectories of promising young men and, in the long run, only make the right less effective. The left knows this, which is why their mouthpieces spend so much time elevating the online influencers who promote this garbage. 

Why do the left’s bidding and poison your life with conspiracies when you could lead a successful and honorable life in service to your friends, family, community, and country? That’s what young people need to hear.

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Henry Taylor, in his classic work The Statesman, observed that “it sometimes happens that he who would not hurt a fly will hurt a nation.” Kennedy, with all his study of international politics, was perhaps overly cautious in that first test of his power. Trump, serenely detached from reading serious books of any kind, has not had the slightest qualm or hesitation in flexing his power. His vice is that he wants it clear to all who can see that good things spring from his touch and his will alone. He produces wreckage wherever he goes, and yet his swashbuckling use of power may indeed rid us of the regimes in Iran and Venezuela—maybe even Cuba, as the last shoe to fall. Through his swagger and confidence, he may find himself ironically resolving unfinished business left by four or more of his predecessors.

In later years, Kennedy did not hesitate to use the well-timed cruelty that Machiavelli described as a tool of statecraft. He gave the green light for the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam, in 1963. And with that move he unsettled the ruling structure of the country and escalated the war. But he was able to keep that hand of brute power hidden. Not so with the Bay of Pigs. It was clear that America was backing the Cuban brigade seeking to reclaim their country. 

Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations wanted to conceal the American involvement in helping refugees from Cuba restore a non-communist regime. Kennedy was sensitive to the leaders of Latin America, who held to the high principle of not intervening in the affairs of other countries—a maxim that nicely fended off intervention against any of them. The same principle has been invoked today against the American intervention in Venezuela—and invoked with high moral posturing.  

And yet it is the character of international law to avoid moral judgments on the various regimes in the world. Surely the sovereignty of the French government under Marshall Petain was violated when Allied armies landed in Normandy in 1944. And under a liberal reading of international law, the Second World War might have properly ended when Allied armies pushed Germany back to its prewar frontiers and stripped the Nazi regime of the fruits of its aggressions. But the understanding of the time was that the war sprang precisely from the nature of that Nazi regime—and nothing would be settled until that regime was removed and reconstructed from within.

Why all of this agonizing, then, over “regime change” in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba? The most consequential data of political life have always involved the shift in regimes, from the Germany of Weimar to the Germany of Hitler, from the Cuba of Batista to the Cuba of Castro. In Natural Right and History, my late professor Leo Strauss remarked that “when the classics were chiefly concerned with the different regimes, and especially with the best regime, they implied that the paramount social phenomenon, or that social phenomenon than which only the natural phenomena are more fundamental, is the regime.” Regimes are fundamental social realities. If we’re not out to change the vicious regimes in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, why are we there at all?

Abraham Lincoln never doubted that the right of human beings to be ruled only with their own consent was a universal doctrine. In no place is it natural for men to rule other men in the way that humans rule over dogs and horses. If Lincoln held back from taking up arms to fight despotisms and establish free elections in all places, he was not holding back in principle, but in prudence, because the United States did not have the means of intervening in foreign countries without exposing the republican experiment at home to grave dangers. But over a century later, George H. W. Bush gauged no such dangers when he ordered F-4 fighter jets to provide air cover over Manila and threatened to act against any forces attempting to overthrow the elected government of Corazon Aquino. A president, with orders easily sent, could now act halfway around the world to protect a government of free elections from being overthrown.

What has curiously eluded many commentators over the years is that this willingness to intervene abroad has not always been motivated by a passion to act as “the world’s policemen.” Rather, it has emerged from a principle that has permeated our laws and the common sense of ordinary folk: Does the capacity to affect the outcome confer at times a certain responsibility to act—if one can? Without danger to American lives, Bush was able to preserve a democratic government in the Philippines with a simple show of force in a timely way. 

Twenty years ago, the columnist Bret Stephens offered a riveting account of “Chinook Diplomacy”: Col. Angel Lugo’s 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital moved from Angola to the northwest frontier of Pakistan after an earthquake killed 16,000 people. Lugo’s American force provided the only fully functional hospital in Azad Kashmir. American doctors performed 330 major surgeries, wrote 14,000 prescriptions, and gave almost 10,000 preventive vaccinations.

But why did it fall to us to do it? The driving reason: It was within our power and ability to deliver medical aid to distant places across the toughest terrain. And so we must ask, whenever we have the power to make a real difference: What serious cost to the lives of our own people do we risk when we rise to what is in our power to do?

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When we read our poems in class, I learned that most of my peers had not followed the assignment. Many students made use of near rhymes instead of perfect rhymes, or wrote lines that did not rhyme at all. Some included lines much shorter or longer than iambic pentameter would allow. One student even submitted a “sonnet” composed of fifteen lines. These students knew how to rhyme and count to fourteen. What compelled them to break the rules anyway?

I recalled something my professor said that I had not given much thought to before. “Many of the greatest sonneteers,” he remarked, “rebelled against the sonnet’s strict conventions.” (Here he was referring to Keats’s “If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain’d” and Denis Johnson’s “Heat,” which we studied in our seminar.) With this comment, our professor granted us permission to subvert the sonnet’s basic rules even as we wrote our very first of the form.

This was just one example of a larger educational trend at Columbia University: the elevation of the spirit of the avant-garde as the pinnacle of artistic achievement. Liberal arts classes I took as part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum highlighted norm-breaking authors, composers, and artists for singular focus and praise. We marveled at Picasso and the cubists for painting without the traditional restrictions of artistic perspective, but were even more impressed by Pollock and Warhol, who completely defied the core conception of beauty in art. We listened with awe as Debussy’s impressionist sonatas and Stravinsky’s modernist ballets introduced novel rhythmic structures and tonalities, but had to admit that John Cage outdid them both when he composed a four-minute symphony with no instruments at all. To be sure, these artists all created works that are deserving of study on their own merits. But too often we did not focus on the quality of their works themselves so much as the subversive statements that they expressed.

The poorly written “sonnets” I had to read represented a relatively innocuous symptom of a pervasive corruption that had been festering at the heart of Columbia’s educational program: Instead of being trained to contemplate beauty and truth, my fellow Columbians and I were being told to subvert them. As students at Columbia’s “academy of the avant-garde,” we learned that in order for art to have meaning, it must challenge norms and rebel against the oppressive structures of society. Was a sonnet composed of fourteen neatly written lines and a perfectly Shakespearean rhyme scheme really a work of art? If we were not avant-garde, we were nothing.

