Will Wilkinson (b. 1973) is an American political writer, policy analyst, and journalist whose career traces a significant ideological migration. He came out of the libertarian movement of the late twentieth century, then built a distinctive liberalism that joins market competition, social insurance, psychological realism, and institutional competence. His work reaches across political philosophy, economics, personality psychology, electoral sociology, and constitutional reform. Across several intellectual worlds he serves as a translator between academic research and public debate, and he produces some of the clearest accounts of political polarization, geographic sorting, and liberal democratic governance written in the early twenty-first century.
Wilkinson was born in Independence, Missouri, and raised in Marshalltown, Iowa. His early development joined philosophical inquiry, literary interest, and a fascination with social science. He earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art and humanities from the University of Northern Iowa, then a master’s degree in philosophy from Northern Illinois University. He pursued doctoral study in philosophy at the University of Maryland before he left the academy. Later he completed a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Houston. This pairing of philosophical training and literary craft shapes his work as a public writer. His prose joins empirical analysis with conceptual clarity and narrative ease.
He entered public life through the libertarian intellectual world that flourished in the 1990s and early 2000s. He worked at the Institute for Humane Studies and the Mercatus Center, two homes for the revival of classical liberal thought in the United States. These places gave him Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, public-choice theory, and institutional economics. Many libertarian writers kept their attention on regulation and taxation. Wilkinson turned instead toward broader questions about culture, psychology, social cooperation, and the conditions that make free societies stable and prosperous.
His national profile rose during his years at the Cato Institute, where he worked as a policy analyst and research fellow. He wrote there on economic growth, inequality, Social Security, political philosophy, and public policy. He also founded and edited Cato Unbound, an online symposium that became a leading forum for long-form exchange in the early blog era. The project gathered scholars, journalists, economists, and philosophers for extended debates, and it anticipated later forms of digital argument.
A turning point in his thought came through his engagement with happiness research and the study of subjective well-being. Many libertarians viewed happiness economics with suspicion. They feared that governments might use subjective measures of well-being to justify paternalist policy. Wilkinson read the literature another way. In his 2007 Cato paper “In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is It Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy?,” he argued that much of the evidence strengthened the case for liberal institutions. Stable property rights, economic freedom, prosperity, and the rule of law all showed strong links to human flourishing.
Wilkinson also reached a conclusion that many libertarians found hard to accept. The countries that ranked highest on measures of well-being were often the Nordic democracies, which paired competitive market economies with generous social insurance. He treated this pattern as a finding rather than an embarrassment. He came to argue that welfare states and markets need not be enemies. Strong social insurance might give citizens enough security to tolerate the disruption, mobility, and uncertainty that creative destruction produces. This thought became a foundation for his later break with libertarian orthodoxy.
Over time he moved away from the anti-state strain that ran through much of American libertarianism. He kept his commitment to markets, entrepreneurship, individual liberty, and open societies. He gave new weight to capable institutions, effective governance, and social trust. His work joined a wider post-libertarian reassessment that aimed to keep the insights of market liberalism while it acknowledged the necessary role of public institutions.
This shift reached its fullest form in his leadership at the Niskanen Center, where he served as vice president for research and later as vice president for policy. The organization became a vehicle for a new synthesis that rejected both progressive statism and anti-government libertarianism. Wilkinson helped shape its emphasis on immigration reform, state capacity, criminal justice reform, social insurance, housing liberalization, and economic growth. Under his influence the center grew into a home for heterodox center-right and center-left policy thinking in Washington.
His most influential contribution to political analysis is the theory of the “density divide.” He developed it across the 2010s and set it out at length in a 2019 Niskanen report. The theory explains the growing geographic split in American politics. Conventional accounts looked to class, ideology, race, or economic interest. Wilkinson drew instead on personality psychology, and above all on research into the Big Five traits.
At the center of the theory sits the trait called Openness to Experience, which measures a man’s attraction to novelty, variety, experiment, and intellectual exploration. Wilkinson argued that modern America runs a long process of psychological self-sorting. People high in openness move in disproportionate numbers toward large metropolitan areas, which offer cultural variety, professional specialization, and dense social networks. Knowledge-economy industries cluster in those same regions and reward the very traits that drive the migration.
The result is a feedback loop. Cities concentrate people with similar psychological profiles, while rural and exurban regions hold a larger share of those who prize continuity, stability, and tradition. Polarization grows less because citizens change their minds and more because they sort themselves into separate worlds. The theory gave a strong account of why electoral divisions track the urban-rural line rather than older class categories. It became a leading sociological reading of American political geography.
His broader work folds psychology into political analysis as a matter of course. Many commentators explain political disagreement through ideology or material interest. Wilkinson gives greater weight to stable personality traits, social identities, and patterns of sorting by temperament and place. This view follows from his conviction that many political conflicts begin in differences of temperament and life experience rather than pure intellectual disagreement.
His journalism reached beyond the think tanks. He served as a Washington correspondent for The Economist and wrote for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vox, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. Across these venues he earned a reputation as a writer who could turn specialized research into frameworks that educated general readers could follow. His essays joined empirical findings from economics, sociology, and psychology with normative questions about freedom, fairness, and democratic legitimacy.
His writing returns often to the tie between capitalism and pluralism. He argues that market societies tend to weaken inherited forms of social exclusion, because they reward mobility, exchange, cooperation, and experiment across group lines. Immigration, urban growth, and economic openness therefore serve cultural and political ends as well as economic ones. Cities hold a central place in this vision. They drive innovation, variety, and social mixing, and they also generate new forms of inequality and polarization.
His influences show the hybrid cast of his thought. He draws heavily on Hayek’s account of dispersed knowledge and spontaneous order, and he engages the Rawlsian tradition and its concern with fairness, legitimacy, and social cooperation. His work tries to bridge these traditions rather than choose between them. The result is a political philosophy that treats markets and public institutions alike as necessary parts of a successful liberal society.
