The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking

Posted on August 14, 2025 by Luke Ford

From this 2025 book by smoking hot Cambridge University neuoroscience and politics professor Leor Zmigrod:

I believe that we can judge an ideology based on what believing in it does to human bodies and brains; on whether being a passionate believer narrows our movements, lassoes our flexibility, restricts our responses, or triggers us to commit violence. If we have less scope for plasticity and change and less direct access to our sensations, we are at risk of dehumanizing ourselves and others. We become less sensitive, less elastic, less authentic. If we see reality through an ideological lens, we end up avoiding the richness of existence in favor of a more reduced, stereotyped experience. By studying the ideological brain with neuroimaging devices and cognitive tests, we can illuminate previously invisible forms of domination. With the tools of science, we can develop new ways to critique ideologies.
Perhaps some ideologies will pass our critical tests. Many will not. We might accidentally become suspicious of our most treasured ideological possessions. A science of ideology can inspire us to question our idols, our icons, our metaphors, our imagined utopias. It can stimulate careful analysis and honest self – reflection. It can even become the basis for personal or social action. Examining the neurocognitive origins and consequences of our beliefs — where they come from and how they transform our bodies — will offer clues regarding the kind of belief systems we might wish to keep and which ones we might be persuaded to let go.
Believing passionately in a rigid doctrine is a process that spills into our neurons, flowing into our bodies. Ideologies are not mere envelopes for our lives; they enter our skins, our skulls, our nerve cells. Totalizing ideologies shape the brain as a whole, not simply the brain when it is confronted with political propositions or debates. Science is beginning to reveal that the profound reverberations of ideologies can be observed in the brain even when we are not engaging with politics at all. Since our brains learn to embody indoctrination in deep and insidious ways, the social rituals we learn to enact can become the biological realities of our minds and bodies. There is therefore a danger that when an individual is immersed in rigid ideologies, it is not only their political opinions and moral tastes that are being sculpted — their entire brain is being sculpted to.

All beliefs are just unnecessary muscular tension, according to a perspective I heard in the Alexander Technique.

I don’t see how any ideology could promote flexibility?

You can experience the difference yourself when you shift between awareness and judgment. Whenever you judge, you tighten up. When you move out of judgment into awareness, your body frees up.

Leor Zmigrod’s website.

Grok says:

Not all beliefs are inherently negative or tension-inducing; some can be adaptive or motivating without causing physical or mental rigidity. The Alexander Technique’s focus is less on eliminating beliefs and more on cultivating awareness to avoid unnecessary effort—whether that effort is physical (like tensing muscles) or mental (like clinging to unexamined assumptions).

In the Technique, rigid mental habits (like clinging to fixed ideas) often translate into physical holding patterns, such as tightened shoulders or a clenched jaw, restricting ease and movement. Zmigrod’s work takes this a step further by using neuroscience to show how ideologies—broad belief systems—can either entrench this rigidity across brain, body, and behavior or, conversely, cultivate flexibility and release. You’re right to question how a belief system could actively promote physical flexibility and release, as the quote primarily critiques restrictive ideologies; however, drawing from her research and related discussions, we can infer what “flexible” belief systems might look like and how they could foster that release.Understanding Rigidity vs. Flexibility in BeliefsZmigrod argues that rigid doctrines “spill into our neurons, flowing into our bodies,” sculpting the brain holistically and reducing plasticity—the brain’s ability to adapt and reorganize.

This isn’t just metaphorical: neuroimaging and cognitive tests reveal that dogmatic thinking correlates with less neural adaptability, even in non-political tasks, leading to narrowed movements, restricted responses, and diminished access to sensations.

For instance, stress from ideological adherence can rigidify thought patterns, making individuals more habitual and less responsive, which might physically manifest as tension or reduced bodily awareness—echoing the Alexander perspective.

In essence, such beliefs create a “lassoed” state, where the body embodies the mental constriction, potentially increasing muscular tension as a stress response.On the flip side, Zmigrod suggests that belief systems promoting cognitive flexibility—measured through tasks like the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, where adaptable people shift rules fluidly—can counteract this.

Flexible thinkers are open to evidence, plurality, and change without being easily swayed, leading to greater mental elasticity that “rebounds” post-stress and enhances sensitivity to experiences.

This ties directly to physical release: just as physical fitness values elasticity to prevent injury and enable fluid movement, mental flexibility can reduce the embodied tension of dogma, allowing for more authentic, expansive living.

How Belief Systems Could Promote Physical Flexibility and Release

Based on Zmigrod’s framework, a belief system that “passes critical tests” would encourage plasticity and direct access to sensations, avoiding the dehumanizing effects of stereotypes or totalizing views. Here’s how such systems might work, with connections to bodily release:

Encouraging Self-Reflection and Questioning: Beliefs rooted in honest self-examination— like scientific inquiry or mindfulness practices—prompt us to “question our idols” and metaphors, as per the quote. This reduces mental clinging, which in Alexander terms releases unnecessary tension. For example, a belief in ongoing personal growth (e.g., via cognitive behavioral approaches) could train the brain to interrogate habits, correlating with less rigidity in daily routines and more physical ease.

Fostering Open-Mindedness and Plurality: Ideologies that value diversity and evidence over conformity promote neural adaptability, making individuals less prone to the “profound reverberations” that sculpt the brain rigidly. Zmigrod’s studies link this to disbelief in absolute doctrines (e.g., flexible religiosity or atheism), where cognitive persistence gives way to openness, potentially easing physiological responses like stress-induced tension.

Physically, this might manifest as greater bodily awareness and release, akin to how Alexander lessons teach inhibiting fixed reactions for freer movement.

Nurturing Elasticity Through Habits: Zmigrod highlights that flexible belief systems resist polarization by embracing complexity, leading to a “fluid, expansive state of existence.”

