Decoding Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard Law professor who converted to Catholicism and became one of the most provocative legal theorists in American academia. He advances what he calls Common Good Constitutionalism, a framework that rejects the liberal premise that the state should remain neutral among competing visions of the good life. In his account, law is not and never has been neutral procedure. It always imposes values. The question is which values, and whether those in power have the honesty to say so. He argues for stronger executive authority, legitimate hierarchy, and a state willing to direct society toward substantive moral ends rooted in the classical legal tradition. That position, coming from a tenured professor at the center of American legal education, has generated a response from the dominant academic coalition ranging from serious intellectual engagement to accusations of fascism.
Read through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, both Vermeule and his critics become legible in ways that pure intellectual debate obscures.
Vermeule began his career inside mainstream liberal legal academia. His early work on administrative law and constitutional theory was technically accomplished and coalitionally unremarkable. His conversion to Catholicism and subsequent pivot toward post-liberal thought represent a coalitional relocation rather than just an intellectual one. He moved from the mainstream liberal legal coalition toward a network of Catholic integralist and post-liberal thinkers, while retaining his position at Harvard. That combination is what makes him high-impact. An outside critic making similar arguments would be easy to ignore. An inside node advancing them forces engagement and signals that these ideas are not safely fringe.
His closest intellectual peer is Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, whose Why Liberalism Failed argues that liberalism fails not despite its internal logic but because of it, dissolving community, eroding tradition, and producing the isolation and inequality it claims to remedy. Deneen provides the diagnosis. Vermeule provides the program. Where Deneen points toward localism and cultural renewal, Vermeule reaches for state power. Where Deneen theorizes, Vermeule operationalizes, translating critique into legal doctrine, administrative theory, and arguments about how courts and agencies should actually act. That division of labor reflects the different institutional positions of Notre Dame and Harvard in the elite ecosystem.
Notre Dame sits at the elite periphery rather than the center. Its explicitly Catholic intellectual tradition gives it some insulation from mainstream liberal academic pressure, which means post-liberal ideas can be developed and refined there without immediate expulsion. The institution provides what Alliance Theory might call a semi-protected niche, a space where alternative frameworks can achieve coherence and teachability before facing the full force of coalition enforcement. Harvard has no equivalent insulation. It sits at the center of elite networks, feeding into government, courts, and media. Ideas there must translate into something that can operate within existing power structures, or they face containment. Vermeule’s choice to stay at Harvard rather than retreat to a friendlier institution is tactical. His presence forces the dominant coalition to engage rather than ignore, and it signals to observers that these arguments can survive inside the core.
The broader network includes Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, Sohrab Ahmari, and Rod Dreher, figures who vary in how explicitly state-focused their post-liberalism runs but who share the conviction that liberal neutrality is a myth and that institutions need substantive moral direction. Together they form what Alliance Theory identifies as a counter-elite coalition: people with elite credentials and access to mainstream platforms who are not trying to reject institutions but to capture and redirect them. Critics tend to collapse distinctions among them because coalition-level threat perception does not require fine-grained analysis of internal differences.
The movement from critique to institutional threat follows a repeatable sequence. Ideas gestate in peripheral niches, where language and concepts develop in relative safety. They gain coherence through books, recurring terminology, and portable arguments. Networks form around conferences and journals. Then bridge figures emerge, insiders with elite credentials who translate the critique into system-relevant language. That translation is the moment of maximum sensitivity for the dominant coalition, because it converts abstract dissent into actionable proposals about how courts and agencies should actually behave. Before that translation, ideas are interesting and containable. After it, they become potentially influential and much harder to dismiss. Vermeule sits at that translation point, and his 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism continues to generate symposia and serious responses, including Jan-Werner Müller’s 2025 analysis questioning whether the framework veers toward rule-by-law authoritarianism.
His critics respond at the level of coalition threat rather than intellectual argument. Andrew Gelman, a Columbia statistician not known for culture war engagement, calls him a fascist-supporting academic and draws parallels to fellow travelers of authoritarian movements in the 1930s. The label is not a precise analytic category. It is a coordination signal that raises the stakes to regime-level threat, bypasses normal norms of collegial engagement, and forces side-taking across the academic network. The specific objection is structural: rejection of state neutrality, acceptance of hierarchy, and openness to strong executive power maps, in the perception of the dominant coalition, onto the historical sequence by which liberal institutions gave way to authoritarian ones. The direction of travel feels dangerous regardless of where Vermeule himself would draw the line.
In March 2025, over ninety Harvard Law colleagues issued a statement on rule-of-law concerns amid rising political tensions. Vermeule responded with an open letter to students affirming his commitment to teach law without fear or favor, while critiquing what he characterized as selective outrage among signatories. In July 2025 he published a piece in the New York Times on lower-court defiance of Supreme Court directives, framing the threat to judicial integrity as coming from within the judiciary rather than from outside it. Those moves illustrate his tactical flexibility. He positions himself not as an enemy of legal order but as a critic of the liberal coalition’s monopoly on defining what legal order requires. That positioning keeps him visible and polarizing simultaneously, which is precisely where a bridge figure needs to be.
The question of how he maintains credibility despite his 2020 election fraud tweets is worth addressing directly, because on the surface those statements should be costly inside elite academia. The answer is that elite credibility is domain-specific rather than global. Vermeule’s status anchors are his administrative law scholarship, his constitutional theory, and his institutional position at Harvard. His election commentary sits in a different domain, public-facing political rhetoric, and elite systems routinely compartmentalize. As long as his legal scholarship remains serious and his institutional role intact, his core credibility survives the tweets. He was already positioned as heterodox and contrarian before 2020, which means the tweets did not create a new category of concern. They reinforced an existing one. In Alliance Theory terms, once someone is established as outside the dominant coalition’s comfort zone, additional deviation carries diminishing marginal reputational cost. Critics use the tweets as evidence of danger. Supporters discount them as overstatement or noise. Institutions treat him as controversial but legitimate. That split perception prevents unified reputational collapse. The tweets narrow and polarize his credibility without destroying it, which is a meaningful difference. The deeper pattern is that dislodging an established figure from a high-status institution requires more than controversial public claims, unless those claims directly violate the core norms the institution feels compelled to enforce. Harvard has not reached that threshold with Vermeule, and the reasons it has not are themselves a data point about how coalition protection works.
What gives him traction beyond the quality of his arguments is that he exploits real cracks inside the dominant coalition rather than manufacturing grievances. The claim that law is neutral procedure has weakened across the political spectrum. Courts make visibly value-laden decisions. Constitutional interpretation shifts with politics. Administrative agencies shape outcomes through discretion rather than rule. Once neutrality looks like a myth, his core move becomes harder to dismiss. He also presses the fault line between the coalition’s equality commitments and its procedural ones. When those two pillars conflict, as they do in affirmative action debates, speech restriction controversies, and administrative discretion battles, Vermeule demands that people choose. That demand resonates because the inconsistency is real and felt. He also benefits from a structural symmetry with progressive legal thought that makes his position harder to expel as alien. Progressive legal theory has already moved toward outcome-oriented reasoning and questioned the myth of the value-free judge. Vermeule mirrors that methodological structure while inverting the values. The dominant coalition has accepted the method in one direction. Rejecting it categorically in his direction requires a consistency it does not always have.
The deeper question his emergence raises is whether liberal systems can repair their internal contradictions without losing legitimacy. The dominant coalition might patch and stabilize, absorbing enough criticism to reduce pressure without fundamental change. It might drift further toward equality-first governance, accepting more interventionist and moralized policy at the cost of legitimacy among those who value procedural neutrality. It might correct toward procedure-first governance, strengthening free speech and rule-based constraints while fracturing internally over equality commitments. If none of those reconciliations holds, the system fragments into parallel institutions with incompatible norms of legitimacy, already visible in diverging media ecosystems, academic subfields, and policy frameworks.
Vermeule’s minority position grows more visible as the dominant coalition struggles to sustain the appearance of procedural neutrality. Ideas do not become threatening when articulated clearly. They become threatening when they find a pathway into power. His continued presence at Harvard, his engagement with live legal debates, and his connection to a networked counter-elite that stretches from Notre Dame into conservative political circles means that pathway exists and remains under active construction. Whether the dominant coalition contains him through reputational enforcement or whether his framework achieves wider institutional uptake depends less on the strength of the arguments than on how well liberal systems manage the contradictions he has spent his career exposing.
To what extent can Adrian Vermeule be compared to German sociologist Hans Freyer?
The comparison has real substance, and it also has real limits. Understanding both requires looking at what Freyer and Vermeule actually share and where they part ways.
Hans Freyer was a sociologist of the Weimar Conservative Revolution, a movement that rejected liberal democracy not from nostalgia for a feudal past but from a conviction that liberalism had failed to give modern mass society any coherent form or collective meaning. He belonged to what historians call radical conservatism, and while he was initially not opposed to National Socialism, he eventually became disillusioned and moved into passive opposition. Hungarian Conservative After the war, he developed a form of conservatism adaptable to the industrial age. The arc of his career, from radical to moderate, is central to understanding him. Jerry Z. Muller’s book The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism by Jerry Z. Muller examines exactly this trajectory, arguing that Freyer’s case illuminates how gifted intellectuals can move from radical anti-liberalism toward a chastened, post-catastrophe conservatism that still retains the old critique of liberal individualism but abandons the revolutionary ambition.
Freyer and Carl Schmitt, as Muller argued, used their intellectual and rhetorical gifts to help undermine support for liberal democracy in Germany, and indeed intended to do so. That is the key phrase: intended to do so. Freyer did not merely criticize liberalism in the abstract. He wanted to replace it with a strong, unified state in which the individual found meaning through total immersion in collective life.
Adrian Vermeule advocate integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought opposed to the division of church and state. Integralism gives the state an order in which the Common Good takes precedence over individual autonomy. His method, however, is not revolution from below. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is what he calls “strategic ralliement,” a transformation within institutions and bureaucracies that lays the groundwork for an integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order he assumes to be dying.
This is where the comparison with Freyer becomes most compelling. Both men look at liberalism and see not a stable system to be reformed but a decaying order that carries within it the seeds of its own collapse. Vermeule argues that liberalism follows a deterministic process of decline and presents it as being propelled by an internal mechanism of relentless aggression, a kind of moral avant-gardism that can never be satisfied or reversed. Freyer made structurally similar arguments about liberal Weimar society, seeing it as incapable of generating the collective will a modern industrial state requires. Both argue from a position of intellectual confidence that history is moving their way, and both see themselves as helping the transition rather than merely describing it.
Vermeule has described his strategy as finding a position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents, and to take over institutions the old order has prepared and turn them toward human dignity and the common good. This language of capture, of working within existing institutions to redirect them toward illiberal ends, echoes what Freyer described as a revolution from the right: not a mob storming the legislature but an elite reshaping the state from within.
The differences matter just as much. Freyer’s anti-liberalism drew on Volkish sociology, German nationalism, and a longing for organic community rooted in ethnicity and war experience. His 1931 booklet Revolution from the Right concluded that a true revolution could only come from the right, with the purpose of establishing a unified state in which the individual found meaning in a closed society directed by a common will with a single collective purpose. Vermeule draws on Aquinas, Catholic natural law, and the classical legal tradition. His framework is Thomist and explicitly religious rather than völkisch. He reaches for a universal theological grammar where Freyer reached for ethnic and historical particularity.
Vermeule has long argued for power concentrated in the executive with minimal interference from other branches, and his common good constitutionalism completes the picture by grounding that deference in natural law conceived as divine ordinance. Yu Freyer wanted a strong state too, but his came from below, from the revolutionary energy of the Volk, not from above, from divine law mediated through Catholic doctrine. This is not a small difference. It separates a kind of romantic nationalist vitalism from a scholastic theocratic project.
There is also the question of scale and consequence. Freyer worked in a broken republic with active paramilitaries in the streets, hyperinflation, and a genuine mass movement willing to overturn everything. Vermeule writes in a constitutional democracy with a strong judiciary, an entrenched legal culture, and a pluralistic society deeply resistant to his project. His institutional path to integralism might strike many observers as more aspiration than plan. His critics on the right have made exactly this point, noting that integralism as a political program has no real constituency and works mainly as a provocation and a thought experiment, however sincere its author.
What the comparison ultimately reveals is a recurring type: the credentialed, academically serious anti-liberal intellectual who argues that the liberal order is not just mistaken but structurally doomed, and who believes that the role of the intellectual is not to patch liberalism but to accelerate or channel its replacement. Freyer was that type in Weimar. Vermeule might be that type now. The key difference is that Freyer’s project found a catastrophic real-world vehicle. Vermeule’s has not, and may never.
Would not all these thinkers, liberal or anti-liberal, benefit from evolutionary psychology which helps you to understand that different politics suit different situations?
The answer is yes, but with important caveats depending on which thinker you apply it to.
Evolutionary psychology argues, at its core, that human beings carry competing psychological tendencies shaped by ancestral environments: tendencies toward cooperation and toward competition, toward in-group loyalty and toward openness to strangers, toward hierarchy and toward egalitarianism. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory, which draws heavily on evolutionary psychology, suggests that different political orientations reflect genuine moral intuitions that all have some adaptive basis. Conservatives, on this account, weight loyalty, authority, and sanctity heavily. Liberals weight care and fairness. Neither is simply wrong. Both reflect something real about what groups need under different conditions.
Applied to Freyer, evolutionary psychology offers a partial corrective. Freyer’s longing for organic community, collective meaning, and a unified state reflects something recognizable in the evolutionary literature: the human need for belonging, for a coherent in-group narrative, for shared purpose. Humans are tribal. That need is real. What evolutionary psychology would challenge in Freyer, however, is his assumption that this need can be fully satisfied by the state, and that satisfying it justifies totalitarian unity. The evidence from evolutionary biology suggests that human groups function best at moderate scales, that hierarchy and egalitarianism exist in tension, and that no single political arrangement suits all environments. Freyer’s revolutionary certainty sits badly with this.
Vermeule might find evolutionary psychology even more uncomfortable. His project rests on a Thomist natural law that holds certain political and moral arrangements to be objectively correct, derivable from divine reason. Evolutionary psychology cuts against this by naturalizing the very moral pluralism he wants to overcome. If different people genuinely weight different moral foundations because those foundations all solved real adaptive problems in ancestral environments, then the integralist project of subordinating a diverse society to a single confessional order looks less like the recovery of natural law and more like the imposition of one tribe’s moral grammar on others who carry equally natural but different grammars. Haidt’s framework, in particular, makes Vermeule’s universalism hard to sustain.
Liberal thinkers fare somewhat better but not without their own problems. Classical liberals tend to assume that rational self-interest and individual autonomy sit at the base of human nature. Evolutionary psychology complicates this sharply. Humans are not primarily rational maximizers. They are rationalizers, constructing post-hoc justifications for conclusions driven by emotion, social pressure, and tribal loyalty. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s book The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argues that reason did not evolve to help individuals find truth or make better decisions. It evolved to help us justify our actions to others and evaluate the justifications others offer. This means that the liberal faith in deliberative democracy, rational public discourse, and persuasion through argument rests on a flawed picture of what human cognition actually does.
Where evolutionary psychology most helps all of these thinkers is in its insistence on context-dependence. The same human being can express radically different political and social behaviors depending on environmental conditions: stress levels, resource scarcity, perceived threat, group size. Authoritarian tendencies strengthen under threat. Openness and cooperation expand under security and abundance. This suggests that Freyer’s desire for a strong unified state might speak to something real that conditions of crisis amplify, without that making it correct or desirable as a permanent arrangement. It also suggests that liberal individualism might flourish precisely in the conditions of relative safety and prosperity that make its assumptions seem natural, and that those assumptions are less universal than liberals typically believe.
The thinker who sits most comfortably with evolutionary psychology is probably Edmund Burke, who stands behind all of these figures as a kind of ancestor. Burke’s argument that inherited institutions encode accumulated social wisdom, that traditions survive because they solve real human problems, and that abstract rationalism tends to destroy working solutions in pursuit of perfect ones, maps onto evolutionary thinking quite well. Traditions as repositories of tested social technology is essentially an evolutionary argument. Neither Freyer nor Vermeule is really a Burkean, despite sometimes borrowing Burkean language. Freyer wanted revolution. Vermeule wants capture and transformation. Burke would have been suspicious of both.