His career also reflects the broader change in intellectual life across the digital age. He came up through blogging, online debate, and think-tank publication, then moved into mainstream journalism, podcasting, and newsletter writing. In 2021, after a controversy over a social-media post during a period of intense political conflict, he left the Niskanen Center. The episode showed how hard it is to hold an independent institutional position in a polarized environment.
After Niskanen he returned to a more independent model of work through his Substack newsletter, Model Citizen. In this phase his attention moved away from daily policy fights and toward larger questions of constitutional design, electoral systems, democratic reform, and polarization. He grew interested in the weaknesses of first-past-the-post elections, the incentives that harden two-party conflict, and the conditions a functional liberal center might need to rebuild itself.
Seen across its full span, Wilkinson’s career belongs to a generation of public intellectuals who came out of the libertarian movement and then sought a broader synthesis. His significance rests less on any single policy proposal and more on his sustained effort to show how psychology, geography, economics, institutions, and culture shape democratic societies together. Few contemporary writers have done more to fold personality research, migration patterns, urban economics, and political theory into a single account of modern American polarization. Through that work he has become an important interpreter of the forces remaking liberal democracy in the twenty-first century.
Will Wilkinson and the Alliance Theory of Political Belief
David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie Haselton argue that political belief systems do not grow from deep values. They grow from alliance structures. A man’s beliefs track whom he counts as friends and whom he counts as rivals, and the values arrive later, as cover. They call the cover propaganda, and they sort it into three biases: perpetrator, victim, and attributional. Run Will Wilkinson through this account and his career stops looking like a philosophical journey. It looks like a change of allies.
Start with the migration. Wilkinson begins inside the libertarian coalition. Its homes pay him: the Institute for Humane Studies, the Mercatus Center, and the Cato Institute. These places sit in the business-elite wing of the American right, funded by donors who want low taxes and light regulation. His early beliefs fit the coalition. He defends markets, growth, and economic freedom. Then he moves. He lands at the Niskanen Center, recasts himself as a liberal, and adopts the welfare state. Alliance Theory reads the shift without reaching for a change of heart. His allies changed. His beliefs followed.
The happiness research episode shows the order of operations. Wilkinson reads the well-being literature and finds that the happiest countries pair markets with generous social insurance. He treats this as a reason to add the welfare state to his creed. Alliance Theory does not call the conclusion false. It notes the timing. The reading that lets a libertarian keep his markets and join the center arrives as he leaves the business-elite coalition for the knowledge-worker one. The data did not change his alliance. His alliance changed which data he found persuasive.
Transitivity does the rest. Pinsof and his coauthors say allies take on their allies’ rivals. The enemy of my enemy becomes my friend. As Wilkinson enters the center reform world, he inherits its enmities. He turns on Donald Trump (b. 1946), on populism, and on the Republican coalition he once stood beside. He keeps a few old positions, on immigration and on growth, but the rivals are new, and the rivals do the sorting. The paper’s own example fits him. The combination of libertarianism and liberalism, like the historical combination of libertarianism and Christian fundamentalism, did not come from analysis. It came from a coalition.
The paper names the split that explains him best. In the late twentieth century the upper class divides. Intellectual elites, the journalists and academics and writers, the holders of degrees, pull away from business elites, the holders of capital. The two camps drift into opposing coalitions. Wilkinson is an intellectual elite to the core. He holds an MFA, writes for The Economist and The Atlantic, edits symposia, and builds his standing from words and ideas. His move from donor-funded libertarianism to credentialed center-liberalism is the intellectual-elite migration in one man. He did not cross the divide. He traveled along it.
This bears on his signature work. Wilkinson explains American polarization through Openness to Experience. High-openness people gather in cities, low-openness people stay in the country, and the parties sort along the line. Alliance Theory rejects this kind of explanation at the root. The paper argues that group alignments carry no deeper pattern, no stable trait beneath them, no more than the cliques at a high school carry one. The military is not always conservative. Professors are not always liberal. Environmentalists once allied with right-wing nationalists in Eastern Europe. If the groupings shift with history, then a fixed trait cannot drive them. Wilkinson reaches for a constant in personality to explain a structure the paper treats as an accident. His theory is the values-based account that Alliance Theory sets out to replace.
Worse for his claim of neutrality, the density divide carries the attributional signature of his coalition. Pinsof’s attributional bias says people credit their allies’ advantages to good internal traits and their rivals’ to bad ones. Wilkinson’s allies, the urban knowledge workers, come out curious, open, exploratory, drawn to variety. His rivals, the rural and the exurban, come out closed, fearful of novelty, bound to the old ways. The flattering trait sits with his side. The unflattering one sits with theirs. He presents this as personality science. Alliance Theory hears a member of the urban coalition praising his allies and grading down his rivals in the vocabulary of the Big Five traits.
The end of his Niskanen tenure offers the sharpest test. In January 2021 Wilkinson posted a sarcastic tweet that used the word lynch against Vice President Mike Pence (b. 1959), a jab at hollow calls for unity. His own coalition did not defend him. Niskanen fired him. The New York Times dropped him. Alliance Theory predicts that allies rationalize an ally’s transgression, that they apply the perpetrator bias on his behalf, downplay the harm, and stress good intent. They did not. The reason is that Wilkinson held a bridging position with shallow transitivity. He belonged to the respectable center, a coalition that prizes its respectability and sheds liabilities fast. He served as an asset only while clean. The theorist of sorting got sorted out, and no cluster owned him strongly enough to absorb the cost of keeping him.
Seen through Alliance Theory, Wilkinson’s synthesis is not a philosophy. It is the belief profile of an intellectual elite who left one coalition for another and built justifications that fit the new home. The strange bedfellows are his own. Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls share his shelf for the reason the evangelical and the tax-cutter shared a party, because a coalition put them there. His talent lies in dressing the alliance as an argument. The 2021 fall shows the limit of the talent. A man who lives by his use to a careful coalition learns, when he slips, that the coalition was never his.
