My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Sean Hannity is the purest specimen Mearsheimer‘s anthropology could ask for, because in Hannity there is no residue of the liberal man at all. No performance of reason, no individualist interior, no gap between the socialized self and the broadcast self. The infusion runs all the way down.
Start with the infusion. Franklin Square, Long Island, Irish Catholic, grandparents off the boat. A father who worked as a family-court probation officer, a mother who worked in a county jail. Altar boy, seminary schooling at Sacred Heart and St. Pius X. The home’s code: God, cops, country, family, loyalty, and respect for the uniform. Mearsheimer says a man’s moral code arrives before his critical faculties do, installed by family and surrounding society, and that reason arrives later as a junior partner. Hannity’s adult worldview is the Franklin Square code without one alteration. He came of age at nineteen as Ronald Reagan won the presidency, took his political identity from that moment, and has not revised a premise since. He did not reason his way to anything. He is what the home made, broadcasting nightly, and his sign-off is the Gospel of John: let not your heart be troubled. The seminary boy still closes with scripture, consoling the congregation.
Now the form of the show, which separates Hannity from every rival. Rush Limbaugh performed argument. Tucker Carlson performed thinking, the furrowed brow, the dissident intellectual. Hannity performs neither. His program is recitation: the same phrases, the same villains, the same loyalties, repeated nightly like a catechism, and his critics have spent thirty years calling him dumb for it. Mearsheimer’s frame says the critics grade him on the wrong scale. Hannity is not in the reason business and has never pretended to be. He said it himself in 2016: I’m not a journalist, I’m a talk show host. That sentence, like John Laws’s version of it, declines the liberal role outright. The liberal anthropology says a broadcaster serves the audience’s reason. Hannity serves the audience’s solidarity, knows it, and says so, which makes him more honest about his function than the colleagues who dressed the same function in the costume of inquiry.
His political career is a chain of attachments to chiefs. Reagan formed him, Newt Gingrich (b. 1943) elevated him, George W. Bush commanded his war years, and Donald Trump completed him. The nightly phone calls, the advice, the rally stage in Missouri in 2018, the texts to the White House. And here the Dominion discovery, which damaged everyone else, distinguishes him. Carlson’s texts revealed a private self that loathed Trump, a gap between the tribal broadcast and the individual underneath. Hannity’s texts revealed concern, management, loyalty, the same man inside and out. He told lawyers he never believed Sidney Powell’s (b. 1955) fraud claims for one second, yet his on-air accommodation of the tribe’s belief was not cynicism layered over a hidden self. It was the member subordinating his own judgment to the group’s need, which Mearsheimer says humans have always done, because the group is how they survive. Hannity holds his private opinions the way a man holds opinions inside a family: they yield to the family.
His foreign policy record shows ideology trailing the tribe, exactly as the anthropology predicts. Under Bush he was the loudest crusader on cable, and his 2004 book title joined terrorism, despotism, and liberalism as the trinity of evil. The war talk wore some universalist clothing, but the engine was tribal: our country, our troops, kill our enemies. When the tribe’s chief changed and Trump turned the movement against the wars, Hannity adjusted without visible strain, kept the hawkishness where the tribe kept it, on Iran, and dropped it where the tribe dropped it. The doctrine moved. The constant was membership. A man whose positions derive from reason shows friction when the positions reverse. A man whose positions derive from the group shows none, because nothing fundamental changed.
His bond with the audience is membership authority rather than intellectual authority. He tells the dishwasher stories, the bartending, the construction jobs, the college he never finished. He is the audience’s self-image made good: the working-class kid who rose without leaving, who kept the faith of the home. Limbaugh’s listeners looked up at a talent on loan from God. Hannity’s viewers look across at one of their own who got the big chair, and they trust him the way the tribe trusts a member, on the credential of sameness.
His durability delivers the frame’s final lesson. Consider the fates of the stars who built individual brands. Bill O’Reilly, the biggest name in cable, fired. Megyn Kelly (b. 1970), who bet on herself as an individual talent and left for NBC, crashed within a year. Carlson, whose personal brand grew larger than the network, cut in a day. Alan Colmes (1950-2017) is remembered as the liberal foil. Hannity, the least brilliant of all of them by the liberal measure, has held his chair across three decades, every purge, every scandal, every regime change at Fox News, because he never once elevated himself above the group. The individualists rose higher and fell. The loyalist endured. Mearsheimer says embedding in the group has always been the human survival strategy, and reason a lesser instrument. Hannity’s whole career is that sentence with a time slot.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology exposes Fox News at the level of its slogans. Fair and Balanced. We report, you decide. Both assume the liberal man: a rational individual who weighs evidence and forms his own conclusions, with the network as neutral servant of his reason. Mearsheimer says that man barely exists. Reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, behind innate sentiment and socialization, and the deciding was done decades before the viewer ever found the channel. The slogans flatter the liberal self while the product feeds the tribal one, and the gap between slogan and product is the business model.
Look at what the programming does rather than what it claims. It names the group: real Americans, the heartland, the folks. It names the enemies: coastal elites, the mainstream media, Hollywood, the universities, the bureaucrats, the border crossers. It patrols the boundary nightly and reports on threats to the group’s standing and survival. Mearsheimer holds that survival is the prime human motive and that survival has always been social, secured through the group. Fox grasped that the deepest available appeal is not policy but group survival, and its strongest content has always run on extinction anxiety: your country is being taken, your culture erased, your kind replaced. Carlson took that logic to its limit with replacement talk, which is group-survival anthropology broadcast straight, stripped of liberal politeness. The ratings rewarded him because he was speaking to the fear Mearsheimer puts at the bottom of the human stack.
The socialization argument cuts deeper. Mearsheimer says our moral codes are infused in childhood, before the critical faculties mature, by family and surrounding society. Fox’s core audience received its infusion in mid-century America: church, flag, two-parent home, the schoolroom pledge. Then the surrounding society changed its values while the audience’s infusion stayed fixed, as infusions do. Fox does not convert anyone. It curates a world where the old infusion remains valid, honored, and right, and it frames the new dispensation as an alien imposition rather than the same process that formed the viewers themselves. The grievance underneath the channel is that the socializing machinery, the schools, the networks, the studios, the platforms, now infuses different values into the grandchildren.
Which explains the content mix better than any media theory. Run down Fox’s recurring panics: critical race theory in schools, gender ideology in classrooms, campus indoctrination, Disney, drag story hour, library books. Every one is a fight over the socialization of children. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts that the fiercest political conflicts will erupt over the value-infusion machinery, because whoever holds it writes the moral code of the next generation, and adults cannot be argued out of codes installed before argument was possible. Fox is a nightly war report from the socialization front. Its audience cannot win back the universities or the studios, so it watches the battle the way exiles follow news of the old country.
On nationalism the channel sits exactly where Mearsheimer’s ranking puts the human heart. Liberal universalism says rights belong to everyone and borders are administrative. Fox’s content says the nation is the unit that counts: sovereignty, the border, America First, suspicion of the UN and the globalists, contempt for foreign policy run as missionary work. Its cable rivals spoke the universal language, facts first, citizens of the world, and lost the ratings war for a quarter century to a channel that spoke particularism, because particularism matches the anthropology. The audience’s drift on foreign wars completes the picture. The same viewers who cheered Iraq in 2003 turned against liberal hegemony as its costs came home, and Carlson spent his last Fox years making the realist case against the Ukraine project, NATO expansion as provocation, to the largest audience in cable news. Mearsheimer’s arguments about the war circulated through that audience while the liberal networks treated them as heresy. The professor’s foreign policy found its mass constituency on the channel his anthropology explains.
One contradiction runs through the network, and it is Reagan’s contradiction inherited. Fox preaches economic individualism, bootstraps and markets, while practicing tribal politics, and the two never conflict on air because the individualism functions as a tribal marker rather than a philosophy. Celebrating the self-made man is how this tribe sings about itself. The content is liberal vocabulary, the function is group emblem, and nobody in the audience experiences any tension, because nobody is processing it as philosophy.
The Arizona call reads differently through this frame than through Collins. The decision desk acted on the network’s official anthropology: viewers are rational individuals, we report, they decide. The audience responded with its real anthropology: the group’s chief was under attack and the channel had joined the attackers. Loyalty beat accuracy within weeks, measured in ratings, and the network capitulated to the tribe at a cost of $787 million. The liberal theory of its own audience was the most expensive mistake Fox ever made about human nature, and it never made it again.
Fox News took the Randall Collins ritual that talk radio built for the commute and rebuilt it for the hearth. Same theory, different hour, different chamber, and a few inventions radio could not make.
Begin with the founder, because the design was deliberate. Roger Ailes (1940-2017) came out of daytime television and Nixon’s image shop, and he understood that he was not building a news channel. He was building a place viewers lived. The instruction he gave his producers was emotional: make the audience feel defended, make them feel at home. Collins would translate: maximize shared mood, and the information will take care of itself.
Television restores something radio lacked: the face. Collins puts the face near the center of ritual life, since entrainment runs through expression as much as voice. Fox News built its prime time on faces held in close-up for minutes at a time. Bill O’Reilly’s (b. 1949) glower, Sean Hannity (b. 1961) disgust, and above all Tucker Carlson’s (b. 1969) furrowed bafflement, a face that performed the audience’s own incomprehension back at it and invited synchrony. The monologue is the same entrainment engine the radio men used, with the face as a second channel of rhythm. The viewer’s expression follows the host’s. That is bodily co-presence at one remove, and it is stronger than the dashboard voice.
The second invention is on-screen assembly. A radio host is alone with the audience. Fox stages the group itself. Fox & Friends puts three people on a couch at dawn, bantering like family at a kitchen table, and the viewer at his own kitchen table joins the circle as the silent fourth. The Five stages a simulated friend group at the happy-hour slot, with laughter, teasing, and one designated liberal to absorb the group’s corrections. Collins says solidarity requires members to witness each other’s mood. Fox solved the problem of the invisible audience by hiring a visible one and seating it on a couch. The viewer entrains with people he can see entraining with each other.
Then the schedule, which turns a channel into a chain. A story enters in the morning shows at low charge, passes through the afternoon, and arrives at prime time fully loaded, each host recharging the symbol and handing it on. The chyrons compress the day’s outrage into liturgical phrases the regulars can read in a glance and outsiders find half coded. By the time Carlson opened at eight, the audience had been entrained for twelve hours, and the monologue landed on prepared ground. Collins describes ritual chains running through individual lives. Fox runs one through its own broadcast day, inside the building, then out through the country each evening.
The audience side is the hearth. Fox skews old, and its core viewers run it six, eight, ten hours a day, in the living room, the kitchen, the nursing home lounge, the airport bar. For the isolated elderly viewer, the widower alone at four in the afternoon, the channel is the household’s other presence, a continuous supply of focused attention, familiar faces, and shared indignation. Collins says people starved of interaction rituals will take emotional energy from whatever source offers it. Fox is the ambient ritual, always on, and the loneliness of its audience is the foundation of its ratings. The set glows in the corner like the fire it replaced.
The sacred objects are visual now. The flag in the graphics, the gold and blue of the set, the dress code that functions as vestments, the logo in the corner of the screen marking consecrated ground. The calendar fills with seasonal rites, and the War on Christmas is the purest case: an annual festival of righteous anger, returning each December like a feast day, in which the group rehearses its persecution and its solidarity on schedule. Collins notes that ritual life organizes itself into calendars. Fox built one. Election night sits at the top of it, the high holy day, the longest assembly, the night the whole tribe watches together.
Which is why the Arizona call of November 3, 2020 was a catastrophe of a kind the frame predicts. The decision desk, acting on the liberal premise that a news channel reports outcomes, called the state for Biden in the middle of the high rite. The audience experienced it as profanation at the altar, the priests desecrating the sacred object on the holiest night. Within weeks, viewers defected to Newsmax in the hundreds of thousands, not because Newsmax had better information, but because it offered the unbroken ritual. The Dominion discovery later showed the aftermath from inside: hosts and executives texting their private disbelief in the fraud claims while broadcasting accommodation of them, terrified of the audience. Collins explains what the texts show. The congregation disciplines the priests. A ritual that has run long enough belongs to its members, and the celebrants keep the rite or lose the church. Fox chose the rite, and the choice cost it $787 million, which the network paid as the price of solidarity.
Donald Trump (b. 1946) fits the frame as the rival sacred object. For years Fox charged him nightly, and a symbol charged by that much ritual attention accumulates more energy than the apparatus that charged it. By 2020 the audience’s loyalty ran to the symbol over the church, and when the two split, the members followed the symbol. Networks can build sacred objects. They cannot repossess them.
The hosts, last, are Collins’s energy stars at maximum wattage. An hour of prime time with three million entrained viewers is the richest EE position American media offers, and the men who hold it behave like men who cannot give it up: the contract wars, the post-firing podcasts and streaming ventures, O’Reilly and Carlson reconstructing smaller altars rather than accept silence. Ailes himself kept the monitor wall running at home. Whoever stands at the focus takes the largest charge, and withdrawal is the one outcome none of them chose freely.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains talk radio better than any media theory does, because the format only makes sense once you drop the liberal picture of the listener.
Take the liberal picture first. Talk radio presents itself as the public sphere in miniature. Open lines, every citizen a voice, opinions tested in debate, the individual exercising reason. That is the founding myth of the format, and almost nothing about the practice matches it. Callers are screened. The host dominates every exchange. Nobody changes his mind, ever, and the audience does not tune in to have its mind changed. It tunes in for three hours a day, five days a week, for decades, which is not the behavior of a rational actor sampling arguments. It is the behavior of a member attending his group.
Mearsheimer says reason is the weakest of the three sources of our preferences, behind innate sentiment and socialization, and that socialization works through long, repeated, protected exposure. Talk radio is adult socialization on exactly that model. The daily three-hour block does for grown men what childhood does in Mearsheimer’s account: it infuses values through repetition inside a trusted relationship, while the critical faculties rest. The host does not persuade. He maintains. He tells the tribe each morning who we are, who they are, and what happened overnight in the war between us.
Talk radio’s core audience has always been the socially stranded: the truck driver alone in his cab, the shift worker, the widow in her kitchen, the small businessman who answers to no one and talks to no one. Mearsheimer holds that humans need group membership to survive and will seek it wherever it can be found. Talk radio sells belonging to atomized people. The voice in the dashboard is a companion, the regular callers are familiar faces, the enemies are shared. Liberal society produces the atomization, and talk radio sells the cure. The format is a compensation racket built on the social nature liberalism ignores.
Several hosts ran their shows on something close to Mearsheimer’s anthropology. Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021). His audience named the proof. Dittoheads. The term concedes everything: agreement precedes argument, loyalty precedes reason, the caller phones in to affirm membership rather than to deliberate. Limbaugh understood this and said so in his own way. He described his job as validating what his audience already knew and giving them confidence to say it. That is morale work for a tribe under pressure, and he fused it with nationalism, the flag, the EIB Network as a country within the country. Restaurants set aside Rush Rooms so members could listen together. No one ever set aside a room for a podcast of arguments. Alan Jones built the same structure in Sydney with a harder edge of command. His phrase was pick and stick: choose your people and never waver, a loyalty ethic with no liberal content at all. Jones ran his audience as a chief runs a tribe, distributing favors, organizing letter campaigns, punishing politicians who crossed him, and the politicians feared him because they knew the audience moved as a bloc. A bloc is a group acting on attachment. Liberal theory has no name for what Jones commanded. Mearsheimer does. John Laws (1935-2025). When the cash-for-comment scandal broke in 1999, Laws defended himself by saying he was an entertainer, not a journalist, and owed nobody the disinterest that journalism’s liberal norms require. The regulators and the broadsheets were scandalized. His audience mostly was not, and it stayed. The liberal institutions assumed the bond between host and listener ran on disclosure, accuracy, and the norms of the rational public sphere. It ran on the voice, thirty years of familiarity, and paternal authority. The scandal measured the gap between liberal norms and tribal psychology, and the tribe’s verdict differed from the institutions’ verdict because the two run on different anthropologies. Paul Harvey (1918-2009). Hello, Americans. The greeting itself addressed a national family, and his whole career was value re-infusion: small towns, work, church, the decent middle of the country told daily that its inherited code was right. Harvey never argued. He confirmed.
The counterexample seals it. Air America launched in 2004 as the liberal answer to right-wing talk and died within six years. Market structure explains part of the failure, but Mearsheimer’s frame explains the rest. Progressive politics in that era spoke the universalist language of rights and humanity, and universalism cannot bind a tribe, because a tribe needs a boundary and universalism dissolves boundaries by design. Right-wing talk spoke nationalism, the strongest group ideology Mearsheimer knows. One side offered arguments to individuals. The other offered membership to social beings. The format rewarded the side whose anthropology was true.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws the line between two ways of having a self. The porous self of the enchanted world is open: spirits, voices, blessings, and curses cross its boundary, and meaning lives in things outside the mind, which can enter and take hold. The buffered self of modernity is sealed: meanings live inside, the world outside is neutral, and the self engages it at a distance, by choice. Taylor says we moderns are buffered. Talk radio is the evidence that the buffering is thinner than the theory.
Start with the medium. Radio has no screen and no page, nothing to hold at arm’s length. The voice arrives inside the skull, in the earbud, in the sealed cab of the truck, in the kitchen at dawn. Print addresses a reader who sits apart from the text and works on it. Radio enters. The listener does not decode the host; he hosts him. Every other medium asks for attention. Radio asks for admission, and the listener grants it, hours a day, for decades. That act of letting a voice in past the boundary is porosity, performed daily in the most disenchanted suburbs on earth.
Watch what duration does. After enough years, the host’s voice colonizes the listener’s inner speech. Listeners quote the host’s phrases as their own, hear his cadence when they read the news, anticipate what he will say about an event before he says it. The buffered self maintains a wall between my thoughts and the thoughts of others. Long listening dissolves the wall. The host’s mind and the listener’s mind interpenetrate, and the listener cannot say anymore where one stops. Possession is too strong a word by a degree, but only by a degree, and the older language would not have hesitated.
Now the content. Taylor says disenchantment drained the world of personal agency: things happen through impersonal systems, markets, statistics, viruses, rates. The buffered self lives in that flat causal weather and finds it cold. Talk radio re-enchants the cosmos in secular dress. On talk radio, nothing happens through impersonal process. Everything happens because someone did it. They wrecked the economy. They opened the border. They are coming for your way of life. The host narrates a world of agents, intentions, malice, and protection, which is the structure of the enchanted cosmos with demons swapped for elites. The listener under threat from personal forces is a porous self again, vulnerable to powers outside him, and the format keeps him in that state because the state is the product.
