Catharine MacKinnon

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

Catharine A. MacKinnon (b. 1946) changed American feminist legal theory more than any scholar of her generation. She works as a lawyer, an academic, and an activist, and across nearly five decades she has reshaped how courts, legislatures, and international bodies understand sexual harassment, pornography, rape, prostitution, and sex discrimination. Her central claim holds that the legal system does not merely fail to protect women from inequality but often reflects and reproduces the social hierarchy that places men in positions of power and women in positions of subordination. Through scholarship and litigation, she helped move feminist concerns from the edges of legal debate to the center of constitutional law, employment law, and international human rights.

She was born Catharine Alice MacKinnon in Minneapolis, Minnesota, into a family of political and legal standing. Her father, George E. MacKinnon (1906-1995), served as a congressman and a lawyer and later sat as a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She was the third generation of women in her family to attend Smith College, and she graduated magna cum laude in government in 1969. She earned a J.D. from Yale in 1977 and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1987. While at Yale she created the first course that grew into the university’s women’s studies program. She opposed the Vietnam War, trained in martial arts, and took part in the early women’s liberation movement. These years hardened her conviction that legal institutions cannot be read apart from the social power relations that shape them.

MacKinnon’s first major work, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), altered American employment law. Before her intervention, courts and employers treated sexual harassment as a private dispute, a regrettable feature of working life, or a question of individual misconduct. MacKinnon argued that it amounts to sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it reflects and enforces unequal power between men and women. She drew the distinction between quid pro quo harassment, where job benefits turn on sexual compliance, and hostile work environment harassment, where pervasive conduct undercuts a woman’s capacity to do her job. Both categories entered the working vocabulary of employment law and remain there.

The theory moved from the seminar into the courtroom through her role as co-counsel in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson. In its first ruling on workplace sexual harassment, the Supreme Court held without dissent that sexual harassment can constitute sex discrimination under federal law. The decision wrote into doctrine many of the principles MacKinnon had set out years earlier. Few legal scholars have shaped the development of American law so directly.

During the 1980s she widened her analysis into a general theory of social power. She borrowed from Marxist method while she rejected the Marxist premise that class supplies the primary source of domination, and she argued that sex hierarchy serves as a basic organizing principle of society. As Karl Marx (1818-1883) examined the social organization of economic power, she set out to explain the social organization of male power. The project found its fullest form in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), which many readers regard as her central scholarly book. There she argued that ideas such as neutrality, consent, privacy, and equality often conceal domination rather than remove it. The state presents itself as impartial, yet its standards frequently track male experience and male assumptions. In a formulation that drew wide attention, she argued that sexuality holds the place in gender hierarchy that labor holds in class hierarchy.

Her work on pornography produced some of the sharpest intellectual and legal conflicts of the late twentieth century. Alongside the radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005), MacKinnon argued that pornography functions not as mere speech but as a practice that eroticizes inequality and contributes to the subordination of women. The two drafted civil-rights ordinances that would let women harmed by pornography seek legal remedies, and they framed the harm as a matter of equality rather than morality.

The resulting fight became a defining First Amendment controversy. After Indianapolis adopted a version of their ordinance in 1984, publishers and booksellers challenged the law. In American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut, Judge Frank Easterbrook (b. 1948) held that the ordinance breached the First Amendment because it discriminated on the basis of viewpoint. The Supreme Court affirmed without opinion, and the ruling raised a high constitutional barrier to her approach within the United States. Civil libertarians read the decision as a defense of free expression. MacKinnon and her supporters read it as a sign that conventional free-speech doctrine ignores structural inequality.

The framework she built found a more receptive audience abroad. In R. v. Butler, the Supreme Court of Canada folded aspects of her analysis into Canadian obscenity law, shifting the focus away from traditional moral standards and toward the harm pornography can inflict on the equality and safety of women. The contrast between the American and Canadian results showed that constitutional context, more than the strength of the argument, governed the reception of her project.

MacKinnon also became a leading feminist critic of prostitution. She argued that prostitution functions as a system shaped by economic vulnerability, coercion, and male dominance rather than as ordinary labor. She championed the Nordic or Swedish model, which seeks to reduce prostitution by criminalizing buyers and third parties while it decriminalizes those who sell sex and offers support services for leaving the trade. Through her work with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, she helped frame international debate about prostitution, trafficking, and sexual exploitation.

Her writing on rape and sexual violence pressed against settled legal assumptions in the same way. MacKinnon argued that legal standards treat consent as a simple act of individual choice while they ignore the social conditions that shape what a woman can choose. On her account, disparities in power influence what looks voluntary and distort the legal grasp of coercion. The argument left a deep mark on later feminist scholarship, on university policy, and on legal reform around sexual violence.

From the 1990s her influence reached past domestic law into international human rights. She argued for treating wartime sexual violence as a crime against humanity and as an act of genocide, and she represented Bosnian survivors of genocidal sexual violence in Kadic v. Karadžić. In 2000 a jury awarded $745 million in damages, the first legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide. The case helped change how international law understands sexual violence in armed conflict and fed the legal developments that arose from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

From 2008 to 2012 she served as the first Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. In that post she worked to build sex-equality concerns into the practice of international criminal law and to establish the principle that sexual violence belongs at the center of atrocity rather than at its margin.

MacKinnon has taught at many of the leading law schools, among them Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and the University of Michigan Law School, where she holds the Elizabeth A. Long Professorship of Law. Her books include Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005), Are Women Human? (2006), Sex Equality, Butterfly Politics (2017), and Women’s Lives in Men’s Courts (2022). In 2023 she published “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” which extends her equality framework to current debates over transgender rights.

Her work has drawn sustained criticism from civil libertarians, from sex-positive feminists, and from scholars who hold that her theory underrates individual agency, sexual autonomy, and the range of women’s experience. Critics charge that she reads sexuality through domination and victimization. Supporters answer that she exposed forms of coercion and inequality that liberal theory passed over. Few legal theorists have provoked such lasting controversy while they exerted such practical influence.

Her significance rests in the attempt to build a full theory of gendered power and then carry that theory into legal doctrine. Liberal feminists often sought wider access to existing institutions. MacKinnon asked whether those institutions embody male dominance in their design. Through scholarship, litigation, and activism she pressed courts, universities, legislatures, and international bodies to take up questions long treated as private. Read as a pioneer of women’s equality or as a critic of liberal individualism, she changed the vocabulary through which modern societies discuss sex, power, and law. Few legal scholars have altered both intellectual debate and legal practice on a comparable scale.

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Who Rules: The Political Thought of Angelo Codevilla

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

Angelo Codevilla (1943–2021) joined classical political philosophy to the practical work of intelligence, diplomacy, and statecraft. He served in government, taught in universities, and wrote for a popular audience, and across those settings he built a sustained critique of the national security bureaucracy, the administrative state, and what he came to call the American ruling class. He moved between Machiavelli, espionage, nuclear strategy, and constitutional government with a freedom few American thinkers of his era could match.

He was born Angelo Maria Codevilla on May 25, 1943, in Voghera, a town in northern Italy near Milan. His father ran a business. The family emigrated to the United States in 1955, when Angelo was twelve, and he became an American citizen in 1962. Growing up between two political orders shaped his thought. He set the American tradition of constitutional self-government against the bureaucratic and technocratic habits he saw in modern European states. He treated the American constitutional order as a rare achievement rather than a stage in some inevitable march of history, and he held that such an order survives only through constant defense.

Codevilla took a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in 1965, where he studied natural sciences, languages, and politics. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a doctorate from Claremont Graduate School in 1973. At Claremont he encountered the study of the American Founding and the tradition of political philosophy tied to Leo Strauss (1899–1973) and Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015). He drew on these teachers without becoming a pure textualist. He matched close reading of old books to direct experience in intelligence and foreign affairs, and the combination gave his work a concrete character.

He served in the U.S. Navy Reserve from 1969 to 1971 and reached the rank of lieutenant junior grade, receiving the Joint Service Commendation Medal. He then entered the U.S. Foreign Service before moving to Capitol Hill. The decisive years of his government career ran from 1977 to 1985, when he worked as a staff member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under Senator Malcolm Wallop (1933–2011). During the same period he taught political philosophy at Georgetown University. In 1980 he served on President-elect Ronald Reagan’s (1911–2004) transition teams for the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. These years taught him how intelligence agencies, diplomatic offices, and bureaucracies work from the inside. They also persuaded him that government organizations drift toward serving their own institutional interests rather than the public purposes that created them.

Much of his early standing rested on intelligence studies. His book Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century (1992) argued that intelligence can never stand in for statesmanship. Information, however abundant, stays useless without political judgment. He rejected both the romance of espionage and the technocratic faith that more data yields better decisions. The hard task, he held, lies not in gathering information but in seeing what matters and folding it into a coherent political strategy.

His national security work reached beyond intelligence. In the late Cold War he became a leading intellectual defender of strategic missile defense. In The Arms Control Delusion (1987), written with Wallop, he challenged the premises of conventional arms control. He argued that mutual assured destruction accepted civilian vulnerability as a permanent feature of world politics. Missile defense, and the Strategic Defense Initiative in particular, he judged morally and strategically better, since it sought to protect people rather than threaten them with retaliation. A self-governing republic, on his account, owes its citizens defense rather than a balance of terror.

His broader foreign-policy scholarship turned on the link between political institutions and national character. In War: Ends and Means (1989), written with Paul Seabury (1923–1990), and in The Character of Nations (1997), he argued that prosperity, military strength, civic trust, and political stability rest on the character of a nation’s ruling class and its governing institutions. He resisted explanations of international affairs built on economics or military statistics alone. Political culture, constitutional form, and the conduct of elites counted for more.

His engagement with classical thought reached a high point in his 1997 translation of and commentary on The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). The project showed his method. He argued that many modern readings shrink Machiavelli to a cynical technician of power and miss his wider grasp of ambition, leadership, conflict, and the survival of regimes. Machiavelli, for Codevilla, exposed permanent features of political life rather than offering tips to Renaissance princes. The translation carried his larger conviction that elite education often hides the realities of statecraft rather than revealing them.

In 1985 he returned to academic life as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. From 1995 until his retirement in 2008 he taught international relations at Boston University, where he later held the title of professor emeritus, and he served as a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. Students remarked on his ease in tying old texts to present controversies. His seminars moved between Thucydides, intelligence reform, constitutional government, diplomacy, and military strategy, since he saw them as aspects of the same questions about power and political order.

He reached his largest audience through political commentary. His essay “America’s Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution,” published in The American Spectator in 2010, became a much-discussed conservative essay of the early twenty-first century and the longest article in that magazine’s history. He expanded it into the book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It. There he argued that American society had split between a self-conscious ruling class and a broader country class.

The ruling class, in his account, ran past elected officials to take in senior bureaucrats, media leaders, corporate executives, academics, judges, and policy professionals who shared assumptions about governance and expertise. The country class held citizens whose lives stayed rooted in local communities, practical work, family duty, and older forms of self-government. The central conflict in modern America, he argued, turned more on who governs than on which policies pass. The widening estrangement between governing elites and ordinary citizens, he warned, threatened the legitimacy of constitutional institutions.

This argument ran ahead of much that later attached to populist politics. Years before the rise of Donald Trump (b. 1946), Codevilla held that large parts of the public had lost faith in institutions they saw as contemptuous of their values and interests. His critique helped form a generation of conservative and post-liberal writers concerned with administrative power, the making of elites, and the decline of democratic accountability.

Where many conservatives pressed taxes, regulation, or judicial philosophy, Codevilla named the administrative state as the defining political problem of the age. Bureaucracies, he argued, reach for greater autonomy and influence as a matter of course. Over time they gather authority that slips past democratic control. The process turns constitutional government into managerial government and moves power from citizens and their elected representatives toward permanent officials whose expertise stands in for political accountability.

His criticism carried into foreign policy, where he faulted the assumptions of a bipartisan national-security establishment. Many interventions and nation-building projects, he held, served the preferences of governing elites rather than clear American interests. In Advice to War Presidents (2009) and To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and With All Nations (2014), he pressed a foreign policy grounded in constitutional principle, national interest, and prudent statecraft.

Away from politics and the university, Codevilla built a life that matched the values he defended on the page. In his later years he ran a vineyard in California. The work drew together themes long present in his writing: respect for productive labor, attachment to property and place, and distrust of bureaucratic abstraction. His Italian boyhood, classical schooling, government service, and farming gave his thought a grounding in tangible things. He admired people who worked with real materials and set their view against that of professional administrators. He married Anne Marie Blaesser, and the couple raised five children over a marriage of more than fifty years.

Codevilla died on September 20, 2021, in a car accident near Tracy, California, at the age of seventy-eight. His legacy rests on three achievements. He helped make intelligence studies a branch of statecraft rather than a technical trade. He built an influential conservative critique of the administrative state and of rule by a credentialed elite. And he revived an older understanding of politics centered on the character of regimes, the conduct of elites, and constitutional form.

Whether he wrote on espionage, missile defense, Machiavelli, foreign policy, or domestic division, Codevilla returned to one question: who rules, by what authority, and for whose benefit? He took that question for the permanent core of political life and the right place to begin in understanding any political order.

Alliance Theory

Angelo Codevilla spent his last decade mapping an alliance structure and calling it a moral order. The ruling class and the country class are the two super-alliances of American politics, and he drew the line between them with care. On one side he placed senior bureaucrats, federal judges, tenured academics, network anchors, foundation officers, and the executives of large firms. On the other he placed small-business owners, churchgoers, gun owners, men who work with their hands, and residents of towns the credentialed never visit. He held that the first coalition governs and the second submits, and that the conflict between them runs deeper than any quarrel over taxes or war. He was right about the structure. Alliance Theory shows what he did with it.