Convenient Beliefs
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) gives us a quieter tool than the coalitional ones. A convenient belief is a belief a man holds because holding it pays him. It need not be false. It need not be cynical. The man believes it, and believes he reached it by reason. The convenience works underneath, choosing which arguments persuade him and which he never quite gets around to. Turn this on Will Wilkinson and the synthesis he takes pride in starts to look like a sequence of beliefs that each cost him nothing and bought him a great deal.
Take the long arc first. At Cato, anti-statism pays. The donors fund it, the colleagues share it, the paychecks rest on it. Wilkinson believes it. At Niskanen a different belief pays, the one that keeps markets and welcomes the welfare state, and Wilkinson comes to believe that instead. Turner does not accuse him of selling out. The reading is subtler and worse. A sincere man updates toward the belief his new position rewards, and he feels the update as growth. The convenience never shows its face. It shows up only as a sense of having thought harder and seen further.
The happiness research is the clearest case. Wilkinson reads the well-being studies and finds that the happiest countries join markets to generous insurance. Consider what that conclusion saves him. He keeps his entire stock of market arguments, the capital of two decades, and he burns none of it. He adds the welfare state, the price of admission to his new home, and he pays the price with a finding rather than a confession. The belief is convenient because it lets him grow without loss. A man rarely finds the evidence that forces him to throw away his life’s work. He finds the evidence that lets him keep it and gain more.
His most convenient belief is the one about himself. Wilkinson believes he stands at the reasonable center, above the fevers of both sides, the man who reads the data straight. No belief pays a writer better. It raises his price, because the market wants a translator who talks to everyone. It flatters him, because it makes him wiser than the partisans. And it spares him the charge that sticks to all the rest, that he too writes from a position and an interest. Turner names the trick. The belief that one is free of convenient beliefs is the most convenient belief of all.
The density divide carries the same comfort. Wilkinson explains why his cohort gathers in the cities. They are high in openness, curious, drawn to the new. Notice what the theory does for the man who holds it. It turns the success of educated urban professionals into a matter of fine temperament rather than a matter of where the money went. The knowledge economy pays his class well and pays it in the cities, and a man of that class finds it convenient to believe he lives there because he is open, not because the rent follows the salary. The theory also saves him labor. If his opponents are low in openness, fixed by disposition, then he need not answer their arguments. He can diagnose them. Few beliefs pay better than the one that lets a man skip the work of refutation.
The state-capacity turn pays his new milieu. Wilkinson moves among policy professionals, foundations, and reformers, the class whose standing rests on the claim that capable government solves hard problems. He comes to believe that state capacity is the central question. Turner is sharp on this habit. Expert classes tend to reach the belief that experts should hold more authority, and they reach it sincerely, as a finding about the world. Wilkinson’s liberalism credentials the very class he joined. The belief flatters his peers and lifts the value of the work they all do.
The fall tests the frame and passes it. Niskanen fires him in 2021 over a careless tweet, the New York Times drops him, and his attention turns toward the failures of the system, the rot of the two-party order, the case for new electoral rules. Read this as conviction and it reads as public spirit. Read it as Turner might and it reads as convenient. A man cast out of his institutions takes comfort in the belief that the institutions were broken. The wound becomes a diagnosis. The structural critique lets him put the failure outside himself, in the rules, in the parties, in the design, anywhere but in the choice that lost him his chair.
The Voice
Will Wilkinson writes the way a philosophy student talks after he has read enough fiction to distrust philosophy prose. He trained in analytic philosophy and later took an MFA in creative writing, and the two halves war pleasantly inside every paragraph. He reaches for a precise conceptual distinction, then undercuts it with a joke or a curse before it can stiffen into jargon.
The register runs high and low at once. He drops a term like “Rawlsekian” and then tells you to tune your bullshit detector. He labels his own Substack artisanal takes for the discerning take-consumer, which tells you most of what you need to know about his relationship to his own product. He sells the takes and mocks the take economy in the same breath. The irony protects him. It also lets him smuggle in earnest claims about trust, institutions, and liberal order that he would feel embarrassed to state straight.
Listen to him on a podcast and the art-kid shows through. He was the thespian, the painter who got hijacked by Ayn Rand. He says so himself, with a Steve Martin gag layered on top: born the child of a poor sharecropper, just kidding, that’s The Jerk. The self-deprecation is real and also a move. It buys him room to be confident later. He talks fast, loops through tangents, signals the tangent, then circles back. In print he does the same with a wink.
His sentences accumulate. He stacks clauses and qualifications until the thought has nearly buried itself, then he lands a short flat line to clear the air. He likes coinages and proprietary labels, his own brand names for social patterns. The density divide. The Southernification of rural America. The label does argumentative work. Name a force and you seem to have explained it, and Wilkinson knows the trick well enough to use it and to half-apologize for using it.
Underneath the irony sits a moralist. He converted from libertarianism to a chastened liberalism, and converts carry heat. When he writes about his parents, the prose drops the jokes and goes for the throat. He describes the recognition of an interracial marriage that some relatives called deviant and immoral, and the sentence runs long and grave because the subject earns it. That switch matters for reading him. The flip irony is the default, not the floor. He can turn it off when he means it.
The rhetoric is combative and consciously so. He frames himself as arguing with people on the internet all day and hating it, then keeps doing it. He picks fights with his former tribe with a defector’s intensity, the man who knows the catechism and now uses it against the believers. He prosecutes. He rarely just describes a position. He situates it, diagnoses the psychology behind it, and assigns it a status in some larger story about who is fooling himself.
So the voice, in short. A trained philosopher’s precision, a fiction writer’s ear, a former libertarian’s heretic energy, and a Twitter brawler’s reflexes, all held together by an irony he can drop when the stakes rise. He performs detachment and feels strongly. That gap is the engine of the prose.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
Start with the name. Model Citizen. The premise of the thing, in its own words, holds that we owe it to our neighbors to build mental models of the world with as little error, bias, and lunacy as possible. David Pinsof needs no second sentence. That is the misunderstanding myth printed on the masthead. The world goes wrong because people carry broken models, the cure is better modeling, and the man who models for a living becomes the physician of the species. Pinsof would call this the perfect story for intellectuals, the one that turns their day job into salvation. Wilkinson branded it and sold subscriptions.
