The Politics of Essence: Vermeule, the IRGC, and the CCP

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner’s deepest objection to Adrian Vermeule is not political or theological. It is epistemological. Vermeule’s common-good constitutionalism rests on an essentialist premise: that the classical legal and natural law tradition carries a determinate moral content across time, that this content can be recovered and applied by properly formed interpreters, and that such access justifies political authority. Turner’s work dismantles precisely this picture. Traditions do not transmit stable essences. They transmit fragments, texts, practices, and institutional residues that each generation selectively reconstructs under present pressures. The appearance of continuity is an effect produced by interpreters, not a property of the material itself.
What makes Turner’s diagnosis powerful is that this same epistemic structure recurs across very different regimes. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims privileged access to the revolutionary essence of 1979 and positions itself as its faithful transmitter into contemporary governance. The Chinese Communist Party claims privileged access to the essence of national rejuvenation and presents itself as the uniquely competent interpreter of China’s civilizational trajectory. Vermeule claims privileged access to the essence of the classical legal tradition and presents trained jurists as capable of directing the state toward the common good. The substantive doctrines differ profoundly. The consequences of rule differ dramatically. But the underlying epistemic structure is identical, and that identity is what Turner’s critique exposes.
The shared structure has three elements. First, each project asserts a persistent essence: a determinate core that originates in the past and survives historical rupture into the present. For the IRGC, it is the revolutionary spirit of the Islamic Republic, the pure will of 1979 purged of compromise and contamination. For the CCP, it is the civilizational essence of the Chinese nation, culminating after a century of humiliation in the historical destiny of rejuvenation. For Vermeule, it is the classical legal tradition, running from Aristotle through Aquinas into natural law jurisprudence and available to those trained to receive it. In each case the claim is not merely that these past formations are influential or worth studying. It is that they contain a stable core that persists through time and remains available for authoritative application in the present.
Second, each project asserts privileged interpretive access. The essence is not transparent to ordinary people. It requires a formed cadre whose training and institutional position allows them to decode and faithfully transmit it. The IRGC positions itself as the guardian of revolutionary authenticity, the institution whose founding sacrifice and continued vigilance gives it a claim to interpret what the revolution essentially demands. Party theoreticians and ideological educators within the CCP position themselves as the competent interpreters of historical materialism applied to Chinese conditions, uniquely capable of reading the direction of history and guiding the nation accordingly. Vermeule positions jurists formed within the classical tradition as capable of discerning and applying the common good, their training giving them access to moral content that neither democratic majorities nor untrained officials can reliably identify.
Third, each project translates epistemic authority into political authority. If the essence is real and the cadre has privileged access to it, then rule follows as a logical consequence rather than a political choice. The IRGC does not merely claim military competence or organizational strength. It claims that its authority is grounded in fidelity to something that transcends ordinary politics, the founding revolutionary moment whose meaning it alone can reliably interpret. The CCP does not merely claim administrative efficiency or economic results, though it claims those too. It claims that its leading role reflects an understanding of historical necessity that other actors lack. Vermeule does not merely argue that his preferred constitutional arrangements are wise or beneficial. He argues that they are grounded in a moral tradition that trained interpreters can access and that the liberal constitutional order fails to honor. In each case the move from we understand the essence to we should govern is the core political payoff, and it is precisely this move that Turner’s critique targets at the root.
The differences between these three projects are real and should not be minimized. Vermeule writes books and articles, teaches at Harvard Law School, and operates within a constitutional democracy where his proposals face open criticism and have no prospect of implementation by force. The IRGC commands armed formations, runs intelligence services, controls large portions of the Iranian economy, and has participated in the suppression of domestic dissent with lethal consequences. The CCP governs 1.4 billion people through a system that combines sophisticated administrative capacity with pervasive surveillance and the elimination of organized political opposition. These are not equivalent phenomena, and treating them as such would be a serious analytical error.
The comparison operates at a different level. It concerns the structure of justification rather than the substance of doctrine or the consequences of power. All three projects claim that history or tradition functions as a container of stable moral or political content rather than as raw material subject to perpetual reconstruction. All three claim that a properly formed elite can access this content reliably. All three use this alleged access to justify institutional authority that would otherwise require explicit democratic warrant or at least open contestation on terms that do not privilege any particular interpretive tradition. That structural parallel is what Turner’s deflationary method reveals, and it holds regardless of the vast differences in political context and moral content.
The Iranian case illustrates the problem of contested transmission with particular clarity. The revolutionary essence of 1979 has been claimed by nearly every significant faction in Iranian politics since Khomeini’s death. Reformists argued that the revolution’s true spirit demanded participation, accountability, and the protection of republican elements in the constitution. The IRGC and hard-line clerics argued that it demanded resistance, unity, and subordination of republican mechanisms to the guardianship principle. Mousavi, Ahmadinejad, Khatami, and Khamenei all appealed to the revolution’s essential meaning while reaching incompatible conclusions. This is not a sign that the revolutionary essence exists and is being correctly identified by one faction and distorted by others. It is a sign that the essence does not exist as a stable transmissible content. What exists is a founding moment whose symbolic materials are available for reconstruction by whichever coalition can most effectively claim them. The IRGC has been most successful at this reconstruction, partly because of its organizational strength and partly because its control over coercive institutions allows it to discipline rival interpretations. But its authority rests on a claim about transmission that the historical record of contestation undermines.
The Chinese case is more sophisticated in some respects because the CCP’s essentialist claim has been deliberately redesigned multiple times. Maoist ideology, Dengist pragmatism, Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents, Hu Jintao’s harmonious society, and Xi Jinping’s national rejuvenation are not continuous expressions of the same essence. They are successive reconstructions of the Party’s legitimating narrative, each presented as a recovery or deepening of what was always essentially true about the Chinese path. The concept of national rejuvenation is particularly revealing. It asserts a civilizational continuity stretching back thousands of years toward a destiny that the Party alone fully understands and is guiding China to fulfill. Turner would note that this is not a discovery about Chinese civilization. It is a contemporary construction using historical materials to justify present authority. The continuity is produced by the interpreter, not found in the material. That the construction is elaborate, historically literate, and genuinely resonant with many Chinese people does not change its epistemic status. It remains a reconstruction presenting itself as a recovery.
Vermeule’s project is intellectually more rigorous than either of these in the sense that it engages seriously with the philosophical literature on tradition, natural law, and jurisprudence. The engagement with Aquinas, with classical legal history, and with MacIntyre’s account of tradition-based rationality is substantive rather than decorative. This is why Turner’s critique of MacIntyre matters so much as background. Vermeule is not simply asserting an essence naively. He has a sophisticated philosophical account of how the classical tradition maintains its coherence and transmits its content across time through living interpretive communities with internal standards of reasoning. The problem is that this philosophical account does not match the historical record of how the classical legal tradition has actually developed, fractured, been contested, and been reconstructed by successive generations of interpreters reaching incompatible conclusions while each claiming fidelity to the same source. The sophistication of the justification does not rescue the essentialist premise. It makes the premise more philosophically presentable while leaving it equally vulnerable to Turner’s deflation.
The concept of mysterious transmission, which Turner identifies as load-bearing in all these projects, deserves particular attention. If a determinate moral content truly persists across centuries, there must be an account of how it survives the ruptures, distortions, and reconstructions that any honest historical examination reveals. MacIntyre’s answer is the living tradition with internal standards. The IRGC’s answer is the revolutionary institution whose founding sacrifice connects it to the originating moment. The CCP’s answer is the Party’s unique combination of Marxist theory and Chinese practice that gives it historical understanding unavailable to rivals. Each account faces the same objection: the claimed mechanism of transmission does not actually preserve determinate content. It provides a framework within which present actors can claim fidelity to a past whose meaning they are actively constructing. The mystery is not a philosophical puzzle awaiting a better solution. It is a symptom of the fact that there is no stable essence to transmit.
Once this is clear, the political implications follow. If there is no determinate essence available for privileged access, then the cadre’s authority cannot rest on superior knowledge of what the tradition, revolution, or civilization essentially requires. What it rests on is a combination of institutional positioning, coalition maintenance, training in a particular interpretive vocabulary, and the social recognition that comes from successfully performing mastery within a specific community. These are real sources of influence and even of legitimate authority in some respects. But they are not what the essentialist claim says they are. They do not constitute access to a moral or historical truth that others lack. They constitute membership in a coalition that has successfully claimed the right to interpret materials that are inherently open to multiple readings.
The philosophical payoff of the comparison is therefore not that Vermeule is equivalent to the IRGC or that American legal academia resembles a Leninist party apparatus. It is narrower and more precise. The most confident claims to rule, across very different political systems and ideological vocabularies, often rest on the same untenable theory of how moral and historical authority travels through time. That theory holds that an essence exists, persists, and becomes available to a select interpreter whose access to it justifies governance. Turner’s contribution is to remove the theory. What remains is more realistic and less flattering to every party involved. No elite possesses the essence. All are interpreting fragments under conditions of uncertainty, using inherited materials to construct justifications for the authority they seek. The regimes are not morally equivalent. Their doctrines and outcomes differ sharply. But the mechanism by which they convert historical materials into present authority claims is structurally parallel, and on Turner’s account, equally fragile at the foundation.
That fragility does not mean these projects are without force or consequence. The IRGC holds real power. The CCP governs effectively by many measures. Vermeule’s ideas have genuine traction in certain legal and intellectual circles. Constructed essences can be politically durable even when philosophically untenable, especially when backed by institutions, coercive capacity, or the social rewards of belonging to the interpreting cadre. Turner’s point is not that the claim to essence fails immediately in practice. It is that the epistemological foundation on which the claim rests cannot be sustained under scrutiny, and that recognizing this changes how we understand what these projects are actually doing. They are not recovering truths. They are building coalitions around interpretive claims that present themselves as something more.