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Decoding Israel’s New Historians

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

The emergence of Israel’s New Historians in the late 1980s looks, on the surface, like a straightforward case of archival discovery. Newly declassified Israeli state documents became available, a generation of younger scholars examined them, and the founding narrative of 1948 grew more complicated. That account is not wrong. It is just incomplete. Read through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory and the related concept of Niche Construction, the New Historians become something more revealing: a case study in how coalition security, legitimacy testing, and strategic realignment shape what counts as serious scholarship, and what gets a scholar expelled from one world and embraced by another.
Start with the environment that made them possible. Before the 1980s, the Zionist narrative of 1948 functioned as a high-cohesion coordination tool inside Israel. In conditions of perceived existential threat, internal dissent about the founding war registered as coalition betrayal. But by the late 1980s, several pressures had eased. The Cold War wound down. State archives declassified. A generation of scholars came of age without direct memory of 1948. The Oslo process generated genuine optimism about a negotiated peace. Under those conditions, the Israeli coalition felt secure enough to tolerate, and in some academic circles even reward, internal moral audit. Challenging the founding myth became a signal of intellectual sophistication and alignment with Western academic norms. That window did not last, but while it was open, it allowed the New Historians to emerge.
The three most significant figures were Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim. They shared an empirical starting point: the archives showed that the 1948 war was more complicated than the official narrative acknowledged, that expulsions of Palestinians occurred, that the fighting was not simply a defensive response to Arab aggression, and that Israeli leadership made choices that shaped the refugee crisis. On the facts, their disagreements were narrower than the subsequent polemics suggested. The real divergence was coalitional, not empirical. Each made a different decision about where to stand relative to the Israeli state’s legitimacy, and those decisions determined their subsequent trajectories entirely.
Morris stayed inside the legitimacy boundary. In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, first published in 1987 and substantially revised in 2004, he documented expulsions unflinchingly and dismantled the sanitized founding story. But his political conclusion was that what happened in 1948 reflected the tragic logic of state survival under genuine threat. That conclusion kept him inside the Zionist coalition’s core claim. When the Second Intifada collapsed Oslo optimism and the coalition shifted back toward a threatened posture, Morris moved with it, becoming more hawkish and more willing to defend Israeli security measures in stark terms. His recent statements reflect persistent pessimism: no two-state solution viable in the near term, Hamas unwilling to disarm or abandon its founding ideology, Gaza likely requiring external administration rather than immediate Palestinian sovereignty. His revisionism was reabsorbed domestically because it never challenged the state’s right to exist. It only complicated the story of how existence was achieved.
Pappé crossed the boundary. Starting from similar archives, he shifted from empirical complication to moral reclassification, adopting the language of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism and eventually supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. In Alliance Theory terms, that is not a more extreme version of what Morris did. It is a categorically different move. It shifts the question from how the state came to be to whether the state has the right to be. Once that shift happens, the Israeli coalition cannot reintegrate the critic. The ideas no longer challenge the founding story. They challenge the founding itself. Pappé left Israel, eventually settling at Exeter, and found that the niche he lost at home had a robust counterpart abroad. His recent work, including 2025 lectures framing Gaza as the epicenter of international order breakdown, continues to amplify that global audience.
Why Western academia received him so well is the more interesting structural question, and it is where Niche Construction Theory adds the most. Western universities operate under coordination rules that made Pappé’s framework highly portable. The oppressor-oppressed template generates status. Insider dissent carries more weight than outside criticism, because a Jewish Israeli scholar calling 1948 ethnic cleansing provides a signal that external critics cannot replicate. And by framing the Israeli case through settler colonialism, Pappé made it legible to scholars working on Algeria, South Africa, Australia, and the Americas. His narrative plugged directly into a pre-existing global network of postcolonial critique, instantly expanding his audience and his institutional reach. The niche he lost in Tel Aviv was, in structural terms, smaller than the one he gained in Exeter.
Shlaim occupied a middle position, sharply critical of Israeli policies, especially the post-1967 occupation and the management of Gaza, yet framing them more as deviations from or continuations of colonial logic than as outright delegitimization of the state’s existence. His trajectory has been less binary than either Morris or Pappé, sustaining academic prestige at Oxford while drifting increasingly toward anti-Zionist critique. His recent Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas, and the Long War on Palestine (2025) extends that drift without completing the full crossing Pappé made decades earlier. He retains something of a bridge role, though the bridge has shortened considerably from one end.
Edward Shils spent much of his career trying to explain why Western intellectuals tend toward what he called antinomianism, a disposition against the established order, against constraint, against the claims of institutions and states. His account pointed to something structural in the intellectual role itself: status accrues through critique, through the demonstration that received ideas are inadequate, through moral distance from power. That disposition does not produce uniform politics, but it does produce a systematic receptivity to frameworks that challenge state legitimacy, especially when the state in question is closely tied to Western institutions and therefore symbolically available as a target. Israel, as a liberal democracy with deep ties to American and European intellectual networks, sits in precisely that position. It is accessible, symbolically powerful, and applicable to broader theoretical arguments. That makes it a high-yield case for academic narratives in ways that most states are not.
The backlash that came after Oslo’s collapse followed the predictable logic of coalition tightening under threat. What had read as intellectual honesty in the mid-1990s read as undermining national legitimacy during a shooting war after 2000. The tolerance that the secure coalition had extended contracted sharply. Morris and Pappé had started from similar archival findings, but they had built their careers on different coalitional bets, and the environment shift revealed the difference starkly. Morris’s bet paid off domestically. Pappé’s paid off abroad.
The fight that followed, and that continues, is rarely about the facts. Most serious historians on all sides agree that expulsions occurred, that the war’s causes were complex, and that Palestinian suffering was real. The disagreement is about what those facts mean for the state’s legitimacy. Morris argues they mean something tragic but not delegitimizing. Pappé argues they mean something that calls the state’s moral foundation into question. That is not a technical dispute resolvable by more archival research. It is a coalitional dispute about the moral status of the state itself, which is why it generates the rhetoric it does and why neither side’s arguments tend to move the other.
Anyone who tries to hold both claims at once faces a structurally difficult position. The bridging strategy that would work in this terrain requires building credibility across multiple coalitions rather than relying on a single one, leading with empirical precision rather than moral positioning, separating description from endorsement explicitly enough that readers cannot collapse the two, and maintaining symmetry in moral attention without pretending that all positions are equally well-supported. It means using calibrated language instead of trigger labels that end conversations before they begin, acknowledging tradeoffs and costs rather than hiding them, and accepting that the audience for serious bridging work is neither the committed activists nor the rigid ideologues but the movable middle that feels the tension without having language for it.
That is a narrow path and not a comfortable one. It offers fewer status rewards than pure critique and weaker coalition protection than full alignment. It tends to attract attack from both sides and full embrace from neither. The scholars who survive in that position usually combine strong technical or empirical credibility with financial and institutional independence sufficient to absorb a controversy without career collapse, and the emotional discipline not to get pulled into the fight when they are misread or instrumentalized. Those conditions are uncommon. That is why bridging work is rare and why most historiographical debates in high-stakes cases like this one tend to produce heat rather than light, not because the scholars are dishonest, but because the incentive structure of the coalitions they inhabit rewards clarity of alignment over clarity of thought.

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Why Is Columbia University Statistics Professor Andrew Gelman Calling Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule A Fascist?

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

On March 17, 2026, Columbia University Statistics professor Andrew Gelman blogs:

Paul Campos expresses irritation at Adrian Vermeule, the fascist-supporting Harvard professor. I feel that irritation; indeed, I share it (see also here).

But I also want to draw an analogy, to the communist academics of the mid-twentieth century. Last year I wrote a post, Props to the liberal anticommunists of the 1930s-1950s, arguing that those people don’t get the credit they deserve for putting in the political effort to marginalize the communists who were trying to infiltrate American organizations. This all became clearer to me in retrospect, seeing the successful far-right takeover of the Republican party in recent years.

Anyway, back to the academics. It may seem wrong for prominent academics to hold fascist positions–but we’re used to prominent academics holding communist positions in the past. The main difference is that, nowadays, supporting fascism can be a path to power and influence, whereas back in the middle of the twentieth century, supporting communism in this country might give you connections through backroom channels but it wouldn’t be something you’d want to do in public.