Then take his post on trust, the one where he tells you to distrust your own reasoning, to eschew iconoclasts, to side with the respectable consensus, to stick up for the New York Times and your local critical race theorist. Wilkinson frames this as humility about his own competence. Pinsof reads it as a coalition-loyalty oath wearing the robe of epistemology. Trust these sources decodes to trust my side’s sources. The respectable consensus is the Democratic-aligned knowledge class, and Wilkinson tells you that good mental hygiene and joining his coalition are one act. Stated motive, accuracy. Actual motive, recruitment.
Now the conversion. Wilkinson tells the libertarian-to-liberal story as growing up, as seeing what his old creed could not see, as following the argument past his tribe. Pinsof asks the cynic’s question. What did the move buy? Libertarianism was a shrinking, low-prestige coalition. The liberal knowledge class sits near the center of cultural status, with the column and the think-tank perch attached. That defector’s heat I described last time, the heretic energy, Pinsof reads as the zeal of a man realigning toward the winning side, burning the bridge behind him to prove the new loyalty. Wilkinson says intellectual honesty. Pinsof bets on status migration.
Wilkinson theorizes the split between the dense metros and the thinning countryside, the Southernification of rural America. Pinsof already has the slot cut. The low-status White man is the educated liberal’s nearest rival, the figure antiracism exists to derogate. Wilkinson stands inside the urban knowledge class explaining why the people outside it believe wrong things. Pinsof might say he is not diagnosing the density divide. He is performing it. The diagnosis is a status move in the contest it claims to describe.
Stick up for your local critical race theorist. Pinsof’s line is that antiracism confers elite status, and the man who signals it fights his closest rivals in the hierarchy, the un-credentialed Whites below him and, in the resentment of millionaires and billionaires, the money above. Wilkinson’s centrism, the reasonable liberal who scolds the Trumpist right and the illiberal left in the same breath, is the highest-status posture his world offers. The man in the sensible middle wins the prestige game by looking like the only adult in the room.
Wilkinson jokes, curses, calls his own takes artisanal, performs the knowingness of a man who sees that the take economy is a racket and stays in it for a living. Pinsof writes that we spout feel-good bullshit to signal we are sweeties, because cynics read as assholes. Wilkinson’s irony is a smarter version of the same dodge. The jokes let him voice cynical truths and keep his earnest liberal commitments at once. Cynical enough to look smart, idealistic enough to look good. Pinsof presses for which one is real, and his answer runs one way. The idealism is the mission statement. The status-seeking is the profit.
Wilkinson pictures the QAnon believer trapped by bad trust, the Trump voter captured by hucksters, the evangelical taught to trust his feelings. Broken minds in need of better trustees, with Wilkinson and the consensus standing ready. Pinsof flips the table. The savvy animal understands what he has an incentive to understand. The Trump voter is not fooled. He pursues status and coalition with the same competence Wilkinson brings to his column. Nobody is broken. There is no hole, so studying the dirt gets you nowhere, and Wilkinson has built a career studying the dirt.
The Set
Will Wilkinson lives in a set you might call the post-libertarian liberal commentariat, the men who began on the free-market right and walked left into the institutional center without ever joining the left. The core formed at the Niskanen Center, where Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey, and Steven Teles built a home for ex-libertarians who had made peace with the welfare state. Lindsey and Teles co-wrote The Captured Economy. Out from that core run the older liberaltarian acquaintances, Megan McArdle (b. 1973), Julian Sanchez, Radley Balko, Conor Friedersdorf, and the academic wing once gathered under Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Jason Brennan, Matt Zwolinski, and Kevin Vallier, men who read Rawls and Hayek and tried to fuse the two.
Around that core sits the center-left wonk world Wilkinson writes into. Ezra Klein (b. 1984), Matt Yglesias (b. 1981), Jonathan Chait (b. 1972), Josh Barro (b. 1984), Noah Smith, and the late Kevin Drum (1958-2024). Klein put Wilkinson on his show after the Niskanen firing, which tells you the circle guards its own. This is the YIMBY and abundance crowd, the people who want to build housing and trains and who think liberalism mislaid its supply side. Tyler Cowen (b. 1962) and Robin Hanson (b. 1959) hover at the George Mason edge as the economists’ economists.
A third ring holds the defenders-of-liberalism set that hardened after 2016. Jonathan Rauch (b. 1960), whose The Constitution of Knowledge reads as near-scripture here. Yascha Mounk (b. 1982) and his Persuasion writers. Anne Applebaum (b. 1964), George Packer (b. 1960), Adam Gopnik (b. 1956), Thomas Chatterton Williams (b. 1981), and the Never-Trump exiles David Frum (b. 1960), Tom Nichols (b. 1960), and Bill Kristol (b. 1952). The rationalist and happiness-research neighbors fill out the map. Julia Galef (b. 1983) of The Scout Mindset, Robert Wright (b. 1957), who once hosted Wilkinson’s Bloggingheads show Free Will, and the diavlog partners Glenn Loury (b. 1948), John McWhorter (b. 1965), and Mickey Kaus (b. 1951), though those three have since drifted to his right. At home stands his wife, the writer Kerry Howley, author of Thrown, his nearest reader.
What do they value? Accuracy first, or the performance of it. They prize the calibrated mind, the man who updates, who steel-mans his opponent, who announces I changed my mind on this and wears the reversal as a medal. They value institutions, the Times, the academy, the expert consensus, the slow machinery of liberal order, and they cast the defense of these as a civic duty rather than a taste. They value range and quickness, the move from Rawls to zoning law to a Kahneman result inside one paragraph. Wit ranks high. Reasonableness ranks higher, the bid to stand above the brawl and weigh every side.
