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The post The Downfall of the Republican Establishment (ft. Daniel McCarthy) appeared first on First Things.

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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On April 1, 2025, Trump’s Health and Human Services froze just over $65 million worth of Title X grants to family planning clinics, citing concerns with “possible violations” of federal civil rights law. HHS said it would investigate clinics for “widespread practices across hiring, operations, and patient treatment that unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” as well as “taxpayer subsidization of open borders”—for example, conducting programs in a way that “overtly encourages illegal aliens to receive care.” 

The funding in question had been for sixteen grantees in seven states—California, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and Utah—including nine Planned Parenthood state affiliates, and affecting roughly eight hundred abortion sites across the United States. (The total number of abortion clinics in the United States is unknown, but most estimates suggest roughly eight hundred are currently in operation.) Other states that receive grants under Title X, such as Texas, received partial funding during the freeze. 

Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union and National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents most Title X grantees, sued the administration for “unlawful” withholding of the grants. In the ensuing months, affected abortion clinics provided materials to HHS in response to the concern that they violated federal rules for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. That lawsuit was dropped last Monday, after the Trump administration began releasing frozen funds on December 19, citing a completed review of the grants in question.

Pro-abortion activists have said that the lack of Title X funding caused many clinics to shutter, though the total number of brick-and-mortar abortion shops had already begun dropping before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision, following the prevalence of mail-order mifepristone. At least two shops in Utah did close during the freeze, one on the northern border near Idaho, where abortion is banned, and the other on the southern border near Arizona. Apparently, the demand for Planned Parenthood’s services was not significant enough to sustain a clinic, absent heavily subsidized and free options for low-income clients. 

Veteran pro-life strategist Tom McClusky, director of government affairs at CatholicVote, called the move to return the grant money strategically necessary, since the Trump administration was “virtually certain to lose the lawsuit, forcing them to repay the full amount plus interest and cover attorneys’ fees,” he told the Daily Signal.

One reason for this is that HHS withheld the money before amending 42 U.S. Code Part 300, a rule that governs family planning grants. As currently written, the rule allows HHS to grant and contract with public or nonprofit private entities to establish voluntary family planning services, including “natural family planning methods, infertility services, and services for adolescents,” with additional memoranda from Biden in 2023 to explicitly protect abortion access and promote mifepristone availability in the wake of the Dobbs decision. 

At its inception in 1970, Title X of the Public Health Service Act was championed by President Richard Nixon and incoming President George H. W. Bush, as it sought to improve access to family planning services to low-income women. It was an easy sell because, in its original form, the Title X program expressly prohibited grant recipients from using the funding to provide abortions, as aborting an unborn child was not considered a legitimate form of “family planning” at the time. Yet since then, Title X has been subject to a match of political volleyball, with Democratic presidents ordering HHS to use the funds for abortion clinics, while Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan onward have instated the Protect Life Rule, which prohibits the funding from being used in the same facilities where abortions take place. 

The Protect Life Rule, neutered by President Joe Biden, has yet to be reinstated by Trump during his second term. Yet, as the pro-life research organization Charlotte Lozier Institute has pointed out, the rule is ultimately a mere stopgap for more sturdy congressional action: “A bill that explicitly amends Title X to prohibit abortion referrals in Title X projects and requires strict separation between the projects and abortion businesses would avert threats to this federal program by future administrations.” In other words, Republican congressmen can defund Planned Parenthood themselves, and more permanently than Trump ever could. One has to wonder what they’re waiting for, with a Republican majority in both houses and a Republican in the Executive Office. 

Despite their political strength, Republicans are still sheepish on national abortion legislation, perhaps habitually so. This is somewhat understandable: Multiple state-level pro-life ballot initiatives have failed (though few have been exceptionally strategic), and the fearmongering from the left about a national abortion ban has yet to let up since 2022. Truly, there is nothing a Republican loves less than proving a Democrat right, even for the sake of an objectively good policy. 

Yet, Trump was re-elected after his judges overturned Roe. This says something, however ambiguous, about the moral compass of the American people. Abortion turned out to be a lot less of a rallying cry for either side in the 2024 election than expected, which means now could be exactly the moment to gently roll the ball forward. There is much room between banning abortion and saying the government may not, in fact, subsidize organizations that profit from killing low-income, minority children. 

In any case, the dismissal of the Title X lawsuit clears the way for a more successful fight against Planned Parenthood funding, which rumors on Pennsylvania Avenue suggest could be coming soon. At the very least, reinstating the Protect Life Rule would seem an easy win for pro-life voters on the eve of the March for Life in Washington, D.C.

The post Is Trump Playing the Long Game on Abortion? appeared first on First Things.

The reasons are many. Gay people are bourgeois. They are just like the rest of us, the boy next door, differing only in sexual preference. A rich white man can’t become black. But his son might be gay. Some women are lesbians; some homosexuals are black. Gay liberation is for everyone, rich and poor, black and white, male and female. It’s the all-­American enterprise.

Moreover, gay liberation promises far more than civil rights for blacks and women. The right to same-sex marriage is far more radical than the right to vote or the right to be free from discrimination in employment or housing. The Pride flag represents a new deal for Americans: Government grants what nature denies. We can invent new ways of life in defiance of the most ancient norms. Neither nature nor history can limit us. It’s a stunning view of freedom. It shines more brightly even than the words of the Declaration of Independence, which is why burning the Pride flag today elicits greater opprobrium than burning the stars and stripes.

According to legend, the initial gay rights movement began with a melee at the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village, when gay patrons fought the police officers who had been sent to round up “deviants.” Due to this episode, what we might call “first-wave queerness” crystallized and became prominent. The Stonewall riots highlighted the plain fact that an active homosexual life diverges from bourgeois values.

First-wave queers participated in the 1960s counterculture. They imagined that straight Americans would join them in fomenting a revolution. In Love’s Body (1966), Norman O. Brown argued that human fulfillment requires overcoming the male-female binary. He preached an “eschatological hermaphroditism” that would inaugurate the perfect freedom of “polymorphous perversity.” Brown’s lyrical book was influential. Its utopian pansexuality led first-wave gay activists to promote the queerest edges and most outrageous behaviors, precisely in order to offend bourgeois sensibilities, and thus hasten the advent of an entirely new social order.

Few leaders of the old queer coalition went as far as Carl Wittman, author of A Gay ­Manifesto (1970). Heterosexuality, Wittman said, “is a ­disease,” and “exclusive heterosexuality is fucked up.” ­Wittman counseled gays to drop the self-­hatred. He pushed boundaries. Sex “with animals may be the beginning of interspecies communication,” and “­sado-masochism, when consensual,” might be “a highly artistic endeavor.” Perversion must be celebrated!

First-wave queers were united in rejecting the “fantasy of the gay liberals,” as Edmund White wrote in his 1980 book States of Desire: Travels in Gay ­America. That “fantasy” held that “all homosexuals are the same as everyone else.” White reveled in the hallucinogens, acid trips, alcohol, cocaine, orgies, and anonymous sex that were common in gay scenes around the country. Sexual compulsiveness, he claimed, was a virtue, not a vice. The violation of youthful beauty was an act of benevolence, not a crime. The young would learn the blessings of uninhibited sex.

Not every writer of that period was utopian. As youthful beauty fades, life in the hedonistic utopia gets hard. The greatest gay novel of the era, ­Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, ends with ­Sutherland, an aging protagonist, apparently committing suicide—exhausted, drugged out, and no longer attracting sex partners.

But Holleran’s grim realism did not set the agenda. Gay literature from the first wave championed the randomness and promiscuity of gay lives. Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots shows gay men targeting “fresh meat” (teenagers) and committing acts of sexual violence. The protagonist, screenwriter Fred Lemish, has sex with more than a dozen men in the novel’s first few pages—all in the pursuit of true love, or so he says.

Raunchy first-wave gays believed that the gay life was superior to humdrum bourgeois life, with its workaday concerns about children, paying the bills, and pleasing a demanding spouse. This sensibility was supported by thinkers who sought to normalize the sexual ­revolution—not only Brown, but also Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Wilhelm Reich, and others. Human beings thrived, they insisted, when freed of all social constraints or constructs. Moral discipline served the oppressive capitalist order, they argued. Rebellion, especially sexual rebellion, fostered a liberating socialism. In this critical ­theory, promiscuous sodomy became a political act, the more public the better.

First-wave queers flouted gender norms in dress and speech. It was during this period that “butch” became stylish for lesbians, and the gay lisp came into fashion. Raunchy subcultures emerged in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village. The queer scene flourished in gay bars, public parks, and public bathrooms. Orgies were institutions. A gay press was built.

Gays relished their difference, manifest in their embrace of the heretofore derisive word “queer.” And they lived that difference. Alan Bell and ­Martin Weinberg, authors of Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (1978), found that 26 percent of gay men had one thousand or more sex partners in a lifetime, while 41 percent had a more modest fifty to five hundred partners. Around three-quarters estimated that the majority of their sexual encounters were with strangers. A 1984 study found that only 4.5 percent of male homosexuals practiced sexual fidelity. First-wave queers saw these statistics as signs of achievement: Gays were in the vanguard of a new way of living!