Practices like meditation or philosophical skepticism could embody this, reducing the “insidious” indoctrination that affects sensations and promoting rebound plasticity. In body terms, this aligns with releasing tension by not “adhering to scripts,” allowing for more elastic responses in posture and action.

Ultimately, Zmigrod envisions a “science of ideology” as a tool for choosing beliefs that enhance authenticity and sensitivity, rather than narrowing existence. If a system inspires action through reflection without demanding conformity, it could promote the very release you’re pondering—mentally unclenching to physically unwind.

Yes, there’s emerging evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and somatic practices like the Alexander Technique that certain belief systems—those fostering cognitive flexibility, open-mindedness, and self-awareness—can promote physical flexibility by reducing stress-induced tension and enhancing mind-body integration.

1. Cognitive Flexibility and Physical Relaxation

Belief systems that encourage cognitive flexibility—adaptability in thinking, openness to new evidence, and reduced attachment to rigid doctrines—have been linked to lower stress responses, which directly influence physical flexibility. Zmigrod’s research, as discussed in The Ideological Brain (2025), uses neuroimaging and cognitive tests (e.g., Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) to show that flexible thinkers exhibit greater neural plasticity, allowing them to shift mental frameworks fluidly. This mental elasticity correlates with reduced physiological stress, as rigid ideologies (e.g., dogmatic political or religious beliefs) can elevate cortisol levels, leading to muscle tension and restricted movement.

Evidence:

Studies show that cognitive flexibility, measured by tasks requiring rule-switching, is associated with lower sympathetic nervous system activation (e.g., reduced heart rate variability stress markers). Less stress means less involuntary muscle bracing, promoting physical ease. For example, a 2020 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that individuals with higher cognitive flexibility had better stress recovery, which could translate to less chronic tension in muscles like the neck or shoulders.

Alexander Technique Connection: The Technique emphasizes “inhibition” of habitual reactions, which aligns with cognitive flexibility. By letting go of fixed mental patterns (e.g., “I must always be right”), practitioners often report reduced muscular tension, as seen in studies where Alexander lessons improved posture and reduced pain in conditions like back pain.

2. Mindfulness-Based Beliefs and Bodily Awareness

Belief systems rooted in mindfulness or self-reflection, such as those inspired by meditation or somatic practices, enhance bodily awareness and reduce tension, fostering physical flexibility. Zmigrod notes that beliefs promoting “direct access to sensations” counteract the desensitizing effects of rigid ideologies. Mindfulness practices, which often embody flexible, non-judgmental beliefs, have been shown to lower muscle tension and improve movement range.Evidence: A 2018 meta-analysis in Scientific Reports found that mindfulness meditation reduces cortisol and improves vagal tone, leading to relaxed muscle states and better joint mobility in practitioners. Another study in Pain Medicine (2019) showed that mindfulness-based interventions improved physical flexibility in chronic pain patients by reducing fear-avoidance behaviors, which often manifest as muscular guarding.

Alexander Technique Connection: The Technique trains individuals to notice and release unnecessary tension during movement, akin to mindfulness. A belief in the process of “non-doing” (a core Alexander principle) fosters a relaxed, open state, with studies showing improved flexibility in musicians and office workers after lessons.

3. Open-Minded Belief Systems and Stress Reduction

Beliefs that embrace complexity and pluralism, as Zmigrod advocates, reduce the “lassoing” of flexibility by avoiding polarized thinking. Such beliefs—e.g., valuing evidence over dogma or embracing philosophical skepticism—lower psychological stress, which can manifest as physical suppleness.Evidence: Zmigrod’s studies suggest that individuals with less dogmatic beliefs (e.g., flexible religiosity or openness to diverse perspectives) show greater cognitive persistence and adaptability, linked to lower stress-induced muscle tension. A 2021 study in Nature Communications found that open-mindedness correlates with reduced amygdala activation (a stress marker), which could decrease physical bracing. Additionally, practices like yoga, often tied to non-dogmatic beliefs in holistic well-being, improve flexibility through combined mental and physical training, as shown in a 2020 Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies study.

Alexander Technique Connection: The Technique’s emphasis on releasing “end-gaining” (rigid pursuit of goals) mirrors open-minded beliefs, reducing tension. Practitioners often report feeling “lighter” and more flexible, as mental openness translates to physical release.

4. Neuroscientific Insights on Ideology and Embodiment

Zmigrod’s work highlights that ideologies sculpt the brain holistically, affecting even non-political tasks. Rigid beliefs can entrench neural pathways, reducing plasticity and increasing embodied tension (e.g., through chronic stress responses). Conversely, beliefs that foster curiosity and adaptability enhance neural flexibility, which may promote physical flexibility by reducing stress-related muscle tightness.Evidence: Neuroimaging studies show that rigid ideological adherence (e.g., extreme political views) correlates with heightened activity in the default mode network and reduced prefrontal cortex flexibility, linked to stress and physical tension. In contrast, beliefs encouraging exploration (e.g., scientific inquiry) enhance prefrontal activity, supporting adaptive responses and potentially reducing somatic tension. A 2022 study in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews suggests that flexible cognitive styles improve sensorimotor integration, aiding fluid movement.

Alexander Technique Connection: The Technique’s focus on mindful movement retrains sensorimotor habits, aligning with beliefs that prioritize adaptability. This can lead to measurable improvements in flexibility, as seen in trials where Alexander training enhanced mobility in older adults.

Practical Implications

Belief systems that promote physical flexibility often share traits like openness, self-reflection, and non-attachment to rigid outcomes. Examples include:Mindfulness or meditation-based beliefs, which reduce stress and enhance bodily awareness, leading to relaxed muscles and improved range of motion.
Scientific or skeptical frameworks, which encourage questioning and adaptability, lowering stress and its physical manifestations.
Somatic practices (e.g., Alexander Technique, yoga), which integrate beliefs in mind-body unity with physical training to release tension.