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Stephen Turner and International Relations: A Strategically External Observer

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

There is no Turner school of International Relations in any conventional sense, and Turner himself would probably find the idea faintly amusing. His entry into IR was, by his own account in his 2022 memoir Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory, accidental and relational. His close collaborator Regis Factor was a political scientist whose dissertation offered a Catholic natural law critique of Hans J. Morgenthau, and their joint work on Max Weber eventually produced engagements with IR that neither had originally planned. Turner did not pursue the field as a vocation. He wandered into it through Weber and stayed long enough to reframe some of its foundational questions before wandering back out. That trajectory is itself revealing. It tells you something about his method, his ambitions, and the particular use he found for a discipline he never claimed as his own.
The intellectual center of Turner’s IR work is his argument, developed with George Mazur in a 2009 European Journal of International Relations article (“Morgenthau as a Weberian Methodologist“) and in related contributions to edited volumes, that Morgenthau is best understood as a self-conscious Weberian methodologist. This is not a minor interpretive tweak. It reframes the entire project of classical realism. Morgenthau, on Turner’s reading, was not describing iron laws of state behavior or deriving a general theory of power politics from human nature. He was constructing an ideal type of the rational and responsible statesman, a normative-pragmatic tool for judgment under uncertainty rather than a discovery about political essences. The distinction matters enormously. An ideal type is a one-sided accentuation of certain features of reality, useful for orienting thought and action in specific contexts, not a claim about what reality fundamentally is. By recovering this Weberian foundation, Turner shifts the question about realism from whether it is true to what kind of intellectual construct it is and what it is actually for.
That move is characteristic Turner. He does not engage a substantive debate on its own terms. He steps back and asks what kind of knowledge claim is being made, how it was constructed, and what work it is doing for the actors deploying it. He applied the same method to sociological expertise, to philosophical accounts of normativity, and to the classical legal tradition. In each case, the result is deflationary: the grand claim turns out to be a constructed model serving particular purposes rather than a neutral discovery of how things essentially are. Applied to Morgenthau, this deflation is not hostile. Turner treats Morgenthau with genuine respect precisely because Morgenthau, on his reading, was already aware that he was constructing ideal types rather than transcribing reality. The problem, Turner suggests, is that subsequent realists forgot this Weberian self-awareness and began treating the model as if it were a set of natural laws, producing the pseudo-scientific pretensions of neo-realism that he finds intellectually unsatisfying.
His hostility runs in two directions simultaneously, and understanding both is essential to grasping his attitude toward IR as a discipline. On one side, he rejects moralized theorizing of the kind associated with liberal internationalism and the normative turn in IR theory. Politics is not ethics, and the attempt to reduce international relations to a set of moral obligations produces what he calls a sanitized worldview that is unhelpful for understanding the gritty realities of political life. The influence of Rawlsian political philosophy on IR theory is, from Turner’s perspective, a category error: it imports the vocabulary of ideal justice into a domain defined by strategic interaction, power asymmetry, and the permanent possibility of violence. This does not make Turner a cynic or an apologist for power. It makes him suspicious of theories that make the world more morally legible than it actually is, and more amenable to the recommendations of academic theorists than the evidence warrants.
On the other side, he rejects the physics envy of neo-realist and rationalist IR theory. The ambition to produce law-like generalizations about state behavior, to model international politics with the rigor of natural science, misunderstands what social science can actually deliver. Social regularities are not natural laws. They depend on institutional contexts, historical conditions, and the interpretations of actors, all of which change in ways that undermine the stability of any purported law. The progressive research program aspirations of much post-Waltz IR theory, the accumulation of testable propositions about deterrence, cooperation, or hegemonic stability, rest on a philosophical foundation that Turner spent much of his career dismantling. What remains after both the moralist and the scientist are deflated is something thinner but more defensible: careful historical judgment using ideal-typical constructs, oriented toward practical wisdom rather than theoretical completeness.
His engagement with Carl Schmitt and the concept of the exception adds a further dimension. Turner’s interest in decisionism is not ideological sympathy with authoritarian politics. It is diagnostic. War, crisis, and the state of exception are the stress tests of all normative and theoretical frameworks. They are the moments where the limits of rules, procedures, and inherited traditions become most visible, where no system fully determines the right answer and where judgment under genuine uncertainty is unavoidable. For Turner, IR is one of the clearest sites where this inescapability of decision beyond rules becomes apparent. Sovereignty, war, and the exception are not embarrassing anomalies in the theory of international order. They are its most honest moments, the places where the gap between the theoretical model and the political reality is hardest to paper over.
This connects to a point Turner makes in passing in Mad Hazard that is more revealing than it first appears. Teaching IR theory in the University of South Florida honors program, he noticed a sharp contrast between American undergraduates and foreign or ex-military students. The Americans were typically sentimental and historically ignorant, believing that international harmony was achievable if everyone would simply be reasonable and well-intentioned. The foreign students and veterans were more intensely engaged, more knowledgeable, and more open to uncomfortable conclusions. Turner does not belabor this observation, but it fits precisely within his broader critique of expertise and training. Proximity to consequences produces better judgment than abstract theoretical formation. Students who have lived closer to what IR decisions actually cost are harder to mislead with sanitized frameworks. Students trained at maximum distance from those consequences are more susceptible to the comforting illusions that moralized theory provides.
This observation also illuminates something about Turner’s relationship to the IR discipline itself. He does not attack IR the way he attacks sociology or analytic philosophy, with sustained critical engagement aimed at fundamental reconstruction. He treats its schools as historically contingent, somewhat parochial, and interesting primarily as evidence for larger arguments he is making elsewhere about knowledge, expertise, and the limits of normative theorizing. He was amused to discover that his Morgenthau interpretation had been taken as representing a school. He did not adopt the tribe’s identity or pursue the field beyond specific occasions. He reviewed for IR journals when asked, contributed to edited volumes when the invitation fit his interests, and taught the theory when the pedagogical opportunity arose. None of this constitutes a home. It constitutes a series of productive visits.
What Turner found useful in IR, finally, is that it is a domain where the problems he cares about most are hardest to evade. In IR, the gap between moral aspiration and political reality is widest. The limits of rule-based governance are most visible. The necessity of judgment under genuine uncertainty is most undeniable. The failure of essentialist theories, whether realist theories claiming to have identified the permanent nature of state behavior or liberal theories claiming to have identified the conditions of perpetual peace, is most empirically demonstrable. For a philosopher whose career was spent deflating overconfident claims about what social science can know and what moral theory can deliver, IR was not a homeland but it was an unusually well-stocked laboratory.
Turner sees IR as a domain where people argue about power, morality, and science, and where none of those arguments quite work the way their proponents believe. He is not trying to reform the discipline or replace its paradigms. He is using it as evidence in a larger argument about knowledge, expertise, and judgment, an argument that runs through everything he has written and that IR, precisely because its stakes are so high and its pretensions so visible, helps him make with unusual clarity.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for China’s Master Institutions

