On October 22, at Harvard Department of Government’s annual Vik-Bailey Lecture, Dean Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI and former Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House, spoke about the future of AI. He argued for the continued primacy of humans over the world and society. However, because of the absence of any role granted to virtue or value in his recommended solutions or preferred society, Ball failed to develop a compelling theory of humanism, and thus could not successfully defend the human primacy which he rightfully argued we ought to hold dear.

Ball argued that one of the most significant threats in the era of AI is what he called the “Silent Consensus.” According to this consensus, shared by many of those in Silicon Valley and regulators, the development of AI will lead to the loss of human primacy over world and individual events. According to Ball, many in the AI industry assume that the “best case scenario” is one in which AI systems come to take over much of the world — making economic, political, and even societal decisions for humans, rendering man complacent in a world where he has little autonomy.

But Ball said that we should find this outcome outrageous. We should recognize that humanity’s “history,” our having built society and civilization, justifies our continued control over world events. Even if AI systems “join that conversation,” they must recognize that this is a “human conversation,” and thus, that the world should be one dominated by human interests and decision-making, not AI interests. Ball calls this human-focused attitude “human chauvinism.” Some might merely call it “humanism.” In his view, it is a strange sociological fact that those in Silicon Valley have abandoned humanism.

Yet perhaps one reason why many in Silicon Valley have abandoned this vision is that the alternative may seem to be no vision at all. Take Ball’s own “human chauvinistic” argument, for instance. Little in it is very appealing or positive. According to Ball, the main way man can fight against the Silent Consensus is by no longer creating the sorts of AI systems that could lead to significant problems. This means more regulation on data use, clearer constraints on the power of AI systems, and even giving up certain “classically liberal” principles and “foundational liberal tenets” by restricting information of AI to a trusted few and, perhaps, nationalizing the AI industry.

In Ball’s view, this would have to occur via agreements between industry and the government and “incentives” for the AI companies, rather than direct regulation, in order to avoid a “war on drugs-style scenario” in which the development of anti-humanist AI was “driven underground” but not eliminated. The implication of Ball’s focus on incentives and restrictions is that, in order to avoid the takeover of AI, what we need is (likely international) regulations to make information about AI limited to a select few technology companies, presumably including OpenAI, which will have a complete monopoly over the AI industry and which will be paid ransom money from our taxes to convince them to hopefully not destroy the humanistic world. Perhaps the Silent Consensus may appear so appealing because the alternative is a government-run monopoly run at the expense of everyone (except, of course, Ball).

This is not to say that Ball offered no positive vision. However, this vision is far less attractive when considered alongside his negative vision. Specifically, while Ball imagined creating systems which helped us expand our own power, this expansion of power was limited to increasing knowledge. It involved us asking “new and bolder questions” to become “a man expanded.”

It is unclear what Ball exactly meant by this. Perhaps the idea is that using AI systems will allow us to discover more about the world, and thus to become greater humans. But who will access this knowledge and power once the government restricts knowledge to the select few in control of the AI monopoly? Who will be these expanded men? Will they be virtuous, humanistic men, or will they be the sort of man currently in charge of these monopolies — those who adhere to the Silent Consensus? If the latter, Ball cannot seem to explain how to make his expanded men interested in the human endeavor. We can make Sam Altman infinitely knowledgeable, but that will not magically make him more interested in human autonomy.

What Ball is ignoring in his entire model of the future of AI is the concept of virtue. Throughout, Ball couched his vision for the future in vague, nonsectarian language — wealth, knowledge, freedom. Yet none of these things are sufficient to make humans care about humanity. None of it is sufficient to lead us to the sort of goodness or freedom which Ball values. There are possible and even exciting ways in which AI systems can aid our virtue; indeed, many alignment systems right now are motivated by that exact goal.1 Moreover, there are ways in which the government could be involved, not to sign away the human future to a monopoly of those trusted with knowledge, but to create systems that can train us in what makes us valuable as humans: the freedom to choose and the virtue to choose well.

It is only with this sort of virtue-focused vision, a vision of how AI can expand our horizons as humans rather than just as knowers, that we could possibly maintain a truly humanistic society. It is only once we imagine a species made more virtuous and freer because of its interaction with new technologies that we can imagine maintaining our independence from those technologies.

But, of course, Ball could not possibly admit this, because as much as he discusses humanism, he is confined by his job to a limited moral world in which the only value of humanity is chauvinistic.

After all, his job is not to promote virtue; it is to sell goods and services. And those goods and services do not always lead people to better lives. In fact, it seems that most people using AI do so for mentally unhealthy activities. But Ball’s job is not to criticize or to imagine a future. Rather, it is just to say that any human activity, even if it is unhealthy, is equally valuable. It is to say that the value of human activity comes from its being human, not its being valuable. To make a sectarian claim about the capacity of humanity for virtue would be to make a sectarian claim about how customers should be using AI. And to make such a sectarian claim would be to undermine OpenAI’s business model.

Subscribe now

Thus, Ball is forced to accept human chauvinism but not humanism. He cannot accept any deep view about the value of human life or how AI systems can help us achieve that value because he cannot accept that the value of humanity is anything greater than the mere fact that we are a species. Ball’s demands, then, must slowly accelerate towards a socialist society paying AI companies rent for the right to be enslaved by humans rather than AI systems. When faced with either the option of an international human-controlled autocracy or an authoritarian set of AI states, we may start to understand why the Silent Consensus has become so popular. At least AI states would take away our freedoms competently.

Nevertheless, Ball’s dichotomy is not a real one. We are not, in fact, forced to choose between losing freedom to either AI or to OpenAI. But what this requires is a vision less focused on regulation and control and more focused on the expansion of human ability. The value of AI, as in any technology, should not be limited to the value of knowledge. It should be applied to move humans closer to our true value as free, good individuals in a righteous society.

On October 19, Michael Anton, who ran the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning until September, told a full room at the Harvard Institute of Politics that the United States has spent three decades defining its national interest so broadly that it no longer has one. “If you focus on everything, you’re not really focused on anything,” he said. Sitting beside him was Jake Sullivan, former President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor and now the Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Kennedy School, who agreed with Anton’s diagnosis yet disputed practically every solution he offered and Amna Nawaz, the co-anchor of PBS Newshour, who moderated Anton and Sullivan’s debate.

Anton opened humorously mentioning. “Obviously I’m right of center and I work for Trump. I know what my assigned role is and I’m willing to play it,” he said. “So if you need me to twirl my mustache and tip the top hat, I can do that.” He then set out a case for restraint on foreign affairs. He discussed how America’s “core interests” have been redefined over the past forty years to slowly include more of the world, growing “until by the end everything is [considered one of America’s ‘core interests’].” The pivotal origin of this overreach, he argued, was a four-year argument inside the George H.W. Bush administration over whether to continue being the world’s policeman after the Cold War. The keep-going camp won, “by which I mean their policies were implemented, but it wasn’t really intellectually resolved.”

Anton said, however, that this policy came with a drawback. We simply cannot effectively defend the entire world’s interests because “Everything is finite. American power is finite. American money, American man-hours, American focus. We [have] got to pick and choose.” Instead of globalist foreign policy, Anton offered a short list of American core interests on which we should focus: “physical security, security of borders, security of infrastructure,” and the trade routes “without which American commerce cannot be safely or profitably conducted.”

Sullivan, meanwhile, declared that the object of foreign policy was the similar mission “to make the lives of the American people safer, better, and easier,” which implied prioritizing building an industrial base at home, maintaining alliances, winning our competition with China, and ending the post-9/11 wars. Agreeing with Anton, Sullivan said that American strategy documents “are not that good in general,” that “our neighborhood matters profoundly to our security,” and that Chinese influence in the Americas should be reduced. Where he disagreed was on the empirical question of whether recent administrations have in fact prioritized those American interests. Defending his time in the Biden Administration, Sullivan said that when Biden left office, “he was the first president this century who could say the U.S. is no longer at war. Now we’re back in war. And I think that comes at a cost to our capacity, our power, our credibility, and our purpose in the world.”

In spite of his stated opposition to American involvement in international wars, Sullivan was nevertheless supportive of American involvement in the Russia-Ukraine War. Sullivan castigated the Trump Administration’s moves of the previous ten days, among them waiving sanctions on Russian diesel, throttling Starlink “so that Ukraine has a harder time actually shooting down the Russian Shahed drones,” and the President “saying Zelensky’s got to go.” Sullivan declared defending Ukraine a moral mission: “If Ukraine just stops fighting, or the world stops helping Ukraine fight, it’s the end of Ukraine,” he said. “If Russia stops fighting, it’s just the end of the war.”

Anton, on the other hand, who took part in the 2025 negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine War led by Special Envoy for Peace Steve Witkoff, said the offer to Moscow “was a very good deal for them, perhaps…but it would have stopped the fighting,” and that the deal failed because Russia would only accept deals based on “no terms you could offer.” Anton had an otherwise bleak view of the war effort. On the one hand, Anton said, Russia has spent enormous casualties on a shrinking population to hold “all of two oblasts, about half of another and a third of another, in four and a half years,” while on the other, American stocks of the weapons “are way down” because “we can’t produce this stuff fast enough” to supply Ukraine. Thus, he said, if Ukraine ended up without the Donbas, that would be “not a great outcome” but still an acceptable end to the war. Fundamentally, the disagreement returned to the two speakers’ understanding of American interests abroad. “How much of [Ukrainian territorial integrity] is really a core national interest of the United States?” Anton asked. “I think there we really disagree.”

On the Iran conflict, however, the positions reversed, with Sullivan defending the isolationist position and Anton the interventionist position. Sullivan, who had been part of the negotiations preceding the 2015 Nuclear Deal between the United States and Iran, called the current war “a folly from the start” and said that it was fundamentally misguided, as the Iran nuclear program cannot be ended by force: “Iran still has enriched uranium, it still has centrifuges, and it still has scientists.” Sullivan said that the best the President could do at this point would be to “retrench, cut a deal, get a deal in place and then try to essentially regroup.”

Anton, who met the Iranians three times last year during negotiations, described the sticking point of those negotiations as whether Iran could enrich uranium, which Tehran claims was not prohibited by the 2015 Nuclear Deal. Criticizing the deal which Sullivan had helped negotiate, Anton described it as ambiguous to the point where each side had believed that very different things had been prohibited by the deal, paving the way to the current conflict. He recognized, on the other hand, that the war with Iran had exposed capability gaps in the American military. “I didn’t know that the U.S. Fifth Fleet and all of our capabilities can’t keep the Strait open,” he said. “I thought that’s why we’re there.” Rather than view the war as a failure, Anton thought the war “could just kind of stop,” and that either way “we would still have pocketed all the degradation” of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

When discussing American operations in Venezuela, Sullivan and Anton disagreed on the effectiveness of the Trump Administration’s intervention. Anton called the January raid that removed Nicolás Maduro “an effective and justified use of U.S. power” against a designated narco-terrorist “in league with a hostile power an ocean away.” Sullivan agreed the operation was “absolutely remarkable” tactically but said that short-term impressiveness was a danger: “That can be intoxicating.” He argued this success led the President to try to apply the same strategy to Iran but then “came to learn: actually there was no Delcy Rodríguez [or other moderates in the regime].” Anton answered that Sullivan had misunderstood the goal of American intervention in Iran. Unlike Venezuela, nobody “sent Chinooks into Tehran,” and further argued that the administration recognizes that regime change in Iran “may be beyond the capability of the United States or Israel or the United States and Israel together.”

On the deeper, foreign policy-strategic level, Sullivan and Anton disagreed sharply on the ends set out by the current Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy. Sullivan called its civilizational language “a real frontal assault on Europe for turning its back on its own civilizational heritage” and a departure from the American tradition. Anton, who was at the State Department when it was written, said he had been surprised by the extreme reaction which many on the left had to the document, “I complained to a few friends. I said, ‘We’re being attacked for saying to Europe, we love you, please live.’” Allies can only carry their share, he argued, “when they have a kind of inner confidence in who they are and their history,” citing Germany, where officials tell him “there’s something now kind of in the German national character that just really resists doing anything more in [military defense]” because of German national shame over their history. Nawaz, the moderator, offered Sullivan a reply to Anton’s response; Sullivan declined.

Anton further argued that allies like Germany have increased spending on their militaries because “they believed Donald Trump that this guy scares us. He may actually get out of the alliance.” Sullivan noted, contrary to Anton’s argument, that nine allies met the NATO target of members spending 2 percent of their GDP on their military when Trump first left office, while 23 did when Biden left. Anton offered, as a rejoinder, the fact that since the current Administration took office in 2025, every member but one has pledged to spend 3.5 percent of their GDP on their military, displaying Trump’s success at forcing European nations to spend on their own defense.

Anton, representing the Trump administration, understood the facts because he was there when the negotiations took place: he had sat across from the Russians and the Iranians and had sat in the briefings on what our military stockpiles actually hold. Sullivan disputed his conclusions but not his facts. Most of the students in that forum had only ever heard the case for strategic restraint from liberal interventionists who oppose it. For one night they heard that case from someone who had implemented it, and the man arguing against him could not say he was wrong.

On October 16, at the Institute of Politics, Professor Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Professor of Law, hosted Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio, Jameel Jaffer of Columbia Law School’s Knight’s First Amendment Institute, and David French of the New York Times. Part of a series celebrating America’s semiquincentennial, this talk was titled “A Well-Informed Citizenry.” Yet, the persistent indecision, if not self-contradiction, of each of the three panelists would have made one think it was they, and not the citizenry, who needed to be concerned about being well-informed.

Inskeep opened the conversation by giving an account of media in the time of “scarcity” — namely, when print media was the only form of news media available to most people. According to his account, what defined news during that era, and what has been lost now, is printed speeches and other items in full, even (and especially) if the editors thought the content thereof was “horrible,” which allowed audiences to make determinations for themselves. This was “more valuable” than the media’s current modus operandi, which is instead to disseminate “the clip of the most idiotic thing that was said or something that wasn’t even said” to provoke a gut reaction.

On the topic of giving audiences the whole picture, Inskeep later lamented that many in middle America are unable to make sound political determinations because the government is too complex for them to properly assign blame for government failures, blaming his “industry as a whole, because it is sometimes actually hard work to figure out who is responsible for the thing the government did.” NPR, Inskeep’s employer, is a great example of exactly this oversimplifying failure. Over the past few years, the broadcaster has effectively determined that all sin originates in our President rather than any other element of the government. It is understandably hard, then, for its listeners to pin the tail on the right donkey: they have been given infinitely many tails, but only one ass.

French took time to caution against misplaced nostalgia for historic civic literacy, citing studies from the 1930s and 40s that found levels of political ignorance among the American population similar to those among 21st-century Americans. Instead, French insisted, what makes the contemporary media landscape so hindering to an informed citizenry is the emergence of a political and media class that “deliberately feeds on and magnifies [Americans’] civic ignorance.” He juxtaposed this elite class with the elites of the 1970s. In particular, he focused on the shock and horror which followed President Ford’s assertion in the second 1976 presidential debate that Poland was not tyrannically controlled by the USSR — at the time, French affirmed, there was a “form of consensus” in the media that “at least facts have to matter.”

Yet, this seems ahistorical at best, and contradictory at worst. Demagogues have always plagued democratic societies, so much so that the critique dates back to the Socratics. Similarly, yellow journalism has a long history in the United States; it helped send us to war with Spain in 1898 (long before the 1970s). The sensationalist journalism and headlines of today are better understood as an extension of this historic trend. Instead, one of the few novelties of the modern media landscape is that modern journalists are so open about manipulating facts for progressive or social justice ends. Perhaps to French’s surprise, then, some of the most impactful players in “feed[ing] on and magnif[ying] civic ignorance” have been the outlets at which he works. Meanwhile, the only two major examples he gave of counterproductive media practice were conveniently right-wing — one related to Trump’s claims about missiles and the war in Ukraine, and the other about the right-wing media’s reaction to Critical Race Theory.

Still, the panel had its moments.

Lepore refreshingly asked about causes of an uninformed citizenry that do not have to do with the “important but [...] totalizing” role of tech. Inskeep responded by giving his “epidemiological” theory of news media. He argued that each party had treated the other’s media as diseased during certain portions of the last quarter-century. In the 2000s, the left fearmongered about reporters speaking directly to the military about Iraq because it thought that the military would corrupt the media; similar beliefs undergirded leftist hysteria about “platforming” conservatives throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s. Under the Second Trump Administration, Inskeep argued, a similar phenomenon was now happening on the right, as the administration declares leftists and their media personae non gratae at the White House.

But panelists appeared most eager to talk about the market — both during the opening round of remarks and audience questions. Unfortunately, there was little coherence on the topic.

The panelists bemoaned the death of local media. French gave a specific anecdote of a “beautiful” new public pool built in Nebraska, asserting that building such a pool was only possible because the relevant Nebraskans were not arguing over Critical Race Theory in their neighborhood schools — a “national issue” which French presented as distracting from more important local politics. Yet, the majority also seemed to agree that the widespread appetite for national news over local news was the result of consumer appetite. This anecdote displayed the general difficulty panelists had in understanding what sorts of things matter to people. Only journalists could be surprised and appalled by parents being more interested in what their son is learning than in whether he will be able to try out his breaststroke over the summer.