Limitations and Considerations

While evidence supports that flexible beliefs reduce stress and tension, direct studies linking specific ideologies to physical flexibility (e.g., joint range of motion) are sparse. Most data focus on stress reduction or cognitive outcomes, with physical flexibility inferred through reduced tension. Additionally, individual differences (e.g., baseline fitness or psychological resilience) may mediate these effects.

ChatGPT says:

How Stephen P. Turner might critique Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking

Book: Leor Zmigrod, The Ideological Brain (on sale Mar 25, 2025). See publisher page here, and coverage in the Financial Times, Vox, an excerpt in the Harvard Gazette, and a profile via Gates Cambridge.

The short version

  • Turner would applaud the book’s interdisciplinary reach (neuroscience, psychology, politics) but argue it overdraws on biology at the expense of sociology and institutional analysis (FT review).
  • He’d insist that ideology is forged in practices, institutions, and expert systems—not just inside individual brains (The Social Theory of Practices).
  • He’d caution against biological determinism: neural findings matter, but social structures entrench or loosen rigidity (USF bio).

Where Turner would agree—and where he’d push back

Zmigrod synthesizes evidence that “cognitive rigidity” correlates with ideological dogmatism and extremism, drawing on tasks like the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and research on dopaminergic systems (Vox; WCST; JOCN 2021; overview in FT). Turner wouldn’t dispute that these correlations are interesting. His critique is about framing:

  • From brains to practices: Turner’s work treats ideology as emerging from socially transmitted practices, institutional routines, and expert regimes of knowledge—not primarily from individual neurobiology (Turner 1994).
  • Institutional epistemics: He’d argue the book underplays how institutions define what counts as “knowledge,” shape incentives, and thereby stabilize or unsettle ideological commitments (USF bio).
  • Against determinism creep: Even where Zmigrod is careful to say nature and nurture interact, Turner would press that social organization can manufacture rigidity or flexibility irrespective of baseline neural differences (FT).

The role of the tacit (Turner’s centerpiece)

Turner’s mature view puts the tacit at the center: the unarticulated skills, norms, and background presuppositions that guide how people see and act. He develops this across Understanding the Tacit (2014) and later essays (e.g., “Naturalizing the Tacit,” 2017). Think Polanyi, but sociologized: ideology lives in what goes without saying (tacit knowledge), learned through participation in practices, not just explicit doctrines.

  • Socially acquired: Neural flexibility may shape how quickly we learn, but the frames are transmitted tacitly via institutions and communities (review of Understanding the Tacit).
  • “What goes without saying”: Deep commitments are often invisible to believers because they’re embedded in background routines, not in articulated propositions (Turner 2014).
  • Methodological upshot: You can’t MRI a person’s unspoken social assumptions; you study them historically and sociologically (Turner 1994).

Does the neuroscience still matter?

Yes—especially where it’s careful. Zmigrod’s empirical program linking flexibility/rigidity to ideological styles is serious work (e.g., reviews and studies in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020; Current Directions in Psychological Science 2021; and dopaminergic correlates in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2021). Turner’s point is proportionality: don’t let brain data crowd out the institutional and tacit scaffolding that actually generates ideological life.

Stephen Turner might say about this new book:

Great neuroscience—but brains don’t think in a vacuum. Ideology is born in social practices, expert institutions, and the tacit distribution of know-how. Biology matters—but only in dialogue with the social world.

Further reading

Rony Guldmann on The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking

Based on Guldmann’s framework in Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, his critique of Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain would likely focus less on the book’s neuroscience and more on the implicit cultural politics it enacts. He would view Zmigrod’s framing of “cognitive rigidity” as an implicit moral hierarchy that mirrors how liberal elites—what he calls the “progressive Clerisy”—use ostensibly neutral scientific concepts to naturalize their own cultural dominance.

1. The hidden politics of “flexibility”

In Guldmann’s account, liberalism often cloaks its moralistic impulses behind universalist ideals. A research program that correlates ideological rigidity with neurological traits risks recapitulating what he calls the “liberal hero-system”—a secularized moral hierarchy in which openness and flexibility are marks of higher civilization, while rigidity is pathologized as a relic of a pre-modern, less disciplined self. In this light, Zmigrod’s work could be read as supplying a new, neuroscientific vocabulary for an old liberal trope: the conservative as less evolved.

2. The asymmetry problem

Guldmann would be alert to how The Ideological Brain might treat conservative dispositions as deficits to be explained away, while treating liberal dispositions as the unmarked norm. He has argued that this asymmetry mirrors the way dominant groups in history have pathologized the consciousness of the “Other” while leaving their own worldview unexamined. In neuroscience form, this could look like studying the biology of “rigidity” without equally probing the biology of “hyper-flexibility” and its potential downsides.

3. Cultural oppression in scientific guise

From his perspective, even if Zmigrod’s data are robust, the interpretation may unwittingly enact what he terms cultural oppression: the imposition of a liberal form of selfhood—disciplined, cosmopolitan, self-reflective—on those who have not internalized it, and the stigmatization of resistance as cognitive pathology. The very framing of “flexible thinking” as an unquestioned good could, for Guldmann, exemplify the liberal “civilizing mission” in secular-scientific form.

4. The tacit liberal anthropology

Guldmann’s theory stresses that liberalism’s self-image as neutral and purely rational is historically contingent—a product of what he calls the secularization of religious asceticism and courtly sociability. He might say that The Ideological Brain relies on this unexamined anthropology, taking for granted that the ideal mind is detached, adaptive, and open to novelty, rather than recognizing this as one culturally specific way of being human.

5. A possible reframing

Rather than using neuroscience to sort citizens into more or less cognitively “fit” for democracy, Guldmann would push for a symmetrical study of ideological styles that treats liberal and conservative cognitive profiles as parallel adaptations to the modern social order. This would shift the emphasis from curing rigidity to understanding the social and historical conditions that make different cognitive styles adaptive for different groups.