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

China’s high-status actors do not compete for power by openly saying they want it. They compete by deploying moral languages that frame their authority as essential to national survival, technological supremacy, social stability, and civilizational rejuvenation. This is the central insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, discipline insiders, and justify institutional control. Every coalition claims to uniquely possess something China cannot do without. The vocabulary changes. The structure does not.
China might seem to differ from America and Iran because the Chinese Communist Party maintains unchallenged supremacy over all formal institutions. There is no opposition party, no independent judiciary with real teeth, no protest movement that can credibly threaten the governing coalition’s hold on office. But the absence of public pluralism does not abolish jurisdictional competition. It relocates it. Elite coalitions in China do not contest whether the Party should rule. They contest what Party rule should mean, which institutions should lead the next phase of national development, and whose priorities should define the mission. Under Xi Jinping, this competition has become more vertical and less publicly legible, but it has not disappeared. The purges, policy oscillations, and institutional reorganizations of recent years are its visible traces.
Three institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. The security state, the techno-industrial system, and the education-information apparatus are China’s master institutions. Whoever dominates them controls coercion, innovation, and meaning. What looks like debate over military readiness, private sector regulation, or patriotic education is, at root, a battle over who gets to define the Party’s mission and the terms on which authority is distributed among those who serve it.
The security state war is the most intense and the most consequential. The central security coalition, built around Xi, the Party center, the Central Military Commission, state security organs, and the anti-corruption apparatus, uses the language of loyalty, political discipline, national security, and what might be called purification through vigilance. Its claim rests on a permanent emergency: China faces external technological containment and strategic encirclement, while internal corruption and factional drift create vulnerabilities that enemies can exploit. Only a tightly disciplined Party center, with reliable political control over every institution, can prevent strategic defeat.
Pinsof’s framework decodes this move precisely. By framing security as permanent and systemic rather than episodic and bounded, the center expands its jurisdiction into every domain simultaneously. Finance becomes a national security question. Data becomes a national security question. Universities, private firms, and military commands all become sites where political reliability must be continuously demonstrated. The wave of high-level military purges since 2023, reaching into the Rocket Force, the Central Military Commission, and figures previously considered untouchable, follows this logic exactly. The issue is not simply cleaning up corruption, though corruption is real. It is establishing that no autonomous power center can exist within the Party-state that is not fully accountable to the center. Political reliability is treated as inseparable from operational effectiveness, which means the language of anti-corruption becomes a tool for ensuring that professional military expertise never escapes ideological command.
The language of threat launders centralization as necessity. Every expansion of oversight presents itself not as a power grab but as a response to danger. That is the coalition technology at work.
The techno-industrial system war runs on different terrain. Here the central tension is not over loyalty versus disloyalty but over the terms on which private capital and entrepreneurial energy are permitted to contribute to national development. The Party-state industrial coalition, comprising planners, state-owned enterprise networks, strategic regulators, and security-minded policymakers, uses the language of self-reliance, resilience, and what Xi has called new quality productive forces. Its argument is that China’s technological future depends on coordinated state direction of innovation, with private firms integrated into national supply-chain strategies rather than pursuing autonomous global ambitions.
Against this, or more precisely alongside it in an uneasy coexistence, sits the patriotic private-sector coalition: entrepreneurs and technology firms that seek operating space while demonstrating loyalty to Party priorities. Their language is innovation, productivity, and national service. They do not argue for market autonomy in any principled sense. They argue that their dynamism serves national strength, and they frame their activities in the vocabulary of rejuvenation rather than profit. The 2025 Private Economy Promotion Law and Xi’s high-profile meetings with technology leaders represent a conditional reconciliation between these two positions. Private capital is welcome, but as a client of state strategy rather than as an independent source of power. Survival depends on proving alignment with national goals: semiconductor breakthroughs, AI development, and supply-chain security are acceptable forms of entrepreneurial energy. Independent political influence or the kind of platform dominance that Alibaba and Ant Financial briefly achieved is not.
The center’s move is classic jurisdictional bargaining. It does not say it distrusts private business. It says private business is vital but must be guided toward national necessity. That formulation turns capital into a dependent variable of state strategy, which is precisely the institutional outcome the Party-state coalition requires.
The education-information apparatus war is the most subtle and in some respects the most revealing. This domain includes universities, national curricula, cyberspace governance, data regulation, and the entire information environment through which elites are formed and reality is narrated. The ideological stewardship coalition, comprising propaganda authorities, education planners, and cyberspace regulators, uses the language of patriotic education, healthy online discourse, data sovereignty, and what official documents call consolidating the soul. Its claim is that the Party holds legitimate jurisdiction not merely over what people do but over what counts as trustworthy knowledge.
The 2024 to 2035 Education Master Plan, fully operational by 2026, places universities explicitly at the service of national modernization rather than independent inquiry. Updated cybersecurity regulations bring artificial intelligence governance and cross-border data flows under the national security umbrella. Online platforms are treated as strategic terrain where foreign influence and domestic pessimism must be managed. The practical result is that institutions capable of generating independent epistemic authority, universities, media platforms, and data-intensive firms, are denied that independence. They are subordinated to the Party’s claim to define what knowledge serves the national interest.
Pinsof would note that this is the most ambitious jurisdictional claim of all. Every other coalition claims authority over a domain: coercion, capital, or a particular sector. The ideological stewardship coalition claims authority over the production of meaning itself. If it succeeds, rival moral languages lose their capacity to recruit allies because they cannot circulate freely enough to do so.
The big pattern across all three domains is identical to what appears in America, Iran, and Israel. Every coalition says some version of: we should have authority because we uniquely possess something essential. The security coalition claims loyalty and vigilance. The industrial planners claim strategic coordination. The patriotic entrepreneurs claim innovation in service of the nation. The ideological stewards claim epistemic responsibility and narrative control. None of these groups says it wants power because its institutional position benefits from holding it. All say they must have authority because China’s survival and rejuvenation depend on them. That is exactly how Alliance Theory says elite competition works everywhere. Moral language does not replace power. It makes power appear rightful.
The specific texture of China’s version differs from the American or Iranian cases in important ways. The Party center is far more dominant, public dissent is far more constrained, and the fiction of institutional neutrality that liberal democracies maintain is openly discarded. China’s system does not claim to be above politics. It claims that politics, properly understood, is the Party’s legitimate domain. That frankness makes the Alliance Theory structure more visible rather than less, because the moral languages are deployed with less pretense of transcending coalition interest.
What the centralization under Xi has produced is not the elimination of jurisdictional competition but its verticalization. The competition now runs mainly upward, toward the center, rather than horizontally across institutions. Each coalition seeks to demonstrate that its priorities align with the center’s definition of national necessity. Military professionals demonstrate loyalty to prove their competence claims will be heard. Entrepreneurs demonstrate patriotic service to protect their operating space. Educators and propagandists demonstrate ideological reliability to maintain their epistemic jurisdiction. The center adjudicates between these claims through a combination of personnel decisions, policy signals, and the anti-corruption apparatus, which functions as both a genuine cleanup mechanism and a tool for disciplining actors whose autonomous power has grown inconvenient.
The most powerful actors in this system are those who can bridge coalitions, speaking the language of loyalty and innovation, security and development, Party discipline and technical competence simultaneously. That bridging capacity is what Xi himself has most successfully claimed: he presents centralization not as the victory of one faction but as the synthesis that China’s moment requires. Whether that synthesis holds under the pressures of technological competition, demographic slowdown, and the continued need for entrepreneurial dynamism that state direction alone cannot supply is the question the system cannot answer from within its own terms.
China is not ruled by the Party as a monolithic bloc. It is governed by competing elite coalitions operating under strict Party supremacy, each using distinct moral languages to claim authority over the country’s master institutions. The purges, the conditional embrace of private capital, the tightening of epistemic controls: these are not signs of instability. They are the functional equilibrium of the system. The jurisdictional wars continue inside the walls of Party supremacy, determining how China is actually ruled, which coalitions expand their reach, and whose definition of national necessity carries the most weight. That is how the system governs itself. And it will keep doing so regardless of who wins any particular battle, because the competition is not a malfunction. It is the mechanism.