The host stands in the old role of the one who manages the boundary. Priests and cunning men once mediated between the porous self and the forces that pressed on it, naming the threat, prescribing the response, offering protection. The talk host does the same office. He names the danger each morning, tells the listener what it means and what to feel, marks the births and deaths of the audience, reads out the names of the sick. Alan Jones ran his program as a parish. John Laws, the Golden Tonsils, was called the voice of God for fifty years, and the joke was only half a joke; the voice carried an authority that no argument in it could account for. The authority was in the presence, which is where enchanted authority always lived.
The caller’s experience confirms it. Long-time listener, first-time caller, and the voice shakes. Why does it shake? On the buffered account, a citizen is phoning a media program to contribute an opinion, and there is nothing to tremble at. The trembling makes sense only if the caller is approaching a presence, entering a charged space where a power can bless him with airtime and agreement or banish him with the cut of a line. People do not tremble before content. They tremble before powers.
Liveness completes the structure. A podcast is buffered media: chosen, paused, skipped, consumed on the self’s own terms, the listener sovereign. Live radio is a flow the listener submits to in real time. It happens to him. He cannot stop the voice, only leave it, and he does not leave it. Submission to a continuous presence beyond your control is the porous posture, and the dial position never changes.
The purest case is night radio. Art Bell (1945-2018) broadcast Coast to Coast AM from a trailer in the Nevada desert to millions of people alone in the dark, and the content was the old enchanted world without disguise: ghosts, possession, visitations, voices from elsewhere. The biggest overnight audience in American radio belonged to a program that treated the porous cosmos as fact. The buffered self was supposed to have outgrown all that. At 2 a.m., alone, with a voice coming out of the dark, the listener discovered he had not.
Taylor gives the reason the whole format works. Buffering bought the modern self invulnerability and paid for it with flatness, the malaise of a world where nothing outside you can touch you and nothing outside you means anything. Talk radio sells the cure for flatness. It offers a daily cosmos where things mean, enemies threaten, a familiar power speaks to you by name, and you are open to all of it. The listener drives to work enchanted. He would never put it that way. He just says he likes the company.
Randall Collins (b. 1941) says rituals need four ingredients: bodies assembled in one place, a barrier against outsiders, a shared focus of attention, and a common mood. Run those through each other and you get the outputs: group solidarity, emotional energy in the individual, sacred symbols, and righteous anger against whoever profanes them. People then chain from ritual to ritual, seeking the energy charge, and a life is the chain. Collins doubts that media can do this at full strength, because the bodies are missing. Talk radio is the great test of that doubt, because it engineered around the missing ingredient and built the strongest ritual chain in broadcasting.
Start with shared focus, the ingredient radio does best. At 9 a.m. the host begins, and hundreds of thousands of people attend to one voice at one moment. Liveness does the work here. A podcast is consumed alone, on the listener’s schedule, and no one knows who else is listening or when. Live radio synchronizes attention across a city or a country, and the host labors to make the audience visible to itself: the folks, you out there, the calls read out, the texts read out, the town named with each caller. Frank from Penrith. Every named caller proves to every silent listener that the assembly exists and he is in it. The bodies are absent. The mutual awareness is not.
Then mood. Collins says rituals run on rhythmic entrainment: voices and gestures falling into a shared beat until the feeling becomes collective. The monologue is an entrainment engine. The host opens with the day’s outrage, builds it through repetition and escalation, and the audience’s pulse follows. Limbaugh’s pacing was a precision instrument. Jones escalated like a man climbing stairs. And the audience invented its own entrainment device: ditto. The word compressed the affirmation so the rhythm never broke. A caller who restated the argument in his own words would have slowed the beat. Ditto kept time. The dittohead was a man announcing that he was synchronized.
The barrier against outsiders is the insider code. Feminazis, the drive-by media, Struggle Street, the running jokes, the villain lexicon, the nicknames that take years to learn. Tune in cold and the show is half unintelligible, which is the point. Mastery of the code marks membership, and the daily broadcast extends the code faster than outsiders can learn it.
Now the outputs. The first sacred object is the host. Collins says the focus of a successful ritual becomes charged, a symbol of the group to itself, and the charge needs periodic renewal. Three hours a day is the renewal schedule. Around the host, lesser sacred objects accumulate: the golden microphone, which Laws possessed in literal gold, the EIB Network, the catchphrases that members exchange like tokens. And sacrilege produces what Collins predicts. When sponsors boycotted Limbaugh or regulators came for Jones, the audience experienced it as profanation and responded with righteous fury, flooding stations and advertisers. Punishing the profaner is itself a solidarity ritual, and a host under attack often emerged with a tighter tribe than before.
Emotional energy explains the listening itself. Collins says individuals leave good rituals charged with confidence and enthusiasm, and they organize their lives to get back to the source. The talk listener drives away from the show pumped, certain, ready to argue at the lunch table, and the charge drains by evening, and tomorrow at nine the source resumes. The schedule is an EE subscription, timed to the commute, with the car as the ritual chamber. The listener then recirculates the charged symbols, quoting the host at work, and each quotation is a micro-ritual that links him to other members and back to the chain.
The call-in segment is the ritual at maximum intensity. The first-time caller’s trembling voice, which Taylor’s frame read one way, reads in Collins as the physiology of high-stakes ritual entry: the member steps from the congregation to the altar. A successful call synchronizes with the host’s rhythm, receives his blessing, and delivers an energy payoff the caller will remember for years. A dissenting caller serves another function. The host crushes him, the group’s anger fires in unison, solidarity spikes, and the line goes dead. The format needs occasional heretics the way the ritual needs occasional sacrifices, and screeners admit a few for exactly that use.
Collins also explains the hosts. Emotional energy stratifies: whoever stands at the focus of a successful ritual harvests the largest charge, and becomes an energy star who needs the ritual more than anyone. This is why the great hosts never stop. Laws broadcast past eighty, retired, and returned, because retirement was withdrawal from the richest EE source he knew. Jones fought to stay at the microphone long after the money meant nothing. Three hours of focused attention from a million people, daily, for decades, produces men who are radiant on air and reportedly diminished off it. The chain holds the host hardest of all.
Two confirmations from the edges. First, the secondary rituals: Rush Rooms, listener cruises, station family days. The audience kept converting the mediated ritual back into bodily assembly, recharging at full Collins strength what the airwaves could only sustain at partial strength. The members themselves sensed what the medium lacked and supplied it. Second, the failures: balanced panel formats, point-counterpoint shows, the respectable forums that program directors love and listeners abandon. Balance prevents a shared mood by design, and without shared mood there is no entrainment, no solidarity, no charge, no chain. The audience was never seeking information. It was seeking the ritual, and it can tell within minutes which stations hold one.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) gives Mearsheimer an even sharper test case than Reagan, because she said the anti-Mearsheimer thesis out loud. “There is no such thing as society,” she told Woman’s Own in 1987. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” That is liberal atomism stated as flatly as anyone has ever stated it. If Mearsheimer is right, her own career should refute her sentence. It does.
Begin with what made her. The grocer’s shop in Grantham, the Methodist discipline of her father Alfred Roberts (1892-1970), the thrift, the sermons, the civic duty of a provincial alderman’s home. Thatcher did not reason her way to her convictions any more than Reagan did. She received a value infusion in childhood and spent fifty years applying it. The woman who preached that individuals make themselves was herself the most thoroughly socialized politician of her generation, a walking product of one shop on one street in one Lincolnshire town.
Then look at what won her elections. Free-market doctrine never had mass appeal in Britain. The Falklands did. In April 1982 her government was the most unpopular on record, and the war transformed her into the embodiment of the nation. Crowds did not cheer monetarism. They cheered Britain humiliating an enemy and recovering its standing after Suez and the IMF crisis of 1976. Her project sold itself as national restoration: putting the Great back in Great Britain. The individualist economics rode on tribal feeling, which is Mearsheimer’s ranking of nationalism over liberalism in one package.
Her foreign policy splits the same way Reagan’s does. The rhetoric was liberal and Atlanticist, freedom against communism. The practice was balance-of-power realism. She spotted Gorbachev before Washington did and announced in December 1984 that she could do business with him. She opposed German reunification in 1989 and 1990 on naked power grounds, fearing a state that might dominate the continent, and she said so to anyone who listened. No liberal principle supports blocking forty million Germans from self-determination. Realism does.
Europe is the cleanest evidence. The European project is liberalism applied to nations: pool sovereignty, dissolve borders, let rules and markets replace tribal loyalties. Thatcher signed the Single European Act in 1986 for market reasons, then recoiled when she saw where the logic went. The Bruges speech of September 20, 1988 drew the line at the nation-state. When her liberalism and her nationalism collided, nationalism won, exactly as Mearsheimer predicts it must.
The domestic record carries a darker Mearsheimerian lesson. Her economics treated people as the atomistic actors of liberal theory, and where the theory met dense social groups it broke them. The miners’ strike of 1984-85 destroyed not just an industry but the villages built around it, and Mearsheimer’s frame predicts what followed: people stripped of one group attachment seek another. Scotland, hit by deindustrialization and then the poll tax, transferred its loyalty from Britain to Scottish nationalism, and the Tories were nearly extinct there within a decade. The long fuse of resentment her project lit in the deindustrialized north helped detonate Brexit, itself a tribal revolt against liberal integration. Her individualism produced nationalist reactions on every side, because the social nature she denied kept reasserting against her.
Her end completes the argument. The electorate never removed Thatcher. Her tribe did. In November 1990 the Conservative Party, the most ruthless group organism in British politics, judged her a liability over Europe and the poll tax and cut her down through its own internal rituals. The woman who said there were only individuals and families was destroyed by a collective she could not command, and she spent her remaining years wounded by exile from it. She needed the group more than the group needed her.
So Mearsheimer’s frame reads Thatcher as a nationalist who mistook herself for an individualist. The mistake cost her little while the two ran together, in the Falklands and the Cold War. It cost her everything when they diverged, over Europe and within her party. And it cost Britain a measure of social cohesion that her theory said did not exist and her policies proved did.
Thatcher is the buffered self elected to office. Taylor traces the buffered self to the Reformation’s long discipline: the war on magic and sacrament, the relocation of meaning from the world into the conscience, the sealed individual answerable to God and his own will. Methodism carried that discipline into the English provinces, and the grocer’s house in Grantham ran on it. Conscience, thrift, work, self-command, no mystery and no excuse. Thatcher did not merely hold the buffered anthropology. She was its finished product, three centuries of Reform compressed into one woman above a corner shop.
Her creed projected that self onto the whole country. There is no such thing as society means: there are no porous selves. There are sealed units of will and responsibility, each generating its own purposes from within, connected by contract and family and nothing else. Her economics assumed that man. Strip away subsidy and shelter, and the buffered individual stands forth, chooses, strives, and prospers. The Sermon on the Mound in May 1988 gave the theology version: salvation is individual choice, the Good Samaritan needed money before he could do good. The Church of England answered with Faith in the City, a porous Christianity of communities and bonds, and she regarded the bishops as fools. The two anthropologies could not hear each other.
In person she seemed sealed to a degree that astonished people. No doubt, no need for approval, four hours of sleep, no visible malaise. The lady’s not for turning is the buffered self’s motto: my meanings are inside, generated from within, and the weather of other minds does not cross my boundary. Ministers came to her with the mood of the party, the mood of the country, and the mood did not enter. She lacked the porous receptors. She could not feel a room, and toward the end she could not feel the nation turning on the poll tax, because feeling a nation requires a permeability she had trained out of herself or never had.
Yet her power over others was porous power. Cabinet ministers, grown men who had governed empires of paper, described being in her presence in the language of possession and fear. The handbagging, the blue gaze, François Mitterrand’s (1916-1996) line about the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe. Charisma is a presence crossing into other selves and acting there, an enchanted phenomenon with no place in her own theory of persons. She wielded on others a force she did not believe existed.
And her politics, when it mattered most, re-enchanted the world. The Falklands turned the nation back into a charged and sacred thing, a presence that claimed lives and demanded rejoicing, and the country answered as porous selves answer a summons. Her rhetoric peopled the cosmos with agents of menace: the enemy within, the Argentine junta, Brussels reimposing the frontiers of the state. Enemy within is demonology, the old enchanted grammar of possession and threat. She preached a disenchanted economy and ran an enchanted politics, and the second carried the first to three election victories.
The deepest collision came in the coalfields. Her theory saw inefficient industries staffed by individuals who could retrain and move, because buffered selves can move; their meanings travel with them, inside. The villages she broke were the last enchanted communities in industrial Britain: the pit, the chapel, the band, the gala, the union banner carried like a relic. The men were porous to those things. The pit was not their employer. It was in them, constitutive, the way the parish was in a medieval villager. When the pits closed, men grieved as for deaths, and then died early themselves in numbers, and her anthropology had no category for the wound. You cannot register the destruction of meanings you believe do not exist outside the head. Arthur Scargill (b. 1938) led an enchanted tribe against a woman who could not see one.
Her end ran the lesson in reverse, twice. First, the fall: the party’s mood gathered for months, porous men like Geoffrey Howe (1926-2015) absorbing the danger and signaling it, and she, sealed, perceived nothing until the votes were counted. The buffered self’s invulnerability had become deafness. Second, the aftermath: the woman whose theory said the self is complete in itself was hollowed out by exile from power, wandering, by every account, in grief for a presence that had left her. Denis, the red boxes, the purpose, the force that had filled her, gone. She turned out to be porous after all, open to one great power her whole life, and when it withdrew it took most of her with it.
So Taylor’s frame reads Thatcher as a woman who governed porous people with a buffered creed, broke their enchanted worlds in the name of a self they did not have, and was broken in turn by forces her philosophy could not admit through the boundary. The creed was wrong about Britain. Its last refutation was her.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s frame turns Reagan inside out. Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) talked like the purest liberal individualist in American politics, and on Mearsheimer’s account that talk was the surface of something else: nationalism wearing liberal clothes.
Start with the rhetoric. The city on a hill, the evil empire, the Westminster speech of June 8, 1982 consigning Marxism-Leninism to the ash heap of history. That language is universalist. Rights belong to everyone, freedom is the natural condition of man, and the Soviet system offends against human nature. Pure political liberalism by Mearsheimer’s definition.
Now look at the practice. Reagan governed in a bipolar world, and Mearsheimer argues that bipolarity disciplines states into realism whether they like it or not. Liberal hegemony only became possible after 1989, when the United States faced no peer. Reagan never had that luxury. So his foreign policy looks like containment with a megaphone. He armed proxies in Afghanistan and Nicaragua rather than sending armies to build democracies. He embraced Jeane Kirkpatrick’s (1926-2006) distinction between authoritarian friends and totalitarian enemies, which is realist alliance logic dressed as moral philosophy. He pulled out of Lebanon in 1984 after the barracks bombing rather than escalate for credibility’s sake. He negotiated with Gorbachev (1931-2022) the moment the balance of power made negotiation profitable. A liberal crusader does not sign the INF Treaty with the head of the evil empire. A realist does.
Reagan preached individualism, but nobody experienced Reaganism as atomism. People experienced it as belonging. Morning in America, the flag, the restored pride after Vietnam and the Carter years. Reagan offered Americans membership in a group with a story, and that is why they loved him. The cowboy individualist is an American tribal myth, a marker of group identity. When Reagan celebrated the lone entrepreneur, his audience heard a hymn to us, the Americans, against them. His individualism functioned as a shibboleth of the tribe.
Reagan’s own biography illustrates Mearsheimer’s claim about socialization beating reason. He did not reason his way to his creed. He absorbed it: the Disciples of Christ piety of his mother in Dixon, Illinois, the small-town Midwest of the 1920s, the Hollywood anticommunism of the Screen Actors Guild fights, the General Electric years touring plants and giving the same speech hundreds of times. By the time Reagan held power his values were decades-old infusions, and he held them with the fixity of a man who never doubted what his group taught him. Reason came later, as decoration.
Reagan succeeded because he fused the two ideologies in the order Mearsheimer says they must be ranked. Nationalism first, liberalism second, with liberalism serving as the vocabulary of the nation rather than a program for the planet. The universalist talk gave Americans a flattering self-image. The realist practice kept the costs down. His successors inverted the order after the Cold War, took the universalist talk as a literal program, and produced the failures Mearsheimer’s book catalogs.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
The Democratic Party comes off worse, because it is the institutional home of the creed Mearsheimer calls a delusion. The GOP contains a faction his theory vindicates. The Democrats are built on the thing he says is false.
Start with the core. Rights universalism is the party’s official religion. Every human being everywhere holds the same inalienable rights, and politics exists to vindicate them. This is the language of the party’s lawyers, its NGOs, its foundations, its foreign policy hands, and its activist base. If Mearsheimer is right, this creed misdescribes the species. People do not experience themselves as bearers of universal rights. They experience themselves as members of particular groups, and the largest group that commands real sacrifice is the nation. A party whose moral vocabulary runs past the nation to humanity asks voters for an allegiance almost no one feels. “Citizen of the world” is, on his premises, a phrase that describes nobody.
Here is the paradox, though. The Democrats preach universalism and practice tribalism. The party’s electoral machine is a coalition of identity groups, each organized around the group attachments Mearsheimer says drive human beings. So the party half-confirms his theory in its daily operations while denying it in its philosophy. The trouble is the level at which the tribalism operates. The Democratic coalition mobilizes tribes below the nation: racial groups, gender categories, sexual identities. The Republican coalition increasingly mobilizes the nation as the tribe. If Mearsheimer is right that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, the party that organizes sub-national tribes against a party that claims the national tribe has chosen the weaker position. Ceding the flag is ceding the strongest force in politics.
The coalition structure produces its own pathologies under his premises. A party of many tribes without a tribe above them must pay each member group constantly, in policy, in language, in vetoes over the platform. Each group polices its boundary, because that is what tribes do. Hence the purity spirals, the acronym politics, the inability to tell any constituent group no. A single-tribe party disciplines itself around the leader. A many-tribe party negotiates itself into paralysis.
The professional-class wing fares no better. The educated stratum that now dominates the party believes in reason as the route to political truth: explain the policy, check the facts, correct the misinformation, and voters will update. This is the anthropology Mearsheimer ranks last. If socialization and innate sentiment beat reason as sources of belief, then explainer journalism, fact-checking operations, and the whole technocratic style convert almost no one. The misinformation framing rests on the assumption that wrong beliefs come from bad information, when on his account they come from group attachment, and no correction touches them. Thomas Frank (b. 1965) asked what was the matter with Kansas, why voters there ignored their material interests. Mearsheimer’s answer is that nothing was the matter. Voters vote their tribe. The Democrats keep offering material benefits to working-class voters, the rational-actor appeal, and keep watching those voters, White and increasingly Hispanic and Black, drift toward the party that offers belonging instead. Benefits do not buy loyalty. Membership does.