David Pinsof and his coauthors argue that political belief systems do not grow from abstract values. They grow from alliances. People choose allies by similarity, by shared friends and shared enemies, and by mutual benefit, and then they defend those allies with propaganda. The propaganda runs in predictable channels. Allies who do wrong get excused. Allies who suffer get their wounds enlarged. Allies who prosper are said to have earned it, and allies who fail are said to have been cheated. The same act draws the opposite judgment when a rival performs it. The contents of a belief system are the residue of these maneuvers, which is why belief systems come out as patchworks of incompatible principles rather than as philosophies. The difference between a liberal and a conservative, on this account, is a difference of friends, not of values.

Read this way, Codevilla’s two classes are the two super-alliances the paper describes. His ruling class is the liberal coalition of intellectual elites and the institutions they staff: the universities, the press, the agencies, the courts, the large foundations. His country class is the conservative coalition that formed across the same decades, the religious, the small-town, the men whose work and standing fell as manufacturing left and credentials rose. Pinsof traces this coalition to a string of historical accidents. The Civil Rights Act moved the white South toward the Republicans. The pro-life turn pulled Christian traditionalists in and pushed secular feminists out. Globalization and immigration produced a white underclass that blamed its decline on forces from outside. Codevilla took the coalition these accidents built and presented it as a class with a character, rooted in labor and faith and place. The bundle looks like a nature. It is a sediment.

Codevilla performs the unmasking that Alliance Theory recommends, and he performs it on one coalition only. He shows, with skill, that the ruling class holds the beliefs that serve its position. Expertise becomes a claim to rule. Diversity becomes a spoils system. Administrative discretion becomes a way to govern without consent. Every value the ruling class professes turns out, in his telling, to advance the ruling class. This is an alliance reading of his rivals, and it is largely sound. What he never turns on his own side is the same lens. The country class, in his pages, does not hold beliefs that serve it. It holds true ones. Its attachment to local control, to gun rights, to religion in public life, to the citizen-soldier and the family farm, appears as fidelity to the American thing itself, not as the propaganda of a coalition defending its interests. The asymmetry is the tell. A man who can see one super-alliance whole and cannot see the other stands inside the second.

The propagandistic biases run through his work in the forms the paper predicts. Take the victim bias first. Codevilla builds his case on grievance. The country class is dispossessed, sneered at, ruled by people who despise it, taxed and regulated and lectured by a class that produces nothing it can touch. This is competitive victimhood in the sense the paper gives the term. The groups the ruling class champions, in his account, are not the real victims; the real victim is the ordinary citizen stripped of self-government. The polling Pinsof cites shows the same pattern across the country class at large, which reports that discrimination against Christians is a grave problem, that men face more bias than women, that the offended are too easily offended except when the offended are its own. Codevilla gives this sentiment its most learned voice. He does not invent it. He dignifies it.

Take next the attributional bias. The ruling class, in Codevilla’s telling, owes its standing to external causes that have nothing to do with merit. It captured the accrediting bodies. It rigged the credentials. It rose by conformity and connection rather than by work. The country class owes its lower standing to no fault of its own, and its virtues to its own character: it works, it serves, it raises children, it keeps faith. This is the self-serving attribution the paper describes, swung toward his allies. Advantage on the rival side is theft. Disadvantage on his own side is injustice. Virtue on his own side is earned. The mirror image, in which the rural white underclass blames immigration and globalization for its decline, appears in the same polling, and Codevilla supplies the philosophical version.

The perpetrator bias completes the set. Codevilla holds the ruling class to a hard standard and grants his own coalition a soft one. The military’s errors he tends to forgive or recast as the costs of necessary strength. Business owners who flout regulation he reads as men resisting illegitimate authority rather than as men serving their interest. The same act, performed by an agency or a professor or a judge he counts as a rival, becomes usurpation. Pinsof’s marines and Iraqis make the point in miniature: the transgression is grave when a rival commits it and forgivable when an ally does. Codevilla keeps the conservative books.

His own category undoes him. The paper splits the modern upper class into intellectual elites and business elites, two factions of the educated and the rich that came to despise each other. Codevilla belongs to the first. He holds a doctorate, taught at universities, wrote for journals read by a few thousand people, translated Machiavelli, lived among books. He belongs to the credentialed class he indicts, and he writes for the coalition that recruits the credentialed class’s defectors. Alliance Theory has a name for this kind of figure, the bridge between a high-status group and a coalition not its own, the ally who lends a popular movement the prestige of learning. His learning does not place him above the alliance structure. It places him at a useful node within it.

What of his deepest claim, that the fight is about who rules and not about which policies pass? Here Codevilla and Pinsof nearly shake hands. Both say the surface quarrel over values hides a contest of loyalty and power. Codevilla refuses the comforting story that the two classes might agree if they only talked. He insists the conflict is real and the interests opposed. The paper says the same: politics is about conflict and loyalty, and the moral language is recruitment. The difference is that Codevilla, having seen that politics is a contest of coalitions, still dresses his own coalition in the robes of principle. He calls its cause constitutional self-government and the rule of the people. The frame answers that “the rule of the people” is the country class’s name for the rule of the country class, as “expertise” is the ruling class’s name for the rule of the ruling class. Each coalition calls its own ascendancy legitimate and its rival’s a usurpation. Codevilla wrote the conservative half of that exchange better than anyone of his time.

Codevilla saw that his enemies were a coalition and that their values served their power, and he could not see that the same held for his friends, because a man cannot see the coalition he stands in. He took one side of an alliance structure for the nation and the other for a faction. The whole achievement, the ruling-class thesis that shaped a generation of the right, reads in this light as elite propaganda of high quality, produced by a member of the intellectual elite on behalf of the coalition that needed him, and offered to third parties as the truth about who rules America. It is the truth about half of who rules America. The other half wrote its own.

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The Other Constitution: John Marini on Bureaucracy and the American Founding

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

John Marini (b. 1946) is an American political theorist whose study of the administrative state has become a reference point for contemporary conservative constitutional thought. He spent his career within the orbit of the Claremont School, and he built that career around a single question: how the growth of the modern federal bureaucracy changed the constitutional order designed by the American founders. His scholarship treats Congress, the presidency, public administration, constitutionalism, and the shifting structure of political authority in the United States. He holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, and he serves as a Senior Fellow and board member of the Claremont Institute.

Marini took his bachelor’s degree at San Jose State University and earned his Ph.D. in government at Claremont Graduate University. There he absorbed the Straussian tradition and the constitutional conservatism associated with Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015). Before he joined the University of Nevada, Reno in 1988, he taught at Agnes Scott College, Ohio University, and the University of Dallas. He served as associate editor of Political Communication: An International Journal, and he moved through a range of public policy and governmental institutions that shaped his interest in how government works rather than how it ought to work in theory.

Critics and admirers often file Marini under the familiar conservative complaint about big government, but his argument reaches further than that. He contends that the administrative state is not an accumulation of agencies but a distinct political regime, one that runs on principles at odds with those written into the United States Constitution. The founders, on his reading, built a system around separated powers, legislative supremacy, political accountability, and popular self-government. Administrative governance brought in a rival system grounded in expertise, professional management, and bureaucratic discretion. The two cannot share the same constitutional space without one displacing the other.

His treatment of Congress sets him apart from many who share his politics. Where conservatives often blame activist judges or grasping presidents for the decline of constitutional government, Marini puts much of the weight on the legislature. In The Imperial Congress: Crisis in the Separation of Powers (1989), co-edited with Gordon S. Jones, and in The Politics of Budget Control: Congress, the Presidency, and the Growth of the Administrative State (1992), he argues that Congress surrendered its first constitutional task, the making of law. Members stopped writing detailed statutes and accepting responsibility for what those statutes produced. They passed broad measures and handed the hard decisions to administrative agencies.

This arrangement pays the members well in political terms. Bureaucrats take on the work of writing detailed regulations and absorb the blame for unpopular outcomes. Legislators free themselves for oversight, constituent service, and intervention on behalf of citizens tangled in federal programs. The trade strengthens incumbency and weakens legislative authority as the founders understood it. Marini reads the rise of administrative power, then, not as a story of executive ambition alone but as a result of the incentives that govern modern electoral politics. Congress gives away its authority because giving it away serves the people who hold office.

His historical account traces the roots of this change to the Progressive Era. Marini argues that the early Progressives, and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) above all, set out to replace the founders’ understanding of politics with a system run by trained experts. The Progressives saw constitutional restraints and separated powers as drags on efficient government. They held that modern social problems called for scientific administration rather than political deliberation. In Marini’s telling, this amounted to a challenge to the constitutional order, not a tidying of governmental procedure.

He also insists that the administrative state outgrew its Progressive beginnings. By the middle of the twentieth century, and during the Great Society in particular, administrative institutions became carriers of interest-group liberalism. Agencies built relationships with advocacy organizations, professional associations, congressional committees, and policy specialists, and together these actors shaped public policy. Bureaucratic governance closed itself off from presidential direction and from democratic control alike. What emerged was not a neutral apparatus of expertise but a web of institutions pursuing political ends of their own.

These themes run through his major works, among them The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science: Transforming the American Regime (2005), co-edited with Ken Masugi, and The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration (2007), co-authored with Edward J. Erler and Thomas G. West. His essays and lectures from several decades were later gathered in Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2019), edited by Ken Masugi. Across these pages Marini holds to a steady claim: the rise of administrative governance as a rival constitutional order is the central political development of modern America.

His reach runs past the academy. During the Reagan administration he served as a special assistant to Clarence Thomas (b. 1948), then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The post placed him among conservative thinkers who worried about the constitutional weight of bureaucratic power. Thomas later became the Supreme Court’s most stubborn critic of administrative deference. No one can reduce Marini’s influence on Thomas to a clean line of cause and effect, yet both men belong to a broader movement that questions the legitimacy of modern administrative governance.

His public service includes directing the Legislative Intern Program in the Nevada Legislature from 1989 to 1995 and serving since 1989 on the Nevada Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. This work kept him close to the daily operation of governmental institutions and gave him a direct view of how constitutional principle meets administrative practice.

Within the conservative intellectual movement Marini holds a particular place as a figure who joins political theory to institutional analysis. He does not center the courts and constitutional interpretation, as many of his colleagues do. He studies the evolution of governmental structures and the incentives that drive political behavior. Long before the phrase “administrative state” entered ordinary political talk during the Tea Party movement years and the presidency of Donald Trump (b. 1946), Marini had named administrative governance as the central constitutional problem facing the country.

His later writing frames American politics as a conflict that cuts across party lines. The deepest division, he argues, runs not between Democrats and Republicans but between those who defend administrative governance and those who defend constitutional self-government. Quarrels over regulation, executive authority, judicial power, and bureaucratic discretion all return to a single question: who governs. Elected representatives answerable to the public, or a permanent managerial class set apart from elections. In a widely discussed 2016 essay, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” he read Trump’s appeal as a sign of public anger at institutions that no longer seemed to answer to ordinary citizens.

Recognition arrived in 2011 when the Claremont Institute awarded him the Henry Salvatori Prize in the American Founding. The prize marked decades of work on constitutional government, separated powers, and the growth of administrative authority. By then the ideas he had pressed for years were moving out of academic argument and into wider political debate.

Marini’s importance rests on his attempt to explain not the growth of government but the transformation of the American regime. He argues that the administrative state carries its own principles, its own institutions, and its own claim to legitimacy, and that scholars should treat it as a constitutional development rather than a swelling of old forms. Accept his conclusions or reject them, his account of how bureaucracy, expertise, and administration remade American government after the Progressive Era remains a systematic and influential one. As arguments over executive power, regulatory authority, and democratic accountability go on, his work stays close to the constitutional questions beneath them.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Marini treats self-government and popular accountability as principles the founders reasoned into being. Mearsheimer reads the same attachment as the sentiment under the principle. Men want their own to rule. They resent a distant class that governs them without sharing their loyalties. The managerial state offends that sentiment before it offends any clause. So Mearsheimer agrees with Marini about the worth of self-rule and parts from him on its source. The founders did not argue the wish for self-rule into existence. They built a frame around a feeling older than the frame.

Marini’s project is restorationist. He wants citizens to see the regime question, to recognize the administrative order for what it is, and to choose constitutional self-government. That hope runs on reason. It asks men to weigh two regimes and pick the better one. Mearsheimer puts reason last. Men do not choose a regime the way Marini’s argument asks them to. They feel their way to it through sentiment and through the values their society pressed on them young, while their critical faculties were still forming. The restoration Marini calls for cannot arrive by the route he offers.

The 2016 essay shows the gap. Marini read Trump’s (b. 1946) rise as a sign that citizens had noticed institutions that no longer answered to them. He read it as recognition. Mearsheimer’s anthropology reads it as sentiment. The voters who turned to Trump did not work through Marini’s account of delegation and the separation of powers. They felt a class above them that did not share their loyalties, and they moved against it the way the tribal animal moves. The movement that carried Marini’s phrase into power ran on the fuel Mearsheimer describes, not on the reasons Marini supplies. The two reach the same enemy by different paths, and Mearsheimer explains why the crowd’s path, not the theorist’s, put the enemy in reach.