Stephen Turner’s convenient beliefs are humming efficiently in Zhongnanhai, the Central Military Commission chambers, the Foreign Ministry strategy rooms, and the Politburo Standing Committee meetings right now. With the U.S.-Israeli campaign grinding into its second month, Khamenei martyred, Iranian nuclear sites cratered, oil terminals smoking, and global energy prices still volatile in the $90s after their brief $110 spike, these beliefs let Xi Jinping, the senior generals, and top economic planners maintain domestic unity, justify calibrated “neutrality” that quietly benefits Beijing, keep the shadow-fleet oil flowing at a discount, and position China as the indispensable, responsible great power—without ever admitting that prolonged chaos could still jolt the real-estate sector, slow the EV transition, or complicate the Taiwan timeline.
Here are the 10 most useful ones likely circulating among China’s leadership today:
The U.S.-Israeli adventure is classic American overreach that accelerates the shift to a multipolar world with China at its natural center.
Every new missile exchange becomes proof that Washington is wasting blood and treasure while Beijing watches from the high ground.
Discounted Iranian oil through our shadow fleet and refined-product exports is a strategic windfall that strengthens energy security without a single PLA soldier deployed.
Higher global prices are framed as “prudent non-interference paying dividends.”
Our calls for de-escalation and respect for sovereignty demonstrate China’s mature, responsible global leadership—unlike the reckless hegemon.
Positions Beijing as the adult in the room every time the Global South looks for an alternative narrative.
Domestic stability remains rock-solid; the crisis has only reinforced public support for the Party’s steady hand and “peaceful development” path.
Any quiet online grumbling about higher fuel costs is dismissed as marginal noise amplified by foreign bots.
The prolonged distraction in the Middle East gives China valuable strategic space in the Indo-Pacific and on the Taiwan question.
Lets planners quietly accelerate military modernization while the U.S. Navy is tied down elsewhere.
The Axis of Resistance’s resilience proves the limits of Western military power; our partnerships with Russia, Iran, and the Global South are more durable than ever.
Frames every Houthi or Hezbollah headline as vindication of the “no-limits” friendship model.
Long-term forecasts show the economic shock is temporary; Chinese manufacturing, exports, and new-energy supply chains will actually gain market share.
Turns tanker insurance spikes and European energy pain into opportunities for Belt and Road 2.0.
Our non-interference policy has been proven wise once again—history shows empires that meddle in the Middle East eventually bleed out while China rises.
Gatekeeps the diplomatic line against any internal voices suggesting more active involvement.
Post-war reconstruction and energy deals will flow disproportionately to those who stayed neutral; China will emerge as the indispensable partner for a stable Gulf.
Positions Beijing to scoop up contracts once the shooting finally stops.
Strategic patience, economic strength, and ideological self-confidence will ensure China’s continued peaceful rise; this is simply another chapter proving the superiority of the Chinese model over Western decline.
The ultimate meta-belief. It lets the leadership sleep soundly (in the Zhongnanhai compound or on secure high-speed trains) knowing that every additional week of the war is another step toward the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
These aren’t conspiracy theories—they’re adaptive survival tools for a ruling party whose legitimacy, economic model, and global ambitions are now tightly calibrated to benefit from other powers’ conflicts while avoiding their costs. Even as Iranian missiles keep the oil market twitchy and the war refuses to end on schedule, these beliefs keep the Standing Committee unified, the propaganda crisp, and the brand insulated from both “too passive” and “too entangled” critiques. Question too many of them out loud and you risk becoming the minister or general labeled “out of step with Xi Jinping Thought.”

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Who Owns the State? Alliance Theory and Israel’s War Over Security, Law, and Sovereignty

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Israel’s high-status actors do not compete for power by admitting they want it. They compete by deploying moral languages that frame their authority as necessary, legitimate, or indispensable. This is the core insight of David Pinsof‘s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are not merely beliefs. They are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, discipline insiders, and justify control over institutions. Every major coalition claims to uniquely possess something that entitles it to rule. The vocabulary changes. The structure does not.
In Israel, this fight is unusually visible because the stakes are existential and the institutions are tightly coupled. The fights over the attorney general, the Shin Bet chief, judicial appointments, Haredi conscription, and renewed judicial overhaul efforts are not separate controversies. They are the same jurisdictional war refracted through different institutional terrain. What looks like a debate about democratic guardrails or Jewish sovereignty or warfighting competence is, underneath, a contest over who gets to define the state itself.
Three institutions concentrate this competition more than any others. The security apparatus, the judiciary and legal gatekeeping system, and the territorial-demographic machinery of settlement and land control are Israel’s master institutions. Whoever governs them governs the country. War policy, civil liberties, coalition durability, the balance between religion and state, and the tension between liberal and majoritarian rule all flow through these three domains. The recurring battles over judges, the attorney general, the Shin Bet, IDF command, and settlement policy are not accidental. They keep happening because the underlying jurisdictional question has not been resolved and perhaps cannot be. Is Israel primarily a liberal legal state, a majoritarian nationalist democracy, a security state under permanent emergency, or a Jewish civilizational project whose institutions should reflect religious and demographic priorities directly? Each coalition answers that question differently, and each answer expands the authority of the coalition advancing it.
The security state war runs along three fault lines. The professional security elite, comprising senior IDF leadership, the Shin Bet, the Mossad, and the defense planning apparatus, uses the language of competence, responsibility, and national survival. Its claim is that Israel lives under conditions that ordinary political logic cannot manage, and that only professionals with operational experience and institutional memory can navigate existential risk. Pinsof’s framework decodes this quickly. By framing security as a domain requiring specialized judgment, this coalition claims jurisdiction over life-and-death decisions and portrays civilian interference as recklessness dressed up as democratic principle. The October 7 failure complicated this claim severely, since the professional elite’s authority rests on a track record of competence, and the intelligence failure of that day was the most consequential breakdown in Israeli security history. The response has been a doctrinal shift rather than a retreat: the security establishment has moved from the older language of conflict management toward a doctrine of preemptive action and regional hegemony, seeking to revalidate its authority through operational success rather than defending the old framework.
The nationalist-political leadership aligned with the governing coalition deploys a different vocabulary: democratic mandate, popular sovereignty, and accountability. Its argument is that elected officials, not generals or intelligence chiefs, must ultimately control policy because sovereignty belongs to the people and not to professional castes insulated from electoral consequence. What the security elite calls professionalism, this coalition calls unaccountable power. What the generals call operational caution, politicians call hesitation or, when the charge is sharper, political interference in the other direction. The moves against Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and the broader effort to assert civilian control over intelligence and security appointments follow this logic. They are presented not as political interference but as the correction of an existing distortion.
The third security coalition overlaps with the settler movement and the ideological nationalist right. Its language is victory, deterrence, and historical mission. It argues that restraint has been Israel’s strategic mistake and that security must be pursued with clarity and maximum force, subordinated to the broader project of Jewish sovereignty rather than to international opinion or professional caution. This coalition does not simply want to win wars. It wants security policy to serve a civilizational agenda, which puts it in tension with the professional elite even when both favor military action.
The legal gatekeeper war is in some ways the most philosophically interesting, because it exposes a foundational ambiguity in Israel’s constitutional structure. Israel has no formal written constitution. The Supreme Court and the attorney general have accumulated their authority through a series of landmark rulings and institutional conventions, most notably the Basic Laws and the Court’s 1995 assertion that it could strike down Knesset legislation that violated them. The judicial-legal coalition, centered on the Supreme Court, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, and the network of senior legal advisers embedded across government ministries, uses the language of rule of law, checks and balances, and protection of democracy against majoritarian capture. Its claim is that in the absence of a formal constitution, robust legal gatekeepers are the only structural barrier between representative government and the partisan seizure of state institutions.
The nationalist-religious governing coalition frames this not as protection but as usurpation. Its moral language is governability, popular sovereignty, and the delegitimization of unelected elites. It argues that legal actors have accumulated power no democratic theory can justify and now exercise it to override the expressed will of voters. The judicial overhaul efforts, the attempt to dismiss the attorney general, and the pressure on the Shin Bet chief all follow the same logic: elected authority must reclaim jurisdiction from institutions that have placed themselves above accountability. Each move is presented not as an attack on democracy but as its restoration, a rebalancing away from an elite that has confused its own preferences with constitutional principle.
The liberal civic-protest movement occupies a third position. It lacks formal office and cannot hold institutions directly. Its tools are mass mobilization, the threatened refusal of reserve military service, business and investment signals, and reputational pressure on the governing coalition. Its language is democracy, civil rights, and institutional integrity. Pinsof would identify its move as moral guardianship: it cannot seize authority, but it can impose legitimacy costs on those who do, making the exercise of power more expensive for the governing coalition than the formal balance of institutional power would suggest.
The territorial and demographic war has the longest time horizon and the most irreversible consequences. The settler-religious messianic coalition uses the language of historical right, divine promise, and national destiny. Its claim is that Jewish sovereignty over the land is not a policy choice subject to negotiation but a civilizational commitment whose denial would hollow out the meaning of the state itself. Its strategy converts physical presence into institutional permanence: settlements become infrastructure, infrastructure becomes legal facts, legal facts become political realities that subsequent governments find nearly impossible to reverse. The expansion of settlement activity in the West Bank, the legal frameworks that govern land designation and building rights, and the political power of settlement leaders within the governing coalition all serve this goal of making territorial control progressively harder to undo.
Against this, the security pragmatist coalition, overlapping with liberal-national voices and parts of the professional military, uses the language of strategic restraint and international legitimacy. Its argument is that uncontrolled expansion risks the combination of international isolation and internal demographic arithmetic that would eventually force a choice between the Jewish and democratic character of the state. This coalition does not necessarily reject territorial control. It argues that territorial policy must serve long-term strategic viability rather than theological imperative. A third voice, the nationalist sovereignty bloc on the secular right, supports territorial dominance but justifies it in strategic terms, as security buffer and deterrent depth, rather than religious ones. This puts it in an uneasy middle position between the messianic bloc and the pragmatists.
The big pattern across all three domains is identical. Each coalition says: we should have authority because we uniquely possess something essential. The security elite claims expertise and warfighting competence. The governing coalition claims democratic mandate and popular sovereignty. The legal coalition claims procedural legitimacy and rule of law. The settler bloc claims historical and religious truth. The protest movement claims moral guardianship of democratic norms. None of these coalitions says: we want power because it benefits our members. All of them experience their own claims as sincere. That sincerity does not change the structure.
War and crisis amplify these forces without resolving them. National emergency elevates security language as a trump card, places legal constraints under pressure, and expands the political authority of whoever holds executive power. But crisis does not eliminate jurisdictional competition. The Haredi draft crisis has handed the security pragmatists new domestic leverage: after years of warnings about manpower shortages, IDF leadership now conditions operational readiness on a binding conscription law, placing Netanyahu in a pincer between his religious coalition partners and the military’s functional requirements. The high-net-worth and technology sectors have largely aligned with the security pragmatists, with capital flowing heavily into defense technology and security-adjacent industries in ways that create a powerful security-managerial alliance rewarding demonstrated competence over ideological purity.
The uncomfortable symmetry that Pinsof’s framework reveals is that each coalition presents its claim as categorically different from mere power seeking, and none is. The judicial coalition’s procedural legitimacy and the governing coalition’s democratic mandate are both genuine values and both coalition technologies deployed to justify institutional jurisdiction. The security establishment’s claim to professional authority and the settler bloc’s claim to civilizational truth are both sincerely held and both structurally convenient for the actors holding them. That is not a reason to treat all claims as equally valid or equally dangerous. It is a reason to read every claim with the question: what institutional jurisdiction does this moral language expand, and for whom?
The system holds because power is distributed and contested. No coalition can fully displace the others without triggering systemic backlash serious enough to threaten the whole structure. The governing coalition needs the security establishment’s operational capacity. The security establishment needs political legitimacy it cannot generate itself. The legal gatekeepers need public trust that the protest movement helps supply. The settler bloc needs governing coalition protection that requires military and legal acquiescence. These mutual dependencies are what keep the jurisdictional war from becoming a terminal crisis, even as they ensure it never ends.
Durable authority in Israel has always formed at the junctions between coalitions, where leaders can speak security and politics simultaneously, or law and nationalism, or religion and statecraft. The question the current moment forces is whether any figure or coalition can assemble that bridging capacity under conditions of ongoing war, internal fracture, and a legal and political fight that has moved each coalition further from the center of the others. The jurisdictional wars will continue regardless of how particular battles over judges, generals, or territory resolve. They continue because they are not accidents or temporary breakdowns. They are the equilibrium through which Israel governs itself.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Iran’s Master Institutions