Only in my senior year did I fully understand the nature of this problem. That fall, our campus was overtaken by terribly loud and unceasing protests, culminating in the campus Gaza encampments of spring 2024. Our university commencement was canceled, and the embarrassing depths of my alma mater’s naked corruption were on display for all the world to see.

That year, I received an email from the student senate that was revealing. The email, written as a complaint against the recent use of police force to clear Hamilton Hall of the students and outside actors who had occupied it, included the following statement: “Since 1968, Columbia has gained a reputation as the ‘Activist Ivy’—for many Columbia students, including ourselves, it’s the reason that we chose this school.” I chose to study at Columbia because I believed it would be an ideal environment to gather knowledge and pursue truth, especially in light of its much-touted Core Curriculum, and I had assumed my classmates felt similarly. This email revealed otherwise. The members of the student senate, representatives of the student body as a whole, chose to study at Columbia in order to practice social activism, not to study wisdom.

I began to realize that the activist explosion at our university was a natural progression from its avant-gardist philosophy. My fellow Columbians had learned that the purpose of the liberal arts is to take part in a game of breaking systems and expressing political statements. Consequently, many concluded that a more effective and easier way of playing this game was not to create or study the arts at all, but to protest directly. It did not bother them that, in pursuing this goal, they would miss seminars, disrupt library study sessions, and wreak havoc on the entire university. To them, this was the goal of the university experience. From the academy of the avant-garde was born the activist academy.

Most administrators and professors, who had already bought into the avant-garde philosophy underlying Columbia’s pedagogy, nurtured and sustained the transformation of their university from a center of learning into an activist hub. Admissions officers selected prospective students on the basis of their propensity toward activism rather than academic merit. In 2020, deans proudly announced action-oriented seminars to educate students on the importance of protest and of amplifying the voices of the young. The Committee on Honors, Awards, and Prizes chose my class’s valedictorian from among encampment leaders while students with real scholastic achievements were relegated to lesser honors.

It is easy to wonder at the chaos overtaking our campuses today and assume it is the work of a few bad actors or the absence of discipline. But the truth is that the call is coming from inside the house. Punishing the loudest agitators is necessary but not sufficient: The deeper problem lies within the philosophy that now animates much of higher education. The academy of the avant-garde and the activist academy alike represent distortions of what a university should be. We must teach students to understand, respect, and thoughtfully build upon the traditions they inherit, not defy and dismantle them. Above all, we must rekindle in our brightest minds a love for truth and beauty pursued for their own sakes, not for the sake of making political statements or breaking norms. Then perhaps they will glimpse that unique beauty that exists only within the limits of fourteen strictly rhymed and metrically sound lines of verse.

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On May 17, 1954, The U.S. Supreme Court issued Brown v. Board of Education, a historic decision striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed for white-only and black-only schools. The decision created an uproar in the South. In Little Rock, the school superintendent sought to conform to the Court’s decision, working out a plan for integration. Local resistance hardened. Community groups organized, promising to turn out protesters to prevent black students from entering white schools. It all came to a head in September 1957. White protesters created an atmosphere of intimidation. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus expressed sympathy for their efforts to prevent integration. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High School as a white mob shouted insults and skirmished with the authorities.

The organized resistance to racial integration was not limited to Little Rock. In the 1960s, Boston public school administrators disobeyed orders to develop a plan to integrate the city’s schools. By the early 1970s, courts became involved and judges imposed a busing plan. Protests ensued, often devolving into riots and fights between white and black students.

The famous battles over civil rights concerned a fundamental principle of justice, the rights due to all citizens. However, they were also tests of America’s rule of law. Those who opposed integration ignored court decisions, civil rights legislation, and administrative rulings to ensure that the decisions and laws were put into force. Some went into the streets to reverse the results produced by our system of government. The goal was to so befoul the public square with bitterness and rancor that officials would back down.

The organized resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis follows the pattern of Little Rock. There was no internet in the 1950s. Community groups organized with leaflets and meetings. Today, the organizing is done on Signal, an app with secure privacy protections. Immigrant rights organizations take the lead. They form group chats. Participants monitor ICE movements, calling for protesters to assemble at a moment’s notice. Their objective is simple: to foment resistance and prevent the federal government from enforcing immigration laws in their city.

Writing for the Free Press, Olivia Reingold reports on anti-ICE activities in Minneapolis. A nonprofit leader told her that “the average participants in these Signal groups are church members, retirees, and parents.” In other words, they’re “really mainstream normies.” The same could have been said of those who opposed integration in Little Rock. It was certainly true of parents who rioted in opposition to busing in Boston.

The activists in Minneapolis may be “mainstream normies,” but they are insisting that the duly elected Donald Trump has no authority in their neighborhoods. Reingold reports a telling chant: “Whose streets? Our streets. Whose streets? Our streets.” I can imagine white Boston parents echoing the chant as they insulted police officers and threw refuse at them, behavior very much in evidence in Minneapolis.

Some uphold the right of the Trump administration to enforce America’s immigration laws, while criticizing the unseemly zeal and unnecessary use of force. Plenty of moderates did the same during the uproars over racial integration. Constrained as he was by respect for the rule of law, Orval Faubus himself tried to find a way to make at least a show of integration in Arkansas, until it became evident that voters would punish him severely. The same is true for the mayors of Minneapolis, Portland, New York, and other blue cities. Political survival requires them to denounce the Trump administration and side with the proponents of nullification.

Reingold quotes Thomas Brophy, an ICE official: “As a United States citizen, you don’t have the luxury to pick and choose which laws you want to follow and when you want to follow them.” Our history suggests otherwise. There are times when mobs rule. Many look back on the Boston busing plan as misguided, and after the 1970s, mandatory busing fell out of favor. To a great degree, the white Boston parents won that battle. The uproar was politically damaging to the civil rights cause. Judges became more circumspect, and federal government retreated.

Will the progressive white “normies” in Minneapolis (and they are almost all white) succeed after the fashion of white Boston parents? Can they prevent the executive branch of the federal government from enforcing in their cities the laws that they reject?