In Guldmann’s idiom: The Ideological Brain may think it’s mapping a universal cognitive virtue, but it’s really drawing a prestige map of the liberal self. Without equal scrutiny of the liberal brain, it risks becoming a high-tech iteration of the very cultural domination it cannot see.

Does Leor Zmigrod’s new book equate liberalism with flexibility and adaptability? ChatGPT says:

No, she does not equate political liberalism with cognitive flexibility. Instead, she studies flexibility as a psychological trait—how people process information, tolerate ambiguity, and update beliefs. That trait can be present in individuals across all ideological positions.

  • Zmigrod is clear that it’s about “how you think,” not “what you believe” (Vox).
  • She asserts ideological rigidity can be found on both ends of the spectrum, not just on the conservative side (Social Science Bites).
  • The “liberal children” example reflects cognitive outcomes tied to rigid thinking, not a claim that liberal ideology equals adaptability (Interview excerpt).

Here are more excerpts from this new book:

* “All real living is meeting,” poeticized the philosopher Martin Buber in his 1937 book I and Thou . “Where there is no sharing there is no reality.”
The word “communicate” originates from the Latin verb “to share” — and when we speak, gesture, or listen, we engage in the act of sharing attention. We greet by shaking hands, bumping fists or elbows, bowing heads in synchrony, feeling our faces come together nose – to – nose or cheek – to – cheek. To trusted friends, we open up, we make ourselves physically and emotionally vulnerable when we begin an exchange.
To mark how and with whom we should enter conversation, humans develop rituals. Social rituals establish trust by demanding that we come into communion. Oaths of allegiance, a scout’s salute, proudly sung anthems, the daily adornment of sacred symbols, totems, and piercings. To constitute effective signals of communicative trust, rituals must be transmissible and exclusive. We develop visual, musical, linguistic, and tactile signatures to signal This is me! This is us! And no one else! Like code words, rituals signify a shared and unique identity. If I move like you, I must be like you, and so maybe I should like you and invite you in. Rituals facilitate synchrony: they force us to move in unison, to coordinate our thoughts and feelings, to repeat the idiomatic mantras that become the basis for our shared reality. When we chant together, sing together, rhythmically march or dance or sway together, pray or om or exhale together, the lines between us become fuzzy. After participating in collective gatherings or social movements, many individuals report: “I felt bigger than myself.” Their eyes sparkle from the memory of how skins seemed to melt and bodily borders became more porous. Together with others, the individual feels bigger, mightier, better.
The sociologist Émile Durkheim endowed this emotional energy with the name “collective effervescence” in 1912 to capture the vivacious aura of communicating as a group. No one is immune to the enlarging and euphoric effect of raucously applauding for a musician’s encore — One more song! One more song! We become united in a shared mission, a joint purpose. Our movements are mirrored back to us, swelling and swallowing us up. Gaining confidence, we march more boldly, sing more loudly, dance more enthusiastically, as though infected by a new kind of joy or passion or peace. Our desires merge and multiply; the resulting wave is stronger than the sum of its parts.
Solidarity is contagious. Our social brain longs to feel part of a story, part of a group. When minds communicate, they transcend the confines of skulls and skins. No one is alone. Everybody can be understood. Everything is shared.

One of these examples is different from the other:

If a person has internalized a nationalistic doctrine in which there are essential differences between people residing on either side of a border, then a potential national threat appears to excuse the killing of innocent civilians. If averting an ecological collapse becomes the sole existential concern, then there is nothing too drastic, no sacrifice too excessive, to fight on behalf of the environment — innocent lives can be endangered if it directs people’s attention toward the havoc of climate catastrophe. The ideological premise explains why an action is necessary and excuses its unpalatable dimensions. If one follows the urgent logic, all actions that lead to victory are valid. An ideology begins to be practiced extremely when the premises justify even the most radical of means.

Nationalism is not primarily a doctrine. It is primarily something that is felt, not thought. Belief in an ecological catastrophe requires far more abstract thought than nationalism. It is much more top down, the brain commanding the body. My conception of nationalism is that it is a concentric extension of loyalty to family and tribe, which is not primarily ideological. We do not love our families and our people for primarily intellectual reasons but because they are like us. We are usually biologically bonded in addition to other ties. Studies show that the more closely related we are, the more likely we are to sacrifice for each other.

ChatGPT says:

Evolutionary biology calls this kin selection—the idea that organisms are more likely to help relatives because it increases the chances that shared genes get passed on. The closer the genetic relationship, the stronger the tendency. Classic research by W.D. Hamilton quantified it with Hamilton’s rule: altruism is favored when the cost to the helper is less than the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the coefficient of relatedness (how genetically similar they are).

This shows up in human behavior studies, too—people tend to invest more time, resources, and even risk their lives more often for close kin than for distant kin or strangers.

Sometimes our ideological choices will override our natural reactions, but I suspect that our innate reactions are usually stronger than our ideologies.

ChatGPT says:

Our evolved, automatic responses—especially those tied to survival, kinship, and threat detection—tend to kick in faster and with more intensity than abstract ideological commitments. Ideologies are learned, culturally mediated frameworks; our instinctive reactions come from older neural systems that operate largely outside conscious deliberation.

When the two conflict, people often rationalize afterward to make their gut reaction fit their ideology. In high-stakes or high-stress moments—danger, injury, kin in trouble—the brain’s fast, emotional systems (amygdala, hypothalamus) tend to dominate over slower, prefrontal “belief-based” reasoning. Ideology can override instincts in some situations, but that usually takes conscious effort and stable social reinforcement.

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Bill Buckley Likely Took As Much Ritalin As Anyone Ever Has

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Luke Ford

Grok says: William F. Buckley Jr., the influential conservative writer and commentator, used Ritalin (methylphenidate) as a tool to enhance his productivity [from 1958 on], not as a recreational drug. According to his son, Christopher Buckley, in the memoir Losing Mum and Pup, Buckley relied on Ritalin and sleeping pills as “work drugs” to maintain his efficiency, impatience, and control, particularly in his later years. These medications were an extension of his disciplined lifestyle, helping him manage a demanding schedule of writing, editing, speaking, and hosting Firing Line. Christopher noted that his father’s doctor kept him well-supplied with Ritalin, suggesting a consistent and possibly heavy use over time.