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

Iran’s high-status actors do not compete for power by admitting they want it. They compete by invoking moral languages that make their authority appear sacred, necessary, or inevitable. This is the logic David Pinsof‘s Alliance Theory makes visible. Moral vocabularies are not just beliefs. They are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, discipline insiders, and justify control over institutions. Every coalition makes the same structural claim: we should have authority because we uniquely possess something essential. The vocabulary changes. The structure does not.
Iran makes this dynamic unusually transparent because the state is explicitly ideological. The competition is not hidden behind claims of neutrality, as it is in liberal democracies. It is conducted openly through rival interpretations of Islam, revolution, national interest, and survival. That transparency makes Iran a useful case. The same forces operating beneath the surface of American elite competition operate here in plain sight.
Two institutions concentrate this struggle more than any others. The security apparatus and the economic state are Iran’s master institutions. Whoever controls them controls coercion, capital, and the channels through which all other authority flows. What looks like debate over resistance strategy, sanctions relief, or economic reform is, underneath, a jurisdictional war over who gets to define the Islamic Republic itself.
The war over the security state runs along three fault lines. The Revolutionary Guard coalition, centered on the IRGC, its intelligence branches, the Basij, and its vast economic networks, uses the language of resistance, martyrdom, and revolutionary vigilance. The claim is elemental: Iran is under permanent siege, and only those forged in struggle can defend it. Pinsof’s framework decodes this quickly. By framing every domain as a battlefield, the Guard expands its jurisdiction without limit. Economic activity becomes resistance economics. Foreign policy becomes proxy warfare. Domestic dissent becomes infiltration. The language of survival launders institutional expansion as necessity. What looks like ideological commitment also secures control over an estimated thirty to forty percent of GDP through opaque networks that sanctions weaken for rivals while strengthening for those already positioned inside them.
The clerical-religious establishment tied to the Supreme Leader’s office, the Guardian Council, and the Qom seminary network deploys a different kind of authority claim. Its language is guardianship, jurisprudence, and continuity with the founding principles of the revolution. It claims the right to arbitrate what the revolution means, which is a more durable form of power than operational control in some respects because it allows the establishment to validate or constrain other factions without directly displacing them. The clerical core does not need to win every fight. It needs to remain the court before which other coalitions must justify themselves. That interpretive position is what Khamenei held for decades, and what his succession now puts in play.
The third security coalition is the pragmatic-technocratic bloc, overlapping with parts of the regular military, the Foreign Ministry, and older state bureaucracy. Its language is national interest, strategic patience, and regime survival through managed stability. This is not liberalism or reformism. It is an alternative survival theory. It argues that overextension, whether through regional adventurism, proxy escalation, or excessive internal repression, weakens the state more than external pressure does. This coalition’s move is to reframe strength away from permanent mobilization toward adaptive preservation. It competes not by rejecting the Guard’s goals but by questioning its methods.
The economic war follows a parallel structure. The IRGC’s resistance economy bloc uses the language of self-reliance and sanction-busting as moral duty to justify control over industrial, energy, and financial networks that are difficult for rivals to penetrate. Sanctions, in this framing, become both constraint and coordination tool: they punish actors who depend on global integration while reinforcing the Guard’s monopoly over clandestine channels. The reform-technocratic coalition, drawing on economists, urban professionals, and moderate political figures including those in President Masoud Pezeshkian’s orbit, deploys the language of efficiency and development. Its coalition logic is to align the urban middle class, younger professionals, and internationally oriented business interests by framing reform not as ideological deviation but as the only path to genuine national strength. The populist-distributive bloc attacks both of these from below. Its language is justice and the dignity of the oppressed, the mustazafin of Khomeinist rhetoric, repurposed to attack Guard monopolies as corruption and technocratic proposals as elite abandonment. It claims subsidies, welfare networks, and redistribution as its institutional terrain. All three coalitions claim to serve the people. Each defines the people differently, and each definition conveniently extends the authority of the coalition invoking it.
The cultural and epistemic domain is less consolidated but no less important, because it determines which moral languages retain resonance and which begin to decay. The clerical core maintains its monopoly through seminaries, state media, and religious institutions, using the language of piety and authentic tradition. The reformist and intellectual coalition, operating through universities, civil society, and moderate political currents, uses the language of interpretation and pluralism to push from within rather than reject the system outright. The third force has no building or budget. It is the diffuse, generational, diaspora-influenced informal public sphere shaped by digital media, and its language is the authenticity of lived experience against official narrative. It cannot take institutions. It can make official languages feel hollow, which over time is its own form of power.
As of early 2026, all of these dynamics are compressed and intensified by the aftermath of strikes that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and triggered an acute succession crisis. An interim leadership council governs while the Assembly of Experts deliberates. The IRGC has used wartime conditions to tighten its grip on operational decision-making, consolidating the security coalition’s position even while absorbing losses. Succession speculation centers on figures who can bridge the clerical-security nexus, whether Mojtaba Khamenei, backed by hardliners and IRGC elements, or senior clerics who can credibly claim both doctrinal authority and strategic realism. The pragmatic bloc has space to operate in the margins, particularly around foreign policy and economic management, but the dominant framing is survival, which structurally benefits the Guard.
External pressure behaves as a rebalancing mechanism in this system rather than a destabilizing one in the way outside observers often expect. War and strikes strengthen the Guard’s crisis jurisdiction language. Economic stagnation strengthens the technocratic competence argument. Inequality and corruption scandals strengthen the populist justice claim. Crisis does not resolve the competition. It shifts which moral language carries the most weight at any given moment, and therefore which coalition has the strongest claim on institutional authority.
The system holds not because one coalition has won but because none can fully displace the others without risking collapse. The IRGC cannot govern without clerical legitimacy. The clerical establishment cannot maintain security without Guard muscle. The technocratic bloc cannot implement anything without navigating both. The populist coalition needs state resources that only the other factions control. This mutual dependency is what Pinsof would recognize as the equilibrium: not stability in the ordinary sense, but a persistent jurisdictional contest that the system requires in order to function.
The most powerful actors in Iran are not those who win doctrinal arguments or dominate a single domain. They are those who can bridge coalitions, speaking resistance and pragmatism simultaneously, combining religion with statecraft, and addressing justice without undermining control. That bridging capacity is what Khamenei exercised for decades. The succession question is really a question about who can reassemble a similar coalition architecture under wartime conditions. It may not be a single figure. It may be a council structure that distributes the bridging function across several actors, each speaking to a different coalition in the language it recognizes as legitimate.
Iran is not, in the end, a monolith driven by singular ideology. It is a layered regime where competing elite coalitions each dominate their territory using the moral language that most effectively justifies their position. The instability visible from outside is not a sign of imminent breakdown. It is the functional logic of the system. The regime endures not despite jurisdictional conflict but through it.