I think not. The Trump administration’s policies of border enforcement and deportation emerge from an electoral mandate. Promising to close the border and deport illegal aliens has been a central element of Trump’s political success. For this reason, the organized resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere is counter-majoritarian. Which means that the success or failure of efforts to nullify American immigration law will be settled in the court of public opinion, not in our nation’s courtrooms.

AP Photo/Adam Gray

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If Paul VI was right about witnesses being evangelists, then Jimmy Lai—the Hong Kong entrepreneur, newspaperman, and human rights advocate who has now spent more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement in Stanley Prison, and who was recently “convicted” in a sham “trial” of being a threat to Hong Kong’s “national security”—is one of Catholicism’s most compelling evangelists. For like other modern Catholic heroes such as Fr. Alfred Delp, Bl. Omelyan Kovch, Bishop Francis Ford, Sr. Nijolė Sadūnaitė, and Cardinal George Pell, Jimmy Lai has turned his imprisonment into a spiritual retreat. And he has shared what the Spirit has taught him in those cruel circumstances through works of religious art sketched in colored pencil on ruled paper, as well as through his letters to his family.

One of those sketches—a portrait of Our Lady at the Annunciation bearing the simple inscription “Yes!”—was the Lai family’s 2025 Christmas card. The card also included one of Jimmy’s most moving confessions of faith. After asking himself in a letter to his wife and children, “Why is my mood not down at all, sometimes even light-hearted?” and then answering his own question—“I guess because so many people whom I have even never met are praying for me is the main reason”—this twenty-first-century martyr-confessor gave thanks for what his conversion to Catholicism and his current ordeal had taught him, in words reproduced on that Christmas card:

I am always in God’s presence because of [those] prayers. I am so thankful the Lord gave me a new life, a life I was [previously] blind to—a life of true peace, joy, spiritual concreteness and meaning—as opposed to my muddling in life in pursuit of purposes bound into the narrowness of my ego before. Now I am free because I can see.

Jimmy Lai would never claim to be a theologian, but he displayed here a profound grasp of what we mean by professing our belief in the “Communion of Saints” when we pray the Apostles’ Creed. Just as the human eye cannot see itself, human beings can be blinded to the truth about ourselves, our obligations, and our eternal destiny when we’re caught in the trap of our egos. To be liberated into human and spiritual maturity, we need others—others who can help us see ourselves clearly, thereby giving us the capacity to see the world truly.

That is what happens in the Communion of Saints. Others introduce us to Christ. Others help us to see ourselves as forgiven and redeemed, thereby helping cure us of the myopia caused by egotism. Others sustain us and help us grow by their prayers, for no authentic prayer ever goes unheard. Jimmy Lai knows that and lives it. Through the prayers that sustain him, he can “see” his suffering during almost five years of an otherwise wretched imprisonment as an occasion of grace, in which he participates in Christ’s continuing redemption of the world.

The policies of Xi Jinping, the absolute ruler of China, aim to make China the world’s preeminent power, in payback for what Mao Zedong called its “century of humiliation” at the hands of exploitative foreign powers. Greatness as measured in the immediate moment can be illusory, however. In the first half of the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII bestrode England like a colossus. Yet today, it’s Thomas More—the man Henry Tudor unjustly imprisoned for refusing to bend his conscience to the autocrat’s will—who is remembered as the “man for all seasons”: the man whose example has drawn others into the Communion of Saints for over four centuries.  

Those who find an analogy here with twenty-first-century Catholicism’s most famous political prisoner, Jimmy Lai, will understand what Pope St. Paul VI said about witnesses being evangelists, and what that means for living the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19) today.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

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I am and continue to be shocked at how extensive it is. You see, the Minnesota I grew up in—moderate governors, fiscal discipline, nonpartisan and highly effective government—is how I still remember the state. Yes, it has always leaned left, but it was not culturally left. That state is now gone, and in its place is something wholly different. 

Trust is vital to the functioning of a society, and we feel its absence palpably in cities and regions that lack it. When I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, we rarely locked our front door. The thought that someone would randomly come into our house to steal or hurt us was not on the menu of possibilities. Likewise, Minnesotans have historically had high trust in government because it was effective and transparent. 

Broken public trust is not easy to fix, but the real damage of fraud is that it corrodes the ability of government to do what it should. Progressives, who have an expansive view of government’s role in our lives, stand to lose the most from declining trust in government, yet they also appear to be the least concerned.

The uncovered fraud is not the work of Machiavellian masterminds. Quite the opposite: It was occurring in broad daylight. How was it permitted? Hannah Arendt, drawing on the Augustinian idea of evil as privation, argued that many of the evil actors in the Nazi regime had motives that were banal, that is, that the actors who carried out the evil deeds of Auschwitz were not driven by sinister motives but rather more mundane ones. Adolf Eichmann, the focus of Arendt’s book, was a shallow character. His head was filled with cliched slogans, and he seems to have been mostly concerned about career advancement. Arendt’s frightening conclusion is that Eichmann acted more like a bureaucrat than a demon.

The cast of political leaders who seemingly enabled the massive fraud in Minnesota are, likewise, shallow caricatures of the actual virtues they pretend to possess. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Gov. Tim Walz, and Rep. Ilhan Omar crusade in the name of justice, compassion, and diversity, but behind their transparently thin facade are operators who have learned how to use guilt, fear, and power to manipulate Minnesotans to advance their own interests while the state continues to slide toward dysfunction. 

Minnesota was a state ripe for corruption because it is a state where progressive ideology and politics have become deeply rooted in the past couple decades, though primarily in the Twin Cities metro area. Historically, the Minnesota Democratic Party, called the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, performed well in rural areas and in the mining country of Northern Minnesota. Tim Walz is a master of evoking the aesthetics of the old DFL, with his talk of fixing cars and pheasant hunting. But most Minnesotans don’t buy it, which is why the DFL is now an urban party in a sea of red. 

Still, even in the red parts of Minnesota there is a communitarian ethos of taking care of all members of society, a part of the Lutheran-Scandinavian DNA of the state that persists.  This humanitarian and compassionate concern, while one of the great strengths of the state, can easily be exploited. Thinking the best of everyone and having a general desire to benefit all its members can easily lapse into naivete. 