Gay groups in the 1970s and ’80s included the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, The Daughters of Bilitis, and, after AIDS came on the scene, ACT UP. Popular sentiment was negative, however. During the 1970s, former Miss America Anita Bryant led a successful campaign, “Save our Children,” to allow private discrimination against gays. At about the same time, Canadian authorities raided a gay newspaper that was sympathetic to “boy-love.” Some gays owned the insult. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was founded in 1978 to confront bourgeois morality. The Village People (referring to Greenwich Village) memorialized macho-gay fantasies. Their classic song “Y.M.C.A.” valorized older men’s preying on the young.

Embracing raunch was central to first-wave gay activism. If gays were intransigent and loud, Americans would be forced to accept their bathhouses and orgies and learn to live with them. The mainstream would become much, much queerer and politically radical. As a gay activist writes in Kramer’s Faggots, “we shall make our presence known!, felt!, seen!, respected!, admired!, loved!” Queer Nation, founded in 1990, was the last great raunchy gay group in the first wave. It promoted the slogans “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it,” and “Out of the closets and into the Streets.” Queer Nation compared itself to an army, and its manifesto was a model of anti-bourgeois contempt: “Every time we fuck, we win.”

As a strategy, however, raunch contained ­serious ambiguities. On one hand, raunchy gays refused to lie about their lifestyles. They ­contrasted their deviance with a supposedly stultifying mainstream. They saw themselves as subversive shock troops, agents of revolution. On the other hand, they wanted, somehow, respect from a new, queerer American mainstream. Their complaints about discrimination and demands for acceptance sat uneasily with their self-image as bold subversives. Their existence as “the Other” presupposed the continued dominance of the mainstream, and yet they wanted a mainstream that welcomed drag queens, pedophiles, bull dykes, and every other weirdo, not as “normal” people who happened to have gay sex, but as weirdos.

First-wave gay liberation failed. America did not become queerer. Gay activists were compelled to shift their strategy. They began to portray homosexuality as a slight deviation from bourgeois life. Thus was born second-wave gay liberation, which downplayed queerness.

Gilbert Baker, an artist and gay activist, sewed the first Pride flag in the late 1970s at the behest of Harvey Milk, who wanted a symbol of hope and confidence that would encourage militancy among gays. Later gay rights advocates reframed the Pride flag as a symbol of safe, sound, and beneficent diversity. In 1999, Bill ­Clinton designated June as Pride Month to commemorate the Stonewall riots. Clinton’s decree gave official sanction to a new founding myth for the gay movement: The pervasive repression and homophobic intolerance of American society were being justly defeated by the noble struggle of gays for respect, pride, and recognition. Gay liberation became gay rights. It sought inclusion rather than revolution and promised to fulfill mainstream America’s self-image.

The morality tale was created in the early 1990s by gay activists who were facing setbacks. Americans are trained to believe that the arc of history always bends toward social tolerance. But this is not the case. The ways in which minorities present themselves will affect political judgments and legal constructs. As gays came out of the closet after Stonewall and Americans became aware of gay sexual practices, public opinion ­tilted against gay liberation. In 1990, polling indicated that more Americans thought sexual relations between two adults of the same sex were always wrong (73 percent) than had been the case in 1973 (70 percent). “The gay revolution has failed.” So begins Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s 1989 manifesto After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 1990s. A new gay image was needed.

Kirk and Madsen saw gay rights in terms of coalition politics. The gay issue presented a puzzle: how to get Americans to accept the gay coalition, which consisted of gay men and lesbians, as well as exhibitionists, pedophiles, drag queens, cross-dressers, sadomasochists, orgy-lovers, zoophiles, and countless others.

Kirk and Madsen observed that first-wave gay revolutionaries had put forward “screamers, stompers, gender-benders, sadomasochists, and pederasts.” This approach confirmed “America’s worst fears” about the excesses and dangers of gay liberation. Mass pro-gay demonstrations and militant Pride parades turned into “ghastly freak shows” during the 1970s. These realities disgusted American sensibilities.

For the gay coalition to succeed, a new approach was needed. Kirk and Madsen argued for platforming “normal” gays while hiding the weirdos. Gays should be depicted “in the least offensive fashion possible.” With handsome, non-threatening, and normal-looking gays as the face of the coalition, the “homo-hating beliefs and actions” would “look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from them.” Kirk and Madsen advised a canny strategy: “The public should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed, and the issue of gay rights reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question.” Being gay had to become boring. Partner benefits, hospital visitation privileges, dignity, and affirmation were to be presented as the essential concerns of gay life.

The second-wave strategy was adopted. The Queer Liberation Front, with its Marxist overtones, was sidelined. Gone was the Pink Triangle, which implied that American society was akin to a Nazi concentration camp. The North American Man-Boy Love Association must “play no part at all,” Kirk and Madsen write, in this new movement. Indeed, one tactic was to accuse opponents of gay rights with unjustly equating the “love that dare not speak its name” with pedophilia.

As the raunchy image of first-wave gay activism was suppressed, the Human Rights Campaign became the leading voice for gay rights. It was portrayed as a natural extension of the nation’s commitment to civil rights. The battle was as American as apple pie.

It worked. Weirdos stayed in the shadows, while normie gays defined the movement. Hollywood gave us Philadelphia in 1993, a movie hewing to Kirk and Madsen’s script. Homophobes in the film are cruel, bigoted liars, perhaps suppressing their own homosexual longings. Tom Hanks, whose character has AIDS, never kisses his lover, played by ­Antonio Banderas. The couple is made to suffer and attract the audience’s sympathy.

In the second-wave script, gays have high tastes, obey the law, and practice monogamy (sort of). They are competent and honest boys next door. In response to this portrayal, which was widely adopted, the number of Americans who thought sexual intimacy between two people of the same sex was always wrong dropped from 73 percent in 1990 to 62 percent in 1993. It sank to below 50 percent in 2008 and hovers around 33 percent today. (It registers in the single digits in Sweden and the Netherlands and below 20 percent in much of Western Europe.)

Second-wave gay rights advocates aimed at stopping all denunciations of gays, lesbians, and allies. To notice any sign of degeneracy within the gay scene made one a homophobe. Gays who pointed out the degeneracy within their own scene were denounced for abetting critics of the movement. In the 2000s and 2010s, the policing of criticism intensified. Accusations of homophobia could end or compromise careers. Opposition to same-sex marriage was stigmatized. Those who violated the new prohibitions, such as Brendan Eich of ­Mozilla, were released from their jobs or, in the case of people like Mark Regnerus, were investigated at the universities where they taught.

The second-wave strategy has been stunningly successful. Few on the right whispered about overturning Obergefell in the years immediately following that closely contested decision. Think tanks that had opposed gay rights and same-sex marriage switched to abortion, religious liberty, or the ill effects of technology. Safer topics. Scholars made prudent decisions to avoid topics that might gain the ire of gay activists. As a result, objective studies of gay distinctives are difficult to find—and respectable scholars hardly ask questions about gay fidelity, mental health, or life expectancy.

But for all its success, second-wave gay activism contained ambiguities. Was it urging propaganda in order to win acceptance? Was the old queer ambition to be out and loud still operating under the surface? Or did second-wave gay activism seek moral reform among gays? Was the presentation of “normie” gays meant to set a standard in the gay community, rather than just shift public opinion? The answer: Yes.

“Straights hate gays not just for what their myths and lies say we are,” Kirk and Madsen write, “but also for what we really are.” Kirk and Madsen advocated better propaganda, but they also called for behavior modification among gays. Reformed gays would be less sexually compulsive, narcissistic, nihilistic, self-indulgent. Their interest in having sex with minors would lessen, and fewer would have sex in public parks, bathhouses, gay bars. Gays would be less obsessed with finding youthful, handsome sex partners, and would cease their cruel shunning of the old and ugly. Gay men with AIDS and other communicable diseases would desist from unprotected sex with other men. Fidelity and enduring relationships would come to be honored among gays. Andrew Sullivan made a contribution to this vision of acceptance combined with reform. His 1995 book Virtually Normal sought to convince straights to embrace same-sex marriage while arguing that bourgeois marriage would tame gays.

But second-wave gay activism never could bring itself to embrace “normal” homosexuality. Kirk and Madsen were of two minds. They saw the public necessity of emphasizing “safe” homosexuality. “Gays must, at this moment, prefer reveille to ­reverie”—which is to say, suppress the impulse toward debauchery for the sake of message discipline. The gay revolution, they promised, would revolutionize public opinion. First gain respect for “monogamous” gays and lesbians, then extend bourgeois approval to those still in the closet—the drag queens, ­cross-dressers, butch dykes, and, perhaps, pedophiles. “In time, as hostilities subside and stereotypes weaken, we see no reason why more and more diversity should not be introduced into the protected image.” After victory for “normal” gays was secured, the weirdos could venture out of the closet.