Mearsheimer’s anthropology spares no one, and it does not spare the man who studies regimes. Marini took his training at Claremont Graduate University inside the Straussian tradition and under Jaffa. The value infusion came early and came from a small, tight group. His attachment to the founders is group attachment. His long defense of a position the mainstream discipline holds in low regard is the sacrifice for one’s own that the frame predicts. The Salvatori Prize, the institute, the line of students and co-editors: these mark a man embedded in a society and cooperating with its members rather than reasoning alone toward truth. Marini studies the tribe and belongs to one. Under Mearsheimer he is a case of the anthropology, not an exception to it.

So if Mearsheimer is right, Marini wins the argument he did not know he was making and loses the one he thought he was making. The administrative state does rest on a false picture of man, and the wish for self-government does run deeper than any clause. That is the win. But the founders become an inheritance rather than a conclusion, self-government becomes sentiment before it becomes principle, and the restoration cannot come by the reasoned recognition Marini asks for, because reason does not rule the men he asks. Marini the theorist leans on a rationalism his deepest ally denies him. He builds his case for the regime on the one faculty Mearsheimer ranks last. And he builds it as a loyal member of the small tribe that raised him to build it.

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Other Constitution: John Marini on Bureaucracy and the American Founding

Nancy MacLean and the History of Concentrated Power

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

Nancy MacLean (b. 1959) is an American historian of the twentieth-century United States whose scholarship treats the relationship among democracy, inequality, race, labor, and organized political power. She built her reputation on studies of White resistance to civil rights, the integration of the American workplace, and the intellectual roots of modern libertarianism. Through archival research, public engagement, and intervention in current political debate, she has worked to explain how institutions, ideas, and organized interests set the limits of democratic participation. She holds the title of William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Public Policy at Duke University, a status she took up in 2025.

MacLean studied at Brown University, where she finished a combined bachelor’s and master’s program in history and graduated magna cum laude in 1981. She earned a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989 under the feminist historian Linda Gordon (b. 1940). Her graduate years fell within a period of upheaval in the historical profession, when social history, labor history, women’s history, and African American history pressed against older narratives built around political elites. Gordon’s influence shaped her lasting concern with how institutions distribute power and how social movements challenge a settled hierarchy.

Her first book grew straight from her doctoral research. In Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994), she examined the Klan of the 1920s through a close study of Athens, Georgia. She rejected the portrait of the Klan as a band of rural cranks and social outcasts. Many members, she argued, came from the lower middle class: small proprietors, clerks, and skilled tradesmen who felt pressed by modernization, corporate consolidation, labor militancy, immigration, and the widening opportunities open to Black Americans. The book reshaped scholarly understanding of the Second Klan by stressing its social roots and its appeal among respectable townsmen rather than fringe radicals. It won a string of honors, among them the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize from the Southern Historical Association, along with prizes in labor and legal history. The themes it opened recur across her career: the link between social anxiety and political mobilization, the institutional roots of exclusion, and the part organized movements play in defending an existing order.

After her doctorate MacLean joined Northwestern University, where she taught from 1989 to 2010. Over more than two decades she became a leading scholar of twentieth-century American social and political history. She chaired the History Department and held the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship in the Humanities. Her years at Northwestern also drew her into labor and living-wage campaigns on campus, work that sharpened her interest in the meeting point of academic inquiry and public life. In 2010 she moved to Duke University as William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy. At Duke she founded and directed the Center for the Study of Class, Labor, and Social Sustainability, a venture that carried forward her long commitment to tying historical scholarship to current questions of economic justice and democratic governance.

Her second major project turned to the transformation of the American workplace after the civil rights revolution. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006), published by Harvard University Press with the Russell Sage Foundation, examined the enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the deep changes it brought to employment across the country. The book traced how Black Americans, women, Latinos, and other long-excluded groups gained entry to occupations closed to them for generations. MacLean argued that workplace integration ranks among the underappreciated achievements of the civil rights era. She held at the same time that these gains drew heavy political backlash, and that opposition to affirmative action, equal-employment rules, and government action in labor markets fed the rise of modern conservatism. The book joined labor history, civil rights history, legal history, and political history in a single account of how American democracy changed. It drew the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, the Allan Sharlin Award in social science history, and the Willard Hurst Prize in socio-legal history, all in 2007.

Across these works MacLean developed a method that blended social, political, and intellectual history. Rather than confine herself to elected officials and formal institutions, she examined networks of activists, donors, business leaders, academics, and political organizations. Her scholarship traces how ideas become policy and how organized groups try to shape the rules that govern economic and political life. This focus on institutions and concentrated power places her within a tradition of historians who study how inequality survives or gives way.

She also reached past the conventional monograph. In 2014 she co-edited Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism with Edward H. Peeples, a book that joined memoir, oral history, and historical analysis. The work fit her long interest in how a man raised inside a racial order comes to reject it and turn advocate.

Her most influential and most contested book is Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017). The project began in research on Virginia’s campaign of Massive Resistance against school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education. While studying the closure of public schools in Prince Edward County, MacLean took an interest in the economist James M. Buchanan (1919-2013), founder of public choice theory and a future Nobel laureate. After Buchanan’s death she gained access to his papers at George Mason University and found material she read as evidence of a long campaign.

In Democracy in Chains MacLean argued that Buchanan built an intellectual framework designed to limit the power of democratic majorities and to shield property rights from popular political demand. She traced the path of these ideas from segregation-era Virginia through later libertarian movements and the organizations tied to the businessman Charles Koch (b. 1935). On her account, a long-term political project took shape that sought to fence off economic decisions from majority rule through constitutional restriction, privatization, judicial protection, and rules that hold popular politics at a distance. One of her sharpest claims concerned the proximity between Buchanan’s early work and the efforts of Virginia elites to resist federally ordered integration; she read his constitutional political economy as offering tools that could narrow the reach of majoritarian politics, and she presented this link as an overlooked chapter in the intellectual history of modern conservatism.

The book reached a wide audience. It became a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Book Award, took the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award, reached the New York Times bestseller list, and drew The Nation’s naming of it as Most Valuable Book of the year. Few historical monographs in recent decades have drawn comparable public attention.

The reaction ran hot. Economists, political scientists, libertarian scholars, and some historians mounted long critiques. Georg Vanberg, Michael Munger, David Schmidtz, and Phillip W. Magness argued that MacLean misread central parts of public choice theory, quoted archival material selectively, and overstated the continuity from mid-century segregationist politics through Buchanan’s thought to present-day libertarian organizations. They held that public choice grew from economic analysis of political incentives rather than from a defense of segregation. The political theorists Henry Farrell and Steven Teles, who share none of Buchanan’s politics, called the book a conspiracy theory dressed as intellectual history and judged the broad thrust of the criticism sound. MacLean and her defenders rejected these readings. They argued that the book correctly named the anti-majoritarian strain in important currents of libertarian thought and drew real connections among arguments, donor networks, and institutions. Supporters read the heat of the attack as a measure of the political stakes. The exchange became a visible scholarly controversy of the new century, turning on archival interpretation, intellectual history, ideology, and the duties of historians who write about live political movements.

After 2017 MacLean carried these themes into articles, essays, lectures, and public commentary. Her later work has examined the global reach of libertarian political economy, the tie between privatization and racial inequality, the roots of school-choice movements, and the influence of corporate-funded policy networks. She has argued that current fights over voting rights, judicial power, administrative governance, and public education carry roots that run back decades.

She has stayed active as a public intellectual. She co-founded Scholars for North Carolina’s Future, the successor to Scholars for a Progressive North Carolina, and has taken part in public arguments over voting rights, labor rights, public education, privatization, and democratic institutions. Like many historians shaped by the social history of the late twentieth century, she treats scholarship as a way to light up present struggles as well as to reconstruct the past.

Her central concern stays consistent across more than three decades. Whether she writes about the Ku Klux Klan, workplace discrimination, segregationist resistance, or libertarian constitutional theory, she returns to one question: how organized groups hold influence against rising demands for equality and democratic participation. Admirers count her a leading historian of democracy, race, and inequality in modern America. Critics hold that her political commitments at times push her to overstate the coherence and the intent of the movements she studies. Even many critics grant that she has forced scholars and the public to face hard questions about the bond among wealth, power, institutions, and self-government. Few living historians have done more to set the history of political ideas in direct conversation with present debate.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

The public, in her account, has been fooled. Ordinary people back the policies that gut their own unions, schools, and votes because they cannot see the hand behind the curtain. They need the curtain pulled. This is the misunderstanding myth restored at the bottom of the hierarchy after she banished it from the top. The masses do not understand their interest. A historian will explain it to them. Pinsof has a line for this move. Capitalism, false consciousness: if only the workers knew how much they were exploited, they would unite. MacLean offers the same structure with better footnotes.

Her own coalition gets a third treatment. The right acts from actual motives, naked and documented. The public acts from confusion. But the people who oppose the right act from their stated motives, and she leaves those motives alone. They defend democracy. They protect the vulnerable. They follow the evidence where it leads. Pinsof’s first instruction reads the deeds and not the mission statement. MacLean reads the deeds of her enemies and the mission statement of her friends.

The frame asks what her friends might want if we read them as she reads Koch. The answer sits in her own subject. She writes about the fight to control the state. Pinsof says that fight is what partisan conflict has always been, a zero-sum struggle over the machine that puts people in prison at gunpoint. MacLean describes that struggle in detail. She names the donors, the think tanks, the long game. Then she narrates her own side as though it stood outside the struggle, wanting only fairness while the other side wants power. The symmetry she will not grant is the plain one. Both coalitions want the state. Both understand this. Her book is a weapon in the war it claims to expose.

Consider the role the story builds for her. If the right runs a stealth plot against democracy, then the scholar who finds the plot in the archive saves democracy by the act of finding it. The work and the heroism become the same gesture. This is the payoff Pinsof identifies in the misunderstanding myth, the reason intellectuals love it. It makes them the most important people in the room. MacLean reaches the payoff by a different road. She does not say the right misunderstands. She says the right deceives, and that the historian who exposes the deception performs a public rescue. The savior survives the move from misunderstanding to conspiracy. Only the costume changes.

The reception of the book settles the question in Pinsof’s favor rather than hers. Economists and political scientists charged that she misread Buchanan, quoted him out of context, and stitched a plot from loose thread. Historians on her side defended the reading. The lines held by coalition. Almost no one crossed. If the quarrel were a misunderstanding, better archival work might resolve it, and the sides might converge. They did not converge, because the quarrel is not about Buchanan’s sentences. It is about which coalition gets to narrate the origins of the present order. The split runs along coalition lines because the participants read their interests well. They are not failing to understand each other. They understand each other and fight.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

MacLean’s books form a catalogue of tribe beating creed, and she narrates each victory as a scandal.

Look at her subjects. The Second Klan draws five million White Protestant men who feel their group losing ground. Massive Resistance closes the schools of Prince Edward County rather than seat Black children beside White ones after Brown v. Board of Education. The backlash she traces in the integrated workplace pits one group’s gain against another’s standing. The Buchanan project she pursues across the Koch archive defends a coalition that fears the unleashed majority. Each case shows a group choosing its own survival and rank over the universal claim of equal rights. MacLean reads each case as a pathology, a wound in the body of democracy, a thing to diagnose and cure. Mearsheimer reverses the polarity. The tribe protecting itself is the baseline of human conduct. The universal creed is the late and fragile overlay. If he is right, her whole shelf documents the rule and keeps calling it the exception.

MacLean thinks tribalism intrudes on a democratic order that would otherwise hold. Mearsheimer thinks the democratic order floats as a thin film on a tribal deep. She has written the same surprised story many times about an outcome that was never a surprise. Men defended their group. Men have always defended their group. The puzzle she keeps posing, why the arc bends back toward exclusion, dissolves once you grant that the arc was never bending the way she assumed.

Her faith in the majority runs into the same rock. She trusts the democratic many and blames the constraints that the right places on majority rule. Let the people govern free of the donor class, she argues, and they choose fairness. Her own first book unsettles the hope. The majority of White Athens joined the Klan. The demos she trusts is the demos that built the hood. Mearsheimer asks the question she steps around: why assume the unleashed majority bends toward her justice rather than toward its tribe? Strip away the checks and the people might choose the creed of equal rights, or they might choose their own. The record she assembled gives the gloomy answer more often than the bright one.

Her method takes a hit too. She presents her conclusions as the residue of evidence, the archive read close and followed where it leads. Mearsheimer ranks reason below socialization and innate sentiment in the forming of a moral code. A historian trained inside the social-history insurgency, raised in the academic class, settled in a progressive coalition, absorbs that coalition’s sense of right and wrong long before she weighs it. The value infusion comes first. By the frame’s logic her universalism is the badge of her tribe, the mark that shows which group she belongs to, worn by a member who takes the badge for a description of all mankind.

The crusade follows from the creed. Liberalism, once it holds power, turns intolerant of those who reject its universal rights and treats them as enemies of humanity rather than as a rival people. That logic sends liberal states abroad to remake other nations and ends in long wars. The same logic turns the liberal scholar into a crusader at home. MacLean’s opponents are no rival coalition with interests of their own. They are a stealth plot against democracy as such, architects of a design to undo the universal. A frame that grants the other side honor cannot survive in the crusading mind, because the universal admits no honorable dissent, only heresy. Her portrait of Buchanan as a cold engineer of oligarchy is the demonization Mearsheimer predicts the universalist will reach for.

So what then for MacLean, if Mearsheimer is right here? Her universalism becomes a dream rather than a map. Her enemies become ordinary men doing the ordinary work of their group rather than monsters outside the human run. Her hope that equal rights can defeat entrenched group loyalty runs against the order of the forces that move men, with reason last and the tribe first. She has spent a working life writing the refutation of her own faith and reading it as the proof.