Andrew adds in the comments section:

I don’t remember the details because I wrote this post awhile ago. In his post, Campos links to a post by Vermeule that seems to have been taken down. I’ve never met or corresponded with Vermeule; from what I’ve read, my take is that his political views are comparable to academic communists of the mid-twentieth century, in the sense that he takes some very extreme positions, perhaps secure in the feeling that it’s all talk and it won’t really happen. Just like the American Maoists who kinda liked the idea of the Cultural Revolution but didn’t think that they would themselves be sent to work on the farms or whatever.
You use the term “alternate reality,” and I agree there’s some of that (for example in Vermeule’s election denial), but I think it’s more that law students and law professors are often pushed to take extreme, boundary-pushing positions (for example, “Should Trees Have Standing?”) as that gets them attention. I’m bothered when law professors are promoting election denial and disturbing when they are promoting fascist ideas–I’m also bothered by the promotion of communism by some influential Americans in the twentieth century–and I think part of this is alternate reality, but to me it seems more like political extremism leading to a willed ignorance. Just as those communists didn’t want to hear about the bad things going on in the Soviet Union, Vermeule may be working very hard to maintain a state of ignorance so that he can promote election denial and dubious constitutional theories. I don’t think this has anything to do with “DNC-propaganda” except for the extent that Vermeule might want to use the DNC as some sort of boogeyman that would justify his extremism as a response to that.

Turn of the 90s responds: “I don’t know much Vermeule and, based on my read of Campos’ post, it doesn’t sound like I’d agree with and maybe even respect most of his views. But when you call someone out for being a fascist – or anything really – and then when being asked for evidence to back up that claim, you can’t just reply “I’m not sure.” You must have had reasons for writing what you did. Your response will only give fuel to those who want to raise up someone like Vermuele by showing how the other side can’t even argue against them.”
Andrew Gelman is not a culture warrior. That matters. When a statistician at Columbia who built his reputation on methodological precision and relentless skepticism of overclaiming starts invoking Nazis and calling a Harvard law professor a fascist, something structural has shifted. He has not lost his mind. He has changed roles. Read through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, which treats moral and political beliefs as emergent properties of coalition logic rather than fixed commitments to truth, Gelman’s escalation becomes entirely legible.
Start with where Gelman normally sits. He occupies a specific niche inside elite academia: empiricist, anti-bullshit, broadly liberal but not doctrinaire, committed to open inquiry and institutional trust. His blog, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, polices sloppy methods, overconfident claims, and institutional hype across the political spectrum. His usual function is intra-coalition critic. He does not typically police ideology. That baseline makes the shift all the more revealing when it comes.
On March 17, 2026, Gelman posted “Fascist academics today and communist academics in the 1930s–1950s.” He opens with the classic Linda probability puzzle, substituting “active in the fascist movement” for bank teller, then names Vermeule directly as the “fascist-supporting Harvard professor.” He links to a Lawyers, Guns and Money post by Paul Campos framing Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism as a move toward hierarchy over equality, one that Campos connects, through the logic of “No Enemies to the Right,” to Nick Fuentes-style politics. Gelman shares the irritation and extends it into historical analogy. Just as liberal anticommunists once worked to marginalize academics who lent intellectual legitimacy to authoritarian movements, he argues, today’s proceduralists must do the same with fascist-leaning ones. The critical difference he identifies is that supporting post-liberal integralism now offers a genuine path to institutional power, given the far-right’s capture of the Republican Party, whereas communism in mid-century America was mostly career-limiting when public. That asymmetry is what makes the present moment feel urgent to him rather than merely comparable.
Vermeule’s project, Common Good Constitutionalism, subordinates liberal proceduralism to a substantive, hierarchically ordered moral vision. The state, in this framework, should actively direct society toward specific ends rather than remain neutral among competing conceptions of the good life. From inside Gelman’s coalition, built around scientific proceduralism and the postwar liberal settlement, this is not merely a wrong argument. It is a proposed rewrite of the rules by which his coalition holds authority. It threatens to replace decentralized, evidence-based scrutiny, the mechanism that gives empiricists like Gelman their status advantage, with centralized moral authority. When a high-status node inside elite institutions begins legitimizing that shift, the coalition does not debate. It enforces.
In Alliance Theory terms, “fascist” here functions as a coordination signal, not a precise analytic category. Gelman does not offer a careful definition when pressed in comments. He does not need to. The label does three things simultaneously. It raises the stakes to regime-level threat. It justifies bypassing the normal academic norms of collegial engagement. And it forces side-taking across the network. Fail to distance yourself from the labeled figure and you become a suspected sympathizer. The communist analogy works identically. Gelman is not primarily making a historical claim about 1930s Germany. He is issuing a cascade warning: respectable intellectuals once lent legitimacy to rising authoritarian movements, those movements converted institutional access into political power, and complacency made it possible. By invoking the memory of liberal anticommunists who pushed back, he tells his coalition that the sequence is happening again.
The earlier posts establish the pattern. In 2023 Gelman critiqued Vermeule’s proposals around libertarian paternalism and cognitive infiltration of dissident groups. In 2024 he compared Vermeule’s election-fraud endorsements to 1960s Mao-cheerleading. The irony the later post implicitly registers is sharp: Vermeule once argued for state infiltration of extremist groups, then moved toward endorsing the political movements such infiltration was designed to contain. Gelman reads this not as contradiction but as the classic fellow-traveler move, playing with dangerous ideas for contrarian or careerist reasons while the coalition’s norms erode around him.
Notice what Gelman refuses to do across all these posts. He does not say Vermeule’s arguments have flaws worth debating. That would legitimize the opponent and invite the kind of ordinary intellectual exchange that coalitions avoid when sacred pillars are threatened. Strong moral language instead activates emotions, converts private discomfort into public obligation, and lowers coordination costs for lower-status members of the coalition. Graduate students and junior faculty can join the response without being seen as initiating a fight. They follow a credible leader. And Gelman is credible precisely because he is not a natural partisan. A reluctant enforcer calling someone a fascist reads as a threshold signal, evidence that the threat has crossed from fringe to mainstream-elite, not as culture war posturing.
The contrast with Nathan Cofnas sharpens the structural logic. Cofnas threatened the equality pillar, the coalition’s commitment to the proposition that group disparities reflect injustice rather than innate difference. He received the “racist and pseudoscience” treatment, a combination designed for rapid excision before tenure. Vermeule, already tenured at Harvard, threatens the liberal-democratic pillar, the commitment to constrained power, pluralism, and procedural neutrality. He receives the “fascist” label plus historical analogy, the treatment designed to make him radioactive so that other elites treat engagement as a professional liability. Same enforcement machinery, different threat classifier, different target status, different tactic.
What the rhetoric does not do is refute Vermeule’s substantive arguments. It does not need to. This is not a debate. It is boundary maintenance. The question Gelman answers is not whether Vermeule is right but whether elite academia can host arguments for hierarchical, illiberal political orders without treating them as disqualifying. His answer is no, expressed not through counter-argument but through the classic tools of coalition enforcement: loaded labels, historical memory, implicit loyalty tests, and public commitment that signals to everyone watching that the boundary is real and the costs of crossing it are serious.
The system Gelman defends did not build its two pillars, equality and liberal democracy, out of pure principle. Both crystallized in the postwar settlement, a set of coordination rules Western elites adopted after ethnic hierarchy and unconstrained state power produced catastrophe on a continental scale. Those rules became embedded in institutions, credentialing systems, and the status hierarchies from which people like Gelman derive their authority. Challenges to either pillar do not register as intellectual provocations. They register as threats to the conditions of the coalition’s stability, and they produce responses scaled accordingly.
Viewed through Alliance Theory, Gelman’s posts are not hypocrisy or hysteria. They are the immune system responding to a high-status defector with real institutional mass. The aggressive language, the fascist label, the communist analogy, the warning about power cascades, is the sound of a coalition defending its procedural and moral perimeter when that perimeter is under direct assault. Once you map the role, the tone is no longer disproportionate. It is exactly what the enforcer position demands.

Posted in Andrew Gelman, Fascism, Nathan Cofnas | Comments Off on Why Is Columbia University Statistics Professor Andrew Gelman Calling Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule A Fascist?

Philosopher Of Virtue Mark Alfano Posts To Nathan Cofnas: ‘You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.’

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Mark Alfano’s tweet to Nathan Cofnas on January 20, 2020 reads, at first glance, like raw aggression. “You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.” Most people encountering that line assume it reflects personal animosity or academic arrogance. It reflects neither. Read through the lens of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, which treats moral and political beliefs as emergent properties of shifting coalitions rather than fixed worldviews, the tweet becomes something far more legible: a precise, public declaration of enforcement capacity.
Alfano is an established professor working at the intersection of moral psychology and virtue epistemology. His research examines how character traits form, how social environments shape belief, and how epistemic norms operate collectively. Those interests place him squarely inside the dominant coalition in contemporary academic philosophy and psychology, one organized around harm avoidance, bias detection, and the social embeddedness of knowledge. He is not a neutral referee in this conflict. He functions as a mid-to-high-status norm enforcer within that coalition, and that role shapes everything about how he responds to Cofnas.
When Cofnas, then a doctoral student at Oxford, published “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” in Philosophical Psychology, Alfano did not engage it as a debatable hypothesis. He reclassified it. He called it “race science,” labeled it “repugnant,” and compared its reasoning to anti-vax conspiracism. That reclassification matters enormously. Once an argument moves from the domain of legitimate disagreement into the domain of moral threat, debate stops being the appropriate tool. Enforcement replaces it.
The tweet signals three things simultaneously. First, it warns Cofnas directly that consequences are coming. Second, and more importantly, it speaks to Alfano’s coalition. By taking an aggressive, public lead, he lowers the coordination cost for everyone who agrees with him but needs someone to go first. Graduate students and junior faculty can join the campaign without initiating the conflict themselves. They follow a recognized leader. Third, the signal reaches every onlooker. The implicit message is that this is what happens when you cross this line. That is how coalitions maintain norms without constant policing. Public enforcement of one case deters a hundred others.
What follows the tweet confirms it was never empty. Alfano launches a Change.org petition demanding retraction of the paper, an apology, or editorial resignations. He organizes a multi-author commentary labeling the piece unscientific and racist. Philosophers receive calls to boycott Philosophical Psychology entirely. One editor eventually resigns. The campaign succeeds as a boundary-enforcement operation, and the episode becomes a case study in how academic coalitions defend their perimeter.
The aggression in that language is functional, not incidental. If Alfano had written “I disagree with this paper,” nothing would have moved. Moderate language produces no collective action. Extreme moral language activates moral emotions, frames the target as radioactive, and converts private discomfort into public obligation. The escalation follows the logic of what Pinsof calls punitive signaling. For a high-status academic, a bold public confrontation carries real risk. It invites counter-attack and potential face-loss. By committing so visibly, Alfano signals to his alliance that he is burned in. He cannot retreat without cost, and that very irreversibility functions as a focal point. Others can now join without being seen as instigators.
The conflict also reveals what Pinsof describes as mobilization asymmetry. Alfano’s coalition organizes around a shared sacred belief, the proposition that group differences in intelligence must be explained by environment and injustice rather than genetics. In Alliance Theory, a shared sacred belief enables rapid coordination. Defending it reads as a social benefit inside the group, not a personal cost. Cofnas, by contrast, operates without a comparably organized counter-alliance. His defenders form a loose collection of free-inquiry advocates who share no unified positive doctrine. That makes them slower to coordinate and less capable of imposing reciprocal costs on Alfano. The exchange feels disproportionate only if you read it as an intellectual dispute. It was never that.
The label “Mafia Mark” functions, in this framework, as a deterrence brand. An enforcer known to pursue challengers with personal intensity, regardless of nuance, deters more effectively than one who responds proportionally. Proportional response invites testing. Disproportionate response discourages it. The aggression is not a character flaw leaking through; it is the core feature of the deterrence model. Future dissenters calculate the cost before they publish.
There is also an institutional dimension. Universities prefer procedural calm. A high-volume public controversy forces a university to choose between protecting one researcher and absorbing sustained reputational pressure from a vocal, well-organized coalition. Institutions tend to follow the path of least social resistance. That path usually runs toward the more aggressive and better-coordinated side. Alfano and his allies exploit that preference structurally, not cynically. They generate the kind of noise that makes institutional neutrality untenable.
His career arc fits the classic Alliance Theory trajectory. Early work built credibility and signaled alignment within a field that already valued both empirical rigor and moral consequence. As status accrued, his function shifted from idea-producer to boundary clarifier and reputational gatekeeper. The Cofnas episode made that role visible. By leading the charge, he strengthened the coalition’s epistemic perimeter, raised the cost of taboo research on race, intelligence, and heredity, and sent a durable signal to anyone watching from the margins of the field. Inside the coalition he gains coalitional capital: visibility, leadership credibility, and a reputation for reliability under pressure. Outside it, he looks like an enforcer of orthodoxy. Both reputations are the predictable output of the enforcer position.
Translate the tweet out of Twitter rhetoric, and it reads: this domain has enforced boundaries, I am one of the people who enforces them, and you are about to experience that enforcement. The tone stops being surprising once you see the structural role. It is exactly what the role demands.