Immigration is where the creed costs most. The universalist logic runs straight to the activist positions: no human is illegal, asylum is a human right, enforcement is violence. The national tribe’s boundary instinct runs the other way, and on Mearsheimer’s account that instinct sits deeper than any argument. The party’s immigration politics since 2013 reads as a long experiment in testing his theory, with the results he predicts.
Foreign policy implicates the Democrats as much as the neocons. Liberal hegemony was a bipartisan project, and its Democratic version, humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, the rules-based international order, flows from the same universalism. Libya was a Democratic war. If Mearsheimer is right, the Clinton-Obama-Biden tradition of foreign policy fails for the same reason the Bush tradition failed: you cannot install a creed in a society whose members were socialized into something else. The antiwar left, long the party’s embarrassing uncle, holds the position his theory endorses, which mirrors the GOP’s situation, where the restrainers were the embarrassing uncles until recently.
Now the other side of the ledger, because his premises also reveal the Democrats’ great hidden asset. If socialization beats reason, the side that controls the institutions of childhood and young adulthood wins the long game regardless of elections. Progressives hold the schools, the universities, the entertainment industry, the HR departments. They perform the value infusion on each cohort before its critical faculties mature. Young Americans lean left not because the arguments persuaded them but because the institutions formed them, which is exactly how Mearsheimer says moral codes get made. On his premises this is worth more than any presidency. It also explains why the Republican assault on those institutions, school choice, homeschooling, the university funding fights, is rational rather than paranoid. Both sides now act as if Mearsheimer is right about where beliefs come from.
One more implication, about religion. The Democrats became the secular party as their constituencies stopped going to church, and on Mearsheimer’s account that removed a deep source of solidarity and moral formation. What filled the space looks like a substitute creed: sacred values, blasphemy norms, conversion narratives, excommunications. This confirms his anthropology, humans will have a tribe and a sacred order whether or not they call it religion. But the substitute is the creed of a class, formed in universities and fluent only there. It cannot scale to a nation, and it alienates the voters whose formation happened elsewhere.
The path his theory suggests is the one the party keeps finding and losing. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) fused liberal policy to national solidarity and won five consecutive presidential cycles for his party. Barack Obama (b. 1961) ran in 2008 on one America, no red states and blue states, the national tribe, and won bigger than any Democrat since. The party wins when it claims the nation and loses when it speaks past it, upward to humanity or downward to the demographic coalition. If Mearsheimer is right, the Democrats’ problem is not their policies, which often poll well. It is that they built a church on the doctrine that congregations do not exist. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws the line in A Secular Age between two ways of having a self. The porous self of the enchanted world stands open to forces outside it. Spirits, curses, blessings, relics, and words can get in and do things to you. Meaning lives in the world, not just in minds. The buffered self of modernity closes that boundary. Meaning retreats inside the head, the world becomes a neutral system of objects, and the self gains invulnerability at the price of what Taylor calls the malaise of immanence, the flatness of a disenchanted world. Run the Democratic Party through this distinction and the party splits open along a line nobody in it can name.
The party’s commanding heights belong to the most buffered population ever assembled. The professional class that staffs the campaigns, the foundations, the agencies, and the newsrooms lives the buffered life in full: secular, credentialed, therapeutic, managerial. Its political style follows from its self-structure. Policy is social engineering. Problems are technical. The world is a system to administer, and the administrator stands outside what he administers, disengaged, running the numbers. Trust the science. Read the explainer. The wonk is the buffered self doing politics, and the party’s chronic production of candidates who read as managers rather than leaders comes from a class that trained itself out of the registers in which leadership is felt rather than evaluated.
But the party’s base was never buffered. The Black church is a porous institution. Grace moves through bodies there, the Spirit descends, the dead are present, and a sermon is an event in the world rather than a transfer of information. Hispanic Catholicism keeps its saints, its candles, its processions. Immigrant communities carry enchanted worlds with them. For most of the twentieth century the Democratic coalition ran on this porousness. The civil rights movement was a porous event. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) spoke of souls, redemption, and the beloved community, and the language did work because his hearers had selves that language of that kind could enter. The party’s moral music came from its porous wing. As the leadership class secularized, the party kept the songbook and lost the voice. Obama could still cross the line, singing Amazing Grace in Charleston, preaching eulogy as a participant rather than an observer. Hillary Clinton (b. 1947) could not, and the difference between those two politicians is in large part the difference between a man who could enter the porous register and a woman locked in the buffered one.
Now the strange part. Taylor predicts the buffered self will not rest easy. The closed boundary produces flatness, and the flatness produces a hunger for re-enchantment. Look at the party’s activist wing through this lens and you find the porous self reborn inside the secular world. Words wound there. A slur is not information about the speaker but a force that enters and damages the hearer, which is porous anthropology to the letter, meaning located in the word as a power rather than in the mind as an interpretation. Safe spaces are anti-contagion architecture. Trauma discourse describes a self that external events colonize and inhabit. Whiteness functions as a possessing force that operates through people without their intent, and implicit bias names a spirit you carry unknowing, while “doing the work” is the exorcism. Systemic racism, in its strongest formulations, has the structure of an enchanted force: invisible, omnipresent, acting at a distance, working through hosts. None of this is meant as mockery. It confirms Taylor. Strip a population of God, saints, and sacraments, and the porous structure does not vanish. It returns wearing secular clothes, with sacred victims in place of saints, privilege confessions in place of the confessional, and cancellation in place of excommunication.
So the party holds a contradiction it cannot see. Its official epistemology is buffered: facts, data, expertise, the disenchanted universe of the explainer. Its activist practice is porous: contamination, purity, possession, words as forces. The same young staffer who mocks religious voters for believing words can be blasphemous will file an HR complaint describing speech as violence, and no one in the building notices the two anthropologies at war in one person. Taylor calls this cross-pressure, the buffered self haunted by what it buffered out, and the Democratic Party may be the most cross-pressured institution in American life.
The electoral costs run in two directions. Toward the religious, the buffered leadership cannot hear porous claims as anything but irrational preference. A religious-liberty claim sounds like a policy demand rather than what it is, a report from people for whom the sacred is real and violable. The party’s tone-deafness toward the devout, including the devout inside its own coalition, is a translation failure between self-structures. Toward the unchurched young, the party becomes the accidental supplier of enchantment. Politics turns into the only available source of the sacred, which produces activists who need politics to deliver meaning, belonging, and salvation, loads on the system it was never built to carry. A buffered politics of administration cannot feed them, so they radicalize toward the porous politics of purity and contamination, and the party’s internal wars follow.
Mass politics itself is a porous experience. The rally, the flag, the martyr, the anthem, solidarity felt in a crowd, these work on selves to the degree the boundary opens. A party run by buffered selves distrusts all of it as manipulation, kitsch, or danger, and so it cedes the enchanted register of national life to its opponents while wondering why its superior policy papers do not move anyone. The Democrats’ nostalgia for the civil rights era is nostalgia for the last moment the party spoke as a porous institution and the country felt it. The songbook is still on the shelf. The question Taylor leaves is whether a leadership class formed by disenchantment can ever sing from it again, or whether it can only cite it.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right about human nature, the Republican Party’s internal fights stop looking like arguments over policy and start looking like a contest between a faction built on a false anthropology and a faction built on a true one.
Start with fusionism. The Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, traditional values, and anticommunism rested on the individualist picture Mearsheimer rejects. Its economic wing treated the voter as a rational actor who responds to incentives, calculates his tax burden, and wants government out of the way so he can flourish alone. Paul Ryan (b. 1970) was the purest expression of this. He offered entitlement reform, dynamic scoring, and opportunity-society rhetoric to an electorate that, on Mearsheimer’s account, never wanted any of it, because people do not experience themselves as atomistic actors maximizing utility. They experience themselves as members of groups under threat or in decline. The base’s indifference to the donor-class agenda, visible since at least 2012 and undeniable after 2016, follows from his premises. Libertarianism within the GOP becomes a doctrine for the small minority of men whose temperament lets them feel like lone wolves, funded by a donor class whose interests it serves, and structurally incapable of winning mass loyalty.
The faction Mearsheimer’s anthropology vindicates is national conservatism. Donald Trump (b. 1946) grasped by instinct what Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), and JD Vance (b. 1984) argue in books: the nation is the largest tribe that works. Mearsheimer says in The Great Delusion that when nationalism and liberalism collide, nationalism almost always wins. If so, the populist turn is a correction toward reality, and the party’s older establishment was the delusion. Immigration becomes the central issue under this reading because it concerns the boundary of the group, and boundary questions arouse the deepest sentiments humans have. The establishment treated immigration as an economic question with a clear answer. The base treated it as a question about who we are. Mearsheimer’s premises say the base had the better grasp of what politics is.
His argument cuts hardest on foreign policy, which is the book’s subject. If rights universalism is a philosophical error, then the democracy-promotion wing, the Bush-Cheney-Bolton lineage, was committed to a project that might never have worked: remaking tribal societies in the image of a creed their members never internalized. Afghanistan and Iraq become predictable failures rather than execution problems. The restraint wing of the party, which barely existed in 2003 and now contests for dominance, holds the position his theory endorses. Sovereignty replaces human rights as the organizing vocabulary. The fight between Vance and the remaining Reaganite internationalists over Ukraine is, on these premises, a fight the restrainers should win and probably will.
The religious right gets an unexpected vindication too, though on secular grounds. If socialization beats reason as the source of moral preferences, then whoever controls the institutions of childhood controls the moral future. The school-board fights, the curriculum wars, the battles over what a seven-year-old hears about sex and country and God stop looking like culture-war theater and start looking like the most consequential politics there is. Mearsheimer’s account implies that conservatives who spent decades fighting over marginal tax rates while progressives captured education made a catastrophic allocation of effort. The value infusion happens before the reasoning faculties mature. The side that performs the infusion wins, a generation later, regardless of who wins the arguments.
For practices, the implications are uncomfortable for anyone who likes deliberative politics. If reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, persuasion through argument converts almost no one. Mobilization beats persuasion. Loyalty signals beat white papers. The rally, the flag, the enemy, the grievance, these work because they engage the tribal endowment. Trump’s style is, on this reading, a more accurate political technology than the think-tank style it displaced. The party’s drift toward loyalty tests and primary purges follows the same logic: tribes police defection because defection threatens survival, and a party that behaves like a tribe will punish heretics more harshly than incompetents.
Governance is where it gets dangerous, and where Mearsheimer himself might caution the GOP against over-reading him. He is no postliberal at home. His argument for liberalism is that people will never agree on first principles, that such disagreements turn lethal, and that liberal tolerance is a survival arrangement, a modus vivendi rather than a truth. A Republican Party that takes his anthropology as license for full tribal rule misreads him. The same premises that explain why nationalism beats liberalism abroad explain why a continental, multiethnic nation needs liberal institutions at home to keep its internal tribes from each other’s throats. The constructive project his theory implies is a thick civic nationalism: build a shared American identity strong enough to function as the tribe, so the smaller tribes within it do not tear the place apart. The destructive temptation his theory also explains is majority-group identity politics, which treats one tribe within the nation as the nation. The first might hold a diverse country together. The second guarantees the conflict it claims to prevent.
So the picture: the donor wing holds the money and a refuted anthropology. The populist wing holds the voters and the correct one, but flirts with conclusions Mearsheimer rejects. The party’s unresolved condition, populists winning the symbolic fights while donors win the legislative ones, persists because the coalition contains both the truth about human nature and the interests that profit from denying it. If Mearsheimer is right, that arrangement is unstable, and the populists hold the high ground, because they are working with the grain of the species.
The Democrats are a buffered leadership sitting on a porous base it can no longer hear. The Republicans are a porous base that captured the party and drove the buffered leadership out.
Start with where the enchanted world survived in America. It survived on the right. Evangelical and charismatic Christianity never accepted the buffer. In the Pentecostal and charismatic churches that supply the party’s most committed voters, demons are real and active, prayer changes outcomes, prophecy continues, healing flows through hands, and spiritual warfare is a daily fact. The devil is an agent with plans. This is the porous self in full, not a remnant of it, and it constitutes the largest enchanted population in the developed world. The Republican coalition is built on top of it.
For decades the party paired this porous base with a buffered command structure. Fusionism, seen through Taylor, was an alliance of self-structures as much as ideologies: buffered money and porous believers. The Chamber of Commerce wing, the libertarian economists, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney (b. 1947) and the Ryan budget wonks, these were buffered men running a disenchanted politics of incentives and growth charts, while the enchanted base supplied votes and moral energy. The arrangement held as long as the buffered wing delivered respect along with judicial appointments. It stopped holding when the base noticed the respect was absent. What followed was the porous capture of the party.
Trump is the porous phenomenon par excellence, and Taylor explains him better than most political science does. Begin with his formation. His family church was Norman Vincent Peale’s (1898-1993), and positive thinking is a porous doctrine: words are forces that shape reality, speech acts on the world rather than describing it. Trump talks the way a man talks when he believes saying it makes it so. The fact-checkers spent a decade treating his statements as failed propositions, buffered selves grading an enchanted speaker, and they never touched him because his audience does not receive his words as propositions either. They receive them as acts, blessings and curses, loyalty and war. The rallies are enchanted events, closer to revival than to speech, where presence does the work and the crowd comes to feel a force rather than evaluate an argument. The MAGA hat functions as a talisman. The prophecy movement declared him a Cyrus, an anointed pagan instrument of God, and Paula White (b. 1966) stood in the White House calling on angels from Africa and South America. None of this embarrasses the base, because none of it is foreign to the porous self.
Conspiracy belongs in the same analysis. QAnon is a porous cosmology: hidden powers behind appearances, a cosmic war of good and evil, coming judgment, secret knowledge for the initiated. The Deep State is demonology for the administrative age. Where the buffered self sees institutions, procedures, and incompetence, the porous self sees powers and principalities, and the porous reading generates loyalty and martyrdom in a way no institutional analysis can. The COVID wars ran along the same line. To the buffered self, the vaccine is a technical object entering a body that is a system. To the porous self, the needle is the state crossing the boundary into the flesh, contamination by an alien power, and the resistance was felt at the level of self-structure before any argument arrived.
The buffered conservatives know they lost. George Will (b. 1941), the disenchanted Tory atheist, left the party. The Burke-and-Buckley style, argument, citation, the well-made essay, gave way to prophecy and rally. The remaining buffered men in the coalition, the tax-cut donors and the Federalist Society lawyers, now operate the way the Democratic porous wing operates in its party, as a tolerated minority that supplies something the dominant self-structure needs, in this case money and judicial craft, while the energy comes from elsewhere.
Taylor’s malaise of immanence shows up on the right in its own form, and here the party has an advantage it barely understands. The young men adrift in the disenchanted world, the audience that found Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) and kept going, hunger for exactly what the buffered order cannot supply: weight, meaning, a cosmos with stakes. The right offers re-enchantment without apology. Trad Catholicism, Orthodox conversion, the online vitalists and neo-pagans, the gym-and-God circuit, all of it sells thickness of being to selves starving on immanence. The left supplies re-enchantment too, but disguised, embarrassed, smuggled in as politics. The right sells it under its own name, and in a market of starving selves the open seller wins.
Now the costs, which are severe. Governance is buffered work. Regulations get drafted, budgets scored, agencies run, by disengaged reason operating on systems. A party whose energy is porous and whose governing requires buffered skills produces what we have watched it produce: administrations at war with their own technical staff, prophecy where planning should be, loyalty tests applied to jobs that need competence. The porous self also makes a magnificent market for grifters. An audience that receives words as forces and leaders as anointed will buy the supplements, the gold coins, the miracle cures, and the legal defense funds, and the right’s media economy has become in part a machine for harvesting enchanted trust. And porous politics has no internal brake. The buffered self can be argued out of a position. The possessed cannot, and a party that runs on enchantment cannot easily call its own demons off.
Step back and the two parties form a single picture. The selves are sorting. The buffered are consolidating in one party, the porous in the other, and each party keeps a shrinking minority of the opposite type, Black churchgoers among the Democrats, country-club rationalists among the Republicans. American polarization, read through Taylor, is not two ideologies fighting over policy. It is two self-structures that no longer share a world, one living among objects and the other among powers, each finding the other not wrong but unintelligible. The Republicans hold the deeper reservoir of what mass politics runs on. The Democrats hold the machinery of the disenchanted state. Neither can do what the other does, and the country requires both.
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Michelle Goldberg (b. 1975) is an American journalist, author, and political commentator whose work examines the intersection of religion, sex, ideology, and political power. Since 2017 she has written an opinion column for The New York Times, where she is a favorite of the left and ignored by the right. Across a career spanning magazines, newspapers, books, podcasts, and television, Goldberg has chronicled the rise of Christian nationalism, the conflicts over reproductive rights, the evolution of contemporary feminism, and the ideological struggles reshaping both the American right and the American left.
Goldberg was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a Jewish family steeped in journalism. Her father, Gerald Goldberg, served as managing editor of The Buffalo News. Her mother taught mathematics at a community college. She resisted following her father into the trade at first, but journalism surrounded her from childhood, and the resistance did not hold. Her political consciousness formed early. At thirteen she accompanied a pregnant thirteen-year-old friend to an abortion clinic, an experience she later described as formative. In high school she defended abortion clinics during a period of intense anti-abortion protest. These experiences fixed a lifelong concern with reproductive rights and women’s autonomy at the center of her work.
A precocious student, Goldberg attended SUNY Purchase at sixteen before transferring to the University at Buffalo. She earned a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she developed the reporting habits that defined her later career.
She entered journalism during the early years of digital media. After working for alternative newspapers in California, she joined Salon in 2002. There she reported on the growing political influence of conservative Christianity, the religious right, and the battles over reproductive freedom. She combined traditional reporting with cultural and political analysis, and she developed a style that sought to explain how ideas become movements and how movements reshape institutions.
Her breakthrough came with Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006). Built on extensive reporting among evangelical activists, pastors, political organizers, and conservative intellectuals, the book argued that Christian nationalism had become a major force in American politics. It appeared years before the movement entered mainstream political discourse, and it established Goldberg as an early and influential chronicler of the phenomenon. The book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2007 and remains a foundational journalistic account of the modern religious right.
Goldberg followed with The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (2009), a global investigation of reproductive rights and women’s status. The book rested on reporting trips to India, Egypt, Kenya, and Nicaragua. Goldberg examined how policies such as the American global gag rule affected clinics and women’s health services abroad, and how struggles over contraception and abortion reflected larger battles over political authority. In Nicaragua she documented the consequences of a total abortion ban and the efforts of feminist activists to challenge the alliance between political leaders and religious institutions. The book widened her focus from American politics to international questions of gender, religion, and development. Its argument: control over reproduction remains a central instrument through which societies exercise power.
During the following decade Goldberg became a leading progressive magazine writer. She served as a senior contributing writer for The Nation and wrote for Slate, The Daily Beast, and The American Prospect. Her reporting and commentary turned with growing frequency to populism, nationalism, feminism, immigration, and the changing character of liberal democracy.