Hero System

MacLean has called herself an archival rat. The name fits the posture, the patience, the nose for the one folder in a long run that turns the whole story over.
This is a scene of devotion. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) has a word for what she is doing.
Becker argued that every man builds a hero system, a scheme of meaning that tells him how to count, how to be of use, how to win a place in something that outlasts the body.
MacLean’s hero system makes her a sentinel of democracy. That is the holy word. Around it her cosmos turns. A teaching career alone will not earn the standing the scheme demands, and a monograph that ages on a shelf will not hold off the dark. The work has to bend the present. She has to find the plot, name the architect, and bind her own name to the rescue. The box at George Mason is the altar where that happens. When she lifts the lid she is not gathering data. She is reaching for the deed that will let her matter after she is gone.
Set a second man at a second desk, three decades earlier, in Virginia. He handles the same papers from the writing end. To him the word democracy names the thing he fears, the many voting away what belongs to the few, the crowd reaching for his purse and his school and his peace. His sacred word is liberty, the self fenced off from the mob. His hero system makes him the lone clear mind who sees what the herd cannot, who designs the rules that guard the reasoning few against the appetites of the mass. He earns his immortality by building chains for the beast and calling the chains freedom. Two people, two altars, one archive. Each takes the other’s holy word for a curse.
Becker’s point is that the word carries the whole cosmos with it, and the cosmos differs from stall to stall. Put democracy to a Trappist in his choir stall and it weighs nothing. It is a noise from the city. His sacred is obedience, the rule, the long silence, the surrender of the will. Salvation is not put to a vote. Put the word to a staff sergeant at Camp Pendleton and he nods at the recruiting poster and then forgets it, because the holy thing for him is the man on his left and the man on his right. He will die for the fire team. The franchise is for speeches. Put the word to a young engineer in Menlo Park who means to route human judgment around the slow and the foolish, and democracy becomes a faulty input device, a thing to be modeled and corrected by the smart hands that see the curve. The sacred for him is the optimum and the future it serves. Put the word to a grandmother in Calabria and she waves at the television where men in suits shout. The sacred sits at her table, in the blood, in the name her grandsons will carry. Five altars, five readings of one word, and on each altar a different act counts as heroism. MacLean treats democracy as the redeeming cause of a human life. The economist treats it as the disease. The monk, the sergeant, the engineer, the grandmother file it under noise, or duty, or inefficiency, or nothing. The word does not hold still, because the hero system underneath it does not hold still.
A hero system runs on a subtraction. Becker named the deep one, the denial of the body, the refusal to know oneself as meat that rots. MacLean’s scheme runs a subtraction of its own. For democracy to stay the one sacred thing in the room, the dead economist has to have no altar. He has to be an engineer of chains and nothing more, a cold designer with cunning and no reverence. Her book grants him intelligence on every page and withholds from him an inner faith. She cannot let him be a man defending his own holy thing, because a rival faith is a tragedy, and tragedy would dim the clean light her cause throws. So she subtracts his soul to keep her own cause spotless. She subtracts a second thing nearer home. The hunger that drove her to the box, the need to outlast herself, the wish to be the one whose name attaches to the rescue, she reads as service. The drive to matter wears the robe of selflessness, and the robe hides the drive from the woman wearing it.
Does she know? The phrase archival rat shows a little play, a little distance, a writer who can see herself bent over the foam cradle and smile. The play stops at the edge of the cause. She knows she is a partisan for democracy and she wears the badge with pride. She does not show the further knowledge, that her democracy is an immortality project, that the heat in her prose is the heat of a believer at the rail, that the man she hunts kept an altar too. Her self-awareness reaches her politics and halts before her metaphysics.
Three coordinates fix her in Becker’s scheme. Her hero is the archival rat as guardian of the republic, the scholar who saves self-government by dragging the plot into the light and who steps thereby into the line of historians who armed the people against the rich. Immortality by exposure. The rival she fights without naming is not the economist, whom she names on every page, but his faith, the rival hero system she battles while calling it only a conspiracy, since a conspiracy can be beaten and a faith can only be mourned, and the refusal to see the faith is the move that lets her win. The one cost her ledger cannot price is her own need to endure. She can audit the donors’ money and the economist’s footnotes to the dollar and the comma. She cannot audit the hunger that chose the shape of the book, because to price it would melt the selflessness the whole scheme runs on. The vital lie at the center of her work is not about Buchanan. It is about why she went to the box.
The room stays cold. The pencil moves. She turns the next page in the run, certain she is reading a dead man’s secret, and she is, and she is also writing, in that careful hand, the terms of her own bid against the grave.

Posted in History | Comments Off on Nancy MacLean and the History of Concentrated Power

Freedom and Authority: The Work of Christoph Bezemek

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

Christoph Bezemek (b. 1981) holds the chair of public law at the University of Graz, where he ranks among the leading figures in Austrian constitutional scholarship. His work moves across constitutional law, legal theory, political philosophy, comparative public law, and freedom of expression. He belongs to a generation of European jurists who want to reconnect doctrinal analysis with the older questions of political legitimacy, democratic order, and the philosophy of law. One concern runs through the whole body of work: how legal institutions can protect individual freedom while they hold the authority and cohesion of the political community.

He was born in Vienna on May 20, 1981, the only son of the Austrian historian Ernst Bezemek. He studied law and philosophy at the University of Vienna and took his law degree in 2004. In 2006 he earned his doctorate at Vienna with a study of the Geschäftsgrundlage, the underlying basis of a contract, in Austrian civil law. The doctoral subject sits at a distance from the public-law and free-speech work that made his name, and it shows the breadth of his training. From the start he read law alongside philosophy, and that double formation marks everything he writes. Where many public-law specialists stay inside doctrine, Bezemek reads constitutional law through moral and political theory. He later took an LL.M. at Yale Law School, from September 2008 to May 2009, and there he deepened his engagement with American constitutional thought and the comparative study of constitutions.

Bezemek began his academic career in 2004 at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, at the institute of Austrian and European public law, under the constitutional scholar Michael Holoubek. He held a research post, then an assistant professorship from 2011. During these years he built the research agenda that shaped his later work. In July 2013 he completed his habilitation in public law, legal theory, and comparative law. The habilitation studied the structure of free-speech protection under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and it appeared as the book Freie Meinungsäußerung in 2015. The project named a theme he returns to again and again: how constitutional orders committed to democracy weigh expressive freedom against competing goods such as equality, dignity, public order, and social cohesion.

The habilitation established him as a comparative scholar of free speech. He treats freedom of expression as a field that exposes rival philosophical assumptions rather than as a single national question. American doctrine carries a deep distrust of government regulation and gives strong protection to political speech. European systems allow wider restriction in the name of collective goods. Bezemek asks how these traditions formed and what they reveal about competing pictures of democracy and constitutional order.

After the habilitation his reputation crossed borders. He took visiting posts across Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, among them appointments at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City, the universities of Zagreb and Katowice, Rutgers Law School, the Ethiopian Civil Service University, and Reichman University in Israel. These years sharpened his comparative instinct and set Austrian public law beside constitutional systems formed under different histories.

In October 2016 Bezemek succeeded Franz Merli in the chair of public law at the University of Graz and became a full professor. He served as Vice Dean in 2018 and 2019 and then as Dean of the Faculty of Law from October 2019 to October 2023, when Gabriele Schmölzer followed him. His term as dean fell in years of rising interest in comparative constitutional law, international legal theory, and interdisciplinary legal education. As scholar and administrator he worked to tie Austrian public law to the wider debates over constitutionalism, democracy, and legal philosophy.

One question holds the body of work together: the relation between freedom and political authority. Bezemek rejects the idea that constitutional law amounts to a set of technical rules that courts administer. He reads constitutions as the frames through which a society negotiates the tension between private autonomy and collective self-rule. That single concern links his writing on fundamental rights, on constitutional interpretation, on judicial review, and on democratic legitimacy.

Free speech holds a central place in his work. He has studied the conceptual ground of free expression, symbolic speech, the regulation of hate speech, limits on speech aimed at public officials, and the pressures that digital platforms place on older doctrine. He shows how technology has unsettled the state-centered picture of constitutional rights. The classic question asked about government censorship. The new question reaches private platforms, algorithmic moderation, and information systems that cross borders. His comparative training lets him read these shifts across several constitutional traditions at once. His chapter on insults of public officials appears in the volume that Adrienne Stone and Frederick Schauer (b. 1946) edited, The Oxford Handbook of Freedom of Speech (2021), and his collaboration with Schauer places him inside the Anglo-American conversation on the subject.

His constitutional interests run past free speech. Bezemek belongs to a cohort of scholars trying to understand constitutional government under globalization, democratic strain, and the spread of international legal institutions. He has written on international constitutional law, on judicial review, on constitutional interpretation, and on the future of constitutional order. A recent two-volume study takes up constitutionally conforming interpretation, the canon that asks judges to read statutes in line with the constitution, and traces the problems it raises at the national, supranational, and international levels.

Legal philosophy gives his profile its sharpest mark. He has returned often to the Austrian tradition of jurisprudence that runs from Hans Kelsen (1881-1973). Many treat Kelsen as a closed chapter. Bezemek treats the Pure Theory of Law as a live resource. He asks how the Grundnorm, legal validity, and the hierarchy of norms can throw light on transnational governance and on the traffic between domestic and international law. His essay on Kelsenian interpretation, set between textualism and realism, appears in the collection Kelsen in America (2016). He argues that Kelsen’s monist account of legal order still holds in a world where national constitutions meet international courts, supranational bodies, and global regulators.

His philosophical reach goes beyond Kelsen. He has worked on Georg Jellinek (1851-1911) and on Lon Fuller (1902-1978), and his writing turns on legal obligation, constitutional legitimacy, the relation of fact to norm, and the moral ground of legal systems. These concerns shape the volume he edited with Nicoletta Bersier Ladavac and Frederick Schauer, The Normative Force of the Factual (2019), which revisits the old debate over whether law draws its authority from facts, from norms, from institutions, or from collective acceptance. A related strand, gathered under the heading of epistemic political philosophy, asks how constitutional orders manage the tension between expertise and democratic participation, a tension felt wherever courts, agencies, scientists, and elected officials contend for the last word on public questions.

Bezemek writes in many forms: monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, textbooks, and joint projects. He co-edits the ICL Journal: Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law, which he has helped run since 2013, and the series Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy, whose third volume, on legal reasoning, appeared in 2023. He edited Rechtsdogmatik: Stand und Perspektiven in 2023, a survey of the state and prospects of legal doctrine. He carries forward the standard Austrian textbook Einführung in das Öffentliche Recht, an introduction to public law now in its eighth edition, which he produces with Herbert Stolzlechner and which has trained many cohorts of students. Through editorial work, conferences, and joint research he has built networks that link scholars across Europe, North America, and beyond, and he has brought European and American constitutional thought into closer contact.

His teaching has drawn formal notice. In 2016 the state nominated him for the Ars Docendi prize, Austria’s award for excellence in university teaching, in recognition of his work on digital methods in legal education.

He also keeps a foot in practice. He serves as Of Counsel at the firm Starlinger Mayer, where he advises in public law, and he chairs the arbitration commission of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He acts as a reviewer for Oxford University Press and for several journals. The roles tie his scholarship to the working life of the law.

His current projects take up the constitutional place of the head of state, the relation between punishment and retribution, the nature of legal wrongs, and the standing of Fuller’s theory of legality. Across these varied subjects one search holds steady: the search for legal institutions that can hold authority together with freedom, and stability together with democratic self-rule.