On top of that, and perhaps more powerfully, in a white state like Minnesota, concerns about racism are particularly acute. If your ideology emphasizes diversity and acceptance, but you live in a homogeneous society, there is a not-so-latent guilt that makes one vulnerable to race-grifters. Democratic politicians and the Somali community have exploited that vulnerability to great effect. 

Progressives argue for an extensive and ever-expanding welfare state that addresses all issues from cradle to grave. They are fiercely opposed to borders and believe in a universal, cosmopolitan vision of all humanity flourishing together. When it comes to Democratic leadership in Minnesota, however, their community-oriented rhetoric functions as a mask for naked self-interest and corruption. They resist the investigations currently underway not because of some high-minded principle, but because it is a threat to their stranglehold on Minnesota government.

The dirty little secret is that for all their talk of the public good, progressives do not have a conception of the common good, because their conception of justice is rooted in a hierarchy of victimhood. When one pulls back the rhetorical layers of leftist ideologues one finds a constellation of ideas that are wholly anathema to public good of cities, states, or nation. If politics is about cultivating and maintaining those public goods that are essential for the thriving of a political community, the political policies of Minnesota Democrats have only undermined that basic principle. Identity politics focuses only on difference, what sets us apart, and not on what binds us together.

Walz and Democratic leaders in the state refuse to take any responsibility for the massive fraud that is being uncovered. Instead, they accuse Trump and the U.S. attorneys of some malicious plot to attack Minnesota, portraying themselves as victims. Even as the evidence mounts against Minnesota Democratic leaders, they seem intent on making their banality clear for all to see.

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This issue arose exactly thirty-six years ago with respect to another Latin American strongman whom the United States arrested, transferred to the U.S., and ultimately convicted in Florida on federal drug charges, Panama’s Manuel Noriega. The legality of Noriega’s arrest was approved at the time by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, though people continue to contest the office’s conclusion. The Maduro case is likely to play out in much the same way.

In some respects, the legal analysis is straightforward. International law permits a state to criminalize conduct that occurs outside its territory when that conduct is intended to have substantial effects within the state. The conduct alleged here—large-scale narcotics trafficking aimed at U.S. markets—fits comfortably within that principle. Whatever one thinks about the arrest itself, there is little mystery about why U.S. law can (and does) reach the underlying conduct alleged in the Maduro indictment. And although international law grants sitting heads of state a degree of immunity from foreign criminal prosecution, most countries—including the United States—do not recognize Maduro as the legitimate head of state of Venezuela.

In other respects, the legal analysis is more complicated. Maduro’s arrest, which involved a significant U.S. military operation in Venezuelan territory, may well violate the U.N. Charter. Still, the administration can plausibly argue that his prosecution in U.S. courts may proceed—even assuming the U.S. violated international law and even assuming one can meaningfully speak of international law as a constraint in the real world. Understanding why requires an appreciation of the United States’ traditionally dualist approach to international law.

Dualism holds that international law and domestic law are separate systems operating on different—dual—planes. International law governs relations among states, but it does not necessarily have effect within a state’s domestic legal system. The two regimes are independent. On a dualist understanding, if the United States were to violate a treaty, that violation could carry international consequences—for example, diplomatic retaliation or an adverse judgment from an international tribunal such as the International Court of Justice. But it would not necessarily have consequences in U.S. courts.

Dualism means that treaty obligations have force in U.S. courts only if the United States incorporates them into domestic law. Sometimes a treaty itself makes clear that it has domestic effect—a so-called self-executing treaty. Sometimes further congressional action is required. But the basic idea is this: A private party cannot invoke a treaty in U.S. courts unless the United States has indicated that the treaty is meant to create domestically enforceable rights. The United States can be, simultaneously, an outlaw abroad but not at home. This has been the prevailing understanding in U.S. law since the time of Chief Justice John Marshall.

Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter is almost universally regarded as non-self-executing. As a result, U.S. courts would not treat alleged violations of Article 2(4) as grounds for judicial relief, including dismissal of criminal prosecutions. Indeed, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Alvarez-Machain (1992) that the illegality of a defendant’s capture under international law does not divest a U.S. court of criminal jurisdiction. This result follows naturally from dualism. The international-law implications of a defendant’s seizure and the authority of U.S. courts to try him for violations of U.S. law are analytically distinct.

True, some scholars argue that even non-self-executing treaties like the U.N. Charter bind the president as a matter of constitutional obligation. On this view, the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and the president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” require the executive to comply with international law even when courts lack the power to intervene. But even if international law binds the president in this sense, it does not necessarily follow that it creates legal rights that criminal defendants may assert in court.

In short, the Maduro prosecution, like the Noriega prosecution more than three decades ago, is likely to go forward. Critics predict that this will backfire on the United States. The administration’s action, they contend, will entangle the U.S. in Venezuelan politics and embolden adversaries—Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi—also to invade their neighbors and seize their leaders in violation of international law. Those aren’t fanciful concerns, though it does seem more likely that Putin and Xi would act based on their own assessments of power and interest. But judges are rightly reluctant to make decisions about such matters. Whatever the foreign-policy merits of the new Monroe Doctrine—I suppose we are calling it the “Donroe Doctrine” now—U.S. courts are unlikely to stand in the way.

Image by XNY/Star Max via Getty Images

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Relying on Stone v. Graham (1980), a Supreme Court decision that is almost certainly no longer good law, three district courts and a panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit have held that these statutes are unconstitutional. Among the claims made by the plaintiffs and cited in court opinions is that the version of the Ten Commandments utilized in these states is Protestant. 

The three authors of this essay are, respectively, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. We understand that it is possible to present the Ten Commandments in ways that are distinctively Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, but the text utilized by Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas is, in fact, nonsectarian. To understand why, it is necessary to first consider how this text came to be.  

Shortly after the Second World War, a Minnesota judge named E. J. Ruegemer became concerned with what he perceived to be the rise of juvenile delinquency. He believed that “if troubled youths were exposed to one of mankind’s earliest and long-lasting codes of conduct, those youths might be less inclined to break the law.” He formed a committee “consisting of fellow judges, lawyers, various city officials, and clergy of several faiths” to develop a “version of the Ten Commandments which was not identifiable to any particular religious group.” 