Buckley might have struggled with focus or productivity, which could align with traits associated with ADHD. His reliance on Ritalin as a “work drug” to maintain efficiency and manage an intense schedule of writing, editing, and public appearances hints at possible challenges with sustained attention or hyperactivity, common in ADHD. However, there’s no definitive evidence in the provided sources or broader records confirming a formal ADHD diagnosis. Buckley’s prolific output—columns, articles, and shorter works—contrasts with his difficulty settling down for longer, serious books, which could indicate issues with sustained focus or task persistence, potentially consistent with ADHD-like traits.

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Are lawyers our governing class?

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Luke Ford

ChatGPT says:

Russell Pearce’s 2001 essay traced how lawyers once occupied a unique, public-serving leadership role. That governing‑class ideal—rooted in civic virtue, republicanism, and professional duty—gradually dissolved under market pressures, fragmentation of professionalism, the rise of “hired‑gun” advocacy, and the erosion of law’s public mission.

Fast‑forward to today: Lawyers are far more like other upper‑middle‑class professionals. Economic constraints, AI disruption, political targeting, and growing class anxiety are stripping away what remained of their prestige and public‑spirited identity. Their role as moral and civic stewards feels largely symbolic—long gone from social reality.

I wonder if the left’s takeover of the professions has led to a decline in the prestige of the professions?

Grok says:

The idea that progressive or left-leaning ideologies have “captured” professions like law, leading to a loss of public trust or prestige, is a common argument in conservative and libertarian critiques. It often ties into broader narratives about the “long march through the institutions” (a phrase popularized by Rudi Dutschke, but repurposed by critics), cultural shifts post-1960s, or the rise of identity politics and “wokeness.”

For balance: These arguments are contested. Left-leaning scholars (e.g., in Pearce’s article or works like Deborah Rhode’s In the Interests of Justice) attribute prestige declines more to commercialization, ethical scandals, or market forces than ideology. Polls (e.g., Pew or Gallup) show trust in professions dipping across the board since the 1970s, often linked to broader societal cynicism post-Watergate/Vietnam.

Based on empirical studies and analyses of ideological trends in the legal profession (a key example from conservative critiques of progressive dominance in elite institutions), the most robust conservative contestations appear to center on the documented left-leaning imbalance in legal academia and, to a lesser extent, the broader bar. These arguments hold up best under scrutiny because they are supported by quantitative data from non-partisan sources, showing a significant liberal skew that exceeds the profession’s overall makeup or the general population.

Russell Pearce wrote in 2001:

* The self-image of American lawyers has undergone a major transformation. As recently as the early 1960s, Erwin Smigel’s renowned study of Wall Street lawyers declared them to be guardians of the law.’ While serving their clients’ interests, they maintained a higher commitment to the public good which permitted them to manage the relationship between law and power that was essential to the continued stability of, and rule of law in, a democratic society. Twenty years later, a number of distinguished scholars reconsidered the role of elite lawyers at a conference at Stanford Law School. They painted an entirely different picture. Far from being guardians of the law, most corporate lawyers were hired guns who provided their clients with little independent judgment or counsel. Concern for the public good was not important to their work.

* The legal elite’s original and uniquely American understanding of the lawyer’s role was that lawyers were America’s governing class. Leading lawyers, judges and scholars, including the first American legal ethicists, sought to explain how the common good, minority rights and the rule of law could coexist with majority rule by an electorate largely composed of self-interested voters. They decided that the answer was a governing class of lawyers. With their dedication to the common good and their placement in the center of commerce and governance, lawyers were ideally suited for political leadership.

* In American society as a whole, the sense of community obligation declined as the focus on individualism rose in the years following the 1960s. At the same time, the public became skeptical of the expertise of elites generally, and leading members of the public, including lawyers, doubted whether lawyers were capable of perceiving and pursuing the public good. Two trends within the legal profession also contributed to this transformation during the post-1960s period. First, the growth of a large, distinct public interest bar led to a transfer of responsibility for the public good from elite lawyers to public interest lawyers and to a redefinition of the “public good” that conflicted with the interests of big business clients. Second, the related development of the idea of a pro bono duty offered those elite lawyers who still clung to a semblance of the governing class idea an opportunity to satisfy their community obligations through their pro bono work. Unlike the Wall Street lawyers of the early 1960s, who viewed themselves as servants of the public in all areas of their work, the elite came to view themselves as hired guns-lawyers devoted to their clients who served the public only in their limited
and separate pro bono efforts.

Although the rhetoric of the governing class lives on in hortatory appeals to pro bono responsibility…it no longer rules the conscience of the legal elite. After more than 200 years, the elite lawyers’ allegiance to the idea that they are America’s governing class appears to have come to an end…

In the view of most historians, “the dominant ideological force behind the American Revolution” was republicanism.’ William Treanor has observed that “[a]t the center of republican thought lay a belief in a common good and a conception of society as an organic whole. The state’s proper role consisted in large part of fostering virtue, of making the individual unselfishly devote himself to the common good.” Acting collectively through their representatives, the people would pursue the common good and protect individual liberty. Republics compared favorably to monarchies like England, which “sacific[ed] . . .the public good to the private greed of small ruling groups.”

…Many of the framers of the Constitution sought the solution to this dilemma in a modified form of republicanism. While advocating a government of “limited powers subject to elaborate checks and balances … intended to limit majoritarian excesses,” they sought a virtuous political elite. Building on the elitist strand of republicanism, which had preferred the political leadership of landed gentry and professionals, they found in these two groups the capacity for disinterestedness “necessary to virtue and realization of the common good.” Gordon Wood explains this preference: The “disinterested gentry… were supported by proprietary wealth and not involved in the interest-mongering of the
market place,” and similarly, “lawyers and other professionals [were] somehow free of the marketplace, [were] less selfish and interested and therefore better equipped for political leadership and disinterested decision-making than merchants and businessmen.”