Kirk and Madsen bet that when same-sex marriage won the day, it would be because Americans had conquered their fear and hatred of the full spectrum of the gay coalition. A people accepting same-sex marriage would not be interested in drawing moral lines of any sort when it came to sex, they thought.

Whether or not Kirk and Madsen correctly predicted the long-term consequences of the gay rights victories of recent decades, the second wave of gay liberation is giving way to a third wave, one that aims to license the full panoply of sexual deviance. Cross-dressers have come out of the closet. Academics have tried to mainstream minor-attracted persons. Queer pedagogy has flooded into elementary school, and drag queens read to children in public libraries.

Players from the old and confrontational gay rights revolution had been sidelined while public opinion was being transformed. Now, in the third wave, they believe the coast is clear. They are ­going public and celebrating sexual weirdness. In this way, they echo the first-wave queers and their affirmation of the most extreme forms of ­deviance. But the third wave also wants to follow the playbook that led to Obergefell. It emphasizes the liberal language of consent, affirmation, and human dignity, not the old vision of anti-bourgeois revolution. “Minor-attracted persons” are trying to win acceptance for an orientation, not a psychological disorder—a rhetoric that copies exactly the second-wave playbook. Transgender youth are innocent and vulnerable, and they must be supported and affirmed so that America can fulfill its vocation as an inclusive nation. Drag queens are just being their authentic selves (as Darel Paul has shown in these pages).

Weirdos act like it’s 1975, but they talk the language of 2015. Drag queens, pedophiles, and gender-benders demand respect, dignity, and affirmation. Transing kids and promoting gay sex to youngsters are now included in comprehensive sex education under the banner of “best practices” for promoting the mental health of children and encouraging tolerance.

But third-wave gay activism has its ambiguities as well. It embraces the second wave’s achievements, especially the successful capture of the language and prestige of civil rights. But because the third wave pushes acceptance of “out and proud” deviance, it inevitably becomes revolutionary, as the first wave recognized. And revolution means an assault on mainstream American sensibilities, which, perhaps, prepares the ground for a reaction or “backlash.”

This ambiguity is evident in the T that has been added to LGB. Transpeople are gender benders whose appearances and behaviors do not fit ­society’s expectations for their biological sex. Third-wave activism insists that they are different, yes, but “normal.” They need to “transition,” but otherwise are just like everybody else. The imperative is acceptance and inclusion.

But unlike gays at a sex party, transpeople are transgressive in public. Everyone must pretend that the man playing women’s volleyball is a woman—or commit a civil rights violation. Misgendering is likewise a civil rights violation in several states. Trans propaganda of normality is coupled with a fervent need to denounce and cancel transphobes. Birth certificates and government IDs must be changed. Euphemisms such as “child-bearing persons” must be employed.

The trans movement is a freak show with totalitarian impulses. The same-sex movement got ­many Americans, including a majority of the Supreme Court justices, to pretend to believe that marriage only incidentally concerned the having and raising of children. The trans movement demands that people forget that there are only two sexes—an even more fundamental human truth. And that kind of forgetting entails a revolution more far-reaching than anything first-wave queers imagined.

Third-wave gay activism even threatens second-wave achievements. Americans were sold same-sex marriage with abstract appeals to lifestyle and dignity. The appeal for acceptance becomes more difficult when Americans learn about “married” gay men who adopt young boys or see lesbians holding hands or gay men necking in public places. Just as ultrasounds brought home to many Americans the reality of unborn children, Instagram posts of manly gay people celebrating the fruits of surrogacy bring the reality of gay marriage home. Kirk and Madsen wanted to keep the reality of gay sex and same-sex marriage hidden, but eventually people notice—and judge. Few television shows depict gay sex, despite the fact that polls say that the majority of Americans support the right of gays to be depicted on television. The “conservative” actions of entertainment producers speak more loudly than polls. It’s not clear that the “wins” of recent decades are as deep and secure as Kirk and Madsen had hoped.

Stretching the category of respectability to cover the raunchy and weird hollows out the whole concept. In 2015, when the arc of history seemed to bend toward limitless inclusion, proceeding from same-sex marriage to the trans cause looked like a winning approach. The Human Rights Campaign went all in. Corporations sold tucking underwear for children. Trans propaganda was everywhere. Today, the same-sex marriage brand is tarnished by its connection with the transing of kids, the platforming of drag queens, and the grooming of children with comprehensive sex education. Pride parades seem passé, and some sponsors have backed away from them.

To be sure, supermajorities continue to support same-sex marriage. But the trends are not favorable to third-wave gay activism. According to Gallup, from 2022 to 2024, Republican support for same-sex marriage dipped from 55 percent to 46 percent, while Democratic support fell from 87 percent to 83 percent. An AEI poll shows an astounding 11-point drop in support for same-sex marriage among Gen Z between 2021 and 2014 (from 80 percent to 69 percent). Ipsos, a French marketing firm, found that in the past three years, support for same-sex marriage had dropped in eighteen of the twenty-six countries surveyed. In 2014, near the height of the “after the ball” strategy, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported the right of same-sex couples to adopt children. The number increased to 75 percent in 2019. Future polling will, I predict, show declines in support.

The question we need to ask is how to accelerate these trends. During the same-sex marriage debate, it was taken as self-evident that the first side that talks about sodomy loses. The left knew it had to hide reality; the right feared looking intolerant. As a result, neither side brought up anal sex. Both sides stuck to abstract notions of rights, dignity, and the proper definition of marriage.

The public’s uneasiness with the realities ­unleashed by gay liberation suggests a new strategy, or a return to an older one. As the third wave becomes more frank and open about what it seeks to make mainstream, social conservatives must become more frank and open about what they seek to promote and censure.  Trimming off the ­excesses of the gay revolution is a containment strategy that does not work. Yesterday’s sexual revolution is institutionalized and awaits its next revolutionary moment. More boldness is needed.

The first step involves exposing the second-wave strategy. That strategy foregrounded the ­virtually normal, and it did so knowing that it would thereby empower the abnormal. The plan was to queer the mainstream. The public needs to understand the connection between same-sex marriage and trans ideology.

Research into and reporting on the reality of gay life was suppressed under second-wave gay activism. We need to reverse this. Funding must be provided for scholarly studies of gay adoption, gay life expectancy, and other features of gay life. Stories should be written about the gay scene in various cities. Gay activists who adopted the second-wave strategy worked hard to shut down this work in the past, because they knew that scholarly research and journalistic exposés would hurt their cause. The right complied, for a variety of reasons.

Such compliance must end. We need to know what proportion of male-male marriages remain monogamous, in comparison with male-female marriages. It is easy to find up-to-date data on the number of sexual partners for straight men and women, but difficult to find the same data for gay men. The CDC should collect those numbers, too. Studies must be done on the mental health and life outcomes of children raised in same-sex households.

Edmund White’s States of Desire surveyed the gay scene in seven American cities. Gays celebrated their deviance in 1980 through gay journalism and literature. Opponents of the gay revolution took the same evidence and systematically presented it to the public, to good effect. Both the deviants and their opponents were silenced by second-wave gay activism.

The frankness and ambition of third-wave activism constitute an opportunity. Well-reported stories can expose surrogacy as a practice that allows doctors to become rich by peddling children to gay couples. We need profiles of discarded surrogates and accounts of the experience of children who lack opposite-sex parents, to say nothing of children adopted and then sexually abused.

The second-wave dignity revolution was always an unstable gambit, meant to hide reality and suppress judgment. Now the unpleasant reality of raunch is coming into the open, not least because of the misjudgment about the trans movement. This reality is creating a vibe shift among many Americans. The arc of history need not bend toward acceptance of sexual deviance. Today, it is possible to imagine the rollback of the gay rights revolution.

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Last year the United Nations Population Division predicted that global population will peak in approximately sixty years, at around 10.3 billion people. After that, the number of human beings will begin to fall. Population decline has already begun in sixty-three countries, including China and Russia. The cause is persistent low fertility. At the world scale, the number of children being born is already below the levels required for a stable population, generally considered to be 2.2 per woman in rich nations and a bit more in poor ones. More than half of all countries today have sub-replacement fertility rates. Japan, Canada, and most Western European countries have been below replacement for fifty years. Today, not only rich countries but even middle-income ones such as Mexico, the Philippines, and Iran are below the levels required to stave off future population decline.

And these are the optimistic forecasts. UN population predictions typically overshoot reality. A 2020 paper published in The Lancet forecast that global population would peak in the 2060s at around 9.7 billion, twenty years sooner and 600 million people fewer than the UN proposed. Population decline will only accelerate after this peak. By the end of the century, countries such as China, Japan, Thailand, and Spain are expected to be reduced to half their present size. The result will be some combination of rapid societal aging, the abandonment of rural areas and small towns, and perpetual mass migration, the implications of which are only now beginning to be contemplated.