What sets Bezemek apart is the ease with which he moves between close doctrinal analysis and abstract jurisprudence. He is a constitutional lawyer, a legal philosopher, and a comparative scholar at once. He wants to lay bare the normative ground of constitutional democracy while he keeps his eye on how legal institutions work in fact. In an age of democratic polarization, constitutional crisis, expanding judicial power, and doubt about the future of liberal constitutionalism, his work offers a long effort to clarify the principles that make constitutional government both possible and legitimate.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

David Pinsof’s complaint in “A Big Misunderstanding” runs against a whole class of thinkers. They blame the world’s troubles on misunderstanding. War, bigotry, polarization, all of it traces back to people failing to grasp something, and the cure is to grasp it. Pinsof notes who profits from the story. The people whose trade is understanding come out as the people who can save the world. The story flatters the teller.
Bezemek’s subject is the conflict at the center of constitutional democracy, the pull between individual freedom and the authority of the political community. He reads that conflict as a problem of clarification. Get the structure of free speech right, settle the relation of fact to norm, fix the canon of interpretation, and the polity might reconcile liberty with order. The trouble lies in muddle. The remedy is the jurist who clears the muddle.
Take free speech. Bezemek treats the American and European traditions as two answers built on different assumptions. America distrusts the state and shields political speech. Europe permits wider restriction for the sake of equality, dignity, and cohesion. He asks how each tradition formed and what each reveals. The framing assumes the two camps misunderstand each other, or misunderstand the good they both serve, and that a comparative scholar might lay the assumptions bare and bring the camps into contact.
Pinsof pushes back. The free-speech fight is not two philosophies talking past each other. It is a fight over the coercive apparatus of the state, over who may silence whom, over who goes to prison for what he says. American doctrine and European hate-speech law are two settlements of that fight, two answers to who wins. The competing goods Bezemek weighs, equality and dignity and public order, are the banners of coalitions. Each side understands the stakes. Each wants the power to bind the other. No one is confused.
The same cut goes through his work on hate speech, on speech against public officials, on the platforms. Bezemek asks where the line falls and how technology moves it. Pinsof asks who gains when the line falls here rather than there. A man who can be prosecuted for an insult understands his position. The official who can prosecute him understands his. The platform that moderates understands its market. The question of where to draw the line reads as a puzzle for the theorist. Lived from inside, it is a contest each party grasps well enough to fight.
Bezemek’s epistemic political philosophy sits even closer to Pinsof’s target. There he studies the strain between expertise and democratic participation, the worry that voters and courts and agencies and elected men all reach for the last word on questions they may not understand. This is the misunderstanding myth in its purest legal dress. The voter misunderstands, so the expert must mediate. Pinsof’s reply is blunt. The voter understands his incentives fine. He parrots his tribe’s line because the line pays and dissent costs. The expert who frets over the voter’s confusion is not solving a comprehension problem. He is bidding for the authority to overrule.
Bezemek treats Kelsen’s Pure Theory as a live resource, the Grundnorm and validity and the hierarchy of norms as tools for a world of overlapping legal orders. His edited volume carries the title The Normative Force of the Factual and asks whether law draws its authority from facts, from norms, from institutions, or from acceptance. Pinsof turns the title over. The factual force of the normative. Strip the talk of validity and the question becomes who can coerce whom and who can make the coercion stick. Authority is the name we give to force once it holds. The Grundnorm is a story a coalition tells to launder its power into legitimacy. Kelsen built a tower of norms above the brute fact of the gun, and Bezemek polishes the tower. Pinsof points at the gun.
Here the frame owes its subject some fairness, because Bezemek half-sees this. He once wrote on the bad man of Holmes (1841-1935), the figure who knows the law only as a prediction of what the courts will do to him, law as force and nothing more. Bezemek argued that the bad man’s view opens up the relation of law and force better than the moralist’s view. So he has stood where Pinsof stands. He has looked at law as coercion and found the look useful. Then he steps back to the balancing, the reconciling, the clarifying. He treats the cynical view as one lens among several rather than the floor under all of them. The misunderstanding myth survives in him by choice. He keeps the brute fact in its place and builds above it.
That choice is where the two part. The cynic says the building above the fact is decoration, a story that serves the men who tell it, the jurist among them, whose standing rises with every page of clarification. The constitutionalist says the building is real, that norms shape force as much as force shapes norms, that a society held by shared principles differs from one held by fear. Pinsof has an answer ready. Of course the jurist believes the building is real. Believing it is real is his trade, his standing, his reason to be in the room. A man reaches few conclusions his position cannot afford.
So Bezemek might ask what Pinsof asks at the end. What if the parties to constitutional conflict understand what they have an incentive to understand? What if the muddle is strategic, a fog each side keeps because clarity might cost it the fight? What if the trouble is not bad doctrine but bad motives, the ordinary motives of men who want to bind other men? And the last, hardest question. What if there is nothing for the jurist to fix? The conflict might be the order working as a contest always works.
Pinsof ends with the man in the hole who studies the dirt and stays stuck. The constitutional theorist studies the conflict between freedom and authority with care and learning, and the conflict does not resolve, because it was never a misunderstanding. It was a fight over who rules and how far. Bezemek’s work might be a careful description of the hole. Whether description is the first step out, or the comfort that keeps us in, is the question his frame cannot answer and Pinsof’s frame will not let him dodge.

Bezemek and the Normative Ghost

Stephen Turner’s anti-normativism makes a single hard claim. The normative is a posit that does no work. When a thinker says a rule binds, that a norm governs, that an order holds valid, he names nothing in the world beyond the plain facts. People acquire habits. They expect things of each other. They sanction the ones who break step. That is the whole of it. The extra ingredient, the bindingness, the validity, the ought that floats above the doing, is a ghost. Turner spends Explaining the Normative showing that you can always redescribe the normative in factual terms and that the redescription loses nothing. What looks like a separate realm of norms reduces to trained dispositions and shared expectation. The normativist sees a domain. Turner sees a habit with a halo.
Set this against Bezemek, who revives the purest normativist the tradition has produced. Kelsen builds his science of law on the gap between Sein and Sollen, between what is and what ought. Law for Kelsen is a system of norms. A norm holds valid when a higher norm authorizes it. Obedience has nothing to do with it. At the top stands the Grundnorm, the basic norm presupposed to confer validity on the whole order. Kelsen guards this structure against two enemies. He fights the natural lawyer who grounds validity in morality, and he fights the sociologist who dissolves law into fact. The normative must stay pure, irreducible, its own thing. Bezemek treats this as a live resource for a world of overlapping legal orders.
Turner aims straight at the Grundnorm. Ask what the basic norm explains that a factual account does not. The officials of a state treat the constitution as authoritative. They train their juniors to do the same. They reverse, void, and punish the acts that defy it. Describe all of that and you have described everything the legal order does. Now add the Grundnorm. What changes? Nothing changes in the world. The basic norm posits a source of validity behind the behavior, and the behavior was the only thing there to explain. Kelsen late in life conceded the basic norm a fiction, a hypothesis we suppose. Turner takes the concession further. A fiction that adds no explanatory weight is not a hypothesis. It is a ghost we agree to see.
The same knife cuts validity from efficacy. Kelsen insists the two stay apart. A norm might hold valid though men ignore it, and a norm men obey might lack validity. Turner denies the gap has anything in it. Strip away the word and you find expectation, habit, the readiness to sanction. Validity names the case where these hold firm. Efficacy names the same case watched from outside. There are not two facts here. There is one fact and two vocabularies, and the normative vocabulary earns its keep only by pretending to track something the factual vocabulary misses.
Bezemek edits a volume under the title The Normative Force of the Factual, the phrase Jellinek coined for the way a fact, by lasting, comes to carry the weight of a norm. The book asks whether law draws its authority from fact, from norm, from institution, or from acceptance. Turner reads the title as a confession run backward. It tries to show how brute fact turns into binding norm, how the is becomes the ought. The turning is the trick. No new force enters when a practice settles. What happens is that men come to expect the practice and to punish the breach. The normative force is the factual force seen by a man who wants there to be more. Jellinek named the wish. He did not find the thing.
Carry the point through the rest of the work. Bezemek writes on legitimacy, on the normative foundations of constitutional democracy, on the principles that make a constitutional order possible. Turner asks what fact legitimacy tracks. An order holds. Men accept it, or fail to mount an effective challenge, or cannot imagine the alternative. Call this legitimacy and you have renamed it. The name hides the plain truth that the order persists because enough men, trained and disposed and watchful, keep it persisting. Bezemek’s global constitutionalism extends the move across borders. He posits a unity among national constitutions, international courts, and supranational bodies. Turner finds no unity, only a scatter of institutions whose officials hold overlapping expectations. The unity is a norm with no fact under it.
Even the canon Bezemek studies most, the duty to read statutes in line with the constitution, dissolves under the same test. The judge ought to interpret in conformity, the doctrine says. Turner translates. The judge has been trained to read this way, his court reverses readings that stray, and he prefers not to be reversed. The ought is the habit plus the threat. Nothing binds the judge except what might happen to his ruling and his standing if he broke the pattern. Add the binding norm and you have named the pattern twice.
Bezemek has a defense, and it comes from Kelsen. The normative is not meant to explain behavior at all. It is the jurist’s viewpoint, a distinct cognitive frame, the science of the ought held apart from the science of the is. Sociology may describe what officials do. Jurisprudence describes what the law requires, and the two never touch. On this view Turner attacks a target outside his field. But this is the move Turner cares about most, because it is the spook’s hiding place. To declare the normative autonomous, sealed off from factual check, is to make it safe from disproof. A claim that cannot be tested against any fact is not a deeper claim. It is an empty one dressed as a deep one. The autonomy of the normative does not protect a real domain. It protects a redundant vocabulary from the question that might empty it.
Bezemek wrote on the bad man of Holmes, the figure who knows the law only as a forecast of what the courts will do to him. The bad man cares nothing for validity. He cares what happens to his body and his money. Bezemek granted that this view opens the relation of law and force better than the moralist’s. He saw the factual floor under the normative tower. Then he climbed back up. He keeps the predictive, force-based view as one lens and restores the normative science above it. Turner says he cannot keep both. Either validity does real work, and Bezemek must show the fact it tracks beyond habit and sanction, or it does no work, and the science of the ought is the sociology of officials under another name.
So the verdict the frame returns is that the normative force Bezemek defends is the force of the factual, misnamed and then revered. His Kelsen revival rebuilds the most elaborate ghost in legal thought, the Grundnorm at its summit, validity flowing down its tiers. He does this with full knowledge of the bad man’s view and the sociologist’s challenge, which makes the choice deliberate rather than blind. He wants the law to be more than the habits of armed men. Turner’s answer is that wanting it does not make it so, and that the science built to house the want describes nothing the facts left out.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Bezemek’s work centers on the very figure Mearsheimer calls a fiction. The free-speech case turns on an individual with a right to speak against the state. The fundamental-rights tradition he studies, the First Amendment and Article 10 of the Convention, posits a person who carries protections into any society and holds them against the group. His comparative method treats rights as portable across traditions. His global constitutionalism reaches for a legal order above the nation. If Mearsheimer is right about man, what then for this body of work?
First, the rights-bearing individual loses his footing as bedrock. Bezemek frames the great constitutional question as a tension between individual freedom and the authority and cohesion of the political community. Mearsheimer breaks the symmetry. The community makes the individual. It feeds him his code before he can weigh it. The two poles do not sit as equals on a scale. One is the ground and the other a figure drawn on it. Bezemek’s balance assumes a free chooser facing a community across a gap. Mearsheimer says the chooser is something the community made.
Second, reason. Bezemek’s craft is reason. He clarifies doctrine, weighs goods, reads principle, and trusts that careful thought might find the right settlement between liberty and order. Mearsheimer ranks reason beneath sentiment and socialization. The judge who reasons his way to a speech rule does not reason his way to it. He arrives where his society’s value infusion already put him and reasons backward to dress the arrival. The American who protects the Nazi marcher and the European who jails the Holocaust denier are not two arguments. They are two socializations. Bezemek’s comparative scholarship looks for the assumptions behind each tradition. Mearsheimer says the assumptions came from no reasoning. They are the code each man’s childhood poured in.
Third, universalism. The human-rights grammar Bezemek works in claims reach over all men. Mearsheimer, quoting Samuel Moyn (b. 1972) on human rights as the highest modern aspiration, treats that reach as the core liberal error. There is no universal man to hold universal rights. There are Austrians and Americans, Ethiopians and Israelis, each raised into a different code, and Bezemek has taught in all those places. The universal in his rights talk is a local European liberalism that takes itself for humanity. His comparative work, read through Mearsheimer, stops being a search for shared foundations and becomes a survey of tribes and their value infusions.
Fourth, the global constitutional order. Bezemek extends the constitutional frame past the nation toward a unity of national constitutions, international courts, and supranational bodies. This is The Great Delusion in legal dress. Mearsheimer’s whole argument is that liberal universalism breaks on the social and tribal nature of man and on the staying power of the nation. There is no global people to hold a global constitution. The dream of law above the nation is the same dream Mearsheimer watches fail in foreign policy, moved into the courtroom.
Now the fair part. Bezemek is no pure atomist, and the frame should say so. His steady theme is the political community, its authority, its cohesion, its claim on the individual. He refuses to shrink constitutional law to a list of individual rights. He takes the social side of man more seriously than a doctrinaire liberal does. In that much he has already walked toward Mearsheimer. The trouble is where he stops. He keeps the individual as a real and equal pole, a value that stands on its own, and he keeps reason as the arbiter that holds the balance. Mearsheimer demotes both. The individual is downstream of the group. Reason is the weakest of the three forces. Bezemek grants the community its weight and then asks the autonomous chooser and the reasoning judge to meet it on level ground. Mearsheimer says the ground was never level.
So what then for Bezemek, if Mearsheimer is right? His life work becomes a careful grammar for a creature described wrong. The atomistic rights-bearer at the heart of it never existed as drawn. The real man, social from the start, tribal, raised into a code, moved more by inborn sentiment than by argument, appears in Bezemek’s pages only in the half he files under cohesion and authority. The honest move the frame presses on him is to turn the priority over. Start from the group. Treat individual freedom as the late, local, fragile thing it is, an achievement of one kind of society’s socialization, worth defending perhaps, never foundational, never universal. A constitutional law built on that order might look unlike the one Bezemek builds. Such a law speaks of rights as the customs of particular peoples. It expects free speech to hold only where a society has been raised to want it. It drops the reach toward a single human grammar of rights. It ranks the reasoned principle, the jurist’s pride, below the value infusion that no court installs and no argument dislodges.
If Mearsheimer is right, Bezemek’s freedom shrinks to a habit some tribes keep, his universalism narrows to one tribe’s custom, and his reasoned balance turns into the rationalization of a code laid down in childhood. The work survives as the description of one society’s settlement. The claim to have found something every society owes the individual does not.