Posted in Nathan Cofnas, Philosophy | Comments Off on Philosopher Of Virtue Mark Alfano Posts To Nathan Cofnas: ‘You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.’

The Cofnas Affair and the Logic of Coalition Enforcement

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

The controversy surrounding philosopher Nathan Cofnas (his Substack, X) has now followed him across two countries, five petitions, and nearly a decade of escalating institutional pressure. At Cambridge, students marched through campus chanting for his removal and posted flyers with his face until he said it was unsafe to walk around. At Ghent, forty-five philosophers from his own department signed a letter calling his views not merely worthy of contempt but beneath it, while a separate petition gathered roughly three hundred staff and students urging reconsideration of his appointment. The language is striking, and so is the pattern. The same sequence repeats wherever he lands: appointment, petition, protest, institutional wobble, and a counter-petition defending academic freedom. To read this as a debate about intelligence research is to miss what is happening. The fight is about coalition boundaries, and the tools being used are not empirical, scholarly and epistemic. They are social.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory holds that moral outrage functions less as a genuine response to ethical violations and more as a coordination signal. When you express outrage, you tell your coalition that you are reliable, that you will not defect, and that you recognize the same enemies they do. The petitions against Cofnas work exactly this way. The forty-five philosophers at Ghent who called his views morally beneath contempt were not primarily making an argument. They were making a declaration of membership. Signing the petition costs something, which is what makes it a credible signal. It tells the dominant coalition inside the university, the DEI-oriented administrators, the student activist networks, the mainstream academic left, that the signers belong and can be trusted. Silence in that environment carries its own cost: it reads as potential sympathy with the pariah, which risks contaminating the bystander’s own standing.
Pinsof argues elsewhere that most public argument is not really about persuasion at all. The form of argument in coalition fights is designed to prevent persuasion rather than enable it, because to be genuinely persuaded is to concede intellectual inferiority to the person who persuaded you. Nobody at Ghent expects to change Cofnas’s mind. Cofnas does not expect to change theirs. The counter-petition does not try to persuade the forty-five philosophers. Both sides perform for their own coalitions, and the performance is the point. This explains something the essays and petitions against Cofnas make vivid: the forty-five philosophers quoted a passage from him as their central damning evidence without following the link embedded in that very paragraph. Checking the link was never the point. The point was the signal. The passage functions not as evidence to be examined but as a focal point, a sacred violation that identifies the violator and triggers coordinated response. In coalition enforcement, facts are secondary to the social function of the belief.
This explains the moralized language that dominates the response to Cofnas. “Abhorrent racism masquerading as pseudo-intellect.” “Morally reprehensible.” “Blood on his hands.” None of this language is calibrated to the actual claims he makes. He is a philosopher of biology who argues that hereditarian hypotheses about group differences in cognitive traits deserve serious empirical treatment rather than institutional suppression. One can think that argument wrong, even badly wrong, without reaching for the vocabulary of moral atrocity. The escalation serves a social function: it raises the coordination cost of association with Cofnas, simplifies the loyalty test, and makes the coalition’s boundaries visible and enforceable. Mark Alfano’s remark in 2020, that Cofnas was about to learn why people avoid crossing him, is the naked version of what the petitions accomplish through more formal means. Both say the same thing: alignment with this position will cost you.
The specific passage the Ghent petitioners quote as their central evidence is worth examining closely. Cofnas wrote that in a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the highest-performing students, and therefore the number of black professors would approach zero. The petitioners call this racism. Noah Carl points out that this is a logical inference from Harvard’s own internal data, produced in response to anti-Asian bias litigation, which showed that under purely academic admissions criteria the student body would be 0.67 percent black. Whether Cofnas’s inference is correct, whether his framing is responsible, whether the broader hereditarian hypothesis he defends has adequate empirical support, these are genuine questions worth debating. But the petitioners did not follow the link in the paragraph they quoted. Forty-five professional philosophers apparently found that too much work. The passage functions not as evidence to be examined but as a focal point, a sacred violation that identifies the violator and triggers coordinated response. In coalition enforcement, facts are secondary to the social function of the belief. What matters is not whether the claim is true but whether engaging with it seriously marks you as a threat to the coalition’s moral framework.
That framework rests on what Cofnas calls the equality thesis: the premise that persistent group disparities in outcomes reflect hidden discrimination rather than innate differences, and that therefore equity-based institutional policies are both justified and necessary. If that premise is wrong, or even seriously contestable, a significant portion of the moral authority currently held by university administrators, DEI offices, and progressive academic culture loses its foundation. Cofnas is not just offering a hypothesis about heritability. He threatens a justification for institutional power and the status hierarchies built on top of it. That is why the reaction is so intense, and why it targets not just his conclusions but his right to hold a position at all. The goal of the petitions is not to refute him. It is to mark his views as outside legitimate discourse, raise the cost of association, and deter others from approaching the topic.
One detail Cofnas himself noted on X in March 2026 is worth pausing on: over 1,200 people signed the petition to remove him from Cambridge, but only around 196 signed the equivalent petition at Ghent. That drop might reflect activist fatigue after repeated cycles, or it might reflect something else. In the UK, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has raised the institutional cost of visible mobbing. At Ghent, the rector’s public stance and the university’s procedural defense may have signaled that the campaign faces a harder wall than it did at Cambridge. Either way, Alliance Theory predicts this: costly signals work best when they are novel. Repetition dilutes credibility or raises personal risk, and both reduce the number willing to sign publicly.
The Cambridge saga, which ran from 2022 through a trial in January 2026, shows the coalition enforcement pattern in high definition. The university dismissed all fifty-eight formal student complaints against Cofnas in October 2025, ruling his views lawful under Cambridge’s new free speech code. That looked like a procedural victory. Emmanuel College then quietly terminated his research associateship anyway in April 2024, citing his “Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” blog post as a rejection of DEI values incompatible with the college’s mission. The university held the line while the college acted. The dominant coalition did not need a formal ruling. It only needed enough sustained pressure to make one institutional actor move, which then served as a signal to others. Cofnas subsequently sued Emmanuel College in Cambridge County Court, arguing belief discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, since his hereditarian views qualify as a protected philosophical belief, and violations of Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The trial ran in late January 2026. As of mid-March 2026 no judgment has been issued, and Cofnas has said only that the lawsuit is ongoing. The Free Speech Union backs him, and he seeks reinstatement of the affiliation along with damages. The case tests whether UK law will allow the dominant progressive coalition to override formal statutory protections when the equality thesis feels existentially threatened.
The closest American parallel is the dispute over the speech of legal scholar Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania, and comparing the two cases illuminates how coalition enforcement adapts to different legal environments. Wax received formal sanctions in September 2024 after years of complaints: a one-year suspension at half pay, revocation of her named chair, and a ban on representing Penn publicly, all for what the university described as flagrant unprofessional conduct involving sweeping derogatory generalizations about race, ethnicity, and immigration. She filed a federal lawsuit in January 2025 arguing racial discrimination and tenure violations. A federal judge dismissed it in August 2025, ruling it was a discrimination case not a First Amendment case, and finding she had not shown her race was a factor. She appealed to the Third Circuit in September 2025, with supplemental filings in January 2026, and a separate state court breach of contract suit has been stayed pending the federal appeal. The comparison with Cofnas is instructive. UK law gives him a stronger formal hook: philosophical belief is explicitly protected under the Equality Act, and the new free speech statute helped the university clear him even while the college severed ties. American law gives Wax weaker tools, since the First Amendment does not bind private universities and proving racial animus is a high bar. Coalition pressure in the UK hit a procedural wall; in the US it succeeded in imposing real punishment while the appeals grind on. In both cases the petitions and sanctions are not about refining the science of group differences. They are boundary maintenance for a moral-institutional project that cannot afford to let its foundational premise be seriously contested.
Ghent University’s response illustrates the position of an institution caught between two active coalitions. Rector Petra De Sutter says the statements concern her, that they are hurtful and disturbing, that she understands the outrage, and that dismissal is not currently being considered because the recruitment process was procedurally correct. This is not incoherence. It is coalition balancing. The university sits between internal activist pressure demanding exclusion and external pressures involving law, intellectual norms, donor relationships, and reputational concerns that cut the other way. The insistence on procedural correctness is an attempt to hold the middle without fully joining either side. This position is unstable. In high-intensity conflicts, the dominant internal coalition tends to treat neutrality as insufficient and eventually demands that the institution choose. The demand that De Sutter act in accordance with the university’s ethical code is exactly that demand: stop balancing, join us, complete the exclusion. Whether the Ghent situation follows the Cambridge pattern, procedural hold at the university level, quiet severance somewhere else, remains to be seen.
The counter-petition, the over one hundred academics Carl calls the cavalry, represents the formation of a rival coalition rather than a defense of hereditarianism. Those who signed it did not, for the most part, argue that Cofnas is right about group differences. They argued that mob-driven dismissal sets a dangerous precedent for academic freedom. This is a deliberate strategic choice. By shifting the frame from the content of Cofnas’s views to the institutional norms governing how controversial views get handled, the counter-coalition tries to recruit people who are uncomfortable with hereditarianism but more uncomfortable still with the spectacle of coordinated academic persecution. It lowers the entry cost: you do not have to believe anything about race and IQ to oppose dismissal by petition. This widening of the available coalition without forcing content-level agreement is the rival alliance’s core meta-strategy, and it has had modest success. The fact that Cambridge cleared Cofnas formally, and that Ghent has so far held its procedural line, suggests the strategy is not without effect.
The asymmetry of Cofnas’s reception across different environments follows the same pattern visible in the Pappé case discussed earlier in this series. Inside mainstream academia, Cofnas faces high reputational cost, repeated petitions, and institutional pressure. Outside it, in contrarian intellectual media, in behavioral genetics circles, in right-leaning commentary, he gains status as a dissident, a symbol of suppressed inquiry. Same person, different coalition environments, entirely different outcomes. Just as Pappé’s foundational critique of Israel aligns with external coalitions hostile to the state, Cofnas’s hereditarianism aligns, in the perception of his opponents, with far-right and alt-right forces. Both trigger the same response: not debate but fringe-labeling, not refutation but historicization, the attempt to starve the idea of oxygen by ruling it beneath serious engagement. In high-threat environments, whether the threat is military as in Israel’s case or institutional as in academia’s, tolerance for hard dissent narrows and facts become secondary to coalition survival.
The deeper conflict, underneath the specific arguments about IQ and meritocracy, is between two incompatible models of what a university is for. One holds that academia is a moral project, that it must actively protect vulnerable groups, and that this mission requires excluding ideas which, regardless of their empirical status, provide legitimacy to harmful political forces. The other holds that academia is a truth-seeking institution, that it must tolerate even offensive hypotheses as the price of genuine inquiry, and that suppressing uncomfortable questions produces worse knowledge and worse policy. These models do not easily coexist, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved by examining heritability data more carefully. It is a conflict about institutional purpose and the kind of moral authority universities claim for themselves. If Cofnas wins his lawsuit against Emmanuel College, it strengthens the rival truth-seeking coalition and sets a precedent that even quietly enforced exclusions carry legal risk. If he loses, it signals that sustained coalition pressure can make presence untenable even when the institution formally protects the speech. Cofnas is the occasion for that conflict, not its cause. The petitions, the counter-petitions, the protests, the institutional wobbling, and now the courtroom are all exactly what Alliance Theory would predict from a system defending its boundaries under perceived threat from a taboo-breaking insider who has found partial protection in a rival coalition and is now testing whether the law will hold the line the institution would not.
Jeffrey C. Alexander’s essay “Watergate as Democratic Ritual,” collected in The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2003), argues that Watergate was not primarily a legal or political crisis but a ritual drama through which American society renewed its civic sacred codes. Drawing on Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction and Parsons’s concept of generalization, Alexander argues that the facts of the Watergate break-in barely changed between 1972 and 1974. What changed was the social context in which those facts were interpreted. Initially the event registered as “just politics” at the level of goals and interests. Over two years it generalized upward through norms and finally to the deepest values of American civil religion, producing a sense of sacred violation and collective crisis.
Alexander identifies five conditions required for this kind of societal crisis and renewal: sufficient social consensus that an event is polluting; perception that the pollution threatens the center of society; activation of institutional social controls; mobilization of differentiated elites who form countercenters; and effective ritual and purification processes that enforce the symbolic distinction between pure and impure. None of these conditions existed in 1972 because Nixon had won by a landslide and the country remained polarized. After the election, as the 1960s culture war subsided, consensus became possible, and the other four conditions followed in sequence.
The televised Senate hearings of 1973 are, for Alexander, the central ritual event. They created what he calls liminal space, a time outside ordinary political life where the normal rules of partisanship were suspended and participants were compelled to speak the language of civic universalism. Senators who had been partisan enemies performed as priests of democratic civil religion. Administration witnesses tried to “cool out” the proceedings by arguing they had merely acted with technical rationality, but the ritual frame had already taken hold. The struggle was not over facts but over whether the crisis would be interpreted at the level of political goals or at the level of the most sacred values of the republic.
Alexander uses a symbolic classification table to show how the pollution spread. In August 1972 Nixon and the White House stood on the “good” side of the Watergate structure, with the burglars on the “evil” side. By August 1973 Nixon himself had crossed to the evil side. The Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, was the decisive moment of pollution transfer: it brought sacred impurity into direct contact with the structural center of American power. After Nixon’s resignation, Ford’s assumption of the presidency represented ritual reaggregation, restoration of the community to profane normalcy. But Alexander insists modern rituals are never complete: roughly 18 to 20 percent of Americans never accepted the generalization and continued to read Watergate as political persecution. The chapter closes by tracing the post-Watergate effervescence, the wave of antiauthoritarian populism, investigative journalism, white-collar prosecution, and moral reform that the crisis left behind, before arguing that this spirit gradually subsided as demands for political efficacy reasserted themselves.
Alexander’s framework adds one thing Pinsof’s Alliance Theory does not supply: a theory of generalization, specifically the question of what conditions must exist before a coalition conflict rises from the level of goals and interests to the level of sacred values. Pinsof explains the mechanics of coordination signals. Alexander explains what makes those signals land differently at different moments.
Applied to Cofnas, the most useful move is Alexander’s distinction between the profane level of politics, which is about goals, interests, and institutional procedure, and the sacred level, which is about the deepest moral codes a community uses to define itself. The Ghent and Cambridge controversies both show attempts to push the conflict upward from the procedural level to the sacred level. When petitioners say Cofnas’s views are “morally beneath contempt” rather than simply wrong, they are performing exactly the kind of generalization Alexander describes: trying to move the dispute from a question about hiring procedures or research quality to a question about the sacred values of the institution. Rector De Sutter resists this by insisting on procedure. The petitioners keep pushing upward precisely because procedure does not deliver the symbolic verdict they need.
Alexander’s concept of pollution transfer is also useful here. In the Watergate case, pollution spread from the burglars outward to Nixon’s aides and finally to Nixon himself. In the Cofnas case, the coalition logic of the petitions works partly by proximity: to hire him is to be associated with what he represents, and that association risks contaminating the institution. The demand that the rector “act accordingly” is a demand that the university avoid being touched by the pollution Cofnas carries. Ford’s pardon of Nixon cost him the next election precisely because it looked like contact with a polluting source. The institutional wobbling at Cambridge and Ghent, the repeated insistence that the process was correct and values of inclusion are upheld, reads in Alexander’s terms as an attempt to maintain separation from the pollution without triggering the costs of full expulsion.
What Alexander cannot add is the strategic layer. He treats ritual as something that emerges from social conditions; he does not fully account for the degree to which the petitions, protests, and moral language are consciously deployed as coalition tools. Pinsof handles that. The two frameworks work best together: Alexander explains the cultural grammar of sacred and profane, purity and pollution, that gives the coalition signals their emotional force, while Pinsof explains why the signals are sent in the first place and what social work they do for the people sending them.