Judge Ruegemer eventually partnered with Cecil B. DeMille and the Fraternal Order of Eagles to help place monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments throughout the United States. When they were first erected in the mid-1950s, Protestants and Jews immediately pointed out that the numbering system was inconsistent with that used by their traditions.

The Ten Commandments may be found in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, texts originally written in Hebrew with no chapter or verse numbers (these were added later). English translations of this Hebrew Scripture have been made by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but few laypersons can distinguish between them. However, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews number the Commandments differently. For instance, Protestants consider the Second Commandment to be “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” whereas Catholics consider it to be “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” and Jews consider it to be “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” (Lutherans are Protestants, but they follow the Catholic numbering system.) Because the first Ten Commandments monuments followed the Catholic numbering system, the text appeared to be sectarian.

In response to complaints, the Eagles altered the way in which the Commandments were presented to overcome “any possible objection to the version of the Ten Commandments.” The most significant change involved removing the numbers before each commandment. Most post-1958 Ten Commandments monuments include this version of the text—including the monument on Texas State Capitol grounds found to be constitutionally permissible in Van Orden v. Perry (2005).

Because the lines of the Ten Commandments on the Texas monument are not numbered, it is possible to read them with thought-breaks in different places. For instance, a Jewish citizen may read the line “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” as the Fourth Commandment, while a Protestant might read it as the Third Commandment. Similarly, one could understand the phrase “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” to be either the Second or the Third Commandment.

In 2024, Louisiana passed a statute requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms. Recognizing that separationist groups would claim that the law violates the Establishment Clause, the statute specified that the “text of the Ten Commandments” that would appear on the posters must be “identical to the text of the Ten Commandments monument that was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677, 688 (2005).” With very minor variations, Texas and Arkansas utilized the same version of the text.  

Despite being found constitutional in Van Orden, and despite the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruling that this version is “a nonsectarian version of the Ten Commandments,” critics continue to claim that Louisiana and the other states are requiring the posting of a Protestant version of the Commandments. We disagree. 

Given that there are no numbers, what sort of argument can be made that the version in question is Protestant? In our view, only unpersuasive ones. In the Louisiana case, for instance, the plaintiffs’ expert contended that the text is taken from the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible because it “uses the words ‘Thou,’ which we don’t use very often these days unless you’re reading from the King James Bible.”

“Thou” is indeed used in the KJV, but it is also used in Catholic and Jewish translations that were available to the committee putting together the Ten Commandments monuments. Presentations of the Ten Commandments are usually drawn from Exodus 20:1–17, but in no display of which we are aware are these verses copied verbatim. This is certainly true with the version in question. Below is the text of Exodus 20:1–3 from the Jewish Publication Society Bible (1917), the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible (1899), and the King James Version (1611). The language retained in the Ten Commandments text is in bold.

Jewish Publication Society Bible:

And God spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.

Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible:

And the Lord spoke all these words: I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.

King James Version:

And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

The text from the Texas monument and posters: 

I AM the Lord thy God.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

There are minor differences between the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant translations, but we submit that there is no good argument that the Ten Commandments text is taken from the KJV. Certainly the use of “Thou” does not indicate that it is Protestant. 

This same expert also argued that the version in question is Protestant because it contains the prohibition on making “graven images” but that “most Catholic translations omit” this prohibition (emphasis added). However, the Catholic Douay-Rheims rendition of Exodus 20:4 reads: “Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth” (emphasis added).

This rendition is not an outlier. Every English translation of the Bible approved by the Catholic Church that we consulted includes some version of the command. For instance, the Jerusalem Bible (1966): “You shall not make yourself a carved image”; the New Catholic Bible (2019): “You shall not make idols or any image of things that are in the heavens above”; The New American Bible, Revised Edition (2011): “You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything.” It is true that these translations do not include the specific words “graven images,” but the equivalent idea is communicated.

Moreover, the 1921 edition of A Catechism of Christian Doctrine—the classic American Catholic catechism, published in 1885 and which remained the default catechism for American Catholics until the 1994 English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church—includes Exodus 20:4’s command that “thou shall not make to thyself a graven image.” The 1994 English translation of the Catechism contains virtually identical language: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image.”

A final argument made by the same expert is that the command that reads “Thou shalt not kill” is Protestant whereas the Jewish version reads “You shall not murder.” It is the case that recent Jewish translations of this command use “murder” rather than “kill,” but there are Jewish texts that use the latter. For instance, the Catechism for Younger Children: Designed as a Familiar Exposition of the Jewish Religion, a catechism for Jewish children written by Isaac Leeser and first published in Philadelphia in 1839, asks, “What is the Sixth Commandment?” The answer is: “Thou shall not kill.” The answer is identical in the third edition of this work, which was published in 1856. 

The distinction between killing and murdering is hardly one made only by Jewish scholars and translators. The English Standard Version of the Bible, translated by Protestant scholars and published by Crossway in 2001, renders this commandment as “You shall not murder.” Indeed, most (but not all) Christians understand the commandment to prohibit the taking, in the words of the 1921 Catholic Catechism, of “the life of an innocent person,” but not a life taken “in self-defense,” in “a just war,” or through a “lawful execution of a criminal.”

In 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found the version of the Ten Commandments that would be placed in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas classrooms to be “a nonsectarian version of the Ten Commandments.” We believe that this court was correct. It is possible to present the Ten Commandments in ways that are clearly Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, but there is no good argument that the text in question favors one of these traditions over the others. 

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, is currently reviewing the Louisiana and Texas laws, and its decision will likely provide crucial guidance for the U.S. Supreme Court’s eventual consideration of this issue. As the judiciary weighs the constitutionality of these displays, it should recognize what the historical record and textual analysis make clear: The version of the Ten Commandments at issue is genuinely nonsectarian. Created through interfaith collaboration specifically to avoid denominational preference and upheld as constitutional in Van Orden, this text represents a successful effort to present a foundational moral and legal code in a manner respectful to Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions alike. Courts should reject claims that this carefully crafted, religiously neutral version somehow establishes a particular denomination’s interpretation of Scripture.

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Previous administrations have been hostile to Maduro. Obama sanctioned some of his close associates. Both Trump and Biden put a bounty on his head. Sending special forces to Caracas was certainly a dramatic escalation. But anyone who read the recently released and much-discussed National Security Strategy could have predicted it. 