The Eighth Edition

The book comes back from the printer in the spring. Einführung in das Öffentliche Recht, eighth edition, the spine the same dark color it has worn for years, the name Bezemek above the name Stolzlechner where it has stood through edition after edition. A first-year buys it used, the highlighting already done by a student two cohorts gone, a girl or a boy he will never meet, whose exam he will never grade. He does not wonder who wrote it. The book is the law. The man is a name on a spine, and the name has become part of the furniture of the law, which is the point.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote that every man lives under two terrors. The first is the body, the animal fact that he will die and rot in a ditch, meat that knows it is meat. The second is worse. It is the fear that he will not have counted, that he will pass without weight, one of the numberless dead who left no mark on anything that lasts. Against these terrors a man builds what Becker called a hero system, a structure of meaning that lets him take part in something deathless. Religion gave the old one. The cross, the covenant, the soul that survives the grave. When that went thin, men built others. The artist’s work. The nation. The bloodline. The cause.
Set the jurist inside this and a strange figure appears. Bezemek serves the law, and the law he serves is the purest immortality project the disenchanted age has made. Kelsen built it. He took the old law, which stood on God and on nature, on a cosmos with a moral grain running through it, and he stripped all of that away. What remained was the norm, valid because a higher norm said so, and at the summit the basic norm, the Grundnorm, presupposed by the jurist himself. No God holds it up. The jurist holds it up by presupposing it, the way a man holds up a rope bridge by walking out onto it. Bezemek revives this and tends it. The order needs no heaven above it. It is its own heaven, self-grounded, self-renewing, deaf to the death of any man who serves it.
Here the jurist’s hero system parts from every other. The artist wants his name on the canvas. The soldier wants the deed remembered. The father wants his blood to run on in a grandson’s face. Each of these beats death by carrying some piece of the man forward. The jurist beats it the other way. He vanishes. The Pure Theory works no matter who administers it, and that is its glory. The norm does not care that Christoph Bezemek read it. The chair he holds was held by Merli before him and will pass to a stranger after. The textbook reaches its ninth edition with him or without him. He joins the deathless thing by erasing himself into it, by making himself replaceable, by seeing to it that the structure runs the same when he is in the ground. He answers the terror of the ditch by practicing his own disappearance. He answers the terror of insignificance by serving a significance that has no use for his person.
Becker saw that men do not so much share a hero system as collide between hero systems, and that the same sacred word splinters as it crosses from one to the next. Take the rule.
For Bezemek the rule is the holy thing, the norm that holds the order together, the line you do not cross because crossing it unmakes the structure that outlasts you. He presupposes it. He serves it. He teaches the young to presuppose it.
Go down the hall of the conservatory. A bass player works the changes to a standard at two in the morning, and the rule means the reverse to him. “You learn the rules so you can leave them,” he says, and he says it as worship. The head, the chord, the form, he knows them cold, and he knows them cold so that the one chorus he plays tonight, the one that will die in the air the second it sounds and never come again, can break free of them clean. His meaning lives in the perishable. The note that cannot be transmitted, cannot be set in an eighth edition, gone as it arrives.
In the operating room the rule means survival, his and the patient’s both. The surgeon runs the checklist aloud because the checklist is the wall he builds against the thing on the table, which is death, ten inches from his hands. “Confirm the site,” he says, and the nurse confirms, and the ritual holds the terror outside the sterile field for one more hour. The rule keeps the room from becoming a ditch.
In the monastery the Rule is the ladder. The monk rises at the hour he rose yesterday and will rise tomorrow, and the sameness reads to him as the shape of obedience, the path worn smooth toward the one permanence he credits, which is God. “We keep the hours,” he says, “so the hours keep us.” He gives up the singular life on purpose, the way the jurist does. He gives it up toward heaven. The jurist gives it up toward an order that admits no heaven at all.
And in a back room above a body shop a man counts cash and lives by a code, and to him the rule, the one in the statute books, is the enemy, the boot, the thing other men use to put him in a cage. His own code is the real law, unwritten, enforced by men who file no briefs. “The law is for marks,” he says. He is not confused about the rule. He understands it, and hates it, and keeps a rival rule of his own he would die for.
Of all of them the bass player is the one Bezemek fights without naming. The two want the same thing, to beat death, and they have taken routes that cannot both be right. The jurist bets on what can be written down, transmitted, presupposed, run again by strangers forever, and the price of that bet is the person, who cannot be written down. The improviser bets on the person, the once, the breath that will not come again, and the price of that bet is permanence, since the chorus is gone before the next man could ever sound it the same. Each looks at the other and sees a man who threw away the only thing worth keeping. The jurist sees a life poured into smoke. The improviser sees a man who turned himself into a footnote so as not to die.
Bezemek has looked at the order from outside the faith and seen the gun under the altar. He worries, in his epistemic work, over the gap between the system and the living people it claims to bind. He stepped out of the deanship and back to the chair. He keeps a foot in practice, advising live clients with live trouble, the warm particular trouble no edition can hold. So part of him knows what the order costs. Then he picks up the pen, the eighth edition goes to the printer, the ninth waits behind it, and he chooses the deathless thing again.
He is the man who joins what does not die by ceasing, on purpose, to be anyone in particular, who answers the terror of the ditch by dissolving into a structure built to run without him. The rival he fights without naming is the improviser in every guise, the painter, the lover, the player of the one chorus, the man who stakes all meaning on the unrepeatable self and lets it die with him before he will trade it for a place in something that never breathed. And the one cost his ledger cannot price is the only thing that was ever his alone and mortal, this life, this man, the Christoph Bezemek who read the norm and loved whatever he loved and will not reach a ninth edition. The order will hold without him. That is its promise and its bill. He gave it the one life it could not use, and it took the gift, and it will not remember the giver, because remembering is for the things that die.

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The Not Boring Hero System

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

Packy McCormick (b. 1987) spent a whole day writing trivia questions and building slides for the first night of a club he wanted to start. Seven people came. He stood in the room with a Duke degree behind him and an expensive high school behind that and four years on a Merrill Lynch trading desk, and he counted the chairs. The arithmetic shamed him. He has told the story since. He calls the feeling embarrassing. The number stayed with him. Seven.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) knows what the number means. In The Denial of Death he argues that a man builds his life as a defense against two facts he cannot carry: that he dies, and that he might come to nothing. The first terror belongs to the body. The second runs deeper, because a man can outlive his fear of the grave and still wake at three in the morning certain he has left no mark. The hero system answers the second terror. Culture hands it to him. It tells him what a life that counts looks like, and it promises that a man who plays it well leaves something behind that the grave cannot reach. Seven chairs at a trivia night is the terror. It says: you might be no one.

The Not Boring man builds his answer out of the future. Most hero systems reach backward for their immortality, to the fathers, the land, the covenant, the dead who watch. Packy reaches forward. He locates the sacred in what has not happened yet. The reactor that floats off a shipyard. The fusion ignition at Livermore. The healthcare system a founder fixes because, as Packy likes to say, no law of physics requires it to stay broken. His heaven sits in front of him, and a man earns his place in it by leaving the world with more in it than he found. More energy. More companies. More open doors for the children who come after. He named the podcast Age of Miracles, and he meant the word.

He tells the story of his optimism as a subtraction story. Strip away the fear the press sells, the doomer who profits from dread, the degrowth myth that has held men back for fifty years, and what remains, he says, is the obvious thing: the world gets better when men build, and it gets worse when they shrink. He calls this realistic optimism, and the modifier does the work. The optimism, he wants you to believe, is what stands once illusion clears. Becker reads it the other way. The optimism comes first. It does a job, and the job is old. It holds the terror at the door. A man who looks forward with hope has somewhere to put his death. The pessimist has nowhere, and so the pessimist, in this scheme, has failed at the one task culture set him. Packy’s good cheer arrives dressed as arithmetic. Under the dress it is a faith, and faiths answer fears.

Watch the sacred words move. A word does its work inside one hero system and means something else, sometimes the reverse, inside another. The same syllables carry opposite freight depending on which terror a man has armed himself against.

Take abundance, the sacred word in the whole Not Boring catalog. For Packy, abundance raises the floor and the ceiling at once. A hundred times more energy brings the rest of the world up to the comfort the West takes for granted, and powers the science fiction that founders will make real. Abundance is the proof that the future stays open. Now carry the word into a Cistercian monastery. To the monk who has taken a vow of stability and rises in the dark to chant the psalms, abundance is the danger. The full barn is the trap. He keeps the parable of the rich fool close, the man who built bigger barns and died the same night. The monk earns his immortality by emptying, not filling, and the soul he is saving needs the room that having less provides. Carry the word again, south, to a herder watching the desert eat his grazing land at the edge of the Sahel. Abundance for him means the rains return on time and the well holds through the dry months and the herd survives to the green. Not a hundred times. Enough. The hero in that place is the man who brings the family through the lean year with the animals still breathing. And carry the word one more time to the degrowth ecologist, the rival Packy names by name. To her, abundance is the disease. Abundance ate the forests and warmed the sea. Her hero treads light, consumes less, leaves the old growth standing for a grandchild she will not meet, and her immortality lives in the continuity of a living world that does not need her in it. Four men and women, one word, four heavens. Packy’s abundance opens the future. The monk’s abundance damns the soul. The herder’s abundance is survival. The ecologist’s abundance is the wound.

Take miracle. Packy built a whole show on it. In his hands a miracle is a thing men make. Fusion. The micro-reactor. The cure for the rare disease nobody funded. The word exalts the builder and the engineer who treats the reactor as just another hard machine. To a pilgrim kneeling at a Marian shrine, or a Breslover at the grave in Uman, the miracle runs the opposite direction. It breaks into nature from outside it, by a Hand that needs no founder and no balance sheet. That miracle humbles a man. Packy’s miracle promotes him. To the oncologist on the ward, miracle is the word a family reaches for when the medicine works and they will not credit the medicine, and she flinches at it, because it gives the win to heaven and takes it from the protocol she spent her life refining. To a Lakota elder, the sacred already lives in the given world, in the grass and the animals and the agreement between them, and the project of remaking that world by splitting its atoms reads as desecration. One word. The builder’s glory, the pilgrim’s humility, the doctor’s irritation, the elder’s grief.

Take risk. Packy turned it into a banner. Embrace risk. The man who refuses it dies slow. Risk is the toll on the road to the future and the founder’s required nerve, and the worst case rarely costs what the fearful man thinks. Here is his own ledger from the lean year, when he left the salary for the startup: the floor, he reasoned, is not that low. Move back to his parents’ house. Still a bed. Still meals. Still a roof. A man who has run that calculation and found the floor soft can afford to leap. Now hand the word to a short-seller on a trading desk who has built his career on fading other men’s hope. Risk to him is mispriced enthusiasm, the bubble he shorts, the founder’s nerve seen from the other side as the mark’s last error. He earns his standing by being right when the optimists are wrong, and his hero is the man who saw the crash coming. Hand the word to an actuary, and risk becomes a number to remove from a widow’s life, a thing to price and hedge and lay off, and the hero is the one who protects. Hand it to a mother in a shelled city walking her children to the one market still open. She does not embrace risk. She endures it. The hero on that street is the woman who gets the children home, and she would trade every leap Packy ever praised for one boring afternoon. The founder’s virtue, the short-seller’s prey, the actuary’s enemy, the mother’s daily weather.

The rival Packy fights, he fights by name. The degrowther, the doomer, the man who says use less and want less and accept the limit. Packy can argue with that man all day, and he does, because they share a board. Both care about the planet his children inherit. Both want the children fed. They disagree about the road, and a shared road allows a fight.

The rival he does not name is the one his system has no seat for. The contemplative. The man of enough. The monk who thinks the whole frame of more is the error, who would tell Packy that the terror of insignificance is the thing to cure, not feed, and that a man chasing the future to escape his own smallness has mistaken the chase for a life. Packy can rebut the degrowther because the degrowther wants the same future built differently. He cannot rebut the man who refuses the future as the place where worth lives. There is no level for the monk in the Great Online Game. The herder does not log on. The mother in the shelled city is not playing. Packy’s scheme reaches the whole world it can see, and the part it cannot see is the part that measures a life by something other than what gets added to it.

He carries more self-knowledge than most men in his trade. He calls optimism his double-edged sword. To a fault, he says, and the phrase admits the cost. He knows the temperament can mislead him on a fact, and he checks the facts. What he treats as a bias to correct, Becker treats as a faith to examine. Packy thinks his optimism a lens that runs a little warm and needs adjusting. He does not yet hold it as a hero system, a structure raised against a fear, the thing standing between him and the seven empty chairs. The honesty is real and it stops at the right place, the place where looking further might cost him the warmth that gets him out of bed.

Three coordinates, then. His hero is the builder who leaves the world heavier than he found it, the founder who treats the impossible as merely hard, the man who beats the terror of nothingness by pouring himself into what comes next and trusting the future to hold what he made. The rival he fights without naming is the man of limit, the contemplative who finds his immortality in renunciation and accepting the given, the figure who has no slot in a scheme where worth lives in the next thing built. And the cost his ledger cannot price is the sufficiency of the present. His books have a column for what gets made and no column for what is already whole. He cannot price the chance that a man might count at rest, that the seven people at trivia night were enough, that a life which adds nothing to the pile is not for that reason small.

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Zero Percent Noise

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

Casey Newton (b. 1980) keeps a Signal handle in his bio, and the bio names the man before the prose does. Founder and editor of Platformer. Co-host of Hard Fork. The newsletter runs on Ghost now. He moved it off Substack in January 2024 over that platform’s tolerance for pro-Nazi blogs, and the move cost subscribers and he made it. Two hundred thousand readers a week. Subscribers pay him, not advertisers. At the head of an interview about artificial intelligence he prints one line: my fiancé works at Anthropic, see my full ethics disclosure here.

The disclosure holds the whole man. A lesser writer buries the conflict. Newton leads with it, and leading with it earns the trust that pays his rent. The confession is the product.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the lens. A man builds a hero system to deny two things. He denies death. He denies the second death, the one Becker thought worse, the suspicion that he never mattered at all. The hero system hands him a script for cosmic significance, a way to earn a place in a scheme that outlives the body. Newton’s system organizes against two terrors, and once you see them you cannot read him any other way.