The hero of this world is the honest broker, the public intellectual who follows the argument past his own tribe and pays for it. Wilkinson’s conversion story is the genre in pure form. To quit libertarianism, to renounce Ayn Rand, to grant that the welfare state had it right, this is the heroic arc, the man brave enough to be embarrassed by his younger self. The villain is the ideologue who will not update, the partisan captured by his side, the crank who trusts his gut over the consensus. Greatness here means you were wrong loudly and corrected yourself in public.
The status games follow from that. You gain rank by signaling independence while staying inside the consensus, the trick of sounding heterodox without landing anywhere disreputable. You climb by your enemies, by drawing fire from both flanks at once, which proves you hold the sane middle. You lose rank by looking captured, by hacking for a party, or by drifting far enough out that the respectable people stop answering your emails. Loury and McWhorter drifted, and the set now keeps the wary distance it reserves for the apostate. The Substack runs on the same engine, the artisanal take sold to readers who pay to feel calibrated by association.
Their moral grammar runs on epistemic duty. You ought to build accurate models. You ought to trust the right sources and suspect the wrong ones. You ought to extend charity to opponents and withhold it from the people who menace the order, the populists, the conspiracists, the illiberal left and the authoritarian right. The cardinal sin is bad faith, arguing for advantage instead of truth. The cardinal virtue is intellectual honesty, which doubles, conveniently, as the thing they are best at. So the moral law and their own comparative advantage point the same way.
Beneath the morals lie the claims they treat as fixed. Liberal democracy is the natural terminus of a reasoning species, and its enemies are deviations, pathologies, failures of schooling or character, not rival goods with a case of their own. Trust is a competence, and the mass of men lack it. Some are calibrated and some are cranks, and that line runs close to the line between the credentialed and the rest. Markets work and need correction. Human nature improves through better institutions and better information. The truth is knowable, and they, more than most, can find it.
The whole set shares one conviction it seldom says aloud. The reasonable man exists, he is roughly them, and the world goes wrong in proportion to how far it stops listening to him.
Essentialism
Stephen P. Turner spends a career attacking one habit of mind. The theorist points at a group, says the members share a norm, a practice, a culture, a framework, then treats that shared thing as a real object with causal force, an essence sitting in many heads at once. Turner asks the question the essentialist skips: how did one identical thing get into all those heads, and what is it made of? He finds no answer. In The Social Theory of Practices he argues that a shared practice cannot be the common cause it claims to be, because nothing carries a single object into many minds. What you have instead is individuals, each with his own causal history of habituation, arriving at dispositions close enough to coordinate. The sharing is the theorist’s projection. The essence is a placeholder for a transmission no one has described.
Turn that on Wilkinson’s set and the central figure dissolves first: the reasonable man. They write as if reasonableness were one thing, a shared standard that exists and that the calibrated mind instantiates. Turner denies the object. No common essence called reason sits inside some men while the cranks go without. There are men trained in particular habits of argument, schooled at particular places, reading particular sources, who recognize each other’s habits and name the recognition reason. The standard is not out there waiting to be tracked. The standard is the mutual recognition of a trained few, dressed as a universal.
The expert consensus takes the same hit. The set tells you to trust it, defer to it, build your models from it, as though the consensus were a single thing that holds the truth. Turner reads consensus as an aggregate of separate men, not an object with a mind. To trust the consensus is to trust that a loose pile of men trained apart happen to point the same way, which they often do for reasons that have little to do with any shared grip on truth. Trust, in their mouths, hardens into a competence, a skill some possess and the masses lack. Turner sees no competence-essence. He sees habits of deference picked up in particular institutions, and he sees that the authority of experts is a contingent arrangement a democracy keeps renegotiating, not the recognition of a kind.
Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge personifies knowledge as a single law-governed thing, a republic with rules and citizens and enemies at the gate. This is the old move Turner has hunted his whole working life, the collective representation treated as an agent, the Durkheimian essence given a constitution and a border patrol. Turner might grant that the institutions exist—the journals, the courts, peer review, the men who staff them. He denies that these add up to one entity that knows things and guards itself. The book is a metaphor in the costume of an object.
Galef’s scout mindset meets the same blade. The Scout Mindset treats good reasoning as one transferable disposition, a single thing you install and share. Turner spent a book arguing that no such installable common object exists. What looks like one mindset is many men with many habits, gathered by many private routes, similar on the surface. Call it a mindset and you have smuggled the essence back in through the title.
Their sorting of persons rests on the same sand: the calibrated and the cranks, the credentialed and the rest. The set files men into kinds, as if rationality were an essence you have or lack the way a metal has its melting point. Turner refuses the kinds. The distance between the trusted analyst and the crank is a distance of training, habit, and audience, not of essence. Move the man to another school, another stable of sources, another room of people he wants to please, and the kind moves with him.
Their oughts go last: you ought to build accurate models; you ought to trust the right sources. The set states these as binding facts, as if a real obligation hung in the air with a force of its own. Turner deflates the binding object. He finds no normative substance out there issuing commands. He finds the trained preferences of a particular set, raised to the rank of universal duty by the trick of calling them rational. The ought is the set’s habit, told as a law of nature.
The largest claim stretches the essentialism to its limit—that liberal democracy is the natural endpoint of a reasoning species. It posits an essence, reason, with a destination built in, democracy, and it reads every man who walks another road as a defect in the kind. Turner has no patience for the natural-kind story or the telos bolted onto it. History hands him contingent arrangements that held for a time in particular places. It hands him no species-essence marching toward one end.
Strip the essences out and watch what stays: no shared reason, no consensus that knows, no constitution of knowledge, no mindset you pass hand to hand, no two kinds of men, no duty in the air, no destined order. Only individuals, trained by their own histories into habits near enough to coordinate, recognizing one another, and naming the recognition truth. The reasonable man was never a kind. He is a habit that learned to see his own face in the mirror and called the reflection the world.