In 2015 she published The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, a biography of Indra Devi (1899-2002). The book traced how yoga moved from India into mainstream Western culture and explored larger questions about spirituality, globalization, and the culture of self-improvement. It departed from her political books in subject, yet it extended her abiding interest in how belief systems migrate across societies and change over time.
Themes from The Goddess Pose resurfaced in her journalism years later. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldberg became a notable commentator on the relationship between wellness culture, alternative spirituality, anti-vaccine activism, and right-wing conspiracy movements. She argued that communities organized around health, self-discovery, and personal empowerment had become vulnerable to misinformation and political radicalization, a phenomenon often called “conspirituality.”
Goldberg joined the Times opinion section in 2017. Her first column, “Tyranny of the Minority,” appeared on September 25 of that year. The move marked a transition from the world of progressive magazines to the most influential newspaper opinion platform in the United States. From 2018 through 2021 she co-hosted the Times podcast The Argument, where she debated colleagues from across the ideological spectrum, including frequent exchanges with fellow columnist Ross Douthat (b. 1979). The podcast became an important forum for argument about American politics, culture, and public policy during the Trump years.
Her tenure at the Times has coincided with an era of political turbulence. She has written at length about the presidency of Donald Trump (b. 1946), democratic backsliding, abortion rights, immigration, political violence, free speech controversies, and the internal conflicts of liberalism. Her columns return again and again to how ideological movements create identities and loyalties that outrun conventional policy debate.
A major theme of her later work traces the evolution of Christian nationalism after Kingdom Coming. During the Trump era she argued that much of the religious right had entered a transactional alliance with Trump, trading traditional moral standards for judicial appointments and political influence. As the decade progressed she examined the fusion of Christian nationalism with populist grievance politics, conspiracy theories, and online movements such as QAnon. Her reporting documented the transformation of a movement once centered on churches and religious organizations into something decentralized and networked through digital channels.
Although firmly identified with progressive politics, Goldberg has criticized the left. During the #MeToo era she raised concerns about the erosion of due process in some high-profile cases and warned against collapsing the distinctions between different kinds of misconduct. She has written against call-out culture, ideological conformity, and the internal policing of progressive institutions. Excessive purity tests, she has argued, weaken political organizations and distract them from larger strategic goals. This willingness to challenge factions within her own coalition makes her a more complicated figure than admirers or critics sometimes allow.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) returned Goldberg to the issue that first drew her into political life. Her post-Dobbs columns documented the practical consequences of abortion bans: legal confusion, medical uncertainty, and widening disparities between states. She framed the decision as more than a legal victory for conservatives. In her account it transformed the status of women as citizens and as patients.
Goldberg has received professional honors throughout her career. She belonged to the Times opinion operation during the period when the newspaper received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on sexual harassment and abuse. She received the Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis in 2020, recognition of her commentary during a period of intense political conflict.
Her influence extends past print. She appears often on cable news, mostly on networks and programs aligned with liberal audiences, and she participates in public debates about politics, religion, feminism, and democracy. The combination of reporting, historical perspective, and ideological analysis has made her among the most recognizable opinion journalists of her generation.
Goldberg lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Matthew Ipcar, and their two children. Her career mirrors the transformation of American journalism over the past quarter century. She emerged from the insurgent world of early online magazines, built her reputation through long-form reporting and books, and arrived at the institutional center of American media at The New York Times.
Whether the subject is Christian nationalism, reproductive rights, yoga culture, populist politics, feminism, wellness movements, or the future of liberal democracy, Goldberg’s central concern remains how belief systems organize human behavior. Her reporting seeks to explain how beliefs become social movements, political coalitions, and durable institutions with the capacity to reshape public life.
I was interviewed by Goldberg in 1999 and 2000 for two articles. She was charm personified. She was magnetic. She was empathic. She was feminine. She was disarming. She sounded like the sexiest woman alive. She made me want to be my best self. She had this quality that made me want to open up. I wanted to talk to her for hours. So did all of my friends (in the Los Angeles sense) who spoke to her. Joan Didion (1934-2021) wrote that her smallness and inarticulateness led people to forget her presence and say things against their own interest. Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) built The Journalist and the Murderer on the claim that every reporter plays a confidence game, presenting as sympathetic, harmless, on your side, until the piece runs. A young woman who giggles and plays harmless while interviewing men holds a strong hand at that game. The subject relaxes, performs, condescends, and talks. The reporter who later writes that the religious right threatens the foundations of the Republic did not sound like that on the phone, though she was honest that her politics were left, but she did it in a way that felt non-threatening. I spoke to her as if she was my best friend in the world. There was nothing underhanded or unethical in her method. I knew she followed good journalistic protocol. She just had a way that relaxed all of us who spoke to her. When Goldberg called, we had all day for her because we enjoyed talking to her. And when we read our quotes in her pieces, we recognized that they were accurate and fair and we enjoyed her lively writing. We had no complaints about our Michelle Goldberg experience.
When she became famous a few years later, it was for polemics, and it was hard to recognize the woman I knew.
Of course, I never “knew” Goldberg. I only encountered her in one role. Upon reflection, some parts of what I heard decades ago translated into her later success — intelligence, empathy, courage, honesty, spontaneity, education, and commitment to her craft.
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, the implications run through every layer of Goldberg’s career, and most of them cut against her.
Start with her subject. Kingdom Coming treats Christian nationalism as an aberration, a fevered radicalism threatening the secular Republic. On Mearsheimer’s account, the Christian nationalists behave as humans behave. They form intense group attachments, derive their moral code from socialization and innate sentiment, sacrifice for fellow members, and seek to order political life around their tribe’s sacred commitments. The dominionist is the default human. The anomaly requiring explanation is the secular liberal universalist who believes a Nicaraguan peasant, a Cairo housewife, and a Brooklyn columnist share an identical set of inherent rights that trump every local solidarity. Goldberg spent twenty years explaining the wrong puzzle. The megachurch needs no explanation. The Times opinion section does.
Second, her own formation. Mearsheimer’s passage on socialization describes Goldberg’s trajectory. She absorbed her moral code in a secular Jewish home where the father edited the local paper. She defended abortion clinics in high school, before her critical faculties matured, exactly the sequence Mearsheimer describes: value infusion first, reasoning second. Berkeley journalism school, the progressive magazines, Cobble Hill. By her own account the clinic visit at thirteen was formative. Mearsheimer might say it was constitutive. The career that followed reads less like a reasoner examining belief and more like a tribe member elaborating the commitments her group installed before she could examine anything. Her conviction that she chose her positions through reason while her subjects inherited theirs through church and family becomes the central unexamined assumption of the work.
Third, The Means of Reproduction. This is the book Mearsheimer’s argument hits hardest, because it is liberal universalism in its purest form: the claim that reproductive rights belong to every woman on the planet, and that American policy, NGO money, and feminist organizing should secure them in India, Egypt, Kenya, and Nicaragua. Mearsheimer’s whole point about ambitious liberal foreign policy applies. The rights crusade runs into nationalism and local religion and loses, because group attachment beats abstract rights nearly every time the two collide. Goldberg’s own reporting documents the resistance, the alliances between political leaders and clergy, the failure of universalist pressure to dislodge local arrangements. She reports the evidence for Mearsheimer’s thesis and draws the opposite conclusion. Where she sees a struggle still to be won, he sees a structural limit.
Fourth, her one great insight survives and turns on her. Goldberg’s career-long theme, that belief systems organize human behavior and become coalitions and institutions, is Mearsheimer’s anthropology applied to other people. She grasps the social nature of man whenever she looks right. The asymmetry is the tell. The evangelicals have a tribe; she has positions. They are socialized; she reasons. Mearsheimer flattens the distinction. Both run on the same fuel.
Fifth, her heterodoxy fits the theory better than her universalism does. When she warns the left against purity tests because they weaken political organizations and distract from strategic goals, she argues as a coalition member concerned with group survival, which is what Mearsheimer expects of a profoundly social being. Her #MeToo cautions, her impatience with call-out culture, these are tribal maintenance, and there is no shame in that on his account. The shame, if any, lies in describing the work as independent reason.
Last, the Dobbs writing. She frames abortion as the status of women as citizens and patients, a rights question with a correct answer. Mearsheimer’s frame recasts it as two moral communities with incommensurable codes, each installed by socialization and sentiment, fighting over whose code the state enforces. Rights talk then becomes one tribe’s idiom rather than a neutral standard, and the post-Dobbs map of America, state by state, community by community, looks less like backsliding from a universal norm and more like the social nature of man reasserting itself against a fifty-year legal abstraction.
Gemini says:
Intellectuals on the left would find much to agree with in John Mearsheimer’s description of human nature, but they would reject his conclusion that this social reality invalidates the universal project of human rights. Many left-wing theorists, particularly communitarians and critical theorists, already critique the pure atomistic individualism of classical liberalism.
The smartest response from the left would address his points by reframing the relationship between socialization, reason, and rights.
1. Rights as Protection Against the Group, Not a Denial of It
The left does not need to believe that humans are naturally atomistic lone wolves to believe in individual rights. Thinkers like Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947) argue that precisely because humans are profoundly social and embedded in groups, the individual needs robust legal rights to protect him from the tyranny of the collective.
Groups, tribes, and nations routinely enforce conformity, suppress dissent, and marginalize minorities. Left-wing anthropology views universal human rights not as a description of how humans naturally live, but as a protective shield. The fact that a person is born into a group that shapes his identity does not give that group the right to crush his autonomy, control his body, or silence his speech when he reaches adulthood.
2. Socialization is Not an Absolute Prison
Mearsheimer argues that because socialization happens during a long childhood, individuals have limited choice in formulating a moral code. A left-wing response, drawing from Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), would counter that while socialization forms the initial identity, the development of reason allows for communicative rationality—the ability to look critically at one’s own inherited values and debate them.
History is filled with individuals and movements that rejected the intense socialization of their birth groups. The left points to the abolition of slavery, the rise of the feminist movement, and the fight for gay rights as evidence that humans can use critical faculties to override inherited cultural programming. Socialization is the starting point, but reason is the lever used to reform it.
3. Universalism as the Evolution of Socialization
Mearsheimer views tribalism and group attachment as fixed biological and social limits. Left-wing cosmopolitans argue that the definition of the group can expand.
Political philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954) suggests that education, global communication, and shared institutions can foster a sense of global citizenship. In this view, universal human rights are not an attempt to turn people into atomistic actors; they are an attempt to expand the boundaries of the social group to include all of humanity. The goal is to make the global community the ultimate group strategy, minimizing the destructive Us-versus-Them tribal conflicts that Mearsheimer views as inevitable.
4. Human Rights as an Earned Social Technology
Finally, the left would argue that Mearsheimer confuses a philosophical justification with a practical tool. Samuel Moyn (b. 1962), whom Mearsheimer quotes, has written extensively that human rights are a relatively recent historical phenomenon, emerging in the mid-20th century as a response to the horrors of state-sponsored tribalism and total war.
The left views human rights not as an innate biological truth discovered by lone wolves, but as a hard-won social technology. It is a set of rules that complex, deeply social societies invented to manage conflict, preserve peace, and ensure that the collective does not destroy the individual.
Applied to Goldberg, Alliance Theory does something more aggressive than Mearsheimer did. Mearsheimer relocated her inside a tribe. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton redescribe her job.
Start with her organizing premise. Across every book and column, Goldberg’s stated project is understanding how beliefs become movements, coalitions, and institutions. Alliance Theory reverses the arrow. Coalitions come first. Beliefs are downstream artifacts, patchwork narratives generated to mobilize support for allies already chosen. On this account Goldberg has spent twenty-five years studying the exhaust and calling it the engine. The megachurch crowds she watched in Ohio in 2004 did not assemble because of a theology of marriage; the theology of marriage got foregrounded because the alliance needed mobilizing, and gay marriage mobilized. Kingdom Coming sits at the center of this. The book treats Christian nationalism as a belief system with a vision of reality, and treats the believers’ subsequent conduct as a falling away from it. The paper handles her exact material in passing: the combination of libertarianism with Christian fundamentalism never emerged from philosophical analysis, and the only reason those philosophies travel together in America is the strategic alliance between pro-life evangelicals and wealthy Republicans struck in the 1970s. Goldberg reported the incoherence of that fusion as a paradox needing explanation. Alliance Theory says there was never anything to explain. The beliefs are not a worldview with internal tensions; they are a coalition’s collected talking points, and coalitions owe no one consistency.
Her Trump-era finding follows the same pattern. She wrote that the religious right entered a transactional alliance with Trump, trading moral standards for judicial appointments, and she framed this as a scandal and a corruption. Alliance Theory predicts it as the baseline. Loyal partisans flout their apparent moral principles when it serves their allies; the most morally vocal are often the least morally constrained, because the moral vocabulary was always a mobilizing tactic rather than a constraint. Evangelical support for a thrice-married casino owner is not the fall of a belief system. It is evidence about what the belief system was for. Goldberg got the reporting right and the genre wrong: she wrote a tragedy where the theory says she witnessed normal operations.
Then the theory turns on her own production. A Times opinion columnist is, in Pinsof’s non-pejorative technical sense, a professional generator of alliance propaganda: narratives that establish the in-coalition as moral and the rival coalition as menacing, that recruit third parties, that embolden allies. Her prize citations say this without embarrassment. The Hillman Foundation praised her as a voice for people who wake up unable to believe what is happening, whose columns make readers feel they are not alone in their horror. That is mobilization, named as such by the people paying tribute to it. The language of Kingdom Coming, the fevered radicalism and bellicose fundamentalism, performs the perpetrator framing the paper catalogs: the rival coalition as aggressor, one’s own as the threatened party. Her post-Dobbs columns perform the victim framing: documenting the suffering of the coalition’s members to mobilize sympathy and recruit the undecided. None of this requires insincerity. The theory’s whole point is that the propagandist believes the propaganda; that is what makes it work.
Her heterodoxy, which I called complexity in the bio, gets reread too. Notice the form her criticisms of the left take. Purity tests weaken political organizations and distract from strategic goals. That is not a moral argument against her coalition; it is tactical advice to it. She objects to call-out culture the way a staff officer objects to a doomed offensive. Alliance Theory predicts this kind of internal criticism from a high-value coalition member: it polices tactics, never allegiance, and it doubles as a credibility display that makes her advocacy more persuasive to third parties. The columnist who sometimes scolds her own side is a better recruiter than the one who never does.
The theory also supplies a test you could run on her archive. Pinsof says double standards are discovered by taking a moral principle deployed for one group and applying it to the rival group. Goldberg invoked due process during #MeToo when certain cases troubled her. The test: chart her due-process concern against the coalition membership of the accused, across Franken, Kavanaugh, Cuomo, and the rest. If the concern tracks allegiance rather than evidence, Alliance Theory scores. I have not run that chart and will not assert its result. But the theory tells you where to dig, and her twenty years of columns are a large dataset.
The conspirituality work fits last. She described wellness communities sliding toward QAnon as belief migration, ideas infecting new hosts. Alliance Theory describes it as re-sorting: groups switching sides in a consolidating two-super-alliance structure, with the beliefs arriving after the switch to justify it. The yoga teacher did not read herself into the rival coalition. She changed sides, then acquired the narratives, which is the order the theory expects and the opposite of the order Goldberg’s frame assumes.
The summary implication is harsher than Mearsheimer’s. Under Mearsheimer she was a tribe member who mistook herself for a reasoner. Under Alliance Theory she is a skilled coalition propagandist whose deepest professional belief, that belief drives politics, is itself a piece of coalition equipment: it lets her describe her own side as people with convictions and the other side as people with a dangerous ideology, when the theory says both sides are alliances all the way down, and the conviction talk is how alliances fight.
The Voice
Goldberg writes a reporter’s column. The unit of her prose is the evidentiary paragraph: a scene, a statistic, a quotation from a scholar, then the turn. She opens on a news peg or a person, often someone she interviewed, and closes with the thesis sharpened to a sentence. The syntax is plain and declarative, medium-length sentences, low ornament. She is not an aphorist like Bret Stephens (b. 1973), not a stylist of wordplay like Maureen Dowd (b. 1952). Among Times columnists her prose is the least decorated and the most reported. She still gets on planes; the post-Dobbs columns came from clinics and courtrooms, and the texture of her writing depends on that.
Her diction runs middlebrow-academic. She leans on books. A typical Goldberg column hangs on one monograph or one historian, quoted and credited, and this borrowing of scholarly authority is a signature: it performs diligence and positions her as a reader who synthesizes rather than a pundit who emotes. The vocabulary stays accessible, with occasional profanity in looser venues and a dark, deadpan humor that undercuts the apocalyptic register she otherwise works in. She writes “democratic emergency” sincerely, then mocks her own doomscrolling, and the alternation keeps the catastrophism from going stale.
Her most distinctive rhetorical move is staged ambivalence. The first person in a Goldberg column is a site of conflict: I wanted to believe this, I struggled with this, part of me thinks the critics have a point. She gives opposing arguments their strong version before answering them, and many columns are built as a wrestle she narrates and then wins. The move does double work. It flatters the reader as someone capable of complexity, and it makes the conclusion feel earned rather than issued. Whether the wrestle is real or choreographed varies by column, but as craft it is her best trick, and it is why her concessions to the other side circulate more than her attacks.
The spoken voice is another instrument. On tape, on The Argument, on MSNBC, at the Munk hall, she talks fast, stacks clauses, interrupts herself, and hedges constantly: sort of, kind of, I mean, right? The pitch is high, the delivery has the run-on quality of a writer thinking in drafts aloud rather than a broadcaster delivering lines. Under pressure she laughs, a quick nervous laugh that reads as either charm or weakness depending on the room. She sounds like print media, and next to trained broadcast voices that is audible.
The Munk debate in May 2018 is the best documented stress test of her speaking manner, because she left friendly territory. Arguing for the resolution with Michael Eric Dyson (b. 1958) against Stephen Fry (b. 1957) and Jordan Peterson (b. 1962), before three thousand people in Toronto, her side lost, with the audience swinging six points against the resolution over the course of the night. One reviewer’s observation gets at her method: she spent much of her time citing Peterson quotes she presented as appalling, trying to shock the audience. That is prosecutorial quotation, the opposition’s own words entered as exhibits. It is how she argues in print, where it works, because the reader of a Times column shares the premise that the quotes are damning. Live, before a hall that did not share the premise, the exhibits drew boos instead of gasps, and she had little else to pivot to. Her debate style is inductive, built from cases, examples, and reported detail, and when the audience refuses the moral frame, the cases stop adding up to anything. The same reviewer’s contrast holds: she and Dyson played within the bounds of their own group’s expectations, while Fry took the room with self-deprecation, a register she rarely uses on a stage.