The first terror is noise. The dread that his words are one more voice in the feed, that he types into the same stream as the cranks and the bots, indistinguishable, replaceable, soon generated by a machine at no cost. Against this terror he raises a slogan. One hundred percent signal, zero percent noise. No hot takes, ever. He sells refinement. He stands at the sewer outflow of the timeline and hands you the one clean cup.

The second terror is complicity. The dread of dirty hands, of the courtier who flattered power and called it coverage, of the man who helped build the internet we all use and looked past its cost. Against this terror he built “The Trauma Floor.”

In February 2019, at The Verge, Newton published an account of the workers who clean Facebook. They worked for a contractor named Cognizant, in Phoenix and Tampa, for about twenty-eight thousand dollars a year while the average Facebook man took home near a quarter million. They watched beheadings and child abuse and a video of a man stabbed to death while he begged, and they signed agreements that barred them from telling anyone. Some developed the symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Newton named the harm. Cognizant left the moderation business. Facebook paid fifty-two million dollars to the workers it had broken. The story reached the final round of the National Magazine Award.

Newton tells his own life as a stripping away. He strips out the advertiser and takes the reader’s dollar. He strips out the institution and leaves The Verge for a newsletter with his name on it. He strips out the hot take. He strips out the noise. The story says that under all the spin and the engagement bait sits a clean hard thing, the score, who is up and who is down and what it will cost them, and that a man with no boss and no advertiser and no appetite for the dunk can hand it to you straight.

Becker would read the subtraction differently. Every thing Newton removes, he replaces with sanctity. The man with no advertiser has no patron to blame and so must answer to a higher one. The man with no institution has no masthead to hide behind and so becomes the masthead. The subtraction never reaches bedrock. It builds a temple, and the temple needs a god, and the god is Accuracy, and Newton serves as its priest, paid in subscriptions and in the knowledge that social media executives read him to find out who they are. He keeps the score. The keeping is the worship.

Now watch the sacred words, because a sacred word means one thing inside his temple and another thing in every temple down the road.

Trust, for Newton, is capital. He banks it with readers by being right, and he guards the principal by disclosing the conflict before anyone can find it. Trust earned, trust audited, trust held in reserve. Carry the word three blocks over to the diamond district and it changes shape. A dealer there closes a six-figure sale with a handshake and the words mazal u’bracha, no contract, no signature, and the deal holds because a man who breaks it never trades on the street again. Trust there goes unaudited. It runs total and exile enforces it. Carry the word into a Cistercian house and it changes again. The monk trusts his abbot by vow, not by evidence, and the surrender of his own judgment is the trust, the reverse of Newton’s careful ledger. Carry it to a case officer running an agent in a hostile city and trust becomes a tool you extend to use a man, and the man who trusts back is the man who hangs.

Independence, for Newton, means the subscriber model. No advertiser to soften the coverage, no editor to kill the scoop, freedom bought with two hundred thousand small payments. Take the word to a shopkeeper in Palermo who has paid the pizzo to the same family for thirty years. Independence to him is a boy’s fantasy. Survival is knowing whom to pay and paying on time. Take it to a permanent secretary in a Whitehall ministry, a man whose independence comes as the gift of the institution, guaranteed by tenure and by the neutrality of a civil service that outlasts every government. His independence flows from the masthead Newton fled. Take it to a hermit in the Egyptian desert, for whom independence from all men means total dependence on God, and Newton’s word inverts.

Signal, his proudest word, fares worst of all once it travels. Newton treats signal as the refined ore and noise as the slag, and he sells the ore. Sit a Talmudist down with that slogan and watch him recoil. The noise is sacred. The minority opinion preserved for two thousand years, the dispute that never closes, the argument for the sake of Heaven, the page that surrounds six words of law with six centuries of quarrel. Strip the noise from that page and you have killed the thing. Hand the slogan to a sonar man hunting a submarine through a cold layer of sea. Signal and noise to him carry no moral charge at all, and a false reading in either direction sends the same number of men to the bottom. Hand it to a drummer in a basement in New Orleans, for whom the wrong note placed right is the whole art, and noise stops being the enemy of music. It becomes the music.

Newton fights several men, and he names some and refuses to name one.

He names the poster. No hot takes, ever, sets him against the engagement maximizer whose significance comes from the dunk, the man who wins the morning and forgets it by noon. He names the activist as well, and he must, because his own moderator reporting earned him the label of advocate, and the chronicler who keeps score and the advocate who wants his side to win cannot share one body for long without one strangling the other.

He lives among the founders and covers them, and here the hero system shows its hunger. The founder earns immortality by shipping the thing, by inventing the future, by building the company. Newton earns his by keeping the score on the men who ship. Who is up, who is down, what will it cost them. His significance feeds on theirs. The scorekeeper needs the game more than the players need the scorekeeper, and a part of him knows it.

The rival he will not name is the courtier he might have become. Every tech reporter stands one favor away from capture, one flattering profile from the courtier’s seat, one withheld scoop from friendship with the man he covers. Newton built his entire edifice against this man and so cannot say his name out loud, because the courtier waits not across the field but along the road Newton did not take, the self that returns the moment the disclosures stop. The ethics note at the top of the AI interview is the wall he keeps building between himself and the man he might be.

Grade his self-knowledge and the grade comes back high and bounded. Newton made a sacrament of error. He runs regular accounts of what he got wrong, and the humility is real and rare and it sells. He sees the small misses. He sees the surface conflict, and he prints it. What his ledger cannot reach is the structure under the ledger. Two hundred thousand subscribers form a coalition as surely as any advertiser ever did, and a coalition has a mood, and the mood prices certain truths out of the market. The executives who read him to learn who is up make him a part of the status engine he claims to watch from the stands. His humility patrols the temple. It never asks whether the temple should stand.

And now the machine arrives, and the machine is the cost his ledger cannot price. In 2026 Platformer turns toward original reporting to keep clear of artificial intelligence, which means the link roundup and the analysis and the curated signal, the products on which he built the house, can now stream from a model at no cost and no sleep. The trusted human chronicler, the man tech reads to understand itself, faces a rival that is not a man. His co-host leaves their New York Times podcast the same year so the two can build a company of their own, more subtraction, more independence, the same answer to the same first terror. The second terror has changed its address. The harm Newton learned to name lived on a trauma floor in Phoenix. The harm he cannot name now sleeps beside him, because his partner works inside one of the firms building the thing that might retire the priesthood of accuracy, and the disclosure he prints can price the conflict of interest while it cannot price the dependency underneath it. His hero system needs Silicon Valley to stay legible to human readers. Silicon Valley is building the engine that makes human readers optional.

Set the three coordinates and let the man stand. The shape of his hero is the trusted independent chronicler, the clean-handed priest of accuracy who takes the congregation’s coin and hands back the score. The rival he fights without naming is the courtier with the scoop, the captured insider, the self he holds off with one disclosure at a time. And the cost his ledger cannot price is the deepest one, that his significance always fed on the men he scored, that his independence is a coalition by another name, and that the industry he chronicles is building the one rival a chronicler cannot survive, the machine that keeps the score for free and shares his bed.

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The Patron Saint of Lost Causes: Gustavo Arellano’s Hero System

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

In the last week of March 2026, the phones in Latino Los Angeles went quiet. Gustavo Arellano (b. 1979) noticed it first as a pattern of small refusals. Men he had known for years stopped returning his texts. Organizations canceled parades and dinners and lectures with no reason given. Then the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation put out their statements, and The New York Times published what the silence had been guarding. Two women said Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) had abused them as girls in the fields. Dolores Huerta (b. 1930) said he had raped her. A secular saint turned into a monster between one morning and the next.

Arellano wrote his column the same day. He did not defend the man. He did not bury the work the man had done. He kept both in view and reached for an old union slogan, la lucha sigue, the fight continues, and he added five words that hold his whole life: damn its imperfect messenger.

To read that line through Ernest Becker (1924-1974) is to see a man at the exact center of his hero system, doing the thing it built him to do.

Becker says man is an animal who knows he will die. He alone among the animals carries that knowledge, and he cannot bear it, so he builds a hero system, a set of stories that tell him how to earn a place in something that outlasts his body.

Arellano’s hero system has two terrors at its base, and they are not the terrors of the men around him. The first is erasure. He grew up in Anaheim, where his great-grandfather came to pick oranges in groves the city later bulldozed to build his elementary school. His family lost its Indigenous tongue generations back. He knows what it feels like to watch a people get paved over and forgotten, and he has spent a career fighting the moment when the record closes and no one remembers who was there. The second terror is the lie. He learned it as a cradle Catholic who covered the men who ran his own Church, the pedophile priests the Diocese of Orange hid for decades. He learned that the institution which sells you salvation will protect itself with your silence. Oblivion on one side, the comforting cover-up on the other. His whole vocation runs in the narrow channel between them.

Around that channel he has built a subtraction story, the account of what the modern world took away. The groves are gone. The language is gone. The cradle Catholic refuses to enter a church now except for funerals. By every secular measure he should have nothing sacred left. And yet he keeps the faith. He still names his patron saints, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Santo Niño de Atocha, and Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. He still believes the arc bends, that justice will come slow and come anyway. The subtraction stripped him of the Church and left the faith standing, and the faith is the thing his hero system guards.

So take his sacred word and turn it in the light. Faith. For Arellano faith means loyalty to a cause that outlives the men who carry it and the institutions that betray it. Faith is the power to separate the sacred fight from the fallen vessel. He keeps faith with the farmworker movement while he calls its founder a monster. He keeps faith with the survivors of the Church while he names the Church a racket. His faith is built to survive the disgrace of its heroes. That is what the word means inside his system, and it makes sense nowhere else.

Move one seat over and the same word changes its whole meaning. To the cradle Catholic who never left the pew, faith means the opposite of what Arellano made it mean. Faith is obedience to the institution, the sacraments taken from the priest’s hand, trust that the bishop knows more than you do. The pew Catholic keeps faith with the vessel. Arellano broke the vessel to keep the faith. They use one word and stand on opposite sides of it.

Move again, to Westminster, a few miles from Anaheim, to the Vietnamese grandmother who fled in 1975 and built a shrine and a yellow three-striped flag into her front room. Faith for her means the vow never to forgive the men who took her country, the refusal to let the lost republic die while she breathes. Her faith is exile and memory and a closed fist. It carries no slogan about the fight continuing, because for her the fight was lost and the work now is to keep the grief alive and accurate. Arellano’s faith bends toward a future. Hers guards a past that will not return.

Move again, to the empiricist who treats every claim as a thing to be checked. To him faith is the failure itself, the word for believing past the evidence, the sin Arellano commits each time he says la lucha sigue with no proof that it does. What Arellano calls his deepest virtue, this man files under credulity. The word does not survive the trip across the table.

Move once more, to the working-class Mexican American man in a stucco tract house who broke toward the right in the last elections, who is tired of being told his pride in the flag is a sin and his wish for order a betrayal. His faith sits in the nation and the paycheck and the rule that the line means something. He hears la lucha sigue as the slogan of people who never had to make payroll. Arellano writes about this man with care and some alarm, and he knows the man holds a faith of his own, aimed at a different altar.

And the Marine, who keeps faith with the dead of his unit, for whom the word means an oath sealed in bodies and never broken, a thing with no politics in it at all.

Five men, one word, five hero systems, and the word means a different thing in each because the terror underneath each one is different. Becker’s point lands here with full weight. The sacred word is never the same word. It is a slot, and each hero system fills it with whatever holds back its own particular night.

Arellano knows more of this than most of his trade. He tells his journalism students that almost no one will read them, that maybe a thousand people out of seven billion will ever see their work, so write the stories certain communities will keep. He knows the throwaway rant goes viral and the years of real reporting sink without a ripple, and he has made his peace with the joke of it. He quotes Godard (1930-2022), to become immortal and then die, and he means it as a reporter’s prayer. He does not want his name remembered. He wants the stories to survive him, the taco history and the priest victims and the salt-stain Madonna on the Chicago underpass. He has looked straight at his own immortality project and named it out loud, which is rare.

The thing he sees least sits closest to his strongest move. When Chavez fell, Arellano saved the cause by cutting it loose from the man. The movement is the hero, one victim told the Times, and Arellano built his column on that line. It is a clean rescue and a humane one. It is also the same move the pew Catholic makes when he keeps faith with a Church he knows hides its abusers. Relocate the sacred one level up, from the man to the movement, from the priest to the faith, and you can keep believing through any disgrace. Arellano spent his career exposing that move in the men who protected Chavez and the bishops who protected priests. He performs a higher version of it and calls it keeping the faith. A faith that survives every crime of its heroes is a faith that can no longer be falsified, and a cause immune to its founders’ sins may grow immune to its own.

So three coordinates, drawn in plain lines.

The shape of his hero is the reporter as keeper of memory, the one-man Spotlight who drags the forgotten and the buried back into the record and humbles the comfortable men who would rather the record stayed closed. He serves Saint Jude. He takes the lost causes on purpose.

The rival he fights without ever naming is not the nativist at the border, the enemy he names every week. It is the loyal believer, the man who keeps faith with the vessel instead of the cause, the parishioner who stayed and the friend who stopped returning calls. Arellano has built his life against the man who protects the sacred object by hiding its sins, and the discomfort of his position is how near that man stands to him, sharing the same word.