Federalist No. 35 went so far as to identify professionals as the most virtuous members of this emerging governing class. While even the landed gentry would seek to protect and promote its own financial interests, lawyers and other members of the “learned professions… truly form[ed] no distinct interest in society.” Such professionals “will feel a neutrality to the rivalships between the different branches of industry, be likely to prove an impartial arbiter between them, ready to promote either, so far as it shall appear to him conducive to the general interests of the society.”

Janan Ganesh wrote for the FT Aug. 16, 2024 about the perils of socializing too much with your peers. When you lose your job, you will lose your social life at the same time. Janan noted that Tim Walz was the first person on the Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who was not a lawyer.

Ganesh says all professions deform, and the deformations of law are crippling modern liberalism. What do you mean governor? The Democrats 2024 campaign focus on “constitutional proprieties. An exhausting primness about words and their use.”

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‘Campaign of Chaos: Trump, Biden, Harris, and the 2024 American Election’

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Luke Ford

I remember when Larry Sabato was not diminished by Trump Derangement Syndrome (99% of his public comments about Trump are negative). Now I read in his new book that Kamala Harris “ran as good a campaign as anyone could have in the mere 107 days left to her before November 5.”

If she ran such a great campaign, where is the clamor for her to return to politics?

She was an all-time awful vice-president and a terrible presidential candidate.

This book is a dud. I haven’t learned anything. It was released July 24 and it has yet to attract one review.

Grok says: “Sabato is a vocal Trump critic with a left-leaning perspective.”

Sabato pins to the top of his X account this tweet from 2017: “A favorite JFK quote: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.'”

I guess he’s a democracy dies in darkness kind of guy.

It’s a bit weird for an academic who loves to proclaim his objectivity pump out hysterical claims about the need to take stirring public stands in times of moral crises.

David Shepard writes Feb. 15, 2024:

Larry Sabato is a good bellwether to the thinking of the left…. Larry is a sufferer of Trump derangement syndrome. It is very well advanced; I’d say stage 4, or as Biden might describe the progression as being in the 4th trimester. Most of his tweets take aim at Trump. Sure, Larry hates all Republicans, but he saves most of his irrational vitriol for the big bad orange man.

What bad thing did Trump do now? Well, apparently the left is mad that former President Trump (now a private citizen) failed to use his dictatorial power to force House Republicans to pass the Democrat senate border security bill.

According to Professor Larry Sabato:

“Trump ordered Congress Rs to kill the border bill. They did as they were told. They are sheep… So who gets the blame?”

It’s quite breathtaking. There is nothing true or accurate in this tweet. It is full of false assumptions, and it is designed to spread a false narrative.

Larry is trying to promote several falsehoods in one fell swoop, everything from Trump is a dictator, even as a private citizen, Republicans are sheep that will just go along, to Biden had a plan to fix the border. The most bizarre assumption in his tweet is that Republicans really supported the Senate bill but opposed it because Trump told them to.

He concludes that since Republicans killed it, they deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the continuation of an open border. It was a poll showing the public mostly blamed Biden for the bill’s failure that prompted the tweet.

No doubt Larry wants people to believe that Biden is trying to solve the crisis at the border, and of course had no hand in creating the crisis. And now in his 4th year in office (and in an election year) he and Senate Democrats come up with the solution and Donald Trump, orders House Republicans to oppose the bill. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The unpatriotic nerve!

The tweet also implies that Trump has some sort of duty to support the Senate Democrats bill. Or at least a duty to keep quiet and not stop it. I have no idea why Sabato and the left thinks Trump had a duty to lobby Republicans to pass the bill. Or that Trump committed an unpatriotic act by speaking out against it. Was it a good bill or a bad bill? I have noticed that the left never says, they simply point out that it was “Bipartisan.” I take that to mean it wasn’t a good bill but that it could give Biden some political cover.

Ah, if only Trump would use his dictatorial powers for good.

Posted in America | Comments Off on ‘Campaign of Chaos: Trump, Biden, Harris, and the 2024 American Election’

‘The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times’ (2005)

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Luke Ford

Jeffrey Hart wrote this delicious book (my 2005 interview with Professor Hart):

* EVERYWHERE WILLMOORE KENDALL went he carried turbulence with him. Unusual behavior. Outrages. The geometrical opposite of the decorous, diplomatic, and elegant James Burnham.

At National Review there remains to this day a leather couch known as “The Willmoore Kendall Memorial Couch.” One evening, after hours, an editor returned to the premises and surprised Kendall on this piece of furniture in flagrante with an employee. Bill Buckley, hearing of this, wondered why he could not have found a hotel room. The business-hours occupant of that office was appalled that he had used her couch for this purpose.

A former Books editor at National Review remembers the following about a drive through New Jersey with Willmoore at the wheel: “We were stopped for speeding, requested to ‘follow me’ to a headquarters building where a State Police sergeant or captain was sitting behind an ordinary desk. This officer requested Professor Kendall to show him his driver’s license. Kendall said he didn’t have one, and then added, rather gratuitously I thought, ‘I don’t believe in them.’ A look of blank disbelief crossed the officer’s face. He started to speak, paused, peered intently at Kendall, and finally in a quiet voice asked, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m an associate professor in the Political Science Department at Yale University,’ Kendall replied. The officer looked at Kendall again, started to nod his head up and down, and said, ‘Oh, I see.’ What he saw I don’t know, but I’m here to attest that he allowed Professor Kendall to continue on his way, unticketed and unlectured, simply demanding, after asking for and being shown my driver’s license, that I drive the car at least until we had passed beyond his jurisdiction.” Weird. Willmoore.