On The Argument from 2018 to 2021 you hear her in a format built for her. Against Douthat, who constructs syllogisms aloud, she counters with reporting, history, and incredulity, and the hedging that sounds weak on a debate stage sounds like honesty in a conversation. MSNBC shows the third mode: friendly territory, where she is fluent and mordant and supplies the moral summary the segment was built to reach.
The pattern across all of it: her power is on the page, where she controls pacing, stages her ambivalence, and deploys quotation before readers who accept her premises. Each step away from the page, podcast, cable, stage, strips out a layer of that control, and the Munk debate, the farthest step, is where the style failed in public and measurably.
The Set
Start with the geography: brownstone Brooklyn, Park Slope to Fort Greene, with a Manhattan annex at the Times building and satellite postings in Washington. The household pattern repeats. Two professionals, one or both in media or politics-adjacent design and consulting, as with her husband Matthew Ipcar, who came out of Democratic digital work. Children in public school or in private school with guilt. Secular homes with ethnic texture, Jewish or lapsed Catholic, where religion survives as holidays, irony, and subject matter.
The second ring is the world she came up through and never left. The Nation under Katrina vanden Heuvel (b. 1959), where Katha Pollitt (b. 1949) holds the chair of feminist elder. Salon under Joan Walsh (b. 1958), her old editor, now at The Nation and CNN. Chris Hayes (b. 1979) ran the parallel route from The Nation to MSNBC and anchors the cable wing of the set, alongside Rachel Maddow (b. 1973) and Joy Reid (b. 1968), whose green rooms function as the set’s clubhouse. The feminist writers form a guild within the guild: Rebecca Traister (b. 1975), her nearest analogue, at New York magazine; Irin Carmon (b. 1983); Jessica Valenti (b. 1978); Jill Filipovic (b. 1983); Moira Donegan (b. 1990) of The Guardian. The third ring supplies the footnotes: the Christian-nationalism scholars and reporters Goldberg cites and blurbs and shares panels with, Sarah Posner, Katherine Stewart, Jeff Sharlet (b. 1972), Kristin Kobes Du Mez (b. 1975), Robert P. Jones, Andrew Whitehead, and Samuel Perry. They give her columns their academic ballast; she gives their books their largest audience. The trade runs smoothly because everyone profits.
What they value comes through in what they envy. They envy the prescient. The set’s highest compliment is that someone saw it coming, and Goldberg holds a strong hand here, since Kingdom Coming predates the field. Claims of early warning function as currency: who called Trump first, who took Christian nationalism seriously before 2016, who flagged the Dobbs endgame while liberals still trusted the Court. They envy the read. Circulation among the right people beats raw traffic; a column that three senators, two showrunners, and the seminar tables of five universities discuss outranks one that merely goes viral. They envy the book. The column is the salary; the book is the soul. A serious book every few years separates the writer from the pundit, and the set polices that line hard, because the pundit is what each of them fears becoming.
The hero system is a secular salvation story with journalism in the priesthood. The transcendent value is democracy, spoken of the way believers speak of the faith, as a fragile inheritance under siege. Service to it confers a kind of immortality: the set’s eschatology is the future historian, and its members write for the archive, for the tribunal of how-this-will-look. Hence the resonant phrases, the right side of history, history is watching, what did you do during the emergency. The saints are recent and real. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) and John Lewis (1940-2020) hold the top tier. The martyrs include George Tiller (1932-2009), the murdered abortion provider, whose name appears in the set’s writing the way the names of martyrs appear anywhere. The heroes are testifiers and exposers: Christine Blasey Ford (b. 1966), who spoke at cost; Jodi Kantor (b. 1975), Megan Twohey (b. 1976), and Ronan Farrow (b. 1987), whose Weinstein reporting gave the set its proudest institutional moment and Goldberg’s newsroom a Pulitzer-adjacent glow; the election workers and state officials who held in 2020; and, in the complicated wing, Liz Cheney (b. 1966), a convert heroine whose welcome shows that the system can absorb a conservative who pays the entry fee of total rupture with her side. Al Franken (b. 1951) occupies a stranger niche, the sacrifice. Goldberg wrote the column urging him out and later confessed her doubts, and the set still argues the case, because it tests whether the system’s purity demands serve or eat its political goals.
The status games run on calibration. The first game is heterodoxy within limits. Criticizing your own side earns courage credit, and Goldberg plays this game as well as anyone alive: the column against purity tests, the doubts about #MeToo overreach, the worry that the left talks itself out of majorities. But the credit accrues only when the criticism stays tactical, framed as concern for the coalition’s effectiveness. Cross from tactics into defection and the set does not argue with you; it stops inviting you. Bari Weiss (b. 1984) is the proof case, with Glenn Greenwald (b. 1967), Matt Taibbi (b. 1970), and Andrew Sullivan (b. 1963) as the longer roll of the expelled. Their exits raised the value of the safe internal critic, since the set needs to show it tolerates dissent, and Goldberg’s brand of dissent is the kind it can afford. The second game is the Substack question. The exiles cashed out for subscription money and independence; staying at the Times became, after their departures, a legible act of loyalty and a bet that institutional prestige outlasts newsletter income. The third game is the citation economy. Quoting Du Mez or Perry in a column confers seriousness on the columnist and reach on the scholar, and rank within the set partly consists of who gets cited, blurbed, and invited by whom.
The normative claims sit close to the surface. Democracy outranks every competing value, and threats to it license departures from old norms of balance, which the set renamed: objectivity became both-sidesism, a sin, and moral clarity became the virtue that replaced it. Speech carries weight; words do harm; platforming is itself a moral act, which is why who appears beside whom on a stage or a masthead generates the set’s fiercest internal fights, the James Bennet (b. 1966) defenestration over the Tom Cotton op-ed in June 2020 being the constitutional crisis the set still relitigates. Bodily autonomy ranks just below democracy, with abortion rights as the test no member fails. Expertise deserves deference; the marginalized deserve amplification; and the direction of speech matters, since punching down condemns and punching up excuses.
The essentialist claims are the set’s least examined possession, because the official doctrine is anti-essentialist. Gender is a construct; race is a construct; categories are made, contingent, revisable. Yet a working essentialism operates one ring out. The right has a nature in this talk: an authoritarian personality, a rage that is who they are. The phrase *this is who they are* does the essentializing for opponents, while *this is not who we are* does the de-essentializing for America. Identity categories, officially constructed, confer real epistemic authority in practice; the standpoint of the marginal speaker counts as a credential, and lived experience functions as evidence that outranks survey data in a dispute. History gets the deepest essence of all: it has a direction, sides, and a verdict pending, and the set knows which side it sits on. So the grammar runs: constructionist about ourselves, essentialist about our enemies, teleological about time.
The moral grammar shows in the verdict words, and the set’s prose can be parsed by them. Dangerous, chilling, troubling, normalize, complicit, gaslight, dog whistle, erasure, harm, reckoning, do the work. The grammar has rules of person and direction: who may say what about whom, with license scaling to standpoint; impact outranking intent; silence counting as a position. It has rituals, the throat-clearing acknowledgment of one’s own privilege before a risky claim, and the apology, a fixed form with required elements, whose botched performance ends careers faster than the original offense. And it has a register problem the best members feel: too much moralizing reads as humorless, too much cleverness reads as unserious, and status flows to those, Goldberg among them, who can hold the dark joke and the alarm in the same column.
The set’s deepest shared trait may be the one it discusses least. Nearly all of them came up insurgent, in webzines, alt-weeklies, and little magazines, attacking the institutional center, and nearly all of them now are the institutional center, with its salaries, prizes, and security. The self-image lagged the position by about fifteen years. Much of the set’s anxiety, its purity disputes, its expulsions, its need for emergencies, makes sense as the behavior of insurgents who won and cannot say so.
Goldberg starts writing for Salon in 1999, when Salon is a webzine fighting for survival and the enemy is the mainstream press: the credulous Washington corps, Judith Miller’s (b. 1948) weapons reporting, the Sunday shows, the whole apparatus the bloggers called the MSM with a sneer built into the acronym. Ezra Klein starts as a college blogger, moves through The American Prospect, and builds Wonkblog inside The Washington Post before founding Vox in 2014 to disrupt the very form of the newspaper. Chris Hayes starts at *In These Times* in Chicago, a socialist magazine with a five-figure circulation, then The Nation. Jamelle Bouie comes up through the Prospect and Slate. Rebecca Traister comes out of Salon. Joan Walsh edits Salon through its insurgent decade. Glenn Greenwald begins as a solo blogger so far outside the citadel that he publishes his first media criticism on Blogspot. Matt Yglesias blogs from his dorm room. The shared founding experience of this cohort, roughly 2002 to 2008, is the siege of legacy media from below: the institutions had failed on Iraq, failed on Bush, failed on the financial crisis, and the webzine writers said so daily, for little money, with the joy of people throwing rocks at a building they could not enter.
Then the building hired them. The absorption runs roughly 2011 to 2017. Hayes gets an MSNBC show in 2011. Klein gets venture funding and then, after the digital-media model collapses, returns to the Times in 2021. Bouie joins The New York Times in 2019. Traister lands at New York magazine. Goldberg’s own absorption completes the pattern: Salon to The Nation to the Times in 2017, the year the Trump subscription surge made the paper rich enough to collect the whole generation. The Times did not merely survive the insurgency. It ate it. It hired the bloggers, bought Wirecutter and The Athletic and Wordle, took the podcast form the insurgents pioneered and built The Daily, the largest news podcast on earth. By 2020 the people who spent their twenties attacking the institutional center of American journalism were the institutional center of American journalism, with the salaries, the prizes, the book deals, and the security details that the position carries.
The self-image did not update. That is the lag, and you can date it. The insurgent identity formed around 2005, at the peak of the blogs-against-MSM war. The positions changed by 2017 at the latest. Yet the rhetoric of 2005 persists into the 2020s: speaking truth to power, from the most powerful opinion platform in the language. Afflicting the comfortable, on a columnist’s salary with a brownstone. Punching up, from the top floor. Fifteen years, give or take, between the fact of victory and the failure to acknowledge it.
Now the explanatory work. Why can they not say they won? Four reasons, each sufficient, jointly overwhelming.
The first is the license. The set’s moral grammar permits aggression only upward. Punching up is courage; punching down is cruelty. The grammar therefore makes position-denial mandatory: the moment you admit you are the center, every attack you launch reclassifies as punching down, and your entire critical practice loses its license. A columnist at the Times mocking a Substack crank, a podcaster in a basement, a pastor in Alabama, is the strong attacking the weak unless the columnist maintains, against the evidence of her own W-2, that she remains the embattled party. The underdog claim is load-bearing. Remove it and the practice collapses.
The second is the authority economy. In this set, marginality confers credibility. The outsider sees what insiders cannot; the marginal voice carries epistemic privilege; lived experience of exclusion functions as a credential. A group that runs on that currency cannot admit to having become insiders without devaluing its own holdings. Victory is forfeiture. So the set performs marginality from the center, and the performances grow more elaborate as the gap widens.
The third is the business model, and this one is institutional rather than psychological. The Times added millions of subscribers after 2016 on the explicit promise of emergency: democracy dies in darkness was the competitor’s slogan, but the whole sector ran on the sentiment. Goldberg’s Hillman Prize citation praised her for making horrified readers feel less alone, which is a subscription pitch restated as an honor. The emergency is the product. An institution whose revenue depends on siege cannot let its writers announce that the siege lifted and the defenders hold the citadel, and the writers, no fools, do not need the memo. Note the relief, faint but detectable across the set’s output, whenever the emergency rearms: the Dobbs decision, the second Trump term. Each restoration of real external threat resolves, for a while, the dissonance of being powerful people whose identity requires powerlessness.
The fourth is responsibility. Insurgency outsources outcomes. If the institutions belong to someone else, their failures belong to someone else. Admitting that your cohort has run elite journalism, publishing, the foundations, and the awards circuit since roughly the mid-2010s means owning what that culture produced on your watch: the credibility collapse, the trust numbers, the half of the country that stopped listening. The insurgent self-image is, among its other uses, a liability shield.
Now the behaviors the thesis explains, with cases.
The purity disputes first. June 2020, the Tom Cotton op-ed. By the standards of an institution, the Times running a sitting senator’s argument for troop deployment is ordinary practice; the institutional response is rebuttal. The staff instead rose as a movement, declaring in a coordinated formula that running the piece endangered them, and the editor, James Bennet, lost his job. Read as institutional behavior the episode is baffling: a newspaper purging an editor for publishing a newsworthy opinion. Read as insurgent behavior inside a captured fortress it makes sense. People formed by movement politics, finding themselves inside the institution with no external wall left to storm, storm inward. The staff revolt is the only insurgency available to insurgents who own the building. The same logic covers the Donald McNeil Jr. (b. 1954) expulsion in 2021 and the serial Slack uprisings of those years across the sector. A movement needs enemies; an institution needs standards; when the two conflict, the set keeps choosing enemies, and that choice is the clearest behavioral evidence that the self-image still runs on movement time.
The expulsions second. Bari Weiss in 2020, Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine the same summer, Greenwald from The Intercept he founded, that October. Each expulsion performs the same double function. It enforces the boundary, and it proves, to the expellers, that they still constitute a movement with a boundary to enforce. Institutions tolerate internal dissent because their identity rests on procedure; movements cannot, because their identity rests on alignment. Every purge is a demonstration that we are still the scrappy us, even though the purge is conducted from the commanding heights with severance paperwork. And the expulsions produced the great irony of the cycle: the exiles built the next insurgency. Weiss’s The Free Press, Greenwald and Matt Taibbi on Substack, Sullivan’s newsletter, together reconstructed the 2005 position, outsiders throwing rocks at a failed legacy center, except now the failed legacy center is Goldberg’s cohort. The Free Press sold to a legacy broadcaster in 2025 for a nine-figure sum, which suggests the next absorption is already underway and the cycle has a period of about twenty years.
Third, the need for emergencies. The set’s anxiety has a misattributed object. The stated object is fascism, theocracy, the end of the Republic. The unstated object is the dissolution of identity that victory entails. If the emergency ever fully resolved, the members of the set would stand revealed as what they materially are: prosperous senior employees of a profitable media corporation, with mortgages, equity, and access, indistinguishable in social position from the establishment journalists they came up despising. The emergency defers that revelation indefinitely. This is why the set’s threat assessments ratchet but never resolve, why each election is the last election, why the rhetoric cannot de-escalate even when de-escalation might serve the stated political goals. The threat inflation that critics read as cynicism reads better as self-preservation, of a self.
Last, the Goldberg-specific turn, because she is the thesis in miniature. Her first book describes a movement, Christian nationalism, whose project she defines as the patient capture of institutions: school boards, courts, agencies, the long march of the faithful through the structures of a society they felt excluded from. She wrote it as a warning. But as a description of method it applies, clause for clause, to her own cohort’s two decades in media, publishing, and the prize circuit, a movement of the excluded marching through institutions and then, having captured them, continuing to speak in the idiom of exclusion. She had the pattern right. She found it in the only place her position allowed her to look.
Kahn is running the counter-reformation, and he is well cast for it, because he was never an insurgent. Joseph Kahn (b. 1964) is institutional to the bone: son of Leo Kahn (1916-2011), the Purity Supreme and Staples co-founder, Harvard twice over, Dallas Morning News, Wall Street Journal China correspondent, two Pulitzers, then the long climb up the Times masthead to the top job in June 2022. The webzine generation stormed the citadel; Kahn was born in it, left to win his spurs abroad, and came home to run it. That biography shapes the strategy.
His navigation has four parts.
The first is doctrine. From the start he named maintaining editorial independence in an age of polarization as his priority, and he has repeated it in every venue since, including his Princeton appearance this April, where the talk centered on the Times as an independent entity under pressure. The crucial statement came in his May 2024 interview with Ben Smith (b. 1976) at Semafor, where he refused, on the record, the demand that the Times become an instrument of the anti-Trump resistance, arguing that a newspaper that campaigns is a newspaper that forfeits its claim on the persuadable. The left raged; he did not retract. In the terms of the essay, Kahn chose standards over enemies and said so aloud, which is the one thing the insurgent cohort cannot do. He is the institution announcing that it knows it is the institution.
The second is discipline. When contributors and staff organized the open letter against the paper’s trans coverage in February 2023, coordinated with an activist organization, Kahn and Kathleen Kingsbury answered with a memo that rebuked the signatories, defended the reporters by name, and declared that participation in campaigns against colleagues breached policy. Nobody was thrown to the crowd. The coverage continued. That single episode marked the regime change: in 2020 the staff revolt cost an editor his job; in 2023 it cost the revolters a scolding. He has since tightened social media guidelines, pruned the Slack culture, and made plain that the newsroom is not a movement space. The insurgency inside the building met, for the first time, management that declined to negotiate with it.
The third is leverage he did not create but uses. The staff revolts of 2020 ran on a seller’s market; a Times journalist could threaten to walk because BuzzFeed News, Vice, and the venture-funded digital sector were hiring. That sector is dead. The Times stands nearly alone as a place that pays journalists well and securely, which transfers power from staff to masthead with every passing layoff elsewhere. Kahn’s discipline works partly because exit options collapsed. The movement lost its strike fund.
The fourth is the redirected emergency. Kahn faces a real external threat, a second Trump administration that subpoenas, sues, and restricts access, and he uses it shrewdly. Fighting subpoenas and refusing Pentagon credential conditions lets him unify the newsroom against an outside foe, satisfying the staff’s hunger for combat, while framing the fight as press freedom rather than partisan resistance. He gets the cohesion of the siege without conceding the resistance identity. The both-sides attacks help him too; he cites criticism from both the left and the right, including from inside his own newsroom, as evidence the paper sits where it should.
Beneath all of it lies a structural change that makes the doctrine affordable. The Goldberg-era business model monetized horror; the Kahn-era model monetizes the bundle. Games, Cooking, The Athletic, Wirecutter now drive subscription growth, which means the company no longer needs the emergency the way it did in 2017. Wordle subsidizes independence. Kahn can afford to disappoint the resistance reader because the resistance reader is no longer the marginal subscriber.
Two caveats. Kahn’s writ runs over the newsroom, not Opinion; Goldberg answers to Kingsbury and Sulzberger, so the columnist corps lives outside his reformation, and the paper speaks in two registers as a result. And Kahn is not a pure restorationist: as managing editor from 2016 he co-led the diversity plan and presided over the culture he now disciplines. Whether that sequence reflects conversion, or a careful man waiting for the publisher and the labor market to make discipline possible, his record does not say. The outcome is the same either way. The insurgents who won and could not say so now work for a man whose entire public posture consists of saying it for them.
David Zahniser (b. 1965) is an American journalist whose career has centered on the government of Los Angeles. As a City Hall correspondent for the Los Angeles Times since 2007, he has become an authority on municipal power in Southern California: campaign finance, ethics enforcement, land use, lobbying, labor influence, housing policy, and public corruption. While most political reporters of his generation moved toward national subjects, Zahniser built his career on mastery of a single institution. His reporting has shaped public understanding of how Los Angeles governs itself and how pvarious interests work to bend that process.