Posted in Alliance Theory, Amy Wax, Blacks, IQ, Nathan Cofnas | Comments Off on The Cofnas Affair and the Logic of Coalition Enforcement

Decoding Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé: Coalition Logic, Niche Construction, and the Career of a Strategic Dissident

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Ilan Pappé is not simply a controversial historian. He is a high-status insider who converted system knowledge into a legitimacy challenge, relocated to a more favorable environment, and built an intellectual ecosystem that now sustains itself largely without him. His career follows a structure that recurs across conflicts, regimes, and centuries. To understand it, you need two frameworks working together: Alliance Theory, which explains the intensity of the response to him, and niche construction, which explains why his influence persists and grows even as his critics keep attacking. Both frameworks matter more now, in March 2026, with Israeli and American strikes on Iran, Hezbollah activity on Israel’s northern border, and school closures in missile-risk zones, because the argument is no longer abstract. The coalition logic the essay describes is running in real time, at high speed, under live existential pressure.
Start with what makes Pappé dangerous in the technical sense of that word. He was born in Israel, speaks Hebrew, trained at Oxford, and conducted his early research in Israeli archives. That combination gives him something no outside critic can possess: he cannot be dismissed as ignorant of the subject or hostile by origin. When he argues that the founding of Israel constitutes ethnic cleansing rather than a regrettable byproduct of war, he carries the credentials of the house against which he argues. Alliance Theory identifies this as the highest-leverage position a dissident can occupy. The insider defector is not just wrong from the perspective of the challenged coalition. He is useful to its rivals, which transforms the charge from error to betrayal.
His core move is structural, not merely empirical. By replacing “war of independence” with “settler-colonial project built on ethnic cleansing,” he performs a normative reclassification of the state. Once that framing holds, a series of conclusions follows almost automatically: Zionism becomes a moral problem rather than a national liberation movement, the state’s legitimacy weakens, and external pressure mechanisms like BDS acquire historical grounding from an authoritative internal source. Pappé provides those external coalitions with what they cannot easily generate themselves, which is an Israeli voice to validate what they already believe. That is why his work functions as a bridge across otherwise incompatible networks: Western academic postcolonial theory, transnational activist movements, and Arab intellectual circles that Benny Morris and most Israeli historians cannot access at all.
The backlash from Morris is worth examining closely because Morris is not simply wrong to raise methodological objections. The substance of his reviews makes a plausible case that Pappé has been careless with evidence. But the sheer intensity of the condemnation, the language of “complete fabrication” and “deliberate system of error,” far exceeds what methodological sloppiness alone would generate. Plenty of sloppy historians escape that level of denunciation. What elevates the heat is that Pappé’s narrative aligns with external coalitions actively hostile to Israel under ongoing conflict conditions. In that environment, sloppiness becomes moralized as betrayal. The critics are not just saying he got the footnotes wrong. They are saying he handed ammunition to the enemy, and in 2026 that charge carries a weight it did not carry in 2004 when Morris first leveled it. The framework he helped build now moves through campus protest infrastructure, progressive media, and international NGOs with enough reach to affect legislative debates over military aid. Morris’s boundary-policing, which once looked like academic gatekeeping, now looks more like wartime triage.
Morris himself is a fascinating case precisely because his trajectory runs in the opposite direction from Pappé’s. In the 1990s he occupied what might be called the middle niche: a historian willing to document Israeli war crimes using the archive, but committed to the state’s fundamental legitimacy. That position was viable during Oslo, when the security environment was relatively open and the cost of self-criticism looked low. After the Second Intifada, the middle niche collapsed. The environment became too threatening to sustain a narrative of honest self-critique that did not shade into delegitimation. Morris faced a choice that was less intellectual than ecological: follow Pappé out of the coalition or reaffirm membership in it. He chose the latter, and the mechanism he used was empiricism. By insisting on strict archival standards and attacking Pappé’s rigor, he built a wall around the historical record to prevent it from being retooled by what he views as moral activism masquerading as scholarship. His position since then is that one can be a serious historian, acknowledge ugly facts about 1948, and still conclude that those facts do not undermine the state’s legitimacy. That is not a denial of the evidence. It is a re-evaluation of its moral weight under changed threat conditions.
Avi Shlaim offers a third path that neither Morris nor Pappé followed. Shlaim’s construction of his “Arab-Jew” identity, claiming that Zionism uprooted integrated Jewish communities in Iraq, gives him access to audiences that neither of the other two can reach. In Arab intellectual circles, he carries insider legitimacy that Morris lacks entirely and that Pappé, despite his Israeli origins, possesses only partially. Shlaim functions as a translator, carrying Israeli archival material into networks already predisposed to a settler-colonial critique, and giving those networks something they prize: proof from inside the system. He has managed to remain a credible figure in Western academia while representing a position that places him far outside the Israeli mainstream, because he found and built a coalition structure that could support that combination.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_construction framework explains what Alliance Theory alone cannot: why Pappé’s influence persists and expands even under sustained attack. When he moved from Israel to the United Kingdom, he did not simply escape a hostile environment. He entered an ecology where the selective pressures ran in the opposite direction. Western academic postcolonial studies already had conceptual infrastructure, publication circuits, conference networks, and hiring pipelines that rewarded exactly the traits the Israeli environment punished. His insider-defector status, his narrative-driven historiography, his postmodern epistemological stance, all of these became fitness-enhancing rather than fitness-reducing once he crossed into that different niche.
But he did not merely adapt. He built. The conceptual tools he introduced, “ethnic cleansing,” “settler colonialism,” “decolonization” applied to Israel, function as portable frameworks that organize facts into a moral narrative and guide what questions future researchers ask. Once installed in graduate curricula and publishing circuits, those frameworks reproduce without him. Students trained in the framework publish within it, hire others like them, and generate further demand for the kind of scholarship he pioneered. That is niche construction in the biological sense: an organism modifies its environment so thoroughly that the environment then sustains the organism’s traits independent of the organism’s continued direct intervention. By 2026 Pappé himself is increasingly a secondary figure within the movement his work helped generate. The niche has its own institutions, its own credentialing processes, and its own funding streams. The Israeli coalition’s enforcement mechanisms now face not one dissident historian but an ecosystem.
The feedback loop with activist networks completes the picture. Pappé’s work gave the BDS movement historical grounding and legitimacy via an Israeli source. BDS in turn amplified his work, brought him new audiences, and provided the kind of external validation that translates into institutional protection. When Morris and other critics attack his rigor, they are not just engaging in intellectual debate. They are trying to poison the soil his ideas grow in. If they can brand the framework as unserious or dishonest, it becomes harder to teach, harder to publish, and harder to institutionalize. They are fighting the niche, not just the man. That the fight has not succeeded reflects how deeply embedded the niche now is, and how the stakes have changed. What Pappé’s framework once did inside postcolonial seminars it now does in congressional testimony about military aid and in European debates about sanctions. The resource flows that sustain Israel, U.S. evangelical and conservative support, bipartisan aid, diaspora fundraising, all depend partly on a narrative that the state is legitimate and its founding defensible. Hard dissent that spreads erodes that resource flow. Enforcement is rational coalition math: when the cost of absorption exceeds the benefit, and when the threat level is high enough to make narrative erosion a potential coordination failure, the coalition prices dissent as an existential liability.
The epistemology dispute sits at the center of all of this. Pappé leans toward the view that history is competing narratives rather than a single recoverable truth. That is not a neutral philosophical position. It weakens the authority of any historiography that claims to have gotten the facts straight, including traditional Zionist historiography. It also gives Pappé license to weigh moral framing heavily relative to strict evidentiary constraints. Morris’s aggressive insistence on archival standards is the counter-move: if history is objective, then sloppiness matters, and sloppiness that serves an enemy coalition is more than sloppiness, it is a kind of fraud. The epistemological argument is a coalition argument conducted in the language of method.
The pattern runs through other cases with mechanical regularity. Daniel Ellsberg had top security clearance and the Pentagon Papers. His release of those documents gave the anti-war coalition high-grade internal validation and accelerated elite defection from support for Vietnam. He was prosecuted and denounced as a traitor, but as the war became broadly unpopular his status rose. Andrei Sakharov was a core nuclear physicist who shifted to human rights criticism, giving Western and internal dissident networks enormous symbolic capital. The Soviet regime could tolerate no legitimacy challenge, so his bandwidth was zero and he went to internal exile. Liu Xiaobo co-authored Charter 08 calling for democratic reform in China, aligned explicitly with global liberal-democratic institutions, and died in custody. The variable that determines outcome is not the quality of the dissident’s argument. It is how threatened the home coalition feels, how useful the dissident is to rival coalitions, and whether the narrative starts spreading among domestic elites.
Israel falls somewhere between the Soviet case and the American one. It is not a regime that incarcerates dissidents, but it is a state under ongoing existential pressure, and that pressure shapes how much bandwidth the coalition can afford. In the 1990s, under Oslo optimism and relative security, the bandwidth expanded and the New Historians flourished. After the Second Intifada it contracted. In March 2026, with live strikes and missile alerts, it approaches zero for anything that reads as foundational critique. The France-Algeria parallel Andrew Gelman raises in his original post fits better now than it did when he wrote it. During the Algerian War, dissent did not have to be factually wrong to be treated as treason. It only had to weaken coordination at a moment when coordination was the difference between holding and losing. Safe dissent still exists in Israel, critiques of Netanyahu’s handling of the war, arguments about military strategy, even debates about hostage negotiations. But the window for anything that questions the legitimacy of 1948 or 1967 is slammed tighter than it was in the 2000s, and the viciousness of the response to Pappé-style work is not new so much as amplified by the stakes.
The U.S. parallel is also worth extending. Gelman notes that America’s layered mythology, born from the Civil War and the competing narratives of North and South, gives it more room to absorb hard dissent without experiencing it as existential. That remains true structurally, but the post-October 7 environment and the political climate of 2026 have shrunk the buffer somewhat. Critiques that frame U.S. support for Israel as complicity in a settler-colonial project now attract boundary operations on campuses and in media that would have looked disproportionate five years ago. The difference from Israel is still one of degree. America’s coalition is large enough and its founding myths layered enough that hard dissent can find institutional homes even when pushed toward the fringe in others. Israel does not have that buffer. Its founding story is too recent, too compressed, and too directly tied to the survival of a state currently under military pressure for the tolerance window to stay open.
What the whole case illustrates is that intellectual debates over national history are rarely about history alone. They are proxy fights over who gets to define legitimacy, conducted in the language of scholarship, epistemology, and method. The bandwidth a society extends to dissent is not a neutral resource allocated by some academic invisible hand. It is a function of coalition security, threat perception, and the perceived alignment of the dissident with external rivals. Pappé understood this, whether consciously or not, and built a career on it. His critics understand it too, which is why they fight with the ferocity they do. In 2026, with the region on fire and the coalition’s resource flows under pressure, that ferocity is not a surprise. The argument about footnotes is real but it is not the argument that matters. The argument that matters is about whether the state’s founding story still holds the coalition together when coordination is literally a matter of survival, and on that question, no amount of archival precision will settle things.