Though Kendall had been granted tenure by Yale on the basis of his publication and professional reputation as a political philosopher, he was eventually given to understand that he would not receive the normal next promotion to full professor. Beyond Yale, his professional reputation remained formidable, and, thinking about teaching elsewhere, he accepted a position as visiting associate professor at Stanford for the academic year 1958–59, with every expectation that it would lead to a permanent post as full tenured professor. But three weeks into his first term he was arrested for driving drunk and against the traffic flow on a California freeway. The state police jailed him for the night. This got into the Stanford student newspaper, and that was the end of his Stanford opportunity. He wrote to Leo Strauss explaining that he had been drinking a bit of bourbon for a cold and some snoop had smelled it on his breath.

His Yale career ended in a unique, that is Kendallian, way. Somehow he prevailed upon Bill Buckley, as a friend, to find out why Yale was refusing to promote him to full professor. Buckley profoundly disliked the whole idea of becoming involved in this.3 Universities usually insist upon holding such decisions closely, for many good reasons, including the professional reputation of the candidate. Buckley did make an appointment to see President Charles Seymour, who was direct and said the reason was lack of publication while at Yale.4 That is a perfectly valid reason. Yale had every right to demand more than Kendall had produced. He had published essays and reviews. But his last book had been John Locke and Majority Rule (1941), which earned him his reputation, his Yale post, and Stanford’s interest. That book was almost twenty years old. Two more important works came along, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition and his edition of Rousseau’s The Government of Poland; but those were published posthumously, years later, in 1972. Yale might have been justified in promoting him on the basis of his teaching, but that would have been rare for a research university and would have required institutional goodwill, which was absent.Since he was inspired by important ideas, what was the explanation for his lack of publication? In addition to his disorderly private life, the evidence suggests a profligate scattering of energy on nonprofessional matters. He wrote letters of gargantuan length, enough prose and enough articulation of ideas for several books, a singular phenomenon. Perhaps a Selected Letters may yet be published. In addition, with a construction project in hand on his New Haven property, he wasted time driving hundreds of miles for cheaper bricks, nonsensically in that the sum saved was trivial.

Then, naturally, his Yale career ended in an extraordinary manner. Kendallian. While he was in Madrid on one of his therapeutic leaves from Yale, so the Kendall oral tradition goes, he phoned President Seymour and, probably drunk, said something like, “You sonofabitch. I know you hate my guts. I’ll tell you what. You can buy back my tenure.” The deal was struck, a check arrived immediately for $42,500. That was a lot of money in 1961, about five times his annual salary.

After his departure from Yale, he remained a senior editor at National Review, contributing valuably, as we will see, until 1963. I spent some time with him later in Europe. This proved in its entirety a bittersweet experience, also an education in political theory. It was a week memorable, strange, and leading to a bad ending. But what else could have been expected?

* His [President Eisenhower] mask was that of the simple farmer boy turned soldier … rather than of a politician whose operations were deliberately shielded from his contemporaries other than his immediate associates.… As a thinker, the public saw a folksy, common-sense replica of the man in the street. The confidential records show a man with extraordinary capacities for detached, orderly examination of problems and personalities. In public he seemed to be removed from the arena. But the inner Eisenhower reasoned about political contingencies with greater rigor and readiness than many political professionals.

* The most successful presidents are coalition builders, and during the twentieth century, these included Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan. Roosevelt was center-left, as his times required, Eisenhower and Reagan center-right, in response to different exigencies. Both Eisenhower and Reagan were prudent, resolute, trustworthy. They both inspired broadly based confidence, and won reelection by landslides. Both used force reluctantly; and when they did so they did so overwhelmingly and unanswerably. In the second half of the twentieth century, Eisenhower and Reagan have gained recognition by historians as the great presidents of the era.

National Review saw Eisenhower as drifting without principle, refusing to define himself in terms of ideas against the ideas of international communism. His refusal to engage in principled argument with Marshal Zhukov, for example, became a scandal from that point of view. But if we can make an abstraction of Eisenhower’s animating “idea,” it would be Americanism. Eisenhower did not think he had to talk about it: because he was it.

* National Review…saw that philosophically, communism and liberalism were both products of the Enlightenment. Both emphasized equality, Communists through force, liberals as a political goal. Though communism could be called “hard” socialism, liberals, or many of them, were simply “soft” socialists.

* If the availability of potential agents among noncommunist progressives had made recruitment easy, it also guaranteed that innocent progressives, who had enough contacts within the deeper shades of red circles, were vulnerable to false charges of “guilt by association.”

* Perhaps James Burnham was in an excessively pessimistic mood when he remarked to me once that the black problem “probably will ruin the country.”

* This view—that the Supreme Court had assumed powers properly and explicitly assigned to the state legislatures—has recently received powerful support within the legal profession, and explicitly on the grounds National Review had advanced. For example, Paul D. Carrington in Stewards of Democracy: Law as a Public Profession (1999) argues that national judicial action during the 1950s should have addressed blacks’ voting rights, since voting is the bedrock of democracy—and that school desegregation in time would have reflected electoral realities. Carrington believes the command that desegregation proceed “‘with all deliberate speed’ has been appraised and found a disaster.”1 Carrington, by no means opposed to desegregation as such, holds that it should have been the result of a political and not a judicial process.

* It is perhaps too harsh to declare extended school desegregation [and similar issues] … were all failed heroics. There were benign consequences. But a significant price was paid in thrusting the Court and the Constitution into the political cockpits where they do not belong, jeopardizing the independence of the Court and the integrity of the Constitution. And in different ways and to different degrees, all of these heroic initiatives at social reform backfired in precisely the ways that Cooley, Brandeis, Freund, and Hand foretold.