More egregiously, returning to French’s President Ford example, the media landscape of that time worked, according to French, because there was a “consensus” among a “real consolidation” of national media, which consisted of “ABC, NBC, CBS…PBS.” That is, the sort of mutual commitment to “facts” that the panel sought was only possible in a world with an effective oligopoly of information run by multinational conglomerates, which prevented any single source from “reinforc[ing] your priors” as (according to French) media does today. Nevertheless, at the first question from the audience, Inskeep quipped about the media being consolidated into a single company, which drew laughs from the fellow panelists and audience.

While nobody serious wants a monopoly on the media, the instinct to laugh at consolidation and demand more local news — to seek out a more democratized or locally sourced media landscape — appears to contradict the laudatory view of the 1970s model of media that French presented. It is impossible for the modern news media to achieve any sort of meaningful agreement on “truth” because, unlike in the 1970s, it is dispersed across many outlets. As such, it seems like encouraging less consolidation and creating more local news could only make the situation worse.

The panelists could thus not escape countervailing liberal principles: on the one hand, that centralized corporations are inherently evil and that, as Jaffer noted, capital does not conduce to democracy; on the other hand, that it is necessary to have a centralized media ecosystem that can agree on notably progressive standards of “truth.” But perhaps these two beliefs are not as contradictory as they first seemed. As Democrats harass conservative media moguls and try to sue businessmen to avoid conservative editorial control over any mainstream media outlet, the left realizes both parts of the panel’s vision: media is kept democratized, but its component parts are censored and thus forced to conform to a leftist view of what cultural issues are “important” and what facts are fit to print.

A YouTuber and a Harvard Law School professor walk onto a debate stage. A cross between a scene from a Platonic dialogue and the beginning of a bad joke, this was the unlikely combination presented by conservative Steven Crowder and progressive Professor Randall Kennedy on Monday, September 28, in an event hosted by the Harvard Republican Club. While the topic of debate was officially “free speech is dead on campus,” the two floated between discussing Trump, DEI, book bans, affirmative action, and the state of academia, especially at Harvard.

Crowder began the debate with an opening statement heavy on statistics, rightly emphasizing the extent of left-liberal dominance on campus. His figures included a nine-to-one liberal-conservative split, or the fact that no HLS professors had donated to Trump in 2023 or 2024. For Crowder, these statistics overwhelmingly indicated that Harvard’s left-wing “monolith” could not have arisen “organically.” In response, Kennedy made two points: first, that Trump, by cutting federal research funding, poses a greater threat to free speech, and second, that academia is largely self-correcting.

A notable sticking point was the DEI pledges that junior professors were previously required to sign at HLS, before the policy was later repealed (a point emphasized by Kennedy). Crowder’s best moments were on this subject, including when he brought Kennedy to an extended silence after asking whether Kennedy would have signed such a DEI statement when he was a junior professor. By contrast, Crowder was quick to deftly redirect (or interrupt) any particularly penetrating questions from Kennedy regarding specific Trump policies, such as, for example, that the Naval Academy had pulled one of Kennedy’s books from its library shelves.

Crowder also pointed out the fact that Professor Kennedy had been the only faculty member at any institution who had been willing to debate him. For this intellectual bravery, Crowder repeatedly praised Kennedy. Indeed, it was hard not to feel sympathetic to Kennedy for enduring a heckling, ideologically antagonistic crowd. On the other hand, this is precisely what conservative academics must face every day in the academy.

As the debate progressed, and for as much as they sparred, Crowder and Kennedy agreed on two principles.

First, while Kennedy downplayed the degree of anti-conservative discrimination on campus, he did concede that there was, in fact, something of a problem. Indeed, he noted that he would not, in principle, oppose a “conservative affirmative action,” though Crowder was (perhaps ironically) against such measures.

Second, the two seemed to largely agree upon, and argue from, a certain bedrock, classical liberal conception of justice. In critiquing Trump’s cutting of federal funding to Harvard (and other research institutions), Kennedy, in a thunderous tone, accused Trump of betraying the conservative (really, classical liberal) values of “free speech, due process, and private property.” To this, Crowder offered that Trump’s funding cuts, primarily aimed at DEI programs, were mere cases of government management of publicly funded institutions. That is, schools like Harvard, having received federal money, could no longer claim to be wholly independent, private institutions, but instead were regulatable by the federal government. Crucially, when cross-examined on this by Kennedy, Crowder pointed out that he would not be against conservative discrimination at a purely private institution. The key difference was that Harvard, in Crowder’s view, was not a purely private institution. In any case, the role of the government remained largely negative for Crowder: neither to actively fund things which it dislikes nor to enforce a broader agenda of non- or anti-discrimination otherwise.

It is, however, in this latter area of agreement that both are vulnerable to critique.

Insofar as Crowder attempted to emphasize the “inorganic” nature of the liberal rise-to-power on campus, at which the Trump administration’s efforts are presumably aimed, Crowder’s examples do not serve him. Take the DEI pledges and hiring/promotion guidelines (requiring candidates to demonstrate their commitment to furthering DEI) that Crowder repeatedly brought up. Certainly, this is a case of progressive excess run rampant. However, nothing about this is inorganic, in the sense of being mandated by an external (governmental) force. In fact, precisely the opposite is the case — given that academia’s left-wing credentials outstrip even the most blue counties of America (a point made by Crowder), this could only have arisen internally. Nobody else could be progressive enough to impose it. But, because this discrimination is self-imposed by the academy, through various more-or-less subtle means, Crowder’s proposed negative justification for government actions does not work. Merely getting rid of active discrimination on the College administration’s part is not enough. Eliminating DEI pledges does not eliminate the environment which produced them — an environment which was cultivated not by any governmental overreach, but by an autonomous self-selection of increasingly progressive academics now over a century in the making.

The case is more dire for Kennedy. If, as he concedes, there is some problem of conservative under-representation on campus, and that “something should be done,” the only natural question is: what, exactly, is to be done? Furthermore, given Kennedy’s commitments on race, it seems that he must take the principled stance against merely “neutral” governance (compare how on affirmative action, facially “race-neutral” admissions were claimed by liberals to be substantively racist).

In this way, as Kennedy observed, the positions of the conservative and liberal have flipped. That is, the conservative is now in a position to argue for a substantive, and not merely formal, conception of the “good”; the right must take a stand on which values, ideologies, or “truths” will be encouraged to flourish, and which will not.

The grounds that conservatives are treading on now are not uncharted; indeed, we have the left to thank for mapping it out. For, it was the critical left which paid particular attention to ways in which “knowledge” is “produced” by institutions with ulterior, truth-defeasing motives, or how “power” is exerted subtly through institutions and social arrangements, not merely by the government.

But just as much as the left crusaded with suspicion against our received institutions, so too, now, may we be rightly skeptical of our ideologically captured institutions — be they academia, administrative agencies, or NGOs. While the left may object to the right’s swapping of “bourgeois ideology” and “systemic racism” for “DEI” and “critical race theory” as ideae non grata, they cannot object to the form or means Trump has adopted. The left has given us their declaration of ideological warfare, and their playbook to prosecute it. The question for conservatives is only: are we willing to fight fire with fire?

On January 14, 2025, Pete Hegseth appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and summarized his entire agenda for the Pentagon in a single sentence: the Department is “laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability and readiness.” Democrats in the Senate treated the line as mere sloganeering, a rhetorical flourish to be picked apart. But this line is not a slogan; it’s a commitment. It represents a fundamental reorientation of the military towards its primary function of defending America. Every other institutional priority pursued at the Pentagon over the last decade (diversity targets, adjusted evaluation criteria, “gender-neutral” recalibrations of physical standards) is legitimate only insofar as it answers to that purpose. What Hegseth was saying is that the point of the Pentagon is defense, not ideology. And what this means in practice is meritocracy, not DEI.

The case for reinstating meritocracy as the core organizing principle of our armed forces rests on the premise that standards should never move — we should not be slow to promote for symbolic effect, nor should we be too quick to promote to accommodate soldiers’ lifestyles, nor should we change our standards to correct for a demographic outcome. A standard that political overseers implement solely to force a desired non-military outcome is simply not serious. It is instead virtue signaling dressed up as a standard. That distinction matters more in the armed forces than anywhere else in American life.

Every major American institution has spent the past decade running some version of the same experiment: implementing hiring targets, promotion quotas, and reweighted evaluation criteria to correct for disparities in outcome. In a university admissions office or a corporate hiring pipeline, this experiment carries real costs such as resentment, inefficiency, and the slow decoupling of advancement from ability. These costs are worth debating. They are not, in the ordinary case, lethal.

Unlike these civilian institutions, a combat unit does not have the luxury of testing out various social equity experiments. When an infantry squad clears a building, or a platoon leader calls for fire support while in contact, or a rifleman decides in a fraction of a second whether the figure in a doorway is a threat, the unit’s performance is not simply assessed at the next quarterly review. It is assessed by those who survive it. An underqualified hire at a civilian institution produces a worse product. An underqualified member of a combat unit produces casualties: sometimes the substandard soldier himself, sometimes civilians. When concerns about maintaining high military standards are dismissed as an extension of the broader culture war, this distinction is lost. No other American institution translates a poor personnel decision into unnecessary death with such immediacy.

It follows that applying the logic of representative hiring to a combat unit is not merely imprudent. It is reckless. No serious person would propose redesigning the qualifying exam for airline pilots to hit a demographic target because everyone grasps, without needing to be told, that an aircraft does not care about representation. It only cares whether the person at the controls can fly it. The hundred-pound combat load of a typical infantry soldier is similarly indifferent. The stakes of error in a military context are categorically higher than the stakes of hiring decisions at a university or corporation, which means the tolerance for softened standards should be categorically lower — not identical, and certainly not more permissive, as recent Pentagon policy has too often treated it.

Hegseth’s critics are right about one thing: when pressed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to name a specific instance of official standards being lowered to achieve a demographic goal, he could not produce one. He instead asserted that commanders broadly face pressure to meet quotas for female infantry officers. Gillibrand replied, correctly, that no formal quota exists on paper.

But the absence of a written quota is not the absence of pressure, and treating the two as equivalent mistakes how institutional culture actually functions. Anyone who has spent time inside a large bureaucracy knows that culture moves people even without formal regulation. A promotion board that quietly notes when a command slate does not “reflect the force,” a fitness standard reconsidered after complaints about pass rates, a peer-review process in which the wrong feedback can quietly put an end to a command track promotion–none of this appears in a memorandum that can be waved at a senator during a hearing. It appears as atmosphere, and atmosphere is what determines whether a commander receives the benefit of the doubt or is managed out. The absence of a smoking gun in the Congressional Record does not establish the absence of a gun in the room.

This is also why the remedy Hegseth has since pursued, removing reference to race or sex in evaluation documents, along with creating a single standard applied without exception to the evaluation of every service member, remains the correct target. Restoring merit does not require proving a nonexistent conspiracy. It requires removing every variable from the promotion and standards process except the one that determines outcomes in firefights: whether the person beside you is the most capable person available to do the job.

The distinction Hegseth drew in his opening statement deserves to be treated with more weight than it received. Standards, he said, would be high, and they would apply equally to service members, but they would not be based on equity of outcome, which he rightly characterized as “a very different word.” Equity, in its contemporary institutional usage, means unjustly adjusting the bar so that outcomes appear even. Equality means applying just one bar to everyone and permitting outcomes to fall where they may. A military that chooses the former has decided, whether or not it says so openly, that the appearance of representation matters more than the fact of readiness. A military that must fight its next war to defend the nation cannot afford to make that decision. Hegseth returned to the same formulation months later, telling the Pentagon press corps that the department is “made stronger and more disciplined with high, uncompromising and clear standards.”

None of this requires believing that women do not belong in combat roles, or that any particular diversity initiative was conceived in bad faith. It requires only the narrower claim that no matter the ideological goal, the standard of promotion cannot be the instrument used to reach that goal, because that standard is often the only thing standing between a unit and catastrophe. Reinstating merit does not require withdrawing opportunity. It instead defines the nature of the opportunity, so that the soldier who earns it under a fair standard is a soldier the rest of the unit can actually trust with their lives.

In a combat unit, the standard is not decoration. It is the thing that decides who comes home.

Harvard’s dearth of conservative faculty is the fault of conservatives, at least according to The Crimson. This week, The Crimson Editorial Board declared, in response to Harvard’s effort to create viewpoint diversity by endowing professorships to conservatives, that, in fact, Harvard has no problem with viewpoint diversity in the first place. The Board instead argued that Harvard’s 9-to-1 ratio of liberal to conservative faculty is really the fault of conservatives’ own choices. When Harvard effectively fires professors for acknowledging men aren’t women, that’s really just conservatives’ fault for not choosing to be liberal.

The Board opens by warning against the danger of Harvard hiring enough conservatives to accurately represent America. It is about time someone took a stand against the idea that Harvard should represent Americans, because a fringe group has been pushing that view for years; they’re called the Harvard Crimson. In 2018, The Crimson Editorial Board complained that Harvard’s professors “do not reflect America,” ideologically. By 2022, The Crimson had seen the light, replacing its view that Harvard should accurately represent Americans’ opinions with the good liberal view that it should instead seek to accurately represent Americans’ skin colors. Of course, no one actually thinks Americans’ politics will be reflected at Harvard in the foreseeable future. Only seven percent of current faculty is conservative, meaning Harvard would have to hire over a thousand new professors to endanger the liberal majority. But most of the faculty don’t even want to hire one: a majority opposed any effort to bring viewpoint diversity to Harvard.

The donation numbers are even more extreme. In 2020, 98.82 percent of partisan donations from FAS faculty went to Democrats, a similar margin to North Korean elections. At the Law School, 56 professors gave only to Democrats, and one gave only to Republicans. Fifty-six to one. That one professor, I’m told, prefers it that way, at least according to The Crimson.

So where did the conservatives go? The Crimson Editorial Board argues they either do not want to be professors or do not want to be professors here, and either way, the decision is theirs. So, says The Crimson, Harvard should not even try to change anything at all. Interrupting these professors’ preferences with a job offer would be rude.

The Board explains this strange argument with a gratuitous quotation from sociologist Max Weber, who observed that scholars often study what their values tell them matters. Conservatives, The Crimson reasons, like business and engineering, while liberals like the humanities, where they can spend their lives studying Capitalism without ever taking part in it. In the Board’s words, “it should hardly surprise us that the liberal arts turn out to be liberal.” Next week’s article will presumably reveal that the United States Mint is full of peppermint candies.

But The Crimson’s Weberian claims are plainly wrong. By the newspaper’s own data, 42 engineering faculty gave $183,399 in partisan contributions between 2017 and 2020, every dollar of it to Democrats. The one department that The Crimson claims leans conservative is the most uniform of all. The Weberian argument also assumes conservatives do not value the humanities, which is an odd thing to say about an intellectual tradition whose whole focus is civilization, the family, religion, history, and the moral life.

Instead, the constraint at Harvard is the culture, not conservatives’ lack of interest in education, nor a lack of qualifications to be in education. Conservative academics with the same publication records as their liberal peers, for example, end up at worse institutions, so whatever is keeping them out of Harvard, it isn’t the standards. It more likely has something to do with the fact that nearly half of Harvard’s conservative faculty said they often or always keep their politics to themselves around colleagues. Meanwhile, in classes, professors regularly misrepresent the state of academic debate in order to justify left-wing policy efforts. Conservatives are not anti-education; they are uninterested in the one Harvard actively enforces, where getting through means having the conservatism “educated” out of you first.

One particularly clear example of how Harvard has spurned conservatism is when it effectively fired Carole Hooven. Hooven taught at Harvard for twenty years before she acknowledged that sex is biological, which, here at Harvard, is about as close as one can get to registering as a Republican. Her department told her it could not defend her because of the “optics,” and the next spring, not a single graduate student would help her teach her course. She eventually concluded that her “only choice was to leave.”

Nobody forced anything. Administrators preferred good optics, the graduate students preferred other courses, and Hooven, in the end, preferred not to stay. In The Crimson’s view, nothing wrong happened. The real problem was that Hooven’s interest in the truth was just not consistent with the Harvard biology department’s focus on left-wing ideology.

But, of course, acknowledging cases like this would force Harvard’s newspaper of record to focus on the problems at Harvard. In fact, while The Crimson’s article is ostensibly about the College, it is actually just another method of criticizing conservatives.

The Board announces, having proven that Harvard’s discrimination against conservatives is not discriminatory, that the real threat to academic freedom is that same tiny sliver of conservatives. According to The Crimson, Republican legislatures are trying to “control curricula, weaken tenure, and restrict what can be taught by professors.” This “growing political control of liberal-leaning faculty at other universities,” the Board says, matters far more than Harvard’s particular partisan head count. In other words, a liberal professor being forced to teach even-handed courses in Florida is a crisis, while a conservative professor barely existing at Harvard is a statistic.