Explaining the Normative
In Explaining the Normative Turner hunts a single supposed thing, the normative, the realm of oughts and obligations and valid inferences and legitimate authority that theorists treat as binding from somewhere outside the causal world. Kelsen (1881-1973) plants a basic norm at the root of all law. Weber (1864-1920) leans his whole sociology on legitimacy. Searle (b. 1932) builds society out of collective acceptance. The rule-following men, reading Wittgenstein (1889-1951), find a normative force riding inside the simplest step of arithmetic. Turner takes them apart with two strokes. First, the regress. To follow a norm you must know how to apply it, and that knowing needs a further norm, and so down without end, until you halt on something that is no norm at all, a habit, a trained disposition, the plain way a man goes on. Second, the idle wheel. Beside every normative account stands a full causal account of the same behavior, built from belief, expectation, training, and sanction. The normative layer turns nothing. It explains the look of obligation by naming an obligation, which explains nothing. Shave it off and the behavior stands, accounted for.
Now Wilkinson. His program opens with a duty. The model citizen owes it to his neighbors to build his picture of the world with as little error and bias as he can manage. Duty, on the first page. The normativism waits at the door of the whole project. Turner asks what the duty adds. Wilkinson and his set are trained to update, disposed to defer to the consensus, fast to sanction the man who will not. They expect it of one another. They feel the pull. That is the entire causal story, and it suffices. The duty hovering above it, the binding obligation said to hold every citizen whether he feels it or not, does no further work. It lets Wilkinson moralize a set of habits. It explains nothing the habits leave unexplained.
Take his counsel to trust the right sources and suspect the wrong ones. Turner springs the regress. Which sources are right? You need a norm to choose them. How do you apply that norm to this source on this morning? You need a further norm. The chain runs until it lands where Turner says it always lands, on a bare disposition, these are the men we trust, picked up at school and in the trade and never anchored to a normative fact. Wilkinson presents the chain as if it hangs from a truth at the top. It hangs from a habit at the bottom.
Rauch builds the normativism a cathedral. The Constitution of Knowledge lays out rules, a charter, an order that binds the honest and casts out the rest. Turner has read this book a hundred times under other names, Kelsen’s pyramid, Searle’s standing acceptance, validity floating free of any fist. He asks the flat question. What binds a man to the charter? Not a norm, for a norm needs another norm to bind him to it, and the regress turns again. What binds him is the causal pile, the prestige, the training, the dread of excommunication, the disposition to go along. Strike the normative force and the institutions still stand, running on habit and sanction. The charter described how these men behave, then rose into the air and called itself a law.
Legitimacy is the word that gives the game up. The set grounds the authority of experts and the rightness of the liberal order in their legitimacy, a normative crown. Weber sat at the head of that tradition, and Turner has spent his working life pulling him down. Legitimacy reduces to belief in legitimacy plus the causes of the belief. The expert consensus holds no normative claim on you. It holds the causal force of reputation, schooling, and the price of defiance. When the set says you ought to defer, Turner hears a social expectation backed by sanction, spoken in the grammar of obligation.
The deepest layer is the feeling. Wilkinson and his circle live the pull of reasonableness and honesty as a summons from outside, from Reason, from Truth, from the liberal order they serve. Turner names the move the normativist makes right here. He takes the experience of bindingness, a fact about a trained nervous system, and reads it as proof of a binding thing out in the world. The pull is real. The object it points at is not. The obligation sits in the man, put there by his history, not in a realm he consults.
Turn the book on the man who wrote the program and it grants him no exemption. Wilkinson’s certainty that updating is owed, that the consensus has earned its deference, that bad faith offends against something, is his set’s disposition felt as law. Turner does not call the feeling false. He calls it a fact about Wilkinson, to be explained by training and trade and temperament, and not a window onto a normative order that Wilkinson alone among the partisans has trained himself to see.
What stays when the normative goes? The same world the set already inhabits. Men who update because their schooling rewarded it. A consensus held by prestige and sanction. A liberal order running on habit and the fear of the door. The oughts melt into the causes of the oughts, and the behavior does not move an inch. Wilkinson raised a civic religion on a duty. Turner shows the duty was the congregation’s own pulse, heard as the voice of God.
RightTalkism
Robin Hanson coined RightTalkism to name a faith he distrusts, the faith that the road to a better world runs through better talk. Get men to say the right things, frame matters the right way, hold the right attitudes, and the problems lift. Hanson’s warning is blunt. Talk is cheap. Talk is mostly signaling. The world runs on incentives and habits that fine words leave untouched, so the man who pours his life into fixing how people talk often moves nothing but the talk. This is Will Wilkinson. You could build the whole concept from his career.
Start with the masthead. Model Citizen rests on a stated duty, that each man owes it to his neighbors to build his picture of the world with as little error and bias as he can manage. Read that as a causal claim and it is RightTalkism entire. The polity goes wrong because the citizens think and talk wrong. Mend the thinking and the talking, and the citizen mends, and the republic mends behind him. The lever is discourse. Push it and the world moves. Wilkinson has staked four decades of writing on that one bet.
His remedy for the age confirms it. Faced with QAnon, with misinformation, with the Trump movement, Wilkinson reaches for epistemic hygiene. Trust the right sources. Suspect the wrong ones. Tune your detector. Defer to the consensus. The disease is bad talk and bad trust, so the cure is right talk and right trust. Hanson asks the deflating question. Suppose the QAnon man learns to recite your sources and parrot your framings. Has anything downstream changed, or has he only switched which tribe his talk now flatters? The RightTalkist assumes the talk drives the conduct. Hanson suspects the conduct drives the talk, and that scrubbing the talk leaves the engine running.
The vocation makes the same wager visible. A column, a Substack, a podcast where thinkers narrate how they changed their minds. Every form Wilkinson works in treats argument as the place where the world gets made or lost. The better take tips the balance. The sharper framing breaks the spell. This is the article of faith beneath all of it, that talk sits upstream of everything that counts.