Conservatives have been writing about this topic for decades. Phillip Longman published The Empty Cradle in 2004, and Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting came out in 2013. Liberals, by contrast, have been wary of admitting that low fertility and population decline exist, much less that they are problems. They fear that simply discussing population will normalize racist and patriarchal ideas. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, two economists at the University of Texas at Austin, aim to break the silence. In After the Spike, the authors advance what they call “the case for people” from a perspective rooted in economic, political, and philosophical ­liberalism.

In that After the Spike is of, by, and for liberals, this approach is a good thing. After all, it is liberals who need to be convinced that global depopulation rather than overpopulation is coming, that low fertility is a social problem, and that human existence is good. And if Spears and Geruso can convince liberals to support political, social, and cultural changes that encourage increased fertility, more power to them. Outside the liberal bubble, however, After the Spike falls well short of a convincing analysis of the population problem. Yet it fails in an interesting way that tells us a good deal about liberalism, why contemporary Western liberals have such a difficult time becoming pronatalist, and why liberal prescriptions for the problem are unlikely to succeed.

This is not to say that conservative pronatalism is guaranteed to work either. The headwinds of global low fertility are strong. As Spears and Geruso inadvertently show their readers, history gives little cause to believe a major fertility turnaround is possible, especially an engineered one. Though fertility policy can tweak the margins of human population, and every little bit helps, it will almost certainly fail to stabilize global population levels. Instead, the youngest readers of this book will live to see the first global decline in human population since the Black Death nearly seven centuries ago. The case for people should be made. At the same time, we must prepare for that case to fail.

After the Spike has two central goals. The first is to convince the reader that global population decline is coming. On this score, the book is a clear success. Spears and Geruso show that every country in the world today has either declining or sub-replacement fertility; even India and China, which together make up more than one-third of the world population, are, respectively, below and well below replacement. There are no “automatic stabilizers” guaranteed to keep fertility rates up and the global population stable. What produced the “population bomb” of the twentieth century is wholly incapable of producing similar growth in the twenty-first.

The book’s second goal is to convince the reader that global population decline is bad. Here simple demography will not suffice. To make the “case for people,” Spears and Geruso must choose economic, political, and philosophical arguments that they believe in and expect will resonate with the reader. Their arguments are rooted in core liberal values: equality, choice, progress, humanity. If the reader doesn’t agree to privilege these values, or finds the authors’ unwavering commitment to them impractical or ­naive, he will quickly tire of this book. After the Spike makes a lengthy and serious effort, however, to sway the liberal reader. Fully half its ­pages are devoted to convincing liberals that there is no contradiction between reversing fertility decline and contemporary liberal commitments.

The authors argue, for instance, that depopulation will do nothing to help the climate. On development, they show that the quality of life in poor countries has improved despite tremendous population growth. They also argue persuasively that past technological, economic, and social progress has been dependent on population growth. As “progress comes from people,” a future of population decline will be a future without progress.

Here Spears and Geruso run into a contradiction that troubles their entire book. They admit that progress has been driving down fertility rates “for several hundred years”—for at least as long as we have reliable records—because “a better world, with better options, makes parenting worse by comparison.” Children increasingly compete against careers and consumption and leisure and self-actualization for space in adults’ definition of the good life. This is economists’ now-standard “opportunity cost” explanation of low and declining fertility. As much in India as in the U.S., today there are just too many ways to spend time and money other than on children. Because Spears and Geruso are so dedicated to the value of free choice, they shrink from any suggestion of changing people’s preferences. So they present no case for nudging behavior by increasing the benefits of having children or the costs of not having them. The only thing to do, in their view, is to keep reducing the “burden” of having children among people who currently want them, in a constant race against (and yet for) progress.

One is led to wonder how low both actual and opportunity costs can go. Can they go so low that “enough” children will be born to stabilize global population? The authors have nothing to say on this point, because they don’t take the social contradictions between fertility and progress seriously. The book faces this problem especially in its discussion of fertility and feminism. Spears and Geruso insist that gender egalitarianism is perfectly compatible with replacement-level fertility. In fact, they venture that gender “fairness might be the only way to stabilize the population.” Yet their evidence is spare and unconvincing. The authors offer the United States between 1975 and 2010 as a “proof of concept.” During this period both gender equality and the fertility rate rose together. Rising female employment, a falling gender wage gap, more female education, more female professionals and leaders, more legal equality, and more babies! Yet Spears and Geruso conveniently ignore the preceding and following periods. Rising gender egalitarianism in the 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the steepest fertility fall in U.S. history. Progress in gender egalitarianism since 2010, whether in wages or educational attainment or seats on the Supreme Court, is likewise concurrent with falling fertility.

The authors also ignore the key question of population stabilization and how to reach it. Over the thirty-­five years in question, only two (2006 and 2007) saw above-replacement fertility rates—and that was due less to feminism than to unusually high fertility among young Hispanic women, particularly recent immigrants. “Fairness” also has a poor fertility track record internationally. The four large Nordic countries, the most gender-­egalitarian in the world, now have total fertility rates in the “very low” range, below 1.5. Excepting two years in the early 1990s in Sweden, they have not been above replacement rate in more than fifty years.

Though progress and gender egalitarianism are values Spears and Geruso are keen to defend, the authors’ most basic commitment is to individual choice. Not only is it their supreme value; in their view, it is also the fundamental cause of human fertility. The authors demonstrate, with good evidence, that “population control has never controlled the population,” at least not significantly over the long run. Neither communist China’s attempts to drive fertility rates down nor communist Romania’s attempts to drive them up accomplished anything more than short-term effects, at the cost of tremendous human suffering. Thanks to universal “socioeconomic development,” from urbanization to modernity to the waning of patriarchy, no power can change population at mass scale against the combined choices of billions of individual women. The authors are so careful not to tread upon free choice that they repeatedly affirm the freedom not to have children as much as the freedom to have them. Thus, all we can—and, in their view, should—do is “make it easier to choose children.”

Who will do this work of easing? According to Spears and Geruso, “humanity” will. Throughout After the Spike there are only two actors: the individual, who chooses; and humanity, which is tasked with enabling individual choice. Not even states—much less families, schools, clubs, religious organizations, neighborhoods, voluntary organizations, the media, or political parties—are tapped for a meaningful role. There is only “humanity,” the great “we” who hold “shared responsibility” for the future, because “responding to global depopulation is going to have to be something that people do together.”

This is a deeply unsatisfying answer. Humanity is not an actor. There is no global polity with an ability to aggregate and express the collective will of the entire human population. Of course, it may be that the appeal to “humanity” is not meant to be persuasive. It allows the authors to cultivate an aura of doing something, without engaging in a discussion of politics. They thus avoid questions of the exercise of power through strong cultural norms, taxation, regulation, or law—all of which would entail a violation of free choice. At the end of the book the authors cannot even muster a call for a personal commitment to reversing population decline by getting married, starting a family, or adding one more child. Instead the reader is offered vaguely social-policy-oriented slogans to “aspire bigger,” “join the conversation,” and “get started.”

But can the bearing and raising of children be made cheaper than all the possible low-fertility adult lifestyles that, thanks to progress, are now on offer? What if driving down the opportunity cost of having children simply isn’t enough? After all, Spears and Geruso have given us good reason to believe it isn’t. Fertility rates have been declining for centuries, and there is no invisible hand guiding human populations to a stable equilibrium. Being liberals, the authors simply assume that nature and tradition will drive the reproduction of society. But as the sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued, contemporary Western societies live after nature and after tradition. We no longer accept either necessity or fate. We refuse to believe we are the subjects of any power beyond the reach of individual or collective human choice. From a liberal perspective, of course, this is progress, born of our technologies, from airplanes to genetic engineering to birth control. As such technologies spread across the globe, all people come to live with the same autonomy from nature and tradition. And with nothing compelling us to choose children, the evidence strongly indicates that we won’t. At least, we won’t choose enough of them to stop the global population from running down the steep slope of the spike as rapidly as we ran up it.

The way in which humanity addresses low fertility and population decline will be much the same as the way we have already addressed climate change. The great projects to stop atmospheric CO₂ concentrations at 350 parts per million or limit temperature increases to +1.5°C from pre-industrial levels have already failed. Instead, individual governments and industries have pursued their own divergent interests while working at the margins to develop “green” alternatives—even as global fossil fuel consumption, thanks to technological progress, continues to increase. As low birth rates persist, some governments will lean heavily on immigration, while others will choose capital investments to compensate for labor shortages. Many policies for radically lowering the cost of bearing and raising children will be tried. Some will succeed on the margins, but most will not. Societies will adapt to their own distinctive combinations of rapid aging, mass immigration, urban population concentration, and peripheral area depopulation.