The document reasserts America’s Monroe Doctrine, which for two hundred years has justified American dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela had become the lynchpin of resistance to that dominance in Latin America and, through alliances with China, Russia, and Iran, a challenge to American interests in the wider world. Trump decided that the United States needed to take stern measures to overthrow Maduro and bring Venezuela and its oil reserves into America’s orbit.

I’ll leave it to experts to debate the legality of Maduro’s arrest in Caracas. But I cannot refrain from pointing out that our post–9/11 legal regime accords great latitude for military action. The Trump administration deemed Maduro to be the head of a “narco-terrorist” organization earlier this year. I’ll venture that this designation ensures that the use of U.S. military personnel in Venezuela falls within the letter of the law. 

Legality aside, what are we to think of the morality of Trump’s action? 

Although the White House justifies that operation as an arrest, not an invasion, the Russian foreign ministry’s altogether hypocritical denunciation of the “act of armed aggression against Venezuela” expresses an element of truth. Military assets were employed to arrest Maduro, and Venezuelan sovereignty was violated. Moreover, as I suggest above, the administration clearly acted for reasons of state, not simply to bring a criminal to justice. Therefore, we are wise to assess Trump’s decision under the morality of war.

The Catholic Church advances a doctrine of just war. It includes many criteria for assessing reasons to go to war, as well as moral constraints on how warfare is conducted. These elements of just war doctrine are rooted in the biblical presumption in favor of peace. The morally licit use of violence aims to restore and secure a tranquility of order.

A well-established rule of law brings tranquility of order. It need not be perfect in its justice. The mere existence of reasonably decent and predictable laws is sufficient. The post–Cold War ambition to create a global rule of law (rules-based order) reflected that ideal. Unfortunately, global realities have dictated otherwise. 

Over the last decade, the greatest threat to the global tranquility of order has been the relative decline in American power. Put simply, American weakness, real and perceived, has invited challenges to the global order that was once backstopped by American cultural, economic, and military power.

If we filter out partisan rhetoric, in 2026, the main foreign policy arguments boil down to a debate about how to restore a global tranquility of order. In this debate, both sides presume that American power plays a crucial and central role.

In one fashion or another, Trump’s critics envision a renewal of the rules-based order. For example, they argue that the United States should expel Russian forces from Ukraine, and that this must be done in close cooperation with our allies, as we strive to build an ever-more unified world.

The Trump White House thinks otherwise. It regards the post–Cold War system as a cause of the relative decline in American power. What’s needed is a new approach, one that recognizes the reality of significant adversaries and seeks to reestablish the cultural, economic, and military foundations for American predominance in an interest-based rather than rules-based global order.

The Trump administration recognizes the need to consolidate the American capacity to contain China. This imperative is the leitmotif of the recent National Security Strategy, the unspoken meaning of every sentence in the document, from start to finish.

The Trump administration’s approach to Russian aggression in Ukraine reflects this imperative. At every turn, the White House has whipped European nations toward greater military expenditure, while criticizing them for self-imposed economic disabilities and civilizational malaise. I doubt that policy planners in the Trump administration seek to eliminate the Russian threat to Europe’s borders (which may be an unattainable goal in any event). The goal is to strengthen the European capacity to meet that threat, and in so doing, to consolidate Western civilization’s resources for the larger global struggle with China.

The White House can take a more straightforward approach in the Western Hemisphere. The original Monroe Doctrine was formulated to prevent the fledgling American nation from being dominated by European powers operating in the Western Hemisphere. It was largely defensive: Keep France and England out. Today, the Monroe Doctrine means ensuring that the hemisphere functions as a unified and effective foundation for American power. This requires gaining control over energy, trade, and military security throughout the hemisphere. The intransigent regime in Venezuela was a significant impediment to achieving that end.

The Trump administration envisions an interest-based global system in which great powers compete—and America is the first among equals. Will this system bring a tranquility of order? Those with longer memories will recall the resentment caused by earlier American interventions in Latin America, resentment that nurtured a generation of anti-Americanism. Perhaps the twenty-first century will see different outcomes. A muscular approach may backfire. The same holds for global affairs. Perhaps Putin and Xi will become more aggressive, seeking to expand their spheres of influence to meet America’s efforts. 

Time will tell. If the interest-based order brings conflict, we’ll judge the Caracas “enforcement action” an ill-considered step down a fateful path. If the Trump administration can navigate toward a relatively stable global system, we will regard it as wise, one of the foundations of the twenty-first century’s tranquility of order.

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I was not the only one noting these problems at the time. In his 2003 apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa (The Church in Europe), Pope John Paul II raised similar concerns, among which he noted in Europe “a fear of the future . . . [An] inner emptiness that grips many people . . . A widespread existential fragmentation [in which] a feeling of loneliness is prevalent . . . Weakening of the very concept of the family . . . Selfishness that closes groups and individuals in upon themselves . . . A growing lack of concern for ethics and an obsessive concern for personal interest and privileges [leading to] the diminished number of births.”

Neither the pope’s observations nor mine were offered in anger, and still less in contempt. He was a European; I believed then, as now, that America is Europe transplanted. Both of us wrote out of affection and concern.

Which is perhaps the crucial difference between what I wrote in The Cube and the Cathedral, what John Paul wrote in Ecclesia in Europa, and the claim in the recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States that Europe faces the prospect of “civilizational erasure.”

To be sure, the demographic situation in Europe has gotten even more challenging since the pope and I wrote, with vast numbers of immigrants from another civilizational orbit—many of whom hold the West in contempt even as they seek shelter from their own failed states—filling the vacuum left by Europe’s self-induced mass infertility. However stringent the language, then, it is not a complete exaggeration when the NSS claims that “should present trends continue, [Europe] will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” Parts of Europe are, now.