The Pence affair is the article of faith turning on its maker. In January 2021 Wilkinson tweeted that if Biden wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence (b. 1959). He explained afterward that the line was sharp sarcasm, a tart way to expose the bad faith of men who had stoked the mob and then demanded comity. There is the RightTalkist in full. He believed the right cutting phrase would drive the point home, would land a blow on hypocrisy, would change how the thing got seen. The talk did none of that. The talk became the whole event. It cost him the Niskanen job and his perch at the paper, and it exposed no one but him. He pushed the lever with all his craft, and the only thing that moved was his own career, off the table. A cleaner proof of Hanson’s warning is hard to stage. Washington ExaminerWashington Examiner
Press the frame further and it reaches his picture of the country. Wilkinson reads polarization and populism as disorders of belief, failures of reasoning and trust that better information might cure. Hanson reads them as the output of incentives, the rewards that make a politician court biased voters and a voter parrot his side. On that reading the discourse is the smoke, not the fire, and Wilkinson has spent his life fighting smoke with better smoke.
His own set half saw this and bolted. The abundance and YIMBY turn is the knowledge class trying to walk out of RightTalkism, trading the war over words for housing permits and rail lines, for things you build instead of things you say. Wilkinson cheers the turn and stays a talker. He writes about building. He does not build. The evangelist of better models stays at the desk, modeling.
The richest seam is that he knows. The irony, the artisanal-takes joke, the line about arguing with fools online when he should be painting in a barn, all of it shows a man who suspects the talk is cheap and spends his life on it anyway. Hanson named the error. Wilkinson lives inside it with his eyes open. That is the spine of him. He believes, against his own evidence, that if he can get the words right the world will follow. The world keeps not following. He writes the next post.
The Superhuman Fallacy
The superhuman fallacy has three step. The men who disagree with me are dumb and bad. They are dumb and bad because of human nature. And the line no one says aloud, so I must stand outside human nature. Wilkinson runs all three, and he runs the third while believing he is the most fallible man in the room.
Step one is everywhere in his pages. The Trump voter, the QAnon believer, the populist, the online reactionary, even the illiberal man on his own left, all of them appear in Wilkinson as captured, gullible, tribal, working in bad faith. In his post on trust he draws the credulous as people who handed their judgment to men who trapped them in a self-serving hallucination, and he draws the evangelical as a man schooled to trust his feelings and the charisma of hucksters. The picture is of minds gone wrong.
Step two supplies the reason, and here his training does the damage. Wilkinson came up through happiness research and the study of bias, and he carries the whole rationalist inventory, the tribalism, the confirmation bias, the motivated reasoning, the gullibility that Kahneman (1934-2024) and his heirs catalogued. He explains the other side’s convictions as outputs of this machinery. Their beliefs are symptoms. Human nature made them sick.
Step three he never states, because stated it embarrasses. If human nature explains why they believe wrong things, what explains why he believes right ones? The only answer that keeps the account standing is that he, somehow, does not run on the same machinery. He updates. He steel-mans. He follows the argument past his tribe. The scout mindset, the calibrated man, the model citizen building his picture with as little bias as he can manage, all of it sets Wilkinson on the far side of the failing he finds in everyone else. The student of the disease assumes he caught the cure.
Kahneman said that learning the biases never improved his behavior. The man who found the defects admitted he could not think his way out of them. Wilkinson and his set treat the inventory the other way, as though knowing the list were the same as escaping the list, as though naming a bias were a vaccine against it. Pinsof’s third step lives in that gap. Knowing the catalogue feels like exemption from the catalogue, and the feeling of exemption is the superhuman fallacy wearing a lab coat.
Now the richest part, the move that disguises the whole thing as its opposite. Wilkinson confesses error. He says Ayn Rand ruined his life, that he was a teenage enthusiast whose mind she hijacked, that he later renounced the creed and grew up. This looks like humility, the one thing the superhuman fallacy lacks. The frame reads it the other way. The confession is the engine. By dramatizing his escape from one ideology, Wilkinson certifies that he is the kind of man who escapes ideology, the rare mind that breaks its own spell. The past error does not check his claim to stand outside human nature. The past error underwrites it. I was captured once, like them, and I broke free, so I see now and they do not. The recovered man earns his pulpit by the depth of the fall. Volts
Watch the asymmetry that follows, because it gives the game up. When the other side holds a conviction, Wilkinson reaches for the bias account, the tribe, the motivated reasoning, the human nature that bent the mind. When he holds a conviction, he treats it as the residue left after the bias is scrubbed out, the bare view of the calibrated man. Same act, two ledgers. Their certainty is a symptom. His certainty is a conclusion. Human nature reaches every mind in the country except the one writing the diagnosis.
A limit. The superhuman fallacy can be turned on anyone who ever criticized anyone, on Pinsof, on me writing this. To see bias in your opponent is not yet to claim you have none. The charge does not land because Wilkinson notices the credulity of QAnon. It lands because he grants himself an exemption he has not earned, the same exemption the discoverer of the biases refused to take. The error is the asymmetry, not the diagnosis. Wilkinson is right that the other side reasons badly. He is wrong, in the silent third line, that he alone reasons.
The Four Questions
1. What coalition do they depend on for status and income.
2. Who do they risk angering if they speak plainly.
3. Who benefits if their framing wins.
4. What truths would cost them their position.
His status and income run through two coalitions that no longer want the same things. The status comes from the liberal knowledge class, the New York Times standing he still carries, the think-tank network that runs out of his Cato and Niskanen years, the Substack-and-podcast intellectual circuit, the post-libertarian liberal set, the neoliberal wonks around Klein and Yglesias. His Model Citizen subscribers sit inside that world too, educated center-left readers who pay to feel calibrated, and they fund part of him. The larger paycheck comes from elsewhere. His recent work is government relations and business development at Block, Jack Dorsey’s (b. 1976) payments company. That split is the key fact about him now. The 2021 firing taught him not to let the commentariat hold his rent. So his bread depends on a corporation and his name depends on the liberal intelligentsia, and he answers to both.