This process won’t continue forever. Our future is not extinction. Low fertility and population decline contain the seeds of their own destruction. Spears and Geruso show that “progress comes from people.” A future of fewer people will therefore produce a future of less progress. If population decline is steep enough, progress will halt, thus eliminating the force that undermines human fertility. Five billion humans—half the number at the top of the spike—won’t build lunar bases, use room-temperature superconductivity, reverse aging, or merge with AI. We might even lose many technologies, institutions, and cultural practices that are dependent on complex global systems. Then nature and tradition will return, and with them the individual motivation and social organization necessary for human reproduction.

No one can say when it will occur. All we can know is that that world will be quite different from our own. It will likely be a world that sees its own future not in the advancement of individual autonomy, but in the fruitfulness of its people. 

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

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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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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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Elsewhere, I have argued that President Trump’s intervention in Venezuela and threat to annex Greenland by force do not meet the conditions set out by just war doctrine. But in online Catholic circles, some have suggested that precedents from Christian history lend support to an expansionist foreign policy. Some point to the Crusades. Others suggest that the Catholic empires’ colonization of the New World shows that wars of conquest can be legitimate. Among those taking such a position is the popular podcaster Matt Walsh.

These arguments, however, are entirely without merit. Whatever one thinks of the Crusades and the history of the Catholic empires, they provide no theological or moral justification for actions like taking Greenland by either military force or the threat of it.

This is obvious enough in the case of the Crusades. The Crusades were military actions authorized by the pope for purposes such as recovering territory that had been unjustly taken by Muslim conquerors, protecting Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, and suppressing heretical movements that endangered the social order. Notoriously, serious evils were sometimes committed during the Crusades. But as Catholic apologists often rightly point out, the extent to which this is the case has been somewhat exaggerated. Nor does it entail that the causes for which the Crusades were fought were always bad ones.

However, all of that is irrelevant to the question of whether it would be legitimate to take Greenland by force. Such an action would not involve the U.S. reclaiming something that once belonged to it, much less protecting pilgrims or suppressing heresy. Nor, of course, would it have papal authorization. The Crusades, therefore, provide no precedent at all for what the Trump administration may have in mind.

It might seem at first glance that the Spanish Empire’s colonization of the Americas affords a more plausible precedent. But it does not. The fact that the empire happened to be Catholic does not by itself prove anything. What matters is what the moral teaching of the Church had to say about the matter. As I have documented in the second chapter of my book All One in Christ, a series of popes from the sixteenth century onward vigorously condemned the harsh and unjust treatment of the American Indians, including their enslavement. The greatest Scholastic theologians of the day, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas, did the same. Their teaching was often ignored. But what should matter for Catholics is the teaching itself, not the bad example of those who ignored it.

Nor did the Church of the day or her theologians teach that taking another country’s territory by force was a legitimate cause for war. On the contrary, as Vitoria wrote in On the Law of War, “enlargement of empire cannot be a cause of just war. This proposition is too well known to require further proof.” The standard teaching of the Scholastics, following in the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, holds that the only just cause for a nation to go to war is in response to harm inflicted by another nation. This by itself suffices to condemn as unjust any U.S. attempt to take Greenland by force.

Does this necessarily entail that Spanish colonization was in every way unjust? No. Where colonization is concerned, the Scholastic tradition came to draw an important distinction. On the one hand, there is territory that is already owned or occupied by a state or by a people who are organized in such a way that they may be regarded as an incipient state. For another nation to attempt to seize such territory by force would be unjust aggression. On the other hand, there is territory that is unclaimed by any state, is uncultivated and undeveloped, and sparsely populated by nomadic peoples without even any incipient central political organization. This sort of territory could—under certain circumstances—be colonized. 

This too gives no support to any U.S. invasion of Greenland. Denmark has for centuries already had a claim over it (one long recognized by the U.S.). And even if it were given complete independence from Denmark, it would be considered an incipient state.

Then there are the reasons that Catholic theologians gave at the time of colonization for its purported legitimacy. Vitoria provides a classic treatment of these in his work On the American Indians. Some argued that the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope had legal jurisdiction over the whole world, and that the pope had given the New World to Spain (whose ruler, Charles I, was also the Holy Roman Emperor). Some argued that the American Indians had lost any right to the land because of their sins, or because of their refusal to become Christians. 

Vitoria presented compelling objections against these and other arguments, but he held that there were also some cases where conquest could be legitimate. One such case would be if the American Indians had themselves shown aggression toward Spaniards who were simply exploring territory; or if they had positively tried to prevent the Spaniards from spreading the gospel; or if Indian rulers were gravely oppressing their own people, for example, by practicing human sacrifice. Obviously, though, neither the arguments Vitoria rejects nor those he accepts have any application to the Greenland situation, nor do the Trump administration’s own arguments in any way resemble them. Once again, we have nothing here that provides justification for a U.S. war to annex Greenland. 

So, the claim that the history of the Catholic colonial powers provides a basis for defending a U.S. military action to seize Greenland is completely bogus. But there is one more argument that some commentators online have been trotting out. 

The Old Testament famously describes ancient Israel’s conquest of Canaan. This, some argue, provides a model for a legitimate American conquest of Greenland. But the comparison is absurd. In the scriptural account, the ancient Israelites were not acting on their own authority. Rather, they were acting under divine authorization, mediated through prophets. And since God has authority over life and death that no human being has, he may command certain things that no human being could do on his own authority. Nothing like that applies today—and indeed has not applied for over two millennia, given that the Church teaches that no prophets have been sent since Jesus. The Trump administration in particular can hardly claim divine authorization for a Greenland invasion.

There is, then, no theological support to be found for such an attack. It would clearly violate the traditional natural law criteria of just war doctrine. U.S. seizure of Greenland by military force would be as manifestly unjust a war as any in recent memory.

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♦ Matthew X. Wilson penned a useful reflection on the appeal of transgressive right-wing figures such as Nick Fuentes (“How to Take Disaffected Young Men ­Seriously,” Public Discourse, November 4, 2025):

Very broadly, I think that disaffected right-wing young men generally share the following deeply rooted sentiments in common: first, the sense that everyone’s identity, community, and culture is being elevated, celebrated, and supported except for theirs; and second, the sense that the left is deliberately working to dismantle traditional conceptions of American identity and culture—to transform America’s cultural and social fabric into something unrecognizable—and that members of American conservatism’s old guard have been either naïve doormats in this insidious project, or worse, willful co-conspirators. 

Disaffected young men see an economic system that doesn’t seem be working for them, with everything from being able to afford to get married and have children to the ability to buy even a modest house appearing far out of reach. They see a culture that has spun completely out of control; while woke illiberalism seems to have slightly receded after peaking in 2020 and 2021, conditions remain abysmal everywhere from elite university campuses to everyday spaces like public school classrooms and corporate workplaces. They observe the feminization of society and the quiet persistence of deeply embedded DEI structures that seem designed to give a leg up to everyone except straight white men. They see that tribalistic identity politics continues to be acceptable, but as usual, only for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Everyone gets to be affirmed, celebrated, and to feel like they belong except you.  

But perhaps most importantly—and this is the case for nearly every disaffected young man I’ve encountered—there is an existential concern that they are losing their communities, their culture, and their country to extreme levels of immigration and the resultant rapid balkanization of society on identity-based lines.  

Wilson goes on to note that condemnations are likely to be ineffective. As one young friend put it to me, “Charges of racism and anti-Semitism are sooo Baby Boomer.” Wilson:

The best way for older conservatives to respond to the rise of someone like Fuentes, I believe, is not to broadly condemn his young listeners as fellow travelers in Nazism and racism and just be done with the matter. Not only does such a strategy risk pushing young men further toward peddlers of those poisonous ideologies; it is also a lazy shirking of the governing class’s responsibility to offer young people concrete ideas and affirmative proposals to renew their hope in America’s future. To win back disaffected right-wing young men, it is imperative to offer them reason to believe that their lives may well be better than those of their parents and ­grandparents—that they will be able to comfortably raise children in a country their grandparents would recognize, and that America’s trajectory is on the upswing, rather than on an unstoppable course toward late-stage illiberal multiculturalism (see: the YooKay) and irreversible ethno-religious balkanization.  

I agree with Wilson that a successful approach must lead with a positive vision for America’s future. It also should include a call to accept responsibility for building that future, which may require making sacrifices, perhaps heroic ones. Nattering on about Jewish conspiracies is a way of shirking that responsibility. 

♦ If you think Wilson’s approach will be easy, read “The Lost Generation” (Compact, December 15, 2025) by Jacob Savage. His earlier essay, “The Vanishing White Male Writer” (Compact, March 21, 2025) ­documented the discrimination against white men in literary ­publishing. “The Lost Generation” broadens the scope of his research to encompass journalism, academia, and the art world. Savage focuses on the past decade, but what he documents was already occurring in ­academia when I was a graduate student in the late 1980s.

The facts are shocking. Here’s an example: “The Disney Writing Program, which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers, has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade—none to white men.” The same pattern can be found at universities. “Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).”  The University of California system exerted even greater discrimination against white men. “UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-­track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).” The same story in the art world: “The ‘Big 4’ galleries represent 47 millennial artists; just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.”