Thus, having identified the wrong problem, it is no wonder that The Crimson’s solutions are somehow worse than its diagnosis.

First, the Board says Harvard must “eliminate its reputation of hostility to conservatism.” Not that it must eliminate its hostility to conservatism; just that it must lie more effectively. More articles like The Crimson’s must be produced which mix superfluous social science quotes with obvious misrepresentations of the facts. If we just have enough articles like this one, The Crimson seems to say, that’ll convince the rubes of middle America.

Meanwhile, The Crimson also proposes that Harvard could hire in subfields which conservatives tend to study, like “family structures in Economics,” and hire the best candidate, who will probably be conservative. Sure, here’s the job posting: “Harvard seeks an economist of the American family. Must be able to describe a nuclear family without the word ‘problematic.’” Otherwise, on the issues that matter to both conservatives and liberals — on the effects of mass immigration, or economic policy, or the good life — students should just get used to the liberal point of view being the only one available.

Finally, the Board posits creating an “institute for pluralism,” partially modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Yes, The Crimson believes the only way that Harvard can stop conservatives from being shouted down is by siloing them off into a separate institute, independent of the school. But even if its effort succeeded, the Board’s proposed institute is nowhere near as sincere as Hoover. Namely, rather than specifically trying to house “the intellectual dimensions of conservatism,” the Board just recommends the institute “accommodate” them, making sure it’s “non-partisan.” It’s hard to think this will be successful. Institutes like Hoover have been taking Harvard’s conservatives for years, with Niall Ferguson, for instance, leaving for California in 2016. As such, recognizably conservative institutes like Hoover are attractive; why would any conservative in his right mind opt for the merely accommodating doors of Harvard?

Having offered these useless recommendations, The Crimson’s editorial closes by promising that Harvard “can build a culture [conservatives] would call home.” That is good news for the Board, but it seems like an answer to the wrong question. What matters is not whether professors would be able to call Harvard home if they got a job here. It’s whether an ideologically biased hiring board would consider them in the first place and whether, upon coming here, they would be effectively fired as soon as they expressed a forbidden opinion. The question is whether conservative scholars could call Harvard home. The Crimson’s Editorial Board gives a clear reply: no.

Harvard’s Institute of Politics has been riddled with hazing allegations, a broken culture, and pieces of its own mission to clean up.

According to The Crimson, the chairman of the Harvard Institute of Politics’ (IOP) Gender and Sexuality Coalition feels he was brutally hazed by members of the IOP’s four-man executive team during an optional spring leadership retreat. The details are almost too shocking to include here: he was asked to recite a portion of Democratic President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech in Ed Sheeran’s voice. To make matters worse, alcohol and even water “sat nearby.” Anyone who has been asked by a professor to read a passage out loud in class, and who has proceeded to take a sip of water after, will certainly understand just how dastardly, how unconscionable, the IOP’s actions were.

What’s more, members were asked to submit personality test scores ahead of the retreat, which were later revealed via a game of Kahoot. According to those involved, “although submitting a score was described as optional, opting out did not feel easy.” Instead, IOP members want University officials to opt out for students by endorsing an ever-growing definition of hazing — i.e., “I personally didn’t like that, so it is hazing.” In all fairness, not participating carried real consequences for IOP members. No, not the risk of being kicked out of the IOP or, even worse, being forced to be a member. Members on retreat had already been appointed to leadership, and the IOP Constitution gives the executive team almost no power to remove or discipline a sitting leader. The repercussions were probably something more serious, like being momentarily chided for not participating — grave indeed.

Along with these awful hazing allegations, reporting focused on other serious “cultural issues” at the IOP. Not that the IOP’s Student Advisory Committee1 (SAC) agrees on 90% of political issues or that its executive team was elected unopposed because of student apathy. No, The Crimson stressed yet more pressing problems: one board member once mixed up someone’s name. Donald Cruse ’27, chairman of the Harvard Political Review, which publishes advocacy pieces for the left disguised as political news, called for the executive team’s resignation over their involvement in the IOP’s failing culture. His open letter, signed by all four members of SAC who have resigned over the last year because of how terrible the culture apparently is, insisted that the IOP should be a diverse and welcoming community — the SAC’s two Directors of Diversity just weren’t enough. In fact, these Directors of Diversity were apparently the exact people the IOP leadership viciously attacked. Allison McGourty ’29, one of those DEI Directors, bravely reported to The Crimson that Vice President Will Smialek ’27 forgot her name at an early spring SAC meeting. This, of course, was because he hates women (or, in her words, he “take[s women] less seriously”), not because they had just met.

Of course, the whole story is funny, but one should only laugh so much. The Crimson published an article accusing the IOP leadership of being sexists and criminals because of what seem like completely spurious allegations. The entire piece is essentially a grab bag of individual, loosely-related grievances from IOP members about the executive team. The left, whether The Crimson or the IOP itself, is always ready to throw its own under the bus. Just ask Joe Biden.

The Institute of Politics, once a gleaming hub for bipartisanship, has come to suffer the fate of all incompetent left-wing leadership: compromised moral values, exclusivity, and nepotism, leading to a culture of self-obsessed oppression olympics. The IOP has real, serious issues: among other things, a dearth of conservatives, student programs built to train students for left-wing activism rather than anything resembling public service, and a bloated, useless 35-member executive board that votes on operations at best once a year. But talking about those things would mean talking about how the left can’t lead — not a presidential campaign, and not even their own overfunded campus advocacy organization.

Many Americans have an all-or-nothing conception of our nation’s merit. In common arguments between left and right, the phrase “greatest country in the world” is thrown around loosely and is normally related to some unmeasurable attribute. Perhaps it is the land of the freest or the home of the bravest, but it is challenging and perhaps impossible to accurately compare these characteristics with other countries.

Even when studies attempt to measure freedom, though, they often appear unfavorable to the conservative argument. For instance, the Human Freedom Index in 2025 ranked the US the 15th freest nation globally. In response, many will argue that these studies are biased or rigged against the US. That may be; it is certainly possible that there is institutional prejudice against positive conceptions of America. And debates over these metrics are noble and necessary. However, by obsessing over these metrics, conservatives implicitly concede that love for the nation must be continually justified by empirical evidence.

Suppose a ship is sinking. The captain calls his officers. Maybe someone plays a trumpet or tolls a bell to alert the crew. A plan of action is laid out to patch the hole; many run to grab buckets and begin scooping water out from the breach. But one man stands up and declares, boldly, defensively, that the ship is not, in fact, sinking. The surrounding crew would rightfully call this man insane.

The man loves the ship, so he wants to guard it from slander. Yet, in protecting it, he blinds himself to the situation at hand. He believes that, in order to maintain his love, the object of that love must be flawless. He attempts to make his love verifiable and provable. Yet, by forcing his love to be fully justified by evidence, he disconnects himself from reality. He may be a loving madman, but, even still, he will be made to walk the plank. Taken seriously, he damns what he professes to love. Rather, it is those who remain grounded in reality, those who recognize its problems and set out to fix them, who save the ship.

There are others still who see the holes, but do not try to save the ship. Instead, they pry apart the leaking boards of the hull and hammer crude lifeboats out of them, hopping on these makeshift constructions to safety on the nearest island. Because they believe the ship is doomed, there is no need to try to save it. Notice that such abandonment need not be spatial. One does not have to leave this country to neglect it. This mistreatment more often takes the form of the dismantling of institutions, of burning things to the ground. Such a process cannot have love because it seeks to eliminate its beloved. Alternatively, some do nothing at all, neither jumping ship nor fixing the problem. Contrary to the Madman’s love, disillusionment marks this group. The dismantler and the disillusioned merge to form the Coward, the man who sees reality but does nothing to save the ship.

Patriotism is not this way. The Patriot sees and acts rightly. It is not unpatriotic to recognize the problems in the object of one’s love; it is the only possible way to do what is best for the country.

There are three types of people on this sinking ship: The Madman, who demands an untenable rational basis for his love, and therefore falsifies the world around him; the Coward, who recognizes reality and abandons ship; and finally, the Patriot, who stays and fights for that which he loves. The first two, though opposites, are left with similar lots (that is, with no ship). But the Patriot, through his recognition of reality and initiative, embodies a love that is vital for the survival of the ship.

Floating is what keeps a boat valuable; love is what keeps things afloat. Rather than the country having to be worthy of love, love is the very thing that makes it worthy. Patriotism should not have to be won, any more than a child should have to win the heart of a parent. Rather, love for country should grip one as when a mother first sees her baby: inexplicable, unmerited, helpless.

Eight years ago, a wave of conservative academics declared a new ideology, “post-liberalism,” which would both explain and justify international right-wing populism. While their beliefs were hardly uniform, their promises were. They declared that they could explain all of modern politics as the rejection of the “old” Republican Party. In their view, Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 represented the repudiation of the “neoliberal paradigm” of the Ronald Reagan years, in favor of a new ideology which sought virtue rather than freedom.

This project has failed. Post-liberals seem entirely disinterested in the actual values of Trump voters or the political moment, and they have thus created a marginal theory disconnected from the conservative movement. This movement has centered a broad, indescript rejection of liberalism rather than anything particularly post-liberal, producing a wave of “illiberal post-liberals.” But post-liberalism may still be salvageable, albeit in a quite different form from how the first wave of post-liberals discussed it. The salvageable form of post-liberalism will, in fact, explain the political alliances, ideology, and policies which underpin the current Republican Party. It will show how post-liberalism can build on liberal theory while rejecting that liberal ends are the only proper ends of politics, implying a view that is post-liberal, not illiberal.

The central view of the post-liberal movement is that Trump’s success represents the rejection of many conservatives’ focus on free markets and, more broadly, freedom as an end. Liberalism, according to post-liberals, is the belief that the main value of government is to ensure freedom rather than to try to enforce particular moral values. This view has underpinned both historic American conservatism and progressivism, from Ronald Reagan’s support for markets to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for labor regulations.1 Post-liberalism’s founding political theorist, Patrick Deneen, argues that the loss of a monoculture has led America away from liberalism to a “communitarian moment” in which voters desire greater powers for communities and fewer freedoms for individuals. This implies the need for a broad “statist” movement which can defend both greater government spending and socially conservative policy. Trump’s election, says Deneen, was an expression of this desire.

Further, according to the post-liberals, the voters were right in rejecting this view. To post-liberals such as Vice President J.D. Vance and legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, traditional conservatism was actively wrong to place freedom first.

Drawing on a 1960s article by conservative public intellectual Brent Bozell rejecting “fusionism,” named after the fusion of conservative ideology with the libertarian skepticism of the state, Vance has argued that no level of freedom is necessary for virtue, or even valuable in itself; rather, people should only be as free as will be conducive to “virtuous action.” Vermeule similarly argues that valuable liberty only exists insofar as it is used for virtuous ends.2 Accordingly, post-liberals think that the era of liberalism was wrong, that fusionist policies which furthered freedom during that time were wrong, and that the goals of the Republican Party throughout much of the 20th century were wrong.

In fact, it is these post-liberals who are wrong. Descriptively, the “communitarian moment” upon which writers like Deneen focused seems to have passed, if it ever existed in the first place. The number of voters who support both left-wing economic policies and social conservatism has fallen to an all-time low, while actual voter preferences have forced Republicans to adopt progressive views on everything from abortion to gay marriage. The only reason why it seemed that voters were drifting towards broad statism was that, as Democrats veered left on immigration throughout the late 2010s, many otherwise socially liberal left-wingers were classified as “socially conservative” by comparison. As the views of both parties on immigration have returned to the center since 2024, this mirage has faded. On an international level, Hungary’s “post-liberal” government lost power in a landslide election, while successful European populist parties in countries from Italy to France are increasingly converging towards freedom-loving fusionism rather than statist post-liberalism.

Why post-liberals have failed to accurately understand our political moment is because they were never interested in it in the first place. The ideology underpinning the contemporary conservative movement is not a rejection of the historical one, just a belief that its recommendations alone cannot answer the questions of today.

To demonstrate, Ronald Reagan, the prototypical punching bag for post-liberals, has a 96 percent approval rating among Republicans today. Meanwhile, post-liberal icon Richard Nixon remains the only Republican president of whom a majority of Republicans disapprove. Over 40 percent of Republicans say that freedom “best represents” America, and a plurality says that America should strive to be even more free. Conservatives clearly do not reject the concept of freedom or the 20th-century conservative tradition.

So illiberal post-liberals have failed at their basic task. As they are more interested in smuggling in their own views than in describing the current political climate, the post-liberal movement seems increasingly disconnected from mainstream politics. This disconnect is encapsulated by Vermeule’s expression of disinterest in “the liberalism debate.” Similarly, Sohrab Ahmari, a major founder of post-liberalism, has moved away from conservatism altogether, defending American liberals from Lincoln to Roosevelt and, more broadly, “American democracy,” as representative of Catholic values. Remaining post-liberals, politically inert, increasingly trend towards extremism. The “Postliberal Order,” an outlet which has acted as a mouthpiece for post-liberals from Vermeule and Deneen, now hosts regular paid articles by Mason Stallings, who has elsewhere expressed support for James Fishback’s failed, fringe, and openly anti-Semitic campaign for Florida governor. This is not an ideology with a finger on the pulse of mainstream American politics.

That post-liberalism has fallen into disrepute is a sorry fact. There is, after all, a kernel of truth in the endeavor. What initially drew people to post-liberalism was the belief that liberalism was, in the words of Vermeule, “no longer [a] live option.” Rising political movements on both the left and right believe that the government should take a stand on moral issues. Conservative donor networks are increasingly made up not of traditional business elites with economic agendas but of technology elites who believe that the government should shepherd a visionary, science fiction-influenced shift in American life. Meanwhile, Americans from across the political spectrum are increasingly skeptical that there exist any impartial institutions, or even that such a thing could exist. Indeed, politicians increasingly justify everything from industrial to social policy in terms of its partisan moral effects. As ex-Times columnist Ross Douthat has argued, it seems today that liberalism has faced a “crisis” over the past ten years which has made a return to “liberal normalcy” impossible, or at least uncompelling. Recognizing this loss of confidence in liberalism in the 21st Century was once the central insight of post-liberal thinkers.

But post-liberalism was not originally compelling only because it could justify the pull away from liberalism, but because it could do so without rejecting the wisdom of Republican luminaries such as Reagan. Post-liberalism need not say that liberalism is always wrong everywhere. Rather, it need only say that liberalism is not right at the current political moment. The view of Vance, Vermeule, and Deneen is not post-liberal; it is illiberal. This article defends a conception of post-liberalism that is not illiberal.

In practice, illiberals have uniformly shown contempt for the view that Reagan’s politics were good then but would not be good now. Indeed, a central element of illiberal post-liberalism is the claim that historic political conservatism was altogether a mistake, and that its misguidedness justifies illiberal policy in the present. This erroneous inclination is easy to understand. After all, liberals often talk in terms of the “ideal society.”3 How could the ideal society have changed between 1985 and today? Certainly, if liberalism is this sort of theoretical ideal, no form of post-liberalism is possible, whether illiberal or not. But historic liberalism does not need to be justified in this utopian manner. Many of the most influential defenses of liberalism, particularly on the right, have been based on pragmatic benefits which liberalism brings to society.

If liberalism is justified by these empirical arguments, then as times change, it may lose viability. Both Kevin Vallier’s defense of liberalism for the sake of social trust and Joseph Raz’s defense of liberalism for the sake of virtue illustrate this claim. These two thinkers demonstrate that American conservatives’ belief in the moral impartiality of the state has been based not on pure theoretical lines, but rather on empirical facts. And in each case, they show how these facts have changed.

In doing so, Vallier and Raz provide a post-liberal framework that respects the liberalism of the past and recommends a politics that is neither liberal nor illiberal. Vallier’s view lays the framework for pessimistic post-liberalism, which shows why, due to changing preferences, post-liberal policy may be necessary to maintain a stable, trusting society. Meanwhile, Raz’s view lays the framework for optimistic post-liberalism, which shows how new technologies make that post-liberal policy consistent with our freedoms. These two theories can also, in a complementary way, explain the political trend towards post-liberalism, and the strange alliance between the technology industry and the conservative base that has emerged behind it. Pessimistic post-liberalism can explain why the economically downtrodden (who are most concerned about the cost of living) believe in post-liberal policy, while optimistic post-liberalism explains why many technologists in Silicon Valley, those who fund these post-liberal candidates, have increasingly converged towards post-liberalism.

For most Americans, post-liberalism is based on a loss of trust in our institutions. Much of the modern right believes that the world, and in particular America, is getting worse. Indeed, the whole concept of the “Make America Great Again” movement is to make America similar to the great nation it once was – that is, to keep America from some postulated decline. Usually, rhetoric on this issue relates to America having somehow lost its status as a “high trust” society, leading to regular allegations of rampant fraud or of conspiratorial control of “the system.”4 This loss of trust leads to a rejection of the ostensibly corrupted liberal institutions in favor of those that can support Americans’ conception of the virtuous life.