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The Idea of Israel and the Coalitions That Protect It

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Andrew Gelman’s post uses Ilan Pappe‘s The Idea of Israel as a lens to ask a broader question: why do national narratives contract and expand? Why do societies permit critical dissent in some decades and suppress it in others? His framework is useful but stops one step short of the real answer. The mechanism driving these shifts is not “bandwidth” or even legitimacy in the abstract. It is coalition survival, and in March 2026, with Israeli and American strikes on Iran, Hezbollah activity on Israel’s northern border, and school closures in missile-risk zones, that mechanism is not a historical observation. It is running in real time.
Gelman notices that the “post-Zionist moment” in 1990s Israeli academia opened a window for historians like Pappé to challenge the founding myths, and then the failure of Oslo slammed it shut. He treats this as a kind of intellectual weather pattern, interesting to observe, hard to explain. But the pattern makes sense once you see that every national narrative is also a coalition boundary. It tells insiders who belongs and who does not. Challenging the narrative is not simply an epistemic act. It is a social one, and the social stakes are what determine how the challenge gets received.
Consider the debate between Pappé and Benny Morris. Gelman correctly notes that the two historians agree on many facts. The dispute, he says, is really about legitimacy. But even that framing is a little soft. Morris accepts the documented evidence of Israeli war crimes and still defends the founding story because his deeper argument is that the story holds the coalition together. Pappé’s narrative does not just say “mistakes were made.” It says the foundational act was unjust in a way that calls current legitimacy into question. That is a different kind of claim, and it aligns, whether Pappé intends it or not, with external movements that challenge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. The viciousness of the response to Pappé is not just about his alleged sloppiness, though Morris’s criticisms on that score may well be fair. It is about the perceived cost of the narrative he carries, and in 2026 that cost has risen sharply. What his framework once did inside postcolonial seminars it now does in congressional debates about military aid and in European arguments about sanctions. The coalition’s resource flows, U.S. evangelical and conservative support, bipartisan aid, diaspora fundraising, all depend partly on a narrative that the state is legitimate and its founding defensible. Hard dissent that spreads erodes that resource flow. Morris’s boundary-policing, which once looked like academic gatekeeping, now looks more like wartime triage.
This is the distinction that Gelman circles without quite landing. There is safe dissent, which operates inside the shared story. “We failed to live up to our founding ideals” is the American version. You criticize, but you reaffirm the legitimacy of the system at the same time. Coalitions often welcome this kind of dissent because it signals moral seriousness without threatening the base. Safe dissent still exists in Israel in 2026: critiques of Netanyahu’s handling of the war, arguments about military strategy, debates about hostage negotiations. But the window for anything that questions the legitimacy of 1948 or 1967 is slammed tighter than it was even in the years after the Second Intifada. Then there is hard dissent, which questions the foundational act itself. Hard dissent becomes dangerous not when one obscure academic holds it, but when it starts spreading through universities, cultural production, and media in ways that weaken internal coordination. That is when enforcement kicks in: status penalties, publication gates, hiring decisions, and the rhetorical move of placing a view beyond the pale of serious discussion.
Gelman’s comparison of Pappé to an HIV denialist is revealing precisely because it illustrates how that enforcement works. When Morris treats Pappé as a crank, he is not just making an epistemic claim. He is performing a boundary operation, saying this view belongs outside the moral community of serious scholarship. The analogy fits better in 2026 than it did when Gelman wrote his post. Debating denialism gives it oxygen. Historicizing it starves it. With Iran war rhetoric active and proxy escalations ongoing, the coalition prices hard dissent as an existential liability because it feeds external narratives used to delegitimize aid and military support. The decision about what gets debated and what gets historicized is never purely epistemic. It reflects a coalition’s judgment about what it can absorb without losing its ability to act together, and right now that judgment is severe.
Gelman’s cross-national comparisons sharpen this. He contrasts the United States, with its layered mythology born from the Civil War, against countries like Egypt, where he suspects a more singular national line. The American case is instructive because the North-South split produced two competing founding stories, which means dissent became structurally normalized. You can criticize American history from the Southern tradition or the Northern one, from the abolitionist tradition or the imperialist one, and still affirm the regime’s overall legitimacy. That layering gives the coalition more room to absorb criticism without experiencing it as existential. Israel’s founding story is more recent and more compressed. Challenging it hits closer to the live nerve of current political legitimacy, so the tolerance window narrows fast under pressure.
That said, even the American buffer has shrunk since October 7, 2023. Post-October 7 and into the Trump 2.0 era, critiques that frame U.S. support for Israel as complicity in a settler-colonial project now attract boundary operations on campuses and in media that would have looked disproportionate five years ago. The labeling of such positions as antisemitic or beyond the pale follows the same coalition logic: the view aligns with perceived threats, so the coalition prices it accordingly. The difference from Israel remains one of degree. America’s coalition is large enough and its founding myths layered enough that hard dissent finds institutional homes even when pushed toward the fringe in others. Israel does not have that buffer, and the current conflict removes whatever remained of it.
Mexico presents a different case. There, revolution is so central to the national identity that internal conflict and competing interpretations are built into the idea of Mexico itself. The myth already contains its own opposition. France during the Algerian War is closer to the Israel pattern: a live conflict raised the perceived cost of dissent, and figures like Raymond Aron faced accusations of treason for questioning colonial policy. That parallel fits the current moment almost precisely. During the Algerian War, dissent did not have to be factually wrong to be treated as treason. It only had to weaken coordination when coordination was the difference between holding and losing. The same logic governs the response to Pappé-style work in Israel now. Any narrative erosion risks internal coordination failure when coordination is literally a matter of military unity, diaspora support, and the continued flow of American aid.
That is the part of Gelman’s framework that needs sharpening. He treats the expansion and contraction of intellectual bandwidth as something like a natural phenomenon, comparable to the rise and fall of fashionable ideas in technical fields like statistics or physics. But in national history, the shifts are not random and they are not gradual. They track the perceived threat to the coalition holding the narrative together, and they move fast when the threat spikes. When the Second Intifada collapsed the optimism of the Oslo period, the security environment changed and the same ideas that had looked like honest historical revision began to look like a liability. In March 2026 the shift is more abrupt still. The facts about 1948 have not changed. The coalition’s risk calculus has.
The same logic extends beyond geopolitics into media and ideological coalitions, which police their own founding ideas by the same mechanism. The splits between pro-Israel hawkish commentators and anti-establishment isolationists, the feuds between figures like Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson over what counts as acceptable skepticism of Israeli policy, follow the same structure. Safe dissent within the shared story strengthens the coalition. Hard dissent that questions foundations gets fringe-labeled when it risks capture by rivals. The “idea of X” applies as readily to a media coalition’s self-conception as to a nation-state’s founding myth.
What the whole case illustrates is that intellectual debates over national history are rarely about history alone. They are proxy fights over who gets to define legitimacy, conducted in the language of scholarship, epistemology, and method. The bandwidth a society extends to dissent is not a neutral resource allocated by some academic invisible hand. It is a function of coalition security, threat perception, and the perceived alignment of the dissident with external rivals. Coalitions do not simply narrow tolerance when threatened. They weaponize narrative enforcement to survive. The idea of Israel is not contracting randomly in 2026. It is being defended as a live boundary in a live conflict, and the enforcement mechanisms, status penalties, reputational attacks, gatekeeping, reflect that with precision. The argument about footnotes is real but it is not the argument that matters. The argument that matters is whether the founding story still holds the coalition together when coordination is a matter of survival, and on that question, no amount of archival precision will settle things.