The systematic elimination of white men from culture-making jobs has not been a conspiracy headed by Ibrahim X. Kendi. Rather, as Savage emphasizes, it has been an openly announced, much celebrated project led by Baby Boomer and Gen-X white men. Whether to protect themselves against DEI censure or because they are true believers, people like Jeffrey Goldberg (editor of The Atlantic) have remained loyal to the older white guys who were already in place, while guillotining the careers of younger white men.

Why did we have to wait for a screenwriter ­shafted by DEI to do elementary research about awards, fellowships, and faculty hiring over the last decade? Conservatives donate millions to D.C. think tanks, and nobody at those institutions exposed the damning facts about the discrimination that we all knew was taking place. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the conservative movement has for a long time been cowed or complicit. 

Savage’s article should stand as a warning to any Boomer or Gen-X conservative who thinks he has the moral authority to police Gen Z online extremism. 

♦ “Faith does not begin in continuity, but in rupture,” observes Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo. He is reflecting on Genesis 12:1, God’s command to Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Cardozo continues:

Authentic belief requires an inner emigration—a bold refusal to remain imprisoned by habit, culture, or collective sentiment. The religious life is not an extension of the past but a revolution against spiritual complacency. God’s call to Avraham is therefore the most radical upheaval imaginable, and yet—and this is the paradox—it demands that one remain deeply oneself. 

♦ Thirty-eight percent of the adult residents of Manhattan are married—a figure about 12 points lower than that for the nation as a whole. Fifty-one percent of Manhattan’s adult males and 48 percent of its adult females have never been married, a rate much higher than the national rate of 37 percent for men and 32 percent for women. Among the 1.6 million residents of the island, 24,312 have served in the U.S. military (1.8 percent, compared to 6.1 percent nationwide). The low level of military service stems in part from the high level of foreign-born residents in Manhattan (30 percent, compared with 14.3 percent nationwide), as well as from Manhattanites’ educational status (since the rate of military service declines with attainment of advanced degrees). Sixty-five percent of Manhattanites have a bachelor’s degree or higher; the national rate is 36 percent. None of these percentages are surprising. As I’ve often noted, Manhattan is an island off the coast of America. 

♦ A few years ago, I penned an op-ed, “Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates” (Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2021). To say I’ve stopped altogether is not accurate. As I explained, I’ve simply become more skeptical of elite degrees and less inclined to treat them as a sign of promise in young people. Rose Horowitch recently gave me more reasons. She reports remarkable statistics about the large numbers of students at fancy universities who claim disability designation for ADHD, ­anxiety, and depression (“Accommodation Nation,” The Atlantic, ­January 2026). “At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of students are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent.” It’s 38 percent at Stanford. By comparison, “only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations.” That difference speaks volumes. Either rich kids at top universities are more emotionally fragile and psychological vulnerable than median kids at ordinary schools are (a red flag when it comes to hiring), or they lie and dissemble to get disability status to ­secure more testing time (which is not a good trait in an employee). 

♦ I learned with sadness that Norman Podhoretz passed away on December 16. The first time I met him was at a party in New York. He came up to me, jabbed his finger into my chest, and said, “You’re wrong about Jack Kerouac!” (I had recently published a sympathetic article about the Beatnik writer, “The End of the Road,” October 2008). I held my ground, but just barely. Norman was a formidable man! After we finished jousting over Kerouac, I told him that his book, Breaking Ranks, had played an important role in my life. I had stumbled upon his account of his defection from the dominant left-wing consensus in a used bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue north of Columbia University. An undergraduate at the time, I was beginning to doubt liberal pieties. I thanked Norman for helping me break ranks. May his memory be a blessing.

♦ The smartphone’s invasion of daily life and the coming onslaught of artificial intelligence raise a crucial question: What does it mean to be human? The Center for Christian Studies (our partner for the ­annual First Things Lecture in Austin, Texas) is offering a seven-day course to address this question. Center of Christian Studies director Keith Stanglin will lead the class, and our own Carl Trueman will be one of the guest lecturers. The class begins on Monday, January 29 (7:00–8:30 p.m.) and meets on subsequent Mondays through March 9. You can participate in person or on Zoom. The regular class fee is $150 for the seven sessions. Subscribers to the Journal of Christian Studies (published by the Center for Christian Studies) or First Things can sign up for $100. If you subscribe to both, the fee is only $50! 

♦ Joe Schmitz of Macon, Georgia would like to form a Readers of First Things group (ROFTers). If you’d like to a gather monthly to discuss articles in the most recent issue of First Things, you can join by getting in touch: jeauxschmitz@gmail.com. 

♦ As I write, year-end contributions are flowing into the office. I’m very grateful for the generosity of ­thousands of readers. You support ensures the strength and excellence of First Things. 

The post While We’re At It appeared first on First Things.

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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My parents had taken me to Rome because I was in love with the classics, probably to an annoying degree. I had lain awake on my grandparents’ apartment floor in New York, ripping through Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Odyssey. I explained what the Iliad was to my elementary school librarian (o tempora, o mores) so I could ask her to order it for the yearly book fair. I loved ­Homer’s fabulous tales of war and adventure.

Still, nothing could prepare me for the first time I read the Aeneid, in translation on that trip and then slowly, doggedly, in Latin class. It is a poem that transformed Western literature. Even while its composition was in progress, the word went round in elite literary circles that it would eclipse everything that had gone before. “Make way, you Roman authors, make way, Greeks!” wrote ­Virgil’s admirer Propertius. “Some unknown thing is being born that’s greater than the Iliad.” It was a time when momentous deeds and epochal changes were very much expected. After a hundred years of gory civil strife, Julius Caesar’s heir, ­Octavian—later renamed Augustus—took control of the state and proposed to usher in a new era of peace. It was a point of pride with him that Roman arts and letters were undergoing a renaissance to match his new regime. The Aeneid, if it really could exceed the glory of Homer’s Iliad, would demonstrate that Rome had supplanted Greece as the cultural as well as political center of the world. Naturally Augustus requested—not to say demanded—a peek at some early drafts. There was a lot at stake.

In form, at least, Virgil certainly delivered. The Aeneid makes a show of doing in one poem of twelve books what Homer had done in two ­poems of twenty-four books each. Aeneas spends the first six books wandering painfully away from his destroyed homeland, trailing in the wake of Homer’s Odyssey. Then he spends six books fighting a war in Italy, like the Greeks who besieged Troy in the Iliad. Augustus would have been pleased to find this son of the goddess Venus, flatteringly related to him through Ascanius, matching the deeds of Homer’s Odysseus and Achilles almost point for point. So it is all the more astonishing that when Aeneas comes on the scene in book 1, he appears to be totally miserable in the role of an epic hero. He seems like he would rather do anything than found Rome.

Homer’s protagonists are notoriously flawed. Achilles flies off the handle; Odysseus lies through his teeth. But one thing they very rarely do is abandon themselves to self-doubt or despair. They are too magnificent for that—they belong to the glorious race of almost-gods, which is already a misty memory from Homer’s perspective. They can toss around boulders that two men, “such as men are these days,” would struggle to lift. Mortal though they are, they are superheroes. Readers of Virgil’s poem would have expected a Roman champion to rival Homer’s in stature. Instead, the first time he opens his mouth, it is to curse his fate and wish his own death.

The scene is a storm at sea, a mainstay of the epic genre. The goddess Juno, incensed that Rome will one day wipe her beloved Carthage off the map, sends a tempest in an effort to stop Aeneas from fulfilling his destiny. He seems inclined to let her: “All his limbs go limp with cold; / He moans, and gropes toward the stars with both his hands, / And cries aloud as follows: ‘three and four times blessed / Were those who died in Troy’” (all translations in this essay are my own). It’s not that no epic hero ever contemplated suicide before: Odysseus, confronted with similar weather conditions, briefly wondered “whether I should cast myself into the sea and perish there.” But his deliberation lasted for about a line and a half before he resolved to tough it out. Aeneas spends eight lines fantasizing in detail about how he could have joined the lucky corpses at Troy, then falls silent again. He really, truly does not want to be on this quest.

It goes on like that. Odysseus was famously driven through his many twists and turns by an overpowering desire for nostos,the return home. But Aeneas has nowhere to return to. The home he has known all his life is burned to cinders in a harrowing scene of carnage, thanks in no small part to Odysseus. The Greeks, recast from the Trojan perspective as a band of shameless marauders, lay waste to everything Aeneas loves. Even his wife, Creusa, gets caught in the mayhem and can only give her blessing to the journey as a ghost, evaporating as she does so into the smoke that streams from Troy’s citadel. Her last instructions to Aeneas are to “‘preserve the love we share by cherishing our son.’ / And after giving me these words,” Aeneas recalls, “she left me there / In tears, and longing still to say so many things, / But she receded on the wind.”