In Vallier’s view, the loss of trust in liberalism can only be explained by the government’s divergence from liberal policy. He argues that liberalism can be justified in terms of maintaining stability, particularly through public trust. When governments illiberally seek to implement moral views, they require people to follow rules which they will find not just wrong but unjustified. These factionally imposed rules make people distrust society. This distrust then leads to polarization, factionalism, and the undermining of the good life. Government policy therefore ought to avoid legislating morality, according to Vallier, because otherwise, the nation will lose stability and social trust, and thus the outcome will be bad from any moral viewpoint.5

Yet, this hardly seems like a full explanation of the sorts of policy which can undermine public trust. While some of the fall in public trust may, as Vallier argues, originate from illiberal elements of our society, illiberalism cannot explain the whole story. The institutions which Americans (and particularly conservative Americans) still trust are not the ones which are purportedly neutral, but rather those which directly enforce or teach morality.6 Vallier’s account of public trust, thus, cannot fully explain what causes people to trust or distrust institutions.

Alternatively, the fall in public trust may originate from people’s resentment at the government’s failure to ensure them the opportunity to live virtuous lives. When people are saturated by a culture which undermines their access to a good life, resentment for the government is a natural response.7

The recent, overwhelming public focus on the “cost of living” can be understood as exactly this kind of resentment. While some view the rising interest in the cost of living as purely economic, it seems to be connected to a desire for a certain kind of life. Americans who avoid having families due to concerns about the “cost of life,” for instance, are often motivated not by the unaffordability of basic necessities but rather by the absence of social and intellectual resources for their children, including high-quality childcare, educational opportunities, and community. That is to say, Americans are increasingly motivated not by economic needs or basic freedoms but by a desire to live lives of value. When Americans’ demands are unmet because institutions avoid taking a moral position about what sorts of lives deserve to be supported, they may lose trust in those institutions. It is instructive that there is an empirically close relationship between the rising cost of living and the loss of public trust.8

This is not to say that pessimistic post-liberalism completely rejects the liberal desire to abstain from questions of morality. In fact, it seems that whenever the government directly adjudicates moral issues, it does, as liberals say, lose significant public trust. Thus, moral impartiality is a value to be defended. But, notably, it is just a value, not the value. Morality-based factionalism may undermine public trust, but it is not the only way in which social trust can be undermined. And in many cases, the loss in public trust caused by political factionalism is less than whatever would be lost by taking the neutral moral position; indeed, factional policy may sometimes be the only means of maintaining trust in institutions. Thus, the post-liberal believes in a general reason not to engage in factionalism but not a universal requirement to avoid moral factionalism, and in this way, the pessimistic tendencies on the right – the view that the cultural effects of anti-factional liberalism have brought the US to a point where it must be willing to undertake morally factional policy – can be justified without the unlikely implication that liberal policy was always wrong.

Thus, one arrives at a sort of post-liberalism that can more accurately represent how ordinary people think about this political moment. It is not that contemporary conservatives want to overturn the freedoms of Americans or to undermine the conservatives of the past. Rather, post-liberals merely believe that the sorts of policies which are called for at this moment may not be perfectly liberal. If people lose faith in institutions because basically good options in life like buying a house or raising a virtuous family seem impossible in light of the rising cost of living, factional government policy which rewards virtuous kinds of life like these may be necessary to make those sorts of lives possible, and thus to maintain public trust. This is true even if, in doing so, the government will undercut the interests of those who do not want to engage in this sort of life.

This view, one which says that perfect liberality is, here and now, counterproductive in light of the hurdles which face Americans seeking to live virtuous lives, is pessimistic post-liberalism. The vast majority of ordinary Trump supporters seem to fall into this ideological camp. It is the ideology of “American Carnage,” rhetoric about American decline, and of Make America Great Again.

Still, even if we can avoid reducing public trust, it may seem that illiberal policy is nonetheless wrong. This is because illiberalism may make people’s lives less virtuous by restricting their autonomy. According to many liberals, such as Joseph Raz, impartiality is not just good because it makes people feel respected; it is good because it stops government overreach that would inevitably make them less virtuous. Raz believes one should have the ability not to make whatever decision one wants, but to choose among different virtuous options. A life in which one is forced to become a good doctor when one wishes to become a good teacher is hardly a good life, even if it is a successful one. However, because government policy is imprecise and life is complex, many policies which seek to make people live some virtuous lives would inevitably stop them from living other virtuous ones, paradoxically making their lives less virtuous. Raz therefore argues that only the sorts of life which are clearly vicious can be restricted – namely, violent or otherwise harmful lives. He therefore defends liberalism by declaring illiberal policy bad for virtue, and thus bad on its own terms.9

However, due to the development of technology, the clumsiness of government policy may be significantly reduced. Jonathan Quong (criticizing Raz) imagines a hypothetical brain implant which removes the ability to act badly while leaving all good actions possible. This policy would promote virtue without undermining the autonomy to choose our own good lives. It is thus illiberal without undermining autonomy.10A brain implant like this may seem like unrealistic science fiction.11 But technologies which can be subtly altered to undermine immorality without sacrificing autonomy increasingly dominate our lives. For example, some forms of artificial intelligence alignment make certain conclusions inaccessible to consumers.12 Few people would reject AI alignment policies because they undermine our right to learn new slurs or build bombs. It seems likely that in the era of data collection and social media, altering algorithms can similarly render bad actions unappealing without undermining our autonomy to engage in any good actions.

This is optimistic post-liberalism. It is optimistic because it claims that, because of technological discovery, we have transcended liberalism. While optimistic post-liberalism takes a liberal perspective on many traditional social policies (refusing to directly ban immoral actions), it nevertheless justifies a government directly involved in moral debates. Such an ideology may seem unpopular; after all, the American public has an increasingly negative view of technological discovery. That being said, optimistic post-liberalism is not nonexistent on the right. Many conservatives in Silicon Valley (that is, those who bankroll the Republican Party) have long believed that by bringing about technological discovery, virtue would follow. Thus, this understanding of post-liberalism can explain how a real segment of the actual conservative movement has moved past liberalism.

While pessimistic and optimistic post-liberalism may seem inherently contradictory, a movement responsive to both may be more effective than either view on its own. Pessimistic post-liberalism cannot justify very much policy alone. While individuals’ freedoms do not automatically prevail for the pessimistic post-liberal, they are still important to respect. Thus, if the only way in which one can hope to enact post-liberalism is via heavy-handed traditional policy, the post-liberal may look quite similar to the liberal, albeit with minor differences on the margins of trade or immigration policy. But, if one incorporates the insights of optimistic post-liberalism – that legislation can alter much of modern life without undermining one’s autonomy – a much broader conception of post-liberalism can be justified. This post-liberal framework may be able to use the efficacy of emerging technologies, from social media algorithms to pharmaceutical drugs, to bring about virtuous lives far more effectively and with a far less negative effect on individual autonomy than many illiberal policies of the past.13

We see in this moment two quite different trends bringing about a perfect storm for post-liberalism. On the pessimistic side, cultural and economic trends are making good lives and safe families increasingly difficult to obtain and maintain, reducing public trust and undermining the promises of liberalism. In light of this, it increasingly seems that America needs some kind of post-liberal policy for its citizens to retain trust in the country’s institutions, even if such policy may abridge liberties. But just as the problem worsens, technology is developing that can change behavior without undermining one’s autonomy, making liberal policy consistent with individuals living good and free lives. Thus, post-liberal policy looks less unacceptable than illiberal policy.

Of course, the concept of post-liberalism discussed herein is hardly the sort of red-blooded, unencumbered legislation of morality which many of the first generation of post-liberals may prefer. What seems to underpin the ideology of many illiberal post-liberals is, in the words of the illiberal post-liberal Gladden Pappin, annoyance with the “limitations on the scope of politics” which make them unable to stand up to the “neoliberal economic system.” What these ideologues want, as Pappin suggests, is not a framework that can recommend particular helpful policies but rather a new ideology that can be to the right what Marxism is to the left: a way of changing the world (and perhaps being remembered for it).

This article’s conception of post-liberalism hardly offers that. Indeed, it accepts much of society as it is. While it rejects fusionism, it still recognizes the fundamental value of freedom and individual autonomy. While it allows the legislation of morality, it still views non-factionalism as a virtue. Thus, while it implies political action, it does not require that we change the fundamental structures of our society.

While Pappin may disagree, this is a substantial virtue of this article’s conception of post-liberalism. People do not want massive change for the sake of it. Large-scale ideological missions to restructure society cannot be justified by the fact that intellectuals or elites may feel ennui due to the constraints created by the limits of political morality. The purpose of politics is the public good, not private fun. This fact is one that intellectually profligate post-liberal intellectuals the world over, whether in Hungary or America, cannot afford to forget.

Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government emeritus, taught at Harvard for more than six decades, and on September 17th, he returned to the University to say on the record what few professors would: the University needs “a kind of affirmative action” for conservatives.

More specifically, Mansfield affirmed, “a certain coercion needs to be put to the faculty until this happens.” To this end, while he believes that President Trump’s campaign against the University was “in a way, outrageous,” he argued the lawsuits still deserve credit: “I don’t think that the universities would have changed without his intervention, and especially without depriving the universities of large sums of money.”

Mansfield made these remarks at a lunch talk on viewpoint diversity hosted by the Society for the Rule of Law at Harvard Law School, a group of largely conservative and center-right lawyers. Alan Raul — a Harvard Law professor, Reagan-era White House staffer, and the Society’s board president — moderated. The audience was primarily law students, graduate students, faculty, and other affiliates. Indeed, there was a lack of undergraduates in the audience.

Mansfield began with the assertion “viewpoint diversity has no meaning without diversity,” clarifying that diversity was always about viewpoint: “It wasn’t the beauty of ebony skin or of shapely bodies that was behind the use of race and sex [in affirmative action]. It was what black folks and women brought to the community with their lived experience.” The trouble, however, was the society that such a justification produced — namely, “a society of identity, which accuses itself of racism and sexism, which is divided between oppressors and oppressed.” In this sort of society, he posited, “There’s no common good. No spirit of deliberation to search for compromise, only expression of one’s identity.”

Much of the talk turned on the difference between speech and expression. Speech, from the Greek logos, uses reason and addresses a listener. Expression, which Mansfield traced to the landmark 1943 Supreme Court case West Virginia v. Barnette, does not. Yet, Barnette, which considered public school students required to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, “declared that an act, a salute, a gesture, was a form of speech entitled to First Amendment protection,” Mansfield explained. “This sort of act is not intended to convince, but rather to impress its audience. The expresser advertises himself to the audience.” Thus, with expression, “shouts and slogans are in order.”

Mansfield’s distinction matters because speech and expression are answered differently. Speech tries to convince, so it can be met with a better argument. Expression tries to impress, so it can only be met with more of itself. Thus, a university that treats the two as equal has little ground to keep protest out of the classroom. At last spring’s graduate student strike, picketers circled Sever Hall chanting “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” and for weeks the disruption reached the classroom. Lectures were canceled or moved online, office hours were cut, and sections were combined. Whatever one thinks of the union’s demands, the chanting was not an attempt to persuade anyone but to pressure the University, and students paid for it. Mansfield noted that protest has its place: “The American Revolution began with protest.” But, “Protest speech is inimical to the spirit of a university community, which requires academic freedom. Academic freedom is for the pursuit of truth, not of justice.”

Real viewpoint diversity, he argued, is not simply having both sides represented on campus but having them constantly, meaningfully engage with each other. This is most urgent because of the distinct value commitments of each party. Democrats, according to Mansfield, organize around compassion: “Inclusiveness is what they call for. No one is left out. No one is marginalized. [...] A liberal is one who makes a lifelong search for people to feel sorry for.” Republicans, meanwhile, organize around admiration and desert, the belief that those who contribute more “deserve to have their greater contribution recognized and appreciated. Plumbers should be well-paid for the relief they bring.”

Each value is real, but each is incomplete on its own; compassion without regard for desert can reward those who contribute nothing, and desert without compassion can leave behind those who cannot contribute. In this way, Mansfield insists that the University needs both, “not because free speech is a universal right that both parties should share, but because the two parties need each other for their substance. [...] Neither can rule simply by itself.” Each side keeps the other honest, but only if they argue, if they speak, and certainly not if each side expresses itself, emptily lobbing values at the other. A campus such as Harvard, where progressives tyrannize conservatives, never has that argument, so its values go unchanged.

Notably, Harvard’s official language on viewpoint diversity contrasts with Mansfield’s. The College’s Intellectual Vitality initiative describes itself as founded in “rigor, charity, and open exploration.” Mansfield set a higher, more structured bar, saying viewpoint diversity is about arguments between the parties: “left and right occupy the center,” alluding to the need for the two ideological wings in all discourse. He closed with Henry Rosovsky, whom Mansfield described as “a Harvard authority, the great liberal,” noting “not everything is improved by making it more democratic.”

When Raul asked Mansfield how Harvard might recruit more conservatives, Mansfield responded that Harvard was “much more one-sided even than the city of Cambridge or the state of Massachusetts, to say nothing of the whole country. So we have people from other parts of the U.S. who don’t come from blue states, but mostly they’re blue people, and we could use some of the other type.”

According to Mansfield, this is true even despite the professed nonpartisanship or institutional neutrality of those in leadership: “The partisans presently in charge of Harvard already think they are nonpartisan. They made their decisions and [did] their hiring believing that this was the best person. In some cases, conservatives and Republicans were excluded, either explicitly or implicitly. But on the whole, they [the Harvard administration] don’t see that they’ve done anything wrong. [Harvard] needs to get to a point where it sees that it has done something wrong.”

What is needed, in other words, is affirmative action for identifiable conservatives and Republicans. At this point, Mansfield paused to ask, “Are we off the record now?” Told he was not, he continued: “I’m on the record. I’ve said this. I think a certain coercion needs to be put to the faculty until this happens.”

The University has been attempting some form of this affirmative action in the wake of its funding battle with the Trump administration. Most significantly, Harvard has been quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to endow professorships under the banner of viewpoint diversity, a campaign led by University Provost John Manning. In a Crimson survey on the matter, 54 percent of current faculty respondents opposed the initiative.

The professorships are not the only change. Two weeks after the administration cut off $2.2 billion in April 2025, Harvard renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging the Office for Community and Campus Life, and ended University funding and space for affinity group Commencement celebrations. Its graduate schools have also since rebranded their own diversity offices, with DEI language across the University giving way to new terms such as pluralism, dialogue, and ideological diversity.

Nor is this the first set of structural shifts that Mansfield has witnessed. Across his nearly seven decades at Harvard, he reflected, the University had changed considerably: all male when he arrived, then the decision “to increase the number of black students, which, by the way, I strongly support,” then feminism, “then the Asians, who, in a way, were the crucial group that killed affirmative action.”

Nevertheless, while Harvard may still seem to be changing, Mansfield’s comments ruffled feathers, and as a microphone circulated for questions from the floor, the audience pushed back.

A self-described liberal was one of the first to speak. He argued that he already hears the conservative perspective in every Supreme Court opinion and presidential statement, and proposed a trade: abolish the Senate and the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court, and conservatives could pick their share of Harvard’s faculty and students. “You’re a pretty dangerous guy,” Mansfield replied.

Raul redirected, asking whether there were national structural reforms Mansfield himself favored. He offered one: “I would like to go back to capital punishment for obvious murderers. The people who recently killed Charlie Kirk and others, they should be dead now. That would put us in a calmer and more just frame of mind.” Two weeks earlier, a Utah judge had ruled that Tyler Robinson, who has pleaded not guilty, will stand trial for aggravated murder in Kirk’s killing, with the death penalty on the table.

The sharpest exchange came from Randall Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, who asked whether the call for more conservatives is the right’s version of the campaigns for Black Studies and Women’s Studies. “I wouldn’t deny it,” Mansfield said. “We’re inheriting something as well as opposing something.” The desire for conservatives “is based on rejection of their being slighted, made to feel small, made to feel dishonorable. Politics is much more about honor than about gain.” Mansfield pointed to Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies, which he said has no black conservative on its faculty: “There are several names one could supply, and which I have supplied, but without effect.”

One last questioner asked whether the whole project fights human nature, since people sort into affinity groups anyway. The stakes, Mansfield said, are squarely scholarly: Harvard social science “tends to be too quantitative and too liberal,” and courses on controversial topics assign readings all on one side. That “isn’t a matter of group feeling, but of how or whether you can learn.” As for nature, he answered, “You are fighting nature if nature consists in identities. But if nature also extends to opinions, it is perfectly natural to want to hear the other side.”

Mansfield is 94. He has been making this argument at Harvard longer than most of his colleagues have been alive. For the first time, the University looks to be acting on it.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace holds a contradictory position in the academy. On the one hand, it is known as a masterwork of Russian literature. On the other hand, the academy has widely ignored its deterministic philosophy, which critics dismiss as dogmatic and inferior to the rest of the work. As such, they resolve the contradiction by divorcing the two dimensions of the work, taking it up as literature without any regard for its philosophy. This strategy, however, is unfair because it ignores how inseparable Tolstoy’s philosophy in War and Peace is from the work's more conventionally “literary” aspects. Moreover, the strategy is dishonest because, while it masquerades as objective and apolitical, it largely stems from the political malice of Tolstoy’s contemporaries.