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Australia’s Fuel Crisis

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Australia’s fuel crisis looks, from the outside, like a logistics story. Ships are arriving, contracts are honored, the minister is calm. But the real story sits one layer down, where the architecture of a system built for stable times meets conditions it was never designed to handle.
For roughly fifteen years, Australia systematically wound down domestic refining. The economics made sense at the time. Asian refineries, especially in Singapore and South Korea, could process crude more cheaply than aging Australian plants, and global shipping lanes were reliable enough that the distinction between making fuel and buying fuel seemed academic. What the policy actually produced was the conversion of a strategic commodity into a just-in-time service. Australia stopped holding much fuel in reserve and started depending on a steady flow of imports timed to demand.
That works until something blocks the pipe.
The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly twenty percent of global oil flows, and about eighty percent of what moves through it goes to Asia. When conflict closes or partially closes that corridor, Asian refineries face a crude shortage. Their rational response is to cut exports and prioritize domestic demand. Australia, sitting at the end of a long supply chain with only two operating refineries and roughly a month of fuel on hand, feels that decision almost immediately.
The geographic pivot to West African and American Gulf Coast supply is not panic. It is a reasonable response to a blocked trade route. But it carries hidden costs. The voyages are longer, which means higher freight rates and longer lead times. Other import-dependent economies are making the same calculations simultaneously, which means competition for the same cargoes. Supply does not simply shift to a new address. It gets slower, more expensive, and less certain.
The government’s assurance that supply is secure through March and into April is accurate in a narrow sense. The ships already scheduled will arrive. The contracts already signed will be honored. What that framing omits is that those commitments reflect decisions made before the current disruption. The next round of contracts must be negotiated in a market where the price of queue position has risen sharply.
This is the contractual lag that matters most. The crisis will not announce itself when the last pre-war cargo docks. It will arrive quietly, in the form of replacement contracts that cost more, take longer to fulfill, and carry more uncertainty about whether they will be honored if conditions worsen.
The mention of rationing by government ministers is doing two things at once. It signals seriousness to dampen hoarding behavior, which is already producing localized shortages in regional areas. It also conditions the public for decisions that may become necessary. The immediate effect, as has been observed across many supply crises, is to accelerate the behavior it tries to prevent. People who might have waited for reassurance instead fill their tanks and jerry cans. The coordination problem compounds the supply problem.
At thirty days, what Australia has is a disruption managed by defensive measures: stock releases, priority allocation, anti-hoarding messaging. The system still functions, though badly and anxiously. At sixty days, if the Strait remains impaired, the character of the problem changes. Australia would then be trying to replace disrupted Asian supply in a genuinely stressed global market, not just drawing down buffers while waiting for normal conditions to return. Diesel becomes the central economic risk because it runs freight, farming, mining, and emergency services. When diesel gets tight, the damage spreads outward fast, showing up as freight costs, food prices, cut mining shifts, and slower public services. At ninety days, the question shifts from logistics to allocation. Who gets fuel first becomes a political question with sharp edges.
The alliance dimension runs beneath all of this. Australia benefits from the United States Navy’s maintenance of open sea lanes, including through the Strait of Hormuz. That is a public good the American security architecture has provided for decades, and Australia has long been a beneficiary without bearing proportionate costs. The Trump administration’s complaints about burden-sharing are not new, but the current crisis makes the argument concrete. Australia is simultaneously seeking American Gulf Coast fuel supply and declining to contribute naval assets to the effort to reopen the waterway through which that fuel must eventually travel. The commercial dependency and the security dependency now visibly overlap in a way that abstract alliance politics usually obscures.
What the crisis actually reveals is something simpler and older. A country cannot indefinitely outsource the production of things it needs to survive without accepting proportional vulnerability to disruptions in supply. Australia made a rational economic choice under conditions of assumed stability. Those conditions have changed, and the exposure that choice created is no longer theoretical. The question that follows the immediate crisis, whenever it resolves, is whether Australian policy will treat this as an anomaly or as evidence that the model itself needs rethinking.

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How much can AI codify local knowledge that was previously tacit and inalienable?

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Claude says: Local knowledge, in the classic sense Michael Polanyi described, is the kind you carry in your hands or your gut. A master glassblower knows when the gather is ready not because he reads a temperature gauge but because of something color does to his eye after years of watching. A Creole fisherman reads the sky and water in a way he cannot fully explain to his children, let alone write down. The philosopher’s shorthand for this is tacit knowledge, and the standard argument has always been that you cannot codify it without killing it.
AI has pushed that boundary further than anyone expected, but it has not erased it.
What AI can now do is remarkable in specific domains. In radiology, systems trained on millions of scans have begun to capture the pattern-recognition that experienced doctors previously called intuition. That intuition was never truly inalienable; it was probabilistic inference the brain ran below the level of conscious articulation. AI makes that inference explicit and reproducible. Something similar happens with agricultural soil assessment. Farmers in the Salinas Valley or the Po Plain carry centuries of accumulated knowledge about when soil needs amendment, knowledge that lived in family practice and never made it into any agronomist’s manual. Machine learning models trained on sensor data, yield histories, and even farmer interviews can now approximate that judgment. The tacit becomes, at least partially, retrievable.
Language is another frontier. Smaller and endangered languages carry embedded cultural knowledge that disappears when the last fluent speaker dies. AI transcription and modeling tools, built with communities rather than imposed on them, have helped preserve not just vocabulary but pragmatic knowledge: the grammar of dispute resolution in Māori, the tonal logic of certain West African languages that encodes social hierarchy. None of this is full preservation, but it is more than was possible before.
The examples get murkier when the knowledge is social rather than perceptual. Neighborhood political knowledge, the kind a ward boss carried in 1950s Chicago or a precinct captain carries in contemporary Los Angeles County, resists codification in a different way. It is relational. It lives in trust, in favors owed, in who actually controls a block regardless of what any organization chart says. AI can map networks and analyze communications, but it tends to mistake the skeleton for the body. The informal weight of personal relationships, what Pierre Bourdieu called social capital and James Scott called metis, is not simply pattern recognition over data. It requires being known and trusting in return.
There is also the problem of what happens when you try to codify knowledge that a community uses precisely because it is not codified. Traditional ecological knowledge held by indigenous communities has legal and political value partly because it is communal and unwritten. The moment it enters a database, even one controlled by the community, it becomes something different. It can be extracted, decontextualized, and eventually appropriated. Several First Nations in Canada have resisted AI-assisted documentation projects for exactly this reason. Codification might preserve the information while destroying the knowledge.
So the honest answer is this: AI can codify local knowledge when that knowledge is fundamentally perceptual or statistical, when it is a kind of inference that practice has made automatic. It struggles when the knowledge is primarily social, relational, or political. And it may cause harm when the community that holds the knowledge gains nothing from making it legible to outsiders, or loses something by doing so. The boundary between tacit and inalienable turns out to matter more than people assumed, and AI has not dissolved it so much as clarified where it actually runs.

Grok says: AI can codify a surprisingly large portion of what was once purely tacit and inalienable local knowledge — turning embodied expertise, intuition, cultural nuances, and “know-how” that lives only in people’s heads or communities into explicit, scalable, transferable forms. But it never captures 100% of it.The classic distinction comes from philosopher Michael Polanyi: “We can know more than we can tell.” Tacit knowledge is contextual, relational, embodied, and often unconscious (e.g., a master craftsman’s feel for wood grain, an elder’s intuitive weather reading, a surgeon’s split-second diagnostic hunch, or Indigenous ecological practices passed orally). “Inalienable” here means it was previously tied to the individual or small group — hard to extract, teach at scale, or separate from the person.In 2026, multimodal AI, knowledge graphs, digital avatars, and generative systems have dramatically expanded codification. They mine “artifacts” of tacit knowledge (videos, chat logs, emails, sensor data, interviews) and externalize patterns into queryable models, avatars, or agents. Enterprise tools now routinely turn veteran “tribal knowledge” into dynamic assets before retirement. Apprenticeship systems use GenAI to make tacit skills explicit faster. Indigenous communities are using AI to digitize oral traditions while preserving context. Robotics learns physical intuition from video demonstrations.Quantitatively, in domains rich in observable artifacts (text, video, logs), AI can externalize 60–80% of usable tacit elements — enough to create massive productivity gains, training tools, and knowledge preservation. The remaining 20–40% (pure embodiment, real-time situated judgment, cultural “feel”) stays human or requires tight human-AI co-evolution. AI doesn’t replace the tacit core; it makes the previously inalienable borrowable and scalable.Concrete Examples (2025–2026)1. Enterprise & Organizational “Corporate Amnesia” Prevention
Veteran employees’ undocumented know-how (e.g., how to troubleshoot a legacy system intuitively or navigate unspoken company politics) used to walk out the door. Modern enterprise AI (e.g., tools from Squirro and similar platforms) mines chat logs, Jira tickets, emails, call recordings, and exit interviews via speech-to-graph pipelines. It turns messy tacit exchanges into permanent, queryable knowledge graphs or LLM-powered assistants.
Result: “Tacit knowledge pipelines” that let new hires query “how veteran Jane would handle this” in natural language. This has become standard for combating retirement waves.

2. Apprenticeship & Craftsmanship
A 2025 study on generative AI in apprenticeship systems showed statistically significant gains: AI tools improved verbal expression of tacit skills (88 vs. 72 baseline), learning capacity, and adaptability by providing instant corrective feedback and turning “watch and imitate” into explicit, interactive models. Example: Woodworking or welding apprentices now train with AI that analyzes video of master movements + sensor data, then generates step-by-step heuristics and simulations. The master’s “feel” gets partially codified into executable guidance.

3. Indigenous & Local Cultural Knowledge (Previously the Most Inalienable)
Oral, place-based knowledge (plant uses, weather patterns, storytelling) was tightly bound to elders and communities. AI now powers digital archiving of oral histories, songs, and languages into interactive libraries.
Tools create “dialogue with heritage” systems where users converse with AI avatars trained on elder recordings — preserving and revitalizing First Nations or other Indigenous traditions.
XPRIZE and academic projects model Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) digitally while respecting sovereignty (e.g., Maori and Navajo perspectives integrated into AI governance).
Ethical pathway projects explicitly address risks, turning once-inalienable local wisdom into sustainable development tools without flattening cultural context.

4. Medicine & Diagnostics
A senior doctor’s intuitive pattern recognition (beyond textbook symptoms) is classic tacit knowledge. AI systems now extract it from clinical notes, imaging logs, and case discussions via NLP and knowledge graphs. Digital human avatars (e.g., Microsoft Mesh or SenseTime-style interactive experts) act as 24/7 repositories that transfer nuanced diagnostic “hunches” through conversation and simulation.
Training programs use AI to accelerate tacit-to-explicit transfer in residencies.

5. Agriculture & Field Expertise
Farmers’ localized soil feel, pest intuition, or timing decisions were inalienable. 2026 agri-tech uses GenAI as “conversational agronomy assistants” that explain recommendations in plain language and incorporate farmer feedback. Robots (e.g., weeding/harvesting bots from companies like Padma AgRobotics) learn physical tacit tasks from video + sensor data.
Caveat: Investors and CEOs emphasize AI accelerates defined processes but “can’t interpret or contextualize messy real-world data” — human judgment remains essential.

6. Robotics & Physical Skills
Motor tacit knowledge (e.g., delicate handling) was once unteachable at scale. 2026 soft robotics and agentic systems learn from human demonstration videos, then generalize (e.g., in manufacturing, healthcare rehab, or farming). This codifies “embodied intuition” into autonomous adjustments.

The Hard Limits (Why It’s Not 100%)Embodiment & Situated Context (Polanyi/Dreyfus): AI infers from outputs (text, video, code) but lacks a body or lived experience. It can’t fully replicate “being in the moment” or relational nuance.
Living Context: Codification can flatten or misrepresent (e.g., turning rich cultural storytelling into flat data risks losing meaning).
Economic Reality: The more a skill relies on pure tacit knowledge, the harder (and more valuable) it is to fully codify — creating a new “uncodifiable advantage” for humans. AI complements experienced workers while automating entry-level codified tasks.

AI has turned tacit/local knowledge from something rare and inalienable into something that can be mined, preserved, taught at planetary scale, and even co-evolved with. In 2026 we’re seeing the biggest leap yet — from static documents to dynamic avatars and graphs. The core human spark (judgment in novel, embodied situations) remains irreplaceable, but the accessible portion has exploded. This democratizes expertise that once died with the expert or stayed trapped in small communities.

Gemini says: AI can codify a significant portion of local knowledge that was once considered inalienable, but it does so by changing what it means to codify. Traditional codification relies on a human explaining a rule. AI bypasses the explanation and extracts the logic directly from the data of the practice.

The Mechanism of Codification
Polanyi’s Paradox states that we know more than we can tell. Stephen Turner might argue that while we cannot tell the machine our tacit rules, the machine can observe the result of those rules and replicate them. AI does not need to understand the social meaning or the history of local knowledge to function as if it does. It treats tacit knowledge as a pattern-recognition problem.

Levels of Codification
Relational Tacit Knowledge: AI can now analyze thousands of emails, meeting transcripts, and Slack messages to predict how a specific person might react to a proposal. This was once a social skill that took years of “reading the room” to develop.

Procedural Tacit Knowledge: In manufacturing, sensors capture the minute adjustments an expert makes to a machine. AI models these adjustments, turning a master craftsman’s instinct into a set of digital parameters.

Local Governance: AI can process thousands of local business rules—vendor preferences, brand safety standards, and regional nuances—that are rarely written down because they are too numerous for humans to manage.