Where I find substantive, rather than tonal, fault with the NSS is its failure to dig deeply enough into the roots of Europe’s twenty-first-century malaise, and its seeming insouciance about the brutal neo-imperialism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

To borrow from Leon Kass, there is a “God-sized hole” in Europe’s heart, caused by centuries of secularism—and, it must be admitted, much of European Catholicism’s failure to embrace the New Evangelization and get about the reconversion (or, in many instances, conversion) to Christian faith of Christianity’s historic heartland. Catholic Lite, mimicking the secularist zeitgeist, its decadent culture, and its woke politics, cannot be the answer to Europe’s crisis of civilizational morale and its demographic self-immolation. Unless and until a critical mass of Europeans recognizes that woke secularism cannot provide a firm cultural foundation for either self-governing countries or the European Union, Europe will continue to flail about seeking a viable future. Helping build that critical mass is the Church’s primary task in Europe today: not by engaging in partisan politics, but by proclaiming Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life.

It is past time, then, for Europe to stop bending the knee to French laïcité and its soul-withering effects on individuals, culture, and public life. Breaking free of that unworthy habit, Europe may have a future worthy of its civilizational heritage.

As for Russia, it is not easy to understand what the NSS means by reestablishing “strategic stability” with a country in thrall to Czar Putin. On the verge of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s barbaric invasion of a sovereign European state—a war of conquest conducted in violation of every conceivable international norm of civilized behavior—how can any serious person imagine the possibility of “strategic stability” with a Russia ruled by a man who has made unmistakably clear that he is not interested in “stability,” but in precisely the opposite: the overthrow of history’s verdict in the Cold War and the reestablishment of Stalin’s internal and external empires? 

Finally, the lack of any reference to the defense and promotion of human rights as a concern of U.S. foreign policy renders the new NSS a less-than-persuasive summons to a recovery of moral grip and purpose in the West. It is also a default on our country’s capacity for moral leadership in world affairs.

But that’s what tends to happen when strategy is confused with “business opportunity.”

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.            

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Although I have not done enough research to be ­confident in my judgment, I’d venture that “liberal” first entered the lexicon in reference to German theology in the early nineteenth century, just as “­postliberal” was first used in theological circles. The term “liberal” refers to the conditions under which a Christian ­intellectual operates. In the early nineteenth century, government ministers of religion oversaw theological faculties at German universities. Liberals in theology sought freedom from official oversight. Research and reflection were to answer to ­academic standards, not to governmental or ecclesias­tical norms.

Free in this way, liberal theology took up modern historical methods for the study of the Bible. Modern modes of thought, such as romanticism and German idealism, were used to reframe Christian doctrine. These innovations were not undertaken to weaken or undermine faith. According to proponents of liberal theology, the inherited faith was narrow and superficial. The use of modern methods and contemporary idioms would renew and deepen Christian faith and practice. Christian self-understanding would become more historically accurate and intellectually responsible, more contemporary and relevant, more personal and authentic.

My teachers at Yale were trained in the liberal tradition of theology. But they harbored misgivings. They noted that university-based biblical study had shifted its subject matter away from what is written in the Bible toward what is “underneath” or “behind” the text. For example, scholars became experts in “ancient Israelite religion” or the “Johannine community.” My teachers recognized that the ideal of “intellectual responsibility” was suspect. Too often it meant chasing after academic fashions. The quest for “relevance” bleached out the distinctive and supernatural elements of the Christian message. Perhaps most decisively, in the last decades of the twentieth century the mainline Protestant churches that were guided by the liberal tradition in theology became spiritually flat and increasingly moribund. Long before Patrick ­Deneen penned his influential book, my teachers judged that when it came to theology, liberalism had failed.

For these reasons, “postliberal” had an important negative meaning in my years of study at Yale. It signaled a loss of confidence in liberalism as a theological project. And because the central premise of that tradition is freedom from authority, to one degree or another, we were drawn in the opposite direction. Our goal was to be less inventive, less original, and less modern in our thinking, and we pursued this goal by being more docile to tradition. We sought something new to us, and quite radical, given the general spirit of modern culture: “thinking under obedience.” 

After I received my degree, I taught theology for two decades. Although most of my work remained within a theological frame of reference, I reflected more broadly on the cultural prestige of notions such as creativity, originality, open-mindedness, and especially “critical thinking.” These cultural and pedagogical ideals are still around. They make a promise akin to that of liberal theology: Creativity and originality will enliven society and make our lives more meaningful. Open-mindedness will allow divergent views and opinions to enrich our reflection. Critical thinking will protect us from bias and deliver us from the narrowness of our social and historical backgrounds.

But here, too, liberalism has failed, or so it seemed to me during my years as an undergraduate instructor. The ideal of open-mindedness led to superficiality. Creativity was an invitation to navel-gazing. Critical thinking produced the intellectual enervation that comes from the implicit message that all truth is historically or culturally relative.

As the educational failures of liberalism pressed ­upon me, I began to see a larger context for postliberalism. God alone deserves our uncritical love and devotion. But the promise of obedience applies to many aspects of life. If we will but give ourselves to what we love, we will enter more deeply into its life-­giving power. That’s true for marriage, it’s true for our vocations, and it’s true for the life of the mind.

I’m not someone who reliably remembers a great deal of what he reads. For this reason, I can only guess that my reading of Martin Heidegger and John Henry Newman as a young professor in the final years of the twentieth century instilled in me a suspicion that the culture of the West had undertaken a dangerous experiment. To a striking degree, we dismiss the promise of receptive obedience and seek to rely entirely on our capacity for independent invention. We believe only in the ideals and sentiments that have fueled the liberal tradition, not just in theology, but also in education and culture more broadly.

There are many ways to explain the origins of this remarkable turn against obedience. The standard Enlightenment narrative is one of progress. We have left behind stultifying inherited authorities, and now, for the first time in history, we are free to live in accord with nature and reason. There are other, less triumphalist accounts. The great German sociologist Max Weber coined the term Entzauberung, or “disenchantment.” He observed that the sacred authorities that once beckoned us to obey have lost their power. In a godless era, we have no choice but to embrace the implicit nihilism of making our own meaning.

In Return of the Strong Gods, I do not tackle big questions about the origins of modernity and our condition of disenchantment. I focus on the events of the twentieth century, which, I argue, led to the dominance of creativity, innovation, transgression, and “openness.” But the winds of change are blowing. The open society—a creature of the liberal tradition—has failed. Old imperatives are reemerging, those of protection, conservation, and consecration. Old sentiments are reasserting themselves, those of love and devotion, loyalty and obedience.