The practice of historical contextualization can ostensibly separate Tolstoy’s views from his literary contributions. Over the past few decades, universities have grappled with the content of their curricula, debating whether they should remove authors they considered bigoted from syllabi. In response, some have argued the writers’ opinions were reflections of the political trends of their time, which can be separated from their unique intellectual contributions. I call this line of reasoning the “separation argument.” While the separation argument has effectively rehabilitated these writers in the eyes of the modern academy, it simultaneously trivializes their opinions as historically determined, rather than as views that deserve serious intellectual engagement. In the case of War and Peace, applying the separation argument allows one to appreciate Tolstoy’s novelistic work while safely dismissing his philosophical views as “the opinions of the time.” In fact, this argument is appealing precisely because it enables readers to appreciate an author whom they love while ignoring the parts of his legacy they find objectionable.

Notwithstanding the risks, in some cases the separation argument has been beneficial to the author’s legacy. It has worked especially well, for instance, when applied to popular works of literature, where the authors’ philosophical or political views can often be distinguished from their intellectual contributions. Indeed, most (non-overtly political) literature lends itself to a basic distinction: the actual novel itself, which can be enjoyed independent of its normative implications, and the writer’s opinions and prejudices, which have little bearing on the reader’s experience. While the two sides are often connected, the lack of an explicit moral argument can allow a reader to experience the work without engaging with any moral or political ideology. For example, scholars and literary critics have interpreted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an ideologically conservative work.1 One might imagine that for many liberal readers of Austen, this diagnosis would turn them off from certain aspects of the novel. But as these political undertones are only implicit, readers can still engage with the novel without losing their appreciation for Austen’s literary skill. Moreover, if one were to argue that Austen’s conservatism was a mere reflection of prevailing trends of the time (and thus easily separable from the rest of her work), readers could dismiss her views without losing their appreciation for the work as a whole. This rationale might appear stretched; after all, just because an author never explicitly states their views doesn’t mean those views don’t play an important part in their work. But if the separation argument is insufficient in the case of writers like Austen, then it makes even less sense in works where the author interrupts the narrative to make philosophical claims.

This is exactly what happens in War and Peace. The book contains elements of a traditional novel alongside sections where the author explicitly discusses historiography and philosophy. Because these latter sections lack the mediating force of a narrator, they are much closer to traditional philosophy than anything else. Readers can skip this material without losing the plot, but if they choose to engage, they must do so as readers of philosophy, not literature. This addition makes War and Peace unusual in the broad set of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Even works like James Joyce’s Ulysses, where philosophy plays a significant role in the novel, include a narrator to provide a buffer between the author’s views and those written on the page. If Joyce were found to have views unpopular with a modern audience, they could be separated from the novel without that novel losing its force. Conversely, Tolstoy’s views cannot be separated from War and Peace without ignoring a large part of the author’s intellectual legacy.

Of course, the reason to apply the separation argument in the first place arises from the “objectionable” character of an author’s views, a label often applied to the opinions of conservative writers and intellectuals. Throughout War and Peace, Tolstoy expresses views that align closely with a version of social conservatism. This conservatism largely manifests through historical determinism, which leads him to reject the narrative of inevitable social and scientific progress, alongside his defense of the deeply religious and traditional life of the Russian peasantry and his disdain for the more secular nobility. In his article “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes that “Tolstoy is…obsessed with his thesis – the contrast between the…delusive experience of free will…and the reality of inexorable historical determinism.”2 This determinism contrasts harshly with socialist theories, which argue that humankind has the freedom to affect its historical destiny. Tolstoy’s admiration for the peasantry is perhaps best encapsulated in the character Platon Karataev, whom he describes as “the embodiment of the spirit of simplicity and truth,”3 someone free, in Berlin’s words, from “bureaucratic or scientific or other rationalistic forms of blindness.”4 Indeed, Karataev’s character is defined largely in juxtaposition to these “rationalistic” views, which were dominant among the Westernized nobility. 

Tolstoy’s views, as espoused in the philosophical sections of War and Peace, have been largely dismissed by the academy. But rather than acknowledging the political bias inherent in this dismissal, scholars more often point to the dogmatic, repetitive character of Tolstoy’s philosophical writing and its lack of clarity and sophistication. While these criticisms have some merit, Berlin suggests that political prejudice has, historically, played a role in informing the consensus. He writes, “the Russian left wing intellectuals attacked Tolstoy for ‘social indifferentism,’ for disparagement of all noble social impulses as a compound of ignorance and foolish monomania, and an ‘aristocratic’ cynicism about life as a marsh that cannot be reclaimed… the only critic who took the doctrine seriously and tried to provide a rational refutation was the historian Kareev.”5

Berlin’s commentary has two implications.

First, it shows that Tolstoy’s conservatism was out of vogue even among his contemporaries; his views thus cannot be dismissed as representative of the “general trends of time.” Even if, as with Austen, separating Tolstoy’s philosophical views from his literary skill was beneficial to his overall legacy, this separation cannot be applied honestly. Berlin shows that Tolstoy’s views were far from commonplace at the time of his writing; they were, rather, fundamentally at odds with the progressive orientation of Russian intellectuals.

Second, the passage suggests that the academic consensus on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history is connected to the political attacks on Tolstoy’s writing by left-wing intellectuals. Admittedly, the opinions Berlin outlines were supplied long before the current discourse of the academy. But as the academy has not become more conservative over time (indeed, the opposite is true), the prejudice Berlin describes likely persists and informs the modern consensus.

By understanding the role political bias has played in the academy’s dismissal of Tolstoy’s philosophical views, we can better appreciate War and Peace as a holistic work that combines elements of literature and philosophy. Moreover, by recognizing the uniqueness of these views, we can challenge a counterargument often raised in such cases — that the opinions expressed represent the trends of the time, elements that can be extracted and dismissed without invalidating the author’s legacy. Rather than seeing the philosophy of War and Peace as a mere reflection of the prevailing dogmas or an aspect of the work too inferior to merit our consideration, we can understand its significance as an element of Tolstoy’s unique perspective that demands our engagement.

Today it is difficult to define what makes an American. As immigration policy has redefined the borders of citizenship, the easiest way for a non-American to gain citizenship is no longer through honoring American values but is instead by working in lucrative industries. The law’s definition of “American” increasingly looks like the ability to code. While migrants useful to America’s largest companies rapidly become citizens, another group of migrants (many of whom crossed illegally from the Southern border) remain non-Americans, at least nominally. Of these 13 million illegal immigrants, around half have been in America for over 20 years. While they have been here since before the Iraq War, they are not, according to our current policy, as American as those who have migrated more recently using the visa system.

Due to the apparent incoherence of our citizenship policy, one may start to wonder what really makes someone an American. In this light, the recent tendency towards nativism among some on the right seems only natural. Vice President J.D. Vance describes those whose families have been here longer, particularly those whose ancestors fought in American wars, as those who have the most “claim to America.” To nativists like Vance, those whose blood has stained American soil are true Americans, while those whose ancestors migrated to America after our defining wars are not.1 Recent restrictions on birthright citizenship and international work visas, for instance, are, for nativists, ways of making sure the country is not overwhelmed by “fake” Americans.

But what the nativist view gains in ideological clarity it loses in accuracy. Nativism does not account for what makes America truly distinctive. America is not a nation in which identity and status are determined by bloodline. Unlike in Europe, there are no royal or noble titles to be passed down. Unlike much of East Asia, citizenship is not de facto restricted to a homogeneous ethnic and cultural group whose ancestors have controlled those lands for millennia. Rather, America’s distinctive identity transcends ethnic ties. When Germans and Irishmen fought in the Civil War, they had been in the country for less time than many modern illegal migrants. These historic immigrants could identify themselves with America, and were willing to die for it, because they could identify with American ideals.

One of these ideals, individualism, itself contradicts nativism. In America, people are defined by what they do, not by what their families or tribes do. In North Korea, soldiers wear the medals of their fathers and grandfathers as if they were their own, and when parents commit crimes, children are punished. In cultures like North Korea’s, there is no difference between the accomplishments of the father and those of the son. In America, however, punishing children based on their parents’ crimes is unfathomable. Our culture correctly understands that the son is defined by his actions, not by those of his parents. The nativist must, in attempting to “save” America, reject this fundamental aspect of American identity.

No American worth his salt would point to his ancestors and say that since they built something great, he is entitled to reap the benefits and create nothing further for his children. Worse are those who actively deny others the opportunity to do something equally great in service of this nation and its ideals. Rather, those who want to be American and have shown a deep reverence for the nation should be empowered to contribute to our country. America should implement a new pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants and non-resident foreign nationals with demonstrated ties to the country and without criminal convictions. This policy will provide those illegal immigrants with enlistment contracts in the United States military in exchange for an accelerated pathway to citizenship.

This would neither be radical nor unprecedented. Indeed, the West has a strong tradition of service in exchange for citizenship. In the Roman Empire, for example, non-citizen soldiers were granted citizenship after 25 years of service in the auxiliaries. At the height of its power, these auxiliaries comprised more than half of the empire’s forces. As Machiavelli writes, this policy allowed Rome the unique ability to defend itself against foreign adversaries while maintaining its fundamental Roman greatness.2 America has historically understood the value of this insight.

During the Civil War, slaves who had not been granted citizenship fought in the Union army to be recognized as American citizens when slavery was abolished. During World War II, Jewish refugees from Europe, called the “Ritchie Boys,” were granted citizenship in exchange for their service. This policy provided America with 60% of actionable intelligence used against Nazi Germany, and the Ritchie Boys received citizenship in a nation they loved and honored.3 Even today, the United States military accepts some migrants, Green Card holders, into its ranks for roles that do not require security clearance, offering an accelerated path to citizenship to those who qualify. These individuals make up 2-5% of our military manpower.

This article’s policy would extend that opportunity to a carefully selected class of illegal immigrants and non-resident foreign nationals who have demonstrated a serious attachment to the United States. This would not involve any radical shift in the purpose of American policy, nor in the composition of troops, which already include non-citizens. Rather, it would fall squarely within a broad conservative understanding that strict immigration enforcement and an earned path to legal status can exist side by side.

Historically, many Republicans have supported a conditional pathway to citizenship for illegal migrants, in conjunction with aggressive means to curb illegal immigration at the border. Senators John McCain, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham all campaigned for a 2013 immigration bill that both furthered border security and introduced a limited pathway to citizenship. President George W. Bush backed similar measures. In these cases, conservatives rightly worried that unlimited pathways to citizenship would incentivize law-breaking. Requiring national service eliminates that incentive.

Only those who truly love America enough to honor it with service will take up the offer. If the choice is between deportation and service, the system separates the wheat from the chaff. Those who genuinely value the opportunities in our country will serve it. Those who do not love America should not be given the privilege of living here. No one who is unwilling to do difficult things for his country when called upon to do so should enjoy the fruits of the nation.

Naturally, such a policy would require strict limitations. Military enlistment should never become a blanket amnesty program disguised in uniform. Eligibility should be restricted to able-bodied applicants who have resided in the United States for a meaningful period of time, possess no criminal record, pass enhanced background screening, demonstrate English proficiency, and meet the same physical and professional standards imposed on American recruits. Those with ties to hostile governments, extremist organizations, organized crime, or foreign intelligence services should be excluded and deported from this country without hesitation. The purpose of the program would not be to lower the standards of military service but to offer qualified people the opportunity to meet them.

Critics may argue that this rewards illegal conduct. In one sense, they are correct: any regularization of an illegal immigrant’s status gives him something he did not previously possess. But the relevant question is whether the nation receives something of greater value in return. The government already exercises discretion in immigration enforcement, already offers legal benefits in exchange for cooperation, and already distinguishes between dangerous criminals and otherwise productive residents. A policy that converts a small, highly screened portion of the illegal population into disciplined servicemen is not an abandonment of enforcement. It is enforcement married to national interest.

But more importantly, such a program would restore seriousness to the idea of citizenship. For too long, the immigration debate has been divided between those who treat citizenship as a universal entitlement and those who treat it as an inherited possession. Both positions cheapen it. Citizenship is neither a participation trophy awarded to anyone who crosses the border nor an ancestral estate belonging permanently to the descendants of earlier settlers. It is membership in a political community, carrying obligations as well as rights. Any pathway to citizenship should therefore demand more than patience and good intentions. It should demand proof of being attached to our values. What this means is viewing America as uniquely deserving of one’s service, of one’s effort, and of one’s support. The American born here is American by necessity; they have no other homeland. The American immigrant, on the other hand, must prove by service that he is attached to this nation above all others.

The deepest American tradition is not ancestry, but adoption. America has repeatedly taken people who were foreign by birth and made them American through language, law, labor, marriage, religion, education, and service. The process has never been automatic, and it has never been free of conflict. Yet it is precisely because American identity is not reducible to blood that it has proved capable of surviving waves of migration that would have fractured more tribal societies.

The man who invokes his grandfather’s service may rightly feel pride, but he cannot inherit his grandfather’s courage. He cannot claim his grandfather’s sacrifice as a permanent title to superior citizenship. The foreign-born recruit who accepts the burdens of military life has made a commitment of his own. Whatever his legal status was before that moment, the nation should take that commitment seriously.

A secure border and a generous nation are not mutually exclusive. Neither are deportation and mercy, punishment and redemption, or citizenship and high standards. The United States can remove those who threaten it while offering a pathway to those willing to defend it. The road should be difficult, the screening severe, and the consequences of failure clear. But for those who complete the journey honorably, citizenship would not be a handout. It would be the culmination of their sacrifice to our country and its ideals.

Jack sat down among a group of fellow students, who seemed engaged in intense conversation. As soon as he had joined them, however, he realized that they were repeating the same word over and over. “Truth, truth, truth,” said one. “Troo-f, tr-U-th, truth,” replied another. “Truth? Tuh-ruth…” posited a third. “What is this?” Jack finally interjected, and they all turned to stare at him. Finally, one explained, “We are coming to mutual understanding. About truth, I mean. Yes, mutual understanding about truth.” Jack was still confused: “How does this get you closer to truth?” But the group’s interlocutor was incredulous: he exclaimed, “Why, in just these past, heated minutes, I have learned, I have understood, that he,” and he pointed, “says ‘Truf’ while she prefers ‘Trooth.’ Now, I don’t know what to think about my own ‘T-rrr-uth!’” Jack was unsure what to say. Satisfied, the interlocutor patted him on the back and reassured, “You’ll get the hang of it. In the meantime, help yourself to some of our hors d’oeuvres, generously funded by Intellectual Vitality.”

This (admittedly contrived) scenario reflects a fundamental crisis of merit in one of Harvard’s marquee programs: Intellectual Vitality. While it has intended and sometimes produced good, Intellectual Vitality’s failure to be discriminating in its funding has stripped the initiative of any sense of self, endangering its hopes of a productive future.

Intellectual Vitality comprises everything from pedagogy to fellowships, all in the name of furthering truth and debate. Besides a required first-year module, students are likely most familiar with Intellectual Vitality and its tenets via its event sponsorship and funding. There is good reason for this, too. Intellectual Vitality has doled out nearly $200,000 in grants to 37 different “Programs” or events since its public inception in February 2024. That translates to an average of about $5,240 in funding per program, which is startlingly higher than the HUA’s average semesterly club allocation in the 2024-2025 academic year, $947.36.1 Beyond the numbers, Intellectual Vitality privileges its “Programs” (the term it uses for its funded events and activities) in its marketing.

This quest to make Programs (and thus Intellectual Vitality) visible to the everyday Harvardian is embodied by the scheme’s limited funding criteria: four pithy bullet points that can be effectively summarized by the request that events contribute to “rigorous, reflective, and open-minded intellectual engagement.” Yet, what this seemingly innocuous ask — respectful exchange — belies is Intellectual Vitality’s ruinous refusal to commit to any sort of robustly meritocratic position about what it funds, and thus about what it is.

Put simply, in its funding structure, Intellectual Vitality has embraced pluralism for the sake of pluralism, conversation not so much for its substance but rather for the act of speech: the practice of moving one’s mouth, of feeling motion, and perceiving that motion in others — “Tuh-ruth” versus “trrrruth” without any regard for the value of what is being discussed.

Student leadership admits as much. According to one co-president of the Student Advisory Board in spring of last year, the objective of Intellectual Vitality’s funding is to “elevate a particular kind of conversation. [We are…] pretty agnostic about the actual content of the events.” The other co-president, quoted in the same article, doubles down on the strategy, affirming it is a demonstration of the “diversity of ways in which Intellectual Vitality could be done.”

Intellectual Vitality’s focus on form at the expense of content, however, is plainly counterproductive to what it was intended for and the ends it ought to serve.