It is in this moment that Virgil starts to reveal what he’s up to, and what he’s capable of. ­Creusa’s son is Ascanius, the boy who has just been singled out in a burst of light from heaven as the future patriarch of what will become Rome. His grandfather Anchises, who was previously inclined to turn his face to the wall and let the flames take him, now brims with fresh vigor at the thought of such a glorious future for his progeny. But Aeneas, the man with the apparent honor of bringing all of this to pass, can only watch in speechless horror as his entire life is incinerated. When he reaches out to grab for the woman he loves, he finds what all epic heroes find when they try to embrace the dead: empty air.

Virgil’s indelible image of Aeneas in flight from Troy, with Anchises on his shoulders and Ascanius toddling along behind, is a picture of courage as gratifying to the Roman mind as one could wish. “Pious Aeneas,” the dutiful son, salvaging his ancestral gods and following his father’s guidance, carries the future with him in the person of Augustus’s own ancestor. And yet Virgil has introduced an unsettling note of melancholy into the poem’s first crescendo. It becomes clear that this will not only be a story about the valor it takes to found a great civilization like Rome. It will also be about how much must be lost, left behind, and even destroyed if something new is to be built. The vacant look that Bernini sculpted into Aeneas’s eyes is the look of a broken-spirited veteran. It’s the look we imagine him giving to Dido, the beautiful queen of Carthage, when she asks him to tell the story of his escape: “unspeakable, oh queen, the grief you now command me to relive,” he says.

He tells her the story anyway, since it is already plastered all over the walls of the temple she is building to Juno and (we are invited to recall) soon to be recited everywhere in the form of the Homeric poems. “Where in all the regions of the world,” asks Aeneas, “Is there a land not yet brim-full of all our toil?” As much as the Iliad and the Odyssey are the inspiration for the Aeneid, they are also the Greek shadows Roman literature can’t get out from under. Homer’s stories contain the grief Aeneas can’t escape. Homer’s genius made Virgil’s possible, but now Virgil has the impossible task of surpassing it. Aeneas, like Virgil, is charged with creating something dazzlingly new—a city to outshine Troy. But all he has to work with are the ruins of everything he once loved.

This must be why ­Anchises’s death, on the journey from Troy to Carthage, leaves Aeneas well and truly rudderless. His cry of dejection at the memory of this loss is one of the most pitiful moments in the poem, as he explains to Dido how his father’s breath finally gave out in the Sicilian port of Drepanum: “Here, so ­many ocean tempests in, / Oh, my sire—lightener of blows and burdens— / I lost him. Anchises! Here, oh best of fathers, / You abandoned me.” In some sense Anchises has to die for Aeneas to come into his own—as every son who grows to full stature must outlive his father, as Troy and Carthage must fall for Rome to rise, as ­Homer must be usurped for Virgil to succeed. None of those concerns can comfort Aeneas, though. History, fate, and the will of the gods are all converging to thrust him to the head of his household and his people. But at a personal level, he’s not remotely ready. He feels in this moment less like a father of nations than like a scared, abandoned little boy.

It is in this condition of vulnerability that ­Aeneas washes up on the shore of Carthage and finds Dido at the dazzling height of her powers. Virgil compares her to the untamable huntress Diana, virgin goddess of the moon. She is clearly modeled after the Amazons and the proud ­heroines of myth. Faced with the enviable progress of Dido’s fledgling city, Aeneas does something understandable and totally disastrous: He lets her take over. She, meanwhile, is inflamed with a wild attraction to him, thanks to the scheming of Aeneas’s mother, the goddess of love. By the time the pair abscond into a cave and consummate their union, Aeneas has become so passive that he’s not even mentioned by name. “They go astray,” writes Virgil, “the leader, Dido, and the Trojan / In a cave.” ­Aeneas lets this dux femina, this formidable leading lady, take total control. He melts into the background. Finally, the gods have to descend from on high to jolt Aeneas out of his funk, at which point he has to toss Dido aside and leave her weeping on the shore.

Ever since this doomed love story was written, it has struck readers as almost unbearably heartbreaking. It is a Greek tragedy in the midst of a Roman epic. Dido transforms from Diana into Medea, the raving woman scorned, and takes her own life in a scene that made the young St. Augustine weep. Among other things, the whole episode is an allegory for Rome’s battle royale, as a growing republic, with Carthage’s maritime empire. Carthage was powerful, wealthy, and ancient compared to Rome, which at that point still had a reputation a little like that of Australia at its founding—a rough and rugged land farmed and defended by ex-­convicts. Like Dido in her fling with Aeneas, Carthage was very much the senior partner in the Punic Wars that pitted her against Rome. And like Dido, Carthage ended up ruined.

Most Romans would have looked back on the victory in the Punic Wars with a sense of satisfaction and pride—as Cato the Elder relentlessly stressed, Carthage had to be destroyed. Carthago delenda est. Virgil, too, portrays the conflict and its outcome as necessary and inevitable for the formation of Rome. But what he adds to the picture is the feeling of profound regret with which ­Aeneas leaves Dido’s shores, knowing quite well how devastated she will be. Italiam non sponte sequor, he tells her: “It is not my will I am following to Italy.” This is one of the poem’s conspicuously unfinished lines. It has always been part of the Aeneid’s mystique that Virgil died without perfecting it, allegedly wishing it should be burned rather than survive in its incomplete state. Even so, it is at least extremely fitting, if not downright providential, that this particular line remains incomplete. There are six resounding beats of silence where there ought to be more syllables, but what words could Virgil or Aeneas possibly fill that space with? He has to go, and she has to die, much as Rome’s expanding republic was bound to collide with Carthage eventually. Dido’s anguish is riveting, of course, but it is Aeneas’s sorrow that expresses Virgil’s tragic vision most completely. Even history’s grandest acts leave destruction in their wake.

It’s in realizing this, and accepting it, that ­Aeneas finally begins to grow into his destiny. C. S. Lewis, who loved the Aeneid more than almost any other poem, wrote to Dorothy L. Sayers that its “effect is one of the immense costliness of a vocation combined with a complete conviction that it is worth it.” If ­Aeneas begins to feel that conviction as he turns away from Dido’s shores, then he comes to full stature as the man he has to be two books later, when he meets his father’s ghost in the underworld. Book 6 is the hinge point of the poem, the ­katabasis or descent into death that defines the ­hero’s journey. Anchises is at rest in Elysium, where the ­blessed wait for resurrection. The speech he ­delivers is history disguised as prophecy, the story of Rome up to Virgil’s day foretold as the destiny of Aeneas’s descendants. Its high point is a tribute to Rome’s distinctive achievements, set against those of other peoples:

Others will mold the breathing bronze with softer touch,
I’m sure, and coax out living faces from the marble,
Plead their causes better, chart the heavens’ motions
With a staff, predict the rising of the stars.
Remember: your dominion, Roman, is of nations.
These will be your arts—impose the ways of peace,
Show mercy to the conquered, crush the proud in war.

With these words, Virgil stakes out a claim to greatness for himself, for Aeneas, and for Rome. Greeks may excel in wordplay and aesthetic refinement; the astronomers of the eastern empires may trace the planets and the stars in their courses. Rome will never reach its full potential by imitating them, just as Aeneas will never fulfill his calling by rebuilding Troy and Virgil will never make his mark on literary history by reproducing Homer. Sad as it is to leave the past behind, the moment calls for something totally new.

What is that new thing? For Virgil, it is surely the Aeneid itself. The poem has often been dismissed as a pale knock-off of Homer, a way station between the Iliad and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács wrote that “the heroes of Virgil live the cool and limited existence of shadows, nourished by . . . blood that has been sacrificed in the attempt to recall what has forever disappeared.” But Virgil thoroughly anticipated this accusation and understood his place in history far better than his critics do. Precisely by seeing and acknowledging that the Homeric world of legend is dying away, he creates a gritty new kind of realist epic and a vividly human kind of hero. Surely that’s why Dante chose Virgil to lead him right up to the gates of paradise, and why T. S. Eliot saw him as the bridge between the fading pagan era and the dawning age of Christendom. To the greatest authors of the Christian West, the Aeneid has always represented the fullest literary consummation of what the pre-Christian world had to offer.

What the poem is to literature, Rome’s empire was to history—the sum and summit of antiquity. That is how Virgil portrays it: as the one power that can gather together the world’s nations and “impose the ways of peace.” Modern scholarship on the poem has often been preoccupied with a debate over whether Virgil meant to extol the majesty of Augustan Rome or covertly denounce the evils of imperialism. The catastrophes of the twentieth century made readers hypersensitive to moral ­anxieties about nationalist excess, and they sometimes ­project those anxieties onto Virgil. But it’s a poor fit. Virgil’s contemporary readers were certainly alive to the possibility that power could be abused. But they were also convinced that it could be wielded righteously, and they tended to believe they were the ones to wield it so, given their peerless martial virtues and sense of justice. Virgil portrays empire as Rome’s divine commission, but he is ­also more honest than any mere triumphalist about what it will take to shoulder that singular burden. Perhaps the Romans would rather not confront the moral complexities of their new regime; perhaps they would rather try to reconstruct the bygone age of the republic or escape to Greece and practice philosophy. Perhaps Aeneas would rather go back to Troy. It’s irrelevant—Troy is gone, and so is the republic. The moment calls for what it calls for.