Forty years ago, I found myself among the rebels against the liberal theological tradition. My teachers did not formulate a programmatic alternative, but they were clear-minded about the failure of liberalism in religion. And they were aware of the ways in which the ­intellectual culture of the West had come to dead ends, also under the influence of liberalism and its rejection of the promise of obedience. In subtle and sometimes exasperatingly indirect ways, they pointed toward a way of being in the world that is different from what liberalism seeks to midwife, a form of life guided by authority and obedience.

Today, thoughtful people wonder whether liberalism has failed in public life as well. That suspicion is sufficient to earn them the label “postliberal.” With suspicion of failure comes reflection on alternatives, however partial, however tentative. As was the case for my theological mentors, those alternatives depend, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, on the restoration of authority and the rehabilitation of ­obedience—the return of the strong gods. 

Like my teachers, I cannot put this return into programmatic form. And like them, I hope I have the wisdom to recognize that what comes after liberalism will not be liberalism’s antithesis. To be postliberal is not to be anti-liberal. The negation of what has failed does not limn an alternative. For example, my teachers did not reject historical-critical study of the Bible. Rather, they urged me to read Scripture and pay attention to the words. Today’s political task is similar. I see no reason to reject the First Amendment. Rather, we should read the book of nature and pay attention to the depth and scope of our humanity, which is not exhausted by the very real and important role of freedom. And note well, freedom cannot be secured by rights. It, too, finds its power and importance in the perennial call to love, honor, and serve.

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This is a childish oversimplification. America does have a creed, but we also have a common culture and a common stock, as do all other nations. Immigration is only healthy when it leads to integration, when the “other” qualities of the immigrant culture fade into the background and normal American customs dominate family life.

Vivek spends over half the essay hand-wringing about racism. Young people engage in dissident discourse, testing boundaries and violating long-held taboos. But this is not happening in a vacuum. They are responding to the material conditions and political forces thrust upon them. It is those conditions that must be addressed, not their epiphenomena.

Instead of spending Christmas lecturing us about what makes Americans Americans, Vivek should sit down and do the reading. A recent essay in Compact, “The Lost Generation,” went viral around the time Vivek’s article was published. It describes in detail how affirmative action, and the legal and cultural conditions it fostered, went into overdrive about a decade ago, dramatically decreasing opportunities for white American men. This is a third rail issue, in part because white men traditionally avoid framing themselves as victims or playing identity politics. Moreover, the antiracist ideological structure calls anyone who questions it a racist beyond the pale of acceptable society. 

This catch-22 has consequences. “For about a decade, under woke and racial-reckoning conditions,” writes Ross Douthat, “certain important American institutions appeared to systematically disfavor younger white men for employment, preferment and advancement. In the process, these institutions forged a cohort that had concrete, economic, material reasons to regard the existing system and its values as a racially motivated conspiracy against their interests.” While DEI was militating against the people Vivek is now smearing, it was helping people like him.

Vivek’s success and that of his family rely on existing immigration and identity politics regulations. His family entered the country through the precursor programs to the H-1B. They were the tip of the spear of modern mass migration. Should we be shocked that he defends the system that birthed his citizenship? If immigration law were radically revised to prioritize American citizens, would he intervene out of familial loyalty? 

We do not know comprehensively the ways in which DEI helped him and his family rise to elite status. But given what we know now about higher education and the DEI machine, it would be far more surprising to learn that he had suffered setbacks because of his race. In 2011, Vivek received a scholarship from the Soros family. This money was not available for what Vivek calls “heritage Americans.” He accepted the scholarship despite being far wealthier than the average American at the time. And as recently as 2020, Vivek established Roivant Social Ventures to support pro-DEI initiatives like increasing racial and gender diversity in biopharmaceutical leadership.

Tell me again about those pernicious identity politics, Vivek!

Last December, on the second day of Christmas, Vivek denigrated Americans for not revering hard work enough, unlike immigrants. The context was a fight about H-1B visas. His long X post included gems such as:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers . . .

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.

I argued in First Things at the time that just as children need a stable home, families need a stable homeland. And a stable homeland is built on more than efficient allocation of capital (human or otherwise).

The Preamble to the Constitution states: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

The Constitution does not establish a universal good for all mankind, but a common good for a particular people and their posterity. At the time, “posterity” meant the offspring of one progenitor to the furthest generation; not, as some modern legal scholars argue, “whoever comes after us.” The founders were building a world for their children and their children’s children. Like many Americans, I have ancestors who were present at our country’s founding; it is clear that the founders intended this more perfect Union for us. They of course anticipated immigration and integration, the grafting of new branches onto the tree of liberty. But it is the tree and its roots that make grafting possible.

The founders took it as common sense that America’s originating culture must be given primacy. Consider Federalist No. 2:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. 

Americans are those who, as Vivek notes, honor the principles of the U.S. government. But an American is more than that. Americans speak English and honor the legacy of English literature and law. We have particular manners and customs that anyone seeking to be an American should embrace. Americans are proud of our athletic abilities, our jocks, and we are equally proud that the jock can be a scholar-athlete. We are proud of our prom queens, and love to celebrate female beauty and social prowess. Primordially Sabbatarian, we are rightly proud of our leisure and reject the idea that work is an end in itself. Work, for Americans, is vocational, a calling placed on us by God and from which God will relieve us one day. But in the meantime, we are in fact very good at working hard, which goes a long way in explaining why we are the richest people in the world. Americans are Christians, even if often secularized; more specifically, as Charlie Kirk so well articulated, America is Protestant. Americans are those whose families have fought side by side, whose sacrifices we remember on Memorial Day. 

We are a people largely descended from the same ancestors, and if a family immigrates to the U.S. we should expect them to drop their former customs and take up ours. They drop their often unpronounceable names to take on American ones. Aleksandr becomes Alex, Jorge becomes George, 康 becomes Lawrence. Over time they will integrate and intermarry and become Americans, but this is not accomplished at the moment of their naturalization oath. That oath grants full legal status of citizenship, but the citizenship is that of an American, and it assumes in the heart of the new citizen a firm desire to emulate the founders of the country, its culture and customs.

We, the American people, have maintained this land as a free and ordered republic for 250 years. Vivek and some of his family have joined themselves to our common project. But as new arrivals, they do not get to tell us what that common project is, nor shame us when we correct them for misunderstanding it.

Image by Xuthoria, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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