To this end, Intellectual Vitality’s final bulletin of the 2025-2026 academic year is instructive. Among the three events featured, one was entitled “(Re)Discovering Wonder at Harvard and Beyond: Senior-Year Reflections on the Meaning of a College Education,” while another was a bipartisan, four-person panel of faculty and outside experts discussing “Efficiency or Erosion? The Future of Government Reform,” which centered on the question “Is government inefficiency the core problem — or is the deeper crisis the erosion of public trust and democratic investment?”2

Exploring questions about what higher education ought to look like can be worthwhile. Less so when the framing of that conversation is one of seniors’ “personal reflections” — so completely devoid of any real, broader implications or normative project for the academy.3 And while governance is a subject that is ripe for the sort of speech culture that Intellectual Vitality wants to cultivate, are government efficiencies really what get people going?4 Above all, are these sorts of conversations really going to end what Dean Rakesh Khurana described, in an email to undergraduates explaining Intellectual Vitality, as the pervasive student proclivity to say “what they thought others wanted to hear, for fear of being criticized or judged if they spoke their own minds”?

Emphatically no.

The fact of the matter is that no one was self-censoring because he thought his reminiscence on the college experience as a senior with one foot out the door or his take on government bureaucracy was going to get him 86’d. Intellectual Vitality’s current policies are based on a misguided conception of the hostile speech culture that has taken root at Harvard.

In reality, many Harvard students elected not to speak up because they thought, for instance, that their support for Israel or opposition to abortion was going to draw vitriol. In other words, it was always hot-button issues that chilled speech. When Intellectual Vitality affords such conversations equal weight as those that were never so controversial — when it embraces a funding scheme that would consider a discussion on citizenship in the United States and one on homesickness in college as equivalently deserving of and conducive to an initiative ostensibly aimed toward Veritas — the program makes a mockery of the very real conditions that necessitated its genesis.

Unmoored in this way, the terminus of Intellectual Vitality’s approach is not only that Intellectual Vitality ends up looking foolish; it is that Intellectual Vitality looks like nothing at all.

That is because when everything is Intellectual Vitality, nothing is. As such, it is probably no mistake that, back in 2024, Intellectual Vitality’s stalwart Dean Khurana felt obligated to clarify the term’s meaning, which The Crimson described then as concurrently “ubiquitous” and “mysterious.” Even now, if one asks members of the Student Advisory Board to define what precisely Intellectual Vitality is, they often couch the organization in exceedingly ambiguous terms. One Student Advisory Board member, for instance, when asked about defining Intellectual Vitality, responded: “I was really excited to come have what we would call intellectually vital conversations. I think I liked the term.” At the same time, Intellectual Vitality proudly and repeatedly defines itself first and foremost as a “spirit” — intangible, impossible to pin down, satisfied so long as one person walks out of an event having felt this “spirit” within them. The semantic diffusion that Intellectual Vitality has undergone is, on the one hand, spectacular in terms of its scale, but on the other, predictable of a group that has such a weak sense of self. By any measure, the term’s use has come to mirror this article’s opening scene: it is to say “truth” so much that the word loses all sense beyond the space it occupies on one’s tongue.

Still, Intellectual Vitality shows no signs of letting up. According to Dean of the College David Deming, “[Intellectual Vitality is] not something we’re ever going to finish.” To Deming’s credit, why should it be? An initiative with no heritage and no actual, determinable goal — an initiative that is not willing to commit itself to a hierarchy of pursuits, to anything beyond ambiguous, even meaningless terms — will necessarily persist, because it will always find something to subsume to its mission. The result of this can only be a forever-apparat: a (conveniently CV-boosting) cycle of deliberation and funding on a permanently amorphous basis.

If Intellectual Vitality wants to have any sort of serious and enduring influence on campus — if it wants to mean anything at all — it needs to remember its original purpose.

First, that Intellectual Vitality, at its core and at its best, is about big questions. It is about questions with stakes, with real bearing on how man orients his life, with a real bearing on Veritas. Secondly, that because of these stakes, Intellectual Vitality is maximally controversial. Intellectual Vitality was born out of a speech culture that was poisonous because it was dominated by passion, but such passion was not unfounded — it was an organic consequence of how important, and how divisive, the subjects in question were — and the initiative will thus effectuate the greatest change by funding and modelling respectful conversations that address those same, once-impossible-to-discuss but always indispensable, topics.

Critics will argue there are risks to this approach. If Intellectual Vitality adopts a privileged funding structure, they will say, it could fall into the trap of underfunding (or refusing to fund) events that are unpopular or controversial, and thus become an instrument for intolerance rather than a solution. But that is what an application process and board are for: to find people who are fair and discerning. It is reassuring in this respect that the faculty and student boards already comprise both liberal and conservative members, a representativeness that would only assume greater significance under a new funding strategy. What is more, requiring written feedback for events that do not receive funding would encourage Intellectual Vitality to be consistent and transparent in its application of criteria. And, for those events that would be rightly rejected, other funding sources exist: to demonstrate, the reader may comb through some of the incoming HUA co-presidents’ many, many campaign promises.

Most importantly, though, the alternative, the status quo, is Intellectual Vitality’s effective nonexistence — its nothingness.

This is unacceptable because Intellectual Vitality is a theoretically valuable and important program. Its present status, however, is grossly overinflated and has lost its way, so much so that the identity of Intellectual Vitality, not to mention its progress, is imperiled. To ameliorate this, the initiative must develop a meaningful standard for the events it funds and with which it associates.

This prioritization will demand reflection and iteration. It may not be universally appealing, but it will give substance to the initiative — it will show what “intellectual vitality” can actually mean, beyond merely an aggregation of polite, pointless conversations.

The first step in this process, however, is for the initiative to accept that not all Intellectual Vitality is created equal.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States outlawed affirmative action in the landmark decision Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College}(“SFFA”), ending 62 years of the most divisive admissions policy in modern American history.1 In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”2 Harvard said it would comply; indeed, as a recipient of federal funds, anything short of complying would be unlawful.3

Harvard’s initial numbers after SFFA appear like compliance. They are not. The university’s behavior indicates an institution with something to hide: delayed releases, a manipulated methodology for reporting race, missed deadlines, and general antagonism. In a landscape where the Justice Department has opened another university’s files and found systematic evasion of the Court’s ruling, Harvard has an imperative to demonstrate that it is dedicated to the individual applying, not their skin color.

In the aftermath of SFFA, the thumb came off the scale, and the numbers moved, though not on the schedule anyone expected. In the Class of 2028, the first admitted without illegal racial preferences, African American enrollment fell from 18 to 14 percent. Hispanic enrollment rose, from 14 to 16 percent. Asian American enrollment did not move at all, holding at 37 percent. The following year Asian American enrollment climbed to 41 percent, African American enrollment fell to 11.5 percent, and Hispanic enrollment fell to 11 percent. But even then, the statistics are not fully trustworthy. This is because the two statistics are fundamentally incomparable. For the Class of 2027, Harvard reported each race as a share of the entire freshman class. Starting with the Class of 2028, however, it reported each race as a percentage of those who answered the question, inflating the numbers. Suspiciously, the new method was implemented in the same years as when SFFA came into effect.

To recap on the trial records: Harvard’s files, forced into evidence, showed Asian Americans getting systematically lower “personal” ratings for courage and likability, despite the strongest academics and extracurriculars of any group.4 Harvard’s own researchers found the same tilt in 2013, in findings that never left secretive administrative hands. The plaintiffs’ expert modeled the odds: an Asian American with a 25 percent shot of admission would have a 35 percent chance as a Caucasian student, 75 percent as a Hispanic, and 95 percent as an African American student.5 The Supreme Court struck this race-based model down.

When the Supreme Court decided that racial discrimination was banned by the Civil Rights Act, the Crimson editorial board mourned that “diversity seems to have been offered a spot on the waitlist.” When Harvard renamed its DEI office, columnist (and now President of the Crimson) Matteo Diaz wrote: “So much for defiance.” When the DEI website came down, an op-ed said Harvard “cares neither for its own stated values nor its student body.” The president of the Black Men’s Forum said Harvard has “fail[ed] to support Black voices while courting conservative ones” after the university created a conservative institute, as if the two races affected by SFFA were “black” and “conservative.” This griping is baseless because it is divorced from a real conception of merit. The person who benefits never comes up in these articles, and neither does any of the evidence that their success was unjust.

We know who was favored and why they were favored: Neither fact favors Harvard. First, take the beneficiaries. The numbers the litigation pried out are the most recent Harvard has let anyone see. Seventy-one percent of its African American, Hispanic, and Native American admits counted as “advantaged” under Harvard’s own measure, while only about a third of these populations are socio-economically disadvantaged. That means many of those classified as disadvantaged based on their race are advantaged socio-economically. A post-trial study modeled six years of Harvard’s applicant files, holding grades, scores, and ratings constant and asking how each applicant would fare if they were Caucasian. If African American and Hispanic applicants were affluent, racial preference would affect their application substantially more than if they were working class.6 Harvard’s policy effectively rewarded wealthy African Americans and Hispanics at the expense of impoverished ones.

Then there is what Harvard’s racial preference bought. Harvard sold its racial prejudice as economically beneficial, something that would help out the consulting and banking firms for which classes train Harvard’s students. But this was a dishonest sell. The most-cited business case Harvard relied upon to defend racial discrimination, four McKinsey studies tying diverse executives to higher profits, fell apart when two accounting professors tried to reproduce the studies and concluded they “should not be relied on” due to methodological errors.7 A meta-analysis of 146 studies found that racial and gender diversity has basically no effect on team performance; what moves innovation is the training and knowledge of the person, not their skin color.8\ The Court found Harvard’s claimed diversity benefits “not sufficiently coherent” to be measured under strict scrutiny, not exactly a vote of confidence.9

Research does, however, show that at least a certain kind of diversity is important: diversity of viewpoint. Six social scientists, Jonathan Haidt and Philip Tetlock among them, wrote the landmark paper: viewpoint diversity drives “creativity, discovery, and problem solving,” and academia spent fifty years destroying that intllectual diversity.10 Harvard included. In the Crimson’s 2025 faculty survey, just nine percent of faculty called themselves conservative while 63 percent called themselves liberal. In FIRE’s 2024 and 2025 free speech rankings, Harvard finished dead last, at 0.00. Government professor Harvey Mansfield made the point in the Crimson: “affirmative action only allowed for the admission of its supporters.” Harvard is now courting ten-million-dollar gifts for individual “viewpoint diversity” professorships, money that could, efficiently spent, pay for twenty to thirty chairs under a conservative provost. So the diversity the campus defends is the useless kind. Meanwhile, the kind that actually helps is bought by Harvard for ten million dollars a chair, when, if the administration took it seriously, they could have it for free.

If that were the whole story, it would have ended with the Court’s opinion. It did not, because Harvard refuses to give up on racial discrimination. The university broke nearly seventy years of precedent and sat on the Class of 2029 demographics until a federal deadline pried them loose. Harvard changed its math too. Starting with the Class of 2028, it counted race only among students who chose to disclose it. Eight percent did not, double the prior year. Multiracial students got tallied in every box they checked.11 The reported shares therefore run higher than the real ones, and experts told the Crimson they could not reconcile or explain the figures. Harvard’s administration, the only people who could explain the data, declined.

Harvard’s stated reason for withholding this data is student privacy. In February 2026 the Crimson’s editorial board backed the refusal on this ground, under the headline “Student Privacy Is Worth Protecting.” Privacy, of course, is a right. But it should be noted that the brave defenders of freedom at the Crimson only seem to recognize this right when it is consistent with their defense of racial discrimination. Eighteen months earlier, the pressure had run the other way, and the Crimson was not so defensive of our rights. Back then, the African and African American Resistance Organization launched a Release the Data campaign, with nearly thirty members and affiliates emailing the dean and Harvard’s President for the same demographic data. An organizer wrote in the Crimson that Harvard kept leaving them “in the dark.” Same records, same students, same disclosure. To the Crimson, public data is a right when it might preserve racial discrimination, but it becomes a “privacy threat” when it might engender fairness.

The stakes could not be higher, because Harvard is not the only school that was asked for its data, it was just the only school intent on lying about it. Duke, Yale, and Princeton showed their data: African American enrollment held; Asian enrollment fell. SFFA sent all three warning letters: “your racial numbers are not possible under true race neutrality.” Harvard’s first class invites the same question. The trial record identified Asian Americans as the group affirmative action harmed most while African Americans and Hispanics were the students whose applications were most aggressively boosted under the previous, explicitly race-based system. However, in the first class admitted without racial discrimination, it was instead Hispanic enrollment that rose, while Asian American enrollment did not move at all. The reason for this is clear—covert racial discrimination.

This can happen because Roberts’ opinion leaves a university free to weigh what an applicant writes about how race shaped his life and a university free to consider that race-based story. Thus, a class that barely moves is not legal proof that anything improper happened. Maybe, the school can facetiously argue, racism just ballooned in the 2023-2024 period. They had no choice. Whether Harvard discriminated based on race is, according to the new guidelines, a result no one outside Harvard can check, and the year it happened is, as it just-so-happens, the year Harvard changed how it counts race.

As a result, in a post-SFFA world, only file-level data can prove racial discrimination. Aggregate data is a portrait of a class after it has been assembled: how many students, from which groups, with what average scores. It can tell you what a class looks like. It cannot tell you how anyone in it got there. File-level data is the decision itself, the reader sheets and the ratings and the notes, and it is the only place where racial preference can be visible, because racial discrimination is not an aggregate statistic. It is a thumb that a person unjustly presses on an individual application at an individual time. But Harvard refuses to hand over this data. It has over two-thousand pages but refuses to hand over even one.

We all know why Harvard is engaging in this obfuscation. It’s because the alternative is to invite federal scrutiny and, possibly, to end racial discrimination. Just look at Duke Law School. While they tried to engage in the same obfuscation, eventually, that became impossible. The Justice Department examined Duke Law’s files and found intentional racial discrimination across three cycles: African American applicants in 2025 had roughly 3.5 times the odds of being admitted as Asian American applicants with the same credentials, and the median LSAT of rejected Caucasian and Asian American applicants was higher than the median LSAT of admitted African American applicants. Duke claims it is reviewing the findings and follows the law. From Cambridge, Duke’s story could be read as a warning: publish, and you invite the same scrutiny. As a result of this fear, Harvard refuses to release the same files that proved Duke was discriminating based on race. These do not seem like the protestations of an innocent institution.

Harvard cannot afford to destroy our limited public trust for the sake of unjust racial discrimination. Harvard’s administration has spent three years telling the public that Washington is acting in bad faith, and perhaps they are. But that defense is only available to an institution that is itself acting in good faith. But that would be an institution which discloses even when disclosure is inconvenient. That’s not Harvard. The administration kept its own researchers’ findings of bias secret until litigation pried them out. It broke seventy years of precedent to stop releasing real admissions data. The pattern is not that Harvard lies. It is that Harvard reports when reporting helps and goes quiet when it does not. If Harvard is following the law, it can report the data that proves it. But it hasn’t, and it won’t.

Merit is what the Court ordered Harvard to measure: one applicant at a time, as a person, not a shade of color.12 The first post-ruling numbers look like compliance. But the conduct looks like a school that would rather nobody check whether its numbers are real. The delayed releases. The friendlier denominator. The missed deadlines. The litigation. Three years on, the government is still asking Harvard for proof a confident school would have volunteered. The colors are on the brochure. The person is still waiting to be seen.

Harvard’s ideological bias should worry all conservative students during their time at the College. To enter an institution where about 10% of faculty and an only slightly larger percentage of students share your beliefs can be, and is, daunting. This feeling, however, has the capacity to transform into a sense of hopelessness that only harms the conservative cause. In fact, for conservatives at Harvard in recent years, that transformation has happened. This dangerous and ascendant attitude is that of the noble loser.

The noble loser’s core principle is an extreme pessimism. Facing an environment in which he is outnumbered, the noble loser says it is impossible to convince or even be understood by his interlocutors. So, says the noble loser, if he must go down, he ought to go down swinging, not giving an inch on his beliefs — in a word, “nobly.”

Yet, the noble loser’s stunning dearth of hope inevitably leads to his own failure. If the point is losing, if the possibility of victory (that is, of productive discourse, improving mutual understanding, and changing minds) is presumed to be impossible, then why try at all? Thus, a self-congratulatory approach to conservative life in the academy predominates, and thereby, conservatives surrender any opportunity to meaningfully influence campus. This loss manifests in two ways: the conservative either excises himself from political debate or treats debate as performance art rather than discourse.

By the first manifestation of the noble loser attitude, conservatives collapse into themselves. This approach was typified in a Crimson editorial from two years ago written by the former President of the Harvard Republican Club, which posited that Harvard conservatives owe broader campus “nothing.” Yet, it is also reflected more subtly in the number of conservatives who decline to speak up in class, for instance. A recent study showed that 63.2% of self-described “conservative” students in Harvard’s graduating class “frequently” avoided saying their views in public. In comparison, only 7.3% of “progressive” students said the same. Of course, some of this self-censorship owes to a real potential of exclusion. Still, if in an environment teleologically committed to truth, conservatives are electing not to contribute, then they must be, at some level, devoid of hope, so that the only option is silence.