Zahniser graduated from Pomona College in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in history. Before journalism, he worked as a staff writer for a labor union. The job gave him an early education in organized labor, a force that remains central to Los Angeles politics. His later reporting shows a rare familiarity with the relationships among unions, elected officials, developers, business groups, and community activists that drive local policymaking.
He came up through the local newspaper world of Southern California, a training ground that exposed him to the practical workings of government at street level. His stops included the Claremont Courier, the Pasadena Star-News, the Daily Breeze, the Santa Monica Daily Press, L.A. Weekly, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Covering city councils, redevelopment agencies, planning commissions, neighborhood disputes, and local elections gave him a granular understanding of the institutions that became his life’s subject.
His years at L.A. Weekly shaped his investigative method. The alternative weekly still ranked among the city’s influential journalistic institutions, and Zahniser produced reported examinations of redevelopment projects, city politics, and the administration of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (b. 1953). The work deepened his interest in the intersection of government power, economic development, and political influence.
In 2007, Zahniser joined the Los Angeles Times and became a principal City Hall correspondent. His beat extends past electoral politics. He works through the technical material of municipal governance: environmental impact reports, ethics filings, campaign finance disclosures, planning documents, court records, grand jury indictments, and public records requests. His stories tend to examine the systems through which power operates rather than the personalities who hold office for a term or two.
Where many political journalists trade on insider access, Zahniser practices a document-driven method. His stories grow out of long analysis of public records, financial disclosures, and bureaucratic paperwork. Colleagues describe his ability to find significant patterns inside dense technical documents. The method suits land-use fights, development battles, ethics controversies, and corruption investigations, where the paper trail tells the story that sources will not.
A defining achievement came with the Times investigation “Big Money, Unlikely Donors.” Working with Emily Alpert Reyes, Joe Fox, and Len De Groot, Zahniser helped uncover suspicious campaign contributions tied to major development projects. The investigation showed how political money moved through networks of donors whose financial participation made little sense given their economic circumstances. The project exposed weaknesses in campaign finance oversight and showed how far developers and political operatives could reach into local government. In 2017, the team won the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting, a major honor in business and investigative journalism.
Through the late 2010s and early 2020s, Zahniser led coverage of the federal corruption investigations that engulfed City Hall. His reporting documented allegations against developers, lobbyists, elected officials, and city staff, and explained how land-use approvals became vehicles for bribery and influence-peddling. The investigations produced criminal prosecutions and convictions, reshaped public perception of City Hall, and fed calls for structural reform.
Another major chapter opened in 2022 with the release of secret recordings of conversations among senior Los Angeles political figures. Public attention fixed on the racist remarks captured on tape. Zahniser’s reporting pressed on the larger significance of the conversation. He explained the technical process of City Council redistricting and showed how elected officials shape district boundaries to preserve power, secure economic assets, and apportion representation among communities. The scandal produced a political crisis with few modern parallels in the city. The fallout brought the resignation of Council President Nury Martinez (b. 1973) and pressure on council members Kevin de León (b. 1966) and Gil Cedillo (b. 1954). Zahniser belonged to the Times team, with Dakota Smith, Julia Wick, Benjamin Oreskes, and others, whose coverage won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.
Development and urban growth sit at the center of his work. Los Angeles is a city where zoning decisions, transit projects, housing proposals, and redevelopment plans carry enormous economic consequences. Zahniser has shown again and again how an obscure planning decision can reshape a neighborhood, redraw political alliances, and generate large private fortunes. His reporting connects technical planning procedure to the broader questions of affordability, inequality, homelessness, and growth that define the city’s politics.
His institutional memory distinguishes his journalism. His stories place current controversies in historical context, tracing present disputes to decisions made years or decades earlier. By connecting today’s conflicts to earlier policies and arrangements, he helps readers see that the city’s recurring problems grow from long-term structural choices rather than isolated events.
Beyond reporting, Zahniser served as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists during his time at the Times, supporting local journalism and professional standards.
He continues to cover City Hall as of 2026, a year of consequence for his beat. His recent reporting has examined Mayor Karen Bass (b. 1953) and her reelection campaign, her budget proposals, the performance of her signature homelessness program, and the challenge mounted against her by Councilmember Nithya Raman (b. 1981), a contest with the June 2, 2026 primary at its center. The work shows the same pattern as the rest of his career: sustained attention to one institution, grounded in documents, with the money and the land at the center of the story.
Zahniser belongs to a shrinking tradition of metropolitan beat reporters who spend decades on a single institution. While colleagues moved between beats or sought national prominence, he stayed with Los Angeles City Hall and accumulated procedural and historical expertise that few reporters can match. His career demonstrates the continuing value of local accountability journalism and of sustained attention to the hidden workings of government. Through investigations into campaign finance, corruption, ethics enforcement, and development politics, he stands as a major chronicler of political power in modern Los Angeles.
The Back Region: David Zahniser Through Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) divided social life into regions. The front region is where the performance happens, where a team of performers sustains a definition of the situation before an audience. The back region is where the team retires, drops the performance, rehearses the next one, and says what it thinks. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman argued that neither region holds the true self. Both are staged. The backstage has its own conventions, its own etiquette, its own required behavior. Chief among those conventions is what he called the treatment of the absent: performers backstage mock the audience they flatter out front. The waiter ridicules the diners in the kitchen. The doctor jokes about the patient in the corridor. The derogation is not a slip. It is how teams bind themselves.
Los Angeles City Hall runs on this division. The council meeting is the front region. The public comment period, the ceremonial presentations, the unanimous votes, the language of community and equity, all of it sustains a performance of open deliberation. The audience is asked to believe that decisions happen in the chamber. They do not. They happen in the back region, in offices and restaurants and union halls, among performers who trust one another to keep the regions sealed. The vote on the floor ratifies a settlement reached out of sight. Everyone inside the building knows this. The performance requires that the audience not see it demonstrated.
In October 2022, the regions collapsed. A recording surfaced of a 2021 conversation among Council President Nury Martinez, council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and labor leader Ron Herrera, taped in the offices of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The four were a team in Goffman’s strict sense: performers cooperating to stage a single routine, in this case the routine of redistricting as a neutral, community-minded process. On the tape they talk the way teams talk backstage. They are crude about colleagues. They are racist about a colleague’s child, about Oaxacans, about Blacks and renters and anyone outside the coalition. And they are technical. They sort the city’s assets, the airport, USC, the Expo line, the shopping districts, and discuss which member’s district should hold them and which members can be weakened by losing them.
The public reaction treated the tape as an unmasking. The real Martinez had been exposed; the front-stage Martinez had been a fraud. Goffman would resist that reading. The backstage talk was not more real than the floor speeches. It was a different performance for a different audience, the audience of the team. The contempt on the tape follows the script Goffman wrote in 1956: teams consolidate themselves by degrading the absent audience, and the uglier the degradation, the tighter the bond it builds. What the tape revealed was not the secret character of four individuals. It revealed that the staging of Los Angeles government requires a back region, and it showed what the work done there sounds like.
This is where David Zahniser earned his Pulitzer. Most coverage stayed with the slurs, which is to say it stayed with the unmasking story, the front-stage scandal of bad people caught. Zahniser did something else. He explained what the four were doing. His reporting walked readers through redistricting, the once-a-decade redrawing of council boundaries, and showed why the conversation happened at all: district lines decide which member controls which economic assets, which donor bases, which voting blocs. He translated the backstage talk. The slurs were the team’s bonding ritual. The asset map was the team’s business. Zahniser’s coverage kept the business in view when the city wanted to talk only about the ritual.
He could do this because his entire method is a back-region operation. Consider what a document is, in Goffman’s terms. An environmental impact report, an ethics filing, a campaign finance disclosure, a grand jury indictment: these are texts an institution produces for a restricted audience, regulators, courts, its own files. They are written with a different audience consciousness than the press release. They sit closer to the back region than anything an official will say into a microphone. The institution speaking to itself, or to a bureaucratic audience it considers captive, lets things show that the front-stage performance conceals. Zahniser’s career is built on reading at that seam. The “Big Money, Unlikely Donors” investigation found, in disclosure filings, donors whose contributions made no sense given their incomes. The front-stage story said citizens supporting candidates. The filings, read closely, showed a back-region arrangement: money routed through names. The documents did not mean to confess. Documents never do. But they are produced with the audience’s gaze pointed elsewhere, and that lowers the staging discipline.
Goffman catalogued the discrepant roles, the people who move between regions without belonging to the team. The spotter checks up on performers from inside the audience. The shopper enters the establishment as a customer and reports to a rival. The beat reporter is a discrepant role Goffman did not name but would recognize. After thirty years in one building, Zahniser holds backstage knowledge without team membership. He knows the rehearsals, the props, the staging history. He sits in the chamber as what Goffman called a non-person, present and discounted, like the waiter at the dinner party, until the moment his story runs and the discounting ends. The team cannot expel him and cannot recruit him. The access journalist resolves this tension by joining the team in practice, trading staging secrets for backstage invitations, and his reporting becomes part of the performance. Zahniser refused the trade. The documents made the refusal affordable. A reporter who can read the filings does not need the invitation.
His institutional memory works the same seam. Goffman noted that a performance is vulnerable to anyone who saw the earlier shows, because the team revises its routine and counts on the audience forgetting. The council member who champions a project in 2026 voted to kill its predecessor in 2014, and the front-stage performance depends on no one recalling the older staging. Zahniser recalls it. Three decades of watching one theater turns every new performance into a text read against its drafts.
The tape changed the theater. After 2022, every performer in City Hall assumes the back region is wired. Goffman wrote that teams require a place where the performance can drop; staging is exhausting, and the backstage is where performers recover and prepare. Strip that away and the performer adopts front-stage discipline everywhere, which does not end backstage dealing. It pushes the dealing into thinner channels, the walk without phones, the conversation that leaves no record. The paradox for journalism is sharp. The leak that produced the city’s greatest backstage exposure has made the next one harder. What remains, when the talk goes dark, is paper. Institutions cannot run on unrecorded conversation. The approvals must be filed, the money must be disclosed, the maps must be published. The back region leaves residue, and the residue is the public record.
That is the wager of Zahniser’s career, made decades before the tape vindicated it. The tape was a windfall, one night of the back region broadcast whole. The documents are the daily discipline, the back region recovered in fragments, filing by filing. Goffman taught that the front-stage performance is not a lie laid over a truth; it is one staging among others, and the work of understanding an institution is the work of moving between its regions. Zahniser does that work for one building in one city. The council votes in public. He reads what it wrote when it thought no one was watching.
What Dies With Him: David Zahniser Through Stephen P. Turner on Tacit Knowledge
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career dismantling a comfortable idea: that tacit knowledge is a shared substance, a collective possession that groups hold and pass down. In The Social Theory of Practices and Understanding the Tacit, he argued that nothing of the kind exists. There is no group mind, no practice-stuff transmitted from one generation to the next. Tacit knowledge is individual. Each person builds his own through his own history of exposure, trial, error, and feedback. Two craftsmen in the same shop hold similar skills because similar conditions trained them, the way two trees on the same hillside lean the same way. Nothing passed between them. When we say a skill was handed down, Turner says, we describe an arrangement of conditions under which a learner built the skill again, for himself, from scratch. And when the conditions disappear, the skill stops getting rebuilt. It dies with the last man who holds it.
David Zahniser holds a skill of this kind. Call it the ability to read Los Angeles City Hall. He can look at a campaign finance disclosure and see that something is wrong with it before he can say what. He knows which ethics filing is anomalous, which environmental impact report buries its finding, which donor name does not belong on the list. The “Big Money, Unlikely Donors” investigation began in that kind of recognition: contributions from people whose circumstances made the giving implausible. A janitor does not give the maximum to a council race. A retiree on a fixed income does not fund a land-use fight. The filings were public. Anyone could read them. Almost no one could see them.
Turner explains why. The recognition is not a method that could be written down and handed to a younger reporter. It is the residue of a particular path: a job writing for a labor union in the late 1980s, then the Claremont Courier, the Pasadena Star-News, the Daily Breeze, the Santa Monica Daily Press, the L.A. Weekly, the San Diego Union-Tribune, then nineteen years at the Times reading thousands of filings against the stories they did or did not yield. Every story that panned out tuned the recognition. Every tip that collapsed tuned it too. The training set was decades of paper checked against decades of outcomes. A manual could list red flags, and the list would be nearly useless, because the flags are not the knowledge. The knowledge is the weighting, the feel for which flag counts in which context, and the weighting lives below articulation. Zahniser could not fully explain his own judgment if he tried. On Turner’s account, no expert can.
This is the standard story of craft expertise, and if the frame stopped there it would yield a tribute. It cuts deeper, because the corruption Zahniser covers runs on the same kind of knowledge.
Consider what a fixer in Los Angeles development knows. He knows which council office is open for business and which is not. He knows how an ask gets phrased so that it is understood and deniable at once. He knows what a contribution means, what a fundraiser hosted at the right moment means, what a consultant’s retainer buys, what the exchange rate is between a PLA commitment and a zoning variance. None of this is written anywhere. It cannot be written anywhere, because in this craft articulation is evidence. The federal prosecutions that swept City Hall in the late 2010s show the structure of the problem. Prosecutors could not build cases from documents alone, because the documents record everything except the understanding. They needed wiretaps, cooperators, men describing in their own words what the money meant. The quid pro quo lives in tacit understanding between parties who have learned, through their own histories of deals offered and honored, what signals what. The fixer’s knowledge was built the way Zahniser’s was built: years inside one system, with feedback.
So the document reporter and the corrupt fixer are rivals in the same craft. Both are experts in the unwritten layer of City Hall. Both know that the official record is a surface and that the action sits beneath it. The fixer’s work is to keep the action below the paper line. Zahniser’s work is to find the places where it broke the surface, the donor who should not be on the list, the approval that moved too fast, the variance that contradicts the file. Each man’s skill defines the other’s problem. The fixer who understands what a reporter can see learns to leave less. The reporter who understands what a fixer must do learns where the residue collects. Neither can fully explain his own craft, and each spends his working life modeling the other’s.
Turner’s frame also explains what Zahniser’s stories can and cannot give the reader. A story articulates a finding: this donor is connected to this developer, this approval followed this money. What it cannot transfer is the judgment that produced the finding. The reader receives outputs of a pattern recognition he cannot audit. He cannot rerun Zahniser’s thirty years and check the weighting. He can only watch the findings hold up over time, story after story, and extend trust on the record. Turner argued that this is the general condition of expertise in public life: the expert cannot show his work in any complete sense, because the work is partly sub-articulate, and so the public’s relation to expertise is always a relation of trust built on track record rather than inspection. Zahniser’s track record is long enough that the trust functions. A new reporter’s would not, even with identical talent, because the talent is not the knowledge.
Now the succession question. On Turner’s account, tacit knowledge survives only where the conditions for rebuilding it survive. The conditions in this case are plain: a stable beat, held for decades, at an institution willing to pay a senior salary for one building, with enough publication and feedback density that a learner’s recognition gets tuned. Those conditions existed at the metropolitan papers of the late twentieth century. They produced Zahniser. They no longer exist. The Times has shrunk through round after round of cuts. Young reporters cycle through beats in two or three years, which is enough time to learn the org chart and not enough to learn the building. No one now entering journalism will read filings against outcomes for thirty years, because no employer will fund the apprenticeship. The conditions are gone, so the skill will not be rebuilt. When Zahniser retires, the knowledge does not transfer to a successor or to an archive. It stops.
The other side of the rivalry faces no such problem. The fixer’s apprenticeship is funded by the development economy, which is not shrinking. Lobbying firms are stable institutions with senior partners and junior associates and decades of client continuity. The conditions for rebuilding that craft persist in every cycle, because the money that pays for it persists. So the two rival bodies of tacit knowledge, the reading of City Hall and the working of City Hall, are on different reproduction schedules. One side’s apprenticeship system collapsed with the newspaper business. The other side’s never depended on it.
Turner offers no comfort here. His whole argument is that knowledge of this kind cannot be preserved by writing it down, digitizing it, or storing it in an institution. The Times can keep Zahniser’s archive forever. The archive holds his findings. It does not hold him. A future reader of the archive will know what Zahniser saw and will not acquire the seeing. The city will still produce filings, and the filings will still carry their anomalies, and for a while there was a man who could look at the page and feel which number was wrong. The page will outlast the feeling.
The Voice
Zahniser writes flat on purpose. Subject, verb, object, attribution. The metro style of the late twentieth century, kept alive past its era. He puts numbers high because numbers carry his stories: “Under L.A. mayor’s $300-million homeless program, 40% have returned to the street”. The dollar figure and the percentage do all the work. No adjective in that headline could add anything, and he knows it, so there is no adjective.
His signature device is deadpan juxtaposition. He sets two facts side by side and lets the collision happen in the reader’s head: “Bass helped Raman win reelection. Now Raman wants to unseat her.” Or “In L.A. mayor’s race, everyone is campaigning on change — even the incumbent.” The irony lives in the arrangement. He never points at it. This is the rhetoric of a man who has decided that commentary is a tax on credibility and that sequencing is free. A columnist would write “the hypocrisy is striking.” Zahniser writes the two sentences and walks away.
He uses the human anchor sparingly and as evidence rather than decoration. The Inside Safe story opens: “It was a risky move and Jonathan Torres knew it, but he did it anyway. He let an out-of-town guest stay with him in his room.” One man, one rule, one consequence, then the lens widens to the $300 million program. The scene exists to prove the policy finding, then gets out of the way. Wikipedia
His third tool is procedural translation. Redistricting, CEQA, ethics rules, the city’s contracting maze: he renders them in plain words with short defining clauses, assuming no knowledge and condescending to no one. This was the heart of his tapes coverage. While others wrote about slurs, he explained what an asset map is and why a council member wants the airport in his district. The explainer instinct is constant. He dates everything, “the third such case in a decade,” because his institutional memory is itself a rhetorical instrument: it tells the reader this event has a lineage, and the official calling it unprecedented is wrong.
Quotes do his characterization. He picks the quote where the official reveals himself and prints it without comment. The restraint reads as fairness and functions as a blade.
The wit he keeps out of news copy leaks into his Twitter presence, where his bio reads “Ex-L.A. Weekly, Ex-Daily Breeze, ex cetera”, a pun he has kept for years. During the tapes chaos he posted footage captioned “Inside the council chamber”, three words over pandemonium, maximal understatement. His “Inbox:” tweets present an artifact, a union statement, a city memo, with no framing at all. The deadpan is the same on every platform; only the dose changes.