So it is that Aeneas climbs up out of the underworld, through an ivory gate reserved for false dreams. This is one of the moments typically cited by “pessimists” as evidence that Virgil thinks of Augustus’s gleaming promise of peace as nothing more than a deceitful fantasy. But here Virgil is ­hearkening back one final time to the Odyssey, in which Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, can’t believe a dream she has that her husband has returned. It must be a dream from the ivory gate, says Penelope, and the point is that she’s wrong: Odysseus is in fact back. The reality of his return brings an end to his wanderings and her loneliness, as if they had woken up from the same bad dream. It’s possible that the dream Virgil means to dispel is the one Aeneas is leaving behind him, the lost past of Troy and the disoriented wanderings of his Odyssean journey. What comes next is hard, solid, and real: a war for control of Italy that takes its cues from the Iliad. It ends with the merciless slaughter of ­Aeneas’s rival, Turnus: “His life fled down beneath the shadows, moaning, in contempt.”

At least, that’s how the poem ends as it stands. There’s some possibility that Virgil intended to soften the blow by adding scenes of reconciliation after the war. But given the trajectory of Aeneas’s development, the ending we have is perfectly fitting. Virgil introduces his hero in a moment of abject disorientation and leaves him in a moment of grim resolve. The whole majestic future of Rome is sealed in the poem’s gruesome final kill. The greatness of Aeneas’s endeavor doesn’t cancel out the severity of what he has to do. Augustus’s autocracy doesn’t vitiate the blessings of his peace. In managing to see and honor all this, Virgil changed literature as much as Rome changed the world.

Commentaries on Bernini’s sculpture of Aeneas invariably point out that it depicts the three ages of man: childhood, adulthood, and old age. If so, then to come to full stature as an adult is to embark on a journey like Aeneas’s—to find yourself thrust into the terrifying position of building a life and a family while the older generation that once defined your world starts to pass away. I feel the truth of that when I revisit the sculpture, now that I’ve grown from ­Ascanius’s height to Aeneas’s. I also find myself wondering whether nations go through the same ages that men do. Virgil certainly seemed to think so.

America is now in a position rather like ­Aeneas’s at the start of Virgil’s poem. The republic is approaching its 250th ­birthday—its ­semiquincentennial or, for optimists, its quarter millennium. It’s a milestone that seems to call for projections of national confidence and displays of patriotic enthusiasm, much as the advent of Augustus’s reign might have seemed to call for a thumping expression of jingoism on Virgil’s part. And yet the lead-up to ­America’s 250th, like the lead-up to the Augustan era, has been marked by things falling apart. The social consensus that obtained after World War II has fractured into a bitter confusion of hostile factions, locked in a cold civil war that sporadically flares hot. The erosion of religious faith has left a void at the heart of the nation, to be filled with fanatical political movements and millenarian forebodings of a digital singularity or an economic revolution. And the uneasy balance of powers over which America presided in the wake of the Cold War has crumbled, taking with it the morality tale we once told about the steady triumph of freedom over authoritarians from Hitler to ­Stalin. Donald Trump’s intervention into the ongoing Middle Eastern wars and the severe disagreements it provoked among his followers typify the kind of harsh ­choices and moral ambiguities we face in a reconfiguring world. There is more to come.

If that’s the case, however, maybe it’s not a sign of America’s decline so much as of its coming to maturity. Maybe what’s ending is an age of innocence, and the task ahead is a little like that of ­Aeneas: to forge a new consensus and a new peace out of the wreckage of the old. The Aeneid can teach us that just because our calling is harrowing and confusing doesn’t mean it’s not noble or necessary. There is a moment, just before the war that wins Italy, when Aeneas hoists onto his shoulders a shield decorated with images of Rome’s future. “He delights in all these images of things / He does not understand,” writes Virgil. “He lifts the fame and fortune of his children’s children / On his shoulders.” That is what makes him a hero for our times: He is lost, bereaved, uncertain, and broken in the midst of the very acts that make him great. Even after he climbs out of the underworld, he must feel his way through a world he does not fully understand, taking each next step as manfully and honorably as he can. So must we.

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 Roussinos’s key insight is that the Trump administration views global conflict in civilizational terms. The present global order is being challenged by “two overt civilizational states—China and Russia.” American foreign policy must be organized to meet these threats.

The Trump administration envisions a two-pronged approach. The first concerns “the world without,” ­Roussinos says. He quotes the NSS, which speaks of America’s seeking “good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours.” The days of global democracy promotion are over. There will be no more hectoring about human rights. Deals can be made with India, alliances forged with Arab potentates. A new coalition of the willing is needed, one made up of those who don’t wish to be overwhelmed by China’s commercial onslaught or Russia’s military aggression.

But amoral pragmatism and alliances of mutual convenience are not sufficient. The West, “the world ­within,” is not a free-trade zone or an alliance ­motivated solely by shared enemies. It is a civilizational project in which the United States has a fundamental stake. The threatening “civilizational states” must be countered by a prosperous, confident, and united West.

Here, the Trump administration sees serious problems. The Western hemisphere, culturally defined by European colonization, has been neglected by American leaders for decades. It needs to be reunified under American leadership. More importantly, Europe, the cradle of Western civilization, is sick. Its political, economic, and migration policies are causing “civilizational erasure” (as the NSS starkly puts it). Roussinos quotes the most succinct statement of the Trump administration’s goals for the old continent: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”

Anyone who has spent an afternoon on a university campus knows that calls for the restoration of “Western identity” are fighting words. In 1996, Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations. It was the most important and influential dissent from the one-world hopes of the post–Cold War era. According to Huntington, civilizational distinctions and tensions are perennial. They will shape global politics, no matter how technologically and economically interconnected the world becomes.

Huntington’s book was respectfully debated in the late 1990s. That was not the case for his final book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004). Huntington questioned many of the pieties of multiculturalism, and he warned that they were undermining America’s civilizational coherence. Some accused him of undue pessimism. The United States could successfully reinvent itself as a multicultural nation, they insisted, and in so doing, lead the way to a new and universal world culture that would transcend the clash of civilizations. Others dismissed ­Huntington’s concerns as manifesting a gauzy nostalgia for white Protestant America, which was—fortunately, they ­presumed—a thing of the past.

Some European reactions to the NSS follow this pattern of morally superior dismissal. Roussinos cites a tweet by The Economist defense editor Shashank Joshi: “Trump national security strategy: Make Europe White Again.” Roussinos quotes former EU official Josep ­Borrell Fontelles, who said that Trump “wants white Europe divided into nations, subordinate to his demands and voting preferences.” 

In my estimation, these snarky comments function as rhetorical sallies in a battle to defend one-world universalism. For those loyal to this vision, any clash of civilizations—whether in Birmingham, England, or in geopolitics—stems from racism, xenophobia, or some other form of irrational nativism. Their argument goes something like this: If everyone believes in multiculturalism, then it will work well. The only impediments are atavistic and backward-looking sentiments.

Although in theory Muslims in Birmingham can sin against the multicultural ideal, in practice only children of the West come in for censure. Something similar obtains in postcolonial studies. In its early centuries, Islam underwrote the spread of Arab expansion and conquest. Asia saw the rise and fall of many empires. But the emphasis falls on Western colonialism. Those in the West who seek a one-world universalism see the most dangerous resistance as arising, paradoxically, in the West, which is the very source of their universalism. It’s more important to tear down statues of Cecil Rhodes than to mitigate the dangers posed by insular Muslim communities.

Huntington was aware that clashes can occur within civilizations, not just among them. It is evident that the West is enduring an agony of internal strife. The hostile reception of Who Are We? foreshadowed the now open conflict between a post-civilizational universalism and a rising populism, which demands the restoration of native peoples and distinct cultures.

Perhaps this intra-civilizational conflict is inevitable. Christopher Dawson often observed that religion provides the DNA for civilizations. Christianity animates the West. It preaches the God-man, Jesus Christ, in whom the universal and particular are united. In view of this paradox, perhaps the conflict between an embattled liberal and globalist universalism and a rising tide of populist particularity will bear good fruit rather than civilizational collapse.

I side with the populists. In recent decades, the West has lost sight of the local, the rooted, the blessedly ­immobile and given—the particular. Unrestrained migration and transgender ideology epitomize this blindness. Both vest hopes in limitless mobility and borderless opportunity. The populist reaction offers a useful corrective. It is a reminder that just as God is incarnate not everywhere but rather in a Jewish man who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, so also the brotherhood of man is not found in the “world community” but rather in particular places and among discrete peoples who are bound together by shared loves. Those who are able to read the signs of the times will endorse this corrective. And the wise? They know that there will come a time when the corrective needs correcting, a time when love of the particular must be reminded of its ­universal vocation.

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