While conservative hermitage should be avoided, it is the latter form of the noble loser attitude — the view that debate is a form of strange performance art — that is especially pernicious. Because, as much as noble losers may wish to retreat from campus, interacting with those outside their carefully vetted bubble is inevitable. In fact, there are students — at Harvard and beyond — who are interested in considering conservative convictions. Nevertheless, the noble loser, viewing communication as useless, necessarily regards all interlocutors outside of his circle as liars, invested in dialogue only as a means of boosting their Intellectual Vitality social credit score. After all, if they were sincerely interested in conservatism, the noble loser would have to reconsider his pessimism, which would be fatal. The only productive avenue left for the noble loser, then, is his nobility, his self-righteousness, which he affirms by resorting to those arguments that will put the greatest distance between his own beliefs and those of the intolerant liar before him. Thus, the noble loser turns to extreme positions, often ones that go far beyond conservatism.

To demonstrate, see the recent policy change from the John Adams Society to exclude women. This was a decision made not on any intellectual basis, which would be appropriate for a debate society, but on that of sex alone. As such, it lays bare the debate-as-a-performance manifestation of noble loserdom, whereby whole groups (here, women) are deemed beyond the pale of engagement and cut off, owing not to any substantive evidence, but because of how the noble loser feels about them in relation to his sanctimoniousness, and thus acts so as to put as much distance — ideological, and in this case, physical — between himself and them. The natural terminus of this approach is, at first, mere intolerance, eventually blindness, and finally, further disaffection, as the definition of who and what is “conservative” at Harvard ever-narrows.

In short, the noble loser succeeds only in estranging himself from the rest of society, whether by his silence or his warped participation. In that way, the attitude is a dangerously self-fulfilling prophecy: if its only achievement is to alienate the conservative from his community, its very success is the failure of all the loser’s other ideological objectives. But perhaps this is what the loser wants. After all, when the loser has proven his failure, he can turn around and proclaim his own superiority. Having alienated himself from the rest of the world, he can proclaim, “See? I knew there was no hope! I said I would lose, and look at that, I did!” For the loser, this loss proves his purity. It is exactly what he wants, no matter what it destroys.

More important than its moral failings, though, is that the noble loser attitude is false.

To be sure, Harvard is demonstrably liberal, and it has progressive elements that are hostile and prejudiced, just as conservatives describe them. That this environment could deflate conservative optimism is fair.

What is more, while certain administrative efforts have been made in recent years to bolster conservative representation within the university (most notably, a proposed “conservative center”), these actions may seem to be a result of the Trump Administration’s pressure on Harvard, not political debate. Simply put, it may seem that force is the only way forward, not discourse.

This view, though, understates what discourse has done for Harvard.

For one, Harvard’s actions, many of which predate Trump Administration pressure, to draw in conservative perspectives and create a more robust environment for intellectual exchange in and outside of class could not have happened if not for the work that outward-facing conservative students and organizations, like The Harvard Salient, have done to criticize and eventually convince our school of our views. For instance, The Harvard Salient’s former president, Sarah Steele, successfully led a movement to install mailboxes on every dormitory door in response to administrative suppression, ensuring conservative groups could successfully circulate our ideas.

Further, a persuasion-first approach among students has been demonstrably successful on a cultural level as well. A recent poll of graduating seniors showed that students were more likely to consider themselves conservative and 5% less likely to consider themselves progressive after Harvard than before. Conservatives at Harvard convincing fellow students is not just possible — it is already happening. In fact, if the conservative tries, he can do a great deal to change Harvard.

To reject the noble loser mindset is not to delude oneself. Of course, being a conservative at Harvard is difficult. Fighting the good fight will often open one up to ostracization and rejection. And certainly, rejecting the mindset does not mean one must “moderate” or change his values or his deeply held political views.

Rather, rejecting the noble loser is a call to reclaim hope and to accept the incredible responsibility to effect change that hope demands of us. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the best men this institution has produced, was right: the credit does belong to the Man in the Arena, even if he fails, but only the Man in the Arena “who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions.” In other words, “the credit belongs” to the man, the conservative, who hopes.

Luster. John examines his teeth in a mirror. Is it wrong to want to look beautiful on such a day? He forcefully rips this thought from his mind, refusing to be trapped in another interrogation.

Today is the bicentennial of the Annual Pearl Collecting Competition. Each year, the municipal government releases thousands of fake pearls into the sea, floating on the surface of the water like sesame on a bun. The person who collected the most within a twelve hour period would receive a $10,000 cash prize. Since this year was the 200th anniversary, the municipal government would also release a single real pearl, christened Le Chemin De La Vie, having been found off the coast of Papeete and described by critics as the most beautiful pearl yet discovered. Worth seven million dollars, the pearl would be hidden among its artificial companions, a sugar crystal in a bowl of milk. Having spent years working with both real and fake pearls as a jeweler, John sets his eyes upon Le Chemin immediately.

As he drives to the beach, he is cut off into the parking lot by an old blue truck with fishing equipment hanging out the back of the tailgate. John tails the man before parking directly opposite the truck, which could hardly stay within the lane. He stomps towards the fisherman, calling out, “Who do you think you are?”

The truck-driver, Tony, grabs an inflatable raft and a large fishing net and begins waddling towards the sand. The event would soon begin, and Tony wanted to be there by the time the whistle blew. John quickly followed, gently berating Tony. “We’re all here for the same reason, to have the pearl,” John explained to Tony, who just wanted to sell the thing.

“Help me load up while you blabber,” Tony says as he pulls on a cord that inflates the raft. On the edge of the water, he begins handing various vittles and equipment to John, which John then chucks onto the raft.

The Whistle.

Left without his equipment, John shakes his head at Tony once again, boiling over with frustration. The masses rush into the water, and John, caught between Tony and starting late, jumps inside the raft. Tony silently accepts this reality.

He pushes off from the shore, and they both begin scooping large swaths of orbs into buckets. Endless white. Disillusionment quickly overtakes John, while Tony pulls in more and more with no plan of how to distinguish between the fake and the real.

The sun begins to sink beyond the horizon, casting an orange hue onto the milky sea. As John gazes out, he sees one pearl that has drifted farther, as if thrown out. Longing swallows him up as he stares. In front of the crowd or away, in the light or in the dark, being seen with the pearl was nothing. “That’s the One,” John mumbles. But is it enough for me?

John and Tony paddled over the burgeoning waves, hastening to their end. The constant glow of the pearl harkens the two men toward it, as the sea and sky merge into one blackness. Tony silently begins to contemplate what he would do with the money, to wonder what of himself would last. John begins to describe the pearl, words gushing out of him, springing outward from a pressure within. Not to sell, but to hold and cherish; this was life. But he speaks as if trying to convince himself.

Was this life? Tony ponders. They arrive at the pearl; their journey has come to an end. Joy, utter joy, meeting each other’s eyes as acknowledgement of their achievement. Complete quiet surrounds them and neither has the strength to break it. Each looks back at the blurred dots in the distance, the mass of people grasping in the dark. A strange sadness now colors the blackened horizon. John reaches over the ledge of the raft to sweep up Le Chemin, but it eludes him, suddenly sinking rapidly below the waves and into the depths. Each could see the glow gliding lower and lower.

Fear comes over John. His dream, his pursuit, slipping out of his hands. It was right there! Tony gazes into the water and abruptly stands. John looks at Tony and sees an emboldened resignation glazed over his eyes. Shaking his head, John asks:

“Are you willing to drown?”

Breathing out a sigh, Tony dives, reaching and grabbing the pearl, holding and cherishing to the bottom of the sea.

Throughout the past few decades, American politics has shifted focus from traditional issues like the economy or social policy to an emphasis on “defending democracy.” In the 2024 election, a third of voters said their vote was primarily motivated by fears that American democracy was under threat, with a plurality of both Democrat and Republican voters saying that “democracy in the U.S.” was “very threatened” by contemporary politics. Within Harvard’s Government department, defending democracy and “democratic institutions” has similarly become the central research question for intellectual inquiry. Unfortunately, this trend has undermined our ability to have serious discussions about politics, both in America and at Harvard.

The emergence of “defending democracy” as the central issue of American political life has been as confusing as it has been bipartisan. On the right, following the 2020 election, concerns about the “deep state” and illegal voting have led both politicians and voters to prioritize fairness of elections above nearly any other political issue. As of March this year, the only major Republican domestic policy proposal was to nationalize the management of elections and require voter ID nationwide. This policy has been declared by President Donald Trump to be the “most important & consequential piece of legislation” in American politics, necessary to stop Democrats from, in his words, “rigg[ing] elections.” Indeed, Trump promised to halt all other congressional policy (in a Republican Congress) if they cannot pass this singular bill, and in support of this goal he has advocated for overturning traditional institutions of the American Republic like the filibuster.

Meanwhile, since the 2020 election, Democrats have also made “defending democracy” central to their political project. Many Democrats such as former President Joe Biden have declared that “MAGA Republicans” are “determined to destroy democracy.” Thus, Democrats say, America must nationalize election management and overturn stringent voter ID requirements in conservative states. During the Biden Administration, one of the flagship policies put forth by Congress was the For the People Act, a bill that sought to nationalize election management which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer argued was necessary even if passing it required overturning institutions of the American republic like the filibuster. This shared political objective has become popular at the same time among both Democrat and Republican lawmakers without the slightest self-consciousness on either side. There must be some reason why rhetoric focused on “democracy” is naturally attractive to politicians.

As philosopher Herman Cappelen argues, the attractiveness of this rhetoric comes from the fact that the actual meaning of “democracy” is nebulous. Some (usually populist) politicians say that anything which limits majoritarian decision-making is undemocratic. Other (usually institutionalist) politicians say that anything which limits the influence of civil society is undemocratic.1 Organizations like The Economist and Freedom House provide entire lists of factors to determine whether a country is a democracy, including everything from the presence of “civil liberties” to the “effectiveness” of the government.2 Because there are so many different definitions of democracy, any political partisan can choose to define “democracy” however they wish without worrying about whether they are infringing on the actual definition of the term.3 As a particularly extreme example, one Chinese government document argues that China is not just a democracy — it’s the only functioning democracy in the world!4 “Democracy” can thus be — and often is — defined however a politician wishes, and thus, all that a politician needs to connect their goals to the “defense of democracy” is a creative enough redefinition of democracy.

Making this sort of rhetoric even more attractive, the term “democracy” is highly emotionally charged. When we read or hear “democracy,” we naturally associate it with positive emotions. These emotional impacts are what Cappelen calls the “lexical effects” of the term, and they strongly influence how we feel about the content of what is defined as “democratic.”5 When a politician says that checks on executive power, or voter ID laws, or any other political policy “defends democracy,” that makes us much more likely to support those policies, because hearing that something is associated with democracy emotionally influences us to support it. Thus, because of our cultural and emotional understanding of democracy, “defending democracy” often functions as a way for political partisans to use the lexical effects of “democracy” to justify unrelated political policies.6

As a result, as Cappelen argues, politicians can very effectively manipulate voters. Even worse, our disagreements become purely verbal and our discussion degrades. When Joe Biden and Donald Trump can both convincingly say to their supporters that they are defending democracy from the other, this is not because of a mere disagreement on facts. Instead, it is a disagreement based on two completely different understandings of what “democracy” even means. In this case, their disagreement is “purely linguistic,” a disagreement which results exclusively from different definitions of terms with strong lexical effects. Thus, cross-ideological discussion becomes intractable, and politics becomes polarized.7

This use of the lexically powerful term “democracy” as a method to justify political preferences has become equally significant at Harvard. In Harvard’s “Government” department, 37 out of Harvard’s 64 courses (around 58%) over the 2025-6 school year include readings or course content analyzing “democracy” or “democratic” institutions. Not including 10 purely quantitative courses in which students are exclusively taught skills (like how to conduct a survey), nearly 70% of courses include some analysis in terms of “democracy.” In contrast, just 7 courses include any analysis whatsoever of what it means to be a “republic.”

This is in spite of the fact that, just like in ordinary political life, it is unclear what “democracy” refers to in political science and political theory. Within academia, definitions abound, often referring to entirely different things.8 We can categorize definitions into five basic ones: “minimalistic” definitions, “pluralist” definitions, “substantive” definitions, “epistemic” definitions, and “agonistic” definitions.9 The significant disagreement over the criteria used to evaluate whether a system is a “democracy” is reflected in the pedagogy of Harvard’s Government department. Among the 37 courses with readings or course content that base analysis on a particular conception of “democracy,” no more than 12 use any one definition of democracy (32%).10 Thus, different students receive wildly different understandings of democracy in their classes — and with those wildly different understandings, wildly different prejudices to influence whatever policies they are naturally predisposed to support.

Without a clear definition to ground them, these courses often invoke “democracy” just as rhetorically as do ordinary political partisans. Take, for instance, GOV 94OA, “Inequality and American Democracy.” In the description of the course, the syllabus makes it very clear that “responsive democracy may have stalled, and in some cases reversed” because of “disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity.” The course readings include yet more lexically charged terminology justifying its political ideology. One book is about how the “rural versus urban” divide “threatens democracy.” Another reading is about how “invisible government policies” like tax relief for the wealthy also “undermine American democracy.” Here, the lexical effects of “democracy,” redefined to include certain normative ends, are used to emotionally influence students to accept a worldview. Perhaps contemporary America is too unequal. However, the right way to discuss that in an educational environment is to directly describe the exact problems resulting from that inequality, avoiding language with strong lexical effects such as rhetoric about the “defense of democracy.” Courses like GOV 94OA fail to discuss these problems neutrally.

However, even less overtly ideological courses have this same problem. GOV 1719, a course on “Political Communication Breakdown,” argues that contemporary partisanship and the resulting “epistemic problems” have led to a situation in which “American democracy is in crisis.” By defining these epistemic problems as displays that our system is not democratic enough and as contradicting our democratic principles, this course description implies that these epistemic problems are “undemocratic.” This course, too, uses the lexical effects of “democracy” to influence student perspectives, albeit in a less overt way than GOV 94OA. Again, the conclusions — in this case that our political system often fails to communicate the truth to voters — may in fact be right. However, by defining “democracy” to include professors’ preferred normative ends, even if those normative ends are right, these courses have moved away from dispassionate analysis and towards political advocacy.

With such a wide diversity of concepts of “democracy,” it is hardly surprising that students increasingly find it difficult to discuss politics across political lines. Whether measured by high levels of political self-censorship, fears of political disagreement, or attempts to shut down visiting speakers, Harvard students are unusually avoidant of political discourse. But who can blame them? The main form of “political discourse” taught to politically interested students at Harvard is not the disinterested discussion of political principles, but rather the emotional cajoling of students into adopting ideologies because of their affinity to artificially constructed conceptions of “democracy.” Thus, students’ disagreements with one another arise emotionally, merely as a result of however democracy has been redefined to a particular student.

Therefore, upon meeting another student with an alternate view of “democracy,” how can two Harvard students with different opinions based upon these redefinitions of democracy possibly hope to communicate and adjudicate their different conclusions? These differences of opinion, after all, are not based in rational disagreements but rather in the students’ different definitions of democracy. Those definitions, just like in the ordinary political case, will inevitably render any further disagreement “purely linguistic” and thus unproductive. As a consequence, it is only rational for Harvard students to avoid impossible-to-resolve political discussions. Just like how our politics polarizes and stagnates, so does our campus discourse similarly polarize and stagnate.

Of course, most professors do not use “democracy” terminology purposely to manipulate. They are, after all, just trying to accurately depict political debate. And most politics today is debated in terms of the “defense of democracy.” As a result, much political-academic literature is written in terms of that defense. Thus, as Cappelen notes, our pedagogical problems are likely less a problem of individual professors and more a problem with the structure of political theory sneaking normativity into the discussion through the use of the term “democracy.”11 But it is unnecessary to define political discussion according to those terms. As Cappelen argues, the term “democracy” does not add much of anything to political-academic life. Who votes, what institutions structure their voting, and what results they reach can be easily described and debated directly, without mediation through the term “democracy.”12

Pedagogically speaking, this problem is even more easily resolved. There is no need for discussion with students to be held in terms of “democracy.” Instead, professors can teach directly about what they want to discuss. Debates about the “impact of political polarization on our democratic crisis” in GOV 1719 can be easily re-defined as “debates about the impact of political polarization on our ability to arrive at policies based on truth.” Debates about whether inequality undermines democracy in GOV 94OA can easily be reformulated as discussions about whether inequality undermines the political power of the poor and how that loss in political power harms America. These are completely ordinary and valuable ways of discussing these issues — and they involve none of the emotional sleights of hand which our current debates entail.

What makes resolving this problem difficult, however, is the underlying collective action problem that is incentivizing the use of “democracy”-laden rhetoric in classes. Politically interested students will be more interested in taking classes about topics on which they already have strong opinions. And, of course, with contemporary politics focused on the “defense of democracy,” students will naturally be interested in classes which use such lexically powerful words.