Examples of AI Codifying Local Knowledge
Medical Diagnostics: A veteran doctor might have a “hunch” about a patient based on subtle visual cues. AI trained on millions of clinical images can codify this hunch by identifying the same patterns, often outperforming the expert’s intuition.

Legal Strategy: AI tools analyze a specific judge’s past rulings to suggest the “tone” or “precedents” most likely to succeed in that specific courtroom. This local knowledge was previously held only by long-time local practitioners.

Agricultural Expertise: Local farmers know the “logic” of their soil and microclimate through generations of experience. AI now integrates satellite data, moisture sensors, and historical yields to provide precise “know-how” that was once considered inalienable from the land.

The Remaining Inalienability
That AI can replicate a behavior does not mean it has captured the knowledge in a human sense. AI lacks the “porous self” or the ability to experience the moral weight of a decision. While the machine can mimic the output of local knowledge, the “living context”—the social trust and shared identity that makes knowledge meaningful in a community—remains with the humans. If the data stops flowing, the AI cannot “learn” a new social shift because it has no access to the tacit social milieu.

Evaluating the professional standing of local experts requires looking at how AI shifts the “logic” of authority. When tacit knowledge is codified, the expert loses their role as the sole gatekeeper of a specific “way of doing things.”

The Erosion of the “Guild” Monopoly
Historically, experts in fields like law, medicine, or high-end craftsmanship relied on a “buffered identity” of specialized, unarticulated skill. This created a barrier to entry. AI might turn this expertise into a commodity. If a junior analyst can use AI to replicate the “hunch” of a senior partner, the senior partner’s social capital decreases. The “state of exception” where the expert is the only one who can make a call in a crisis becomes a standard procedure managed by a model.

Purification Rituals and Accountability
Jeffrey Alexander discusses how institutions use “purification rituals” to maintain their sacred status. Experts often use their tacit knowledge to justify why a certain decision was made, even if the reasoning is opaque. AI forces a “profane” transparency on these decisions.

The Loss of Discretion: If an AI suggests a medical treatment based on 10 million cases, a doctor who chooses a different path based on “intuition” faces higher professional and legal risks.

The Shift to Oversight: The expert’s role shifts from “doing the work” to “auditing the AI.” They become a chronicler of the machine’s logic rather than the source of the logic itself.

The Rise of the “Strategic” Expert
While AI codifies the “how,” it cannot easily codify the “who” or the “why” in a social sense. Experts who survive this shift often do so by leaning into the “Alliance Theory” of professional life.

Social Coordination: The expert might focus more on managing the social alliances within a community—something AI cannot do because it lacks a “porous self” that feels social pressure.

Navigating Ambiguity: AI is a symmetry of past data. It fails when a local community undergoes a radical shift in values or identity. The expert who can articulate this new “logic” of the group maintains their standing.

Impact on Local Prestige
In small communities or specific Orthodox Jewish institutions, for example, a rabbi’s authority often comes from a deep, tacit understanding of the community’s “inner life.” AI can codify the legal precedents (Halacha), but it cannot navigate the “friend/enemy” distinctions or the subtle social purification required to keep a community together. The expert’s standing becomes less about “technical know-how” and more about “social navigation.”

That the machine can replicate the output of an expert does not mean it replaces the expert’s role in the social hierarchy. It simply changes what the expert is used for.

ChatGPT says: AI is steadily converting chunks of tacit, local knowledge into portable playbooks. What resists codification are the parts tied to embodiment, real-time social stakes, and shifting local incentives.

Think of tacit knowledge as three layers. AI eats the outer layers first.

Patterned routines
These are repeatable, language-describable, and leave data trails. AI does very well here.

Examples
Medical triage in ERs. Models trained on millions of cases now approximate the “seasoned nurse gut feel” for who is crashing.
Litigation drafting. Boilerplate once held in senior associates’ heads is now systematized into prompts and templates that get you 80 percent of the way.
Skilled trades diagnostics. HVAC techs used to “hear” a failing compressor. Models trained on audio and sensor data can flag the same failure modes.
Farming decisions. Yield, irrigation timing, pest detection. Satellite plus local weather plus historical data replicate much of the farmer’s accumulated intuition.

What happened
The knowledge had structure and repetition. It was tacit mainly because it was costly to write down, not because it was inherently unspeakable.

Contextual judgment
This is where local conditions, exceptions, and sequencing matter. AI can assist but not fully replace.

Examples
Trial strategy. AI can suggest lines of argument, but reading a judge’s temperament or a jury’s mood still leans on lived courtroom experience.
Policing and de-escalation. Bodycam-trained models can suggest tactics, but moment-to-moment judgment depends on subtle cues and risk tolerance.
Restaurant kitchens. AI can standardize recipes and timing, but a great chef adjusts constantly to ingredient variability, staff skill, and service flow.
Urban planning approvals. Knowing which stakeholder to approach first, what tradeoffs will pass, and how to package a proposal is still highly local.

What happened
AI can surface options and past analogs. The last mile is about sequencing moves in a live social field with incomplete signals.

Embodied and coalition-bound knowledge
This is the hardest to codify. It sits in bodies, relationships, and incentives.

Examples
Sales rainmakers. Closing a deal depends on trust, timing, and reading power dynamics across organizations. CRM data helps, but the edge is relational.
Community mediation. Knowing who can speak to whom, what face-saving move will land, and which norms are live. Hard to extract without breaking it.
Skilled craft at the edge. A master carpenter fitting irregular materials, a surgeon handling unexpected anatomy, a mechanic improvising with nonstandard parts.
High-stakes leadership. When to escalate, when to absorb blame, how to signal resolve without cornering the other side. These are coalition moves, not just patterns.

What happened
The knowledge is partly inarticulable and partly strategic. People have reasons not to fully reveal it. It is tied to status and bargaining position.

Where AI has made surprising gains

“Soft” domains via large corpora. Customer support tone, therapy-adjacent conversation, teaching explanations. Not perfect, but much more codified than expected.

Multimodal sensing. Vision, audio, and telemetry let models pick up cues humans once claimed were ineffable.

Workflow integration. Turning scattered know-how into stepwise systems that juniors can run.

Where it still struggles

Rapidly shifting environments with sparse feedback. War zones, novel crises, new regulations.

Adversarial settings. Opponents adapt once patterns are exposed.

Incentive-laden contexts. People withhold, distort, or game inputs.

Physical dexterity under uncertainty. Robotics is improving, but general skill in messy environments lags.

A useful way to think about it going forward
AI converts “private skill” into “shared protocol” when three conditions hold

lots of examples

stable feedback on what works

low penalty for revealing the method

It stalls when

examples are rare or non-stationary

feedback is delayed or ambiguous

revealing the method weakens someone’s position

Concrete before and after snapshots

Radiology: from individual read styles to standardized AI-assisted reports with higher baseline accuracy.

Law: from partner-specific drafting styles to firmwide prompt libraries and clause banks.

Logistics: from dispatcher intuition to algorithmic routing that outperforms most humans.

Retail pricing: from merchant instinct to dynamic pricing engines.

AI is eroding the monopoly value of a lot of mid-level tacit knowledge. It raises the floor. It also raises the premium on the parts that remain uncodified, especially real-time judgment and coalition management. That is where the durable advantage is shifting.

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Decoding Mark Levin

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Per Alliance Theory, Mark Levin is not a commentator who happens to sound angry. He is a coalition enforcer, and his entire output makes sense once you understand that role. Where Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson broker between coalitions and Barri Weiss imports outsider energy into institutions, Levin does something different. He holds the line. His job is to define who belongs, mark who has defected, and raise the cost of leaving.
David Pinsof’s frame (“argument is bullshit”) fits him. Arguments, in this model, are not primarily truth-seeking tools. They are weapons for defending allies, punishing defectors, and strengthening the coalition’s internal cohesion. Levin runs that logic at full volume, all the time. The intensity is not a personality quirk. It is a professional signal. He tells his audience: I will fight for you and I will destroy your enemies. Calm neutrality would actually undermine his position because it would suggest he might be persuadable by the other side.
His relationship with Trump tracks how alliance hierarchies shift when a dominant new node appears. Levin was skeptical of Trump early because Trump did not come out of the conservative intellectual ecosystem Levin belonged to and had spent decades building. That made Trump a risky bet. But once Trump reorganized the right coalition around himself and became the dominant node, Levin adapted. Not because he abandoned his principles in some abstract sense, but because the coalition had moved and the cost of staying outside it had risen too high. His current posture is loyalty with an ideological frame. He supports Trump strongly but packages that support in constitutional and foundational language. This lets him preserve status with both populist listeners and older conservative intellectuals who want their tribalism to feel principled.
That constitutional framing is the most sophisticated part of his operation. Levin is not just an angry man on the radio. He is a constitutional scholar defending the Republic. When he attacks a rival coalition, he is not picking a fight. He is identifying a threat to the founding documents. This elevates every coalition battle from a policy dispute to an existential crisis. Compromise starts to look like betrayal of the founders rather than a standard negotiation between competing interests. His background at the Landmark Legal Foundation is not just a credential. It is a status amplifier that allows his audience to feel that their tribal loyalties rest on objective historical truth. They are not just rooting for their side. They are defending civilization.
The RINO label is his primary boundary-maintenance tool, and he deploys it with precision. By marking internal critics as defectors rather than dissenters, he draws a hard line between the true coalition and the infiltrators. For a Republican politician, being targeted by Levin is a high-cost event. It signals to the primary-voting audience that this person can no longer be trusted. It also tells everyone else in the coalition what happens to people who step out of line. The label does not need to be fair to be functional. Its function is enforcement, not description.
His attacks on Carlson and Kelly in the context of the Iran fracture follow this logic exactly. Both have questioned U.S. involvement and positioned themselves as voices for an isolationist reading of America First. From Levin’s perspective, this is not a legitimate policy disagreement. It is defection from a coalition obligation. His response, calling Carlson a mentally ill evil Nazi and Kelly an emotionally unhinged harlot, reads as unhinged if you expect political commentary. It reads as entirely rational if you understand that he is performing high-intensity loyalty enforcement for an audience that wants to see defectors destroyed. The cruelty of the language is part of the signal. It shows he cannot be bought, cannot be softened, and will not negotiate with people he has decided are outside the alliance.
Kelly’s micropenis counterpunch and the subsequent back-and-forth illustrate a problem with this kind of enforcement. When the target fights back with equal venom and a larger social media presence, the enforcer starts to look less like a guardian and more like a petty combatant. Levin’s effectiveness depends partly on asymmetry. He attacks and the target absorbs the blow or retreats. When Kelly turns it into a public feud she clearly enjoys, his status as a serious defender of serious ideas takes damage. The audience notices.
Trump’s public defense of Levin as a truly great American patriot under siege by lesser intellects is its own kind of coalition signal. Trump is not just complimenting Levin. He is telling the MAGA base which side of the Iran fracture he stands on and who the authorized enforcers are. This is the alliance hierarchy working as designed. The dominant node validates the enforcer, the enforcer validates the dominant node, and people outside that mutual validation loop get marked as disloyal or irrelevant.
The deeper structural point is that Levin has not made the pivot that Kelly and Carlson made. He has not moved toward independent ownership of a direct audience relationship. He remains tethered to Fox and to the institutional hawkish right, which means his status is still partly loaned rather than fully owned. This makes his position strong as long as that coalition holds and Trump remains the dominant node. But in a media landscape where the edges increasingly pay better than the center, and where figures like Carlson profit specifically from breaking with hawkish orthodoxy on foreign policy, Levin is betting that the institutional core holds. If the anti-war populist current inside the right keeps growing, his enforcement strategy starts working against him. The harder he swings at Carlson and Kelly, the more attention he drives toward them and the more their audiences grow on the premise that something important must be happening if Levin is this angry about it.
He is a feedback loop made flesh. He validates his audience’s instincts, tells them those instincts are the last thing standing between the country and ruin, identifies the specific enemies responsible, and then directs the coalition’s energy outward. This keeps internal fractures from becoming visible and keeps the audience focused on external threats. It works until the fractures get large enough that no amount of enforcement can paper over them. The Iran debate, with its open splits between hawkish institutionalists and isolationist populists, might be that moment. Levin is shouting louder. Carlson and Kelly are getting bigger audiences. The coalition he is trying to hold together is the thing that is breaking.

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