He turns up on KCRW, on the Times podcast, on local radio panels, and the pattern in those appearances matches the prose: even pace, low affect, no performance. He answers in the order he writes, fact first, then attribution, then context. He hedges with care, “what we know” and “what we don’t know yet” as distinct categories. He supplies the procedural tutorial unprompted because he knows the host will not ask for it. When pushed to predict or to assign motive, he declines and redirects to the record. The dry humor surfaces a little more in audio than in print, but it stays under the line. He has none of the broadcast reporter’s punch or the pundit’s certainty. He sounds like a man reading from notes he trusts.
The whole package is a rhetoric of withheld judgment. The flatness is not an absence of style. It is the style, and it makes a claim: the documents speak, I arrange them, you conclude. Thirty years of arrangement, and the conclusions have a way of arriving where he put them.
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James O’Keefe (b. 1984) is an American undercover investigator, media entrepreneur, author, and political activist who turned hidden-camera operations into a durable institution of conservative media. Over two decades he built, lost, and rebuilt organizations devoted to a single proposition: that institutions say one thing in public and another in private, and that the gap between the two constitutes news. Admirers place him in the muckraking tradition of Nellie Bly (1864-1922) and Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Critics describe him as a partisan operative whose deceptions and editing choices corrupt the record he claims to expose.
O’Keefe was born on June 28, 1984, in Bergen County, New Jersey, and raised in a Catholic home in suburban Westwood. His father worked in construction; his mother practiced physical therapy. He attended Rutgers University, where he studied philosophy and edited a conservative student publication. His instinct for political theater showed early. As an undergraduate he campaigned to remove Lucky Charms cereal from Rutgers dining halls on the grounds that the leprechaun mascot demeaned Irish Americans. The stunt parodied campus identity politics rather than advancing a grievance, and it previewed the method that defined his career: occupy the language of an institution, push it to absurdity, and record what happens.
Two relationships shaped his formation. The first ran through the Leadership Institute, the conservative training organization founded by Morton Blackwell (b. 1939), which schooled young activists in the mechanics of messaging, organization, and confrontation. O’Keefe worked there after college and absorbed its emphasis on practical technique over theory. The second relationship was with Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012), the conservative media entrepreneur who saw in O’Keefe a weapon against the legacy press. Breitbart supplied the distribution platform that turned O’Keefe’s early operations into national events.
His apprenticeship in undercover work came through the anti-abortion movement. In 2008 he collaborated with activist Lila Rose (b. 1988) on recordings of Planned Parenthood employees made while the pair posed as people seeking help for a pregnant minor. The operation circulated widely in conservative media and established the template he would repeat for the next two decades: a false identity, a hidden camera, a private conversation, and a public release timed for maximum effect.
The ACORN investigation of 2009 made him famous. Working with Hannah Giles, O’Keefe recorded employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now appearing to offer tax, housing, and legal advice to visitors presenting themselves as a prostitute and her companion. Breitbart’s site BigGovernment.com published the videos in sequence, and the rollout overwhelmed ACORN’s capacity to respond. Congress voted to cut the organization’s federal funding. Donors fled, affiliates collapsed, and ACORN dissolved within a year. The episode demonstrated that a twenty-five-year-old with a camera and a distribution partner could destroy a national organization that had operated for four decades.
ACORN also fixed the pattern of dispute that followed every subsequent operation. Supporters argued the videos showed real misconduct that established media had no interest in finding. Critics argued the footage was edited to mislead, and several official reviews, including one by the California Attorney General, found that the published videos omitted context and that no criminal conduct by ACORN employees was established, even as some reviews faulted individual employees’ judgment. The argument over ACORN never resolved. It became the standing argument over O’Keefe himself.
He founded Project Veritas in 2010 to institutionalize the method. The organization fused functions that conventional journalism keeps separate: investigation, advocacy, fundraising, and viral distribution operated as a single system. The nonprofit form gave it donor money and tax advantages; the activist culture gave it speed and aggression that no newsroom could match.
The same year brought the episode that most damaged his standing with journalists. O’Keefe and three associates entered the New Orleans federal building housing the office of Senator Mary Landrieu (b. 1955) while posing as telephone repairmen. Prosecutors initially weighed felony charges; O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of entering federal property under false pretenses and received probation. Mainstream outlets treated the conviction as disqualifying. His supporters treated it as proof the government feared him. Both readings hardened.
Project Veritas proved ACORN was no fluke. In 2011 its operatives, posing as representatives of a Muslim organization, recorded NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller disparaging the Tea Party movement. The release triggered a crisis at NPR that contributed to the resignation of its chief executive, Vivian Schiller (b. 1961), no relation to Ron. The operation showed that the method scaled upward: a prestige institution proved as vulnerable as a community-organizing group.
Through the 2010s the organization ran operations against labor unions, technology companies, television networks, government agencies, political campaigns, and schools. Its findings circulated through conservative television and radio, and Republican lawmakers cited them in hearings. Fact-checkers and press critics answered each release with challenges to its editing and framing. The cycle became ritual: release, amplification, rebuttal, fundraising appeal.
Not every operation worked. In 2017 a Project Veritas operative approached The Washington Post claiming that Senate candidate Roy Moore (b. 1947) had impregnated her as a teenager. The Post investigated the accuser instead of publishing the accusation, traced her to Project Veritas, and published a reconstruction of the attempted sting. The episode reversed the usual roles. A target had caught the hunter, and it did so by practicing the verification O’Keefe’s critics accused him of skipping.
Legal trouble recurred. In 2013 O’Keefe paid $100,000 to settle a suit by Juan Carlos Vera, a former ACORN employee who argued the recordings violated California law. In 2022 a federal jury ordered Project Veritas to pay about $1.2 million to Democracy Partners, a Democratic consulting firm an operative had infiltrated under a false identity. The verdicts established financial costs for the method without deterring its use.
O’Keefe wrote three books across this period: Breakthrough (2013), American Pravda (2018), and >American Muckraker (2022). The books mix memoir, manifesto, and self-defense. Their consistent claim places hidden-camera work in the lineage of American undercover reporting, from Bly’s asylum exposé forward, and argues that the press abandoned the tradition out of class loyalty to the institutions it covers.
The most consequential episode of his later Project Veritas years concerned the diary of Ashley Biden (b. 1981), daughter of Joe Biden (b. 1942). Project Veritas acquired the diary in 2020 after its theft from a Florida residence and chose against publishing it, citing authentication and privacy concerns. Federal prosecutors investigated the interstate transport of stolen property, and in November 2021 agents executed search warrants on homes of O’Keefe and his colleagues. The raids ignited a debate over press freedom that crossed ideological lines; even outlets hostile to O’Keefe questioned whether the government could treat a self-described news organization’s editorial materials as ordinary evidence. Courts appointed a special master to screen the seized devices. Two individuals who sold the diary pleaded guilty; neither O’Keefe nor Project Veritas was charged.
By the early 2020s the organization he founded had grown into a multimillion-dollar institution with a board, a large staff, and donors who expected governance. In February 2023 the board removed him. A staff memo accused him of abusive management, micromanagement, and spending irregularities, including the use of organizational funds for personal expenses. O’Keefe denied the charges and argued that the board acted under pressure from interests his investigations threatened, pointing to the timing after a release targeting Pfizer. Project Veritas later sued him, alleging he prepared a competing venture on its time and resources. The organization declined after his departure, suspending operations and shedding staff, which strengthened the argument that it had never been anything other than its founder.
Within weeks of his removal he launched O’Keefe Media Group, known as OMG. The new organization abandoned the nonprofit form for a subscription and direct-support model and built its strategy on decentralization. Where Project Veritas concentrated investigative capacity in a staff, OMG sought to distribute it across a network of citizen journalists equipped with cameras and training. The O’Keefe Academy formalized the instruction. The vision treated investigative journalism as a practice to be multiplied rather than an institution to be staffed.
OMG resumed the familiar operations. Targets included technology employees, federal officials, and corporate executives, with several stings built on dating-app encounters that yielded candid talk from government staffers, a series promoted under the name “Dating the Deep State.” A 2024 recording of a Washington Commanders executive disparaging the team’s owners, players, and fans drew national coverage and cost the executive his job. The same year O’Keefe released Line in the Sand, a documentary on the United States-Mexico border distributed through the platform of Tucker Carlson (b. 1969). OMG also recruited poll watchers and election observers, extending his long interest in election procedures into field organization.
The pattern has continued into the mid-2020s. A 2025 hidden-camera recording of a Fox Weather executive boasting of misusing company funds led to his firing. In early 2026 OMG ran an undercover series in Los Angeles documenting petition circulators paying homeless people on Skid Row for ballot-petition signatures and voter registrations, including footage of payments and of circulators directing signers to use the names of registered voters. O’Keefe and his crew reported being assaulted while confronting the circulators on camera. The series brought police attention and renewed argument over whether his releases produce prosecutions or only spectacle. In the same period he fought a personal legal dispute with a former associate that briefly cost him his firearms under a restraining order a judge later lifted, and in May 2026 OMG won a federal court ruling it characterized as a significant victory. He also launched an interview program, “My Price Is My Life,” featuring dissidents and controversial figures, a format that moves him toward conventional media work even as the undercover operations continue.
O’Keefe’s significance lies in the model. He emerged as trust in established institutions collapsed and demonstrated that a small team with cameras, a donor list, and social-media distribution could set the national agenda without access, credentials, or institutional permission. His methods descend from the undercover reporting of the Progressive Era; his distribution strategy descends from Breitbart’s digital populism. The fusion of the two, funded by the audience, was his invention, and activists across the political spectrum have copied it.
The argument over his legacy reduces to a dispute about deception. O’Keefe holds that lying to institutions reveals truth about them, that the candid private statement outranks the official public one, and that a journalism establishment that once celebrated Bly’s feigned madness forfeits standing to condemn his feigned identities. His critics hold that his deceptions extend past the targets to the audience, through editing that arranges authentic footage into inauthentic stories, and that his measure of success is political damage rather than accuracy. Two decades of operations have given both sides their evidence. Careers have ended, organizations have dissolved, juries have awarded damages, prosecutors have investigated, and the cameras keep rolling. Whatever the verdict, the boundary between reporting and political combat sits where it does in American media partly because James O’Keefe spent twenty years moving it.
Alliance Theory holds that political belief systems have no moral thread running through them. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton argue that beliefs derive from alliance structures, that moral principles serve the strategic function of mobilizing support for allies and opposition to rivals, and that the inconsistencies in every political camp follow from the heterogeneity of its coalition rather than from hypocrisy in any personal sense. Moral principles are not so principled. Core values are not so core. Apply this to James O’Keefe and something strange happens. The theory explains his career, his target list, his audience, his firing, and his durability. It also reveals him as a practitioner of the theory, applied with a one-sided discipline the theory predicts.
Start with the product. O’Keefe sells documented hypocrisy. Every operation follows the same arc: an institution states its principles in public, an employee flouts them in private, the camera catches the gap. The ACORN videos showed a community organization appearing to assist a criminal enterprise. The NPR sting showed a fundraiser for a neutrality-professing network disparaging the Tea Party. The Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson recordings showed health officials talking about their products in ways their press offices never permit. Alliance Theory says this gap exists everywhere and must exist everywhere, because belief systems are patchwork narratives stitched together to serve coalitions, and no one can perform the patchwork without seams. O’Keefe mines a renewable resource. He will never run out of material because the supply of inconsistency is structural. The theory explains why two decades of stings keep producing footage: institutions generate the gap between stated principle and alliance function as a byproduct of normal operation, the way engines generate heat.
But the theory cuts against his interpretation of the footage. O’Keefe holds that the private statement reveals the institution’s true character and the public statement conceals it. Alliance Theory denies that any true character sits beneath the inconsistency. There are only alliances, and statements tuned to audiences. Consider what a sting does in Pinsof’s terms. The operative fakes the cues of alliance membership: similarity tags, shared rivals, the markers that trigger alliance detection. The fake Muslim donor group presented NPR’s fundraiser with what looked like a wealthy ally who despised the Tea Party. Ron Schiller then did what alliance psychology directs a man to do in the presence of a perceived ally: he signaled loyalty by derogating the shared rival. The dating-app operations run the same play in miniature. A government employee believes he sits across from a sympathetic woman and produces the candor that performs trustworthiness in courtship. The hidden camera records alliance signaling calibrated to the wrong audience. O’Keefe then releases the footage to the public, where the same words function as betrayal. His method does not strip propaganda away to expose truth. It captures one propagandistic register and broadcasts it to an audience for whom a different register was prepared. The private statement is no less strategic than the public one. It is strategy aimed at a smaller room.
This reading does not acquit his targets. It says the confession O’Keefe claims to extract is a performance, and the institution’s public statement is also a performance, and the question of which one is “true” dissolves. What remains is the alliance structure, visible in both registers.
The target list confirms the frame. Pinsof’s figure of the American alliance structure places journalists, scientists, universities, Google, Hollywood, and federal agencies on the liberal side of the super-alliance divide. O’Keefe’s career reads as a tour of that column: ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NPR, CNN, The Washington Post, teachers’ unions, Big Tech, the FBI, Pfizer, the Department of the Army’s bureaucrats, Los Angeles housing officials, California voter-registration NGOs. A theory of journalism cannot predict this list. A map of coalitions predicts it. His stated principle, that powerful institutions deserve undercover scrutiny, would, if applied transitively, produce stings on megachurches, gun manufacturers, oil companies, and conservative media empires. It does not. The principle is the moral package. The alliance is the function. The exceptions prove the structure rather than the principle: when OMG recorded a Trump domestic-policy aide in 2026, the operation served the populist core against the administrative class, the same rival his audience has always held, now staffed by nominal co-partisans. The alliance line runs around the MAGA coalition, and “the Deep State” names whatever sits outside it, whichever party signs its paychecks.
The propagandistic biases sort the combatants on both sides. His audience applies victim biases to O’Keefe. The Landrieu conviction becomes political persecution. The FBI raids over the Ashley Biden diary become proof the regime fears him. The 2023 board coup becomes a deep-state decapitation. The restraining order and the firearms seizure in 2026 become harassment. Each setback gets recoded as grievance, the perpetrator’s responsibility maximized, the mitigating circumstances denied, the harm embellished, exactly the bias package Pinsof describes for allies under attack. The same audience applies perpetrator biases to his conduct: the false identities become tradecraft, the misleading edits become editing, the federal misdemeanor becomes a technicality. None of this requires bad faith. Motivated reasoning, in the paper’s sharpest line, operates as an honest signal of loyalty. A subscriber who accepted a fact-check from The Washington Post would be defecting, and his fellow partisans would read the defection correctly.
The symmetry holds on the other side. The journalism establishment condemns O’Keefe’s deceptions as disqualifying while celebrating the lineage of Nellie Bly, the Mirage Tavern, and the Mother Jones private-prison infiltration. Undercover deception by coalition members serves truth; undercover deception by a rival serves propaganda. When the Post unmasked the Roy Moore operative in 2017, the press treated the episode as verification triumphant, and it was, but the same institutions extend no equivalent credit when O’Keefe’s footage proves accurate and an executive resigns. Fact-checkers police his edits with a rigor they do not apply to sympathetic documentary makers. The guild’s claim that he is not a journalist functions as boundary enforcement by a coalition defending its credential, and Pinsof would note that the boundary moved when the FBI raided him: portions of the press defended his materials against seizure, because the category “journalist” shelters their own coalition’s privileges, and a precedent against him endangered allies. They defended the category, not the man.
Interdependence explains the business model. Project Veritas ran on donors; OMG runs on subscribers. Both arrangements bind O’Keefe to his coalition through reliable mutual benefit: he supplies ammunition against shared rivals, they supply income and acclaim. The model contains a discipline no editor could impose. A sting against a conservative institution would rupture interdependence, confuse the similarity tags, and read as betrayal under the transitivity rule, since attacking his audience’s allies makes him the ally of their enemies. The target list is not a choice he revisits operation by operation. The coalition structure chose it for him, and his revenue enforces it.
The board coup of February 2023 plays as an alliance rupture with competitive victimhood on both sides. The staff memo claimed abuse, cruelty, and misappropriation: victim claims designed to mobilize the board and donors. O’Keefe answered with his own victim narrative, timed to the Pfizer release, claiming powerful interests had captured his creation. Both sides bid for the loyalty of the same third parties, the donors, in the pattern Pinsof describes for groups striving to establish that their side suffered the greater injustice. The donors split, the organization collapsed without its founder, and O’Keefe rebuilt his coalition under a new name within weeks. The speed of the rebuild measures how little of his support ever attached to the institution. The alliance was always with him.
O’Keefe’s operating premise and Alliance Theory’s thesis are the same claim. He has spent twenty years arguing that stated values are propaganda, that institutions profess principles to serve interests, that the moral package conceals the coalition function. American Pravda is folk Pinsof. The man built a career, two organizations, and an academy on the insight that moral principles are not so principled. The difference between O’Keefe and the theorists is scope. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton apply the insight symmetrically, to liberals and conservatives, masses and elites, and predict that all humans run the same alliance psychology because it ships with the species. O’Keefe applies it to rivals only. His camera finds the gap between principle and practice in NPR and never in his donor base, in the FBI and never in his own editing suite. An asymmetric application of a symmetric theory is the signature the theory predicts: he uses the insight propagandistically, as a weapon for his allies, which is what the insight says people do with insights. The exposer of alliance behavior turns out to be its most disciplined practitioner, and Alliance Theory, unlike his critics, does not even count this against him. It counts it as human.
A limit. Alliance Theory has nothing to say about whether any given O’Keefe video is accurate, whether his edits deceive, or whether ACORN deserved its death. Those are evidentiary questions the theory leaves to others. What it explains is why the answers never settle anything: because the verdict each viewer renders was determined by the alliance map before the footage played, and the footage, whatever it shows, gets metabolized as ammunition by one coalition and as libel by the other. O’Keefe understood that before the academics formalized it. He bet his career on it, and the bet keeps paying.
The Group Mind on Hidden Camera: James O’Keefe Through Stephen P. Turner
James O’Keefe runs his enterprise on a theory of knowledge he has never had to defend. The theory goes like this. Organizations contain a hidden layer of belief that everyone inside knows and no one says. Official statements conceal this layer. Candid private talk samples it. A hidden camera, pointed at one unguarded employee, therefore extracts the institution’s true character and forces the tacit into the explicit, where the public can finally see it. Every sting from ACORN to the dating-app operations depends on this chain of inference. The footage is the evidence; the theory is what makes the footage mean anything.