* Carrington concludes that the Court too often has derived its decisions arbitrarily, on the basis of shaky interpretations, and without regard to the citizens’ “right to self-government.” He considers that the law schools have fostered a culture that encourages its students to regard themselves as philosopher-kings, and that they are further encouraged by the publicity given to “impact decisions.” In a review of Carrington’s book in the Journal of Law and Politics, Jeffrey O’Connell, Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, notices with a touch of amazement that “Carrington is politically incorrect enough to argue boldly and at length that Roe vs. Wade was a decision that should not have been made in court.” He notes that “[s]ome of the Court’s resisters practiced defiance, while others took to the streets and became violent. Those violent reactions have no counterpart in the politics of other nations, even predominantly Catholic ones in which abortion rights have been established by parliamentary means.”

* Again and again, National Review articulated this perspective on the Court’s “heroic advances,” as in this editorial, worthy of partial but extended quotation:

“In June 1954 relations between Whites and Negroes in the United States, and racial relations generally, were in a more amicable and promising condition than ever before in the nation’s history.

Then a Supreme Court obsessed with an egalitarian ideology rendered its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. What has happened, what is happening, was predicted. Every observer, whatever his views, concurs in the finding that Negro-White relations in the South, and in many northern cities also, have catastrophically worsened. (Even the rate of integration in the schools is actually slower than during the five years prior to 1954.) From this poisonous cauldron the fumes of anti-Semitism, too, begin to spread, both because the racist impulse tends to be non-selective, and because organized Jewish groups have noisily egged on the Court, and called for immediate implementation of its decisions. Now comes the shutting down of Southern schools, the dynamiting of homes, schools, and Jewish temples. And it will be worse. A viciousness has been released that is not easily brought back to kennel. The Court, in Brown and the successor decisions, was “obsessed”: the word is carefully chosen. Obsessed in that it acted from abstract imperatives of a monolithic dogma, without reference to the real situation of real men in the real world. It is easy enough for Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter, at the turn of an ideological spigot, to lecture their 175 million countrymen about instant and total obedience to “the law of the land,” but platitudes from the bench—that so plainly exempts itself from the restraints of judicial precedent and tradition—will not, overnight, transmute the ingrained sentiments and convictions of self-reliant communities. Tragically, the resistance by self-reliant and decent men to what they deem the usurpations of the Court and the despotism of the central government tends to promote a general atmosphere of civil disobedience, and disrespect not only for the Warren Court but for the law; in which the dregs of society break through to the surface.”

* Brown plus “all deliberate speed” destroyed the once excellent public school systems, especially in the metropolises of the North, whites and their tax money fleeing to the suburbs beyond the reach of “busing.” Brown was tacitly shelved as unenforceable, but not before the destruction of the public schools. Brown had made a desert and called it peace.

* [Gary] Wills, who was not and is not simple-minded, lets [James] Baldwin get away with anything, even with calling Jesus a “sunbaked, disreputable Hebrew…” Wills lets Baldwin get away with junk thought, Baldwin even demanding “immediate secession from our civilization,” the “transcendence of color, and of nations and of altars”—that is, for a rejection of the profoundly actual. Jump, white man, jump. Wills knows that we should respond to this kind of disgraceful performance by a black man by getting angry with him—that is, we should treat him as an equal. Yet Wills voluntarily accepts nonsense.

What are we to make of Wills’s performance? Literary criticism throws up its hands. Apparently, he had been utterly disoriented by the black revolution.

* But for now, the Eastern Establishment had demonstrated suicidal incapacity, helpless before the Black Revolution that was erupting in riots, property destruction, arson, and murder in urban centers across the nation. In due course, New Yorkers would exchange Yale’s John Lindsay for such very different leaders as Rudy Giuliani. Nor could the Eastern Establishment, in its Perfumed Stockades, deal with or even understand the fury and agony of the blue-collar neighborhoods, for years tribal Democrats, over the court-ordered integration of their schools in the form of “busing.” On top of that, the older elite could not do what was needed to protect its own institutions, the universities for example, against the youth upheavals. It appeased. It even sympathized. Collectively, the elite had lost the courage to govern, and the odor of its weakness could be sniffed on the air.

* [We] ran into Michael Oakeshott and a beautiful young woman near the exit. Oblivious of us, [Michael] Oakeshott was saying to her, “Just call me Mickey.” This chef needed no cookbook.

* From a long-range historical point of view, the great domestic issue in American politics had become the role of the judiciary, and most importantly of the Supreme Court, in the balance of powers within the federal government. To an ever greater degree, to put it one way, the Supreme Court had been performing as a legislative body, “interpreting” the Constitution in order to, in effect, pass new laws. In the polemical phrase, the Supreme Court had become an out-of-control legislative branch, not simply “supreme” over other courts, but supreme over the other branches of government. This, despite the fact that the first three words of the Constitution are “We the People,” implying the relative supremacy of the popularly elected branches of government, and despite the fact that Congress constitutionally has weapons superior to those of the Court. Reagan’s new justices appeared to be slowly shifting the balance against the Court’s assumption of legislative powers, and so were threatening the liberal agenda.

* Time and again he has made his view clear. “Courts must accept any value choice the legislature makes, unless it clearly runs contrary to a choice made in the framing of the Constitution.” In ruling against a claim of homosexual rights in 1984, [Robert Bork] wrote: “If the revolution in sexual mores … is in fact ever to arrive, we think it must arrive through the moral choices of the people and their elected representatives, not through the ukase of this court.” He speaks of his philosophy of “deference to democratic choice” and attacks “judicial imperialism.”

* Since the French Revolution, European conservatives had distrusted the people, whom they visualized as the Paris mob. This distrust and fear was amply reinforced by the populist nature of national socialism in Germany and fascism in Italy, the “revolt of the masses.” American experience trusted the delaying mechanism of the Constitution to ensure that the “sense” of the people was “deliberate.” The Court was supposed to be part of the delaying mechanism, not a vanguard quasi-revolutionary body. At bottom, what rose to the surface in the Bork fight was the fact that modern liberalism simply does not trust the “deliberate sense” of “We the People.”

Posted in National Review | Comments Off on ‘The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times’ (2005)