Stephen Turner’s convenient beliefs are battle-tested and thriving inside the IRGC command bunkers right now. With Khamenei martyred, nuclear sites turned to rubble, oil terminals smoking, and the U.S.-Israeli air campaign grinding into its second month, these beliefs let the generals, commanders, and economic czars maintain iron discipline, keep the rank-and-file motivated, justify the body count, and preserve their sprawling economic empire even as missiles fly both ways. They coordinate the coalition of hardliners, shield the “resistance economy” from blame, and let every surviving IRGC leader look at the burning horizon and still see victory.
Here are the 10 most useful ones likely circulating in the IRGC high command today:
The Zionist-American aggression has only accelerated the divine victory of the Islamic Revolution.
Every crater is proof that the enemy is panicking; our survival after losing the Supreme Leader is living proof of Allah’s favor.
Our asymmetric arsenal (missiles, drones, proxies) is far more effective than their billion-dollar jets.
One cheap Shahed or proxy attack on a tanker is worth ten of their precision strikes—keeps morale high while the Air Force is grounded.
The “resistance economy” is not collapsing; it is being purified and will emerge stronger.
Black-market oil sales, currency controls, and IRGC business empires are framed as genius self-reliance, not desperation.
Any internal protests or desertions are purely foreign-orchestrated (CIA/Mossad/MEK) and have zero organic support.
Lets commanders crush dissent without ever admitting the Iranian street is tired of the war.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s leadership transition proves the system is more stable than ever.
No power vacuum here—just seamless continuity under the son, with the IRGC as the real backbone.
The Axis of Resistance is delivering decisive blows; Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iraqi militias are bleeding the enemy on multiple fronts.
Conveniently ignores that the proxies are also taking heavy losses—still, every Houthi drone launch becomes “strategic depth.”
Nuclear breakout was never the goal; the program was always a peaceful deterrent that the enemy has now proven we need more than ever.
Gives cover to quietly restart enrichment deeper underground while claiming moral high ground.
The West and Israel lack the will for a long war; they will tire, fracture, and beg for talks.
Classic: our patience (and willingness to absorb casualties) is our greatest weapon against their short attention spans.
Sanctions and strikes only strengthen the IRGC’s grip on the economy and society.
Every new restriction funnels more money and loyalty through IRGC companies and foundations—perfect for expanding control.
Final victory is inevitable through continued resistance, faith, and strategic patience; this is just the latest chapter in the 45-year war.
The ultimate meta-belief. It lets IRGC leaders sleep at night (or in bunkers), keep issuing orders, and position themselves as the eternal guardians who will outlast yet another “decisive” enemy campaign.
These aren’t conspiracy theories—they’re adaptive survival tools for men whose entire identity, wealth, and power are fused with the regime’s survival. Even as the IRGC loses generals, infrastructure, and oil revenue, these beliefs keep the machine loyal, the propaganda crisp, and the internal purges justified. Question too many of them out loud and you risk becoming the next “martyr” on state TV.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for America’s Master Institutions

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

America’s high-status actors do not compete for power by admitting they want it. They compete by deploying moral languages that frame their authority as necessary, virtuous, or inevitable. This is the central insight of David Pinsof‘s Alliance Theory: moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, exclude rivals, and justify control over institutions. Every major coalition in America runs the same underlying play. It claims to uniquely possess something, whether knowledge, virtue, legality, tradition, or protection, and argues that this possession entitles it to rule. The vocabulary changes. The structure does not.

Two institutions concentrate this competition more than any others right now. Artificial intelligence and the university are what might be called master institutions: whoever controls the rules governing them controls the pipeline of credentials, capital, and epistemic authority that feeds every other domain. What looks like a debate about AI safety standards or campus speech codes is, beneath the surface, a jurisdictional war. Different coalitions are fighting not to win an argument but to determine which moral language gets to set the terms for everyone else.

The war over AI governance runs along three fault lines. The safety coalition, centered on Anthropic, parts of OpenAI, and much of the academic AI ethics world, uses the language of existential risk, alignment, and responsible development. Pinsof’s framework decodes this quickly: by framing AI as a near-divine danger that only specially trained researchers can manage, this coalition justifies barriers to entry that larger, established firms can meet and smaller rivals cannot. The language of catastrophe launders regulatory capture as altruism. Against this, the open-source and accelerationist coalition, aligned with Meta, Andreessen Horowitz, and various strands of the tech right, deploys the language of innovation, democratization, and anti-censorship. Their play is counter-elite mobilization: they align smaller developers, outsider investors, and populist sentiment against what they call the priestly class of safety researchers. Neither side is simply lying. Both believe their framing. But both framings also happen to serve the institutional interests of the actors deploying them, which is precisely what Pinsof would predict.

The third force is the one reshaping the terrain most decisively. The national security coalition, operating through the Pentagon, Palantir, and the defense-industrial complex, uses the language of AI sovereignty, strategic competition, and warfighting capability. Their move is emergency jurisdiction: because AI is a weapons system, it must be removed from civilian ethics oversight and placed under state authority. By 2026, this logic is winning. The earlier federal-state dynamic, in which California and other states tried to impose their own AI regulations, is being preempted by federal standards designed to be minimally burdensome on national champions. The technocratic and private industry coalitions, previously in tension, are finding common cause against what they both regard as incoherent patchwork governance. The consolidation of authority at the federal level is not a resolution of the war. It is a shift in which coalition holds the high ground.

The university war is older and more visceral because the stakes are more personal to the people fighting it. Three distinct governance models compete for control of what is, at bottom, a credential-producing machine that determines who enters the elite and on what terms.