While this collective action problem is difficult to solve, similar collective action problems are resolved by universities all the time. A recent example is the Harvard Administration decision to cap the assignment of A’s at 20% of students in any particular course. As Amanda Claybaugh’s report itself recognized, the proposed policies were aggressive. Nevertheless, they were, in the eyes of the administration, necessary because “collective action problem[s]” such as grade inflation necessitate aggressive action. As President Alan Garber has recognized, Harvard’s lack of genuine campus discourse has also become a crisis. Similarly aggressive action is thus necessary to respond to Harvard’s crisis of self-censorship. If Harvard is serious about bringing back campus discourse, it should cap the number of courses on “democracy” offered in the Government department each year.

The policy would be controversial and assertive. But viewpoint diversity cannot be solved just by task forces and reports. As Harvard has recognized, decades-long collective action problems require aggressive engineering to solve them. To stop the continued polarization of political discourse at Harvard, we need strong action. Refocusing the purpose of Harvard’s Government department on what we think rather than what we feel would be a strong first step. Only through this decisive action can we hope to engender political discourse on campus that does not devolve into the mudslinging of partisan politics or the silence that follows collective incomprehension.

The most dangerous person in the modern world economy is a twenty-something year-old graduate with a prestigious degree and a polished slide deck. At Harvard, we treat entry-level offers at top-tier consulting firms as secular sacraments. We build skills specifically to facilitate change, but this change is always characterized by top-down administrative exercises that value the aesthetics of competence over the infrastructure of reality.

Nowhere is this more true than among “charitable” students seeking to go into government and nonprofit work. When friends speak about their “passion” for “helping developing nations” and the impact they intend to make, they are usually sincere. They are also usually wrong. The impact will be real, but it will probably be negative. We have been trained to see the world as a series of administrative hurdles rather than a physical reality that requires a grounded bottom-up approach that knows how and why actual systems work.

In his 2006 book The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly identifies this as the fatal flaw of the planner. Easterly defines the planner as someone who believes he already knows the answer to poverty. He or she thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve, no matter what short-term resistance he or she may face. The Searcher, by contrast, accepts that the world is too complex for a single blueprint, instead finding local solutions connected to civil society through trial and error.1 Because our university culture prioritizes the hubris of planning over the humility of searching, our leadership class is defined by its inability to understand reality.

To fully understand the failings of the Planner mindset, we can think of the personification of the Planner, the McKinsey-vetted technocrat who treats the complex machinery of a nation like a high-school debate prompt. He begins his career at a firm where the primary product is the illusion of certainty and competence through presentations and Excel models. While at McKinsey, this archetype, whose closest analogue is Pete Buttigieg, is trained in the language and doctrines of Planner-logic: massive, top down theoretical frameworks that fail to account for or even attempt at the grit of implementation. When this mindset is applied to national infrastructure, it manifests as a complete inability to distinguish between administrative motion and physical progress.

We saw the true cost of this during the Supply Chain Crisis of 2021 and 2022. This crisis fell directly under the purview of federal Transportation leadership, controlled by the archetypal Planner. While record numbers of container ships idled off the coast of California, industry leaders and shippers openly requested suspending antiquated zoning laws and an immediate transition to 24/7 port operations to clear the backlog. The administrative response, however, was to convene task forces and announce a Port Envoy. As Easterly notes, Planners like Buttigieg announce good intentions but provide motivated Searchers with no incentives to implement them.2 This is because Planners believe that convening is equivalent to action.

Because our leadership prioritized administrative oversight over getting things done, the cost of shipping a container from Asia to the US West Coast spiked from \$2,000 to over$20,000.3 This port inaction was a primary engine of the 9.1% inflation spike that gutted the purchasing power of American families. The Searcher understands that if the ship is not at the dock, the economy is dying. The Planner, on the other hand, believes that if he has announced a “strategic framework,” the problem will recognize his ingenuity and go away on its own.

But Buttigieg looks like a success relative to when charitable Planners try to “help” emerging markets. The World Bank initiative Scaling Solar shows just how bad Planner hubris can become, Zambia implemented a record low tariff on energy through hidden subsidies and donor-funded loans. When the Planners set an artificial 6-cent benchmark for what tariffs ought to be, however, they effectively broke the local credit market. African governments cancelled their previous trade deals because they were told by the “experts” that 6-cents was the new market reality. But that price was impossible without inherently short-term support. After a decade of administrative delay, Zambia has managed to produce less than a sixth of its promised energy. Influenced by the Planners, Ethiopia mandated 500 Megawatts of energy to its people in 2019 but has since failed to produce even a single watt.4

The Planners did not scale the market but strangled it by making real-world risk look like a failure of management rather than a fact of life. Planners’ “charitable efforts” failed because they were reductionist by nature, assuming that a single price-point is a marker of success while ignoring the rational risk-perception of the nation. By stripping away sovereign nations’ ability to negotiate and build independently, Planners also took away their knowledge of those risks.

The alternative is Industrial Sovereignty through the logic of the Searcher. The proof is Mauritius. In 1961, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Meade, the quintessential Planner, dismissed Mauritius, predicting that its reliance on sugar and overpopulation would lead to economic ruin.5 If Mauritius had followed the standard “Plan” handed down by Ivy League academics, it would have remained a stagnant mono-crop economy dependent on British handouts. Instead, Mauritius was governed by Searchers. Mauritius’ leaders rejected the orthodox shock therapy often prescribed by the IMF, choosing instead a “dual-track” strategy that protected local institutions while aggressively building Export Processing Zones (EPZs) to compete globally.6

Instead of begging for experts to manage their transition, Mauritius leveraged its most critical asset: Institutional Sovereignty. They ignored external calls for rapid currency devaluation and welfare cuts that would have shattered their delicate ethnic social compact. By maintaining high-quality local bureaucracies and fostering a unique partnership between the state and local capital, Mauritius transformed from a sugar-dependent island into a diversified, high-income economy with a thriving textile, finance, and tourism base. Between 1977 and 2010, the Mauritian economy grew at an average of 5% per year, consistently outperforming the “Planned” economies of mainland Africa. Mauritius is the refutation of the woke man’s burden.7 They did not wait for a top-down master plan; they formed the internal capital and political stability required to ignore the Planners entirely. This is what true leadership looks like: recognizing a nation’s internal assets rather than asking for external aid.

Real leadership is about respecting people enough to let them take their own sovereignty, not dictating their decisions from an ivory tower. The students at this university are being trained to be tools of a stagnant bureaucracy. We are being taught to value the model over the street and the slide deck over the ledger. As leaders, we need to leave our hotel rooms and talk to the people actually doing real work. Only then will we learn how to stop “helping” and start building. We need to ground ourselves in reality or get out of the way.

Political bias in Harvard’s academic offerings has become endemic. As previously cataloged in the Salient, Harvard Humanities departments in particular are dominated by left-wing ideology. Instead of learning about history or sociology, many students only learn a one-sided Marxist or critical theoretical perspective on history and sociology. Most attempts to explain this bias are purely based on professors’ perceived ideological bias. According to James Hankins, for instance, Harvard went woke because of irrational shifts in educational philosophy. By analyzing the history of Harvard course descriptions, however, we find something very different — Harvard shifted left because administrative social engineering made activism the only way for Humanities courses to survive.1

Prior to 2015, Harvard required students to take a range of courses across departments for their General Education requirement. In 2015, however, Harvard’s administration decided there were too many courses. So, they cut the number of courses by 20% and shifted to a new General Education system dominated by large, easy courses about four arbitrary “kinds” of education. This nearly inexplicable social engineering, as with all social engineering, led to unexpected, awful consequences.

In the Humanities, these changes led to an unprecedented decline in the student population. Very few of the 20% of courses that were cut were engineering or science courses; indeed, the number of STEM courses at Harvard has only increased over the past 10 years. Instead, these cuts were targeted at the already declining Humanities. Since the 2000s, History has declined from the second largest department at Harvard to the eighth largest department, for instance. On the other hand, the number of Computer Science courses has grown nearly every year since 2010.2

What this administrative social engineering meant was that courses that were too small were cut, even if professors were happy to teach them. Now, Harvard teachers had to compete for student interest in order to teach. Making this even worse, the same year that Harvard cut the number of courses, they also implemented an online Q Report system, allowing students to review courses and professors online for the benefit of future students. The implementation of the online Q Report system, however, had the unfortunate effect of allowing every single student to decimate future enrollment in courses by writing a strongly worded negative review of that course. Indeed, Harvard specifically facilitated this policy, telling students to describe on their Q Report if their professor said anything they viewed as “offensive.” As a result, Harvard professors now have to make sure they do not offend even a single student, or else their courses may be cut next.

Due to this growing fear, Harvard’s Humanities offerings are now determined by student preference rather than faculty teaching. The number of words in course descriptions has increased dramatically, as these descriptions have changed from professors trying to explain their courses to practically begging students to take an interest. The shift in the number of courses has also affected the sorts of courses Harvard offers. Once a place where students could learn from the greatest Professors in the world, Harvard now enables students to indulge in their preferences to hear their own voices instead. As a result, over the past ten years, there has been a consistent increase in the number of seminar courses and a decline in the number of lecture courses.

As has previously been noted in the pages of the Salient, 2015 was the year when Harvard’s wokeness problem became septic. In course descriptions, we find both a proof and an explanation of this failure. Proving the point, we see in the data 2015 as the year when the number of left-wing keywords (such as “race,” “climate change,” and “diversity”) starts to increase dramatically in course descriptions. While it may seem like 2015 has been picked as an arbitrary line in the sand, our data shows there is significant evidence that this year was a real turning point. Second, we can see from the data that the reason for the left-wing shift was the same as for the increase in the number of words in course descriptions: the need for student interest. When a single activist student can destroy a professor’s career with an especially negative Q review, it is not surprising professors start teaching whatever activist students want. Harvard has created an incentive structure in which courses become activism or else disappear.

This problem is particularly pronounced in departments that rely on non-tenured faculty. History & Literature is the largest department at Harvard that relies almost exclusively on non-tenured visiting lecturers. These non-tenured lecturers are dependent on student interest each and every year in order to keep their jobs in the short run. This means that offending a single activist student (and thus getting a mean Q review) can often end a lecturer’s academic career. It is no surprise that the increase in the number of words per course description has been most pronounced in History & Literature, as a result. Equally, it is not surprising that History & Literature courses include some of the most ideological, left-wing language, simply as a method of self-preservation. History & Literature’s ideological tilt has become so extreme, in fact, that, as the Salient has previously noted, not a single course offering in the 2025-26 year in the department included even one conservative secondary source.

What this data importantly reveals is that Harvard’s problems go much deeper than just the institution. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis found battling the College Board, critical theory is often taught to excelling high school students in the humanities. While DeSantis managed to remove critical race theory from the Florida curriculum, that did not mean the end of ideological indoctrination. In extracurriculars like high school debate (in which over a quarter of Harvard students participated during high school), the primary view debated is whether we should kill all Caucasians or just the rich ones.

Thus, we can see that Harvard’s problems with activism are not solely created within the university — they also result from secondary schools indoctrinating students before they even step foot on Harvard’s campus. Harvard’s intellectual diversity problems have been most extreme within the Humanities simply because Humanities professors are forced to cater to activist students’ preferences in order to be able to keep teaching classes.

The fact that Harvard’s problems have not solely been internally generated, however, does not mean that Harvard is innocent in this story. Its decisions over the past decade, from telling students to report “offensive” professors in the Q Report to its drastic cuts in the number of courses, facilitated the creation of an ideologically lopsided environment. Throughout its entire history, the university has had the important role of offering students new perspectives from which to learn. That Harvard has deliberately lost its ability to teach new perspectives in the past decade has been a terrible loss, something which Harvard’s administration has facilitated, if not caused.

The first shift that Harvard can make to broaden the intellectual environment is to undo the indefensible social engineering at the root of current ideological bias. The 2015 change in the General Education system is a failed experiment which should be abandoned. The current General Education system, by artificially reducing the number of courses taught, makes professors too dependent on student interest. If we remove the cap on the number of courses, professors will no longer have to fear lost student interest, removing the incentive for left-wing activism.

We need similar reform to the Q Report. Of course, information about the number of hours a course requires every week and the quality of professors is important. But we do not need a culture of peer pressure where each and every student justifies or rejects a course via dissertation-level essays. By getting rid of the comments on Q Reports, individual activist students’ idiosyncratic beliefs and preferences will matter less, and thus, professors will be able to teach courses without fearing individual students. While this will not be a perfect answer to our problems, it can be part of the solution.

Just undoing administrative social engineering, however, will not be enough to bring back Harvard from this precipice. The effects of Harvard’s decisions were not just administrative but cultural. Students have become used to never facing any pushback to their opinions — and in the rare instances when they do face pushback, they are often outraged. The Harvard Crimson has a column in which students literally complain that Economics professors do not state their left-wing political opinions frequently enough in class to properly comfort their students. If, tomorrow, we abolished the Q Report and the General Education system, these students would still use whatever methods they could find to pressure professors into left-wing activism.

Thus, removing bad administrative policy cannot, alone, fix our problems. What we need, instead, is culture change. This means action to return Harvard’s culture to one of real viewpoint diversity. Students should not have to worry about being overridden by their professors (or other students). Professors should not have to beg activist students (or activist professors) not to end their careers. Harvard’s President has publicly stated that he wants to bring viewpoint diversity back to Harvard. The only way to follow through on this promise is by action to no longer favor activists over intellectual seriousness. The question is whether Harvard’s administrators, students, and professors will have the courage to reform Harvard’s culture into one of Veritas rather than fear.

The decline in cultural authenticity is one of the defining characteristics of our moment in history. In the not-so-distant past, communities across the world could exist in relative cultural separation from one another. Each city or town had its own distinctive and unique customs. This particularity enabled a sense of authenticity that has now diminished due to technology like the phone and the internet. Through social media, we can connect to a wider array of people than our ancestors could have possibly imagined. Through our phones we can instantly access a network of people and events across the world. This connectivity, however, flattens individuality and diminishes the particular cultures of different religions, nations, and ethnicities. The omnipresent gaze that technology foists upon us gives us access to the world but eliminates the communal individuality of our predecessors.

Some would argue that by returning to our physical communities, we can reclaim the authenticity which we have lost. But in the digital age, the very idea of community has deteriorated. Nowadays, our communities lack the common set of cultural practices and values which previously defined them. Our communities cannot separate themselves from the omnipresent online network regulated and policed by corporations and governments.

The sense of interconnectivity and the deterioration of authenticity have their foundations in the Enlightenment ideal of freedom. Just as the international transfer of resources integrates decentralized markets into a single global economy, it also supplants local, heterogenous cultures with a universalist globalism.

This internationalization of culture has only been accelerated by the digital age. Nowadays, not only can material objects like toys be exchanged, but also content and ideas through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. American values (and even slang!) are exported across the globe, while our own culture converges towards the international mean. Values and practices that were once separate are thus ultimately diluted.

This relationship between economic and cultural exchange makes economic isolationism seem appealing; by breaking our economic ties to the rest of the world, some imagine, we can reclaim our country’s cultural heritage. Economics therefore becomes a tool through which to obtain cultural and moral goals. For example, Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s trade advisors, has argued that economic isolationism allows us to restore Christian values. Isolationist visions like Navarro’s appeal to us by promising the restoration of an authentic past.

But this argument neglects the fact that isolating oneself is itself a consequence of lost innocence. After all, a society that never lost innocence would never have to pursue policy to reclaim it. The past is, needless to say, irrecoverable. Every action we undertake is in some way influenced by the way things are, even those actions which attempt to reject or deny the present age.1

This argument does not suggest any attempt to defend one’s culture is inherently misdirected. Rather, what we are saying is that ideology cannot avoid the deleterious effects of contemporary social trends. Any view which seeks to reclaim the past is, while anti-modern, nevertheless a product of modernity. To seek to live a life untainted by our globalized world is, for anyone in contemporary society, inherently impossible. An ideology motivated by nostalgia and resentment towards modernity is thus incongruent with its actual objective. This raises the question of what such ideologies actually offer. If they cannot fulfill their promise to restore the cultural authenticity we have lost, then what is their purpose?

When political movements promise a return to the past, what they actually accomplish is the mere simulation of return, the fulfillment of a fantasy of authenticity. In rejecting the modern globalist order, these ideologies allow us to indulge in a self-aggrandizing, purely expressive sense of nostalgia.

Their solution is thus negative; they want to dismantle modern economic systems, but have no vision for what comes after. Of course, the fact that a solution is negative is not in and of itself a problem. It is only a problem because isolationist ideologies implicitly promise a positive solution: the possibility of reclaiming cultural authenticity. By promising what they cannot deliver, such ideologies are thus deceptive.

We want to make clear that the deterioration of cultural heritage is bad. The conservative’s task of preserving our forefathers’ values will always be in tension with globalist ideologies that value freedom or economic progress first and foremost. But a conservatism that, under the guise of reclaiming a lost heritage, harnesses populist dogmas to tear down existing systems cannot remain intellectually defensible. Rather than just dismantling these systems, we should instead strive to reform or create new institutions based on the values of our forefathers.