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) has spent four decades dismantling exactly this kind of theory. In The Social Theory of Practices, Brains/Practices/Relativism, and Understanding the Tacit, Turner attacks the idea that groups possess shared hidden objects: collective practices, common presuppositions, a stock of tacit knowledge held jointly by members. His argument turns on transmission. A hidden mental content cannot be copied from one mind to another, because what passes between people is only public performance: words, gestures, examples, corrections. Each learner watches the performances and constructs his own internal analogue through his own history of trial, feedback, and habituation. The analogues resemble one another enough to coordinate conduct, and the resemblance creates the illusion of a shared object behind them. But the object is a fiction. There is no group mind, no collective unconscious, no institutional soul. There are only individuals, each carrying tacit knowledge of his own manufacture, produced by his own path through the world.
Run O’Keefe’s method through this argument and the central inference of the sting collapses. Consider the operation that made the genre respectable to its audience: Ron Schiller at lunch, disparaging the Tea Party to men he believed represented a Muslim charity. O’Keefe’s framing held that the camera had caught NPR saying what NPR believed. Turner’s question is simple. What entity, exactly, did the believing? Schiller’s talk that day was the output of one man’s habituation: his years of donor lunches, his trained feel for what wealthy prospects want to hear, his individual read of that table on that afternoon. The performance reveals a great deal about Schiller, his formation, and the skills his job selected for. It reveals nothing about a shared hidden belief at NPR, because on Turner’s account no such object exists to be revealed. The inference from one tongue to the institution’s soul requires a folk Durkheimianism, the organization as a person with private convictions any member can confess. Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) at least argued for his collective consciousness. O’Keefe assumes his and points a camera at it.
The same goes for the phrase that carries the whole enterprise: what everyone inside knows and no one says. Turner treats “what everyone knows” as a manner of speaking that dissolves under pressure. Each insider knows his own version, built from his own exposures, and the versions converge only in their outward performances. The convergence has a real cause, and here the frame starts to give something back to O’Keefe rather than only taking away. Institutions hire particular kinds of people, train them through particular feedback, reward particular performances. These causal processes produce similar individual habits across a workforce, similar in the way that graduates of one drill sergeant march alike. So a sting can constitute evidence of something institutional, but the something is a pattern of convergent individual formation rather than a shared secret. The implication is methodological. One executive on camera is a sample of one habituation. Twenty-eight separate instances of cash changing hands for ballot signatures on Skid Row, recorded across multiple circulators, approaches evidence of a convergent practice, the kind of repetition from which an institutional pattern can be inferred without any appeal to a group mind. Turner’s frame does not condemn the hidden camera. It sets the sample size at which the camera’s findings begin to mean what O’Keefe says they mean, and most of his famous operations fall below it.
There is a second, stranger problem. O’Keefe claims to make the tacit explicit, and Turner’s account says this is the one thing a camera cannot do. Tacit knowledge, on Turner’s reading of the tradition that runs through Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), is what never makes it into words: the feel, the trained judgment, the embodied skill that lets a man perform without consulting rules. When Schiller speaks candidly, he does not read out hidden content. He produces more words, another explicit performance, this one tuned to a small room instead of a press release. The gap O’Keefe’s cameras document is a gap between two explicit registers, frontstage talk and backstage talk, and both registers ride on tacit skill that stays off camera: the fundraiser’s feel for flattery, the bureaucrat’s feel for what a date wants to hear, the petition circulator’s feel for which homeless man will sign. The sting captures the products of tacit knowledge and never the knowledge. The institution’s true operating layer, the trained judgment in ten thousand individual heads, remains exactly as inaccessible after the video drops as before. O’Keefe sells extraction of the tacit. What he delivers is a second transcript.
The journalism guild’s standing answer to O’Keefe is a normative claim: he is not a real journalist. In Explaining the Normative, Turner asks what such claims amount to, and his answer is corrosive. Normative assertions invoke a special realm of correctness, validity, and constitutive rules that supposedly stands apart from ordinary causal fact. Turner argues the realm is empty. When we explain why a performance counts as real journalism, everything we can point to is causal and local: who was trained in which newsroom, who answers to which editors, what habits of checking got drilled into whom, what sanctions follow which lapses. The “norms of journalism” add nothing to this inventory. They are a folk theory, what Turner calls a good Bad Theory, an idiom that feels explanatory while referring to nothing, sustained because it does rhetorical work its users could not do by stating the causal facts plainly.
This is why the credentialing fight against O’Keefe never lands a clean blow. The guild cannot state the rule that excludes him, because there is no rule. Its members acquired their sense of what real journalism is the way everyone acquires tacit competence, through individual apprenticeship, correction, and habituation, and a habituation can be possessed without being articulable. Asked to articulate it, they produce post hoc rationalizations that O’Keefe defeats one by one. Deception disqualifies him? Then it disqualifies Nellie Bly’s feigned madness and the Mirage Tavern. Editing for effect disqualifies him? Every documentary edits for effect. Political motive disqualifies him? The advocacy press keeps its credentials. Each stated criterion either excludes honored ancestors or admits him, and the guild retreats to the unstated remainder, which is where its real knowledge lives and where, by its nature, it cannot be exhibited. O’Keefe has built a career in this gap between what the profession knows tacitly and what it can say. He claims the muckraker lineage and dares the guild to produce the membership condition. Twenty years on, it has not, because on Turner’s account it cannot.
Turner offers the guild a way out that it will not take. Drop the normative idiom and describe the difference causally. The Washington Post’s unmasking of the Roy Moore operative in 2017 displayed what newsroom formation produces: reporters whose trained suspicion fired at a story that wanted too much to be believed, who checked the accuser before the accusation, whose habits of verification had been built through years of supervised failure. O’Keefe’s operatives lack that formation, and against it the Moore sting died. Stated this way, the contrast needs no constitutive norms. Different training histories produce different capacities; one capacity caught the other. This is a stronger indictment than “not a real journalist,” because it can be demonstrated rather than asserted. The guild prefers the normative version anyway, which is the persistence of a good Bad Theory in the wild: the moralized idiom feels weightier than the causal facts, even though the causal facts are all there is.
O’Keefe believes his method can be codified and scaled, a doctrine teachable to thousands of citizen journalists. Turner’s transmission problem says otherwise. What made O’Keefe effective was never the protocol; it was his individual tacit endowment, the nerve, the timing, the feel for a mark, grown through two decades of practice that began with a leprechaun at Rutgers. The Academy can transmit the explicit shell: equipment lists, legal guidance, scenario templates. Each student must then grow his own tacit analogue through his own failures, and most will not, because the formation took the founder twenty years and a temperament. The prediction is a citizen-journalist corps whose output varies wildly around a low mean, with occasional hits from the few students who put in the habituation, a prediction the early OMG record already tracks. Decentralized journalism inherits the same constraint as every apprenticeship: the master can show, but he cannot transmit, and showing only starts the student’s own slow construction.
O’Keefe needs a collective object Turner denies: the group mind whose confession one camera can capture, since without it a sting is a sample of one habituation and the genre loses its inferential force. The guild needs a normative object Turner denies: the constitutive rule of real journalism, since without it the boundary fight reduces to a comparison of training regimes that O’Keefe might survive. Each side wages the war with a fiction, and the fictions are load-bearing. Strip them away, as Turner would, and what remains is a set of plain causal questions. What formations produce what habits of talk. What sample of recorded performances licenses what inference about an institution. What training builds verification and what training builds nerve. Neither combatant wants the war on those terms, because the fictions fight better than the facts. That preference, for idioms that feel explanatory over descriptions that are, may be the most institutional thing the hidden cameras have ever caught.
The Emotional Energy Machine: James O’Keefe Through Randall Collins
Randall Collins (b. 1941) built his sociology on a small unit: the situation. In Interaction Ritual Chains, every successful encounter requires the same ingredients. Bodies assembled, a barrier against outsiders, a mutual focus of attention, a shared mood. When the ingredients combine, the participants entrain on one another, rhythm answering rhythm, and the encounter pays out its products: solidarity, symbols charged with group membership, standards of right conduct, and the master commodity Collins calls emotional energy, the confidence and enthusiasm that individuals carry away and spend in their next encounter. People chain these situations together across a lifetime, seeking the encounters that pump energy and avoiding the ones that drain it. Beliefs, loyalties, and moralities ride along on the chain. The theory has an unsettling implication: people do not assemble because they believe; they believe because they assemble.
Run James O’Keefe through this apparatus and his entire operation resolves into ritual engineering, link by link.
Start with the sting, which Collins exposes as a manufactured interaction ritual with one counterfeit participant. The operative supplies every ingredient. Co-presence: a lunch table, a bar, a date. The barrier: privacy, intimacy, the closed door that tells the target outsiders cannot hear. The mutual focus and shared mood: the fake donor’s flattering attention, the dating profile’s manufactured chemistry, the false membership symbols that gain entry, a Muslim charity’s letterhead, a repairman’s uniform, a young woman’s interest. The target’s alliance detectors read a solidarity encounter in progress and his body cooperates, entraining on the operative’s rhythms, warming as the ritual builds. And then he produces candor, which on Collins’s account is the natural output of a successful ritual rather than a leak or a slip. Solidarity talk is what charged encounters generate. The unguarded disparagement of shared enemies, the boasting, the confession, these are membership offerings, the verbal sacraments of a bond the target believes is forming. Ron Schiller at lunch was not failing to maintain his guard. He was succeeding at a ritual. The sting harvests the success.
The cruelty of the device, and its theatrical power, lies in the asymmetry. For the target the ritual succeeds in the room and fails retroactively, weeks later, on the internet. The solidarity he invested in turns out to have had one participant. Collins says failed rituals drain emotional energy, and the sting engineers the most catastrophic failure available: a ritual revealed as counterfeit before the largest possible audience. The published video lets viewers watch a man’s emotional energy collapse in public, the deflation, the shame, the resignation that follows within days. That spectacle is part of the product. The genre does not merely transmit information about a target. It exhibits his ritual destruction.
The release is the second ritual, and here the chain proper begins. A video drop assembles O’Keefe’s audience around a mutual focus, the footage, with a shared mood of righteous anger and predatory glee, behind a barrier that subscription and insider knowledge supply. The encounter is mediated rather than bodily, a weakness Collins acknowledges in dispersed audiences, and O’Keefe compensates with the strongest substitutes available: countdown promotion, synchronized timing, the comment swarm that lets each member see the others reacting in real time. OMG releases on a schedule, new videos every Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern. Collins would recognize the liturgical calendar at once. Symbols decay without recharging; solidarity fades in days; a congregation must reassemble at fixed intervals or dissolve. The Tuesday drop is a service, and the brand, the raised-eyebrow founder, the phrase citizen journalist, the hashtags, are the charged symbols the service renews each week.
From there the links multiply. The confrontation ambush, where O’Keefe appears with camera and crew to face a target, is a staged conflict ritual designed so the tension breaks his way. In Violence, Collins argues that face-to-face conflict is governed by confrontational tension and fear, and that the party who controls the attention space wins the encounter long before any blow lands. The ambush gives O’Keefe every attentional advantage: foreknowledge, a team, a script, a camera the target must suddenly perform for. The target stumbles, flees, or stonewalls, and the footage records emotional energy transferring from him to O’Keefe in real time. When the tension breaks the wrong way, as on Skid Row in March 2026 when petition circulators assaulted his crew, the loss converts instantly into a different ritual ingredient: the wound becomes a martyr symbol, the attack footage becomes the next mutual focus, and the audience reassembles in outrage. Collins’s conflict sociology runs back through Georg Simmel (1858-1918): an external enemy is the cheapest solidarity machine ever devised. The persecution episodes, the FBI raids, the police at the West Palm Beach office, the restraining order and the seized firearms, each one supplies an enemy in motion and a fresh occasion for the congregation to feel itself a congregation.
Why is the model self-funding, and why does it never need to win an argument?
Self-funding, because what the subscriber buys is ritual membership rather than information. Information is a poor commodity; it leaks, and anyone can free-ride on a news report. Participation cannot be free-ridden. The monthly payment purchases a place inside the barrier: early access, insider briefings, the standing of a member rather than a spectator, a personal stake in each Tuesday’s solidarity. Collins describes a market for ritual participation where people allocate their resources toward the encounters that pay the highest emotional energy. O’Keefe’s pivot from the nonprofit donor model to direct subscription was a move toward the pure form of this market. Project Veritas sold donors the satisfaction of funding a weapon. OMG sells members the weekly experience of firing it. The Academy extends the market one step further by selling ritual production, training consumers to become operatives, each graduate a new node intended to generate chains of his own. Whether the graduates succeed matters less to the model than that the training is a high-intensity ritual, the workshop, the mission, the initiation.
And the model never needs to win an argument because arguments and rituals run on different currencies. An argument trades in validity; a ritual trades in emotional energy; and Collins holds that beliefs follow the energy. A fact-check arrives from outside the barrier, authored by members of a rival congregation, carrying no charge for O’Keefe’s audience except the charge of profanation. Collins is precise about what happens when outsiders attack a group’s sacred symbols: the group experiences righteous anger, the strongest of the ritual emotions, and the symbol comes out of the encounter recharged. Every debunking therefore functions as a donation. The editing controversies, the Columbia Journalism Review autopsies, the deplatformings, each one supplies the Tuesday service with its reading. A criticism that might devastate O’Keefe in the currency of validity arrives in his economy already converted into fuel. This is why two decades of refutation have left the operation undented. His critics keep trying to win an exchange of arguments with a man who is conducting an exchange of rituals, and only one of these games is being scored.
The frame also explains the event his enemies misread as the end, the February 2023 firing. Project Veritas kept the building, the staff, the donor list, the legal team, and the brand, and collapsed within months. Collins predicts exactly this. Emotional energy attaches to persons, not institutions. O’Keefe was the organization’s energy star, the figure who dominated every attention space, whose confidence was the display that drew the chain forward, and the rituals ran through him: his reveals, his ambushes, his persecution. Remove the star and the services go dark; the symbols, uncharged, fade; the congregation drifts to wherever the energy went. It went to a new name within weeks, and the donors followed, because the chain had never lived in the nonprofit. It lived in the man and the audience, and that pair rebuilt the apparatus at the speed of an email list.
One last turn. The press has always been a ritual chain too. The newsroom ran on co-presence and deadline entrainment; the front page was a daily mutual focus for a city; the byline, the prize, the masthead were charged membership symbols; and the profession’s morality, objectivity and verification, was the ritual standard the chain sustained. That chain has been weakening for thirty years as its assemblies dispersed, its symbols lost charge, and its congregations stopped showing up. O’Keefe’s innovation was to see, earlier than the institutions he attacks, that the ritual function and the information function of journalism could be separated, and that the ritual function was the one the audience paid for. He kept the forms, the exposé, the hidden camera, the muckraker lineage, and rebuilt them as pure energy machinery for the platform age: scheduled drops, member barriers, conflict liturgy, a persecution calendar. His targets keep asking whether what he does is journalism. Collins suggests the harder question runs the other way. What he does is what journalism was always partly doing, with the other part removed, and the removal is why it runs so hot.
Here are 10 things news organizations and journalists should watch for to avoid landing a starring role in one of these videos:
The driving premise of those engaging in undercover-video stings borrows from a Saul Alinsky rule: Humiliating an individual is a powerful pathway to disrupting an institution. These operatives aim to find individuals, however loosely connected to an organization or movement, who will make a comment or take an action that challenges the way an institution presents itself to the public. While this may not often prove actual fraud in action, it aims to sow doubt. This can be any employee, vendor, freelancer, PR rep, donor, interviewee, or even a customer. The very definition of infiltration in this universe is so broad that video provocateurs are sure to declare victory even if they gain access to the receptionist desk rather than the inner workings of a corporation. From the perspective of the sting orchestrator, their work aims to reveal some fundamental, inconvenient truth (in this case, fraud in a federal program that subsidizes mobile phones for low-income people).
Infiltrators know that using the endorsements of trusted people and companies can help open doors with insiders, particularly via social media platforms such as LinkedIn. They are also expert at using old-fashioned networking to gain access to private conversations. Recently, an operative in an O’Keefe sting asked his target to help him get his niece a job, thus planting an additional operative.
Operatives almost always use fake identification or claim fake identities. Expect these infiltrators to create fake companies, make real donations while posing as fake donors, host fake websites, and use fake identification. Operatives keep these assets alive for years at a time. In one instance, anti-abortion activist David Daleiden is alleged to have created a fake company and used fake government ID to gain access to medical professionals. In another, O’Keefe concocted a fake company (including a basic website) in an attempt to lure filmmakers into accepting money from a dubious source.
Undercover operatives play on empathy to encourage rule bending or some level of deceit. Plenty has been written about how ethical people decide to break the rules. In general, if you find yourself talking to someone you’ve recently met (who appeals to your expertise or sense of self-importance) and you find yourself saying something like, “I’m going to share this but it didn’t come from me…,” you have made yourself vulnerable to operatives. (That case involved bid rigging for a school-district contract.)
Operatives use gossip or social event chit-chat to generate criticism about the boss or workplace decisions, and get subjects to concur or divulge secrets about the inner workings of an operation. In one sting a deputy attorney general in Maryland admits to an operative (as he flirts with her) that he is “winging it” in his job and that his boss does not want to run for governor.
Ego and alcohol add up to regretful comments. Fundraisers, public events, and conferences are golden opportunities for undercover operatives. A key strategy is to attend the cocktail hour, or hang out in the bar of hotels where conference attendees are staying, hoping that the combination of alcohol, flirtatiousness, and ego-boosting comments will open the tap of exaggeration or private storytelling. After New York Elections Commissioner Alan Schulkin was featured criticizing Democrats in what he thought was a private conversation at a Christmas party, he explained that he was trying to “placate” a woman who was a “nuisance.”
Even when someone has the appearance of legitimacy, it’s important to verify their identity. Undercover operatives have posed as a telephone repair operator, a flower delivery person, a physician, a public works employee, and more.
Operatives subvert organizational rules and culture to their advantage. For example, O’Keefe operatives visited a labor union with a culture that eschews demeaning any types of work, presented members with a nonsensical work proposal, and subsequently deceptively edited the video footage when the union representatives tried to steer the operatives toward more productive work instead of treating the operatives more harshly.
Operatives look for situations where people are already emotional about something they care deeply about, and then do something provocative. For example, they pretended to be Hillary Clinton supporters and wandered through a crowd of Bernie Sanders supporters protesting outside of the Democratic National Convention, generating footage of activists appearing angry and combative.
Like many journalists, operatives use old-fashioned ambush techniques to get interviews or comments. But often they take it a step farther with more aggressive techniques that would not be endorsed in most newsrooms. In one case a journalist was ambushed at his home by a man who appears to be O’Keefe pretending to be a Verizon employee conducting a satisfaction survey. O’Keefe recently published video of a counter-sting where one of his operatives was ambushed by the people she was trying to catch on video, where she is heard being badgered with aggressive and sexual taunts and being followed even into her cab. A more common undercover operative strategy is to confront someone that’s been secretly recorded for comment about the recording. The minute you find out you are on an O’Keefe video, get ready for an ambush.
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