The progressive activist coalition controls the human infrastructure of the contemporary university: HR regimes, admissions frameworks, social norms, the internal vocabulary of institutional life. Its moral language of equity, safety, and lived experience does not merely describe values. It creates reputational costs for deviation and rewards for conformity, which is how any coalition maintains control of an institution it cannot govern by fiat. The classical liberal coalition, drawing on older faculty, some journalists, and a set of institutions explicitly founded as alternatives to progressive orthodoxy, deploys the language of merit, free inquiry, and colorblindness. Its goal is to restore the epistemic rules: a model in which the university’s primary legitimacy signal is the neutral pursuit of truth rather than the advancement of particular social ends. This coalition lost the internal culture of most major universities decades ago. It now fights primarily through external platforms, litigation, and the production of counter-narratives.

The third coalition is the most operationally significant right now. The post-liberal and populist alliance, using the language of accountability, Western values, and institutional capture, has moved from rhetoric to leverage. The mechanism is funding. By March 2026, the Department of Defense has begun severing ties with elite universities, including Harvard and Tufts, on the stated grounds that progressive capture has degraded warfighting capability. This is a precise Alliance Theory move: the national security coalition withdraws its protection from the activist-technocratic alliance that has governed elite higher education, signaling to university leadership that continued activist dominance carries a material cost. The goal is not to win a debate about pedagogy. It is to use financial dependency to force institutional realignment, replacing one coalition’s internal dominance with another’s.

What connects the AI war and the university war is the pattern Pinsof identifies in every jurisdictional contest: the game is no longer about winning the argument. It is about using the legal and financial machinery of the state to strip rivals of their institutional footing.

This pattern is dissolving the corporate-managerial elite’s long-standing strategy of neutrality. For decades, large corporations maintained autonomy by speaking the language of pragmatic competence, arguing that because they deliver growth and stability, they should be left to manage themselves. This strategy depended on the ability to borrow moral languages from rival coalitions without fully committing to any of them. ESG was the clearest expression of this hedge: a way to signal alignment with progressive cultural elites while preserving the underlying logic of shareholder value.

That hedge has become a liability. From the right, conservative legal and populist coalitions now use the language of fiduciary duty and anti-discrimination to attack DEI programs and climate-aligned investment strategies. From the left, the activist coalition has escalated its demands, treating symbolic alignment as insufficient and demanding active political intervention. The corporate elite faces a reputational pincer: silence reads as hostility to one side, and speaking reads as partisanship to the other. Meanwhile, the national security coalition’s intrusion into global supply chains has replaced the language of efficiency with the language of resilience and friend-shoring, stripping the managerial elite of its primary claim to authority, the ability to allocate capital according to market signals. They are becoming, in effect, a client class.

The internal fracture matters too. A younger tier of managers and employees, formed in the progressive moral language of the post-2010 university, clashes with older leadership still speaking the language of shareholder value and operational efficiency. When these two vocabularies collide inside a firm, the result is not compromise but paralysis, and paralysis invites external actors, politicians, activist shareholders, and media figures, to claim jurisdiction over the firm’s internal governance.

Recognizing that total neutrality is no longer viable, the high-net-worth tier of the corporate world is splitting into two distinct pivot strategies. The populist-legal pivot, most visible in Silicon Valley and among the PayPal Mafia generation, pairs the populist-nationalist language of the people versus the establishment with the conservative legal goal of dismantling the administrative state. For tech billionaires, this is a structurally attractive trade: they offer the populist movement platforms and capital, and in return they gain a judiciary and executive branch committed to dismantling the regulatory agencies that constrain AI, cryptocurrency, and platform growth. Elon Musk’s America Party represents the first serious attempt to institutionalize this alliance, using concentrated wealth to create a swing bloc that forces both parties to adopt pro-technology, anti-regulatory positions. It is a high-variance strategy. It courts disruption deliberately, because disruption benefits those positioned to exploit the new rules before they stabilize.

The technocratic-security pivot is the defensive incumbent’s answer. Finance, established defense contractors, and global consulting firms are doubling down on alignment with the national security and liberal technocratic coalitions. Their language is stability, security supercycles, and rules-based order. The logic is straightforward: state-backed investment in defense AI, satellite infrastructure, and drone networks creates guaranteed markets. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the broader security supercycle have produced a class of high-status investors for whom the state is not an enemy to be dismantled but a partner to be captured. This is a low-variance strategy. It sacrifices the upside of disruption for the predictability of institutional incumbency.

The two pivots are now in open conflict. The populist-legal faction wants to break state regulatory power to liberate innovation. The technocratic-security faction wants to become the state, or at least to ensure that the state’s priorities align with their balance sheets. Both claim the moral language most useful for their position: one speaks of freedom and democratic legitimacy, the other of necessity and protection. Neither acknowledges that it is primarily a coalition pursuing power. Neither needs to. That is precisely how the game works.

What Pinsof’s framework reveals, and what Turner’s sociology of knowledge confirms at a deeper level, is that no coalition possesses the stable epistemic foundation its moral language implies. The technocrat’s science, the activist’s harm, the constitutionalist’s text, the post-liberal’s common good, the populist’s will of the people: all present themselves as foundations. All are, on closer inspection, coordination mechanisms that work by convincing followers they are something more. The instability this produces is not a bug in the American system. It is the equilibrium. Moral language inflation, cross-coalition delegitimization, and recurring legitimacy crises will persist for as long as no coalition can prove, to the satisfaction of the others, that it alone deserves to rule.

The most powerful actors in this environment are not those who win individual debates. They are those who build bridges between coalitions, who can speak corporate and technocratic, or populist and legal, or security and political, simultaneously. Durable power forms at the junction between coalitions, not at their cores. Understanding that is the beginning of understanding what actually governs the country.

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When the Epistemology Collapses: Stephen Park Turner and the Post-Liberal Catholic Project