The one cost his ledger cannot price is the chance that la lucha sigue is the same anesthetic he diagnoses in everyone else, that the movement is the hero offers a way of never counting the dead the movement makes, and that a faith built to outlast its imperfect messengers may also be built to outlast the truth. He can price the man. He cannot price the cause. That is the one debt he carries and cannot read.

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The Hero System of Los Angeles Times Columnist Steve Lopez

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

Steve Lopez (b. 1953) keeps a private appointment with the obituary page. He has described the moment a newspaperman dreads, when the names there stop belonging to strangers and start belonging to men he knew, men he stood beside at a bar or a city council meeting. The page turns from news into a tally of his own losses, and then into a forecast.

Two terrors sit under that habit. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) named the first and built a whole anthropology on it. A man knows he will die and rot, knows it as no other animal knows it, and he cannot bear to be only a creature that ends. So he builds what Becker called a hero system, a set of rules for earning a place in something that outlasts the body. The second terror belongs to Lopez in particular. It is the fear of the unrecorded death. To die is the common lot. To die unseen, to be swept off a downtown sidewalk before sunrise by a sanitation crew and bagged with no name, to leave the world without leaving a single line in it, is the horror a columnist spends his life pushing back against.

His answer is the byline. The column hands a man a small, secular afterlife. A man Lopez writes about gets a name in the Los Angeles Times, gets quoted, gets a face. The street crew might still come, but now there is a record, and the record says this man was here and this man counted. Lopez built a career out of handing that record to people the city had filed under surplus.

The clearest case is the one that made him famous. On Skid Row he found Nathaniel Ayers, a man trained at Juilliard and broken by schizophrenia, playing a violin with two strings in an underpass near a statue of Beethoven. Lopez wrote him into the paper, then into a book, The Soloist, then into a film with two movie stars. The arc looks like rescue. Read it through Becker and it looks like something more exact. Lopez took a man the economy had discarded and granted him the one thing the economy cannot grant, a place in the permanent record. He answered the terror of the unrecorded death on another man’s behalf, and in doing so he fed his own hero system.

Under every hero system lies a story about what has been taken away. Becker’s heroes never simply build. They build against a loss. Lopez’s loss story is the one he has told for nearly fifty years across several cities. A society once held to the idea that a man was owed something for being a man. It owed him a roof, a wage that fed a family, a place at the table when his working years ran out. That idea has been subtracted, piece by piece, until what remains is a verdict delivered by the market: a man is worth what he produces, and a man who produces nothing is worth nothing and may be left on the pavement. Lopez writes to register the subtraction. Each column is an entry in a ledger of what the city removed and hoped no one would notice.

Stand at the center of that ledger and you find a single word doing all the work. The word is use. Lopez believes a discarded man still has worth, that his use is not the only measure of him, and that a society which prices men by output has lost its soul. But use is not a fixed thing. It changes shape depending on the hero system that holds it, and the same word means different things to men standing in different rooms.

Take the founder in a glass office in Palo Alto, thirty-one years old, two exits behind him, a third company hiring fast. For him use is throughput. A thing is useful if it scales, and a man is useful if his output climbs faster than his cost. He is kind, he gives to the food bank, and he cannot see Ayers as anything but a tragedy of misallocation, a brilliant input with no working channel to market. The terror he builds against is irrelevance, the dead startup, the man whose product the world routes around. His hero is the builder who leaves behind a machine that runs without him.

Carry the word up to the high desert, to a Carmelite who rises at two in the morning to pray for a world that will never learn his name. For him use is the trap. The contemplative life produces nothing the founder could put on a slide. Its whole point is to stand useless before God, to refuse the verdict of output, to insist that a soul has worth before it does a single thing. The byline Lopez offers Ayers might strike this man as a vanity, one more bid for a name to outlast the body, when the only afterlife worth wanting requires the surrender of the name. His terror is not obscurity. It is pride.

Move again, to a gunnery sergeant who has buried four men he trained. For him use means something the founder might call madness. The highest use of a Marine is to be spent, to be used up for the man beside him, to become a name read aloud at a ceremony and cut into a black wall. He does not want a byline. He wants the wall, and he wants the men who pass it to stop. His terror is the fear that the dying bought nothing.

Now the hospice nurse on the night shift, who measures her years not in deeds done but in deaths attended. For her use has nothing to do with output and everything to do with presence. She sits with men who will never make another thing, who have passed beyond the founder’s ledger and the sergeant’s mission both, and her work is to make the last hours of a useless man tender. She might understand Lopez better than the others. She might also tell him that the dignity he hands a man through a column is thinner than the dignity she hands a man by holding his hand while no one writes it down.

Four rooms, one word, four different gods. This is Becker pressed to his edge. A sacred value never floats free. It is the local answer to a local terror, and it makes sense only inside the hero system that needs it. Lopez’s use, the worth of the discarded man, is the answer of a working-class kid from Pittsburg, California, who watched the world sort men into the useful and the surplus and decided to spend his life arguing the sort was a lie.

Few men in his trade know their own machine as well as he does. Lopez wrote a whole book, Independence Day, interrogating his refusal to retire, and the book is a long act of self-examination by a man who suspects his need to keep working is the same need that drives the men he covers, dressed in better clothes. He went part-time at sixty-eight rather than stop. He turned his beat toward aging and the old, which is to say he turned it toward the discard pile he is himself approaching. He sees the trap. A man who builds his worth on usefulness cannot retire without facing the verdict he spent his life fighting.

What his ledger cannot price is subtler, and it sits at the root of the whole structure. His usefulness requires a steady supply of the discarded. The witness needs the wounded. For the column to confer dignity there must be men stripped of it, and the more he restores a man to the record, the more his own place in the record depends on the supply never running dry. Ayers becomes a book. The man on the sidewalk becomes nine hundred words and a photograph. Lopez does more good than most men do in ten lifetimes, and still the engine runs the way all hero systems run, by converting one man’s terror into another man’s significance. He cannot wish away the suffering that gives him his subject without wishing away the work that gives him his answer to death. That is the one cost the ledger will not show, because the ledger is the thing being paid for.

Three coordinates locate the man. The shape of his hero is the witness, the boy who escaped the sort and now hauls others out of the surplus column one byline at a time, granting a secular afterlife to men the city filed under waste. The rival he fights without naming is no politician and no developer. It is use, the market’s quiet verdict on who is worth keeping, the actuarial shrug that prices a human being by his output and sweeps the rest into bags at dawn. And the cost his ledger cannot price is the supply line at his back. A witness needs the wounded, and the man who spends his life restoring dignity to the discarded depends, in the part of the account no column will print, on there always being more of them.

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The Hero System of San Francisco Chronicle’s Ace Investigative Journalists

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Luke Ford

The database does not care who reads it. Susie Neilson sat at her desk at the San Francisco Chronicle and worked through LexisNexis CourtLink, a repository of court filings, and found a lawsuit that gave her pause. She had read about Hurricane Helene survivors underpaid by their insurers. She thought the same thing might happen in California. She walked to the desk of Megan Fan Munce, the insurance reporter, and asked. Within a day Munce had surfaced an obscure trove of state investigations into California insurers. That trove became “Burned,” the series that won Neilson, Munce, and Sara DiNatale the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, the work that showed how insurers used a replacement-cost algorithm to undervalue homes and leave families in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Sierra foothills unable to rebuild.

In the same newsroom, Cynthia Dizikes and Joaquin Palomino built a different kind of file. They spent more than a year inside California’s for-profit psychiatric hospitals. They assembled a dataset that did not exist before, mined from state and county reports, 911 calls, and medical records, and it showed hundreds of assaults and at least eighteen deaths tied to poor care between 2019 and 2024. They called the series “Failed to Death.” It made them Pulitzer finalists. The photographer Gabrielle Lurie spent months earning one family’s trust to photograph what the locked wards had cost them.

Hold these two newsroom scenes in mind. Then ask the question Ernest Becker (1924-1974) poses. What death is each of these reporters defeating?

Becker, in The Denial of Death, argues that man is the animal who knows he will die, and that culture is the structure he builds to deny it. Every hero system answers two terrors. The first is the body that rots. The second is insignificance, the dread that a life adds up to nothing. A hero system hands a man a way to matter past his own funeral. He earns the coin of that system, and the coin buys a piece of symbolic immortality.

For the investigative reporter the first terror is a death that leaves no mark. The patient who dies on a locked ward and whose death the state never counts. The fire victim who lives in a trailer on the lot where his house stood and whose ruin no agency tallies. The uncounted death is the reporter’s real terror, and his hero act is to count it. The dataset that did not exist is the answer to the first terror. The byline that survives in the Columbia archive is the answer to the second.

The reporter tells himself a subtraction story. He adds nothing, he says. He removes the spin, the press release, the official lie, and shows the reader what was there all along. The Chronicle’s dataset, the team said, gives the most comprehensive accounting to date. Accounting. The word does the work. The reporter counts, and the count looks like the world stripped of distortion.

Becker does not let the story stand. The counting is the hero act. To assemble eighteen deaths into a series with a name, a front page, and a result in Sacramento is to make meaning, not to find it lying in the road. He does not subtract illusion to reach bare fact. He builds a particular cathedral and calls it the absence of architecture.

Now take the reporter’s holiest word and watch it splinter.

Accountability. Say it in the newsroom and it means the powerful answer in print, before everyone, in a record that outlasts the man who wrote it and the official who must reply. The reporter’s heaven is the public ledger.

Say accountability to a hospice nurse and it means something with no archive at all. She is answerable to the person dying in the bed in front of her, in the hours she has, and no one will read a transcript. Her immortality runs through the quality of a presence that vanishes when the breath stops. She finds the reporter’s ledger beside the point, and perhaps cruel.

Say it to a career analyst at the state agency that licenses those hospitals and it turns into the audit trail. He answers up the chain. He files the citation, logs the inspection, follows the regulation, and when he has done so, accountability has occurred. He can prove it. His whole working life is the proof. The Chronicle found the hospitals facing almost no consequences from the Gavin Newsom administration for breaking the rules, and the analyst can answer, within his own hero system and without lying, that the procedures ran. Two hero systems, one word, and they cannot both be right, because the word names the gate to a different heaven in each.

Say accountability to a Pentecostal pastor in a storefront church and it means the books God keeps, opened at the end, every secret thing brought to account. The reporter’s front page is a poor shadow of that final reckoning. The pastor can lose every earthly case and still hold that the true account waits.

Say it to a trauma surgeon and it means the morbidity and mortality conference, the room where she answers to the body that died on her table and to the colleagues who saw her hands. The dead patient is the auditor. No reader is admitted.

Each man and woman here treats accountability as sacred because it is the coin of his own immortality, the thing he spends at his own gate. The reporter and the agency analyst worship the same word and go to war over it, and the war has no settlement. The analyst cannot accept the reporter’s definition without his life’s work turning into complicity. The reporter cannot accept the analyst’s without the byline turning into noise. Evidence does not resolve this. Each needs his own meaning to keep earning his way past death.

The series names its villains, and the villains run their own systems. The for-profit hospital operator builds a going concern that scales and outlives him. Care is an input, the patient a unit, a death a cost in the model. He is not a cartoon. He answers to limited partners and a board, and within that system he can be a success and a credit to his family. The makers of the insurance algorithm run another system again. Their hero defeats death by pricing the unpredictable, by turning fire and ruin into a number a machine can set. They see the model as the one honest thing in a market full of sentiment. The reporter sees the model as the lie. Both are telling the truth about their own heaven.

Then the family. The family let the photographer in. They run the oldest hero system of the lot, the one that defeats death through the remembered face, the photograph on the wall, the name said at the table. For them the sacred object is the person, not the dataset.

Here the reporter’s system and the family’s strike an alliance, and the alliance carries a quiet charge. The reporter needs the face to make the count land. The family gives the face so the death will mean something. They want their child remembered as a son or a daughter. The reporter needs the child to become evidence, a data point with a name attached, the human cost that lets the policy move. The aims run close enough to hold hands. They are not the same aim.

How much of this do the reporters see? On craft, a great deal. Munce knew she had to have the receipts, knew the insurance market was a tangle and not a single evil man behind a curtain, knew she could not burn the sources she would need next year. That is real care, and rare. The team worried about fairness to the accused and built the work to survive a challenge.

The deeper trade-off sits where craft does not reach. The reporter who builds the dataset that did not exist needs the dataset not to have existed. He needs the gap. The terror that drives him, the death the state will not count, is also the raw material his hero system consumes. The better he counts, the more he depends on there being uncounted dead to count. That appetite is hard to see from inside a hero system, because no hero system shows a man the bones in its own foundation. The charge here falls on the system, not on three reporters who do their work with care. The appetite is the shape of the work.

Three coordinates locate the hero of this system. The shape of his hero is the one who counts what the state will not count, who assembles the record that outlives both the dead and the institution that killed them, and who walks into the permanent archive by the act of counting. He is the assembler of the uncounted.

The rival he fights without naming is not the operator or the algorithm, the men the series puts on the page. It is the honest analyst inside the agency who holds, in good conscience, that accountability already happened on paper, who can document that the system worked, and whom the reporter can never credit without dissolving his own claim to the hero’s seat. The named villain is easy. The unnamed rival is the decent bureaucrat whose definition of the sacred word would, if granted, end the story.

The one cost his ledger cannot price is that his significance runs on mortality. His immortality feeds on other people’s deaths, the way the priest’s standing feeds on the congregation’s fear of the grave. The dead who become his evidence pay in a coin the byline cannot return. They wanted to be remembered as themselves. They were remembered, with care and accuracy, as the eighteenth death tied to poor care between 2019 and 2024. The work needed them to be that. The front page could not give back the rest.

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