Speak plainly and the first people he angers are the paying readers, the liberals who subscribe to hear their side flattered and their priors confirmed. Tell them the respectable consensus is often a tribe’s signal, that his own coalition propagandizes, that the misinformation panic is partly motivated, and the subscriptions thin. Next he angers the institutions that confer his standing, the Times, the think tanks, the peers who trade citations and podcast invitations, the Rauch and Klein circle. He has seen how fast they drop a man who becomes a liability. Heaviest now is the employer. A government-relations man speaks for the company, not for himself. The lynch-Pence joke that cost him a think-tank seat would cost far more bolted to a public corporation. The corporate leash is shorter than the think-tank leash ever was.
If his framing wins, the credentialed win. His picture sets epistemic authority with the experts, the mainstream press, the academy, and casts the people who challenge them as cranks and casualties of bias. The Democratic-aligned professional class gains, because the order to defer to the consensus points at institutions that class staffs and runs. The incumbents of the liberal order gain, their power recast as reason and their opponents recast as pathology. And the public intellectual gains most of all, since a world that traces its troubles to bad thinking needs men whose trade is thinking. The physician does well when everyone agrees the sickness is in the patient’s head.
The truths that would cost him his position are the ones his whole product denies. That the expert consensus he tells you to trust is often wrong and often a loyalty test rather than a measure of truth. That his own walk from libertarian to liberal tracked the prestige and the salary as much as the argument. That fixing how people talk fixes little, that his life’s work moves the discourse and leaves the world where it sat. That his side runs propaganda too, and the alarm over misinformation serves his coalition as a weapon. And the plainest one, nearest home: the man who sells epistemic independence earns his living as paid advocacy for a corporation, which is the opposite of the disinterested truth-seeking the model citizen preaches. Say any of these without the protective irony and he loses readers, invitations, or the job. So when he approaches them at all, he keeps the irony on.
The Great Delusion
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
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 here, then that is the end of Wilkinson as a useful thinker.
Mearsheimer says we are social to the marrow. We are born into a group that stamps its values on us before we can reason, and by the time reason wakes the work is mostly done. Of the three forces that set a man’s preferences, innate sentiment, socialization, and reason, reason ranks last and weakest. Liberalism, Mearsheimer says, is the creed that forgets this, that takes the man for an atom who picks his values by thinking. Wilkinson is that creed in human form. So if John is right, here is what follows for Will.
His vocation goes first. Model Citizen rests on the bet that a man can reason his way to a better picture of the world, update, calibrate, shed his bias, and that a republic of such men runs well. Mearsheimer hands Wilkinson the weakest tool in the box and tells him it was never the lever of history. Reason does not set the preferences. Sentiment and socialization set them, early and deep, before the argument starts. The model citizen leans his whole weight on the one faculty that moves the least. His life’s work sits on the part of a man that decides the smallest share of what the man does.
His own story goes next, and this one cuts close. Wilkinson tells his conversion as reason’s victory, the teenage ideologue who thought his way clear of Ayn Rand and grew into a liberal. Mearsheimer reads no victory of reason there. He reads re-socialization. Wilkinson did not reason his way out of a tribe. Another tribe took him in, the educated liberal class, and laid its own value infusion over the old one. The grad schools, the magazines, the think tanks, the set that reads and cites and platforms its own, these did to him what every society does to its young. He changed gods. He did not escape the having of a god. The man who believes he reasoned his way to his views is, on this account, the man least aware of who raised him.
His universalism goes with it. Wilkinson holds his reasonableness as a view from nowhere, the conclusion any clear mind reaches, good for every people on earth. Mearsheimer says no such view exists. What Wilkinson calls reason is the socialized creed of one tribe, the Western credentialed class, taking its local values for the verdict of the species. The liberal universalism, the rights that belong to all, the trust and tolerance owed by everyone, is the parish creed of a particular people sent out to conquer the globe under the banner of reason. Wilkinson preaches a tribe’s values and calls them no tribe’s.
Then the inversion he will like least. The men Wilkinson files under bias and tribe and capture, the Trump voter, the nationalist, the populist who loves his own and fears the stranger, these are not the broken ones. On Mearsheimer’s anthropology they are the normal ones, men acting as the social animal has always acted, bound to the group, ready to give for it. Wilkinson is the strange case, the man who fancies he has climbed above the tribal nature that defines the species. And he has not climbed above it. He has joined a tribe that denies it is one. The cosmopolitan runs as tribal as the nationalist. His tribe spreads wider and dresses better and tells itself it has no tribe.
So the long defeat. The Great Delusion argues that liberalism keeps losing to nationalism because nationalism speaks to the deep social sentiments while liberalism speaks to the shallow faculty of reason. Wilkinson has spent his life defending the liberal order against the populist tide. If John is right, he fights the grain of human nature with the weakest of its three forces, and he loses across time, because the thing he fights is the thing men are and the thing he defends is the thing they merely think. He keeps betting on reason in a species that runs on belonging.
A fair word on the conditional, since you posed it as one. Mearsheimer’s own claim is a reasoned, universal statement about all humans everywhere, which leans on the faculty he demotes and the universalism he distrusts. The man who says reason is weak asks you to grant it by reason. And Wilkinson could answer that socialization is not destiny, that some men do revise their inheritance, that he is the living example. Inside Mearsheimer’s frame the answer stays small. Revision comes at the margin, late, against the grain, and the rare man who turns is most often turning toward a new group that caught him, not toward no group at all. The frame grants Wilkinson his sliver of reason and tells him it was never the engine he thought.
If John is right, Will is not the physician of the republic. He is a member of one tribe, raised to its creed like every other man, calling his socialization reason, his parish the world, and his enemies sick for being what all men are. The model citizen is the last man to learn he has a tribe.