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

There is no famous direct encounter between the sociologist Stephen P. Turner and the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule. They operate in different institutional worlds and have rarely, if ever, addressed each other by name. Turner works in the philosophy of social science and the sociology of knowledge. Vermeule works in constitutional law and Catholic political theory. The absence of a direct debate, however, obscures something important: Turner’s central arguments quietly dismantle the epistemic foundations on which Vermeule’s entire project rests, and they do the same to the broader post-liberal Catholic movement that includes Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari. The failure to recognize this connection is not accidental. Taking Turner seriously is uncomfortable for everyone.
The core of Vermeule’s project, as articulated in his common-good constitutionalism and integralist writings, rests on several interlocking claims. A thick moral tradition exists, running from classical natural law through Thomistic philosophy into modern jurisprudence. That tradition carries genuine continuity across time. Trained elites, judges and administrators formed within it, can access it and apply it to contemporary governance. The goal of constitutional interpretation, on this account, is not to maximize individual liberty or reconstruct original intent but to direct social life toward the common good. The framework is not just political. It is epistemological. It says: we know what the good is, and we know how to apply it.
That last sentence contains the root error Turner would identify. The entire project rests on essentialism: the belief that the tradition is a carrier of a determinate essence, a stable moral content that exists independently of any particular interpreter and gets passed down through the generations to those trained to receive it. Vermeule does not merely appeal to tradition as a useful resource. He claims to recover it, and recovery implies there is something fixed to find, not something being constructed in the present. Natural law has specific content. The common good has a determinate shape. Thomistic jurisprudence identifies something real about human flourishing that skilled interpreters can access and apply. Without this essentialist commitment, the entire architecture of common-good constitutionalism collapses into what Turner would say it actually is: a contemporary coalition selecting and reinterpreting past materials to justify current authority claims.
Turner’s work, particularly in The Social Theory of Practices, Explaining the Normative, and The Politics of Expertise, attacks this essentialist picture at its root. Traditions are not containers for determinate moral content. They are historically produced and perpetually reconstructed sets of texts, arguments, practices, and institutional forms that each generation reshapes in light of its own situation and incentives. What gets transmitted is not an essence but raw material. The appearance of continuity is produced by interpreters, not discovered in the material itself. When Vermeule reads Aquinas and finds support for a strong administrative state oriented toward the common good, he is not retrieving what Aquinas essentially meant. He is producing a reading that his present coalition finds useful, and then treating that reading as if it were the tradition speaking rather than a contemporary interpreter selecting.
The mysterious transmission Turner identifies is where the essentialist commitment becomes most philosophically exposed. If the tradition carries a determinate essence, there must be some account of how that essence travels from Aquinas to a Harvard law professor in the twenty-first century, through centuries of fragmentary and contested institutional life, reformation and counter-reformation, revolution and restoration, the collapse of Christendom and the rise of the modern state. MacIntyre’s answer, which Vermeule imports wholesale, is that the tradition is a living practice with internal standards of reasoning that allow practitioners to participate in an ongoing argument across time. But that answer only works if traditions cohere and self-correct in the way MacIntyre describes. Turner’s sociological account says they do not. What actually travels across generations is fragments, contested interpretations, and reconstructions shaped by the incentives and power structures of each era. The essence, if it exists at all, is not what gets transmitted. What gets transmitted is raw material that each generation reshapes in its own image while claiming to recover something prior.
Turner is careful not to reduce this observation to a simple dismissal of tradition’s political weight. Political traditions made of messy, tacit material do have serious staying power. That is precisely why they cannot simply be replaced, and why they resist transplantation. The durability is real. But it is a different kind of durability than the one Vermeule claims. A tradition endures not because it carries a stable extractable essence but because its very messiness and internal resistance make it hard to dislodge. This is a crucial distinction. Vermeule needs the tradition to be a reliable guide with determinate content. Turner’s point is that it is better understood as a stubborn historical presence, one that shapes what is politically possible without supplying the clean normative content that a governing program requires.
Michael Oakeshott’s account of tradition deepens this diagnosis in ways that cut directly against the essentialist move. For Oakeshott, a rich tradition sustains itself through its long-term underlying tensions. The tensions are not impurities waiting to be resolved by a sufficiently trained interpreter. They are the tradition. What gives it resilience and depth is precisely that it holds competing tendencies in unresolved relationship, allowing different actors in different circumstances to draw on it in different ways. The moment you claim to have identified the essence of a tradition and to be applying it faithfully, you have replaced the tradition with your own reading of it. You have resolved the tensions rather than inhabiting them. And a tradition with its tensions resolved is no longer a tradition. It is a doctrine, and doctrines are far more brittle than the living inheritances they claim to represent. Vermeule’s classical legal tradition is not a recovery. It is a resolution, and in resolving the tensions he claims to transmit, he produces something new while presenting it as something ancient.
The philosophical spine of Vermeule’s world is Alasdair MacIntyre, and the clash between Turner and MacIntyre is where the essentialist problem becomes most precise. MacIntyre’s After Virtue argues that modern liberalism destroyed coherent moral frameworks, leaving only emotivism and bureaucratic management in their place. The solution, for MacIntyre, is to recover tradition-based rationality: the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition as a living inheritance that carries internal standards of reasoning and can guide human action toward genuine flourishing. The key word is carries. MacIntyre’s tradition is not merely a historical residue. It is a vehicle for moral knowledge with its own internal logic of development and self-correction. That is an essentialist claim, and it is precisely the claim Turner dismantles.
Traditions lack the unity and stability MacIntyre attributes to them. Transmission involves distortion, selective reconstruction, and persistent unresolved disagreement rather than faithful inheritance. Tacit knowledge of the kind MacIntyre’s tradition-based rationality requires thrives in small, stable communities where accountability is immediate and shared context is genuine. Scale it to a modern nation-state, filter it through centuries of institutional change, and it ceases to be knowledge in any robust sense. It becomes a label applied after the fact to justify what a group is already doing. Authority within a tradition stems from social recognition and institutional positioning, not from epistemic mastery of an essence. Strip MacIntyre from Vermeule’s framework and what remains is a group of contemporary actors saying: this is what the tradition essentially teaches, and we are the ones qualified to apply it. Turner’s response is that the essence is their construction, the tradition is their raw material, and the qualification is their coalition’s credential.
This last point came into sharp focus during the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Vermeule’s public claims of voter fraud at that time showed exactly the susceptibility Turner would predict: high-confidence claims resting on weak evidence, rapid uptake of coalition narratives, failure to maintain the epistemic discipline his own theory requires. A system built on the premise that trained elites can exercise disciplined prudential judgment needs its central figures to model that discipline under pressure. Instead, what Turner’s framework would lead anyone to expect is what appeared: an expert embedded in networks, responding to coalition stress by aligning with coalition narratives. Not an anomaly. A confirmation.
Andrew Gelman’s skepticism about expert calibration reinforces the point from a different angle. In his New America essay on overconfidence in research and policy, Gelman argues that standard paradigms of expert reasoning lead practitioners to extract apparent discoveries from noise and to exaggerate effects even in controlled conditions. His concept of the garden of forking paths, developed with Eric Loken, demonstrates that even researchers acting in good faith produce overconfident conclusions when they make data-dependent choices along the way. If the tradition does not carry a determinate essence but only raw material open to multiple interpretations, then the trained jurist’s confident recovery of the common good is subject to exactly this kind of systematic distortion. The forks in the interpretive path are invisible to the interpreter because the essentialist commitment tells him he is discovering rather than choosing. Hugo Mercier’s argumentative theory of reason adds a further layer. Reason evolved not to track truth but to produce justifications for positions we hold on other grounds and to evaluate the justifications others offer in social contexts. Common-good reasoning, on this account, is doing what all reasoning does: serving coalition goals while presenting itself as the discovery of something that was always there.
The critique of Patrick Deneen requires the same essentialist diagnosis, applied with slightly different emphasis. Deneen’s argument in Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change is that liberalism destroyed a coherent way of life rooted in local community and that restoring the common good requires recovering what was lost. The essentialist commitment here is if anything more explicit than in Vermeule. Deneen believes there was a determinate thing, a genuine common form of life with identifiable moral content, that pre-liberal communities embodied and that liberalism corroded. His political program depends on this thing being real and recoverable, not merely imagined or selectively constructed.
Turner’s response, sharpened by Oakeshott, is that what those communities had was not an essence but a set of practices held together by local conditions, mutual dependency, scarcity, and unresolved internal tensions. The tensions were functional. They allowed the community to adapt, to hold competing demands in productive relationship, to mean different things to different members without flying apart. The moment Deneen describes the essence of that way of life clearly enough to use it as a political program, he has already left the tradition behind and entered the territory of ideology. He has resolved what was unresolved, made explicit what was tacit, and converted a living historical residue into a governing doctrine. What he then proposes to restore is not the original thing but his own systematization of it, which is precisely what Turner means when he says these guys think there is an essential thing that gets passed down in some mysterious way. The mystery is load-bearing. Without it, the recovery project has nothing to recover.
Deneen’s proposed aristopopulist alliance, in which a virtuous elite uses the state to protect ordinary people’s way of life, does not escape Turner’s critique of expertise by replacing technocratic credentials with moral ones. Any elite, regardless of its credentialing vocabulary, will behave as an interest group asserting jurisdiction. The new elite credentialed by adherence to tradition and the common good is not accessing an essence that the old technocratic elite missed. It is deploying a different moral language to claim the same institutional authority. A change in vocabulary. Not a change in mechanism.
What emerges from Turner, Gelman, and Mercier together is a picture in which Vermeule’s project looks structurally identical to the liberal technocratic order he criticizes. Both rest on essentialist claims about what kind of knowledge a trained elite possesses. Both present that knowledge as something more than coalition preference dressed in prestigious vocabulary. Both use the claim to special access, whether to neutral expertise or to determinate moral tradition, to justify institutional jurisdiction that would otherwise require explicit democratic warrant. The vocabulary differs. The mechanism does not. And the root philosophical error, the belief that there is a determinate essence being identified and transmitted, is the same in both cases.
What Turner offers is not a political critique of post-liberalism but a deeper one. He does not argue that Vermeule is authoritarian, though others do. He argues that the metaphysical commitment on which the entire project depends cannot be sustained. There is no determinate essence in the classical tradition waiting to be recovered. There is no mysterious transmission of moral content from Aquinas through the centuries to those trained to receive it. There is no neutral expert class whose formation gives them privileged access to the common good. What remains, once the essentialist picture dissolves, is a group of high-status actors saying: we should have authority, and here is our moral language for why. The tradition they invoke is a real historical presence with genuine staying power. Their claim to have identified its essence and to be faithfully transmitting it is not. And that distinction, between a tradition’s stubborn inertial weight and any particular coalition’s claim to own and apply its determinate content, is where Turner does his most precise and most devastating work.

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Decoding Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

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

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Decoding Israel’s New Historians

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

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

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

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Luke Ford

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

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

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

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

Andrew adds in the comments section:

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

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

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